The Science Of Building Extreme Discipline - Andrew Huberman

What do you think most people don't understand about stress? Yes, the findings that I think are wildly overlooked are the next experiment. There is an animal experiment where a rat is given the opportunity to run on a treadmill and rats and rodents of all kinds love it. I love running on treadmills, you know they're cool, we'll see who catches this fly first, yeah I'm ready man. I think there's even a study from Hoppy Hofer's lab at Harvard that showed that if you put a wheel running Wheels in the fields that rodents will run there in the middle of the night and run over them, that's how incredibly obsessed with running they just have to run. energy, they want to go, there is something rewarding about it for them, but in any case it reduces their blood pressure, which leads to further improvements in a number of metrics that are expected and the same thing is seen in humans running on a treadmill of running or they run outside or they swim cardio exercise is okay, well, um spolski um and I love to talk about an an experiment where they took two different cages with animals, one runs voluntarily but then that wheel is tied to a wheel in another cage that confines an animal and forces it to run every time the other runs, so forced exercise versus voluntary exercise and the The conclusion is very simple: voluntary exercise leads to all kinds of improvements in performance metrics. health.

Resting heart rate. Blood pressure. Blood glucose. Being forced to exercise causes declines in a number of health metrics and you see the same thing in humans, so what's wild is that my colleague, Dr. Ali Crum, Stanford Department of Psychology, has performed these beautiful experiments on mentality and beliefs. Placebo effects and what she has shown in an absolutely spectacular way is that if people watch a short video about all the ways that stress can actually decrease your health, then, in fact, stress decreases your health, whereas if a separate group watches a video too. Also a five minute factual tutorial on all the ways stress can improve performance by harnessing your ability to focus on forming memories etc., all that's true, that's what you see.

Can I give you my favorite that I've learned about over the last year? Boston Marathon bombing, uh, 2012, about 10 years ago, 2016, maybe anyway. Boston Marathon bombing, a study was done comparing people who had been at the actual marathon while the bomb had gone off and people who had watched 90 minutes or more of news coverage about it and the People who People who watched 90 minutes or more of news coverage about it showed a greater stress response than people who literally lived through it. Interesting, interesting, yes, the effects of mindset and beliefs are absolutely extraordinary and very real. I think you know, I was doing a lot of reading and research recently and I did a podcast about tenacity and willpower and, from the beginning, Balme and his colleagues had this idea that willpower is a limited resource, something about the depletion of the ego will be exhausted. it was controversial um, they showed that you know replenishing glucose between difficult tasks could restore willpower, they showed that jurors or judges who had low blood glucose levels were more likely to give harsher sentences, things like this, yeah , it's a little bit perverse various naturalistic situations and it made sense and then my colleague Carol DW, also in the psychology department at Stanford, most famous for her work on growth mindset, did an experiment where they essentially asked if tenacity and whether or not willpower was limited in terms of being some kind of resource and also whether or not it was related in any way to the availability of glucose fuel in the brain and body, and he found that if people thought or were I told that mind that, excuse me, willpower was a limited resource. in fact, what they observed experimentally, but if they were taught or told that willpower is unlimited and divorced from glucose levels, then that is exactly what they saw, they are saying that learning about ego depletion and believing that willpower is a limited resource is an information Danger that is self-fulfilling uh potentially now now now now arc Meister, you know, he was very determined, um, when and countered the uh, the DW counter by showing that, in fact, there is a difficult task followed by a difficult task. task, then your beliefs about willpower um can affect your performance on the second task, so D, aka D is right, but if you have a difficult task, a difficult task and then another difficult task, consecutive tasks or more , which is a lot. of what life is like, then it seems that the theory that willpower is a limited resource and glucose supports willpower.

The theory holds up a little better. What have you come to believe about the difference between willpower and motivation and

discipline

? How is it done? This all fits in your mind, yes, so willpower and tenacity are related to motivation, but they are not exactly the same. I think we should think of motivation as a um, as the verbal state that takes us from um, let's just say apathy to tenacity okay, so it's the verbal function that moves us along that continuum an apathy at an

extreme

tenacity. and willpower but strong um willpower exercise on the other end um one of the most interesting structures in the entire nervous system is one that becomes very Unfortunately, little coverage, in fact, most neuroscientists don't know which It is its function and it is called amcc, which is the anterior middle singular cortex.

It has one on each side of the brain. The name isn't really important, but we want it. Namely, to the credit of the structure, we should call it amcc. The amcc receives input from many interesting brain areas related to reward related to autonomic function, so how alert or sleepy are we for prediction error prediction, it is a hub for many many input and output hormonal systems, etc. Beautiful experiments done by my colleague Joe Pery at Stanford have shown that if you stimulate this area of ​​the brain, a small area of ​​the brain in a human being, they immediately sense as if some challenge is imminent and is going to be met. that challenge is a forward center of mass versus the response to the challenge.

This has been seen in independent subjects doing checks where they are then told that they are stimulating but in reality they are not stimulating it and they say: I don't feel anything that you can. turn tenacity and willpower on and off, so there is literally a center for this. This is where it gets really interesting. I'm going to list a bunch of peer reviewed published results in quick sequence and I'm happy to point out the um justification for this or the references are either people who are dieting or resisting some kind of tempting behavior and are successful in making the size and activity in your amcc increases over time and the structure becomes larger dieters who fail to flatten or descend the trajectory of amcc size and activation this can be taken too far people with anorexia nervosa, the deadliest of all psychiatric disorders where profound self-deprivation of food triggers excessive reward, there is this type of reward loop, their AMCs are significantly larger in size than others, so you know, this can be taken too far, superagers, which It's a bit of a misnomer because these individuals are people who maintain healthy cognitive function similar to people in their 20s and 30s until their 70s, 80s, and 90s, their amcc maintaining or increasing in size as they progress.

In later years, typical-aged people the size of we always hear that brain mass is lost throughout life, well, most of it comes from amcc and beautifully, and these are two of my favorite results that really bring this to bear. a protocol or a takeaway if people are given an easy task, the amcc does not activate if they are given a difficult task, particularly a difficult physical or cognitive task that they do not really want to do, the activity levels of the amcc soar and this is what's really cool. gave aging, let's know, people aged 60 to 79 the task of adding an extra three hours per week of cardiovascular exercise.

Now that's very true, three hours of an hour they call them aerobic classes, but they raise your heart rate to about 65 70% of maximum. you're getting into the Zone 3 area, yes people can look for zone three, but you made it, zone three, your amcc size increased over the course of that six month protocol and it offset the normal decrease related to the age at this sprain area in terms of its size. The theory that is starting to emerge is that amcc is not just about tenacity and willpower to overcome difficult things, but it may actually be related to the will to live, the will to keep living and I think these are some Of the most important results, by the way, I did not participate in any of the research I just described.

I spent a lot of time with that literature, but I think it's very important. I mean, we hear about the amydala, the hippocampus, the prefrontal cord, all very important. brain structures, but at least I hope this conversation puts amcc on the map, the one that could literally create your will to live is the one that is being overlooked a little bit and it may be, and the interesting thing about this structure is that it is involved in generating tenacity and willpower for all things, not just one situation, and what's really wonderful, I think the research literature on this is that it's very clear what we need to do, let's say, like me, you're a person.

Who likes to lift weights and you love to run? I love those two activities. Guess what those activities are, even if they're hard, like a hard run that I really enjoy or some hard sets at the gym, I'm not going to increase the size or activity of the The people at amcc love to over-romanticize the usefulness of those two last repetitions. Okay, push until failure. Great, you know, running hard until your lungs burn real good, but if you enjoy it, you're not increasing your amount of tenacity and willpower, at least according to the research. data, what it's going to do is do something that I call Micro sucks or macro sucks, you know, so the micro sucks could be all the little things that you don't want to do during the day.

Macro sucks might be the biggest things, but of course, you don't want to do things that are going to harm you psychologically or physically, of course, of course, but I think everyone would benefit from picking up some micro sucks, what are some of your micro sucks or macro sucks that you could spread everywhere? the day is fine, so on a home maintenance level, you know, I keep a very clean house. I'm also constantly throwing things away, but there are some things like once I exceed a certain amount of dishes in the sink, it becomes that good.

I'll load the dishwasher later, kind of like micro suction for me, especially if something's been in there for a while and it's a little gross and you have to like work on it and of course I try to put it in. every plate, you know, getting them dirty, but, um, such small things, things like that, I don't really want to deal with that right now, that's the kind of thing, those harder tasks where you have to break some barrier, some resistance. . to put it in the language of Step Pressfield or um, our friend David Gogins, you know, you know this idea that one has to have a callous mind.

I'm serious. David said that. The good thing about having an amcc that is highly available for activation is that you know through the micro and macro sucks the day you have this, it's like an engine that you can dedicate to other things so you can then dedicate the amcc. In other endeavors, I have this thing I call email anxiety and that's when my unread inbox hits three figures or more and that's when it follows me like a poltergeist all day long and that's definitely probably macro shit, right? You know? to top that, it's probably three to four hours of heavy programming, when this guest is coming.

I need to talk to this fellow, come on, blah blah blah, um, so yeah, I feel like um, what's more subjective? I mean, what sucks. sub, someone else might love the email, yeah, someone might love it and I think, you know, you've talked a lot on your show with various guests about yourself, you know, when we get too comfortable, aren't we meeting our goals? ? I love deadlines for that reason. I love deadlines. I love the pressure. I think Parkinson's law is the closest thing we can get to productivity thermodynamics. You know what I mean? When you have a deadline, you will meet it correctly if you don't. a deadline, Tomorrow Tomorrow see you forever, that's right and some people, I think, preload the datelimit procrastinating and then that's what you know, it brings your activation energy to a level where you can engage so I started thinking about this.

Lately you know I love running, but it's interesting. I like to finish it in my driveway and I live on a hill and in fact this morning I went for a run and the gate at the end of Colac is my sort of designated stopping point. so it was actually a bitch to do the last 20 meters, you know, this morning, so I probably got a little amcc activation because it was all the amount of negotiation I went through when I turned down my street at the end of this race , either or I wasn't going to run this extra 20 M was ridiculous, I mean the human brain, you know, was struggling not to do these extra 20 MERS, it was so dumb that it has to hurt a person.

A little more, You don't want to hurt yourself, but I think in the context of, say, cognitive learning, getting to the point where you finish something and then forcing yourself to do a little bit more at the end so you know. I'm not looking for any credit for this, but I want to be very clear that the scientific literature does not call these things micro sucks. I call them mics suck and I put it in there just to make it clear what I mean you know Nick Bear I'm not in Austin he's an athlete and a supplement yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah like a hybrid athlete, a bigger guy, but he runs really fast, he does body

building

shows, he does weightlifting, he also runs, to be clear, I know the big guys. he runs fast, but they don't normally run fast for 20 miles properly and he does, that's accurate, his little catchphrase is "go one more" and it's interesting what you're saying here is that it's not just about completing the thing. . what you are doing because many times what you choose to do, even what is difficult, you do under your own control.

Don't get me wrong if you do a hard CrossFit workout, Fran, whatever 2159 thrusts and pulls it is. Oops, it's hell, there's literally a name for how your throat feels once you're done, called Fran cough, which people get for having their heart rate raised to the point of spasms, um, that metal taste in the back of your throat, but what? people are doing there, even though they're doing something that's difficult, it's really difficult and it's within their domain of enjoyment and what you're saying here is that we're looking to push ourselves a little bit beyond that. an unnecessary amount of Challenge and I think going one more is a good reminder for us with the micro asshole, the macro asshole, let's push ourselves a little bit further than where we would have gotten our sense of satisfaction because presumably you get the dopamine.

I completed the task, yeah, and then it's like and then I do a little bit more to bring, we'll talk again in a minute, but first I need to tell you about mud water, mud water is an alternative to coffee. that tastes like chai and cocoa had a baby has four functional mushrooms and with only a fraction of the caffeine as a cup of coffee you will get all the natural energy without jitters or crashes each ingredient was purposefully added cocoa and chai for a touch of coffee and Lion's man flavored hot chocolate for Focus ceps to promote natural energy and both cha and Reet to support a healthy immune system, plus it's Whole 30 approved, 100% USDA certified or organic, gluten-free, non-GMO, vegan and kosher, so If you're looking for a delicious alternative to your morning coffee, this is a great place to start right now.

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