Dr. Paul Conti: How to Improve Your Mental Health | Huberman Lab Guest Series

Andrew Huberman: [Opening theme music]

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Guest series, where I and an expert

guest discuss s cience and science based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today's episode marks the second episode in our four episode series with Dr.

Paul Conti about mental health.

The first episode in the series dealt with how to understand and

assess your level of mental health.

Today's episode is about how to improve your mental health.

I do want to emphasize that you do not need to have heard or seen the first

episode in order to understand or glean important information from today's episode

about how to improve your mental health.

But I do encourage you to go and listen to the first episode at

some point if you have not already.

Today's episode deals with several topics important to all of us, as well as

protocols to improve one's mental health.

For instance, you will learn how to guide yourself through a process of self

inquiry in which you address certain key questions about your drives, your level

of aggressive drive, pleasure drive, and the so called generative drive.

These are essential things to understand about oneself if you want to guide

yourself toward your aspirations, and if you want to understand how your

subconscious processing is influencing your thoughts and your behaviors and

your feelings in ways that sometimes serve your aspirations, and in other

ways that can hinder your aspirations.

Dr.

Conti shares with us a way of assessing our internal narratives, as well as

a way of creating a constructive self awareness and an understanding of

where those narratives and that self awareness stem from in our childhood,

so that we can navigate forward with the greatest sense of agency.

We also talk about how to move past common hindrances to improving

one's mental health, such as overcoming intrusive thoughts.

And perhaps most importantly, today's episode provides information and

protocols that anyone can use to cultivate their generative drive,

which is a hallmark of mental health.

Just a reminder that Dr.

Paul Conti has generously provided a few diagrams that we include as

PDFs in the show note captions.

They are completely zero cost to access, and they can help you understand some

of the material that was discussed in t he first episode of this series,

as well as the current episode about how to improve your mental health.

And while those simple PDF diagrams are certainly not necessary in order

to understand the material in today's discussion or in the other discussions

of this series, many people find them useful, so I encourage you to check out

those links in the show note captions.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that 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 Betterhelp . Betterhelp offers professional

therapy with a licensed therapist carried out online.

I personally have been doing weekly therapy for more than 30 years,

and while that weekly therapy was initiated not by my own request,

it was in fact a requirement for me to remain in high school.

Over time, I really came to appreciate just how valuable

doing quality therapy is.

In fact, I look at doing quality therapy much in the same way that

I look at going to the gym or doing cardiovascular training such as running,

as ways to enhance my physical health.

I see therapy as a vital way to enhance one's mental health.

The beauty of Betterhelp is that they make it very easy to

find an excellent therapist.

An excellent therapist can be defined as somebody who is going to be very

supportive of you in an objective way, with whom you have excellent rapport

with, and who can help you arrive at key insights that you wouldn't

have otherwise been able to find.

And because Betterhelp therapy is conducted entirely online, it's

extremely convenient and easy to incorporate into the rest of your life.

So if you're interested in Betterhelp, go to betterhelp.com/huberman

to get 10% off your first month.

That's Betterhelp, spelled he help.com/huberman.

Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking up.

Waking up is a meditation app that offers dozens of guided meditation

sessions, mindfulness trainings, Yoga Nidra sessions and more.

By now, there's an abundance of data showing that even short daily meditations

can greatly improve our mood, reduce anxiety, improve our ability to

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And while there are many different forms of meditation, most people

find it difficult to find and stick to a meditation practice in a way

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The Waking up app makes it extremely easy to learn how to meditate and

to carry out your daily meditation practice in a way that's going to be

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It includes a variety of different types of meditations of different duration,

as well as things like Yoga Nidra, which place the brain and body into a sort of

pseudosleep that allows you to emerge feeling incredibly mentally refreshed.

In fact, the science around Yoga Nidra is really impressive, showing that after a

Yoga Nidra session, levels of dopamine in certain areas of the brain are enhanced

by up to 60%, which places the brain and body into a state of enhanced readiness

for mental work and for physical work.

Another thing I really like about the Waking up app is that it provides

a 30 day introduction course.

So for those of you that have not meditated before or getting back to a

meditation practice, that's fantastic.

Or if you're somebody who's already a skilled and regular meditator, waking

up has more advanced meditations and Yoga Nidra sessions for you as well.

If you'd like to try the Waking up app, you can go to wakingup.com/huberman

and access a free 30 day trial.

Again, that's wakingup.com/huberman.

And now for my discussion about mental health with Dr.

Paul Conti.

Dr.

Conti, welcome back.

Paul Conti: Thank you.

Andrew Huberman: In the first episode of this series, you laid out for us

in a very structured way what true mental health looks like, essentially

what we should all be aspiring to.

And you touched on these themes of agency and gratitude as verb states,

really, ways of being in the world that allow everybody to have some sense

of well being, to have some sense of themselves in a way that is kind to

themselves and to others, and really to feel good and do good in their life.

Without question, this is what people want, right?

You also spelled out for us these two pillars, the structure of self and

the function of self, that consist of a number of different things that

from which geyser up or kind of give rise to these feelings of empowerment,

humility, agency, and gratitude.

And reminded us several times that when we are challenged, when we're not doing

as well as we would like, that we need to look back to the structure of self

and the function of self and ask specific questions in order to arrive or re arrive

at this sense of agency and gratitude.

Yes, I think it would be wonderful for us if you could just recap the overall

model because it has the components that I just mentioned, but some subtlety and

some really key aspects of these pillars of structure of self and function of self.

I think if people keep in mind for today's episode, which is about

challenges that people commonly face, and even, if you will, phenotypes

that we see commonly out there.

For people that haven't heard of phenotypes, phenotypes are the

typical appearance of something.

So there is the phenotype of the anxious person, the phenotype of the person who

just can't seem to get out of a rut.

There's the phenotype of the traumatized person and these things play out

differently in different individuals, men and women, boys and girls.

But we're going to visit many of the most common phenotypes out there and think

about how to do better, be better, feel better through the lens of the model

that we spelled out in episode one.

And of course, if people have not seen or heard episode one, today's discussion

will still be entirely accessible to them.

So in keeping with that, if you could just give us an overview of what this structure

of the healthy self looks like as a roadmap for where we're all headed today.

Paul Conti: Thank you.

Thanks very much.

Revisiting the pillars is, I think, the best place to start, because

there really are routes to understand.

And if we understand, then we can strategize, we can make change, right?

We can make things better.

So the first pillar, the structure of self, starts with the unconscious mind.

This incredibly complicated biological supercomputer that's firing a mile a

minute underneath the surface in us and is throwing up to the surface all sorts

of thoughts and ideas and states that then the conscious mind apprehends.

Then our awareness comes into play, and then we have defense mechanisms that

sort of rise up from the unconscious mind, and they circle and sort of gird

themselves around the conscious mind, which they can do in an unhealthy way or

in a healthy way or anything in between.

And then the character structure is sort of the nest around all of that.

And it's from the character structure that we are engaging in the world

in the ways that we're engaging.

It's our active engagement with the world around us.

And the idea is that the self grows out of that.

It grows out of that nest sitting on top of the unconscious mind to the

conscious mind rising above the defense mechanisms and the character structure.

And if we go back to that, when we're trying to understand ourselves,

trying to understand states of health as well as states of unhappiness or

states that aren't healthy, by going back and looking at the structure,

we can learn a tremendous amount.

And the other side, the other pillar, is the function of self.

And it really starts with a self awareness.

The awareness that, hey, there is an I, I am in the world.

This is 24 hours in the day are going to pass today, and I'm going

to be doing one thing or another.

I'm to some very significant extent deciding how am I going to engage in

the world around me during that time.

So on top of that are the defense mechanisms in action.

So defense mechanisms, remember, are unconscious.

So there's a lot then going on inside of us that's determining

sort of the field set of options.

There may be a lot of automaticity that narrows down the set of options

of what we may entertain, what we may be aware of, what we may decide.

And that could happen for better or for worse, depending upon the

health of the defense mechanisms.

But on top of that lies salient.

So the idea then we would next visit, okay, what are we paying attention to.

What's coming from inside, what's coming from outside.

And we have to not pay attention to many, many things in order to pay

attention to whatever our attention has alighted on at the moment.

So it's a complex process, and it's worth looking at very closely if

we want to understand ourselves.

So after thinking about the defense mechanisms in action, the unconscious

aspects of how we're engaging with the world, then next to consider

is salience, which is sort of where does the mind arrive at rest?

Where does the mind trend towards?

Is it something internal?

Is it something external?

What are all the things we're not paying attention to in order

to pay attention to something?

And is that thing healthy?

Is it not healthy?

Is it serving us well?

So there's so much to understand about salience.

And then the next step beyond that is understanding behavior.

How are we engaging with the world around us?

What are our behavioral choices?

What are our automatic behaviors?

And then sitting on top of all of that are our strivings.

So we have a sense of wanting something in the world around us, and what is

that, and how are we trying to get to it, and how does it make us feel?

So if we look at the ten elements, the five under the structure of self and

the five under the function of self, then what we're really looking at is

sort of like looking at ten cabinets.

And if we're trying to understand ourselves, whether we're trying to just

generally understand ourselves or we're trying to get at a problem, then looking

in all ten of those cabinets makes sense.

Some of them will be bare, meaning that they may seem to have very little to

do with the problem we're bringing.

And we kind of maintain an open mind.

We may be led back to that cabinet, and there may be something there.

But what usually happens is if we look in all ten places, we find a couple

where there's some rich material to explore, sort of the X marks the spot,

and then we go and we dig there to sort of mix metaphors we dig in the cabinet

where we're going to find something.

And then it leads forward a process of understanding.

And if we're bringing those things into line, where we have a healthy structure

of self and a healthy function of self, and we're aware of all of this and we're

working on it, we're self aware, and we're paying attention to everything

built on top of that, then what we end up with is a sense of humility, because

one cannot be anything but respectful, compassionate understanding the complexity

of all of this and understanding, how does it manifest itself in us?

And just the very fact that we can make our ways in the

world, right, is so impressive.

And in a way, I think it brings to us a respect, just a respect for

being here, navigating the world.

And I think of that respect is born humility.

The complexity of us, the fact that millions of things are going on underneath

the surface, millions of neurotransmission and endocrinological function.

All of this is going on under the surface.

I'm not even aware of it.

And then it kicks up to the surface, generates a tremendous amount of

respect for the complexity and also the diligence and perseverance it

takes us to navigate through the world.

And I think built upon that understanding is a sense of

humility and a sense of empowerment.

And the humility and empowerment in action, right?

So expressed, become agency and gratitude.

And agency and gratitude, as you said at the beginning, we're seeing as verbs.

That's how we're living life.

It's through the lens, so to speak, of agency and gratitude

that we're actively living.

And again, I would put forth that when we look at measures of human

happiness across disciplines and across time, this is always what we see is

some way of describing how agency and gratitude, together, as verbs,

manifest and then create happiness.

It's the state that we're seeking to be in, because from that state of

active agency and active gratitude, we achieve what it is that I

think we're really searching for.

And there are infinite words throughout human history to describe what that is.

We might choose to use words like peacefulness, a sense of peace, a sense

of contentment, being delighted by things, like just being amazed and impressed

by things in the world around us.

Like, this is a state that we're striving for.

And I think when people talk about happiness and what we're really

trying to get to, it's this.

But it's not that these things are passive.

These things are coming from the active agency, the active gratitude.

And they're then interacting with a generative drive within us.

We have an aggressive drive.

We have a pleasure drive like this has been thought about now for a

long, long time within mental health and validated in a lot of ways.

But what hasn't been validated is that they're the only things, right?

We see human beings striving.

We see human beings wanting better for themselves and for the world around them.

We see acts of kindness that seem to be rooted to nothing

other than the act of kindness.

We have within us a drive to know, to understand, to learn, to make better.

And that has been described as many, many things across human history.

But I think the words we might choose are a generative drive, a

drive to create and to make better.

And it's the generative drive as something active within us that is then aligning

with agency and gratitude, the active ways in which we express ourselves.

And then that altogether brings us the peace, the contentment,

the sense of delight.

Sometimes that may exist in us in a state of rest.

But very often it's existing in us in a state of activity.

And that's why people find the quote unquote happiness, like what people

are seeking, not just in meditation.

Sometimes we can find it there, but people also find it in action, right?

They find it in doing that thing that they love to do, or in taking care

of someone and learning something.

So when we look at all of this, we can then have a route of understanding

what is going on inside of us and how we can make the changes that

let us be in this state, which is really the state that we are seeking.

Andrew Huberman: I really appreciate that you highlight that agency and

gratitude are verb states from which peace, contentment and delight emerge.

And also the way that you explain the generative drive that is distinct

from aggressive drives and pleasure drives that exist in all of us.

I'm smiling because a number of examples of peace, contentment, and

delight while in action come to mind.

I mean, for me, podcasting, and in particular, preparing for a podcast,

trying to mine the literature and figure out where the gems reside and

where the confusion could emerge.

And all of that brings about such peace, contentment and delight for

me, but it's anything but passive.

Likewise, yesterday had the experience of running into a puppy.

It's been a while since I've owned a dog, and dogs are delightful.

Puppies are particularly delightful.

Paul Conti: I had the experience of seeing you light up when you ran into the puppy.

Andrew Huberman: You did, and I'm still buzzing from that

short interaction with the puppy.

Downstairs the way Mariner puppy.

I don't know why, but I just delight in animals of most all kinds.

Not a fan of reptiles, sorry, reptile fans so much, but I just drive so much energy

from it, and it felt like life energy.

And the way the animal is sort of attentionally scattered is amusing

to me as compared to the dog that he will eventually be, which is going

to be more linear in his thinking.

It encapsulates so much of the other things I love, like

brain development, et cetera.

Anyway, I highlight those examples because there's nothing passive about it.

It's pure delight and joy for me, and it intersects with other delights and joys.

And I think that as you describe agency and gratitude, peace, contentment and

delight in these generative forces as well as other forces that exist in us,

I think it's really critical that people understand that these are not states

that you sit down and place yourself into, although perhaps one could through

reflection or meditation or waking up from a really great night's sleep,

things of that sort, but that these are things that we can find ourselves awash

in if we are doing the right things.

And those things can oftentimes be very challenging.

So assuming I understand the way the model is spelled out correctly, I'm

more and more delighted at the fact that this is not just accessible in

one domain, but is accessible in many, many different domains for everybody.

This is not something unique to my experience, even though I give examples

from my own life, but that we really all do have access to this if we're looking

in those cupboards, those ten cupboards, and asking the right questions and.

Paul Conti: To maybe comment even a little further on the

experience of you and the dog.

So it was an experience of delight.

And you enjoyed it, and it brought a sense of peace and contentment,

like, all of that happens.

But think about what that's linked to.

I believe there's a strong sense of agency in you that you are enacting.

There's a strong gratitude in you that you're enacting.

You're handling your life in a way.

And also for all of us, good things always come with good fortune, but it comes with

our strivings and our achievements that you're in a place to delight in that.

If you are unhappy, like, I don't like what I'm doing, I'm angry,

I'm frustrated, then there's no room in you to find the delight.

And the delight that you find is also very much linked to the generative drive.

It makes me think of how you loved and nurtured Costello.

So you have it in you to love and nurture a dog, and you have done

that in a really wonderful way.

And that generative drive is part and parcel of the delight you

feel when you see a dog, because you love dogs and you think about

nurturing, and it all comes together.

The agency and the gratitude expressed as verbs puts you in a position to

have that sense of delight which is so intertwined with your generative

drive, with a sense of caretaking, a sense of creating the beyond self.

Because although you enjoyed and loved Casello, you enjoyed

and loved his happiness, right?

So it all comes together.

And I think it's interesting because in some ways it's a

simple example, but that's life.

Life has its big moments, but so much of our lives are the smaller

moments that link together.

And I think that smaller moment becomes a big example.

Andrew Huberman: I appreciate that you mentioned Costello.

For listeners of this podcast that have tuned into early episodes, Costello was

the source of the background snoring.

For those of you that haven't, you can go check.

He was a 90 pound English bulldog mastiff who had many skills,

the best of which was snoring.

So in addition to the generative drive, which is something that we

certainly want to talk more about today, you mentioned these other drives,

aggressive drives and pleasure drives.

And much of what we're talking about today is going to be where people can

go wrong or where people struggle.

We are also, of course, going to go deeply into where people succeed and

in particular where people can ask questions of themselves, in particular

what is working for them and why, as a route to understanding how to sift

through those cupboards and understand what's not working and why, and come

up with real actionable answers and then the ability to move forward.

So if you would, could you tell us a little bit more about drives?

Generally, when I hear drives, I can't help as a neuroscientist,

but default to, okay, the dopamine circuit, or the endogenous opioid

circuit, or the serotonergic circuit.

But how do you conceptualize drives within us?

And then perhaps you could tell us what the nature of aggressive drives and

pleasure drives and generative drives.

Paul Conti: So the concept of a drive, the definition of a drive, is

something that's intrinsic to humans.

So we could look at it as a motivation.

I mean, we don't just lie on the ground and do nothing until we passively die.

So something is going on inside of us that is driving us to

do something other than that.

And historically, the thinking in the field arising from early psychodynamic

principles, the theory in the field that has really dominated the field, either

directly or indirectly, in so many ways, has been that there are two drives within

us, that there's aggression and pleasure.

And again, these are just words, right?

So we could apply many, many words, which is why, of course,

we want to define what that means.

So aggression, even though we're using that word for it, because the word

for it is commonly used, but it means sort of forward active engagement.

So a good, healthy amount of aggression using that word for the drive

would be a strong sense of agency.

Too little aggression can be a problem, then the person isn't

bringing themselves to bear.

So there's too little in the way of self determination, forward

movement, empowerment, agency, right.

And in the same way, too much of this drive becomes actual aggression.

So the idea that I want more, and if I can't get it in certain

ways, I'll just take it, right.

So it starts to become what we more map to the word aggression, which would

be something negative in most cases.

Andrew Huberman: Like a desire or a tendency to harm.

Paul Conti: Sure.

As aggressive drives get higher, which you see why they're in us,

because let's say we're defending ourselves, or you're defending a

family member or like an entire family.

Then it makes sense to have high levels of aggression if your family is threatened.

So those drives are in us at potentially those high levels for a reason.

But we certainly access very high levels of aggression without the

indication of preservation of life or preservation of safety.

The thought is, that's a drive in us, and that gets us up and

off the ground, so to speak.

And that the other drive, then, is pleasure, which, again, doesn't just

mean that we all want to be hedonists.

So pleasure could be even the pleasure of relief and safety.

We're all back in the cave together, and we roll the stone in front of the door.

We're safe.

Throughout human development, pleasure comes in a lot of ways.

It can come through the pleasure of food or other people, friendship, romance, sex.

There are a lot of ways we can achieve pleasure.

It can be relief of things that are unpleasant, relief of pain.

But there's a drive towards this in humans, which, again,

really does make sense.

And too little of it, again, can be problematic because the person, then isn't

motivated to sort of seek things because they're not anticipating or don't receive

gratification and too much of a drive for pleasure can also create problems.

We can kind of see how these two drives, like, okay, they get us up

and off the ground, so to speak.

But the question is, do they explain everything?

And it's a very important question, because if they explain everything,

then there's not room for behaviors and choices that are beyond the self.

Right?

There's not an explanation for the person who.

I'll give you an example of a person I've taken care of, who's just a very

strong swimmer, knows how to swim, has swimmed throughout his life, who

was in a place, I saw video of it, where there had been a hurricane,

and the waves were so frightening.

They were just this huge surf, and there were people who had gotten dragged out.

And you just see him, he runs into the water.

He runs in and he goes.

And he was really at risk.

He needed to be saved himself, but he saved them.

And I do not believe you can explain that through these drives.

I don't think you can say, well, he was aggressive.

He wanted to go and do something that was imposing himself on the world,

or he got pleasure in thinking, I'm strong enough to go do this.

I mean, I think we're really gyrating, we're contorting ourselves, right,

in order to explain it that way.

If we think there's a goodness in that man's heart, like, I

know there's a goodness in that man's heart, I know him, right?

And that goodness sees him in the moment, and he knows that maybe

he can save them, maybe he can.

He's not sure, but maybe he can.

So the next thing you know, he's in the water.

And I think things like the love and nurturing of other people, of children,

love and nurturing of animals, of plants.

There are things inside of us that we can't explain with those two drives.

And I think they have led to a very sort of darker way of

just conceiving of humans.

I think it's a reason why now you look at us in the modern day and age, we come

at humans through the lens of pathology.

I mean, there's a very, very thick book that if a person is assessing,

another person is thinking about, like, okay, what numbers in that book apply.

Which is like, that's not the way to go about understanding humans.

And I think if we just think there are those two drives, we're

not doing justice to humans.

One, I think it's not true.

I think it's evident that it's not true.

And then if we're framing it in a way that's not true.

We are not appropriately respectful of humans.

And if we come from what I believe to be the truth, that there is a

generative drive in us, a drive for the beyond self, a drive to make

things better, whether it has anything really directly to do with me or not.

And as with the other drives, there can be more or less, in people, a

combination of nature and nurture what genetically is in us, a predisposition

based upon the genetic lineage that comes down to us and the recombination.

And now we're a unique person with a unique set of drives, but they are

impacted by the genetics and then they're impacted by life experience, a more

strongly formative life experience.

So the younger the person, the sort of deeper the impact of events

they have, nurturing versus abuse on the array, on the relative

weighting of drives within people.

But ultimately, we get to these three drives and how they're

functioning in a person, being a way of understanding and assessing how

healthy or not healthy the person is.

And then we look back to those ten cupboards for the answers.

If we're finding things that we don't like, those drives are out of balance.

And here are the problems they're causing.

So very, very concrete issues of problems in people's lives.

We can look and see where is that out of balance.

And if it's out of balance, there's something in those pillars

that are not in the right place.

We can then go back and look in all those cupboards for, like, oh,

where do we dig to find the answer?

We learn things, we bring things more into balance.

So the pillars are in a healthier place.

And then what sits on top of it, as you use the word geyser.

The geyser that then comes up and floats everything on top of

it can do that in a healthy way.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

During episode one, we touched on some of the similarities between

understanding the self and building towards a healthy or healthiest version

of self, where agency and gratitude are these states that are being expressed.

And one of the themes there was this idea, you know, people perhaps want to be

healthy so that they live a long time, but presumably they also want to be healthy

so that they can walk up flights of stairs, pick up their kids, move objects,

not get injured, perhaps even do sport.

And of course, some people want to be healthy for aesthetic reasons as well.

And if we were having a discussion about physical health, we could address the

major pillars there, which were items within the covered, like most people

want some ability to have endurance or stamina to walk some distance

or maybe even run some distance.

As I mentioned before, walk up a flight of stairs, have some strength, some degree

of flexibility, certainly some mobility, maybe even dynamic mobility, et cetera.

And in order to address those or improve upon those, they could look in those

covers and say, well, how much running, swimming, long form cardiovascular

exercise am I doing per week?

How many steps am I taking per day?

How many times a week do I lift objects that are slightly heavier than is

comfortable for me to lift, et cetera?

It's very tangible, very concrete.

Here you're making the psyche and the self and mental health very much concrete

in some of the same way, saying, there are ten cupboards that one can look in,

and these drives, as you refer to them as generative drive, aggressive drive, and

pleasure drive, you'll probably tell us in a few minutes, can be expressed to varying

degrees in different people and how that shows up and what that looks like.

And I just want to frame this in people's minds as very similar to

addressing whether or not, okay, if somebody can run very long distances,

but they're always having aches and pains, or they feel weak, or they are

weak, there are good reasons for that.

They're overemphasizing one form of exercise.

The expression is more along the lines of endurance and stamina,

not strength, or vice versa.

The power lifter who can lift 750 pounds from the floor in a deadlift,

but walks up two flights of stairs and is belly breathing and has

to stop at the top of the stairs.

It's obvious in the physical realm, it's slightly more cryptic, or more

cryptic in the psychological realm, but here it's becoming concrete for us.

Paul Conti: I think it's very interesting and very ironic.

Right?

So the field that I'm in, the field of psychiatry, has historically wanted

to be sort of part of the rest of medicine, or like the rest of medicine.

And what I believe it's ended up doing is glorifying a taxonomy,

glorifying a category, mechanism of understanding human beings.

So in the way that if I'm practicing general medicine and you come in and

you're congested, and I determine, like, oh, you have bacterial sinusitis.

So now I've made a diagnosis, and now I know what I'm going to

do about that, okay, I'm going to prescribe an antibiotic.

Now, the thought comes in of what antibiotic.

But the identify sinusitis, now you need an antibiotic, is like

kind of how medicine works.

So the thought was psychiatry is going to categorize everything.

So we'd say, okay, I've listened to you like, I know your number or your numbers.

And then once I've given you the numbers, now I know what to do.

I prescribe this medicine, that medicine, these many sessions of

a certain kind of psychotherapy.

And that doesn't work.

It doesn't work in mental health.

It may.

It's not that it never works, but if you're going to try and

understand people, it's different.

A problem of self.

If I have a lack of confidence in one area of life and not in

others, that's a significant issue.

It is not like bacterial sinusitis, where then, okay, arrow

goes to prescribe antibiotic.

And I think what is ironic is that this route of approach actually does bring

psychiatry or mental health into line with the rest of medicine, r ight.

Which is why you can make that parallel and it fits well, right.

When you're making the parallel to physical health

and to I want to be healthy.

Okay, what are the components of that?

What am I doing to achieve that if something's not the way I want?

Let me go back and look at those components.

It may be because it's more tangible, sort of essentially

easier to comprehend, right.

Because it's more concrete.

But I don't, in a sense, see it as cryptic, just less obvious.

But if we go and we look at it and we say, oh, that really makes sense.

In a sense, it makes sense that it makes sense, right?

If there's a mechanism of understanding that applies to lots and lots of things

that are more concrete, why would a similar kind of mechanism, like

understand what the components are, understand what's built on top of them?

This, I believe, is how psychiatry actually fits with the rest of medicine,

not by glorifying a taxonomy, but by coming through the lens of understanding.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

And I think that what's so reassuring is that both in terms of creating physical

health across the various domains of heart health, lung health, endurance,

strength, et cetera, cognitive health, as well as mental health is verbs.

It comes back to action items that we each and all should engage in, in

order to arrive at the states and ways of being that we all want to be in.

Right.

We want to feel healthy, look healthy, et cetera.

We want to be happy.

I know very few people who don't want to be happy.

I mean, certainly there are people who give up, but we'll talk about

that today and routes out of that.

But at the end of the day, it's all about looking in those bins, asking

specific questions, and then moving forward in specific actions to get to

the place of empowerment, humility, agency, gratitude, peace, contentment,

delight, et cetera, as opposed to simply using words and understanding to arrive

at insight and then stopping there and expecting everything to change.

And I think that's where a lot of people are confused about

psychology, therapy and psychiatry.

And as you mentioned, psychiatry has its own shadows, if you will, within it,

where the use of drugs, which certainly can be very useful, even life saving.

Paul Conti: Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman: Oftentimes is seen as a fix all that somehow could reorder

everything within the cupboards and make the recipe just right, when

in fact, we'll talk about today.

That is generally not the best route, but again, with the understanding

that drugs can be very powerful, tools

Paul Conti: Play a role.

Yeah, right.

But it's important we understand what role is appropriate for them,

and that's where we often go astray.

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So as we move forward here in defining and helping people gain, for lack of

a better word, agency over their own mental health and self understanding, and

defining for them what action items to take, I'd like to ask you about some of

the things that I observe in the world and hear a lot about, in particular

from the audience of this podcast.

It's obvious to me that people vary in terms of their level of

aggressive drive, pleasure drive, and presumably generative drive as well.

One common question is, how do I become more motivated?

Right?

And of course, that opens up a bunch of other questions, like,

are people afraid of failure?

And that's why they're not motivated?

Are people afraid of success?

Is that why they're not motivated?

Is there some underlying childhood trauma or unconscious process

that's driving that fear?

And so on?

But if we were to take the psychiatrist's perspective, your perspective, if

someone comes to you and says, I just don't really feel like trying.

School is hard, school loans are excessive, which is true, by the way.

It's not even clear that with a degree I can do much, or I had a series of failures

in the work domain or in the relationship domain, and they're just feeling weighed

down as if it's not worth trying.

What does that tell you in terms of where to look?

And what does that tell you in terms of their drives?

I mean, do we conclude something about their innate level of

aggressive drive or their pleasure drive or their generative drive?

I think there are many such people out there, and then we'll consider some

other kind of phenotypic examples.

Paul Conti: So it's a great example because any good clinician could hear

that story and have thoughts about it that could and would hopefully be helpful

without necessarily referring to drives.

I think you can anchor any set of assessments, any evaluation, any

attempted understanding to drives, but it doesn't have to be that way.

So, for example, you might ask that person more questions about what

they're doing, how they spend their time, because you're telling me about

someone who's not getting enjoyment or gratification out of anything.

And that then becomes of interest to me.

Is there something this person does enjoy or something they'd rather be doing?

Did they go to college and take on a bunch of loans because they felt

that was better, because they thought they were going to do something

that now they actually don't want to do ? Or that opportunity isn't

there, and now they're frustrated?

What is inside this person that might seem different than that.

And again, the answers could be complicated.

It could be.

Maybe that person enjoys what they're doing, but the cost of

living where they are is so high that they still feel miserable.

There's a sense of privation, and then that gets backmapped to like, I'm not

getting any pleasure out of anything.

So the answer could be as simple as you strategize with the person of,

for example, does a person like that move or move to a different area?

There's so many ways of looking at this and so many ways of understanding this.

But you're describing someone to me who is kind of really complaining

that nothing is feeling good, right?

Nothing's providing a sense of enjoyment or of pleasure, right?

So I would probably be interested in that first and think maybe the pleasure drive

is higher than what's being fulfilled.

Maybe the pleasure drive is low, and that's an issue in and of itself.

We sort of learn those things.

Maybe the aggressive drive is low, and if that person just put a

little more energy into it, right.

Like they could be in a different place.

So you try and help the person understand themselves so that you can make change.

And again, that understanding doesn't have to be anchored to the drives.

But I do believe the drives are at the root of all understanding, because if

you sit with that person and you talk to that person, then you're going to be able

to understand what is out of balance, either in the actual array of the drives

or in how they're being experienced.

Because again, if you have a high pleasure drive, for example,

and it's not gratified, right.

That represents a problem.

Andrew Huberman: What about people who can experience some pleasure or can keep

busy, say, for instance, on social media or playing video games and I should

also say perhaps it's bringing them to a place of peace, contentment and delight.

But in some sense, it's not really generative.

I'm not going to cast judgment and say that video games and social

media are all a waste of time.

I mean, I'm on social media trying to provide value to people and

learnings, and I derive value and learnings from other accounts as well.

But there are these milestones, if you will, in life.

I mean, not that everyone has to go to college and get married and have a family.

There are a lot of different paths through life that I would consider successful.

But in some sense, there are milestones, like we want to move forward.

There's this phenomenon nowadays of a lot of young people so called failure

to launch, like they're not leaving home or they're not finding a vocation.

They're not feeling as if they're good at anything.

Or they have the sense that unless you're going to be top 1% in

something, it's not worth trying.

But they can still find what most people would describe as pleasures.

Like they might enjoy food maybe a little too much.

They enjoy alcohol maybe a little too much.

They enjoy social media or video games, maybe a little too much.

And I say a little too much because it's providing more or less a

sink or a reservoir for their aggressive and pleasure drives.

That's not moving them forward in the standard milestones of life.

I hear about that a lot.

I see that a lot.

So it's a slightly more complex phenotype than described before as just simply

the a motivated or non motivated person.

But what do you think of the phenotype I just described?

Paul Conti: Because we're unique.

Each person is unique, although we fit categories.

So there are categories a person there could fit that could be

different from what I'm saying.

But I think most people, they say on balance.

What is most prominent?

I think what is most prominent in that situation is there's something out

of balance in the generative drive

. And what you see a lot of times is the person has a generative drive

in them that's higher than their ability to realize that drive.

The generative drive then is frustrated.

So I'll give an example.

And it's a real true story of a person who had worked very, very hard, gone

to school for a long time, and had achieved a very high paying job.

And that was the goal.

It's a prestigious job, it's a high paying job.

And the person for a while was doing quite well at it, and things went relatively

rapidly in a negative direction.

So maybe for a little while, the person's doing okay.

Then the person becomes very negligent of themselves and their environment

when they're not at the job.

So the house is a mess, things are dirty, the person is wasting time with things.

So this is a person who enjoys it wasn't exactly video games.

Let's say it could have been.

Well, it enjoys them to a certain degree and can really gain pleasure

and feel good about the time spent

. But starts spending too much time.

Now what was pleasurable starts becoming a distraction mechanism.

And then what that transitioned to was overuse of alcohol.

So now you have either something that is actually destructive and was negative

to job performance towards the person.

This wasn't a person who was drinking a lot before, and this is a person who

was miserable when they were drinking or they were sort of wasting their time.

And we're aware of all of this.

Well, there was a very clear problem, which is that that person had no

interest in what they were doing.

None whatsoever.

It felt like the majority of waking hours were spent in an automaton like

way, but being awake and aware of the tedium of it, the frustration of it.

Andrew Huberman: The professional side.

So they essentially had very little intrinsic curiosity or desire to do the

job that they were successfully doing.

Paul Conti: Right.

Which comes out only after exploration, because it seems like, well,

what's going on with this person?

This person has a good job and their life was going really well,

and they're doing well financially.

And is this person trying to now overly indulge themselves?

Is that why they're drinking?

What's going on?

And what you feel is that this person had a strong, generative drive, and it

wasn't met one little bit by what he was doing, which was creating such frustration

inside that the person was either taking himself online or doing something

that was punitive and self injurious.

And this is a real story.

The person exchanged that job for a job that paid a 10th of

what the job they had paid.

And the change in the person's life was amazing.

Like, I didn't know this guy could smile.

He became happy.

He loved what he was doing.

He sold the larger house, bought a smaller house, kept it

beautifully, like he was happy.

That's what he needed to be happy.

Because then the generative drive in him, he loved what he was doing, gets

enacted, it gets expressed, and then other things can come then into line.

He's not being over aggressive towards himself and drinking too much because

he's saying, oh, to help with you, to the world around him and to himself.

He's not taking something that serves a purpose in his life.

Like, again, if the example had been video games, it would be like, yeah, great.

You enjoy doing that X amount of time and go do that and get gratification from it,

as opposed to then over relying on it.

And then it's not providing gratification.

It becomes a distraction.

So those things came back into balance in his life, but there

had to be the understanding.

And I think there's a lot of that in people who have a generative drive in

them that they feel is frustrated by a world around them that isn't cooperating.

Now, do I think we can understand that and change that in the vast majority

of people who are in that place.

Yes, but it has to be looked at first, right.

Because it's not always that.

It's just that a lot of the time.

So it has to be understood what is it in that person?

And then how do you go back to those pillars and look at what's going on,

that the person is in that place?

Because the world can bring us a lot of difficulties, right?

And that person who now is saddled with a lot more loans than they expect.

I have tremendous compassion for that and sympathy for that.

That's real.

Right?

So people can be up against a lot of things and that's just one of them, right?

But it doesn't mean that life can't be okay.

It doesn't mean that, but the person has to feel that there's some way, they have

to understand enough about themselves to say, okay, this is what this is.

And I kind of see what this is and why and how I'm here.

And from there I can start to plot a route to something that is better

because, yes, we have our difficulties and we can have a lot of them, right?

But for the vast majority of us, it's not like they're not surmountable.

We have to just understand them.

And let's say if that person goes and says, I'm going to get some help, and

they go and someone says, okay, you get ten sessions of cognitive behavioral

therapy and you try and like, how can that person think differently?

Then they'll feel differently.

And look, cognitive behavioral therapy has its place, right?

But it's not going to solve that.

That person needs to understand something about themselves, not redirect

their thoughts to better places.

So if the person gets a reflex, because that reflex works well for the system,

a reflex works well for the system that's treating that person, for the

medical system, the insurance system, that person isn't helped one bit, right?

And maybe a medicine can help.

Maybe a medicine helps to just take down the anxiety and the tension in the person.

Then the person can sort of think more about it.

And truly medicine did help this person because the idea of leaving the job.

I'm leaving the prestige, I'm leaving the money, is that okay to do like?

It generated a lot of anxiety and it helped to kind of bring the

temperature down a little bit of that so that he could think about

it, engage in therapy, ultimately navigate to where he wanted to be.

Then we could back away from the medicine.

So medicine has a role.

But if he just got medicine, what are the odds of that helping?

Like, zero, right?

Because it's not going to make the answers unless somehow the

person feels a little bit better and figures it out on their own.

It's not how it works, right?

So medicine has its place, but a kind of therapy that recognizes the limitations

of medicine in most situations and is designed to really help the person

understand, like, that's what we need.

Andrew Huberman: The example you gave is a spectacular one because, as you

mentioned, medication had its place.

Perhaps even redirection of thought in some sense had its place, because, as I

recall, under the pillar of function of self, one of the key items is salience.

What we pay attention to internally or externally, what

our internal narratives are.

But in staying with the example of this individual, again as a phenotypic example

for everybody to learn something from, the asking of better questions about oneself

is really what leads to the understanding.

So, like, better forms of inquiry, to me, these better forms of

inquiry, better questions are really the cardiovascular exercise, the

strength training, the flexibility training, the mobility training,

coordination training of physical health just translate to mental health.

Paul Conti: It's so interesting, right?

Because if you think about it, in the example I gave, both the

therapy part through the system.

The CBT has a place.

And the medicine part also had a place.

So both of those things have their role.

But if we build the whole story of, like, this is what this is, and this is how

you're going to be helped around those things, we don't help that person at all.

In fact, we ultimately, if you take on balance, you take all

comers, we end up doing harm.

Andrew Huberman: Well, in some ways, if we stay with the analogy of physical

health, it would be like the person who wants to get in shape and then they

get a, i'm not picking on peloton as a brand, but just a stationary bike.

And they pedal every morning and they lose weight, their blood pressure

goes down, they're doing better.

But then at some point, we know with certainty that if you just do

the same form of exercise over and over again, sooner or later you're

going to get overuse injuries.

So then there's like the lower back piece and another piece

and you become out of balance.

But I guess this is stealing from the Lance Armstrong book.

But it's not about the bike, right?

It's not about the bike.

It's about the elevation of heart rate.

It's about whatever other healthy activities go along with exercising

first thing in the morning and all the things that you're not doing as a

consequence of exercising in the morning.

So it seems to me that these better lines of inquiry as the path to better

mental health, a better life, that sit under these pillars of structure of self,

function of self, are really the key.

Paul Conti: But in this example, the parallel that you

made is even more dramatic.

It wouldn't be the stationary bike, right?

Because a stationary bike is achieving a lot of ends, right.

It would be more like telling the person, you should walk more

briskly when you're going upstairs.

That's a good idea, but that's not going to make the change.

So the idea that some CBT, some medicine makes sense, it's more like that.

It's not that walking more briskly up the stairs isn't a good thing, it's that we

can't build the story around your whole health is going to change based upon that.

And then that's a problem.

Then if the person thinks, just walk more briskly up the stairs and

you'll be healthier, because when it doesn't work now they've failed.

And this gets used a lot in mental health.

That person failed this therapy, failed that medicine.

I think it's so also ironic because that's often what the person internalizes.

Well, they failed because we set them up 100% for failure, right?

Because we took things that have their role, at least potentially have their

role, and we built the whole story around them because that story is convenient for

the systems that are providing the care.

It's convenient for the healthcare systems, it's convenient for the insurers.

CBT packages very nicely.

And you could see how if you start changing thoughts and how they

make you feel like you can get some movement on the surface, even if

there's no movement underneath.

And again, I'm not saying CBT is bad, but to see it as the whole answer

guarantees failure in so many situations.

Same thing with the medicine.

If you build the whole story just because it's convenient.

And by and large, medicines are cheaper than people, right?

So you can prescribe medicines very reflexively.

Psychiatrists with 15 minutes with a patient that they can't then

see back for a couple of months.

Like, how does that go well?

The answer is it only goes well the way a broken clock is right a

couple of times, twice a day, right?

I mean, look, sometimes it goes well where it just somehow it works out.

And that person can do a little bit of therapy in 15 minutes and choose the right

medicines, but by and large, we do those things because they're convenient for the

systems, even though that's why people don't get better like we think they would.

That's why they stay in systems.

That's why they come in and out of emergency rooms.

That's why they're not able to stop the drugs that end up only

being stopped when the person dies.

This happens all the time, and we don't stop it because we're coming

from a perspective that is so limited.

That's not saying, let's take a step back and look, can we really help someone?

Can we really help that person understand?

Can we help that person make change?

Which ultimately would be, of course, so much better for the person and

so much better for society, but is also better if we just look at,

bottom line, dollars and cents.

Because the short term view of it is cheaper today to have a

psychiatrist at a 15 minutes appointment reflexively prescribe

a medicine that is cheaper today.

Is that cheaper across time when that person is utilizing more resources or

they're in and out of emergency rooms?

It's so short sighted, which fits with many ways in how our society works, right.

That we want gratification and we want gratification rapidly.

That's why a person would accept that their problems could be

changed by medicine, right?

We're kind of conditioned that way.

Andrew Huberman: Well, of course there's the cost we don't see, which is that

person doesn't get the opportunity to express their generative drive, and the

consequence of that is incalculable.

Paul Conti: Right?

Yes.

And if we take a step back and we look at that, I think that what we will see is

that we have, it's not quite like painted ourselves into a corner, but it's like the

idea that if there's a beautiful tapestry that's the size of the wall, that you

can see that only standing back from it.

I mean, this goes back, I think, a couple of thousand years,

this sort of thought and idea.

But if you come up too close to it, then you can't see what it means anymore.

And we're up so close to it that we're thinking, well, okay,

how could one parameter change?

And can this person get a 15 minutes visit sooner rather than later?

Or how about this medicine instead of that?

And then it's like our noses are right up against the tapestry and we don't see that

we're not doing right by individual people a lot of the time, and we're not doing

right by society, which then, if you stop and think about it, we're not doing right

by us because any one of us could be in that position, and many of us have been in

that position being on the other side of things and really needing help and needing

to understand so any of us can be there.

So if we're failing a lot of individual people and we're failing the society, it

doesn't matter who we are listening to this, ultimately we're failing ourselves.

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Lets therefore talk about what does know, and again, placing on the shelf

the fact that medications can help and CBT cognitive behavioral therapy

can help, but they are just but two components of a much larger picture.

The map that we described briefly at the beginning of today's episode,

and that is, by the way, available as a downloadable PDF in the show note

captions if people want to look at it visually and that was described in a

lot of detail in episode one, which I hope people will take the time to listen

to because it's so rich with depth of understanding and I'm certain everyone

will learn a ton about themselves and others simply by listening to your

words, I'm absolutely certain of that.

That map provides essentially a description of the bins, the

cupboards to look in to arrive at better answers and even the sorts

of questions that one might ask.

If we could just talk about that in the context of the example that you

gave of this person who made this really incredible choice to move

away from this higher paying job.

They were overindulging in certain maladaptive behaviors.

And again, we will use this example.

But this example is but one of an infinite number of examples that we could

use of a person who's in a struggle.

They're doing something that's not working for them, and they're

also not doing things that they know they ought to be doing.

Okay, this is important for people to understand, because there are

going to be people out there that are thinking, oh, like this poor

guy, he's making tons of money.

Poor him.

But he was experiencing deep misery, lack of satisfaction.

So it could have been the reverse example.

Like, the person isn't in a job that brings about enough

wealth for them to thrive.

Right.

Because there are financial realities to life.

Paul Conti: It's just one example , right.

Andrew Huberman: Right.

Paul Conti: But it's a good one, I think, because the person left the money.

Right.

So it's like, well, what would make you leave that?

Right.

Well, what would make you leave that is if you're miserable in the

situation with that, and you're happy in the situation without it.

Andrew Huberman: Right.

So it's about leaving misery and finding happiness.

So if you'd be willing to share with us a little bit of your mindset during those

sessions, meaning the sorts of questions you asked him about the structure of his

self or to reveal the structure of his self and the function of his self that

allowed the both of you to eventually set him down this far better course.

What's better than moving away from frustration and overindulgence and

maladaptive behavior to deep satisfaction, peace, contentment and delight, and

to become a generative human being.

Paul Conti: Right.

So we can look in each of those ten cabinets.

Right?

So let's say we look in the unconscious mind cabinet.

There's not much there.

When the person was growing up, it was very clear that having more

money and having a job that impressed people was an important thing.

He internalizes some of it, so some of it's unconscious, but

by and large, he's aware of it.

Andrew Huberman: And then that was revealed to you how?

You would ask him a question about, tell me about your upbringing.

And he would say, yeah, money was important to my family but I

always felt like we had enough.

He wasn't super wealthy, but it had enough.

When you say there wasn't a lot there, do you mean that there was no kind of like,

X marks the spot or blinking red light?

Like, whoa, there's something really in his unconscious mind that's in his way.

Do I have that right?

Paul Conti: Well, more because it was conscious.

So he was aware that it was very much like beat into him.

Right?

Like, this is the only way to be okay is to have a prestigious job that makes

a lot of money but he's aware of it.

If he weren't aware of it, we have to bring that to light.

Right?

But he was aware.

He's like, look, it has a big impact on me.

It makes it hard to step away.

Like, I know I don't really care that much about the money, but I also kind of do.

Andrew Huberman: Sure, I always say money can't buy happiness, but it certainly

can buffer certain stressors in life.

Sometimes you hear people who have a lot of money saying, like, money

can't buy happiness because there are a lot of miserable rich people.

But it's very different to have two night nurses to take care of a baby than to be

the person who has to stay up all night taking care of a kid, especially, or a

single mother versus a mother that has a partner who's willing to pitch in.

You just can't compare

Paul Conti: That's absolutely true.

In this case, we're just looking at money as money as an endpoint, right?

The idea that no matter what, how secure and safe is more money better?

And he had an intrinsic overvalue of that.

So it made it harder to step away from it because he was overvaluing it.

He knew he was overvaluing it just in and of itself.

Not even for what it gets you, right?

But for the psychological meaning of it.

Then we look at his defensive structures.

If we look in that cupboard, you see that they've really shifted, right?

They shifted from healthy places.

Now they're sort of twisted and distorted.

And he's doing a lot of denial, a lot of avoidance, a lot of rationalization.

He's enacting a lot of aggression towards himself.

And he's doing a lot of projecting.

He's harming himself with the alcohol.

He's punishing himself.

So his defensive structure, it can be healthy.

We know that because it was healthier, right?

But then we see that it is so twisted.

So we learn a lot from that, right.

A lot is conscious in this person, the defensive structure, can be

healthy because it was healthy...

Andrew Huberman: Eventually it was healthy.

Paul Conti: Well, it was healthy before.

Andrew Huberman: I see.

Paul Conti: It was healthy before.

So you know that it can be healthy again.

He has it in him to have healthy defenses.

They just started getting away from him as he felt less and less satisfied with

his job and more and more angry with himself and more and more miserable.

Andrew Huberman: This is a really key point for me and

everyone else to understand.

Throughout the years of high school and college and friends and things of that

sort, I would hear this like, "I used to be really good at fitness, or if I had

a dollar for every time someone said, you should have seen me in high school".

Like, the person who lets themselves go and arguably is very busy with

professional duties and family duties, and you can understand why

their time is more compressed than it was when they were in high school.

But nonetheless, you hear these sorts of things all the time.

I used to have this sense of I could do things or that things could work

out, and then it's as if there was a previous version of themselves that

is completely atrophied and the new version of themselves or the later

version of themselves rather just simply doesn't have access to that anymore.

Paul Conti: That's the impact of trauma.

Whether it's big trauma or it's a big event or it's multiple

things, like, oh, the world just isn't rewarding me, I'm trying.

The world's not rewarding me.

I'm trying.

The world's not rewarding me.

Then people become dispirited, demoralized.

It's the trauma of that that takes away the sense of self, the sense of agency.

Like, I thought I could do things before, now I don't think I can do things, right.

But nothing has really changed in me.

That's a problem and it's a problem.

The vast majority of times it's born of trauma.

Andrew Huberman: Does that necessarily mean early childhood trauma?

Or I suppose it could be later life trauma.

I mean, one of the things that I like about what you're saying so much is that

you, the psychiatrist, hears, I used to be able to do something well or feel well.

And that's like, it sounds like is a signal.

It's really a beacon of health that still exists in the person, but

that they're out of touch with.

I think for most people, when they think about themselves or people who talk

about how they used to be functional in some domain, and they're no longer

functional in that domain any longer.

It sounds as if things are fundamentally broken.

It's as if a piece of them that was functioning drifted

out of their body and left.

But I love the optimism, because I think so much of what we're

interested in covering today is not just what's not working and why,

but also what's working and why.

And what used to work and why.

And the idea that within these cupboards there can be the discovery of problems.

Clearly, that's why one goes to the cupboards as we're defining it, but

that there are a lot of answers.

The ingredients for success already exist within us.

Paul Conti: Especially if we know we've had that ability before, right?

Because we know that we had it before.

So think about in this man.

He felt that he couldn't make change.

Like now he's stuck.

I got a lot of things done.

I was able to get myself into this school and achieve this and then get this job.

He could do all of those things.

But now he feels like he can't do anything to make himself happy.

So we know he could do that.

He had a strong sense of agency.

He does it now, right?

And like people often do, they feel a sense of loss.

Like, naturally, I've had this happen in myself.

It feels like something's cut out of you and there's something hollow.

I had that thing, and now I don't.

Hence the I'm broken, I'm hopeless.

The things that we hear over and over and over again.

So think about the shift in this person to what's actually going on,

which isn't that hard to discern.

We just pay attention to it.

So then if we run up the structure of self, we say, okay, not a lot of it is

rooted in the unconscious mind, right?

There are problems of overvaluing certain things, but they're in the conscious mind.

Andrew Huberman: He knows.

Like in his household, over dinner, it was dad or mom being proud of some

dollar amount that they had achieved.

So that narrative exists.

And he's like, yeah, money was a big deal in my family kind of thing.

By the way, I'm not speaking about my family.

Rarely were their discussions about money.

There were discussions about other things, of course.

But in this hypothetical.Sorry.

Paul Conti: He knows.

He overvalues it, right?

He knows that independent of what money buys and what he needs and all that, he

just puts too much importance in money.

And he knows that.

Right?

So, okay, they're conscious mind issues.

He's pretty aware of them, and they're pretty kind of set in him.

Like those are the issues, and they're there.

Okay, we learned that.

Then we go look at his defensive structure.

Boy, that's very, very helpful to talk about.

Wow, you had a very healthy defensive structure.

What were you doing before?

A lot of sublimation.

Right?

Andrew Huberman: Could you explain sublimation?

Paul Conti: Yeah.

Take anxiety or tension or something negative in the self, or that

could be negative, and you channel it towards something positive.

He channeled that energy towards learning.

He channeled some of the aggressive drive into a sense

of agency that got achievement.

So he looked and he said, right, that network of defense mechanisms that

comes up out of the unconscious mind was like looking pretty good, right.

It was pretty clear.

Light was coming through it in a way that wasn't distorted.

And now we could look at, wow, things are pretty different now, right?

As he's saying, no, it's okay what do you mean?

I spent 10 hours of my weekend utterly wasting time.

And what's wrong with that.

Or he's rationalizing even that he likes to drink when he doesn't

because he's so mad at himself.

Like the defensive structure now is twisted.

So we can say, okay, that's a big observation, right?

And then the character structure, when we look at that, we find a

person who's pretty good at figuring out and understanding things and

coming right up to the precipice of change, but has a long history of

then difficulty making the change.

I know it, and I'm on the verge of it, but I can't bring myself to do it.

That's in his character structure.

Andrew Huberman: By the way, s uch a common thing.

I mean, people that know better know they know better.

Sometimes you almost have to wonder whether or not it's like

a medication in the pocket.

Like, they could take it if they wanted to.

That might even give them some comfort.

But they just don't do it.

They just don't engage in the proper actions to move their

life from one place to the next.

Paul Conti: And if we look then at the level of strivings,

he does know what he wants.

He wants a feeling of contentment.

It's really what he wanted was a feeling of contentment, a feeling of

like, I'm taking good care of myself.

I'm doing something that's of value.

I'm enjoying doing it.

He wanted those things.

And even when we talked more, he had ideas of what jobs would do that in

the beginning, he said he had no ideas.

What he really meant that he said to me, but was also saying to himself,

is, I have no ideas of jobs that would meet these requirements for me that

pay as much as the one I have, right?

But within him, which we got to where he knew that there were

jobs that would make him happy.

He just had to get over that they were lower paying.

So think of what we learn about that.

There's nothing lost in this man.

There's nothing cut out of him.

He's not damaged, he's not hopeless.

And now he can understand that.

He understands himself actually pretty well, right?

And his conscious mind is apprehending pretty well what's

going on and where he wants to go.

But, boy, as he hasn't taken good care of himself, the defensive

structure gets sort of warped.

And then it makes it a lot harder to take care of yourself.

It starts making other problems in life.

And he starts feeling lousy about himself.

Like, maybe I can't do much of anything right.

Why?

Because work isn't going as well.

Because he's drinking too much and role performance goes down.

So we can see that.

And then what's of most interest there is that there's a character structure

that can come right up to the precipice but not pull the trigger, so to speak,

on what the thing the person wants to do.

Because now we start getting, okay, an understanding of

what's actually going on, right?

And then if we look at function of self, let's look in those cabinets too, right?

To help him be more aware of.

There's an I here which he was pretty well aware of, but not enough.

Like, there's a person here I'm shepherding through 24

hours in the day, right?

Like, I am an I and I'm aware of what's going on inside of me.

And it can make me happy or it can make me miserable.

Let's be more aware of that.

Andrew Huberman: How did he go about doing that?

Because I find this first step within addressing the function of self

awareness and really understanding that there's an I, there's a me,

and I'm moving myself through life.

I find this to be so interesting and on the one hand, kind of obvious.

Like, okay, there's a me, like, tangible thing.

You look in the mirror, you see yourself.

But at the same time, it's a bit abstract, I think to me

and to many people out there.

How does one go about building up a sense of self in a way that provides

positive agency in the world?

Is it to tell?

We hear all the time about these affirmations.

And I'm sure there are people who look at themselves in the

mirror and say, you are enough.

And I'm not making fun of these people.

Right?

I actually have my own internal list that I tell myself on waking

every morning, which has nothing to do with positive affirmation.

It's just actually defining the different roles that I play.

I don't know why this is useful to me, but I find it incredibly useful to me.

It reminds me who I am.

It also reminds or reassures me that I don't have any dementia yet.

So we'll see going forward, but hopefully not.

But yeah.

Let's talk about this line of inquiry within the category of

self awareness that people can do regardless of whatever challenges

they might be having or not having.

What does that look like and what do you think that accomplishes at

the level of self understanding and agency in the world?

Paul Conti: So one way of looking at that is, and it's not the words

I would use, but what's pervading a person and sort of setting the stage?

Which you can discern by inquiry.

For example, in this case, the person.

So there's a person who would really not think, this is okay.

This person taking a job at 10% of the previous pay and

the job has less prestige.

Who's a person who would be very unhappy about that and very faulting of that.

And talk to this person, my patient, through the lens of that,

he should feel shame for that.

That person's not alive.

The person is not alive.

So one way of looking at is what master are you serving.

And a lot of the givens.

The automaticity in him was as if that person was alive inside of him, really

telling him how this wasn't okay.

He was fighting that he wasn't aware that, hey, that's some other person's voice.

He's like, no, I'm very, very conflicted about this.

Actually, he wasn't very conflicted about this.

When he starts focusing on the I, what do I actually think?

What do I actually think?

I don't care if I make 90% less.

Like, I don't care.

My needs are met.

I put some money away.

I want to be happy.

I'm not conflicted.

But in order to get there, we have to look at the I.

How much is the I at center stage?

I don't mean in some way of paying too much attention to the self, but

we're all acting through the lens of the I, no matter what we're choosing.

So to be aware of that and do I want to be impacted by the

opinions of this other person?

Because I can let someone else's opinions very much.

I mean, we all do, right?

Very much impact my thoughts.

But I want to kind of decide that, do I really value that person's opinions?

I don't want them automatically inside my head telling me how I feel about myself.

Andrew Huberman: I can't tell you how many people I know come to me in a place of

struggle, even though I'm not a clinician.

And as I listen to what they're struggling with, it's so clear that they know the

best answer and route forward, but that they're dealing with some internal,

oppressive voice about whether or not they are a good person or a bad person,

whether or not the choice they want to make is really a good choice at all.

Sometimes those voices are the voices of parents in these particular

examples, or the voices of peers.

And so I think, if I understand correctly, what you're talking about is getting

really firmly rooted in who a person is for themselves and what they really

value and what they really know to be true for themselves and really trying to

not necessarily quiet those voices, but see those voices truly as other, even

though they come from within their head.

Is that right?

Paul Conti: Yes.

To stop and think, what voices do I want inside?

So maybe I want the voice of a kind mentor who still held me to

account for a very high standard.

It's a good voice to have inside of me.

Andrew Huberman: A few of those.

Paul Conti: But what might not be a good voice is like, say, a not

so kind mentor for whom you could never do anything good enough.

That's not so good.

Or maybe you take part of that and you leave part of that.

But the earlier and more formative the voices are, the more they're

in our head automatically.

Like, think about that man thought that he was deeply conflicted.

Absolutely, 100%.

And he was right.

Like, his experience was to be deeply conflicted.

But when you go in and dig, if you just dig and you get to like,

okay, the I is going to assess this, he's not conflicted at all.

Which is why then if you're coming up the function of self ladder and you look

at defense mechanisms in action, and what's on top of that salience right

now is when it creates an immediacy.

So defense mechanisms in action sort of inform the process

and say, hey, the defenses are shifting to denial, acting out.

And that's what sort of gives us a time horizon, like this thing.

This is not going to be okay.

That if he kept down this path, what was very clearly going to happen.

You don't have to roll the tape forward that much to see that

he's going to lose his job.

He's going to feel very ashamed of that.

Like a bunch of negative things are going to happen.

So it helps the person apprehend that there's something going on here.

I'm changing, right.

Because in some way I'm thinking now that it's okay that I'm wasting 10

hours on something that I could really enjoy if I spent 90 minutes on it.

Whoa, I'm kind of losing a little bit perspective there.

So it adds a sense like it frames the situation.

And the salience of it.

Andrew Huberman: Could you elaborate a little bit on this defense

mechanism in action of acting out?

I think we covered in episode one, and I'm sure we'll come up

several times more during today's discussion about things like denial,

projection, displacement, et cetera.

Those defense mechanisms seem to have their own intrinsic definition.

But acting out is something that we hear more and more about these days.

Like, they're acting out.

What is acting out?

Is it acting out of some conflict?

Is it trying to demolish a struggle by going and doing something else?

Paul Conti: We can think of it as, by and large, an unhealthy manifestation

of a lot of aggression, which could be a very high aggressive drive or an

aggressive drive that's not too high, but is then furthered, its power is

furthered by a negative situation.

Say, like this one.

Because the acting out, what was going on here inside of this

person is he was very, very mad.

And this isn't a person who expressed a lot of anger or had outlets for.

He wasn't going and running 10 miles or this was all inside of him.

He wasn't getting it out in one way or another.

So what he starts doing is he starts acting out the anger.

Now, he's angry at the world around him because he's unhappy in it, and

it's not giving him more choices.

Now, of course, this is about him and not the world around him.

But he's feeling an anger towards the world that won't cooperate.

Right.

And he's angry towards himself.

Because he can't make himself happy.

Look at all of this.

Look at all that he did, and look how miserable he is.

So a way of acting out then is the drinking.

Because the drinking is to hell with the world, right?

You think I shouldn't be drinking at night and coming to work hungover?

I'll do it anyway, right?

To hell with the world.

It's a way of snubbing his nose at the world.

He's also snubbing his nose at him, right?

To hell with me, right?

The guy who now doesn't come across the way he did before, because

I'm showing up at work, not in the responsible way I showed up before, but

in a way that's a little disheveled.

Function is lower.

To hell with me.

It's a form of self denigration.

Like, let people think worse of me.

Why?

Because I'm so mad at myself that I think it's justified, right?

And then there's also the inviting of, hey, if I really have an

addiction problem here, I lose my job.

It's like, fine, I deserve that too, right?

There's an acting out against the self that if the person doesn't stop and look

at that, that can become true, right?

Because that person didn't really wasn't built to say to hell with the world and

with me, or to not even understand that, what's the hell with the world mean?

It also means to hell with me.

And it's not good for the or me.

But he was able to understand that because we would look at,

like, wow, what shifted in you?

This is a person who did a lot of sublimation before, who now all

of that's going into acting out.

So they're not taking negative energy and doing something good with it.

They're taking negative energy and doing things that are bad with it.

Why?

Because there's too much.

There's a lot of negative energy.

It's overwhelming everything else.

And then it's going down these pathways where the unhealthy

defenses are always beckoning us.

Send the energy down here.

It's easier to avoid than it is to face something and figure it out.

It's easier to just act out than it is to hold what's inside of us and

then think about why it's there.

So the unhealthy defenses are beckoning us.

And for him to see you have had a healthy defensive structure,

like, you can be healthy again.

You're not broken, right?

But to also see the way these defenses are going is bringing real risk to

your ability to even be happier.

You get further down the shame and loss path, it can be hard, sometimes

impossible for the person to get back.

So it sets the stage.

Like, this is very, very important, what these defenses are, how they're

being enacted, and for him to be able to see that, like, oh, this

could be healthy, but it's not now.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

These slow, degrading forms of acting out and self sabotage and sabotage of

others, I think, are the particularly dangerous ones because they're slow.

And sometimes the change is imperceptibly slow.

And then one day somebody arrives at a place where, as you said, they

unfortunately can't get back, or it requires going into residential treatment

or things that really big departures in order to get back into life.

And I would never wish for somebody to choose to act out

by driving off a cliff instead.

But there are other forms of acting out that immediately wake people up.

But it seems like people don't often select those.

They select these more subtle forms of acting out where they don't get

caught or no one's calling them out on it because plenty of people have five

or six drinks at happy hour, right?

As opposed to 50, right?

So it's slow self sabotage as opposed to immediate self destruction.

And again, we're talking about alcohol, but we talk about food, video games,

social media, arguing with spouse.

I mean, all of these kinds of things that build up over time to eventually deliver

people to a place of real problems.

I'm curious, for this particular individual you worked with, sounds

like that's not what happened.

They started this process of self inquiry around self awareness.

And did you see that the salience that is what they paid attention to

internally and externally immediately shifted and the defense mechanism

of acting out immediately dissolved.

I mean, what was the kind of contour and time course.

Paul Conti: There was less.

If we're looking in the cabinets, there's a lot in the defence mechanisms in action

cabinet, there's not as much in the salience cabinet because this is the major

thing on his mind right above all else.

And he was having intrusive thoughts about it and his self talk was about it.

But we kind of already knew that, just like we knew it was in the conscious mind.

So if you think, where's the money at?

It's not as much in that realm because he's aware of it.

If he thought, oh, this isn't bothering me very much.

And then he said, well, all his internal dialogue is about it, right then,

okay, there's a lot to achieve there.

But just as he brought a lot that was unconscious into the conscious

mind, was aware of it, it was salient.

There's less to do there because the things to understand and change

are not residing so much there.

Andrew Huberman: For people that are, no doubt everyone is thinking about their

own internal processes and where they could ask better questions and arrive at

better answers to help themselves along.

Perhaps you could elaborate a little bit more on this salience

cupboard under function of self.

To me, salience is what's most apparent.

As you talked about yesterday and again today, there's this internal

narrative, like what's on my mind often or what kind of jumps to mind.

I've started doing this recently based on our discussions here, and I've noticed

that under different states of arousal.

And here I'm talking specifically about sleepiness versus alertness type arousal

when I wake up in the morning or when I'm tired in the evening, where my mind

is at, where it defaults to and what I'm paying attention to throughout the day

is that just asking myself to notice, and I've certainly noticed some patterns.

For instance, I've noticed that anytime my overall state is elevated, more alertness,

or in the middle of exercise, my mind goes to some not so pleasant thoughts.

And it's interesting to me, it's like, wow, this is strongly

correlated with states of internal arousal that are healthy.

Exercise within a limited frame or exercise in general, if done

in a healthy way, is healthy.

And when I'm sleepy, those thoughts never come about.

When I wake up in the morning, certain thoughts tend to leap to mind.

Other thoughts know.

So sort of categorization of different types of thoughts

depending on my internal state.

Is that the sort of line of inquiry that you're suggesting or describing here?

Paul Conti: Yeah, I think it's quite half the picture, because half the

picture would be what's going on in your mind when your mind is sort of at rest.

What then starts playing itself right in your mind.

The other side of it is what comes to the fore when there's a

lot of competition for attention.

So I'm making this up, but the idea that if he stubbed his toe really badly,

he'd still be thinking about this.

Because it's so much power.

Now, again, maybe if, God forbid, he has a badly broken bone, there's a lot of pain,

like he's going to think of that first.

But it takes a lot of other stimulus to be more salient than this.

So you can look at what's coming in your mind when your mind is

sort of free and open, that's very, very important and relevant.

And then what's winning out when there's maybe a high arousal state and

a lot of competition for attention.

Andrew Huberman: That's very helpful.

Again, I think that along with this self awareness piece, the asking of oneself

what is happening in my mind when I'm in different states or throughout the

day, and as you're describing now, also including when there are other

things available to think about.

Does that include how often I'm distracted by a particular thought?

Like how many times throughout the day my mind goes from the conversation

I might be in to something else?

Paul Conti: Yes.

Does it hijack your attention?

Is one way of putting that.

Andrew Huberman: A lot of people mention to me challenges with intrusive thoughts.

What can be done about those intrusive thoughts?

Or is it simply a matter of paying attention to the fact that they're

there and then thinking about the origins of those thoughts?

Paul Conti: Right.

Absolutely.

One example, you could have intrusive thoughts because there's trauma in

your background, maybe very clear trauma that you're not facing and

addressing, and then you have intrusive thoughts that say, I'm not safe.

Okay, go look for what's still in the unconscious mind.

Or when it comes out a little bit, you push back into the unconscious mind.

That's a very different scenario than, like, in this case.

This man was having intrusive thoughts about his job situation, his overall

situation, and it made sense that he was having those intrusive.

They were markers of the acuity of it, of, like, you have to do something about this

or something very bad is going to happen.

So the intrusive thoughts there.

And this made sense, right.

This is not going well, and your mind is sort of forcing you to

pay attention to this because time really kind of is of the essence.

You're at real risk now.

So intrusive thoughts can be anything from, as they often are, they can be

markers of something that is traumatic, something that's underneath the surface,

something that is really bothering us, that we've shoved down, that's making

guilt, shame, distress, vulnerability.

That's very often the case.

But sometimes intrusive thoughts are a marker of like, oh, right.

That's the thing to pay attention to.

Andrew Huberman: And once we identify the intrusive thought, how do we eradicate it?

I mean, how do we work with it?

Talking about trauma now, of course, it might map back to a childhood experience,

some internal narrative, but is there some roadmap for moving intrusive thoughts

from a place of intrusive and disturbing to simply there and kind of, meh.

I mean, it'd be wonderful to hit a delete switch, but obviously,

we don't work like that.

Paul Conti: Well, let's take a look, if we could, at this example, right,

which is a little bit different if we run through this example of the person

in the job, because then we should talk about trauma driven intrusive thoughts,

which is, I think, in many ways, the biggest topic about intrusive thoughts.

But think of this person here.

If we go up from salience, we look at behaviors, right?

And behavior actually now is very, very important, right.

This person is drinking.

They're still going to that job they don't want.

They haven't gone and interviewed for the jobs they want.

So we start looking at the behaviors that are making problems, the changes in

behaviors that could make things better.

And then on top of that, we arrive at strivings.

And I think when I was talking about structure of self, I think at least one

time I misspoke and said striving instead of self at the top of these pyramids, self

and striving have a lot of overlap, right.

Because if you're growing a healthy self out of the sort of top of the structure

of self pyramid, then that self is going to be aware of strivings and it's

going to be better able to enact them.

So his sense of self was shaken here, but he was aware of the

strivings for a better life.

So now let's see the roadmap.

It's interesting, right?

Because the roadmap is his roadmap.

If we look in those ten cupboards, we come up with a roadmap, and the

roadmap doesn't have us spending very much time in unconscious land, right.

Because he doesn't really need that.

If we look at what makes the difference for him, what did we do?

We really cultivated the self awareness, the I that is making decisions for him.

We looked at how his defensive structure had changed and the things he didn't

want to be there now and the good things that were there before, and

how could he get back some of that?

How could he trend back towards what was working before?

So we start to really look at that and then we go from there

really to changing behaviors.

Like it requires a behavioral change, which is not to walk up to

the precipice of doing this each day, but to actually do it, right.

Because it was very clear all the vectors, so to speak, inside of

him were pointing towards doing it.

And that that was consistent with the self being healthier, that garden

growing on top of the structure and the strivings then being realized.

So for him, that was the roadmap and the salience, it wasn't really part

of it, because the intrusiveness, the salience bias inside of him made sense.

And then, of course, it went away once he made the decisions, right.

Because the intrusive thoughts of, like, you have to figure this out.

You have to figure this out.

Weren't there anymore, along with the intrusive thoughts of,

you'll never figure this out.

It goes away because he made the change, but he made the change

because we looked at self awareness and we strengthened self awareness.

We looked at defense mechanisms, how they could be versus how they are.

We looked at the behavioral change, which was really necessary.

And then also referencing a character structure that has difficulty.

Coming across the precipice.

So we say, okay, that's a baseline characteristic of him.

We kind of understand that.

But how do we help him change the behaviors anyway?

When he does that, the self is in a better, happier, healthier place.

The strivings are realized.

This person stops drinking in the way they were.

They start doing the enjoyment aspects of their life.

They start doing them within reasonable bounds again, they're

taking care of themselves.

Person's smiling and now think the generative drive is much more fulfilled.

What comes on top of those pillars, right.

Is that person has a sense of humility.

Enough humility to say, I'm going to walk away from this job.

It's okay that people in the job will think I'm crazy.

How could you leave that?

And it triggers something in me in some way.

But it's okay.

I'm not out there for that.

I'm not out there for the big thing that everybody is guiding.

I can have the humility to go to the job that I know makes a

difference and feels good to me.

He's empowered to make change.

He's moving away from the disempowerment of the alcohol and the avoidance.

So there's empowerment and humility and absolutely, if you talk to that

person on the other side of it, like shortly as he was enacting it, right.

Getting just to the other side of it, there was so much empowerment

and so much humility, which were then brought to bear through a sense

of agency that made the changes.

That changed the job, that stopped drinking, that dealt with the people

who thought negatively of it through a sense of gratitude of, it's not awful

that I'm going to go make less money.

A lot of people said that to him.

Like, how could you do it?

It was so terrible.

It's not terrible.

I'm grateful.

You know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to go make an amount of money.

That's all that I need.

So it was like, that's what helps a person do that thing.

And that's actually true.

That's what mattered to him.

So an activated, an active, a verb, sense of agency and gratitude, then

leads him to the place where there was at peace, contentment, delight.

He was delighting in the job that he chose, and his generative

drive was in accord with it.

Then eventually, we stopped at some point, working together.

He didn't need me anymore.

He could always come back, but we didn't need me anymore.

Then you look at.

How are those last sessions?

A lot of the last sessions were him in an excited way, telling

me what he was doing, right.

Like, oh, and then we did this, and I did this.

I figured this out.

He was so happy about it.

And you can see that man's generative drive, which naturally is quite high

in him, but was being squelched.

That brings him out of balance.

Now, the generative drive was in quite a good place, and he had enough aggression

or assertion to go and do that job and to do that well, and even enough to

counter anybody who would still kind of rise up and say, that wasn't a good idea.

He could counter all that.

He was getting pleasure from it.

He didn't need to seek pleasure.

By what?

Not even pleasure?

Because alcohol was pleasurable?

No, pleasure.

Because harming himself and saying, to hell with you, to the

world, and to him was pleasurable.

He's not getting pleasure that way.

He's getting pleasure in healthier ways, taking care of himself, doing the job

he loves, doing his leisure activities.

Like, the man comes into balance, and then life is good.

And when you say, yeah, okay, come back in a couple of months, comes back in a

couple of months, maybe in six months.

Comes back one more time, I don't see him again.

That's great.

He totally doesn't need me again.

And I atrophied from his life.

Great.

That's the success state of it.

Andrew Huberman: He eventually arrived at being truly wealthy with

all the components of mental health and peace, contentment, delight.

As you describe his story, which is a remarkable one, it occurs to me

that the narratives that we hear as children end up being so powerful.

Paul Conti: Yes.

Andrew Huberman: And I'm sure there are people out there that receive such direct

messages from their mother and or father.

Like, you have to do this.

You cannot do that.

But often we get messages through observing and overhearing.

Right.

The way that our mother talks about our father when he's out of the room.

The way that our father talks about our mother when she's out of the room.

And some of this could be nonverbal, like a rolling of the eyes or somebody

saying, yes, yes, agreeing, and then they walk out and they just.

And kind of blowing them off.

I mean, kids are, we are all so aware and integrating all of that all the time.

And I do think those messages get woven into us at a very deep level.

Paul Conti: Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman: And then, of course, there are the conscious narratives

that we build up as we go through in particular, I think, elementary

and middle school and high school.

I mean, I can still remember a negative comment somebody made about

a jacket that I was wearing in, like, the third or the fourth grade.

I forget everything else that happened that year.

Remember that?

Yeah.

And I'm not insecure about the clothing that I pick.

I mean, obviously it's a black button down shirt.

I've had similar shirts since the first grade.

Just kidding.

But the fact that that's embedded in my memory systems is, like,

just speaks to the salience of negative, of insults basically.

It was an insult.

And I'm sure I've insulted plenty of kids coming up as a teenager

and back and forth, but these narratives get so deeply embedded.

And the idea that one could pick a different path of vocation or, like, you

miss the opportunity to be truly happy at a deep level based on these narratives.

I mean, on the one hand, it's obvious.

On the other hand, you just go like, whoa, this is not good.

This is a flaw in the design.

And yet you're giving us a roadmap to understanding and to overcoming it.

Paul Conti: Right?

Let's say we take your examples and we really look.

They're great examples and we look at them, right?

The person making fun of the coat in third grade.

We're assuming it hasn't harmed you, it hasn't changed the course of your life.

What does it tell us?

It shows that negative stimuli are very salient.

I'm sure you got a lot of compliments in third grade too, right?

But it's the negative that stands out, which just shows that there's a

salience bias in us towards the negative.

And that's probably about survival and threat sensing.

Like, in some ways it makes sense around human survival, but it doesn't

make sense around human trauma.

So you had given the example of what gets communicated to the child when,

say, mother says something negative about father when father's out of the room.

Father says something negative about mother when mother's out of the room.

Just to give an example.

So, children, because the complex cognitive mechanisms

haven't been formed yet, right?

Then the natural way that the brain functions is in a self referential way.

So the child generally doesn't have the capacity to say, like, oh,

mom and Dad aren't really getting along well in this certain way.

So when Dad's not here, mom vents a little bit about something about him by saying.

The child isn't thinking about that, right?

Then what the child will often internalize is, okay, there's

me and there's mom and dad.

And mom says dad is bad, and dad says mom is bad.

And I must be bad too, right?

Because in general, if your parents are bad, then the

child takes that on themselves.

Now, again, I'm giving a simple example, but I'm very much extrapolating it.

I mean, imagine if that were very, very aggressive where the mother,

when this happens, just tells the child how awful the father

is and the father does the same.

Someone's not going to come out the other side of that being like, you know what?

Maybe they're both awful, but I'm not.

That's not how that goes.

So the lessons, the traumatic lessons of childhood get internalized.

And they don't even always have a solution state.

So you think about the man who knew, like, okay, you have to go get this job.

And all those things he internalized.

You might say, well, I mean, he got to a good place for him.

So for better or for worse, at least there was a place to go.

To go work hard, go succeed.

Go check this box you've been told you're supposed to check, but

oftentimes there is no solution state.

So how many children, I mean, it's terrible that this is such a high

percentage of the work adult practitioners do is helping people who, as children

were told one way or another that they were worthless, incapable, bad.

That gets put into the child.

Unfortunately, far, far...

I mean, one time on the planet is too frequent, let

alone how often this happens.

Andrew Huberman: That example makes really good sense.

And this is a question.

Could we add to that the example whereby the child overhears examples

of what say, men should be like or women should be like these things.

It's not so much like, you did wrong Andrew or you did wrong Paul, or

telling the daughter you screwed up.

But it's more, again, narratives that we overhear, or even a parent showing

delight or excitement about a certain phenotype in the world, like, oh, wow,

look at that person, or look at them.

Isn't she beautiful, right?

That the young child thinks like, okay, well, then that's the epitome of

beauty through the lens of the parent.

Or, gosh, like this person.

Then that child internalizes that this is the epitome of

disgust with another human being.

And I think children are so savvy without realizing it, it's like, okay, well,

then I guess you move toward that and you aspire to that and you deflect from that.

And you can see how these trajectories can be set very early on.

I mean, these are the four lane highways that we were talking about

in episode one, where just routes of neural processing that can bring us

to choices in life and places in life that oftentimes you go like, I don't

want to go down this path anymore.

The exploration of early narratives, both direct and indirect, first person

and third person, seem so critical.

How does one go about that?

I mean, clearly, with a trained clinician like you, you would

guide somebody through the process.

But if somebody were to try and do this in some sort of structured

way for themselves, what do those lines of inquiry look like?

Because we have vast number of experiences from childhood, but some messages are

going to be more salient than others.

Paul Conti: Sure.

Yeah.

The idea that reflective self scrutiny can help us, I think, is just a great idea.

It's a great concept.

And we do a lot of different things sort of inside, and we're guided

to do a lot of things inside.

But this, I think, should overshadow many, if not most of all those other things

of what's really going on inside of me.

Because if you think about it, a lot of people will come

through that and they'll learn.

So the person is told like, this is what beautiful is, this is what successful

is, this is what good enough looks like.

And that person may, through all sorts of experiences, maybe other people in

their lives who are more balanced, be able to arrive on the other side of

that even still sometimes going through the midst of it, depending upon age

and situation, and know, like, okay, my father and mother thinks like, this is

what beauty is, this is what success is.

But it's one set of opinions, and there's not a set of opinions

that are going to define me.

Sometimes people get to that place, but a lot of times they don't.

And they carry that lesson forward and they're not aware of it, right?

So they think that they're very unattractive, even though other people

are giving them different signals.

They think that they're very dumb, even though other people

are giving them different signals.

And their own grades and their own success may be giving them different signals.

But they're not putting the two things together.

And that's going to generate tension.

That might be why that person doesn't follow up on potential relationships.

They just don't think they're good enough and the person's

eventually going to reject them because of what they look like.

They're taking that with them in this example from childhood.

Or they're not satisfied with the job that in other ways is really great.

They enjoy the work.

They enjoy everything, but doesn't pay enough.

Why?

Because they have some false idea inside of what it's supposed to pay.

Because it's what the parent said by self scrutiny.

What are the givens?

I always think it goes back to the math minor.

If you can't solve the problem, go back and look at the givens.

What are you taking for granted?

Like, oh, I know that every time I see an X, that X equals four.

Really?

Maybe you wrote down four somehow because you were thinking of four at

the time and X actually is a three.

Right.

Just go back and look at what you're taking for granted.

And a lot of times this is what we're doing in the therapy process, and then

that's when the person can realize.

So I'm simplifying, but for the person to realize, like, oh, there's

a voice in my head, so to speak.

It's a natural voice.

That is the voice of this person who may not even be around anymore, whose

opinion doesn't mean to me what it did before, but that voice is saying,

you're unattractive, you're not making enough money, you're not good enough.

And you know what?

I don't believe that they can identify that.

And then it doesn't happen all at once.

But you can get it out of you.

Generally, you don't get it out of you unless you realize that it's there.

Andrew Huberman: What is the process of getting it out?

Because I think that we all have the capacity to remember certain things and to

arrive at a place where we can understand.

Okay, I'm taking for granted the fact that there's a voice

in my head that says blank.

Actually, I have a brief anecdote to say about this, and this

isn't I have a friend thing.

I literally have a female friend who the other day called me

laughing and crying because she was being evicted from her apartment.

And she told her mother about this over the phone.

And her mother's response was, well, at least you're thin.

Paul Conti: Wow.

Andrew Huberman: And she was laughing and crying about it because it reflected

so much of her childhood that no other accomplishment of having a job, having

an apartment, et cetera, mattered.

It was about one thing.

It was about a certain form of aesthetic beauty that I'm not even

sure she subscribes to, even though she happens to be thin, right?

So the fact that her mother would lift that from the conversation,

there's such a deprivation of so many things in that interaction.

But it really wasn't about that interaction.

She was calling me because it was really about her entire childhood, right.

And obviously, I'm not equipped to solve the problem.

And it wasn't a request for money or anything of that sort.

It was almost like the hilarity and the sadness of the whole picture, right?

But again, it speaks to these narratives that we internalize

and that sometimes show up in very glaring ways in the real world.

It's like to hear that, I think, was shocking to her.

I think she needed to tell me to, is this real?

But then it was clear that that message had existed in her

head for a long time anyway.

Paul Conti: That could be very pivotal if she realizes that, right?

And even the power of the humor of it is like, this is absurd, right.

That can be very powerful in creating change, because if there's some vestige

of that inside of her where she still believes, like, oh, I'm not good enough

because I achieved A, B and C, but I don't look like X or whatever, it can

very much help because there's a lot of power behind realizing that absurdity

of, like, oh, my, that's bizarre.

But wait, is any of that inside of me?

Am I carrying some of that with me?

I mean, there's an incentive for self scrutiny through what you're

describing, because what's the ideal amount of that to still be in her?

Zero.

Andrew Huberman: So as one comes to realize, the messages they've heard,

or perhaps, like, in this case, that they're still hearing, is the

process of overcoming those messages and really arriving at the self.

It sounds to me like it's a two part process, at least two part process.

It's to look in the bin of what are the givens?

What am I taking for granted about the internal narratives and

thinking about their origins in childhood or elsewhere, but then also

cultivating the self awareness piece that's under the function of self.

Like, wait, what's really true for me at the level of me?

And this is really, I think, about separating out the voices in one's

head, these internalized narratives from the person that we really truly are.

Paul Conti: Because the idea is that those two pillars encompass

everything we need to look at.

Those ten cupboards encompass everything.

So it's all that.

The person who's going and looking at the givens, they're trying to

understand what might be in my unconscious mind that I'm not aware of.

And, wow.

The last time I got this big award at work, I had this reflexive thought

of like, but you're not thin enough.

Wow.

Whoa.

Right?

There could be a process, like, that's going on inside of me.

I don't want that going on inside of me.

So the process of trying what is unconscious in us that may be causing

us harm, which is often where, that's where the trauma goes, right.

It's where the childhood trauma seats itself, which brings us back

around to the intrusive thoughts.

Intrusive, negative thoughts.

A negative self dialogue usually does not mean what it meant to the

man who need to change jobs, right.

Because they were there for a good reason.

Then he needed to make change more often.

The vestiges, the hangover, the lingering badness of some prior trauma.

So oftentimes when you think, we talked a little bit yesterday about

the person who was driving in the car and just telling themselves over

and over that they're a loser, right?

And then they can't achieve the things that they achieved

when they stopped doing that.

I'm simplifying a little, but that's the basics of it.

Because the intrusive thoughts, the self narrative, all the negativity in

us is often coming from places that are in the unconscious mind, right?

Not always.

But this idea that I don't think I'm good enough, I'm saying it to

myself over and over again, like, wow, let's go back and look at why.

Because the answer to that, again, lies in a different place.

There's just a different roadmap, right?

The man who needed to change jobs had a roadmap that spent a little

bit of time in the I, self awareness.

And then it went through self defense mechanisms in action land, and it

spent a lot of time with behavior, and then it got up to the strivings.

That's his roadmap.

Whereas for someone who's laboring under the intrusive thoughts, the negative self

talk, the automaticity, the givens of childhood trauma then needs to go to a

different place where now we're spending time in the unconscious mind thinking

about what's there, figuring out what's there, bringing things to consciousness.

That person, say, realizing maybe your friend, you had this

realization of, like, oh, my goodness.

We say, wow, did that bring something to the conscious mind in her.

If so, great, let's look at that and let's look a lot at it and let's look.

Are there other things there too?

Are there other givens?

Let's bring them to conscious, to consciousness so that we can talk about

them, we can identify them, and then look at how does that relate to defense

mechanisms and character structure?

And now what are we doing?

A process of interested inquiry like this is really interesting.

I mean, it should be interesting to the person doing it.

It's them, right?

And it should be interesting to the person doing it with them, right?

Because if you're a therapist and it's not interesting to you,

you need another job, right?

Or you're talking to a friend.

Like if it's a friend is going to be interested.

So there's an interested, honest, open inquiry with the idea of holiday

. Let's learn things so that we can make change for the better.

And even though, as we talked about yesterday, the intrusive thoughts and

the self dialogue that's gone on over and over and over again, it doesn't go

away easily, but that doesn't mean it doesn't atrophy over time and go away.

Or that the person can have that reflexive thought like, oh, there's

the thought again that I'm a loser or that I should cut myself or I

should drink or whatever it is.

I know that thought appears in me automatically at times because it

was in my head for so long, but it does not telling me anything,

it's just an automatic thought.

It's not telling me I should drink, it's not telling me anything, right?

Other than the fact that, oh, that's what happens in human beings.

That's how the self understanding brings change in us and gets us

over the barriers of why i've been trying this for what modern mental

health would often have us think.

I took the Silexan, I did the ten sessions of CBT.

I'm a failure.

Nothing will ever get better.

A different framing that says, hey, this can get better over time.

And my understanding and my efforts and my thought redirection, my

behavioral changes all makes it better.

And then those things I don't want in my head, they're going away.

It's taken time, but they're going away.

Andrew Huberman: I'm relieved to hear you say that one can have intrusive

thoughts and that one approach to dealing with those is to acknowledge them and

look at them and not try and push them back deeper, not try and eradicate them.

I'm familiar with having intrusive thoughts, not all the time, but at

various periods throughout my life.

And the idea that one can just extinguish them is a great idea,

but that's simply not the way it's worked, at least not for me.

But I have found that if I just say, okay, this is spontaneously coming up through

the neural circuits of my subconscious, and they're intrusive, and I don't like

them, but I eventually arrive at exactly the place that you describe, which is

that there's nothing actionable here.

They go from being intrusive and troubling to intrusive and just kind

of mildly irritating to intrusive.

And like, okay.

And yes, I go through some redirect, like, try and redirect my attention from

time to time when they're happening, but I eventually just get to a place

where it's like, okay, it's just a boring story or boring imagery.

There's nothing there.

There's nothing there.

And then they eventually break up like clouds.

That process could take a while because...

Paul Conti: You took the energy out of them, you made them go

away, which happened over time.

And then the energy that was so powerful becomes less and less and less.

And what happens?

They dissipate, they atrophy.

That's how they go away, because there's no more power.

There's no more power in them.

And that really is the way that we make change.

And I think your emphasis upon the fact that it takes time, the fact

that it takes effort, the fact that it only goes away slowly.

Over 20 years of, at times, being a therapist, what I've seen the most

daunting, the thing that makes people just give up and go away and go back

to the things that hurt bad, give up on themselves, are that it takes time.

And if you think it's supposed to take two weeks, and the world around you

is kind of leading you to think that, and then you go for help, and the

help kind of leads you to think that whether it's two weeks or it's ten

weeks, if it's going to take two years, you're going to go away disheartened.

Or maybe more angry at yourself or maybe demoralized.

So we have to look at the truth of all of this, parallel to your story.

In my own life, for years and years and years, I carried a negative

voice inside that was always waiting for me to do something wrong.

So if I say something that's a little bit off or not exactly what I want to say

now, it would say, like, that wasn't good.

It says something negative inside to me, or it's waiting for me to drop something

and say that I'm stupid and clumsy, right.

With me all the time.

But over time, through self reflection, through therapy, like, through a

lot of hard work, but a desire for things to be better and a desire to

understand it, it's not there anymore.

I mean, every now and then, it'll raise its head, right?

I'll do something.

Really?

I dropped a cup of coffee.

I haven't done it in ten years, and it made a mess, and now people

are coming to clean it up, and, man, the voice came back, right?

But I could recognize it.

I really feel bad about this.

And now it gives that voice a chance to come out, but it

doesn't come out much anymore.

Whereas I lived with it for years, it doesn't come out much anymore.

And when it came out not that long ago, I could recognize it.

I'm not happy I did this and let me help clean it up, but it

doesn't mean I'm an idiot, right?

So the voice in my head can just go away, as I've been helping it

to do for a bunch of years now.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

I think also important for people to understand is that it takes time, but

that we can all potentially engage in, right, actions, moving towards strivings

and hopefulness as we cope with those and try and diminish those internal

narratives, those intrusive thoughts.

It's not as if during the entire process, you can't function.

I mean, I think that it's cognitively and sometimes even physically demanding to do,

but we can still engage in healthy ways in the world, and we can still try and avoid

acting out and avoid forms of denial.

As I say this, I'm realizing that the wish for or the impulse to really just

suppress intrusive thought born of trauma or whatever else is really futile.

That's not going to work.

It's not going to work.

We have to embrace these narratives and not expect them to disappear in a finger

snap, but embrace them and see them and look at them and be unafraid to look

at them and discount where they are.

Absolutely not true.

Paul Conti: I would say unafraid to understand, right?

Because we must understand means we must look at what's going on inside of us.

When I didn't like that voice but was afraid of it, like,

what is going on inside of me?

What does this say about me?

And I'm directing away from it.

Well, that's why it was with me for, like, several decades.

But when I start to go look at it, I can find an answer to it.

And again, you have to look at what's going on in that person because one

might presume, and maybe people listening are presuming this or maybe not, but

a reasonable presumption that might just reflexively happen in a person

would be to think that, oh, when I was younger, the messaging I was getting

was that you're not good enough.

Right?

You're not good enough.

That's why I carry with me, you're not good enough.

But it's not that sometimes it's the opposite, that I was rewarded a lot

when I was younger for doing things in a way everyone thought was great.

Like getting great grades and being well behaved, doing all sorts of things that

brought a lot of positive reinforcement to me, but I never handled well things

that fell even a little bit short of that.

And then it would evoke a lot of shame.

So the oppression inside is not coming from denigration, it's

coming from something different.

Which is also why this is not a search to blame someone.

Because sometimes the people who are giving the message,

they're doing the best they can.

I mean, someone who's saying to a child, you're a loser, like, that's not okay.

No matter what, that's not okay.

But that's often not how it happens.

The parent, like you says, communicating, they don't realize that every time

they're admiring a certain level of wealth or a certain kind of beauty,

they're giving that message that the child that doesn't meet that or ends

up not meeting that isn't good enough.

But they don't know that.

Or my parents tried to nurture me and they did a good job of it in many

ways, and teachers did a good job.

So they're not realizing, hey, this person's going to end up

a bunch of years from now not thinking anything's good enough.

They don't know that.

So it's not a search for blame.

And I think that's very, very important.

Very important.

Because often people don't want to look inside because they think either I'm

going to find something dramatically wrong with me, and the answer I would

give is there's almost surely not something dramatically wrong with

you if you're having that thought.

And if somehow there is, you're better off looking at it now than later.

So that's part of it.

The other part is that people become worried that they're

going to ruin something.

I like my parents and if I go look at this, I'm going to hate them.

People say things or think things like that.

And the idea that we may get down to something that really involves

someone being responsible for something bad, now, if that's the truth, the

person already knows that inside.

The vast majority of times, they know that they're just not facing that.

But most of the time also, it's not that.

It's just like, okay, that's how life evolved.

And what's the predisposition?

Like, I was smart enough to get good grades, and I have a low threshold

for shame, and people reinforced me and like, oh, I can kind of understand

that, so then I can get control over it.

It's not a search for anger, frustration, blame of self or others.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Oftentimes I hear that people are afraid of dealing with these deeper issues or

addressing these deeper issues for fear that they'll lose, say, their drive.

Right.

The thing that makes them successful in the first place.

And that allows them perhaps even to afford therapy or afford the time to

think about these sorts of questions.

So it seems to me that the drives that you referred to earlier, the generative drive,

the aggressive drive, and the pleasure drive, are such critical nodes or areas

to look for all of us in terms of figuring out whether or not we're doing well or

less well according to some features that are pretty much universal in people.

Essentially what I'm saying is, at least by my understanding, we all

have drives to some extent or another.

And to the extent that our aggressive drive is very high and pleasure

drive is very high, and whether or not it's pointed in the right

direction, it can be generative.

If it's not, perhaps it can undermine our generative drive.

I'm very curious to know how you've observed the different ranges of

these drives in people and how that predicts whether or not people will

do more or less well in different areas of life, essentially how

the different drives play out.

Paul Conti: I think that the first thing to say is where the drives are

at, so to speak, in any of us is a combination of nature and nurture.

So the nature part tells us the range, sort of that the drive is going to be.

But because nurture means so much to humans, as we understand from

epigenetics, from the advancement of science, we see more and more

and more how much nurture matters.

So the range that's denoted by nature is probably pretty broad.

We see the manifestation of that, and then the nurture lets us then move that drive.

Now, sometimes nurture, that's not gone in the right place can move

the drive in the wrong direction.

But as adults, as people who can take care of ourselves, who can

learn about ourselves, we can change where the drives are seated.

It's not an easy thing to do because it requires a lot of changes of

self knowledge and hard work.

But we can do it.

We can change the sort of array of how those drives are

manifesting themselves within us.

And we see that, I mean, that's part of the hopefulness of

mental health treatment, right?

That we see not just surface changes, but we can see changes on a deeper level.

So I think it's important that these things are not fixed.

Although there are some natural elements.

Someone who may have a natural sort of low aggression or low self assertion,

okay, it's going to be in the lower range, but it doesn't mean that it's

locked in at any one particular point.

And that the place that we want to be, what is the place that's consistent

with the things that we want, the agency and gratitude as verbs, and the

sense of well being and all of that.

So the idea is the state of health has the generative drive as prominent.

It's the dominant drive, and then aggression and pleasure, which are

still active in us, but they're subserving the generative drive, and

that's the state that we wish to be in.

So when we're assessing, okay, why is there something that doesn't feel okay

or something that's not going okay, then?

One way to start is to look at, okay, what's going on in the person,

what may be off in the drives.

That gives us a very strong idea of, okay, what's going on.

A way of understanding what's going on as we then go and look in the ten cupboards

to figure out the specifics, okay, what is actually going on here that we can then

change, but the framing of what's going on can come through the lens of looking at

the drives and how they're manifest in us.

Andrew Huberman: What does it look like when the aggressive drive is very high

and the pleasure drive is also very high?

Paul Conti: So if these drives are running too high, where we end up

at is in a place of envy and envy.

I'm always sort of on the soapbox about envy, because I think envy

is just so wildly destructive.

And if the aggressive drive is very high, so the person say, in

one way this can manifest itself, just wants more and more and more.

They're not getting satisfaction from anything, but they want more.

That may be because of a strong vulnerability inside of them.

So something that might map to narcissism, for example.

There could be a strong aggressive drive to get more, and that leads

to something that's very unhealthy.

So the idea that I want more, I need more, I don't have enough, I can't get enough,

then fosters envy, which is not the desire to be better or to have more, but it's

just the desire to feel better about the self, whether that involves raising the

self up or bringing someone else down.

That's why envy is destructive.

So very high levels of aggression that are not tempered, for example, by a

generative drive that would also be high, then create a circumstance of

envy, and the envy is destructive.

And the same happens if the pleasure drive is very, very strong.

So if one continues to want more pleasure.

So I can't find any satisfaction.

I don't feel good about myself.

I feel bereft inside.

And I see that pleasure can make me feel better, but just for a little bit.

Then it fades away and I want more of it, and I want more of it.

That also can lead to the place of envy.

Like that's the outcome.

So if the aggressive drive is running very high, or the pleasure drive is

running very high, or if both are running very high, but it only takes one in

order to end up in a place of envy.

So if the generative drive is not high enough to overcome how high the aggressive

drive is, which would mean then the aggressive drive would be sublimated

towards good, productive things.

So take the energy and put it towards something that is goodness.

But if the aggressive drive was way out there ahead of the generative

drive, that ends up in a place of envy, as does the pleasure drive.

If I want more and more and more, but I never get satisfaction from

anything, it never brings me any sense of goodness that where it ends is in a

place of vulnerability and resentment.

Because envy involves wanting more.

If we look at what's really going on, envy under the surface

involves wanting everything, right?

If a person is at the outer limits of envy, which is why envy is so destructive.

Because if I can't get enough pleasure and there's so much aggression in me, then

I'm not going to make myself feel better.

But what I can do is make other people feel worse.

Andrew Huberman: I want to ask you more about envy.

But first I want to ask is one way to characterize the generative drive and

to distinguish it from the other drives is to say that generative drives are pro

social, meaning they tend to bring about benevolent interactions between people in.

Paul Conti: The sense that pro social as constructive, right?

In a sense, building goodness, then yes, because it's the drive in us that makes

us want to love and nurture things.

That makes us want to learn and sometimes learn to make better in the

world or learn for learning's sake.

The drive is a drive of goodness.

So if the drive is then going to enact itself in the world around

us, it's going to be pro social, because we exist as social units.

I

mean, if we decide, oh, I want to be an island off somewhere,

that's not healthy, right?

We exist in social units from small, like a nuclear family to a neighborhood, all

the way up to nations and to the planet.

So if we perceive the truth of that, that, hey, there's an interdependence

between me and others, and I see that then the drive will lead to choices and

behaviors that are socially constructive.

Andrew Huberman: Earlier, you talked about aggression, and you were clear

to make sure that we all understood that aggression does not necessarily

mean violent aggression, that there are different forms of aggression.

I'm curious if you could give us some examples of how you've observed

people with high levels of aggression and high levels of pleasure drive as

well, both male and female, and here, without defaulting to stereotypes.

I think a lot of people just despite the fact that you've clarified

what aggression is and isn't in the context of this conversation,

we hear the word aggression and we think verbal attack, physical attack.

However, the way you're describing aggression and the aggressive drive, I

have a feeling that you're referring to other expressions of aggression as well.

Paul Conti: So if the aggressive drive is running too high, and that could have

factors of nature, factors of nurture, factors of the situation the person is

in, factors of their whole life, but it ends up at the moment in a place that

is too high, then what that person is doing in one way or another is to try

and exert an unhealthy level of control.

And that can be done in so many different ways.

It can be done in that overt way of just intimidating people.

Of using harsh language towards people.

It can be done by manipulating people.

It can be done through passive aggression.

There are all sorts of ways that the person can try and exert unhealthy

control, but that's where we end up.

If there's too much expression of the aggressive drive in us,

Andrew Huberman: That makes sense.

And it reminds me of an example from my own life, where, first off, I

should say I've had almost exclusively positive collaborations among my

colleagues at Stanford and elsewhere.

Every one of those collaborations has ended in a paper that

we were all happy with.

But more importantly, the relationships grew and were not diminished.

But I had one collaboration with someone, not to be named, where it

was going very well, but I had the need to reschedule an appointment.

So I sent ahead a note about the fact that my car dealing with.

I had some other things.

I explained why I need to reschedule the appointment and didn't receive a reply,

which was a little unusual, but then eventually received a reply that said,

well, it's clear that you don't want to pursue this collaboration, which is like

the furthest thing from the truth, right?

And so I expressed that, and then the collaboration was reinstated.

But it brought to mind some concern for me because it was sort of an extreme

reaction to something that happens among academics or anyone we get busy with.

Things come up.

It was important to tend to the car, that is.

And then at some point later, they were late to a number of meetings.

Okay, no big deal.

We're academics, we tend to run late.

That's typical of many academics.

But then I was late once to a meeting, and they essentially left and wrote

an email that said something of the sort, like, I've got my own great

ideas, so I'm no longer interested in pursuing the collaboration.

And I was pretty shocked, because there was nothing really outside the ordinary

in terms of busyness and prefaceorial schedules, and there were other people

involved, postdocs and things like that.

And there was a great project to be worked out.

So I remember being disappointed, but also really kind of surprised.

But then when I mapped it back to the earlier example of the car incident,

I thought, well, there's a real sort of lack of ability of this person to

handle disappointment, and yet they're exerting or demonstrating rather some

of the same behavior, of occasionally running tardy and these kinds of things.

And I remember feeling like it was pretty aggressive.

It's a pretty aggressive reaction to something that could have

been handled with a conversation.

Now, I must say I'm very grateful that the collaboration didn't proceed and it

went elsewhere and it worked out great, and they're doing great and we're doing

great, and so, no hard feelings, but it stands out to me as a pretty salient

example of aggression, but not played out at the level of yelling or anything.

There's a passivity in there, but then there's also kind

of a kind of entitlement.

And here, of course, I'm only looking at the other person's behavior.

And I should acknowledge, I realize canceling, not good.

Being late, not good.

But listen, I'm a human being, and I...

Paul Conti: You canceled once.

You were late once.

This isn't habitual.

This is human stuff.

Right?

Andrew Huberman: Right.

And a lot of good work had gone into the project, and there was a

cost where, most importantly, the postdoc suffered because they weren't

involved in these interactions at all.

And yet the project halted at that point.

So to me, that seems like an example of somebody who has a,

well, strong, aggressive drive.

And that's clear from that they are incredibly successful

in the academic domain.

And when disappointed, lashes back or is passive, one or the other.

Is that what we're getting at here?

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the person rarely publishes with other people.

Paul Conti: Right.

Andrew Huberman: Probably that doesn't make a very good collaborative partner.

Paul Conti: Right.

And it totally makes sense.

Think about what you're describing here, which is some vulnerability in the person.

There's some way in which the person doesn't feel good enough, no matter

what this person has achieved.

So then there's a sense of the need and the right to over control.

So when you agree to work together, you didn't agree that I'll

never have to cancel anything.

Right?

Sure.

But the thought was different, the framing is different on the other end,

that now we're going to work together.

So I'm exerting significant control over you.

And again, you're not aware of it.

And maybe that he's not aware of it.

Andrew Huberman: In this case, it was a she.

Paul Conti: Okay, so I was thinking of someone different, but she has to have

some deficit of self that results then in the reflexive need to over control.

And think about the first response is a non response.

Which is, that's aggression.

But it's just passive aggression.

The thought would be, well, you're worried something doesn't feel good in you

because I didn't respond, which was true..

You're expecting a response, maybe you don't know.

Did you get the email?

What's happening?

Is she mad?

So it's sort of effective.

It creates some consternation and some dissonance in you.

Then on top of that, the person is willing to potentially, at that

point, sacrifice the relationship.

So you think about aggression now is not good.

This excess aggression is not good for you.

It also is clearly eclipsing the generative drive.

Because it's not good for this person and their research.

It's not good for this person and the postdocs in their lab.

But the person is willing to accept that in the service of

gratifying the excess in aggression.

Now, so then you said something that then sort of made it okay.

For the short term.

Okay.

Then the person feels gratified, like, whether you apologize or not, they

took it as you've, to some degree, bowed down before me now, like, it'll

be okay, at least for the short term.

But then the next thing that happens actually does end the collaboration.

So that's not good.

And you say, even from a self serving perspective, that person was

collaborating with you for a reason.

She saw a benefit to the science that she's very, very interested in

through the collaboration with you.

But then let that all go in the service of what?

In the service of the ego.

Of, I don't feel good enough about myself.

The response to that then, is a response of envy.

That I don't like that you have the freedom to behave

differently than I want you to.

I don't like any of it.

I don't like that I don't control you as much as I would like to.

And ultimately, it's that envy that becomes destructive.

So it's a setback for that person.

It's destructive of the science that person was doing.

It's destructive of the science that you were doing.

So envy is destructive.

And here, the high level of aggression, the aggressive

drive, is at a very high place.

It's exceeding the generative drive.

The pleasure drive isn't high enough either, because there's not enough

pleasure coming from the great science that's being done, right?

So then the person is approaching the world through the lens of envy, right?

They don't feel good enough.

They want to exert that aggression through over control.

And what they end up doing is destructive, right?

And it's very clearly destructive.

It's a great example because it's destructive of the science,

which is ostensibly the reason that you're there, right?

It's the reason you were there.

But someone who needs to exert over control is there,

not just for that reason.

And then the other reasons can trump the generative reason that they're there.

And that's how envy, when it is the product of aggression or pleasure

seeking, being too high, always unfailingly creates destruction.

And how different is that from agency and gratitude as active verbs.

There's a sense of agency, but the agency isn't being exactly enacted, because if

the agency is being enacted in the service of science or career or whatever it may

be, that's not going so well, right.

And the gratitude part isn't active.

Like, my goodness, I'm here, I have this great career.

I'm discovering things.

I get to spend my life in science.

I get to collaborate with you.

There's so many things to feel good about.

I have postdocs in my lab, right?

I get to nurture them because I know more and I can guide.

That's not leading.

Envy is not those things, which is why people who are doing that, at least in

this realm of life, although this often this bleeds into other realms of life,

the vast majority of times you see, is someone who does not have happiness in

the way that happiness with the quotes.

That happiness is the sense of peace, the sense of well being, right?

Being able to delight in things, contentment.

The person doesn't have that.

And here it's interesting, right?

This person gets to the highest levels of academia, and they're very

successful, and they have a lab of their own, and they're collaborating.

You think that's all great, right?

But not inside of them.

It's not bringing them those things, as evidenced by how this person is behaving.

And I would bet almost 100% if you say, what's that person like in other aspects

of life, at least in the professional realm, probably in others, too.

No one's going to describe a happy person.

Andrew Huberman: So much of what you just said captures

this individual extremely well.

And it also reminds me that so much of the way that you're describing this

aggressive drive can also be observed, perhaps in the way that people show up

to social interactions, not necessarily big interactions, maybe even just

interactions between two people.

What I'm thinking of here is the person, male or female, who shows up

and just kind of takes over, talks the whole time and tells stories.

I went to a meal when I graduated university, and someone showed up

for the first time at this meal, meaning we had never met them before,

and just sat down and just started telling stories for like an hour.

And it was interesting.

Portions of it were captivating.

And then at some point I realized this is either total pathology.

Like, this person is crazy, but they weren't crazy, or they have no recognition

that they're absorbing all the oxygen in the room, as it's sometimes described.

But it seemed like they had this need to just control the whole environment by way

of speech, just like fire hose stories.

And I've seen this definitely in the academic realm.

I've seen this in the non academic realm, in social settings.

What's interesting is perhaps why this person does this or these people do this.

But what's also interesting is how people react to it.

On the one hand, I think most people find that kind of obnoxious, but there also

seem to be people who see this as like, oh, that person has a lot of agency.

Like they're a leader.

They actually grab a lot of the attention that they're seeking.

And we tend to view those people as kind of empowered.

I don't actually think that they're necessarily empowered, but perhaps it

stems from the feeling that the rest of us, I like to think, have, which

is some sense of social etiquette, where there's some give and take.

You walk into a room, you kind of assess what's the context here.

There's some listening as well as some speaking and so on.

When someone shows up and kind of violates all those rules, on the one hand, it can

be obnoxious and overtake everything.

But as it said before, there's also the sense of like, oh, that must be nice

to just be able to be as one feels.

And so I'm describing this not because I think people should mimic this type

of behavior either way, be really meek and not say anything that's

on their mind or just overtake, but because I feel like it might be an

exploration of this aggressive drive.

And if someone's doing that, are they trying to mask something else?

And why do people react to these seemingly powerful people in this way?

Paul Conti: These things happen in the world around us, right?

They're independent of the spectrum of gender, the spectrum

of intelligence, achievement.

They're human problems.

So a person you're describing, whether that person has character

structure, problems that are present with them across time, or whether

they're in a certain place, whether it's in life or today, we don't know

for sure what the underpinnings.

But what you're describing is it's a presentation of narcissism.