Dr. Becky Kennedy: Overcoming Guilt & Building Tenacity in Kids & Adults

Andrew Huberman:
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science 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. My guest today is Dr. Becky Kennedy. Dr. Becky Kennedy is a clinical psychologist and one of the world's foremost experts in parent-child relationships. Now, you may or may not have children. If you do, today's episode is absolutely for you. If you don't, well, you were once a child. Perhaps you're even still a child. Today's episode also will have valuable knowledge and tools that you can apply to your life. Today, Dr. Becky Kennedy teaches us an immense number of extremely valuable tools for the workplace, for romantic relationships, for family relationships of all types, not just parent-child relationships, and of course, also for parent-child relationships. We discuss themes that have not been discussed previously on the Huberman Lab podcast. Topics such as guilt, which Dr. Becky Kennedy offers a completely unique perspective on, one that I've never heard before and that frankly, I don't think anyone has heard before. In fact, she distinguishes between what most people think is guilt and an entirely different set of emotions, and offers you very useful practical tools for when you experience guilt and how to work with guilt. We also extensively discuss frustration, or what she calls frustration tolerance. Frustration tolerance is an extremely important theme for everybody to understand and apply in their lives because frustration tolerance, as Dr. Becky Kennedy so aptly points out, is central to the learning process of anything at every age. If you can understand this concept and you apply some of the very simple rules and tools that Dr. Kennedy explains during the podcast, I assure you, you can learn many more things much more quickly and with much greater satisfaction, if not during the process, certainly at the end when you master that learning. And those are just a few of the themes that we discuss during today's episode. Again, whether or not you have children, I assure you that today's episode is going to be immensely beneficial for all of your relationships. You will notice during today's episode that our studio backdrop is different. You will notice that for once, I was not wearing this particular style of shirt. The reason for that is that this episode was recorded during the LA fires, what was initially called the Palisades fire, and then spread to multiple fires throughout LA County. So we were not able to access our normal studio, so I want to express extreme gratitude to Rich Roll, our good friend in the podcasting space, who allowed us to use his podcast studio, which is where I'm seated now, and where I held the discussion with Dr. Becky Kennedy. First off, our entire team, our homes, and our studio are fine. I can assure you of that. But most importantly, our thoughts and our prayers go out to the people who have lost their homes, lost pets, and sadly, there have been fatalities during the LA fires. So our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families, and we hope everyone remains safe. 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, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Becky Kennedy. Dr. Becky Kennedy, welcome back.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I'm so happy to be here.

Andrew Huberman:
Grateful to Rich Roll for lending us his studio under the duress of fires in Los Angeles. I'm praying that his home is okay. It's unclear at this moment, but in any event, let's talk about emotions, both theory and practice. And if we can place it in the context of parenting, that would be great, but I'm certain that this has a broader theme that pertains to everybody. So I love the theory of emotions or how we would theoretically respond to something, but then there's the reality. So as a parent, let's say you have a stance in your home and in your family that it's okay to be sad. Like sadness is normal, it happens, it passes, et cetera. But let's say you're feeling particularly sad about something.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you express that and show that in front of your kids? Because I've also heard that young kids, in particular, younger than eight or nine, perhaps shouldn't be aware that their parents are experiencing, say, extreme sadness.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
Because it can be scary to them.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Or they might feel like their world is destabilizing. And then, we also hear a lot about kids feeling like they had to parent the parents, and then this whole thing becomes pretty complicated. So while-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... there's no perfect world where one knows what to do every single time, how do you look at this business of modeling emotions and also encouraging kids to be able to experience and express their emotions?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah, and I think everything I'm about to share applies in the workplace, right? Can a boss be really upset in front of the person they manage? Management, right? So it's all the same stuff. So I guess zooming out as a start, emotions are normal. Emotions are unstoppable. You can't not feel sad just because you have your five-year-old in the room, right? And I think the other thing that kind of forms my perspective is it's really hard to not show someone that you're sad. Like, you might think you're doing that well, but kids are extra perceptive. They are actually built to be more perceptive than we are because their survival depends on adults, so they have to always notice, "Is my adult around? Is my adult okay?" So they really attune to what's going on for us, right? And so I think the kind of question is less, do I show my emotions to my kid or not? And it's more, okay, if I'm sad, my kid is going to notice. What do I do then?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And as a principle, one of the things I think about often is information doesn't scare kids as much as the absence of information scares kids. So let's say there's something really awful. I don't know, as a parent, your family member, someone died of cancer. I don't know. There's something really horrible that you just found out. There's wildfires right now. Let's say you evacuated, and you found out your house burned down. You're sad. Your child is going to notice that, and you want your child to notice that. You don't want your kid to be a teenager and adult who goes around the world unable to pick up on emotional cues from other people. That's not adaptive. And so the patterns we set with our kids when they're young inform their view of the world when they're older. And so here I am. Let's say it's the situation of somebody dying, and I'm upset. First of all, as a parent, tell yourself, "It's not my kid seeing me sad that's going to destabilize them. It's seeing me sad and me making up a bogus story or denying it," because then my kid goes, "Pretty sure my mom was upset. Oh, she's not? Oh, she's pretending like nothing happened. Oh, she looks sad, but she's saying she's not sad." That is really upsetting. It would be like hearing your boss say, "Oh, yeah, 20% layoffs. What are we doing? I don't know. Oh, hi. Everything's great. How are you?" You're like, "What is happening?"

Andrew Huberman:
Scary.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
What you'd want is your boss say, "You just heard something. You were right to hear that. We are about to go through a really tough time. I'm stressed about it, that's why I yelled. You might be stressed. Here's what I know. This is going to be hard, and we're going to get through it together." Now, all of a sudden, that emotional experience has a container. It has a story. Humans need stories. We like stories. And so often we think it's the emotions that dysregulate a kid. It's the lack of a story to explain it. So let's say this really did happen. People always say to me, "Okay, but Dr. Becky, my kid is four. I'm going to say that their aunt died? They don't even know cancer." We don't have a better alternative. I can't even tell you how many parents I've seen whose kids have all of these issues because of the made-up stories. "I just said she went to sleep for a while." Six months later, "My kid has a lot of trouble sleeping through the night." Yeah. They haven't seen their aunt who went to sleep one time. Creates a huge issue. No matter what bogus story you make up, kids can handle the truth, and they can handle the truth when it's told to them from a loving, trusted adult. It's kind of like me and you. Someone can tell us a hard truth, but if it's from someone you feel safe with and that you feel like also believes in you and says it honestly, it might be hard, but it doesn't feel awful. So it's about saying to your kid, "You saw me crying." One of my favorite kind of sentences to say to kids around this, because I think it really builds their confidence, is just, "You were right to notice that. I was crying, and I'm feeling sad. And look, you saw that. I'm going to tell you why." I'm making this up. "Aunt Sally died. Do you know what dying means? Dying is when someone's body stops working." Then I pause. This wouldn't just be a monologue. I'll see how my kid responds. I might add, "I'm not dying." Kids actually really need to hear that in hard times. "I'm not dying. No one else is dying. I'm safe. And you know what? I'm sad, and I'm still your strong mom who can take care of you." That sets the stage for such resilience and is kind of the opposite of, "Everything's fine." My kid keeps seeing me crying. They keep hearing words they're not used to hearing, die, cancer, Aunt Sally, funeral, whatever it is. That situation is what makes kids feel really, really uncomfortable and unsafe.

Andrew Huberman:
So it's the absence of information that causes the harm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And it's the lack of coherence between what they're observing and feeling and kind of this open loop. If I place it in neuroscience-y terms, I feel like the brain does think in terms of stories. Stories have a beginning, middle, and an end, and they kind of want to know where they are in that story.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
That's exactly right. And the terms I would use to match your terms are coherent narrative. What is therapy? Why does therapy help people? It's interesting. Therapy doesn't change what happened to you. Therapy doesn't change your past. Therapy does not take away the pain. But the pain was never the thing that really got in our way. It was the pain plus a lack of a coherent narrative and support. And so early on, when kids have painful experiences from witnessing you or something else, giving them a coherent narrative is what they need. And without that, the way I think about it is they have what I call unformulated experience. It's just affect and experience that kind of free floats in their body unformulated. That tends to later show up as triggers and kind of other things in adulthood. And so yeah, that's what we want to try to avoid when we can.

Andrew Huberman:
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Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But with some distance between us and the fires, that's actually true, and I think one of the things that's so destabilizing for kids and adults in this kind of circumstance is that we don't know how this is going to work out. We just don't. And of course, none of us have a crystal ball. We can't peer into the future.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But it's the not knowing that really extends our brain resources. And I can imagine that for a kid, seeing their parent upset and then hearing, "Well, no, I'm okay," would create this kind of open loop, where then the kid has to worry about it. Like when will this come to an end? One question about expressing sadness in front of a child, and if, let's say, somebody expresses why they're sad, is it okay to accept consolation from the kid?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Because we hear so much that as children, we shouldn't have to parent our parents.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And this is a big theme-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... especially on social media nowadays.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Like were you the parent to your parent? Were you the one that took out the trash when someone else should have done it, and therefore you took on more responsibilities? I don't want kids to think they shouldn't take out the trash, but-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... you know what I mean. But if you're consoling a parent about a lost job, if you're the kid, rather, that is sort of the go-between between the parents, that's sort of acting as therapist. We hear about this a lot, and I think a lot of people peer into their past and say, "Yeah, I grew up way too fast."

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So on the other hand, I think we would all agree that being an empathic person, teaching our kids that if somebody's crying, you walk over to that person, perhaps, and just say, "Do you want me to sit with you?" Or maybe do nothing at all. Maybe offer a solution, maybe not, but at least provide some sort of support. That seems healthy. But the basic question is, should parents accept consolation from children when the parent is sad or experiencing some other negative emotion?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I think this is a great question. There's a couple things that are coming to mind. So first of all, all of this is a matter of extent and patterning. Yes, we do not want our kids to feel like it is their job to take care of our emotions. It's not a good situation. And I think the difference here actually comes down to what the true definition of empathy is. To me, empathy is noticing someone's feelings and caring about them. It's not taking care of them. That's a big difference. So let's say I'm crying, and my kid comes over, and this whole situation, maybe somebody died, and they're like, "Oh my goodness, Mom, can I give you a hug?" And, "Do you want me to get you a cup of water?" Okay, I just want parents to know, you don't have to say, "No! I do not want you to be a parentified child." Be like, "That is so kind. Yes, that would feel great." Okay, that's totally fine. I think the line is, and every parent just knows this for themself, where it might get to, "Oh, you know what? I love that you're noticing I'm sad, and I love that you care about that. And I also want to let you know, those are my feelings, not yours. And I am really able to take care of them myself with whoever is a friend. And you're still really allowed to be a kid who can go play, who can go have fun, who can even not listen to me once in a while when I say it's bath time. That's actually your job. So let's go do our jobs well." And to me, that comes down to what empathy is, the delineation of what is a parent's job and what is a kid's job. But also, I think all of this can get misrepresented in social media, and I don't want parents to think that they always have to chastise their kid for acting in a caring way.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I feel like kids are, as you said before, kids are so perceptive about what their parents are experiencing, and they'll create or move towards all sorts of emotional gymnastics in order to work with that. Years ago, I saw, I think it was a YouTube video with Jim Carrey, who basically revealed that he became funny As a way to make his sick mom laugh. That he grew up with a very sick mom, who was chronically ill, and so he would throw himself down the stairs and try and make her laugh.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And he was an incredible, world-class physical comic, among other aspects of comedy. But that his whole career was born out of this childhood tendency to notice that his mom was really hurting and try and basically make her laugh, make her feel something good.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And now I'm thinking about this because it's just incredible the way that kids can pick up on something and then try and find a solution to it.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I could imagine that for kids who have a sick parent, could be mental challenges or physical challenges, that they've got to notice.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And, in the case of Jim Carrey, one could argue whether or not it was adaptive or not adaptive. He had this meteoric career, but eventually just left it, decided that wasn't what he wanted to do.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But leaving that extreme example aside, let's say a parent is sick with the flu or is grieving the loss of, God forbid, a spouse or something really major.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
At what point does the parent need to say, "Listen, I'm really hurting. This is bad, and I can handle it," when that might not actually be true? So the question is, how much information to give kids.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Because you don't want to lie to them. On the other hand, you don't want them to feel the burden of-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... of needing to worry about a circumstance. And I'm framing this in the context of sick parent, but I'm also raising this thing of financial worries.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I have a close friend who told me that growing up, their parent was constantly dealing with moving from one job to the next. It was like this issue of whether or not we're going to have enough resources to get through the next year was a constant question. And this person is now in their mid-30s, and you can tell it still haunts them.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And it's completely shaped their relationship to work and finances.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I think we can think about this compared to, what would I want from my boss? I have a boss who's, I don't know, going through a really hard time or having a really hard time at home, and I kind of notice it. I'd probably want my boss to level with me and say, kind of again, "You're right to notice. I'm going through a hard time."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
But at what point would it feel like, "Ooh, am I safe in this organization?" Right? I think we probably all have a point there, and I think it's the same thing with kids. Kids really do need to feel like they have sturdy parents. Again, I always go back to pilots because I think airplane examples are so powerful because there's very few times in adulthood that we actually feel like our safety is truly dependent on another adult, like 100%. When you're a passenger in an airplane, you are 100% dependent, so it's kind of the closest dynamic. And you can imagine what it would be like if the pilot was saying, "Going through a really hard time. Who wants to come in and give me, I don't know, tell me a nice story?" You'd be like, "Oh my goodness. I get you're going through a hard time, but this is really not feeling great." Right? And what that means, and which is kind of even a larger point, is if you're a pilot, you need to make sure you're really doing a lot of self-care, more than the average person, because of this outsized responsibility you have. This is what I think about parenting, and it's why, the bigger theme here is this is what gets me out of bed every morning so motivated is not just to help parents understand tantrums or emotions or the latest struggle in their house, although I actually love that. It's to say, hold on, we've been really sold an awful story about what it really means to be a parent and how parenting really, first and foremost, is a journey of self-care. How can I be the sturdiest person possible? Who do I need in my life when things go poorly, so I don't lean on my young children and give them a responsibility that is not theirs? I was just saying to someone the other day that when you have kids, all of the unhealed parts of your childhood come right before your eyes. They are just triggered over and over and over with your own children. Like, "Oh, my kid's whining. I can't deal with that." Oh, well, whining is probably triggering because it's kind of representative of helplessness. What was it like in my family if I kind of felt helpless? Was that allowed? Did I grow up in a, if you don't stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about family? Okay, if I don't resolve that, I'm going to act that all out on my children and pass that along. So all of these situations where parents are feeling all these different emotions from a trigger from something in their life, I think it goes to what I always tell parents. You have a first and foremost job of self-care and taking care of yourself. That doesn't mean traveling to Europe for the year and leaving your kids alone. It means what is going on inside you? What skills do you need? What networks of support do you need? What do you have around you to help you on the hardest journey of your life, and the most rewarding one, of being a parent, so that you don't have to say to your kids, "Oh, can you kind of take care of me?"

Andrew Huberman:
Paul Conti, who came on this podcast to do a series about mental health, not just mental challenges, but also mental health, which is an interesting concept in its own right, has been quoted as saying that if you were to list out the 100 most important things for romantic relationships, it would be self-care and communication repeated 50 times. And I'm thinking about that now because sounds like a pretty good model for pretty much every relationship.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Self-care, communication. And I must say, the first time I heard him say that, it wasn't on my podcast, it was on a different podcast I was sort of surprised. I thought, self-care first? But the way you're framing it, it seems to me that if self-care comes first, or at least very high on the list of what parents should do, it frees up the kids to live and experience life with a lot more ease.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
A lot more peace.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And to basically unburden them of about 50,000 jobs.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
That's exactly right. And I think self-care has gotten misrepresented. It doesn't mean getting a manicure every week. It could, if that does it for you. But when I think about self-care, and I really think about the work we do with parents at Good Inside, we always say Good Inside, and our app, it's not parenting. It's for parents. It's for the journey of what it means to be a parent. It's for your own stuff. It's for your triggers. It's for finally learning how to set boundaries. It's about finally learning that it's okay to get your needs met, even when they inconvenience others. It's learning that your relationships are strong enough that they can get through hard moments where people are upset with you. Right? It's about finally saying to, if you need to, your mother-in-law, "We can't have any visitors on Saturday." And the reason I'm finally able to do that is because I understand my self-value and all this stuff. This has nothing to do with the fact that your kid isn't sleeping at night. But that is the foundation for intervening in the way you're proud of when your kid is waking you up at 2:00 in the morning. Right? So, that is the self-care. It's really like a, not just self-care, it's self-establishment. It's self-growth, really.

Andrew Huberman:
I don't know the psychology literature or clinical literature around this, but I'm thinking about speed of emotional shifts.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
In my own experience of life, I've known moody people, and I've known not as moody people. I define moody as people whose moods fluctuate quickly and sometimes spontaneously. But this idea that some people are steady as a rock is a great concept. But we also know that we need to feel our emotions, express them to some extent. And yet there are people where, if we were to plot this, it would look like a high-frequency wave, where some people are really upset, then they're feeling better again. They're upset, then they're feeling better again. I'm not talking about extreme pathology here.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm talking about someone cuts them off in traffic and they're pissed, but then they're fine. They're very, very happy about something they see, so it doesn't always have to be negative. But then they're kind of flat affect, and then they're into something negative. I think that experience of emotions is so far and away different from the experience of emotions emitted from somebody who you can kind of see the emotion coming. It's like a slow swell. It's like an expansion and then a contraction again that you have time. And I feel like I keep coming back to this theme of time perception. But anytime we have time, or we hear about in all the Buddhist traditions, like space. Like you're trying to create mental space, and this gap between stimulus and response. It all sounds great, but with some people, you have to really be on your toes. Or perhaps you disengage.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And so I've never heard a satisfying answer to this, probably because I've never asked it out loud. If you're a kid or if you're a parent, and somebody is experiencing something-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... let's say they're really angry or really happy, you can imagine riding that wave in with them. You could also imagine sitting back from it, and some of this is probably what we'd call temperament. But maybe you could talk about this a little bit in the context of having one or both parents as kind of high-frequency shifts between emotions versus kind of a slow expansion and then settling of emotions. Because I feel like those are two completely different experiences of life.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah. I think you're speaking to how differently we feel emotions. I think about one of my kids who I call a deeply feeling kid, right? So my image is always she's just more porous to the world. And so if you think about someone who's more porous, that their pores are literally wider, a lot more is going to come in. And guess what? A lot more is going to come out, right? And she's a kid who, by the way, you're in a certain area in New York City, she's like, "I can't be here, the smell." For me, I'm wired differently. I was like, "I literally don't smell anything different." Now, does that mean she's wrong? No. I actually bet, knowing her, she smells things, and then she lets me know how awful it is, and she can't stand on that corner. And for me, in that moment at least, because we're probably all volatile in different ways, I look steady as a rock, right? I have another kid who, yeah, is pretty steady, until he feels like his authority and power is threatened, and then you better watch out. And so in one moment, someone might see him as, oh, wow, that kid's really volatile. But in probably 90% of other moments, he's kind of cool as a cucumber. So, I also think it's important to categorize kids not as always one way or another, but we all feel emotions differently. None of them is wrong or right. To me, the goal is to not be locked into any one thing. That, to me, rigidity is always the enemy. That's what holds us back in adulthood if we're always one way. "I can never handle someone cutting me off in traffic because the emotion takes me over, and I have road rage." Yeah, that's not good. That's a very rigid, limited way of living life. But it's probably also limiting to say, "I've never really gotten riled up about anything." Forget road rage, but it's kind of amazing to get riled up once in a while and to feel really passionately about something and to feel something enough that you want to go do something about it, right? So, there's no morality on it. I think what's tricky, I can even say as a parent of three kids, is each of my kids, I always kind of imagine this, if I have all these different parts of me, they each need a different part of me to kind of lead. They almost need different lead parents, right? So, my kid who is my deeply feeling kid, I know What's so important is that I believe her experience, and I better be ready with certain boundaries because she feels things so intensely. Especially when she was younger, I have to step in more often. There's more difficult behavior. My kid who's really, really steady, I try to sometimes, even though it's convenient because he's so easy, there's definitely a lot going on in there. And sometimes I wonder, does he almost feel like all the emotional space is taken up by his siblings, and the only thing left for him is kind of steady as a rock? And that can lead to a rigidity later in life. So, I think these are moving systems. So much of how we experience emotions growing up is also dictated by the system and the roles our siblings play. So I don't know if that gives you enough of an answer. But I think-

Andrew Huberman:
No, that's informative.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah. I think the thing I'd really want parents to know is, I think we place a lot of morality on it, and if we're honest with ourselves, we're probably just comparing our kid to how we do things. So, if you're someone who's pretty steady, you're like, "My kid is crazy. They're dramatic." If you're someone who's a little more out there, you're not as bothered by that kid. And then you have another kid, you're like, "That kid's boring," because they're so flat. And so, I think this is true in couples, too. Whenever we're fighting, we're probably just saying, "Why can't you be more like me?" When we're triggered by our kid, we're like, "Why can't you be more like me?" That's probably what we're always saying to each other, going back to communication. But if you take a little different perspective of, "Hold on a second. There's no wrong or right way to feel emotions." Some behaviors are not allowed, but all the emotions have information, and what might my kid need right now? Instead of, "Oh my goodness, is my kid messed up?" Or, "Why is my kid not just a little bit more like me?"

Andrew Huberman:
How useful is it to talk to kids about emotions when they're not happening?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
To me, this is something I always just say, I always phrase it as emotion talk. Just knowing that emotions live within you, knowing that there's names for them, that they're normal, that they make sense. To me, it's like the ultimate leg up in life. It gives your kids such resilience because we can't beat our emotions. I feel like we've been trying that for generations. Like, "If I just only didn't feel so angry or so jealous or so sad." Our emotions are so primal in our body, and I really do believe emotions, they're information. That's what they are. Why would we ever want to not get the information our body is giving us? And sometimes it's almost dramatic what happens in an amazing way. So many people, I think about so many times I have people in a room for therapy, they start crying. "I'm so sorry." You're feeling something so intensely that your body is producing water from your eyes to get your attention. That must be really important information. Why are we saying sorry?

Andrew Huberman:
And as far as we know, a uniquely human thing. I could be wrong about this, but a colleague of mine at Stanford and psychiatrist, Carl Diseroff, talked about this, that humans are the only species that we are aware of that sheds tears for sake of emotion.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Other animals, they have lacrimal glands. They produce water, so to speak.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Salty water that comes out of their eye region, but not as it relates to emotions. At least we don't think so.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
So, that's a great example. I even think about a conversation I have had with my kids, and I like to just have these moments here and there. Whenever I talk about good conversations with my kids, I think people think I have these 45-minute, no. They're usually 10 seconds. I say one thing. My kids say, "Can I have a snack now?" And I think that's a great conversation because I know it gets in there. "Do you know that tears have really important information for us?" My kid will be like, "What? What did you say?" "I'm just thinking, so many people think tears are bad. Tears are kind of amazing. It's like our body is trying to stop us, and it's asking us to pay attention to something really powerful. I just think it's kind of an amazing thing our body does." Then my kid goes, "Can I have pretzels?" "Oh, sure. I'll get you pretzels." That, to me, is a win. I just want to tell everyone-

Andrew Huberman:
I love it

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... that is a 10 out of 10. I'm bragging to people about that. I'm like-

Andrew Huberman:
I love it

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... "I had the best conversation." Because I know this is seeping in.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Because in the moment my kid is crying, you think it's going to be helpful when my seven-year-old is crying, "Tears are amazing." They're like, "F you, Mom."

Andrew Huberman:
Totally.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
No one wants to hear that.

Andrew Huberman:
My reflex would be to tell them the biology of tears. Noam Sobel, who was on the podcast, told us that tears contain hormones that signal to other people, pheromones, excuse me-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... that literally change the biology of the people around you.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
That's right.

Andrew Huberman:
We can actually smell tears. We don't realize we're doing it. See, here I go. So I realize-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... I've spent enough time with kids that if you tell them that, they're like, "Whatever."

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
But you know when that's a great conversation? Around the dinner table. And again, your kids will roll their eyes. Kids roll their eyes about everything. I always think rolling their eyes or "Stop" is kind of a kid's way of saying, "There's a lot coming at me. I'm my own person. I just need to push it away a little so that on my own time and under my own control, I can take it in." And we take eye rolls or whatever it is so personally that then we end up getting into a power struggle. "Why are you rolling my eyes?" And we miss this opportunity. If we just say nothing then, our kid is going to take in what we just said. Just walk away. Let the whole process happen. It's kind of like if your boss comes in and says something like, "Oh, look, that project really wasn't as good as it could've been, and I really need these things done." And you're like, "Oh." And then imagine, "You're rolling your eyes at me." If your boss just leaves the room, you probably think, "Oh. I didn't do that as well as I could. I'm going to go work on it." So, I feel like not taking the bait-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... is a very important parenting tool. But I think those moments with our kids to talk about emotions and to talk about our own, especially when it comes to struggle. One of the things I think a lot about, I try to be intentional with my kids, especially when they were younger. I just think Kids are flooded by their parents' capability, and it is so hard to learn in environments where someone's capability is so far beyond your own. I'm not a good cook, but if I was really learning to cook, I would want to learn from someone. From here or there, burned some garlic or messed up the broccoli, and then it was like, "Okay, well, I guess I could do this next time." I'd be like, "Okay." But if I'm learning to cook from someone who is whatever celebrity chef, I'm like, that person's way too far from me, and I almost feel shame. So I think about this with our kids and how this relates to emotions, where when your kids are younger, especially if you just think about the first 10 minutes of their day, they're trying to figure out maybe how to brush their teeth, how to go to the bathroom, how to turn on the sink, how to wash their hands. They always put their shirt on the wrong way. They can't get on their socks. There's so many things, and you come out, dressed perfectly, and then they're like, "I can't get on my socks," and you go like this, "Okay. One, two." And kind of in those moments, I always think that I'm just kind of saying to my kid, "I can do everything easily." And they don't know our history. They don't know we struggled to put on socks for five years, too. I put on my shirt backward until college. They don't know that. And so I think, again, in these calm moments, you have this opportunity to say something like, "Oh, I cannot finish this crossword puzzle." Or like, I love "New York Times" games, right? And it's so fun with my kids now that they're older. But my connections was really hard today. I really struggled with it, and then I was like, "Oh, I can't do it. I can't do it." And then I took a deep breath, and I tried it a little more, and maybe I said, "And I did it," or I didn't do it. Whatever it is. And it gives my kid, first of all, it gives my kid an opportunity to just notice that I struggle, too. It gives my kid, again, kind of an arc and a story of, oh, someone I admire so much, every kid admires their parents. They've had hard times. They still have hard times. They work through things. They burn garlic. They can kind of talk themselves through it. That is such a more powerful kind of lesson in emotion regulation than teaching your kid kind of directly.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. It also seems that here we're not defining the age of the kids, but if one presents themselves as perfect or close to it in any kind of relationship, work, romantic, parenting, et cetera, sooner or later, you're going to fall from grace because they're either going to be looking for the mistake, or the moment you make a mistake, it's going to be this fracture in the picture that people had of you.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I have to say, and I think some people might get irritated or even, dare I say, triggered by the language I'm about to use, but I feel like the real ninja move in all of this is to acknowledge that there are power dynamics between parent and child-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... but then to try and dissolve the power dynamics.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
And I say this in the context of having run a lab for a long time, which is very different than raising small children. But you have people who are coming into your laboratory. If they're your graduate student or postdoc, they're staking their whole career on your ability to teach and mentor. And a lot is at stake. Nothing is for certain. They might not get a job. The papers might not work out. And so there's just so much tension around it. And so as a PI, as a principal investigator in our lab, I remember feeling that pressure of like, "It's got to work out." And one of the best things that ever happened to me as a graduate student was that my first paper took forever to get accepted. And we almost got in, and then it didn't get in, and then finally it got in, such that every paper after that felt like a breeze because it took so damn long the first time. And I got to see that my advisor couldn't make magic happen. And fortunately, that's the way-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... the scientific process is supposed to work. And I think about this in the context of parenting. If you're seen as invincible, we hear about this. People say, "I thought my dad was Superman. I thought my mom was Superwoman." But you can imagine how disappointing it must be when they discover anything about a lack of capacity or a break-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... in emotional stability, et cetera. So how does one present themselves as both-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... powerful in the positive sense of the word?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Such a thorny word, but powerful in the positive sense of the word, but human and vulnerable to making mistakes-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... in a way that you don't give up the essential, let's just call it what it is-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... a power dynamic with your kids so that the kid then doesn't feel they have to parent you.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I love this topic because it's so interesting. Right now it's kind of review season at Good Inside because I also am the CEO of a company. And to me, the things I talk about with parenting and my kids, and for other people parenting their kids, they are the exact same principles, exact, as leading a team. And so when I think about review season and the way we get feedback and back and forth, it brings this all together, and I'll explain. So the other day, I said to my kids, I love resolutions. I actually do love resolutions, right? Because I love just the opportunity to say, what is one small thing I value and I'm going to hold myself accountable to do? What I said to my kids was, "I want you to come up with one thing, just one thing for now, and it has to be something manageable and real that I could do that would really make me a better mom to you."

Andrew Huberman:
You asked your kids this?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I asked my kids this. I actually ask my kids this relatively frequently. It's like a review, right? Because it's something I do at work all the time. And what I say at work is, because often my direct reports say nothing, and I said, "I just want to tell you something. I need one thing from you by the end of the day. I need it because I know I can get hot. I know I can get a little reactive, right? I know I'm always go, go, go, and there probably is a moment that I need to pause. I know. I know I have a lot of issues. So if you don't tell me one thing, I don't trust you as much." So here's what happened with my kids. At that point, it was only two of them. It just happened the other day. My son says, my seven-year-old son Sometimes when you're trying to get some work done at home, and I want to get your attention for something, this is what you do, Mom. One minute, one minute, one minute, and then you still don't give me your full attention."

Andrew Huberman:
He's clocking.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
"I'd rather you tell me five minutes, and then give me your full attention." That's literally what he said. I was just like, "That is a really good suggestion, and I really needed to hear that. I can do that." This is a couple of days ago. Okay, I have to admit, two days ago, he was trying to show me something, and he just goes, "You're doing it. You're not really giving me your attention." And I said, "You're right. Thank you. Change is hard. I actually do need about two minutes. Is that okay? And then I'll put my computer down." Because I'll sometimes look at him and kind of look at, you know. And he goes, "Okay." It was so beautiful. My daughter said, at night, she goes-- It's so interesting when you give people this opportunity, how generous they can be with you. I think it's been true at work and home. My daughter goes, "I know when it's my bedtime at night, I always want to do one or two extra things." I know. "I always have to get my water. Mom, it's just how I am." That's what she said. "And you get this rushing voice, and you go, 'Come on, it's bedtime,' and that's like the last voice I hear before bed, and I really don't like that voice. And so can you just know that I always need to do those one or two extra things and not use that voice?" And again, I said, "You know what? I wouldn't want to hear that as the last voice." And I think at night especially as a little digression, I always feel like I'm in a rush. I don't know, an extra two minutes with my kids, like my kids are getting older. They're not even in my house for that much longer. I just have to remind myself, like, I'm not in a rush. This is the best use of my time. And so I said, and that one I've been really good at. And so how do we show our kids that we're fallible? One way is actually asking for feedback, especially when you have older kids. When you have a teenager, this is the number one thing that can change things around. You know what I'm thinking about? It's hard to be a teen, and I'm definitely not a perfect parent of a teen. I'm sure you have a long list, but for right now, can you name one thing that I could do that would make me a better parent to you? And I want to follow this through, because what a lot of teens will do, or parents will say, my teenager tells me something ridiculous. They'll say, "Well, you know how you make me charge my phone at 9:00 or 10:00 PM out of the room? You could let me sleep with my phone." Which maybe as a parent you're like, "I'm just not going to do that." Or they'll say, "You know what you could do? You could give me $1,000 every week for an allowance," right? And so parents will say, "My kid doesn't take it seriously." This is where, to me, one of the most important life skills, parenting, management, friendships, it doesn't matter, is differentiating someone's words on the surface from their needs, or their feelings, or their fears, whatever it is underneath. And not responding to the words, but kind of cutting under them. Let's even say my kid said the phone thing. What would be so great about having your phone? Just help me understand it. I know in my head I'm never going to do it, but we don't realize just because we're not going to do something someone asks, it doesn't mean we don't owe that person the right to try to understand why they want it. Right? So I might just ask questions. It might probably end with, "Look, I actually hear what you're saying. All of your friends are on Instagram until midnight. It sounds like you legitimately do miss out on conversations. By the time you get to school, you feel out of them. I'm not even joking. I feel like if I was your age, I'd feel like that's basically the worst thing ever. I believe you. Having your phone after X time, it's just one of my non-negotiables. It's actually just because I love you so much that I feel like my job is to protect you. I wonder if there is some other way that we can figure that out." Or my kid says $1,000. I might say, "What would you do with $1,000? Oh, you'd go-- Oh, you want to go to more concerts? Oh, your friends all get more allowance." Tell me more. No matter what your kid says to you, there's information. So I think feedback is one. I think repair is another way. Repair is the most important relationship strategy to get good at, and I just hope everyone hears the duality in that and realizes what that means. Because if you're going to get good at repair, you have to mess up. The only way to repair is to mess up. And so if I'm telling you get good at repair, I am telling you, you have to accomplish step one, which is yelling at your kid. You have to. And you're going to do it anyway. I do it. But if you then tell yourself, "Wait, I'm getting good at repair. Step one is messing up. I crushed it. Amazing. I'm half the way there." Then when you repair, which is when you take ownership, "Hey, I'm sorry I yelled." Just like you, I'm managing my emotions. Emotions are really tricky. Emotions are really hard, and do you know what? Even though you're going to have a leg up on this compared to most people when they're adults because you're learning how to regulate emotions, you're still going to be practicing that when you're my age. That is my responsibility to work on. It's not your fault, and I love you. So powerful.

Andrew Huberman:
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Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So I think there's an important distinction there. And then it seems that the question that the parent, or who knows, the boss or whatever, maybe it's with a romantic partner, needs to ask themselves is, what is this request really about?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
What's underneath it? I'm just paraphrasing essentially-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... what you said. And what's it really about? Is it a request for more autonomy, for more social connection with other people? And then one starts to realize, certainly in this example that you gave of a child asking for more time with their phone late at night, is that it actually has nothing to do with your relationship to them. It's really about their relationship to their friends.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah. Could be.

Andrew Huberman:
And the fact that they might feel as if they're missing out.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And that leads me to another question, which is, what if you, as the parent, partner, boss, et cetera, keep your phone close to you until midnight, and they know that?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So one of the worst things that I believe anyone can say is, "Do as I say, not as I do." It's just such a blatantly arrogant stance of, "You're supposed to do what I say because I say so, but I'm not going to do it because I don't want to."

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And yet there are times, like in parent-child relationships or boss-employee relationships, where you're telling somebody to do something, and you yourself are not going to do it, or no longer do it, or choose not to do it. And in reality, you don't have to.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And maybe there's a good reason why you don't-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... or don't have to.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That's why I use these words, power dynamics.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Power. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Which everyone hears and goes, "Oh, boy. Here we go." But it is an issue of power dynamics. You have more power than the kid.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
So what you're doing is you're giving the kid power to express where they want more agency. I like the word-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... maybe agency more than power.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Did you grant your son the right to use his phone later into the evening?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
My son had-

Andrew Huberman:
Not to pry into your personal-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
My son did not ask me that.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, okay. Sorry.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And he knows that our phone rules are non-negotiable.

Andrew Huberman:
Got it. No, I didn't mean to pry into your family dynamics, but-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
No, but that kid, if that's a rule, you would never give it to them. But I think so many times, and then we'll go back to power, we shouldn't be afraid to learn more. I actually just think that's what it is. Our kid says, "All my friends get this." That's not true. Why don't you just learn more? Oh, they do? It's like learning more about what someone says doesn't mean you ever have to change your boundary. Most of conflict is about a lack of understanding anyway. When you learn more, you're trying to understand. You understand your kid, understand someone wants to raise and you think it's ridiculous. You can learn more. Tell me what's been going on. What have you been doing? Learning more about someone's position does not weaken your position.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And I think that's really, really important in-

Andrew Huberman:
So key

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... any form of leadership. Now, in terms of the power dynamics, there is something about the word power that like, you know?

Andrew Huberman:
Isn't that weird?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah. I think the way I think about it and what we do at Good Inside a lot in terms of our leadership and parenting style, I don't use the word power, but I think it's about embodying your authority. Parents have authority. Pilots have authority. Bosses have authority because they're the ones who have the job of setting up the whole system for success. That's their job, right? My job isn't to make my kid happy. My job is to help create the conditions for my kid to be a real functioning, confident adult. That's what I believe, right? A pilot's job is definitely not to keep passengers happy. It's to get everyone safely on the ground. A boss's job is not to keep everyone happy. It's to set up the conditions for health and success of the business, right? Now, if you know that's your job, it's no one else's job but the CEO. To some degree, all the management, but that is their job. And so there's a difference where if the CEO believes a job needs to be done a certain way, it's not that they have power, it's just their role involves having that authority. And if someone else disagrees, it's up to them to say you can keep the job or not. It's just you have different roles. And I actually think owning that very outright, it's actually something I recently said at work in a review around something I really wanted and kind of owned, like in my role as a CEO, that is under my role to decide this is important. And now we have to figure it out. Let's see. I would love some input on how we're going to get this done. Same thing for a kid. One of the ... lines I said over and over and over to my kid when they were younger, and I see so many Good Inside parents tell me that their kids reflect this back to them later, is, "My number one job is to keep you safe." So what does that mean? That kind of relates to power. It can mean, why am I not letting my kid, I don't know, jump up and down on our kitchen counter? It's not because I'm pissed that my kid isn't listening. I'm not letting them jump up and down on my kitchen counter where there's a light above their head because my number one job is to keep my kid safe. Is that power? I guess. I think it's authority. How would I embody that authority? I would say, "It looks hard for you to get down. I'm about to pick you up and put you on the floor." Because I have authority, right? We get to this phone discussion, let's say, and I really do believe that the phone has to be charged out of the room at a certain time. I'm going to understand. I'm going to listen. Hopefully, I'm connected to my kid, and they feel respected by me in a million ways. And it might lead to me saying, "Look, my number one job, still, is to keep you safe, and that really means making decisions that I really believe are good for you, short-term and long-term, even if you're upset with me. This is one of those times. And so I love you. This might be a point of conflict. I know we're going to get through this. And that is my role as a parent, and it comes from a place of wanting to protect you." And I think when you embody your authority in that way, kids never say thank you, and they will roll their eyes, and kids always feel loved and protected. They really do. I hear it from my kids. This is so true. Sometimes things happen with my kids, and I'm like, "No one's going to even believe this." But I was walking with my seven-year-old the other day and I said, "What does it mean to be a good parent? What does it really mean? I'm curious." He really thought, and he goes, "It means you're kind of strict." And I said, "What do you mean strict?" He goes, "You have certain rules that you think matter." And he goes, "But it also means you also have to be loving and fun." And my heart hurts hearing myself say this, in a good way hurting. They know. I think kids know. And maybe he says that because that's what we are, but I think kids know. And I can't even tell you how many kids I used to work with, and teens especially, the pain of their parents not embodying their authority was so clear. They knew that they shouldn't be out at a certain time. They knew that they were hanging out with kids who were bad news, and their parents had no idea, and they felt unanchored. They really, really knew. Not that their parents weren't exerting power. Their parents weren't embodying their appropriate authority to protect their kids.

Andrew Huberman:
I had something come to mind, which is not a phrase that I've ever used before or heard before. But what comes to mind is statements of stance.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
I feel like statements of stance in parent-child relationships, families, workplace, romantic relationships, et cetera, are great when they're about actions or about overriding themes, like, "No matter what, I'm trying to keep you safe. I might not get everything right, but that is non-negotiable internally, and I'm going to try and make it non-negotiable externally."

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's a statement of stance about actions. Or, "Keeping you healthy and safe is my number one priority." Those are facts. Those are things that one can really say and believe, and until the end of time, be trying to incorporate into one's behavior. But I feel like statements of stance about emotions are very dangerous.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Like, "We don't yell in this house." "It's okay to cry." There's always a caveat. Of course, it's okay to cry. But there are times when crying is less appropriate. There's times when yelling might be appropriate. There's times when emotions need to be expressed or not expressed in a particular way because, look, I don't think I'm alone in thinking that the kid tantruming in a public environment-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... is an embarrassing thing for them, for their parent, for people around, and it's not the end of the world. It's a tantrum, for goodness' sake. People will survive. But I feel like statements of stance about emotions kind of hold us to this standard that we'll never be able to meet. But that statements of stance about action-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... until we fail, and hope we don't-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... we can say things like, "My job is always to keep you safe. I'm always going to try and make the best decision for you and for your sister"-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... for instance. But I think that many people, I'm not just speaking from my own experience, but in talking to friends and others, that they grew up in homes where there were these philosophies, these statements of stance, and the moment that things didn't match that statement of stance, the whole concept of what parents and children are supposed to be about just kind of started to dissolve.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And it creates that underlying fear, like, do they even really know what they're doing?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Or maybe they don't know what they're doing, but maybe they're trying. So in any case, it's just something that maybe we could-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... talk about for a moment.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I have some reactions to that. I kind of think you're talking about values and principles.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right? And so I think there are, in my house, to be honest, it's not like we have some wall of like, "These are our family values."

Andrew Huberman:
I've seen those in people's homes.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah. That's not-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, on the refrigerator

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... we're not organized enough to do that. But if I thought about a couple that come to mind, my job is to keep my kids safe. By the way, safe does not mean they're never in a situation without risk. That's not what I mean. But in general-

Andrew Huberman:
That's its own form of danger

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... Exactly. The minimization of risk ... is also not safe. But in general, my job is to keep you safe. I'm not going to let you do things that endanger yourself or others. So that's one. Another principle I think about is, I will always tell you the truth, even if it's uncomfortable. You can always count on me for that. I call that truth over comfort. So if my kid says to me, "How are babies made?" That value is useful. Another thing is all feelings are allowed, not all behaviors are okay. Stuff like that.

Andrew Huberman:
What about we don't swear in this house?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
So what I was about to say-

Andrew Huberman:
And then you're on the phone, and then you screw up-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
What I was about to say is-

Andrew Huberman:
... and then the kid goes, "You swore."

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
To me, what's very different is these rigidities around behavior.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
We don't swear. Swearing is a behavior. We don't cry in public. Behavior. We don't tantrum here. That's a behavior. Behaviors, all the time, are a manifestation of feelings that overpower skills.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
So saying we don't do certain behaviors, to me, it doesn't even make logical sense. Well, what if I'm in a situation where I have a really intense emotion and don't have the skill to manage it? The behavior's going to happen, and then I feel like a bad person. That's very different than values around intention. I want to be truthful with my kids, even if things are uncomfortable. I might fumble around with the words. I might even sometimes lie because I didn't do that value in action. But what I can come back to is, okay, nobody lives their values 100% of the time.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
So I think we're talking about actually something core to what we think about at Good Inside, which is I'm a good person with values who is totally imperfect and sometimes acts in ways I'm not proud of. Both are true. When families have values that are very behavior based, what ends up happening in the kids is they start to equate certain behaviors with morality. These are good behaviors that make me loved in my family, and these are bad behaviors that kind of make me feel like I'm not the right part of my family. And they even make me wonder, am I lovable? Am I good inside after all? Am I worthy? That's not good, because whenever we tie behavior to identity, that's shame. And we've tried to motivate kids with shame for hundreds and hundreds of years, and it does not work and causes a lot of problems. I think another one which is interesting, especially as my kids get older, I said this to my teen recently. I said, "This is really tricky. One of my jobs, as always, has been to create guidelines and rules with you. It's always going to be kind of collaborative. Some, because of my authority, will be directive, that I believe are going to keep you safe." And I think this really relates to a phone. "I want to tell you another part of my job that might sound contradictory, but I actually think we just need to hold them both at once. Another part of my job is to be there for you when you inevitably go against those guidelines, and I want you to know that. We have rules around what can and cannot be done online, and," and I'll say this here, "and if you do become part of a really inappropriate text conversation, if there is bullying, if you do come across some images online that make you feel really uncomfortable and you're like, 'I shouldn't have seen that,' you're not getting in trouble with me. I'm not going to throw you a party. I will be there for you to help you through those moments." Those things sound contradictory, and in our family, we know two things can be true, and those are both true. To me, that's a really important thing for a teenager to know.

Andrew Huberman:
Let's talk about guilt and shame.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
I've heard some kind of catchphrase-y stuff, not from you, but like, oh, guilt is about the thing you did, and shame is a feeling about who we are. And while I'm not against those sort of 1990s, early 2000s kind of psychology isms, I feel like they're not very useful.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
In the same way that hearing that there's a gap between stimulus and response, and if you identify that gap, well, then, goodness, you're going to be the kind of person that can feel stressed but not be reactive. You're going to be responsive, not reactive. That's just a bunch of words that doesn't, here I'm a biologist, so I'll just say, doesn't take into account the fact that the biology of stress changes your perception of time and a whole bunch of other things that basically make that gap between stimulus and response much, much smaller. And I think once people understand that, they go, oh, so like the kitchen refrigerator magnet or the poster on the wall that says, there's a gap between stimulus and response. It was supposed to save me, but it didn't. Of course not. We're just in different states of mind at different times.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
So how do you define, no pressure here-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... but how do you define guilt versus shame?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Great.

Andrew Huberman:
And what about guilt and shame?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Great. Two of my favorite topics. I have a couple different ways of defining things. I'm like you. To me, I like defining things in ways that are very concrete and very usable. That's all. And if there's multiple ways of doing that, that's great. So the way I think about guilt, and this will probably set us off in a direction about what is not guilt also, is guilt is a feeling I have when I act out of alignment with my values. And in that way, guilt is a really useful feeling. Real useful, because it makes me reflect on, wait, I didn't act in line with my values. I wonder why. What would I have had to do differently? What got in my way? Wow, I'm so glad I have that information from my body to have this deeply uncomfortable feeling to set in that process. So if I yell at my kid, I'm going to feel guilty. I think about a time when my kid told me, "I lied to you. I did take that eraser from that kid in school, and I feel really guilty." And I said, "First of all, I'm so glad you told me that. I'm so glad you're feeling guilty. That's the right way to feel. Now, there must've been something so hard about seeing something so shiny and fun that you don't have. I totally get that. And you're right, that's not in your values to take it. So that's a useful feeling. That feeling's going to help you." Not do something like that again. Let's figure out what you can do. Not just to say sorry. This is what parents miss. You know what's going to happen another time? You're going to see something else pretty cool that someone's got, and you know what most people think? "I'm going to take that." You're going to have the thought again. I would, too. What can you do the next time you have that thought, right? All of this comes because of guilt. Useful feeling. Guilt is a feeling you have when you act out of alignment with your values. Now, to me, guilt is one of the most misunderstood feelings because what you hear all the time, and you'll hear how much it kind of conflicts with this definition, is something like this: "I haven't seen my friends in years. There's finally a dinner, but it would require me not to put my kid down to sleep." And if I'm talking to someone, I'd say, "Okay, well, I'm guessing you're not leaving your kid alone." No, again, my husband or my mom, someone who's a totally safe adult. "But Becky, I told my kid, and she was clinging to me like, 'No, Mommy, I need it to be you. I need it to be you.' And so I'm not going to dinner." Do you know what I'm going to say, Andrew? Because I feel so guilty. This is-- Right. "Ugh, someone asked me to be in the PTA meeting. I'm so busy, I can't, but I can't do it because I feel so guilty." Okay. Again, I'm just curious. I say, "Well, it sounds like you really want to go to dinner with your friends." She's like, "Oh, I do. All I do is parent these days. I literally haven't seen these friends in years. They're in town." And I said, "Tell me about your friendships. Does that mean you-- Do you value them?" "Yes. I know that I'm kind of more than just someone who puts down my kid for bed, and I love doing that, but this matters, too." So I said, "This is really interesting. You really value your friendships. Your life right now feels out of balance, and that your friendships, that part of your burner of your stove is really low. Okay. And you're not going because you feel guilty. I just want to share an idea. Guilt is a feeling you have when you act out of alignment with your values. It seems like going to dinner would be in line with your values and almost..." It's like, yeah, that's true. So what is this feeling? And here's what I think the feeling is. I call it not guilt, just because I haven't figured out a more sophisticated term.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
But here's what I think is happening. A lot of us, especially women, when we were growing up, we learned to notice everyone's feelings around us, and we learned that our value really and our worth, really, and we were kind of best and good girls when we took care of everyone else's feelings except for our own. I think so many young girls especially become expert at what people need of them by becoming distant from what they need for themselves.

Andrew Huberman:
The picture I get in my mind is sort of like having antennae cast in every direction-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
That's right

Andrew Huberman:
... except perhaps at the-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Inward

Andrew Huberman:
... exclusion of paying attention to the antennae that are inward.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Exactly.

Andrew Huberman:
And we are, attentional resources are finite. I mean, we just don't have the capacity to-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
That's right

Andrew Huberman:
... respond to other people's emotions and feel at the same time, to the same degree that we would if we just concentrated on theirs or our emotions.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And kids are-

Andrew Huberman:
I mean, that's just a fact of how humans work

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... yeah, and kids are oriented by attachment. They have to learn with their families. "How do I become the most lovable, safest version of myself?" So I have a friend who, it's true I remember her even in middle school. "I can't come. My dad's traveling, and my mom really needs me to stay home and watch a movie with her." Right? And I know this mom well. It's like, "Oh, you don't love me, you don't..." Right? I mean, this was-- So she became expert at always noticing other people's emotions, and not only noticing them, taking the emotions from them, kind of like taking them into their body and almost metabolizing them for them. That's not guilt. That is taking someone else's emotions and taking them into your body at the expense of taking care of your own needs. And so I have a visual for this because I think it's really powerful where let's say it's the situation where a mom is saying, "I really want to go out to dinner, but I feel so guilty." First thing, it's just powerful to say, "That is not guilt. It is something else, and it is real, and it is powerful, but it is not guilt." What is happening? I'm on one side of a tennis court, like me and you, Andrew, but let's say it's a tennis court, and you're on the other side, or even-- And in between, instead of a net, it's like a glass table. Over here, I am here in my desire to go out with my friends because I do value my friendships. Okay. Over there is you're upset about it. And let's say instead, you're my daughter. You're like, "No, no, don't go. No one else can put me to bed." That is definitely hard to deal with, but that is your daughter's feelings. Those are not your feelings. Those are your daughter's feelings. And some of us/a lot of us have developed this tendency where we're on this court, and all of a sudden, all those feelings from your side somehow go through that wall, and they come to your side, and you call it guilt. It is not guilt. And to me, one of the most liberating things, and this actually relates to empathy, as I always say, is to give that feeling back to its rightful owner. Because what that means is if I really give it back, now I have a boundary. That's my kid's feeling. That's not mine. And I can now actually empathize. People said, "No, I was empathizing. I wasn't going out." No, no, no, no. That's not empathy. You weren't going out with your friends because you couldn't handle the distress in your body. You just made your daughter's feelings your own. You just engaged in something almost selfish. This has nothing to do with your daughter. In those situations, that's why we say weird things to our four-year-old like, "Don't you want Mommy to have friends?" I feel like four-year-olds are like, "Why are you asking me that question?" It's like a pilot being like, "Don't you want me to make an emergency landing?" If you need to make an emergency landing, don't ask me for permission.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Because once I give it back to my daughter, I can do this. I can say, "You really wish I would go "... put you to bed tonight." "You're right. It feels so different when Grandma does it." "Oh, it does. I'm going out. It's okay if you're upset. I'll be back, and I'll kiss you, and I'll see you in the morning." And then this next part's so important. When you walk out, I don't want any person having any illusion that the daughter's going to be like, "Yes, you go, girl." No. She is going to scream. That's okay. Going back to the boundary. You're allowed to take care of your needs, and other people are allowed to be inconvenienced and upset by it. It doesn't mean your needs are wrong, it doesn't mean their feelings are wrong, and it definitely doesn't mean you feel guilty.

Andrew Huberman:
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need but nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, are vital for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking LMNT dissolved in water makes it extremely easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of LMNT in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I also drink LMNT dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and therefore losing a lot of water and electrolytes. They have a bunch of different great-tasting flavors of LMNT. They have watermelon, citrus, et cetera. Frankly, I love them all. And now that we're in the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, LMNT has their chocolate medley flavors back in stock. I really like the chocolate flavors, especially the chocolate mint when it's heated up. So you put it in hot water, and that's a great way to replenish electrolytes and hydrate, especially when it's cold and dry outside, when hydration is especially critical. If you'd like to try LMNT, you can go to drinklmnt.com/hubermanlab to claim a free LMNT sample pack with the purchase of any LMNT drink mix. Again, that's drinklmnt.com/hubermanlab to claim a free sample pack. Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. Now, I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each night. That's truly the foundation of all mental health, physical health, and performance. And one of the best ways to ensure that you get a great night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase about one to three degrees. Eight Sleep makes it incredibly easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment by allowing you to control the temperature of your mattress cover at the beginning, middle, and end of the night. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for nearly four years now, and it has completely transformed and improved the quality of my sleep. Eight Sleep has now launched their newest generation of the pod cover, the Pod 4 Ultra. The Pod 4 Ultra has improved cooling and heating capacity, higher fidelity sleep tracking technology, and even has snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve your airflow and stop your snoring. If you'd like to try an Eight Sleep mattress cover, go to eightsleep.com/huberman to save up to $350 off their Pod 4 Ultra. Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman. Wow. I say wow because I think the lens that you're looking at guilt through and the way you're defining it is so very different than the way it's been discussed ever, and I think this is a super important topic.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
So I'd like to lathe into it a little bit more.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
In some ways, the way that I think many people experience guilt, at least according to your definition, which, by the way, I love. It's when we've acted out of alignment with our values, versus feeling pressure. I think about, Lord knows I don't have the best reputation as having a short text response latency. It's variable.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Sometimes I'm quick on the draw, and other times I'm like, "Oh, goodness, it'll be days or weeks."

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Over the holidays, I was spooling through it. I would respond to people a week later. And I do my best, but I do often feel, quote unquote, "guilty" about not being as responsive in text to a number of people because I care about them.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I value them.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But I get overwhelmed by text messaging-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... very easily, to the point where I have to put my phones out of the room when I work, et cetera. So the way I experience a bunch of text messages coming in is as pressure.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That then I feel guilty.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Now, I'm not trying to make this about me, but-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
No, I want to. Let's go into this.

Andrew Huberman:
But-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I have a lot to say

Andrew Huberman:
... I feel, quote unquote, "guilty," but-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... do I really feel-- But what's interesting is I believe in cognitive dissonance, and then what I notice is that then my brain tries to bridge that gap. I come up with these justifications with like, "Well, when I text people and they don't respond for two weeks, I don't get upset." Which is true, unless it's in a particular sort of-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... category of circumstances. So how come the way they view this whole dynamic is not the same as the way I view this dynamic?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay, maybe this is a more male-centric view as opposed to feeling porous, like I feel their upset.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
But I will say, in fairness to all the chromosomes and their arrangements, I do feel bad.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It sucks. I love these people, and-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... they're reaching out to say whatever, Happy New Year or something, and I'm feeling pressure as opposed to feeling-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... how wonderful it is to have people in my life.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
So here, this is such a beautiful example, where I'd ask myself or I'd ask you to ask yourself, "Okay You already named one of your values, which is interesting. "I really value my relationships." You said that. Okay. That's one value. And I think this is-- I'm going to ask you this question. Do you value quick responses all the time from you on text message? Is that a value of yours?

Andrew Huberman:
From me or to me?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
From you. Do I value always responding to people on text right away?

Andrew Huberman:
The truth is, if I'm really honest-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... I hate shallow exchange of any kind, except maybe a fist bump to somebody you just kind of feel some-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... kinship with on the street, and you have that connect, and you just give them the fist bump. Great. But I like more in-depth, lengthy connection.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Like three-hour-long conversations.

Andrew Huberman:
Three hour-long conversations. Or a friend came by the other day for New Year's. He was on my list of people that, and yes, I made a list of people that I want to deepen my friendship with in the new year.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
He came by, we had a two-hour lunch, we chatted, and I feel like it was awesome and worth a million single-line text messages.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I'm also the kind of person where I'm good to not see him for a while, not because I'm tired of him, but because-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... I also have other friends and things to do.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
So I'm more of a depth, not breadth, kind of guy.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
So this is such a powerful process. And then after this, I kind of want to link it back to how I've actually told my kids about why I do go out to dinner with friends. Right? So you're like, "I value deep relationships. I value relationships. I value deep relationships." And if I'm honest with myself, responding to someone right away, that's actually not my value. But again, we can hold multiple things at once. That doesn't mean I don't care about those people.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I just laid out all my values. What I think is so powerful as a not guilt diffuser is naming this directly to the people.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
So it doesn't have to be on text, but you're seeing person X, and you know, "I'm never that good. I just want to tell you, I really value our friendship. I really value these times we have together. Something I just also want to get off my chest is going back and forth quickly on text, that's not something that's easy for me, that I do very often. And so you might text me, and it might take me a while, and I just wanted to name that to you." Right? Now, look, someone else always has the right to say, "Well, that's interesting. That doesn't work for me. One of my top values with friends is someone who's always getting back and forth." To me, that's actually great. Now we know, okay, what are we going to do about that? That's fine. You know where someone stands. And the reason I relate this to the situation with going to dinner is I remember early on when my daughter said, "Why do you have to go to dinner with friends?" Or, "Why do you and Dad..." This was it. "Why do you and Dad go to dinner without us? I know the couple you're going out with. You both have kids. Why can't you bring us?" Right? And this is where we say we feel guilt, but we don't, because I'm like, "Timeout. She's feeling this feeling, not me." And also, I don't need her permission or approval. That's the real parentified thing. We go to our seven-year-old and we're like, "Don't you want me to have adult conversations?" Again, not-

Andrew Huberman:
That's not an atypical response. I've heard parents do that.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Say that

Andrew Huberman:
Like, "Don't you want me to have a social life?"

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
But you know what it is? It is asking your kid to do your job for you.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Again, can you imagine a pilot say, "Do you think we should make an emergency landing?" That's how a kid feels when they're asked that. They're like, "Why are you asking me that?"

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Here's what I said to my daughter in that situation. I really did. "Look, I want to tell you something. I love being your mom. I really do. It's one of the most important things in my life. I also really like being married to Dad, and I really like the times we have when it's just us and other adults. That's really important." I remember saying this, maybe I was really trying to double down. "We actually had that before you guys were here." You know?

Andrew Huberman:
And they're like, "What?"

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah, exactly. And so one of the reasons, I want to be honest with you, why do we go to dinner without you? It's not so much we go to dinner without you. We think of it as going to dinner with each other and just adults is that something we really enjoy. It's really important to us. It's a really important part of us, and that's why. Being really vocal about your values as opposed to looking to your child unconsciously to give you permission to have those values. If you want to use power, that's a power move.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And it's amazing. This is true in any time in life. The more you can locate someone, the more you respect their boundaries. I use that word a lot. I know, like, locate.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I'm sure you know people in your life, like, can I locate them? You kind of know who they are. You know what they value, and you respect them, right? When you can't locate someone, you feel very uneasy around them. You're kind of like, "Where are you? Who are you? What do you stand for?" And as you can see with my daughter, I wasn't saying something mean. I was saying something true. And so I think with the friendships, and when you say, "Is this guilty?" It's like, well, maybe my step and my action is just actually being honest with this person. "I'm not very good at responding right away, and I want to let you know I deeply care about our friendship. I'm not very good at responding to kind of small talk over text, and I just wanted to let you know that, so you didn't misinterpret it." I wonder what would happen. I wonder if people would kind of respond really positively.

Andrew Huberman:
I love it, and I can't help but recall when I was a kid, after dinner, my dad would sometimes take a walk by himself. Now granted, he's a physicist, and he's a theoretical physicist, so all his experiments were in his head. He did work on paper, too. So he would take these walks, and occasionally I'd see him coming back from these walks, and he'd be smoking a cigar, something he doesn't do anymore, fortunately. I'm grateful that he's very robust. He was actually a guest on the podcast recently.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Oh.

Andrew Huberman:
Talked about science and life, et cetera. And one of the things that I remember thinking, and still to this day think and feel is, it's kind of awesome how he takes this walk, and he looked so happy with the cigar and his thoughts, and he'd walk. And I wanted to be on those walks with him. He was very, very busy. In fact, I wanted a lot more time from him than I got. It's kind of interesting because now it's oftentimes that I'm the busier one. The tables turn, kids. But In all seriousness, I didn't think of it as self-care, but it was so clear that that was his time.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That was absolutely his time. And I knew when I could and should join for things and when I didn't. And so when you say, "The more you can locate someone, the more you respect their values," I feel like bells go off.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's exactly that. And there are other examples of my mom, et cetera, but it's kind of interesting when we see somebody, adult or child, really in their element of their thing.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
It's almost like we love them for it and through it.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And it fills us, I think, with a healthy sense of safety.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
They're right there. Kind of like the pilot flying the plane really well.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah. That's right.

Andrew Huberman:
We're like, actually, we don't really want to know about the pilot. I want to hear the thing at the beginning. We're about ready to take off. I actually don't like it when we're landing, and they say, "We'll be on the ground in just a few moments." I'm like, "We're at 10,000 feet. Can we make it a little bit longer than that?"

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
But you get the point, which is that I don't want to hear from the pilot. I just want the pilot to fly the plane.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
You want the pilot to do their job.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And again, I think I have so many pilot metaphors around sturdy leadership, and I think it really is such a metaphor for how we teach people the skills they need to parent. Because again, no one becomes a pilot overnight. No one becomes a CEO-

Andrew Huberman:
You sure hope not

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... overnight.

Andrew Huberman:
You sure hope not.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
No one becomes a lawyer overnight or a professional basketball player. I think we actually laud CEOs these days who say, "I don't know how to do leadership as well as I'd want to. I'm getting executive coach." You all want to work for that person, right? The amazing athletes in the world get amazing coaches, and they go to amazing training camps because they're amazing, right? And so somehow with parenting, it's like the last area where people think, "I should become an amazing parent overnight. I shouldn't have to invest in skills or education." Even people who invest in skills and education for every other area of their life that they probably care about less, there's so much shame-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... we've internalized that we should be able to do it naturally.

Andrew Huberman:
And you do become a parent overnight.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
You become a parent overnight.

Andrew Huberman:
Literally.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
You do. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
I'll remember my graduate advisor had two kids while I was working in the lab, saying that there were all these books back then about pregnancy. And she was like, "It's wild. There are all these things of what you should eat and shouldn't eat, and you and your partner, and how you should prepare for the birth and all this." And then at the hospital, they're like, "Here." And you're like, "Uh." Now, granted, that was in the early 2000s.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
That's still what it is.

Andrew Huberman:
You know?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And they're like, "What do you need?" And they go, "You need a car seat to leave the hospital." Which, by the way, you definitely need. That's all? Just a car seat? How am I supposed to manage this? Because the thing I want parents to know, because again, there's just so much shame, and maybe we should talk about shame, right, is the only thing that comes naturally when it comes to parenting is how you were parented. That comes naturally. That lives in your bones. That lives in your circuits. And there might be some people who say, "Amazing. I have the greatest privilege in the world then. What will come naturally is exactly-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... what I value and what I want to do." I would say more often, people would say some version of, "Definitely not what I want to do," or, "Parts I'll take, parts I want to do differently."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And to me, it's kind of like if you were brought up speaking English, and you really want to speak Mandarin, or you want to speak Mandarin half the time to your kid, and someone said, "Are you going to learn Mandarin naturally?" I feel like you just want to say, like, "How does one learn Mandarin naturally?" You would, I don't know, you'd probably sign up for Duolingo. You'd find an app or something, or a course, and you'd then practice and practice, and you'd be able to make progress because you actually learned something new. And so I just think big picture, parents are so under-equipped and set up to feel, and this, I think, has to do with shame, that when my kids are struggling or when I'm yelling a lot, it means something is wrong with me or something is wrong with my kid. I feel like these days in almost every area, if a CEO is saying, "I feel like I'm struggling, is it my fault or my employees' fault?" They'd probably say, "I don't know. There's probably people around who can help me, who can teach me.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Why do I keep yelling?" Right? And same thing with almost every other field. And to me, more than if there's any legacy I get to leave in this world, it's not even the approach itself, even though I think our approach to parenting is very different. I just want parents to know there is no shame in investing, in learning, in growing, in parenting, and to look at that like they probably look at every other area of their life.

Andrew Huberman:
I assure you that your legacy extends far beyond that, but includes it as well. You've had a tremendous impact and continue to. It wasn't long ago that the power dynamics of parent-child relationships, where you do what I say, and I'm the parent, you're the kid, and that kind of thing. And I grew up in a different era. I'm 49 now, and I've been wanting to say I'm 49 now, so that I can actually say something with having had some experience when things were truly very different. They were just so different.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It was like you took what you got, and you worked with it, and things are so different thanks to your part in all of this. And one thing I do want to return to-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... because I realize I took us off track with it, is this idea of kids, but perhaps adults as well, feeling or thinking they feel someone else's feelings, taking that on.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
This difference between real guilt and, gosh, it's really hard to come up with a word for it. At one moment, I thought, well, maybe it's faux guilt. But no, you're not pretending. You're actually feeling something, which feels like guilt, smells like guilt-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Someone said-

Andrew Huberman:
... tastes like guilt

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... someone said codependence. I don't know that much-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... about that word, but something like that.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, it's a whole landscape.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes, exactly.

Andrew Huberman:
It's a whole landscape. But one practice that I'm familiar with-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... that I know exists in a couple of different realms of let's call it modern psychology tools, is this idea of creating a frame separation. So, after you come together with somebody, say, to do therapy or something, or you've had sort of an emotional bind or entanglement doesn't have to be negative. That one way that you can learn over time to differentiate their needs and wants from your needs and wants is this idea of, in your head, I know it sounds kind of corny, but there's a-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... clear neuroscientific basis for this, at least to my understanding, of in your head, you say, for instance, if we had just done this, we had some resonance around something, maybe an argument. Okay, like Dr. Becky and I got into a fight. That in order to really be able to move away from that and see it clearly, how much of that was yours, how much of that was mine? There's this idea that you tell yourself, okay, what are five ways in which you and I are clearly distinct entities?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
So you say, and I know folks might chuckle at this, but you say, "Okay, I'm a man, you're a woman. I live in California. Dr. Becky lives in New York."

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
You could even make it first person. You could say, or third person, rather, you could say, "I, Andrew Huberman, am wearing a black shirt and a black overshirt, and Dr. Becky is wearing black and white." Okay, so some people might think, what's the use of that? But to me, as a neuroscientist, whoever came up with that, and it wasn't me, is nothing short of brilliant.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Because the brain organizes emotions in these broader schemas of physical objects, and physical distance, and distance in time. And that's the way that we can differentiate between ourselves and everything around us. And there's a whole discussion to be had about this, but so it's something that I've been playing with a little bit-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... because I don't claim to be this ultra empath or anything, but I think it's clear that sometimes we take in our thoughts and feelings about what other people are feeling, sometimes accurate, sometimes not, and it can become very difficult. Whether or not someone's one of these, I guess you call it deeply feeling-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Deeply feeling kids

Andrew Huberman:
... deeply feeling kids, or not. Anytime you get into an emotional resonance, good or bad-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... I think we're porous. We're porous, and that's part of what makes humans so beautiful.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But I've found that practice to be very useful, even if it's just in my own head.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
They're over there, and I'm over here, but not even necessarily pushing off them, but thinking, like, "Oh, I'm me and you're you."

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And there are a bunch of ways in which we differ in time and space, and I think the nervous system comes to understand that as a felt thing as opposed to just a statement. Like, "Hey, you own your emotions, I'll own mine." That's just a statement.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I-

Andrew Huberman:
Is this any of the s-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I've never heard of that, but I love that, and it is in parallel, I think, with so many of the things I teach parents. So even the idea of locating someone-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... to me, my version of people in my life that I know and love, even if I don't agree with anything they say, that I can locate. They're like an egg with a shell.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
They have a shell.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
There's a boundary. We're really talking about boundaries.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
We all have different levels of porousness to the external world. And I think if you know, and there's pros and cons of both. I really mean this. I am not terribly porous to other people's experiences. I really have solid boundaries. There are definitely moments in my closest relationships because what people will say to me, "Okay, I know these are my feelings and not yours. We're in a close relationship. Can you be here a little bit more with me?" And that is true. That is what I want to do, right? And sometimes it can be a little distancing, right, and a little separate. People on the other end of that spectrum, if they know I'm very porous. To me, one of the ways of also thinking about it, I think I gaze in before I gaze out, and I think a lot of people gaze out before they gaze in, right? They spend a lot of time in other people's brains and less time in their own, right? What do they think of me? What do they think, right? If that's what's going on for you, then the shell to your egg isn't always intact, and so there's a spillover. It's like, whose feelings are whose? Whose thoughts are whose? I'm spending so much time worried about what that person thinks of me, I almost like, what do I think, right? And so the exercise you're naming is actually just a resetting of a boundary, right? And things that are absurdly concrete are necessary for the most primal parts of our brain to actually understand. My name is Becky Kennedy. To me, what I say, I don't usually say that, I'll say, "My feet are on the ground." When I do a grounding exercise, everyone in our community knows this, is my hand is always on my heart. I think there's some amount of having contact with your body. My hand is on my heart. Sometimes I used to do this with clients, especially after an emotional experience, going like this. Name five things in the room is probably another way. There's a red clock. I'm wearing a white shirt. They're very, very, very basic as a way of kind of coming back into your body. Two mantras that I find help parents a lot actually make me think about this exercise. One is, "I am the pilot, not the turbulence." In our kids' turbulent moments, when they are that turbulence, what so easily happens is we merge into that with them. And then it's no wonder our kids can't calm down or episodes last forever because we're just turbulence and turbulence together, right? So I'm the pilot, not the turbulence. Also, one day I'm going to do a partnership with some airplane company because I feel like airplanes are just so beautiful because the pilot gets a cockpit. They get a boundary. That's what parents need. So that's one. And the other one, when your kids are upset or after there's an argument, some people get very dysregulated just knowing someone's upset with them, right? Which is, again, kind of whose feelings are whose. I find one of the most effective mantras, and again, these sound cheesy, is just, "I'm safe. This isn't an emergency. I can cope with this." Because our body, if you tend to be porous, you get activated Just by other people being activated, even though it wasn't your feeling in the first place. And your body actually needs the reminder that you're safe to not add to that turbulence.

Andrew Huberman:
I love it. Can we talk about projection for a second?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Sure.

Andrew Huberman:
One of the things that drives me insane, people close to me know this, because of this issue of porousness versus non-porousness, is when people tell me how I feel.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
And so I've talked to a few very qualified psychiatrists about this, and it's called projection. Sometimes it's, if in anger, it's evacutive projection, like, "You think I'm crazy," someone will say. Like, "You think I'm crazy" or "You're upset with me," or something like that. I feel like projection is one of the kind of litmus tests of how porous we are.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
Because, in theory, somebody should be able to tell us that we feel whatever. And if we first look inside, and by the way, I love this concept of do you first look inside or outside? Do you listen to what's inside or outside first when something kind of arises emotionally outside you. Love that. It's something I'll have to explore. But if we don't do that, then you could see how projection would be very effective. And I'm not accusing anyone of using this-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... in any kind of diabolic way. I think people just do it because it worked, and they're doing it because they've always done it.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But if somebody says, "You don't care about me as a friend," or telling someone how they feel is so very different than telling someone how we feel.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Duh. All right.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's kind of obvious. And yet, once you start watching for projection, you see it all the time.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Not just at you, but in between people.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Like, "I know this stresses you out," but people start doing it all the time. And it's very interesting to see how people kind of divide into a couple different groups on this, maybe two or more groups, in terms of whether or not it affects them or if it gets in their head, or somehow they're like, "No, that's ridiculous. I don't feel that way." And for me, it's very context-specific, but I'd love your thoughts on projection, both towards kids and from kids.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
So, all right. I'm going to respond to that, and you just cut me off if you're like, "Becky, that's not the direction I want you to go in." Because I guess MGI, which is, I call most generous interpretation, is to me the embodiment of not what I do all the time, definitely not, because I'm imperfect, but what I think is just a useful framework to try to employ as much as possible. Because the idea of what is the most generous interpretation of someone's behavior, like projection, counteracts our very natural human tendency, which is just what is the least generous interpretation, right? We all come up with the least generous interpretation-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... of people's behavior all the time.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And it's just quick, it's easy, and I think it's because in our brain, if we see something bad or annoying, it's just easy to think that that's the whole. Right? So I can't even tell you how many times, every parent I know will say, "My kid doesn't listen. They hit all the elevator buttons. They hit other people." And then I said, "And I know what you're thinking. They're a sociopath." They're like, "That's literally what I'm thinking." I was like, "I know. I have that thought, too."

Andrew Huberman:
Well, no, when I was a kid, I used to push every button in the elevator.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Does that mean I'm a sociopath?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
No. It means you are a good kid who has not yet learned the skills to regulate urges. That's all it means. That would be the most generous interpretation.

Andrew Huberman:
They're there. You just want-- No, I'm kidding. You just want to push them.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
You do.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm joking.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I have a kid like that, too. He wants things for himself, and he derives a lot of joy from things.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Those types of kids are going to do things.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Okay. That's my resilient rebel. Okay, but projection, why am I bringing that up? So what's my most generous interpretation of why this projection would happen? Why would a kid say, "You're mad at me," or, "I can see how mad you are at me," or why would someone even say in adulthood, "You seem really, really stressed out." Right? Again, the gazing in versus gazing out. I think it comes back to, in our childhoods, I mean, that's what often a lot comes back to. Were we taught that we have an emotional life that lives inside of us? Then were we taught how to understand that emotional life? Then were we taught how to manage and cope with that whole emotional life? Most people were not. So it becomes this very, very complicated conundrum. The emotional life is happening inside me. Again, you can't beat it. It's happening. Our feelings, can't get rid of them, and they're very powerful. They're sensations. But if your framework was always you're getting punished, you're getting ridiculed, you're being a baby, then you develop a very conflictual relationship with your feelings. Like they can't be real. They almost can't be mine. That's really what-- They can't be mine. People like this often blame other people a lot for things they never did when they're really frustrated and upset, because it's almost like this can't be mine, so who did this feeling to me? You know? There's blame.

Andrew Huberman:
You see a lot of that in the world.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
A lot of that in the world. Who did this feeling to me? Who put this in me, right? It's so fragile and so sad almost. And so toxic. But projection, in a way, is the only way that I can understand my emotional life, is by imagining you having an emotional life.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I don't know. A lot of these things, I hear myself say this, I melt. I was like, "Oh, what a vulnerable way to go about the world. What an awful way to live in your body, that you're so overwhelmed and almost so self-abandoning of the information in your body that it must be someone else's." So So that's what projection is, right? So what do we do when we see it, right? I don't know. What's an example, right? Like, "You're so stressed out. You've been so stressed," and maybe you're thinking of partnership, like, "I feel like you're the one who's stressed," right? Never helps in the heat of a moment to be right. I've tried it a million times. I don't know about you.

Andrew Huberman:
To be right in an argument?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
To be right in a heated moment when you're like-

Andrew Huberman:
No

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... "I'm going to be right."

Andrew Huberman:
Not if you want an effective outcome, no.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
No.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
But it's a very hard urge to resist.

Andrew Huberman:
No. It took me many years to learn, but someone taught it to me in one hour. I feel very grateful that she taught me this. She didn't tell me to do it, but I just realized if you just, I don't have any word other than just soften.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
If you just kind of imagine becoming more like a noodle than a rigid bar of iron. I just go . And I actually think of the way that my, he always comes up, but I had this bulldog mastiff, Costello, and he was super lazy. The contract with him was he would protect me with his entire life, but if my life wasn't on the line, noodle. And I remember just thinking, like, "If I just go there-"

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... "then the basic contract of I care about you, I'll protect you with my life, is still there." So I guess I learned it from my bulldog, but it sort of played out in a romantic relationship, and it was just really beautiful. It was one of the best things I learned from the two of them.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Is that I just literally physically soften, then everything becomes apparent. Somehow for me, it allows me to get back into my own eggshell-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... but still have optics out.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Now that's me. And that doesn't mean in the heat of the moment I'm not feeling like I want to be reactive.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
But for me, a physical change to my body-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... self-directed physical change to my body is what just kind of changed everything.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah, and I think this is so true in relationships, definitely at work, and definitely in parenting, is you don't have to represent everything you believe in in a given moment. We're not so fragile to be like, "No, and you're projecting." I have time. This is a heated moment. I can kind of chill out. You're so stressed, and I think I'm not. I think there's projection. I might say like, "Oh, I am? Well, who cares?" Just get through the moment, right? And then maybe after, if it feels important, I say, "I feel like this thing happens sometimes where when you're stressed, you say I'm stressed. I don't know. Let's talk about this." That's when that happens.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I think this is really true with kids, too, right? This happened the other day, and in some ways it's the same strategy, which I jokingly on Instagram called Do Nothing with a capital D and a capital N, because so many times in hard situations, especially when you're accused of something that's not true, people will say to parents, "Oh, so you're just going to do nothing?" Where I'm like, take away the just. Doing nothing in a heated moment is a very sophisticated technique because really what you're saying is you're doing nothing on the outside, and you're being an adult and managing your feelings on the inside.

Andrew Huberman:
Amen to that.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Versus doing nothing on the inside-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... and just yelling or reacting on the outside. So the other day, my son came to me before school, my youngest, and he goes, "My sweatshirt's still dirty." And I was like, "Oh, man." He goes, "You promised me you would wash my sweatshirt before school." Between us, he never asked me that, okay? And here's my fork in the road, is like we all know what it would be easier. And by the way, I wanted to say back to him, 99% of me was about to go, "You never asked me." And then he'd say, "I did." "No, you didn't, and now you're lying to me." And all of a sudden, it's like, okay, you know what he was saying to me? "I wish my sweatshirt was clean." That's what he was saying. That's what we're all saying, and I'm so upset about it. The feeling is so big that it's too overwhelming in this moment as a seven-year-old to be mine, so I kind of have to make it your fault to try to make sense of it. So what did I do in the moment? I literally did nothing. He goes, "You promised me you'd watch my sweatshirt." And I went like this. I kind of was just looking at him like I knew what it was like to want something and not be able to have it. And he's like, "You did." In the moment, I go, "I did? Ugh, that sweatshirt is dirty. You really wanted it to be clean." And he's like, "I really did." And I was like, "Oh, that's the worst." I'm not joking. And then by five minutes later, I didn't say anything. He got another sweatshirt. We moved on. I didn't say. I wasn't going to ruin the moment by being like, "See, you could cope," or, "You never asked me." But I think in both these moments, whether someone's saying you're stressed or my kid's accusing me, I think about this a lot in parenting. I don't have to prove my parenting in a moment. I don't have to prove it to my kid. I don't have to prove it because my mother-in-law is watching. I trust myself way more than I trust one single moment to represent everything about me. And I think when we can gain a little bit of that confidence, we have a lot more freedom to just be effective and to also know there's a moment to do nothing. And then if something's a chronic issue, if my son's chronically blaming me, when things are less heated, I'm going to say to him something in a calm moment.

Andrew Huberman:
These are super important and novel approaches to things that I think everybody deals with, kids in the picture or not. My audience sometimes gets angry with me when I ask very long, extended questions, but- Could I just share with you something I learned about an experiment? Because I think-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Please

Andrew Huberman:
... it blew my mind. I won't take long. There's an imaging experiment. So you put people in a scanner, they image their brain, see which areas are active, fMRI. There's a really wild experiment where they bring people in for the scan. They don't tell them why they're there, and they tell them they're going to be paid $30, and they set out three $10 bills. Maybe you know this experiment. I don't know.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-mm.

Andrew Huberman:
And then they go into the scanner, and then they come out, and then the researcher leaves, and there's a discussion, et cetera. And at some point, one of the $10 bills is removed by the researcher. And people are told at the end of the experiment, "You took one of the $10 bills." And they're like, "No, I didn't," because they didn't. Nobody says, "You're right." But then they re-image them, and they compare that to a condition in other subjects where people actually did a little sneaky steal during a money game. And the same areas of the brain light up that we think are associated with guilt. In other words, if somebody is told that they did something, even if they know they didn't, there are aspects of brain circuitry that reflect a, quote-unquote, "feeling of guilt." It's like it introduces this question about reality. And so they can know with 100% certainty, you can know with 100% certainty that you did not do something, and yet it starts to introduce these questions about how you gauge reality.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
Simply because somebody you just met a few minutes earlier, yes, in a position of authority. They're the researcher, you're the subject, et cetera, told you that you did it.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
I think this has huge implications for parent-child relationships, for romantic relationships, workplace relationships, for real bias in the outside world. You can imagine if you're told your whole life that you're a piece of garbage or that you're part of a bad group or something like this. I'm not trying to get political here. You could come to believe that at a level that is biological-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... even if cognitively doesn't make sense. So this is where I think about this challenging boundary between knowing what we know, being a container, staying in our frame, pick your favorite lingo around this, and the fact that words and the emotions of other people really do have the capacity to rewire us on the inside.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
A question I'd have about that study, I'd be really curious if there was variation among subjects, where some people, that guilt part lit up a lot more.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay, so you reminded me. So this is the wild part.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
The distribution of-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... kind of people who have this-- By the way, folks, there aren't single brain areas for whole emotions.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
But let's just, for sake of simplicity here, that have the guilt area activated even when they didn't take the money.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
The entire population of subjects doesn't experience that to the same degree. You have these people whom it's very high amplitude response, and others who aren't. Now, I don't recall, and I need to go back and look at the study if it divided according to male, female, because earlier you said that this tendency-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I would bet a million dollars that if I got to know those people, the people who really light up have a lot of focus on gazing out and determining their inner reality by what other people think about them.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And the people who did not light up as much are the people who gaze in and have a deep sense of themselves, even in the face of a lack of validation or even in the face of criticism.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I would bet my money on that psychological, kind of, is that a moderator or mediator? I don't know.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
You would tell me.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
So I'd be very curious about that.

Andrew Huberman:
Great. Well, I have no skin in the game. I didn't run this study and I'll-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I think it's fascinating. I want to know

Andrew Huberman:
... go back and check it out. And it's a collection of studies.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I hadn't known about this. I read the neuroscience literature, but I hadn't known about this. I find it like a complete yes, of course, on the one hand, and also super surprising on the other.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And just, oh, so cool.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
In the sense that it's informative, and it's making me think that some people really need to do the work of paying more attention to other people's emotions and feeling them a little bit more, and other people probably need to do the exact opposite.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
That's exactly right. And to me, I say this to people I manage, I think about this in general with adults. I think such an empowering thing as an adult is just to know where you are in any given scale. So for me, as a leader, I'm always gas. I'm like, "Go, go, go. We can do this. We can get this accomplished." I'm probably pretty far in that. And given that, I know it's really important for me to have people around me who sometimes say, "Whoa, let's look at this first." I also know that sometimes if I do have a like, "Maybe I should slow this down," I should really listen to that because that's not right. But knowing where I am on a scale is important. I talk about someone that I manage who she really needs to be more direct with the people she manages. Just sometimes ask questions when she really wants statements and can have a little higher standard. And I think it's helpful to know where she is on that scale because I remember saying, "I want you to go as far as you can toward the other direction without being disrespectful," because it's almost impossible to do that. And so I think for adults to know, let's say I gaze in or I more gaze out, neither is better or worse. Probably, again, mental health and resilience is about having just a lack of rigidity. And so to say, what is my starting point? Like anyone listening, what is my starting point? There's no morality. It's literally not better or worse. It just gives me information about which direction to experiment with. And I like to make this a concrete experiment. So let's say you are someone who tends to gaze out before you gaze in, and you're always like, "I can't do this thing I want to do because it would inconvenience someone." I told this story the other day on my Instagram, and people went bananas about it. I was at the airport, and I got a cup of coffee in the morning. And I like my coffee with just a really little bit of milk. Right? And I know to specify it if I'm asking someone else. So I went to the counter, and I said, "Hey, can I get a medium coffee? Not black, just a little bit of milk, pretty close to black." "Sure, no problem." I go, I wait in the line, then it's on the counter. I pick it up, Becky, and it's light as can be. I got back in line. I brought the coffee. And I said, "Hey, ugh, I had asked for this. I know there's a lot of people, probably got lost. I asked for this darker. Could you pour out a good amount of this and then refill it with coffee?" The person, who knows if it could've gone differently on a different day, she said, "Oh, right. No problem. Here you go." This happens with things that are so much bigger than coffee, but the coffee example is such a good one because what I'm doing in that moment is I'm saying, "I'm allowed to have my coffee the way I wanted it and asked for it, even if it's awkward or inconveniences the other person." Now, can people be on the opposite extreme, and can someone hear this and be like, "I probably need to do a little bit less of my own needs." That's what I'm saying. You have to know where you are. But what I have found, at least with moms, is the idea of, "Ooh, I asked for almond milk, and this is whole milk." Or I used to give my clients this experiment who had this struggle. I said, "I want you at the grocery store after you're basically done checking out to say, 'Ugh, you know what? I actually don't need those paper towels.' I can't even tell you. People are like, "I can't do that. I can't, like, return it. Like, oh, my goodness." It's like a panic attack. And the panic feeling is that would be a completely new circuit. That would be me saying, "I am willing to do something to meet my own needs. I actually don't need that paper towel," even though it could get an eye roll or inconvenience, temporarily, someone else. Those little experiments, and it might be the opposite. It might be saying to my partner tonight, "You know what? We always sit down and talk about my work. And I actually did have a stressful day, but you know what? I want to hear about your day. You go first." That's also an experiment. And for someone who's on that extreme, they're going to also have a panic attack. They're going to be like, "This is deeply uncomfortable."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
But just knowing where you are in the spectrum gives you the information you need to get a little bit of balance.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I think there's clearly a distribution. And whether or not it's a binary distribution or it's kind of like a normal distribution, I don't know. But there's clearly variance here from one person to the next.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And probably even depending on how well-rested we are and all the rest. But I do think that we do fall into phenotypes of-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... prone to reacting to other people's emotions without hearing and listening to, and responding to ours first-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... truly ours first, versus people who are just really out there. I realize it's very different than any other kind of relationship, but when I first went from being a postdoc to having my own laboratory, the chair in my department, my chairman in one department, anyway, he said, "You should get a great big desk that's really thick." I was like, "Yeah, why? I get it. You don't want to be sitting right next to your employees or something, but why so that..." And he goes, "So that when they cry, you won't feel like you need to cry or take care of them. You'll just slide the Kleenex across the desk." And I was like, "Are you kidding?" And he's like, "No." And then years later, I looked back, and I realized I understood what he was saying. He didn't know me at all, but he was just saying probably something about himself, which is people are going to come into your office, they're going to cry. It does happen. And you're going to need to be the boss, which is to be supportive and empathic, but you can't get pulled into it because they might be crying about something they don't like about the lab-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... or about something not happening the way they wanted. Who could imagine any other reason to cry in your boss's office?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But maybe they have a family issue, and so you have to remember you're the boss. And I thought, "Oh, that's interesting." I ended up with a desk that was medium in width. But I think that nowadays there's a lot more bleeding of roles, and it used to be that everyone got really dressed up for work. Now dressing down is common in certain circumstances and not others. I think that there's a lot of lack of clarity about, here we go again, power and authority but also staying in our own frame versus taking on someone else's frame.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I have a friend who runs a pretty large business, and he did the same experiment that you did of asking people how he could do better. But first he, unfortunately, made the mistake of asking people how they felt about being there, and they ended up making one of these emotion clouds, where everyone filled out a thing and wrote what the most dominant emotions were. And then he told this story, like, call me late at night. He sits down, and they're going to present this as data in front of everybody. And this emotion cloud comes up, and the biggest bubble in the middle just says stress. And he was mortified. Right? But he learned that they all feel really stressed. That sort of exercise would never have happened 10, 15 years ago.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I won't say what profession he's in for sake of privacy, but it's a profession where stress is part of the process, and you don't get the certificate at the end, so to speak, if you don't experience stress.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
But this actually relates to what we started with in a way. I'm going to circle it back there. Which is, and because I hear this a lot, some kids these days, they don't know how to tolerate stress or they're always overwhelmed. But part of it is Again, maybe this is my MGI. Maybe they haven't been told the right story about stress or anxiety. This came up with my kids the other day. My older son had his first basketball game of the season, and he goes, "Oh, I'm really nervous. Feeling all anxious." And it's just so interesting, the way we respond in little ways to our kids in these moments form the way they end up thinking about those feelings later on. I said, "Well, of course you're nervous. Being nervous means you care. You really care about basketball." Right? And obviously, we've had many conversations about what feelings mean. But it was so interesting. I watched him go, "Yeah, I do care." Kind of in that little sentence. Being nervous means you care. I mean, think about it. You're never nervous about anything you don't care about, right? If being nervous means I care, I have a story to understand it. I now inherently feel like the feeling is normal. I'm almost proud. Like, "Yeah, I do care." Right? My relationship with that feeling is going to be so different than if my parents are like, "Why are you nervous? There's nothing to be nervous about." Or, "Oh, you're nervous? Oh, does that mean you're not going to play well? Oh, my goodness. Are you going to miss your foul shots?" So in the first, right, my kid feels like being nervous is wrong, so I just set them up to feel like they're feeling the wrong feeling when they're feeling nervous going on. In the second, I'm layering on my anxiety to their nervousness.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Not a great combo. But the stories we tell matter. So in the workplace, you're stressed. Actually, this makes me think, maybe not right now. When we have more time, it'll be really helpful to talk about what is stress? Why do we feel stress? How do we talk to ourselves when we feel stressed? Does anyone here know the way you talk to yourself when you're stressed has the power to make stress feel a little smaller or a little bigger? That's really interesting. I wonder, does anyone here use a session? Should we do something in the workplace about how to deal with stress? Because you're right, this is a stressful job. And this is where I don't think about power, but authority, and I want to own that and let you know that. Stress comes along with this type of job. I'm making this up. And this is why you get paid pretty well. And this is why whatever else could be true. But one of my jobs is not just being honest, but actually helping everyone develop the best skills that maybe no one ever taught them before to manage stress. Let me know if that's of interest. I just think about that, like-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... the whole mood just changed. You own your authority, and you own the story. And I think whether you're talking about being a CEO or being a parent, it's actually all the same.

Andrew Huberman:
That makes sense. I have a rule, which is if my pulse rate goes above a certain limit, my thumbs stop working, meaning I won't allow myself to text.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I won't talk on the phone. I'll just-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Very different

Andrew Huberman:
... go in the bathroom and just sit for a second if I have to, but that's rare. Typically, I just, I'm like, I have a rule. If my heart rate goes up, my thumbs don't work.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
What do you do?

Andrew Huberman:
I just do nothing. I follow the do nothing thing. I just wait. I also have a rule, which is unless somebody's hemorrhaging right in front of me, it usually can wait. Drives people crazy, but they thank me later.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Unless somebody's literally hemorrhaging, I can pause my response.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Because I'm a move fast, get things done kind of person. And actually, it was taught to me by a chairman of a major university in your home city of New York City. He said, "There's always more time." And I said, "That's ridiculous." He said, "Unless somebody's hemorrhaging right in front of you, there's always more time."

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Going back to my daughter, it's one of the mantras that's been really helpful for me as someone who, again, just knowing myself, I always like to go, go, go. I get so much pleasure, probably identity, value from doing things.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And so a byproduct of that is I always feel like I'm in a rush because my body craves movement and checking things off. But being in a rush is never terribly helpful in close relationships. No one likes to feel like, come on, can you get to the end of the story? Or it's not good. So sometimes I think efficiency and relationship building are antithetical.

Andrew Huberman:
Amen.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
A thousand times over. I don't think we can be efficient in relationships. It's like efficiency in other things is beautiful.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Well, it's a unitary experience, being efficient.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And so, when I can be in efficiency mode a lot, and it's something that I have to really think when I'm going home to my closest relationships, and it's interesting now that I work so much more than I used to, it's almost reinforcing the efficiency mode. So I really know I have to, my own therapy, really work on, that's not a value of mine all the time. At work, maybe sometimes. Even there, sometimes you got to get out of it to connect to people, right? And so that is something, again, where knowing where I am on that scale, asking people to call me out. "Oh, Mom, you're rushing me at night." "Becky, I want to tell you the whole story. I'm not just trying to give you the TLDR. I want the experience of telling you the story."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I'm like, "Right, I'm doing that thing."

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, slowing down is rarely a mistake.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
That's really true.

Andrew Huberman:
I guess occasionally, but rarely a mistake.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
It's really true.

Andrew Huberman:
I'd like to talk a little bit about technology.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I know this is a-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... a growing interest of yours. I've been thinking a little bit, based on our earlier discussion about people who are in their own container or sensing what's going on inside them prior to paying attention to and sensing what's going on in other people, because clearly both are important. I don't like this idea that it's one or the other.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But with the advent of text messaging, so here I'm not going to talk about social media. This is not about social media. With text messaging, first of all, this is the first time in human evolution that humans have written with their thumbs. That's weird, but in a kind of quirky reflection. But the other one is, this is the first time in human evolution, meaning very recently, that we are aware of what's going on with so many other people and We're expected to at least know it and perhaps even respond to it. I know people younger than 30 are probably going, "Wait, no, it's always been this way," but it wasn't always this way. Clearly, our brain has adapted to this new format, but it did not evolve in this format whereby you're getting on a plane, and you look at your phone, and you are aware of the movements and requests and maybe kind statements, et cetera, from other people. We're tethered in so many ways, and that means that our brain is really tethered to the states of others, their emotional states, their physical states, where they are. You said, and I'll keep repeating it because I love it so much, the more you can locate somebody, the more it reflects their values. So being able to locate somebody in space and time and understand how bounded they are or not to their own emotions or yours is fantastic. But the fact that you have 10 people in your phone that you're aware of, you're not even supposed to be aware of 10 people at once, except the 10 people perhaps around you boarding a plane.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So we're being forced to navigate a new landscape with all this.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
After this conversation folds, we'll look at our phones. You couldn't have that many-- I guarantee one thing, no matter how many text messages or few text messages you have, it's far more conversations, if you will, than you could possibly have by phone at once.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
So in the old days, you left messages, and you'd get on the phone when you could. I'm not saying we go back to that, but I think we might be asking ourselves to do something that is impossibly hard and maybe even bad for us.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah. I don't know how apocalyptic you want me to get about this. My husband and I were talking about phones and text and social media and AI, and I brought up something to him. He's like, "I don't think I have. In all the arguments I've heard, I haven't heard that." Where I feel like we're changing in a dramatic way our basic evolutionary drive around attachment in a way where attachment has always been the primary evolutionary drive of humans.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And with all the different technological shifts there have been, because people say, "Oh, there's been this, there's been this." What's never been shifted is the nature really of one-to-one human attachment. We're entering into something really new where let's even say text messages, 20 at once, 10 at once. Our bodies will always crave what's immediately gratifying over what is long-term good for us. Another way I think about it is our bodies will always choose convenience and ease and gratification over what's good for us long term. So you think about all these pings coming in. It's a lot of information, this text, that text, this text, this text. And what you're doing in your circuitry, and over time evolutionarily, is getting used to the multiplicity of relationships, the multiplicity of information. It's just more gratifying than one-on-one. To the point that one-on-one conversation over text or even in person is going to have so much more of a gap than it ever has been in terms of how slow, how low stim, and how boring and awkward it is compared to, especially for kids who get this early, the constant information flow and gratification and stimulation. I think that's going to have a profound impact, not right away, but over time. And then if you add in social media, and then if you add in AI, on the way humans just are even able to relate to each other. So yes, I think this advancement in technology and what's happening, I think there's always been a trade-off, always, between how short-term gratifying something is and how long-term good something is for us. Because the things that are really good for humans long term are the things that involve humans to tolerate frustration. I would say that is the most important skill, I think, for kids to learn. But the world, more than ever, is built now with insanely low frustration tolerance because we're built for so much information, so much consumption, and so much immediate gratification. This is actually, I think, the thing that isn't talked about with technology. It's why parenting has changed. It's why so much of parenting is about making kids happy and their lives easy because there's never been a generation of parents like my generation where our lives are just so much easier. We have so much less tolerance for our kids' tantrums because we're on our phones wanting our life to be easier. So we stop the tantrum. We make their life easier. We make them anxious. We make them fragile because of our lowered frustration tolerance. So I don't know where we're landing here. And by the way, I text. I'm not a purist here. I am a realist.

Andrew Huberman:
That's safe.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I live in the world.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
But I think it's profound how it's changing human interaction and expectations and gratification.

Andrew Huberman:
And my colleague, Anna Lembke, who wrote "Dopamine Nation"-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm. Right

Andrew Huberman:
... cited some data that humans have more free time now across socioeconomic groups, more free time for everybody than ever before, more expectation of immediate gratification. And it's not just the texts that we're getting, it's for some people, the texts that they're not getting. They're thinking about the people that they haven't heard back from, et cetera.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Like you.

Andrew Huberman:
The number of tethers. Right. Exactly. The number of tethers is just astonishing. I had a conversation with somebody recently that popped to mind where it was a low friction one that ended in a really good place where I said, "The problem is," I was talking about there's a little bit of an age gap, and I said, "The problem is you think slow is low." What I was saying was, "I like to just chill." This is something I haven't done enough of in my life because I'm Pretty ambitious person and always have been since I was little, about everything. But I've learned that slow isn't low. I love just sitting down and hanging out with the dog or just slowing down. And it used to feel like slow was low. It used to feel like, oh, nothing's happening, or, this is depressing, or it's boring. And I think in recent years, that became more and more the case as I got more and more pulled into technology. And then I did a little bit of a technology distancing experiment, if you will. I have this wooden box that someone made for me, and I put my phones in there. And it's so amazing how once you put the phone in a different container, it completely changes the relationship to it. I don't get it. But anyway, again, physical barriers to take emotional steps, always a good idea. And I just realized slow isn't low, slow is awesome. So I totally agree that the circuits of our brain have now adapted to expect immediate gratification. I like to think, and maybe this is a false wish, but I like to think that there are components of our brain that are hardwired enough through tens or hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that might be able to recognize and appreciate the slow moments-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and not feel like slow is low, meaning slow is depressing. But I do think that if one is weaned in, raised in an environment where you expect things quickly, well then, it's going to feel like the horse and cart compared to the car at some level.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I think that's right.

Andrew Huberman:
I do. I agree.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And I think for parents who have young kids, I think these are such powerful and empowering things to think about when your kids are young, because I think it's easy to think, "Oh, okay, so I'll deal with this when my kid gets a phone." The circuits around even how your kid will use the phone, how much you're going to be able to set boundaries with your kid when they get a phone, all of these have to do with the patterns early on, right? So if we go back to slow is good, frustration and frustration tolerance is the name of the game. It requires a lot of inconvenient moments that matter so much for how not only your kid learns to tolerate the frustration inherent in life, but I think this is really important, how your kid learns to feel capable. Kids only develop capability from watching themselves get through hard things. They don't develop capability by being successful, ever. In some ways, it builds up this pressure and a fragility if that's been the only thing they have. And when we think about this whole generation who's so anxious, so fragile, I really believe the antidote to anxiety is capability. And I'll give you an example. We steal our kids' capability all the time when they're young in the name of short-term convenience for everyone. So here's an example. I remember this day with my oldest, who's now 13. He was three, and he was really into puzzles when he was three. But puzzles are really hard, right? He was working on it, something like, "I can't do it." The classic whine, which I just want everyone to know, no part of me is like, "I love that sound." No. Nobody likes whining, okay? But to me, those are our bang for our buck moments. They're not our easy moments. They're our bang for our buck. My kid is going to learn something about how to deal with situations they don't think they're capable of completing. That is such an important lesson. And I have a fork in the road. I can either do the puzzle for him, which gives me short-term convenience, stops the meltdown. But beyond frustration tolerance, one of the things I really remember thinking when my kid was young is, if I do it for him, I'm stealing his capability. Because if he can get through this and get to the point where he says, "I did a puzzle I didn't think I could do," that's incredible. So I remember this because it felt so-- He still whined, but there are these moments as a parent, and this is what I like to tell parents, but our wins are not based on our kids' reactions. Our wins happen when you just know there's this amazing feeling you have as a parent. I know that was important. I know it. And I remember saying to him with this puzzle situation, "Sweetie, I'm not going to do the puzzle for you, and I want to tell you why. The feeling you get when you think you can't do something, kind of take a deep breath, maybe take a break, maybe even the next day, watch yourself do that thing, is literally the best feeling in the world. It is the best feeling. It becomes addictive, and I will not take that feeling away from you, because I believe you're going to get it." I could cry. I feel like people hear this story like, "Okay, Becky, great." I do not do that all the time. Sometimes I finish the puzzle. But when we think about what we want for our kids later in life, it might be, "No, I'm not getting you a phone yet." How a kid reacts to that situation, it's not just about a phone. It's kind of, "Well, have you always just done the thing for me? Have you always just given me what I want? Do I have any ability to feel like I can tolerate frustration and wait and figure things out?" That all layers into how kids react to not getting a phone, how kids approach hard math problems, how kids do or do not sit down to start their English essay that is difficult to do. And all that stuff, you can start building those skills in the teenage years, don't get me wrong, but the leg up your kid has at 14, when they've been basically building those life and academic skills from the start, and they've built their identity around capability, that's what I want to give every parent and every kid in the world

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, it's awesome. I said it last time we spoke, I'll say it again. If you're thinking of adopting, I'd be happy to put myself up for adoption. It's such a beautiful philosophy and stance to take around effort and frustration. Again, this isn't about my life, but I feel so blessed that I came up in science where things take forever.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
You can work two years on a project and then discover you do the right control experiment, and you're like, "We got nothing." Literally, we have nothing.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And there still isn't a tendency to publish what are called negative results, which aren't bad results, but where you basically got nothing. You find a flaw in the reagents you're using, you got nothing. You're starting again.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And to have that a few times and to have some papers take two, three, four years to get accepted, other papers, six months. I'll tell you, the six months feels really short. But these days, we get so much immediate gratification.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
The other day, I was staying at a hotel, and I ordered food in. I don't do it that often. I was like, "Oh, I really want a poke bowl." There's that poke bowl place. I ordered it. It was there in 11 minutes, and I was like, "Whoa, this is so wild." And I was like, "I got to be careful." Not because I'll overeat poke bowls. You can only have so many poke bowls, but it's like you just, it's there.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Convenience.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
It's so-

Andrew Huberman:
It's incredible.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I remember-

Andrew Huberman:
And sad and scary and exciting-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... and all the things. So I think having variable durations of effort-reward in one's life and being able to see where the latency is very short. Yes, social media, but other things where you have longer duration effort to reward contingencies. I'm sounding kind of this is like nerd speak, but I've gone on record saying before, and I'll say again, that dopamine that is achieved without effort preceding it is just be really careful. Doesn't matter if it's amphetamine, cocaine, social media, or anything else. You get used to the schedule.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
That's right.

Andrew Huberman:
And I think we need to be able to tolerate and enjoy and lean into and savor variable schedules of effort and reward.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
It's so interesting you say that. I have two thoughts. Number one, when I think about the puzzle situation, that's like effort, because effort, effort, effort, struggle, deep breath, effort, effort. Nope, that's not it. Effort, effort. And then you get the dopamine.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
That circuit, I just always think that is such a benefit-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... to my kid later in life. It's kind of the opposite of which we all do sometimes, but if it's the only circuit, being on your iPad all the time as a little kid, and the no effort, all the dopamine.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I think about it-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right?

Andrew Huberman:
... as a friend used to call it years ago, birthday money. There's one time each year, okay, maybe a couple because of the holidays, when you're supposed to get presents just for being you. It's called your birthday, right? Or if you're a kid, or what other holidays are where we celebrate kids by giving presents or we celebrate each other. But every other day, you're not supposed to get rewards necessarily just because, not just for being you.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
The rewards are out there in life and appreciating things. I'm not trying to be too stoic here, but there's only one day each year where you get literally presents just for being you. The other stuff is supposed to require effort.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah, and struggle. I think it's really interesting. My second had a lot of speech issues when she was younger, and I kind of noticed it like at a certain age, you're supposed to be building sounds and words, and she was replacing, like as soon as she had a new sound, she lost one and just had a sense something was going on. She had a pretty serious speech apraxia. She had to go to speech therapy three days a week for probably a year. Now you wouldn't know. But it was interesting. I remember at that time, my older one, she probably was five, maybe she was two or three and six, and I remember someone saying to me, like, "Ugh," about my daughter. Like, "Ugh, poor her." It's like a lot. And I don't think I said this, but it's so interesting. I remember thinking, "She's way better off than my son. If I'm going to worry about one of my kids right now, which I'm not worried about either, I would worry about my son." His early years were so linear, so without struggle. She's going to have an early experience of struggling, working hard. She won't remember it with her words, but that circuitry, which are our important memories, the ones we don't remember with our words, the ones that our bodies remember.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
She has such an early experience with watching herself struggle and get to the other side. I would wish that for every child. And so I want to also share that story because I think parents who have kids who have those early issues, it's so easy to be like, "Oh." I actually think it's really empowering to do a complete 180, to be like, "Wait, I'm not going to fix this right away. I'm going to support my child. I'm going to let them know I believe in them. I'm going to let them know I see a version of them that's going to get through this. They're going to still struggle." And that is actually going to be the best foundation and almost the best leg up.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. I have a friend, very, very successful, who told me that he wasn't until he was in his 40s that he had a major difficult life, a major business disappointment, and it almost crushed him.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But he had never had that before.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
He had been so successful over and over again.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
It was fun for me to talk to my dad recently on the podcast because we haven't had a conversation like that ever. And we were talking about sort of mistakes that one makes and in the context of work, et cetera, and he said, and it's still ringing in my ears. He said, "Well, those humiliations are actually good for us." He called them humiliations. I was like, "Really?" And he's like, "Yeah, they humble us, and they keep us thoughtful about what we're doing next." And I was like, "Yeah." But it was kind of wild to hear that. I don't know why I need to hear it externally because I know it's true. I knew it was true. But yeah, it's not just making mistakes. Like sometimes, listen, I'm fully against bullying where I understand how that can be very destructive, but there are going to be times when we're going to feel humiliated, and to be able to bounce back from that-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... is pretty awesome. I actually think that builds character strength. I do.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah, and I think this is a great lead into parenting. I hear this all the time where someone will say, "I don't know if my kid's being bullied, but they were told, 'You can't play basketball with us. You're the worst basketball player in the grade.'" Something like that, right? Where the way I work with parents is, again, assuming this isn't chronic, I don't think step one is calling the school. I don't think step one is calling the other parent. If you zoom out, you're right. I don't think a kid's going to be called the worst basketball player over and over in the course of the next couple decades, but they will be called something. They'll be left out. Or even if nothing happens, you know what's going to happen? They're going to feel less than in a group, probably a million times. I do, right? Still. So we have this almost opportunity of like, okay, well, what skills would be useful when my kid is 18 and 30? And actually, the struggle, again, is my opportunity. I always think, my kids are in my home for 18 years. This sounds sick, and I don't know if I really mean this, but I'm going to say it. I almost hope they have all the variations of struggles they're going to have later on, because then at least I can get in it with them and build some skills and help them see that they can manage. And then I feel like those bumps are going to happen, right? I guess it is like pilots. When they have simulations, there's no way they simulate perfect flights and say, "You're ready to fly." They simulate all the issues so that a pilot can learn the right controls, and then they're really prepared. They don't take away the issues.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. No, I love the analogy of flying because I'll never forget driving in the really thick fog for the first time. This happens if you grow up in the Bay Area, and just being able to see one reflector at a time and being terrified. Now, driving in fog never feels great, but I've been there.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's a familiar feeling.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Been there.

Andrew Huberman:
And, yeah, I've been thinking a lot these days about this whole thing about proficiency and our expectation of kids nowadays. That we have been told for a long time that we need to guard against kids feeling terrible about themselves. On the other hand, we want them to be proficient, and what you're really talking about here, if I understand correctly, is proficiency at being human, at being really good at certain things, less good at others. I can also tell any kid, because I was this kid, in a group of musicians, I'm the least proficient. Talk about wanting someone to do nothing. I'm best off not even playing the triangle. Okay? Just doing nothing would be the best thing I could do to any musical effort. But I realize that at some point, even though every kid in my school played an instrument, and they had the youth symphony and all that kind of stuff. Because it was also a time when I could just kind of relax.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
You don't have to be certainly best at everything. But I also believe that in order to really find what you're, quote, unquote, "meant for," you have to try a bunch of things and find out what you're never going to even approach partially skilled at.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But you still have to try.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I guess that's the point. So, on the one hand, I guess I'm saying do nothing. On the other hand, I'm saying you still have to try. I guess you have to try to find out that you're really as bad at music as I found out I am.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Maybe, or I think we're also talking-

Andrew Huberman:
I'm good with it. I'm good with it.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I love music, but I don't need to play it.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
But I think then what you're saying is you're able to separate your identity from any behavior.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Being bad at music doesn't mean you're a bad person. And I think anyone hears that and they're like, "Obviously." But we conflate those two things 90% of the time.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right? That's why we really care about winning at Scrabble is like to some degree, we think it means we're smart and everyone's like, you know, versus I'm probably the same level of smart whether I win at Scrabble or lose at Scrabble, right? And to me, that's what confidence is. It's not feeling like you're the best at something. It's feeling like it's okay to be you when you're not the best at something, right? It's feeling at home with yourself. And to me, feeling at home with yourself is, first of all, it's an amazing internal motivator because you get to also figure out what you're really passionate about, right? And yeah, learning to participate in things and even have joy in things that you're not great at. Again, these are things I think our kids really can learn not from lessons, not from a textbook, not really from a teacher. They learn it from what we model. It's actually interesting. We play a ton of board games in my family. Again, I think they're like the antidote to everything on a screen, so we have a million board games. I'm the resident. If anyone ever needs a recommendation for a good board game, ugh.

Andrew Huberman:
What's your favorite board game to play as a family?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Okay, I love Sushi Go!

Andrew Huberman:
Okay. I don't know it, but I'll check it out.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Sushi Go Party is the better version. It's actually a really great adult game, too. It's very strategic. We play Codenames. We play a lot of board games. We play Boggle, we play Ghost, we play Scrabble, we play Rummikub. But the game I was going to say that we also play a lot of that I love is Scattergories. Okay? So have you ever played that?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
That's a fun game.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Whatever part of the brain is good at generating a lot of different things from a single letter must be very small in my brain. I am so bad at Scattergories. My kids are all pretty quick. I lose to everyone, my seven-year-old included. I'm horrible. It actually is a game I suggest often. I'm like, "Let's play Scattergories." And I think that's actually so powerful for our kids. I think a lot of us, if we look back, we think like, is one of the reasons my parents didn't really play with me or do things is they felt like they weren't good at it? Probably, right? To demonstrate to your kid, I can choose something. I can have joy in something. I can want to do something that I'm not good at. That is, again, going to be more powerful to your kid than sitting down and saying, "This is what we think is going to help kids. It's okay to do things that you're not good at." You and I know that's like logical words in the brain. That's not an experience they're building or internalizing. Kids learn from stories, from experiences. And so I think that's one way in terms of how do I help my kids be confident, but also just be at home with themselves and do things they're not best at. Probably the best way to do that is to model it over and over to your kids.

Andrew Huberman:
I love it. We're back to theory versus practice.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes. I'm big on practice. Maybe on both.

Andrew Huberman:
I feel like as long as there are kids and adults that seem, I want to emphasize seem, to do everything well, the athlete, academic-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... musician, good dancer, charming with other people, as long as those people exist or seem to exist, we're going to have to all overcome our sense that we should be at least partially good at a wide variety of things. Maybe not everything.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Do you think those people exist?

Andrew Huberman:
No, I know they don't exist. I know that there are people that apparently are like that.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
They're fakers.

Andrew Huberman:
Well. Well, I don't know.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Or are they not?

Andrew Huberman:
I will say that, and I don't get paid to say-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... positive things about the university I work for or not, but I will say occasionally I'll meet a student from Stanford and I'm like, "Goodness gracious." This kid can apparently do everything. They're an athlete and they're a musician. They have all these things. There are those people.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I will say, but this is important, the pressure that the perception of those people creates on them, without fail, brings them to immense challenge in their life, if not then, later. I've seen it every single time. I know because I grew up in the town where I'm now a professor.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I went to school with many people who ended up there or other places like that. And, of course, there are people like that in every environment. They are outliers. They tend to be very salient. We tend to notice them, and they create this false internal pressure. This is the reason I raise it. And I want to say, it's not like they eventually fail and dissolve into a puddle of their own tears. Hopefully, they're resilient and they push forward in life, and some of them do amazing things, and some of them do less amazing things. But the point is that there are people among our species that seem to do many things very well. And I think when we hold ourselves to that standard, we suffer and we hold ourselves back. I believe, I just have a central belief that we all do have some unique gifts that we're meant to bring to our life and to the world, and it shows up in different forms. And one of the worst things we can do in trying to find that and express it is trying to be really good at everything. I just think that's the most poisonous idea in the American mindset, that we're supposed to be really good at everything. On the other hand, I personally believe that we should try a variety of things so that we experience frustration and fail and eventually find what it is that is-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... we're, quote unquote, "meant to do." I do, but I feel also very fortunate that I was never really pushed to be excellent at everything.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I have terrible hand-eye coordination, but I'm pretty good at sports with my feet. But when I say pretty good, I mean passable.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So I gave up on the idea of becoming a professional athlete very young. So I think we have to know that we had to play games with our hands and our feet in order to figure that out.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah, and I guess, we were talking about this maybe before we started, but I don't know. I'm trying to think why this is, but I tend not to put anyone on a pedestal.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I feel like, and maybe part of it is in part of my private practice for years, maybe I saw the Stanford grads who were then living in New York.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And they weren't literally from Stanford, but I'd have all these late 20-year-olds and their pedigree all looked the same.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Top of their class, Ivy League, Goldman Sachs, this MBA, and so many of them had the same insane anxiety and emptiness. I still remember the way one of them described how they felt, and she was brilliant with her words, and she said, "I walk around and when I'm with people and doing things and at work, it's like there's a ton of color. But when I'm alone, I feel like I am in empty room with white walls."

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, goodness.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And it's-

Andrew Huberman:
That is very sad

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... very sad.

Andrew Huberman:
Very sad.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
It actually has a happy ending, or has a nuanced ending, but happy ending where she feel like I was actually saying this to a friend because it actually relates to my own childhood. I feel like I've grown a lot, had my therapy, and I feel like when I was younger, I was really hard driving and really somewhat people-pleasing. And me and my friend who are both like that, were like that, have kids who aren't really like that, and they're amazing kids, and they do so well, and they have this internal confidence. But sometimes we joke. We're like, "But there's nothing that will drive you like feeling not good enough." There's nothing that drives you like feeling like every test score defines your self-worth.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And it's so sick, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Because we're almost conflicted with our kids. They're all great kids. They're responsible, but they almost have a little bit more inner contentment, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
But I think about that young woman I saw and how at work she felt amazing until, didn't happen until she was 28, she didn't get the promotion she thought she was getting. And then, I mean, it-

Andrew Huberman:
She had never failed before

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... And it's not only the never failure. When your internal sense of self is built outside in, which you actually can do if you have a lot of accomplishments.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
It works for a while, but as soon as that stops working, if you have- Nothing. You feel like in an empty room with white walls. What's really compelling about the therapy over the course of a number of years is I still remember over COVID, we were then Zooming, and she'd had her own place, and she actually went through this process, and she was very artistic, of painting the walls in her actual room.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Talk about making something concrete.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And kind of in the way that she was feeling a lot more lit up inside out instead of outside in.

Andrew Huberman:
It's great.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
But I just think, I guess I know myself, too, and maybe this is part of why I try not to put people on a pedestal. Maybe it's as I'm talking, people are like, "Oh, Becky gets it right with her kids, and she's doing this." And whatever I can share, that is part of my story. I also yell at my kids. I also feel like sometimes I'm on my phone too much. I feel like my life is out of balance. I don't get to see my friends nearly the way I used to. They probably often are like, "Where's Becky? Why is she not only responding to texts, but remembering my birthday or whatever I forget?" And that doesn't feel good to me because I used to do more of that. And so no one has it all figured out. Humans, I think, are remarkably complicated, remarkably imperfect. We all have parts of us that feel really good, and maybe some of us play up those parts more than others. And we all have parts of us that feel confusing, maybe have some shame, feel, I don't know, just more complicated. And so I at least want to get that out there about myself.

Andrew Huberman:
No, I really appreciate you sharing, and I want to be clear, if I was at all unclear, that I certainly don't hold up these ultra performers in all domains on a pedestal. I think they're in a very precarious place inside and outside.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
They've essentially given up all their power and agency to one incoming failure. And maybe they never experience it, and they get to the end without having known, but what a terrible way to live anyway.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I've always looked up, since I was little, to people that really took a unique path. I've always found that they, yes, accomplish tremendous things, and they have interesting, sometimes painful flaws. I'm a huge fan of the late neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Very incredible man, very complicated life.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Incredible. Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
If you read his books and his autobiography, which I highly recommend everybody do if you're interested in science and just animals and a life uniquely lived. He's a really good example. And there are a bunch of other examples that are meaningful to me. Certainly not somebody who-- He couldn't do an experiment to save his life. He was moved out of multiple universities and places. A very, very complicated character. Had a methamphetamine addiction, was a closet homosexual. It came out later in life and was then long periods of time on his own. Then, anyway, had a great relationship later in life. Very interesting person. Became that way and found his passion by realizing how terrible he was at certain things, including certain branches of medicine. So I think that trying many things and being really realistic about whether or not something's for us or not is the key. But then I guess the question becomes, and this must be so hard from the perspective of parenting, but also just in terms of guiding ourselves through life is, how much friction do we experience before we say, "You know what? I'm not a musician, and I'm cool with that. I love music, but I'm going to put my efforts into these other things," and this thing comes more easily for me. I do think we have a lot of natural tendencies, and I feel like especially in the United States, there's been this complicated relationship with parenting and education whereby we don't want to push people to their own suffering and demise. But we also have to avoid not pushing them because then they don't ever find what they are proficient in, and they don't learn that overcoming friction thing. So it's tricky. I do believe everyone has a unique expression of themselves in life, whatever that is. It doesn't have to be in professional life. But you have to try a lot of different things. And at what point you bail out, I've had few in my lab, but I've spoken to graduate students and postdocs where I had to say, "You know what?" I actually had this conversation with a postdoc. I was like: "You know what? You're a really good scientist. You're never going to be a professor. Let's get you a job in biotech."

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And they were like . They thought their whole life they were going to be a professor.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm like, "You're not. And the data are the following, which point to that." And it's kind of devastating, but then years later, they thank me, or they thanked me in that case.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
A few others probably cursed me. But so how do you know when to keep pushing your kid to even engage in something?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Maybe they're the kid that always is picked last for the team, but you know they should play sports.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
So I guess my first reaction is I'm reacting to the word pushing because I'm not sure that's the verb I would think about. Because I think the idea of pushing your kid, even how much do I push? There's a lot about us there. It's like, is that my desire?

Andrew Huberman:
I guess I grew up in a town where a lot of kids got pushed.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Oh, I grew up in a town where every kid got pushed.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
So maybe that's why I know something about it, right? I think we see this all the time, and it goes back to actually what side of the tennis court, like whose feelings are whose.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Is this my unlived dreams as a athlete in my youth, or is this actually about my kid's soccer skills? I think parents watching their kids playing sports is a prime example of am I living out my unfulfilled dreams and projecting that onto my daughter?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Or does my daughter like soccer, and how can I really differentiate those, right? I think actually, though, making it back to that, a lot of this actually goes back to frustration tolerance and why it matters so much to me. My approach to teaching frustration tolerance, which is like a hidden gem we have here at Good Inside, I want it to be in every school. I think it needs to be in every school, and I want to describe it to you, okay? So I literally have this graph. It's helpful, and I know you like to write things down too to make it concrete, where point one is not knowing how to do something.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And point two, which is very far away, is, let's say, knowing how to do it or being very proficient. This could be soccer. I think a good example is reading. Everybody starts out not knowing how to read, and let's say, not everybody, but a lot of people learn how to read. The space between not knowing and knowing, I call the learning space.

Andrew Huberman:
Uh-huh.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
It has a name, and it's helpful to know where you are on a map. And the learning space has one feeling that you're supposed to have, frustration. That is the feeling you're supposed to have. And we have this idea that we jet from not knowing to knowing like this.

Andrew Huberman:
It's because of those damn "Star Wars" movies and-- Oh, no, actually "Star Wars" incorporated some frustration, but it's because of movies. Boom, you're supposed to just have the skill because you picked up the rock or the sword or the pen or the wand.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Well, and now it's because if you think about the circuitry that kids get used to with dopamine, and the space between wanting and having, in general is low. Because when you don't know something, you want to know it. Here, you do know it. Our tolerance and our kids' tolerance for wanting and not having is so low that what's so sad is the learning space has gotten massively compressed, and people fear frustration. This image, when I've gone over this with kids and even teachers, I know teachers who teach this in their class. "Okay, today we're going to learn this new thing. We're going to learn," whatever it is, how to read a short word. Everybody in this class is here, not knowing. Everybody in this class is going to get here. And probably today, most of us, and you can actually do it in a map, are going to be right here. What does this say? The learning space. How are we supposed to feel when we're in the learning space? The class can say, "Frustrated." Okay, here's an interesting assignment, different than you think. The goal today is not to tell me if you can read the letters that are in front of you. I want you to raise your hand when you feel frustrated, which feels like this, "Oh, I can't do it." Because I'm going to come up to you, and I'm going to give you a high five, and I'm going to say, "You are in the learning space. You are learning. How amazing is that?" Andrew, I really believe this has the power-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... to change learning. Because then when we talk about proficiency or when we talk about years from now, my kid is saying, this happens all the time, I get questions about this all the time. My kid says they want to do whatever it is. It could be a coding class. It could be a lacrosse class. And they do it once, and then they always come home and they say, "I don't want to do it, I quit." Or maybe they're on a swim team, and they want to quit. Do I let my kid quit, right? To me, the question is actually most likely none of our kids are going to be Olympic swimmers or professional basketball players. I think about this a lot with youth sports. The whole goal, in my mind, for most people with youth sports, not everyone, but most, is learning how to deal with frustration, learning how to do things you thought you couldn't do, character, sharing, being a good teammate, sportsmanship, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
All those things are hard skills to learn. So the reason I'm signing my kid up for basketball is actually just because it's a good medium for all those things. And so I want to be sure that if my kid is quitting, it's not because they're escaping the very, very natural learning space that is so important to be in, in life. And this happened. Actually, my oldest wanted to quit baseball. He had played for years, and he wanted to quit. And the conversation we ended up having was, "Look, let's wait till the end of the season." And this goes back to values. It's not we don't quit, but in our family, we really value and try as much as we can to keep our commitments. And not just to ourselves, to each other. And so the rest of the season, you might be thinking all the time, "I don't want to be doing this." And again, in my head I'm thinking, "Good, that's a good life experience to watch yourself go through that, as long as it's not toxic. And at the end, we'll talk about it." Interestingly enough, he had the best baseball season he'd ever had. He had a grand slam, which no shade to baseball, that's as exciting as youth baseball ever gets.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right? And still, he was like, "I think I'm done. I just want to..." And I felt really good about that. I was like: Look, you ended on you were playing really well. It wasn't just because you got moved down in the batting order. If that's the reason why my kid get moved down to the batting order, they're not starting on basketball, I hear this all the time, now they want to quit. I don't have any rigid rules, but if that becomes a pattern, that worries me. Or not worries me, but forget youth sports. That's just not a great circuitry that would be conducive with resilience and confidence in adulthood.

Andrew Huberman:
Look, I love, love, love this concept, which I believe to be entirely true, that the learning space between unskilled and skilled, if you will-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes, that's what it is

Andrew Huberman:
... is characterized by the feeling of frustration in mind and body.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
I don't want to rattle off another experiment, but there is just so much data. I'll share this with you offline, the papers that is, showing that brain plasticity, changes in neural circuitry, only occur when the chemical milieu of the brain is different than it normally is. Otherwise, how would the brain know it should change?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
So what sets the context for massive change in our neural circuitry is when there's a lot of adrenaline in the body. Sorry, folks, it's true. Adrenaline, also called epinephrine, and norepinephrine released in the brain. Now, you don't want to be in a state of panic or stress to the point where you're debilitated, but that shift in the chemical milieu sets the stage for ... rewiring of connections between neurons.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
This is known at the molecular level, it's known at the cellular level, it's known at the circuit level, and I'm excited to share that literature with you because-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... it just basically is a bunch of nerd speak and numbers to support the fact that you're nailing it right in the bullseye, which is without frustration, there is no rewiring of the neural circuits. And if you think about it, it had to be that way.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Otherwise, why would the circuits change? So the error signal is what sets plasticity in motion. Now, the actual rewiring occurs during sleep, so this is my reminder-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... to make sure that your kids get enough sleep, because this is the phenomenon of not being able to do something, coming back a few days or weeks later-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and you're like, "Can do it." Well, it's because it happened in sleep, the final portion of the rewiring.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
That's why phones shouldn't be in the bedroom for kids.

Andrew Huberman:
I think 75% of people between the age of seven and 18 are massively sleep-deprived, and the neural rewiring deficits associated with that are serious, and these are what we call sensitive periods. I like sensitive periods more than critical periods, because critical periods imply an open and shut. Sensitive, there's a tapering-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... but it does taper.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So, this unskilled to skilled, and frustration in the learning space model, this is part of something that you're putting together now. Could you-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I already have it

Andrew Huberman:
... expand on that?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Our frustration tolerance program, it's a workshop. It's within our membership. So it's one of 30 workshops. To me, the thing is no parents say, "Dr. Becky, what I'm really dealing with is low frustration tolerance." They'll say, "My kid is having tantrums," or, "They won't do their homework." Or kids with ADHD tend to have low frustration tolerance. So to me, it's one of the first things I recommend to new members, where I say, "Okay, this is the thing. This is the key thing that underlies a lot of tantrums, it underlies entitlement, it underlies not sharing, it underlies why you throw the board game when you're about to lose, it underlies quitting, it's not homework." And again, the MGI, the most generous interpretation is, wait, right, the commonality in all those situations is my kid is frustrated. And if what they're learning or what they've practiced is when I feel frustrated, it's so intense that sometimes I think, do our kids learn that their emotions operate on a dimmer switch or an on/off switch? We want our kids to operate on a dimmer. Like you said, if you're at a 10 out of 10, you can't operate.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
But if every time, and I'm so interested in this literature you mentioned, because I was thinking, what would happen in the first number of years of a kid's life if every time they're frustrated, well-intentioned, but again, just under-resourced parents turn it off. Then what I think would happen, I'm wondering, is then something that could be a five out of 10, I feel like would feel like a 10 out of 10, because you never had a dimmer. Because if you only operated when a light went on with always going off, then even if over time, years later, the light was at a five, it's still going to feel blinding. Right? And so this idea of a dimmer, you want your kids when they're frustrated, that's what frustration tolerance is. Nobody says, "I'm frustrated, I can't read, yay." No one says that. But if it kind of comes up, oh, there's that light. We want their bodies to think, "Okay, all I need to do, and I have skills to get my nine out of 10 to an eight, an eight to a seven. When I'm at a seven, that's where learning happens." That's very different than it's at a nine, and kind of like, "Who's going to turn it off for me?" Or the reason in those situations, because they, "I'm not doing my homework," is they don't have the skills to bring it to a seven. And so their choice is to stay at a nine or 10 out of 10, which no human can do, or walk away and bring it to a zero. And so what I'm saying is our frustration tolerance workshop, which I want every parent to take, but I also just want to get into schools, is literally the thing that helps you teach your kids how to get frustration tolerance. You really can do this. It sounds sick, but you can get your kids to like being in the learning space, to be like, "I'm going to thrive here. The good feeling is eventually going to come. I'm relatively comfortable here, because I just have watched myself survive it that many times." And so the benefits of that workshop, and just the program, is not only tantrums, but actually it is a lot in academics.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Because so many times when kids have issues in school, ADHD is real. Dyslexia is real. That definitely can be a component. But so many times, it's actually an issue of frustration tolerance, and that's often not kind of labeled for parents.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm realizing as you're saying this that the literature that I'm aware of about stress and trauma is actually relevant here in an interesting and perhaps surprising way, whereby this thing I said earlier, the brain only changes under conditions where norepinephrine and epinephrine are released. There is such a thing as one-trial learning, and it's associated with negative experiences. And the reason negative experiences create such robust learning in only one trial is because there's a massive amount of epinephrine and norepinephrine, and other neurochemicals released. So it's stamped into the nervous system. But learning of things we want to learn relies on the same neurochemicals. There's a wild and really cool literature from a guy named James McGaugh, who showed that if you spike adrenaline before learning, the learning is much faster and much more durable. If you spike adrenaline after learning, turns out the learning is more durable.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
Now, we can't start getting into kind of biohacking experiments on kids or themselves, but the adrenaline is supposed to come during the learning itself-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... which is what you're saying. But the problem is-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... if we stop once we're frustrated, we get the increase in adrenaline and norepinephrine, and again, other neurochemicals as well. But Then the perception is that the plasticity loop is closed there, so what did you learn? When I do hard things, I get frustrated. When I stop, the frustration goes away.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
That's all you learn. In the same way that somebody exposed to trauma, this underlies the basis of almost all modern trauma therapies, is to, in the right setting, take people back through it sequentially, let them experience that, and start to desensitize to it-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... so they can complete that loop.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah. That's exactly right.

Andrew Huberman:
And so I think it's so important to push through frustration, and I think it's so important as you-- I'm just agreeing with you here, clearly. But oftentimes that frustration can last more than just the learning session. It can be weeks, or months, or in some cases, a year of a really challenging course or sports participation. And so that's where it gets tough because as-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... empathic creatures, one hopes, we hate to see members of our own species suffer, especially our kids. And so it becomes this thing of do you let them opt out? What do they learn by opting out?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And that's where it gets really complicated because we also got a forebrain which can set all these different rules.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And so-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
But can I-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I don't know about frustration for a year. I guess I always think how we experience a feeling-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... is the feeling plus the story we tell ourselves about-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... the feeling.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And the feeling kind of is at a certain level, but the story we tell ourself about the feeling and what it means about us or how capable we are of coping with it, that can make a feeling that was here, go to here. So thinking about frustration of a year, it's interesting we're talking so much about stories, but again, if one of the things I try as a parent is when my kid is saying, I don't know, what would it be to quit? "I hate gymnastics," right? And you're thinking, okay, first of all, quitting is not always weak or wrong. Sometimes quitting is a very brave, awesome-

Andrew Huberman:
Oh

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... great thing to do. So-

Andrew Huberman:
Definitely sometimes-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... the absolute best thing to do.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
100%.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
But as a parent, sometimes, and I get this a lot, I'm conflicted. I don't know what's right. First of all, there's probably not a right, and again, our parenting never hangs on one decision, so just let that go. But I think what I would be curious to just experiment with. Again, maybe it's because I'm so obsessed with frustration tolerance, especially in this world that is so working against frustration tolerance.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I feel like it's even more my duty as a parent to help. So I'm like, okay, let's just have an experiment where I would say, "Okay, talk to me about why you want to quit gymnastics." And I might know in the back of my head, maybe they're not as good as everyone anymore, right? Or maybe they just don't like it. Who knows? But I might say, "Look, maybe this isn't relevant. I'm thinking about when I did..." I'm thinking about a different sport. When I did track growing up, and there were whole years where I was like, "I love track, I love track." And I don't know if I ever told you this, but when I was 11, I hated track. I went from love to hate. And part of it was, and again, say something kind of relevant to your kid. Part of it was there was a new kid at school, and I was kind of the track star until she came in, and then I was second, and that just kind of stunk. And no, I didn't tell myself it's okay. I kind of told myself this stinks every day. And part of it was all my friends were doing soccer, and I kind of felt left out. But I finished the year, and the next year something interesting happened. And this is what a kid will say. They'll go, "Oh, what? You love track again?" And it's this amazing moment because they're always going to say that to be like, "No." I ended up deciding that next year was my last year at track, and I stopped after that. But I can't explain it, it felt like it came from a different place, and almost like I felt more settled, I think, after. Like I really knew. And I don't know if that's relevant to gymnastics. I do know you've loved it for a while. It's kind of new to not like it. And sometimes when something's new and you don't like it, you just got to go. But other times, when something's new and you don't like it, you want to figure it out. And I don't know. I'm wondering if we should give it a few more weeks to try the figuring it out thing. And again, maybe your kid says, "No, I want to quit," and you're like, "Fine." And in some ways, you've already had the experience, no matter what they do. But I think that's what I think about playing around with, with kids, way more than I think what parents say is, "So should they quit or not?" It's so binary, it's so rigid, and I think we're missing the nuance of the story and the process that matters more than the eventual decision.

Andrew Huberman:
I love your use of story and narrative with your kids. It seems like you use that a lot.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I do.

Andrew Huberman:
Instead of saying, and forgive me for-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... I'm not an analyst, but I feel like it starts with an observation. Like, okay, you're behaving this way. Maybe what's behind the behavior? You're expressing this. What's maybe deeper to that? But when talking about your own experiences towards your kids, as you've been doing here-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... in these pseudo-hypotheticals.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm sure some of them is this. We'll interview your kids later and find out.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
No, I'm kidding. It's clear that you use story as a way to kind of share genuinely, but also probe-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... for what might be going on with them. And I have to say, I find it really delightful because-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... it raises lots of questions that I think anyone would have, and I think it's part of your gift-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... clearly because so many people follow your advice. But the advice you give is also, it's interesting, it's like an observation, like frustration is key. I want to increase frustration tolerance. But then you're not like, okay, you're going to hammer down their throats frustration tolerance in the following way. It sort of becomes a question, like-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... where is there frustration in your life? And then you put it into your own narrative as opposed to necessarily asking them questions. I think asking kids questions or asking people questions generally is great. Like, "Hey, how can I do better?" As you pointed out earlier. But it's really, I don't know if the word is disarming, but it's really-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... entirely positive way. The way you use your own narrative to allow people to start going, "Oh, yeah. Where am I experiencing frustration? Where could I tolerate that better?" And so I think that there's this incredible triad of or tripartite thing of observe, consider the deeper layer, and then offering a narrative that's really a bunch of questions where you're speaking from your real truth. It's really elegant, I have to say.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Thank you.

Andrew Huberman:
It's spectacular. I hadn't realized it until right now.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I don't know if I realize those parts, but you know what? It is interesting is it brings up the word we kind of mentioned before but didn't talk about, and maybe it'll be surprising that I say this, is shame. And I think shame is the biggest blocker to learning. And shame, I think, could be defined like a lot of things in many ways, but it's the experience of aloneness.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I think shame is the feeling you have when you kind of feel like a part of you is not attachable. So for a kid, that's an existential threat to not be in attachment with someone. And in that way, when you're not attachable, you're alone. And so many of the things that happen with our kids, because I'll model another story, and maybe I'll get some flak for this because it's probably counterintuitive. But I think about one of my kids, my resilient rebel, who was in a hitting stage when he was younger. Hitting, and it was in a couple of weeks. He was hitting, and then there was this one time where we were doing a family puzzle, and he was younger. He was probably three. It was really hard. It was more for my older kids. He was kind of doing his own thing. I think he was playing with blocks on the side. We leave, we come back, and a couple of the puzzle pieces were missing that weren't in. And I just knew. I knew it. He saw it. I know most generous interpretation, he felt like, "Oh my God, I can't participate in what the rest of the family is doing. And so you know what I'm going to do? Because I'm a smart kid, I'm just going to stop them from participating, and so I'm going to take the puzzle pieces and hide them." I knew it. I know him. So we come back, and we'd worked really hard on this puzzle. Of course, you're angry, but again, I can either do nothing on the outside or do nothing on the inside. In that moment, not always, but chose to be an adult. And I was just like, "I know you took the puzzle pieces." And he's like, "What are you talking-- No, I didn't." Maybe he was four. "No, I didn't." And I was like, "We're working on this puzzle. I get that it's probably frustrating, but you need--" And he, "I'm not. I didn't have the puzzle pieces." Okay. That was not working. And then this is truly going back to stories and going back to shame. If you feel like you're the bad kid who's doing bad things, and you're the only one who's like that, you are shut down from learning. So I went up to him on the couch, and my husband, I remember, watched me being like, "What are you doing?" And this is how I started. I go, "I don't know if I can tell you this." Which any kid's going to be like, "What?" I was like, "I don't know if I can tell you this. When I was probably about seven, I did something really bad." That's what I said. And he was like, I can't even tell you. He was like. He every part of his anger diffused. And you can really draw a kid in by just saying to them, "I can't tell you. I've never told anyone." I go, "Okay." And this is true. I go, "My sister was two, and she had these oily stickers, and I really wanted them. And I asked my mom, and she said, 'No, we couldn't go to the store, and no, those are my sister's stickers.' And you're never going to guess what I did." And he was like, "I don't know. You asked her for them? You waited?" And I was like, "No. I took them. But that's not the worst part." And he's like, "What?" And I go, "My mom asked me if I took them. And I knew I did, so you know what I told her?" And he said, "You told her yes?" And I go, "No. I told her no." And he literally goes. And I feel like in that moment, what's happening is he's saying so many things that you can never say didactically, like, "Mom, you're my mom. I love you. I hold you on a pedestal, and even you did something that wasn't so great." There's so much hope and goodness. And then I didn't, in that moment, I did not say, and you cannot say in these situations, "So now you can tell me the truth."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
You just have to trust because I think the shame of the badness, shame freezes you as an animal defense state. Shame freezes you. So a kid who's lying to you is always in shame, and you can't get a kid to unfreeze and move to a different place of telling you the truth if you're adding more shame through fear. The math doesn't work.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
But you can through stories. Now, true story, he did not right after that say. I remember my husband, who is okay with me saying this, he was like, "We have to punish him. We have to punish him." I was like, "In the moment, that's going to feel very cathartic to us." That's what punishment does. It makes you feel very powerful. It makes you feel very cathartic. It doesn't work. It just doesn't, especially not with kids who are strong-willed. And I was like, "Just give it a couple days." It was probably a good three days later, and he brought me the puzzle pieces in a bag, and he just said, "I took them." And he truly started crying, and I did not lecture him. I feel like the whole arc, the whole lesson Had basically already happened. Honestly, the day after or so, again, and this is what I think we miss as parents, and we're almost afraid to just name the humanness of it, and I kind of gave an example earlier. He's going to want to do something bad again. We all want to do bad things. That's not a bad urge. It's just about having the skills to do something differently when you have the urge. So I think a couple days later, and I do this, I do these little role plays. They take like 20 seconds. I was like, "Oh my goodness. Look at the puzzle." Because we had still been working on it. "What if you want to take it again?" He goes, "I won't." I go, "I know, but I think you might want to. Remember how I took the Oilies?"

Andrew Huberman:
So you're acknowledging that inside him, there might be a piece that still wants to do the wrong thing.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Feelings, and that's an urge. I teach my kids, an urge means you want to do something. My kids will say, "An urge is not a behavior. Behavior is doing the thing." That's not okay, but the only reason your urge doesn't convert into behavior is because you have a skill to manage the urge, and you can't build skills if no one teaches you them. So I said, "What could you do instead? Could you run to me and say, 'I really want to take the pieces'? Can you say, 'I need time with you?'" Because at the end of the day, I think he felt left out, and we did. And by the way, this kid, is he perfect now? No. But it brings together so many things. Number one, when we trust ourself that we have time, when we realize shame, the fear of being the only one, being bad, being unlovable, being alone is often the biggest blocker for kids. When you really realize that, punishment and sending your kid away makes no sense at all, and you can kind of give yourself freedom to tell stories, right? Because when we're really struggling with something, you don't want to look at someone, especially someone who's perfect. Right? It's like when you really have a bad experience as an adult, the only thing you want to hear is your friend who I don't like. "I'm mortified. I sent this email to my boss." The only thing that would make me feel better is someone like, "Let me show you the email I sent." I'm like, "Oh, wow, that's worse." That's the only thing that makes me feel better. Not because I wish bad upon other people, but because you want to know you're not alone. And other people's stories do that. Vulnerability, it's like this magic trick.

Andrew Huberman:
Is pretty far away from the parenting dynamic, but the understanding and actual data from 12-step programs and group therapy generally-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... including trauma therapy that is of a group therapy nature, fully supports everything you said.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Hearing the terrible and/or humiliating things that people have done or have done to them, as awful as that sounds, is often what underlies people's-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
That's right

Andrew Huberman:
... willingness to recover, ability to recover, and then they become the teachers-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
That's right

Andrew Huberman:
... over time. Like you said, I think you said so many incredible things there, but right at the end, you said something that I hope everyone internalizes, that when you do something embarrassing, maybe even humiliating, the last thing you want to hear is, "Look, it's all going to be fine." The thing that actually helps is somebody who has experienced something similar and is doing fine.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah. And I use that at management a lot. We had someone do a presentation at work, and it was for a bunch of people, and it did not go well. And I met with her, and she knew it kind of didn't go well. And honestly, the only thing I said to her, I don't even manage her directly, she's more junior, and I really mean this. In clinical psychology grad school, it gets intense. You do a session when you're first doing sessions, and everyone's watching you. They're watching you do therapy, which is helpful. But I remember my first one, and I felt pretty okay about it. I was like, "This is my first one." I was okay. I got torn to shreds. They were like, "That was not good." And now, obviously, I feel good about my clinical abilities, but the only thing I said to her is I was like, "Look," and I shared it with her, and I said, "I've been there. Eventually, I look back on that. It helped me learn. That day, I just felt awful. I wasn't like, 'This is my learning space moment.' And so if you're feeling like that, I just want to let you know I've been there too. This is the starting point to getting better. This is going to make you stronger. I know that. I've lived that." And I think storytelling in that way is probably a really underutilized kind of quote, "tool." It almost dehumanizes it to call it that, in management, in any relationship.

Andrew Huberman:
Love it. And I feel like the story of your son bringing those puzzle pieces back is like, there's so much there.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
So much.

Andrew Huberman:
And the fact that there was a delay, and then he brought it back on his own accord, and that you had already kind of let it go. That's, I feel like, a really interesting piece. It wasn't to appease you. It was really something internal for him. He got the lesson for him. It wasn't just about making Mom feel okay about him. He clearly understood you still love him, but it wasn't about fixing something externally as much as it was about fixing something internally, which I think is the addressing and overcoming the shame piece.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I think that's right, and that's the thing. I think sometimes it's like, are we teaching kids what to think or how to think? After they're gone from our house, it's the how to think. And you said questions. I love Socratic questions for kids. Like, oh, if, again, a different version of a story would be like, "Oh, okay, I know you didn't take the puzzle pieces," but I'm just thinking for me, what would make me take puzzle pieces? Oh, I wonder if I felt left out, or I wonder if I was just really trying to get my parents' attention for a while, and this was the only way to do it, and what would I do after? And what would I need-- Now I'm going to get emotional. What would I need to know about myself or from my parent for me to share that I did take it? Maybe I would need to know that my parents knew I was a good kid. Anyway, sorry, what were we talking about? Because your kids eventually make good decisions. Adults make good decisions for themselves because they ask themselves the right questions. Not because they've heard their parents' specific lesson. Because they're able to say to themselves, "What am I feeling right now? What am I really looking for? Why did I do that?" So asking questions, telling stories, asking questions without even answering them, actually provokes a much more sophisticated developmental process in your kid than the lectures we all, me included. Trust me, plenty of times at my kid that I've just lectured them. But again, they're just catharsis. They're not actually terribly effective.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. If ever there was some core truths about brain plasticity, it's that frustration is associated with the chemicals that foster brain change. We know that, and that questions have a really interesting impact on learning.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Which sounds kind of like a duh. Well, of course they do. But when we ask questions, it creates this open loop in the brain that the brain wants to solve, as opposed to hearing a statement. This is why I always felt like those pictures on office walls, like motivation when you blah, blah, blah. Motivational statements don't mean much in terms of, because they're not about verb states. When we ask questions, we put our brain into kind of a process of verb states, of asking-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... what behaviors are going to lead to which outcomes.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
There's an interesting literature about this that probably isn't fully relevant here, but it gets back to trying to learn basic motor tasks, and the same things are applied to basic cognitive tasks of like, how do I solve this? And a puzzle is a great example because it's both cognitive and motor, like you're fixing these pieces in different ways. I have to get back to doing some puzzles I'm realizing. Yeah.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And emotional.

Andrew Huberman:
And emotional.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I can really embarrass myself, but one of my favorite things that, again, I've just noticed my kids extending for puzzles, because they all did a lot of puzzles when they were young is so funny. I remember my kid doing this puzzle and getting some frustration. What I did is I did a puzzle to the side of him. Instead of doing it perfectly, I kind of mimicked. I was like, "Oh, this doesn't fit. Oh, it's not that piece." Okay? And one of the things I noticed, this is when my kid was really young, is kids have a really hard time with puzzles, and it's kind of a metaphor for life, for when a piece doesn't fit, they keep trying it when what they really need to do is, such a metaphor, is put it down and pick up another piece.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Right? But I could tell my kid that, but I always feel like just telling doesn't really work. So this is what I did. I'm not joking. I'm going to sing. Okay, get ready, okay? So I was doing it over here, and I just go, "Oh, it's not fitting. It's not fitting here, it's not fitting here." And I go, "If it doesn't fit, put it to the side and try another piece." And then I was like, "Oh, right. I can put it to the side. Okay, I've got this one." And I didn't make it perfect. I was like, "Oh. Oh! That one fits there." Right? I have heard, not anymore, my kids are too old, but there was a time I remember me and my husband were outside the playroom, and we heard our son singing this song. It's a mantra. It's self-regulation.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Because is it cognitive? Is it physical? It's also emotional. It goes back to frustration tolerance, where our kids need, they need mantras, they need skills, they need songs to actually up-level their skills to regulate the emotions that get in their way of doing great things. Right? And that kid is interesting. Not really anymore. Now that I think about it, I want to revive it. He makes up songs through situations. What an amazing skill, right? And if anyone's hearing this and like, "Oh, that's unrealistic," it's amazing. You do it one time. One time. Make up a silly song, model the frustration yourself, make up a song, struggle again, and then get success. Whatever it is. It could be with reading, with a puzzle, with putting on your sock. It could be, "Oh, it doesn't fit. I'm taking a deep breath and trying it again." It could literally be anything because it adds a little play and joy.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And you probably know what song does in the brain better than I do, but probably regulating. I would put money that a parent would be like, "That's so weird. Becky, you're right. It didn't take that much time. I did it one time, and my kids started singing the song, and now they put their socks on by themselves."

Andrew Huberman:
I love it. You taught a process through song, and there actually is a lot of data on music in the brain and how it organizes things mostly in the form of a story, of a beginning, middle, and end.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
And just the quickest example I can give is when we learn our ABCs, we learn them in song. Right? It's ABCDEFG.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You never forget that, right? It's much easier to learn things through rhythmic song, little motifs-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... than it is through a list of letters or numbers.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Does our brain encode it differently?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. So it fragments it into a beginning, middle, and end, and then there's an underlying repetitive sort of wave. ABCDEFG. Okay, here I'm now, I'm singing, so-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... at risk of-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Embarrassing both of us

Andrew Huberman:
... inducing all sorts of- ... bad neural responses in listeners. But you get the point. It's a waveform that the brain can recognize. I actually have a friend who's a very accomplished musician, and I know the lyrics to his songs very well, and I said, "Remember that song?" And he goes, "Well, I have to hear the underlying melody," and then he can remember all the words. He's a singer. He's a lead singer in a very well-known band. He doesn't even know the words to his own songs if you just ask them for him, but you give him the music, and he's just out the gate.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Oh.

Andrew Huberman:
And he can do this in front of tens of thousands of people.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
So then it is a cheat code for coping skills-

Andrew Huberman:
It is

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... if you put it to song.

Andrew Huberman:
It becomes a verb process Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off there.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's almost like saying, oh, the mechanics of writing are you pick up, you put the pen between-- There's a whole rhythm to writing. There's a whole motor sequence that we learn, or eating, or anything for that matter. No one who's an expert piano player thinks about playing the individual keys. At the point where they've learned it, they've batched it into, it's sort of like chunking, but it has an underlying rhythm that's carried by a neural circuit that allows the expression of the movements of the fingers or the-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... words out the mouth, or in this case, overcoming frustration to just ride on top of all of it.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So, there's an unconscious genius to what you- ... what you did, and I love it. Maybe, as long as nobody hears me saying, I'll need to sing more to get through frustration. I have a question about Ms. Edson.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
People are going to be like, "What?" Before we started recording, you shared with us something I think is entirely appropriate to what we're talking about now, which is learning and learning hard things and frustration tolerance.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And you've evolved these concepts in the course of your work and through your own parenting/child relationships, clearly your own, and then yours with your kids. Who was Ms. Edson, and what did she teach you? Because when you told me this, I was like, "Whoa, that's super valuable. We all need to know about this."

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yes. So Ms. Edson was my second-grade teacher. And I remember writing in her class, and I remember something she told us, and it's truly something that shapes me every day. And she said, "If something feels too hard to start, it just means that the first step isn't small enough." And then she really made this even more concrete because what I remember in her class writing, and I still use this in writing today, is okay, so if something feels too hard to do, the implication is it doesn't mean it's my fault. It doesn't mean I can't. It doesn't mean I'm stupid. It literally just means the first step isn't small enough. That's very actionable. And so the way I play around with it now, even in my own writing, is, okay, I have to write a new article. And I'm like, "I can't do that." Okay, so I'm in I can't mode. Okay. If something is in I can't mode, if it feels too hard, I hear her voice. It just means the first step isn't small enough. So I'll make it, literally, I'll just make it smaller. I'm going to write a page today. And then often I'm like, "I can't do that." Okay, smaller. A paragraph. No. And I literally do it until, and some days it's a word, and I go, "Oh, you know what? I can write a word." Okay. Now I'm not... Okay. Right? And I really think Ms. Edson was ahead of her time. Obviously now we talk a lot about frustration tolerance, growth mindset, but this really is a way of saying when things are hard, it's not your fault, and there's something you can do to build the circuit of capability. Because I think when we're trying to do something hard, there are, if you think about it, I don't know, you're on the top of a ski mountain, and on the one side is the I can't, it's too hard, and the other side is I can. We all have natural capability. I really believe this. Every person. But it's just about figuring out how to get your skis to the beginning of the ski slope. And then maybe if we've practiced being on the I can't do hard things slope, our skis keep trying to turn, but we just have to keep getting them back. And so if we tell ourselves, "I can't do this," and we just stay there stagnant, but if you say, "Wait, smaller," like I used this with a client a while ago. "I can't ask my boss for a raise. I know I deserve it." Cool. No problem. Let's make it smaller. Okay, what would be smaller? I don't know. Let's get creative. Could you write down what you would say? Okay, no. Could you say the word to me five times out loud? Raise. I remember she laughed. She goes, "I can do that." Cool. Let's start there. Okay, she literally did that. What I think is so powerful about Ms. Edson's advice is as soon as we get even our skis a tiny bit into the I can circuit, the I can slope, we're actually just a lot more likely to stay there, or at least that becomes a bigger part of our identity, right? So with this woman that I was working on this with, one of the things we were working on, it was just, okay, so you did that. Amazing. The next thing, I even just had her play around with things, saying to me, "Can you say to me, 'I deserve a raise'?" It was very interesting. I think this is one of the reasons she had trouble speaking up for it. It was really hard for her to embody that. We said that. She couldn't. I remember a week, she said, "I'm going to write it down and bring it." She didn't. Again, like parenting. I didn't punish her. I didn't send her to her room. I said, "Okay, that was just too big. Let's make it smaller. Let's write it together." We wrote some things down there. Right? I then had her write it as an email and send it to me. And I then had her practice it with her best friend. And then she asked her boss for a raise. Probably no one's surprised. Yeah, that makes sense. She'd gone through-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... a lot of steps.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
But it's just applicable in every area of your life. So even anyone listening, we all have something in our I can't category. This is too hard, or I can't. And we just stay there. And if you hear Ms. Edson saying, "Wait, if something feels too hard to do, it only means that the first step isn't small enough. And if then the next smallest step feels too hard, no biggie." No judgment. Make it smaller. And then allow yourself to eventually build up from there.

Andrew Huberman:
Love it.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Love Ms. Edson.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm going to thank you and Ms. Edson. Yes. Thank you, Ms. Edson. I think the idea of lowering the stakes to be able to move forward is just spectacular.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And in everything. And I notice you do that. By the way, I'm not analyzing, I'm just saying you do that with parenting. I think there's so much tension around this notion of creating healthy, productive, functional kids.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
And I think there is a lot of shame for parents that-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... when things aren't going great and people know it, or they know it, and the idea of creating lower stakes in order to be able to make pretty big moves over time-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... where they're required or just do nothing when sometimes that's what's required.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah, and the similarity is so interesting. What I think the powerful thing about Ms. Edson's advice is, is she's almost saying, "Make something small enough so you can get your first win."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Having a win is really powerful. It's kind of addicting. You're like, "What's my next win?" Right? You're on the win circuit. One of the reasons we want to create so many more resources for parents, and when parents come to us and even say, "This is a problem, this is a problem, this is a problem," I often just start, I would say, "Okay, what is the smallest thing would change that would make you, when you go to bed at night, be like, 'Today was a better day.' There's some bigger stuff, I hear you. How are we not going to tackle that? We'll tackle that in time, but I want to get you a win today." And then all of a sudden, when a parent starts to build, it's kind of their own self-efficacy, their own like, "Oh, wait, I did feel good about that one moment. I did feel more connected to my kid. I said this one thing." It's momentum.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
And we have to give ourselves the opportunity to build momentum, which really usually only starts by taking the smallest step anyway.

Andrew Huberman:
I think it's spectacular. I was going to ask you, and I never do this-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... but I was going to ask you, if there were one thing that people could start the process of trying to-

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... be a better parent, better to themselves, if it's more about emotional containment, et cetera, maybe it's this thing of asking, at the end of today, what would be one thing that would allow me to have said it was a better day?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Would that be it?

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
I mean, I-

Andrew Huberman:
Certainly, that's powerful

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
... I might give you two things. One is kind of a one small thing, but it's kind of a bigger theoretical thing, and one thing is very concrete. So the bigger thing. I really believe that the single biggest thing that gets in our way of feeling more empowered and capable as parents is that as much as we say we value parenting, and I think people do, where parents are like, "Yeah, what do I care about more than parenting?" It's kind of the lowest on our list in terms of what we invest in. People invest in all types of things. And I want to be clear, yes, we have an offering at Good Inside in our membership, but that's not what I mean. For someone listening, they might be like, "There is that parent coach in my town who I've been saying I'm going to call," or maybe it's a therapist, or maybe it's a parenting group at your school, or maybe someone listens to me and they're like, "No offense, Dr. Becky, there's someone else I follow on Instagram, and they have a course, and I like them better." I'd be like, "Do that today." Align your even purchasing decisions with your values. Because we're not expected to know this naturally. We're not. And as long as we don't have the resources around us, a little kind of, someone described it to me as like a onesie, twosie thing. It's just not giving ourself what we deserve. It is like a surgeon saying they're not good at surgery when you find out they never went to medical school or residency. You'd be like, "Well, just didn't really get resourced in the way you deserve for this very challenging job." So that would really be the thing, if I'm really honest, because as much as I'm about a quick win, I'm not about a quick fix. I think that just sets us up for more of a Band-Aid. Having said that, I love a quick thing. So a couple of things I think people can do with their kids. Telling your kid at night, and I'll model how I would say it. I think most people, it's not just me, when you put your kid to bed, it's like, "Ugh, I just want to be on the couch," but it's when your kid's willing to spend five extra minutes with you because it's the cruel irony at night. You want time without your kids, and they just want a little bit more time with you. If you allow yourself to lean in, and you can just say to your kid, almost like in a whisper. I think whispering to your kid is one of the most underutilized, simplest strategies. Whispers are so sacred. They feel sacred, and they feel like they know they're just for you. Whispering to your kid, like, "I just want to tell you, there's nothing you could ever do that would make me stop loving you."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Or, "I just want to tell you, you're a really good kid. We're in a hard stage, but I will never, ever, ever think of you as anything but a really good kid." Don't expect your kid to say anything. But just that takes 10 seconds. And if you're like, "Whispering feels awkward," don't whisper, just say it. It doesn't matter. If you're thinking, "You don't know my kid. They're a teenager," text them. Sometimes a text to a teen can feel like an unexpected whisper from a parent. And that's it. And that's the single thing today. And then maybe I'm going to add a third. Just do something like that for yourself. Give yourself credit, put your hand on your heart, tell yourself this parenting thing's really hard. I'm doing enough. I'm not messing up my kid forever. That's not a thing. And I've got this.

Andrew Huberman:
Awesome. Well, this whole thing that you've attempted to take on is also really hard, and you're doing incredible work educating people on how to parent. There's so many things that you've said today. I'm not going to recap them all. We do timestamps and all that so people can find them. But in no particular order, this concept of telling a kid you're right to notice when they notice something important in you or in others or in themselves, that rigidity is the enemy Asking what's this really about when they're doing or saying something or expressing themselves in a way that feels confusing, or maybe especially when it's irritating.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Encouraging frustration as a route to learning. Incredible. And then you said the more that you can locate somebody, the more you respect their values, which I think is incredible. And on and on. There's just so many gems in today's conversation and so many actionable gems that you provide on social media, through your courses, through conversations like this, and others that you're holding in other podcasts. And I just want to thank you so much. You're teaching people how to parent others, how to think about their own parenting. Oh, yes, that's the other one. You said the only kind of parenting that we do reflexively is the one that was done for us, which will evoke feelings of relaxation in some people and feelings of dread in others. But it all just speaks to the importance of paying attention to this thing that we call parenting.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I think the way that you're merging this with a thoughtful eye on technology, where it's taking us and where there are concerns as well as where it can be utilized, is just fantastic. I can't say enough good things about the work that you're doing, and I'm just so grateful that you're doing it. And I'm saying that on behalf of myself and everyone else, you're making the world a better place.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Thank you.

Andrew Huberman:
So thank you so much for joining today and for sharing so much. We'll, of course, point out where people can find you, but just keep going. It's awesome. I've learned a ton. I know everyone else has as well.

Dr. Becky Kennedy:
Thank you. I'm honored to be back here a second time. I love speaking with you and look forward to the next time.

Andrew Huberman:
Likewise. We'll do it again. Thank you for listening to today's episode with Dr. Becky Kennedy. I hope you found it to be as informative and as actionable as I did. Right now, Dr. Becky has a 20% promotion going for her fantastic online program on parenting. Becky was kind enough to extend this discount until this Friday, January 17th, 2025, for Huberman Lab listeners. You can find more on that, along with links to Dr. Becky's book, her terrific social media handles, and more through the links in our show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. Please also subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple by clicking the follow button. On both Spotify and Apple, you can also leave us up to a five-star review. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to include on the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. If you're not already following me on social media, I'm Huberman Lab on all social media handles. So that's Instagram, X, formerly known as Twitter, Facebook, Threads, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the Huberman Lab podcast. So again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media channels. If you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, our Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries and what we call protocols in the form of brief one- to three-page PDFs that cover things like deliberate heat exposure, deliberate cold exposure, how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize your dopamine. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training, stretching, and strength training. Again, all available at completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the Menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to Newsletter, and sign up. And I should point out that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Becky Kennedy. I hope you found it to be as informative and as actionable as I did. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.