Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination

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. Martha Beck. Dr. Martha Beck did her undergraduate, master's, and PhD training at Harvard University. She is also considered one of the foremost experts in the personal development field, having authored many best-selling books, including her upcoming book, "Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose." I must say that today's discussion is a truly special one. I've long benefited from Martha's teachings, and I assure you that during today's episode, you will benefit from Martha's teachings. She describes and we explore practices in real-time that will allow you to truly understand what is most important to you and what you ought to spend your time pursuing. You will hear a rich discussion about how to frame the thoughts and the emotions around any topic, including pain points in life, as well as your goals and the things that you are in pursuit of. You will also learn how to figure out exactly what is most essential to you, and indeed, how to explore what Dr. Martha Beck calls your essential self, those deep-rooted desires that are unique to you and your history and what will make your life most fulfilling. By the end of today's episode, you will be armed with new intellectual and practical knowledge, and you will be able to adopt the best possible stance for you as you navigate forward in your life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. Now, I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years. Initially, I didn't have a choice. It was a condition of being allowed to stay in high school. But pretty soon I realized that doing regular therapy is extremely important to our overall health. There are essentially three things that go into great therapy. First of all, you need to have great rapport with the therapist, so you need to be comfortable with that person. You need to be able to trust them and talk to them about all the issues that are relevant to you. Second, and this is what people normally think of when they think of a great therapist, that therapist needs to provide you support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance. And third, excellent therapy has to provide very useful insights, insights that you can apply to be better, not just in your emotional life, in your relationship life, but also your relationship to yourself. BetterHelp makes it extremely easy to find an excellent therapist for you, one with whom you resonate with, have excellent rapport with, and that can give you those three essential benefits of therapy. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com/huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com/huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. Now, the mattress we sleep on makes an enormous difference in terms of the quality of sleep that we get each night. We need a mattress that is matched to our unique sleep needs, one that is neither too soft nor too hard for you, one that breathes well and that won't be too warm or too cold for you. If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz, and it asks you questions such as, "Do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night?" Things of that sort. Maybe you know the answers to those questions, maybe you don't. Either way, Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the Dusk mattress, D-U-S-K. I've been sleeping on a Dusk mattress for, gosh, now more than four years, and the sleep that I've been getting is absolutely phenomenal. If you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com/huberman, take that brief two-minute sleep quiz, and Helix will match you to a mattress that is customized to your unique sleep needs. Right now, Helix is giving up to 25% off mattresses and two free pillows. Again, that's helixsleep.com/huberman to get 25% off and two free pillows. Today's episode is also brought to us by LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Now, proper hydration is critical for the optimal functioning of all the cells in your body, and that's especially true for the neurons, the nerve cells. In fact, we know that even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish both cognitive and physical performance. So, to make sure that I'm getting proper hydration and electrolytes, I personally dissolve one packet of LMNT in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I first wake up in the morning, and I drink that or sip that across the first half hour of the day or so. And then I also make it a point to drink another packet of LMNT dissolved in an equal amount of water, so 16 to 32 ounces, at some other point during the day, and maybe even a third if I'm exercising and/or sweating a lot. I should mention that LMNT tastes absolutely delicious. My favorite flavor is watermelon, although I also confess I like the raspberry flavor, the citrus flavor. Basically, I like all the flavors. If you'd like to try LMNT, you can go to drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim a free LMNT sample pack with the purchase of any LMNT drink mix. Again, that's drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack. And now for my discussion with Dr. Martha Beck. Dr. Martha Beck, welcome.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, it's so good to be here, Andrew. Thank you.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm so excited. I don't know how to convey to the people listening and watching just how excited I am. I have very few heroes in life. But you are one of them.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I know.

Andrew Huberman:
It's true.

Dr. Martha Beck:
That does not compute.

Andrew Huberman:
It's true. I won't name all of them, but you, the great Oliver Sacks-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... are among the people that have really influenced me so much-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... in terms of the things I do The ways I try and think, the ways I try to not think-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... at times. And your life story is an amazing one. So we have a lot to cover today.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yay.

Andrew Huberman:
So I'm not going to spend any more time talking about why I feel that way, because it's going to just become apparent in our discussion. But I do want to say that you have really been ahead of your time. You're triple degreed from Harvard, you have these academic credentials, and yet you were one of the first people to be public-facing about the mind/body connection-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman:
... in a way that is operationalized, what we sometimes call, in and around this podcast, protocols.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And you've offered some practices that have absolutely transformed my life-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Thank you

Andrew Huberman:
... and other people's lives. And I gained them through reading your books, and that's not a standard book advertisement, but all of your books have been transformative for me.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Aw.

Andrew Huberman:
One of the exercises that has had a profound effect on my life is the perfect day exercise.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah. The ideal day.

Andrew Huberman:
And when I first read about it, I thought, "What could this possibly be?" And as I recall, it involved taking a little bit of time, maybe 10 minutes, maybe 30 minutes-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... and just sitting or lying down, closing one's eyes, and just imagining, with no limitations-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... one's perfect day.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And what's so wild about this exercise-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman:
... is that several, not all, but several of the things that I imagined in that exercise-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... have amazingly come to be-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Kind of

Andrew Huberman:
... reality.

Dr. Martha Beck:
It works. I don't know how or why it works. I used to have people send me a postcard, this is how long I've been doing this stuff, now it's emails and texts, but I'd say, "Okay, we just did your ideal day. You've got it all written down. Now send me a notification when that day happens." And I get a lot of notifications.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay. Well, I'm giving you a notification right now.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
Because at the end of that exercise, and I ended up doing it several times-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh. I do too. I do it all the time

Andrew Huberman:
... Okay. That's good to know. I want to know about the frequency there ... was, I'd love to sit down and talk to Martha Beck, what I wouldn't do.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Ah.

Andrew Huberman:
So I'm in a pinch me moment right now.

Dr. Martha Beck:
This is so great.

Andrew Huberman:
It's wild. It's like reality weaving back on itself.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And I've listened to your podcast, and I thought, "That guy's really cool," and here I am.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, thank you.

Dr. Martha Beck:
This is amazing.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm moved by that. So let's just talk about this exercise for a second.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Cool. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Clearly, we could come up with scientific explanations for-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Sure

Andrew Huberman:
... why it would work. The brain is a predictive machine. Once it understands that something might be possible, maybe it looks for avenues for that-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Exactly

Andrew Huberman:
... unconsciously. We could come up with a whole narrative around that.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But just for sake of those listening, what is this exercise? How would you suggest somebody try it?

Dr. Martha Beck:
So the first thing is that you don't make up something. People would always tell me they'd make up a day where they woke up in a white room with white sheets and windows with white curtains, and then they would put on white clothes and drift around. And I realized finally that these people were just tired. They could not project anything but a sort of blankness that I finally realized meant that they'd just pushed themselves too hard. So I stopped doing this with people until they were well-rested. Then you don't make it up, you see it happen. That's the key thing. You allow it into your mind, not as though you're reaching with your imagination, just as though it emerges. So I talk people through it. The first thing is you wake up in the morning, you're perfectly refreshed by a beautiful sleep. In your imagination, don't open your eyes, but listen. What do you hear? So you don't make it up. You listen for it. What do you hear?

Andrew Huberman:
For me, the first thing I hear is just feeling how comfortable my body is on the bed.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm. Oh.

Andrew Huberman:
Something that I don't do enough.

Dr. Martha Beck:
What about the sound of someone or someone's breathing?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, someone next to me breathing, and they're still asleep.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Ah, lovely. Is there a dog breathing on the foot of the bed?

Andrew Huberman:
Well, if it was like my bulldog, Costello- ... that's snoring. I'm going to get another dog soon, so I would like a dog that breathes- ... with less snoring than Costello. Although, I must say, I miss his-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Bulldogs

Andrew Huberman:
... his incredibly deep snores. The early versions of this podcast, the early episodes, we kept him in the room snoring. And by the way, the watering up of my eyes, these are truly tears of joy.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Aw.

Andrew Huberman:
And I said at the beginning of the podcast, I said, "Listen, I have a bulldog. He's getting toward the end of his life, so we're going to keep him in the room. And so if when you hear that breathing in the background-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Aw

Andrew Huberman:
... that snoring, let's call it what it is, he's in here. So sorry, not sorry." So anyway. So yeah. So there's some-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... bulldog breathing.

Dr. Martha Beck:
You can have as many dogs in the room as you want. Just listen, and maybe you hear birds outside, maybe you hear the ocean, maybe you hear wind.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Maybe you hear people talking or the noise of traffic.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Just listen for a minute until you're pretty sure you've heard everything there is to hear.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I like the sound of kids playing.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Ah, sweet.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Okay. So smell the air. What's it like? How humid is it? What's the temperature?

Andrew Huberman:
I'm a Californian at heart.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
I like it in the 70s and 80s.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Perfect.

Andrew Huberman:
Not too humid. And I don't It's weird that a don't jumps in, but there's something about the sound of airplanes flying over-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Interesting

Andrew Huberman:
... that always depresses me.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It must be some paired association from-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Something like that

Andrew Huberman:
... some time, like I don't like that.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
No planes.

Andrew Huberman:
So birds, bird chirping. Who doesn't like birds chirping?

Dr. Martha Beck:
And by the way, for our listeners, this is not one magical day that you'll never live again. This is a typical day, but your life is now perfect.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
So it's an ordinary day-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Martha Beck:
... but in your perfect life. So we're, put it out three years, five years, whatever makes it possible for you to allow that your ideal life could form in that time.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
You'll find, as you do it many times, the time necessary for it to happen becomes much shorter.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Anyway, so you get up, look around, you sit up in the bed, look around. Who's next to you? What does the dog look like? What does the room look like?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's my partner next to me. My dog is... I told myself I wasn't going to get another bulldog.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, you are.

Andrew Huberman:
But I think I'm going to get another bulldog.

Dr. Martha Beck:
You are.

Andrew Huberman:
They're the best.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
They're like the essence of efficiency of metabolism, meaning they do as little as possible. And they experience as much joy as possible.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, that's perfect.

Andrew Huberman:
They're hedonists when it really comes down to it.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, you need a wise hedonist-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah

Dr. Martha Beck:
... in your life.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. And they are capable of protecting if they need to, but I honestly don't care about that. All that stuff, like my bulldogs, I don't care about any of that.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Something tells me you could protect yourself pretty well.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I'm good there. So-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Look around the room. What color are the walls? What pictures are hanging there, if any?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. I'm a Wyeth fan-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm. Me too

Andrew Huberman:
... Andrew Wyeth fan.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Which one? Andrew or Anzy?

Andrew Huberman:
Well, recently I saw a caption, I don't know if this is true because it was an Instagram post, that the woman in the field-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh

Andrew Huberman:
... image.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Christina's World

Andrew Huberman:
That-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... yeah. I didn't know the name of it, thank you. That this was a neighbor of theirs that had a-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... degenerative-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... neural condition.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And rather than use a wheelchair of sorts, she insisted on crawling everywhere.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And so that image is actually of her-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... crawling out into the field, happily, to enjoy the field.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I know.

Andrew Huberman:
Because my impression of the painting before was that somehow because she's seated up there, it looks like, in my mind I projected onto it that there's some desperation there or something to get back to the house.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
But that's not it at all. Turns out this is a woman who preferred to move with her own agency-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Amazing

Andrew Huberman:
... even if it meant crawling to enjoy nature.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And-

Dr. Martha Beck:
It's a magnificent painting

Andrew Huberman:
... it's a magnificent painting.

Dr. Martha Beck:
So it's on the wall there?

Andrew Huberman:
Yes. Maybe not the original, although that would be awesome.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Why not? It's your perfect life.

Andrew Huberman:
Then I'm waking up in the Met.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And also, just notice that you're creating a theme, which is, the theme is, "I will go out as myself and I will reach and strive for things, and I'm not here to be helped. I'm here to do hard things and to do them for the joy of it." So that's what that painting is.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Strong symbol of who you are. So, get out of the bed and your partner's still sleeping, the dog's still sleeping. Go look out the window. Where are you? And you can be anywhere.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm a mountains guy.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
As much as I love California, I've realized that... I just went out to Boulder, Colorado for the first time for a week-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... just by myself, and I fell in love with it.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So I'm in the mountains.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Colorado.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
Feels right to me. And there's water.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh. Lake or river?

Andrew Huberman:
A river. They've got great rivers there.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah, they do.

Andrew Huberman:
Or the little streams.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I like the little streams that they have there, because the rivers are so loud.

Dr. Martha Beck:
That's true.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. The rivers are really loud when they get going. Yeah. And, yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
So are you looking at a small town, a city, or do you just live out in the mountains by yourself?

Andrew Huberman:
Definitely small town. I can't be too isolated. If I'm going to be in a city, I'm going to be in Manhattan.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's like it's all or none.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
So if I'm going to be in nature, I want to be in nature. So a small town.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Beautiful. So just look around, smell the pine and aspen air, and then you go into your perfect bathroom.

Andrew Huberman:
Uh-huh.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And it's beautiful. You could go through a lot of description if you wanted to, but I'm going to rush through that to get to-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm

Dr. Martha Beck:
... the interesting parts. So you take a look at yourself in the mirror. Your body is absolutely perfect. Of course, in your case, that's not an aspirational thing. You're already there. But make it even better.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. For me, that means being clear-eyed.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
People who listen to this podcast know that I came up through neuroscience studying a number of things, but the visual system, and these two little bits in the front of our skull are pieces of our brain.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
They're the only pieces of our brain outside of our skull, and yes, they may be the windows to the soul if people want to refer to them that way, but to me, just feeling like my eyes are clear.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And there's a certain tone or something that I'm like, "Okay, like I'm all there."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, there's a real clarity.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I've seen it. I don't know if you've worked with people who are dying or who are really ill. Sometimes you'll see a shift in the transparency of their eyes.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
There actually seems to be a radiance-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Martha Beck:
... coming from the eyes or gathered around the eyes. That's what I'm sort of thinking-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Martha Beck:
... as you talk.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, and I think it's the Buddhists that talked about, it's someone who's at the level of, their eyes are at the level of their skin.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Huh.

Andrew Huberman:
So, like right there, as opposed to sunken back into their eyes.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And then of course, some people are like really forward leaning.

Dr. Martha Beck:
That's so interesting.

Andrew Huberman:
But this whole, and- I also happen to work on the intersection between the visual system and the autonomic system.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
So, stress or-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... calm, and I think what that's referring to, and I'm speculating here, is where we are alert but calm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes. Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
So we're present, alert, but calm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And of course, that controls pupil size, and all of this stuff, I do believe has been understood in other traditions, in ancient traditions-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. It has

Andrew Huberman:
... through a kind of unconscious genius, where they're recognizing all the symbols integrated of clarity of the eyes-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and level of the skin, and of course, we can measure the stuff in the lab, but that's just isolating variables.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
So for me, it's looking in the mirror and being like, "Okay, my eyes are clear."

Dr. Martha Beck:
This is so interesting because my friend Liz Gilbert of "Eat Pray Love" fame, she wrote something before she was famous where she dressed as a man for a week and walked around, and she's tall and broad-shouldered and has a great chin, so she could look male. And she got herself all dressed up male, and they faked a beard and everything, and then she had her friends come, and a male friend said to her, "No, Liz, pull yourself back six inches away from your own eyes." And she did it, and then he said, "Now you're looking like a man."

Andrew Huberman:
Interesting.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And she walked around that way, and she said it was the loneliest, saddest week she's ever experienced. Like yeah, people gave her more respect in certain ways, but she said, "When they told me to back away from my own eyes, it was like my soul went dim."

Andrew Huberman:
Wow.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And that's really, really interesting that you would say that exact distance even.

Andrew Huberman:
It's like a retraction of our humanness.

Dr. Martha Beck:
That's fascinating.

Andrew Huberman:
I mean, I don't ever recall as a kid, my dad or my mom or anyone telling me where to place my vision.

Dr. Martha Beck:
No, no, no. It's not articulated.

Andrew Huberman:
And I'm probably guilty of being more expressive, emotional, effusive than-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman:
... certainly the traditional male stereotype.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? Like, if I love something, people are going to hear about it.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I'm not shy about the fact that thinking about Costello or my graduate advisor or-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... people I love, I'll well up, and I'm okay with that.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But I think, well, to flip that one around, do you think that that's a real thing, that-

Dr. Martha Beck:
I have no idea. You have a-

Andrew Huberman:
... through cultural conditioning, that men and women tend to be either more, I don't know, there's no language for this.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Well, I have an N of two, you and Liz Gilbert.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay. All right.

Dr. Martha Beck:
But I think it's very interesting that you said that, that you're forward in your eyes, and the idea that the eyes are the parts of our brains that are showing. It's fascinating that she had that experience, too. So I would love to, I'll be asking people from now on if you're designated male, identified male, do you feel you have to pull your sort of vitality back from the world? And I suspect it's true. I suspect it's true just from interacting with people. And ask women if they-- I think it's more vulnerable to be right on the surface of your life, and in the surface of your eyes, but it's also much more, there's a sensuousness to the world when you're fully present that I know I had to shut down, like when I was in the Ivy League, I had to pull myself back and sink down, and that's a typically male environment. I think it's about materialism and conquest and oppositional thinking as much as gender.

Andrew Huberman:
It's very tactical.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes. It's a tactical-

Andrew Huberman:
It's like taking what's out there and holding it in.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I actually can do it. I know how to do this.

Dr. Martha Beck:
You just did it.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I know how to do this.

Dr. Martha Beck:
It's like visible.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. And I probably just learned how to do it, right?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Wow.

Andrew Huberman:
Because I'm comfortable in a lot of different environments.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
I mean, there are certainly environments I don't want to find myself in again, or in the future for the first time, but, yeah, I'm very aware of that distinct change in internal state that accompanies that, but-

Dr. Martha Beck:
That was so interesting that you just did that. Wow. Okay. The problem I'm having now is that I have, and I quote, "An interest-based attention system."

Andrew Huberman:
I love that.

Dr. Martha Beck:
ADHD, which means I pay attention to things that interest me, which means that I literally follow squirrels away from business meetings.

Andrew Huberman:
But I have paper and pen here, and it's okay-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Okay. So we're back to your ideal day

Andrew Huberman:
... because the art of podcasting-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... in my opinion, is that we can spin a couple of different plates and return to them.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I love it.

Andrew Huberman:
Because it's like conversation, otherwise we might as well be on-

Dr. Martha Beck:
I love it

Andrew Huberman:
... a highly produced, traditional media show, and that's not what this is.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Pshaw, I say.

Andrew Huberman:
So, we're back. So I look in the mirror, and I see-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. You are present, man

Andrew Huberman:
... I'm clear. I'm clear and present.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Clear. Alert.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay. And of course, for those listening, you should all be doing this exercise for you, right?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yes. Okay.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And now you go to your closet, and you're going to get dressed. Open your closet, which is the closet of clothing you have in your ideal life, and just look at the different outfits you have, how many kinds of shoes are there?

Andrew Huberman:
This is pretty funny because I definitely have my ideal wardrobe, which is very sparse. I've always owned 20 or so of these button-down black shirts-

Dr. Martha Beck:
I love it

Andrew Huberman:
... for work purposes. I like T-shirts that are super soft.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And because I have a short torso and long arms, they have to fit right, and so I find the ones that fit right. It's a nightmare trying to get them, but once I get them, I adore them- ... because I always own two belts or so.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
One watch.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Black jeans. The shorts I like, I get teased for wearing mailman shorts, but they're actually- ... the Costco purchased mail, or Kmart purchased male person shorts. They fit best for me. And And I've always worn Adidas, so-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... I'm happy there.

Dr. Martha Beck:
No dress shoes?

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, yeah. I own a pair of proper leather shoes. I have a suit. I actually own a tuxedo.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, my.

Andrew Huberman:
I own those things, and I like my closet. I've always liked it.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
It feels very safe in there.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
I like it. And then, I've always kept a couple photographs of people that I love in my closet.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, sweet.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
So whose photographs are there? Do you see any photographs you don't recognize at this moment?

Andrew Huberman:
It's my sister.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
It's my grandfather, and then I think that's it.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah, don't think about just-

Andrew Huberman:
Apologies to my parents.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Apologies to my parents.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Everybody else. Losers.

Andrew Huberman:
Apologies to my parents and anyone else. Just forgive me. Okay. Yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Okay, so then you go through the whole day, and I can spend at least an hour going through this with someone. And the important thing is that you do something I call the three Ns. You notice what comes into the field of your imagination, but you don't try too hard to see it specifically, and then as you go through, you sort of narrow down what it might be.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And if the name of that thing comes up, you can then name it. But for example, in one of my ideal days, I was writing short pieces of writing, then I was interacting with people very regularly about it, and I couldn't even imagine what kind of job that was. And then, an editor in Manhattan knocked over a manuscript I'd written, and she was the editor of a women's magazine, and she called me and asked me to be a columnist. And I was like, "All right." I was a magazine columnist for 20 years, and it was exactly what was in the ideal day, but I had not named it. I didn't know that you could live in Phoenix and be a columnist for New York magazines. So notice what you're doing. You put on your very comfy T-shirt, very cool black jeans, your one watch, your belt, your Adidas, and you go do something really fun with people you really love in a place you really enjoy.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, the work part of my life, quote, unquote, work is reading and teaching and talking about stuff on the internet, which is podcasting.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But what I got a flash of is I'd want to work on my fish tanks with my kids.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah. See, now I skipped a thing.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
You're supposed to go down to breakfast and see if you've got a family.

Andrew Huberman:
I do. I've always wanted kids. Been trying to time that correctly-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Wonderful

Andrew Huberman:
... and with the right person. So yeah, I like tending to my fish tanks. I have kept fish tanks since I was a kid. I haven't had one for a few years now, but I'm always setting them up for other people.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Ah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's kind of interesting.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Ooh, interesting.

Andrew Huberman:
I always go play in real life. I go-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Ooh

Andrew Huberman:
... places I haven't seen before. I'm like-

Dr. Martha Beck:
I know

Andrew Huberman:
... "I'm going to put a fish tank there." I don't know, it's a weird-

Dr. Martha Beck:
My interest-based decision system just went, "Oh, really? You do it for other people but not yourself?"

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, yeah. I'll show up and I'll be like, "I got it. Will you let me?" And then I'll set it up, and I love setting up fish tanks.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
It's like the, who knows? Yeah, working-

Dr. Martha Beck:
So your kids are helping you.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, cleaning the fish tanks.

Dr. Martha Beck:
How many kids are there?

Andrew Huberman:
Realistically?

Dr. Martha Beck:
No. In your imagination.

Andrew Huberman:
Two.

Dr. Martha Beck:
You can have 20 if you want.

Andrew Huberman:
Two. Two. For some reason, I got obsessed with numbers for a while, but I was thinking like five or something. No, two.

Dr. Martha Beck:
You never know. It could happen.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
The important thing about this exercise is you don't get logical about it. You don't think what's manageable and what's probable, and you just see who's there.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, two feels good.

Dr. Martha Beck:
All right. Fair enough.

Andrew Huberman:
Two feels good. And, yeah, there's so much life in a fish tank.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
There's the plants, there's the food, there's how the fish are interacting with one another, who's chasing who, who's nibbling- ... who's hiding, who's dominant, who's being kind of unruly and like- ... I must have seen the "Finding Nemo" movie, especially the second one-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Huh

Andrew Huberman:
... like 12 times.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Fabulous.

Andrew Huberman:
Like 12 times. It's crazy. As an adult.

Dr. Martha Beck:
It's not crazy. This is wonderful.

Andrew Huberman:
So good. I just loved the personalities. Any movie where Willem Dafoe is the voice of a fish- ... you're like, "Okay."

Dr. Martha Beck:
I am in.

Andrew Huberman:
All right, so we tend to the fish tanks, which is-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... great pleasure. And then for me, it's we come here and sit down with you and-

Dr. Martha Beck:
I'll be back

Andrew Huberman:
... hang out with these guys and my team and share what I know to be really cool, useful, like truly useful-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... practices.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Fabulous.

Andrew Huberman:
Like that.

Dr. Martha Beck:
So you're very close to your ideal day right now.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
But, and as you said, I don't know the mechanisms that get put in play. Certainly directed attention. You're now like a guided missile that knows where its target is-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Martha Beck:
... or at least what the target looks like.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And we all make countless decisions every day, and you can think of it as a lot of little whys branching out, and if you've got this in your mind really clearly, you're going to take the option that leads to it. That's what I tell people. It's logical, directed attention. Except that in many cases, I have to say, a miracle occurs.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
You know? My favorite cartoon is this physics equation with these two physicists, and there are all these symbols on both sides of the board. In the middle, in brackets, it says, "A miracle occurs."

Andrew Huberman:
I love it. My dad's a theoretical physicist, so he-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, really?

Andrew Huberman:
But he will delight in that. As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for more than 10 years now, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast. To be clear, I don't take AG1 because they're a sponsor. Rather, they are a sponsor because I take AG1. In fact, I take AG1 once and often twice every single day, and I've done that since starting way back in 2012 There is so much conflicting information out there nowadays about what proper nutrition is. But here's what there seems to be a general consensus on. Whether you're an omnivore, a carnivore, a vegetarian, or a vegan, I think it's generally agreed that you should get most of your food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources, which allows you to eat enough but not overeat, get plenty of vitamins and minerals, probiotics, and micronutrients that we all need for physical and mental health. Now, I personally am an omnivore, and I strive to get most of my food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources. But the reason I still take AG1 once and often twice every day is that it ensures I get all of those vitamins, minerals, probiotics, et cetera, but it also has adaptogens to help me cope with stress. It's basically a nutritional insurance policy meant to augment, not replace, quality food. So by drinking a serving of AG1 in the morning and again in the afternoon or evening, I cover all of my foundational nutritional needs. And I, like so many other people that take AG1, report feeling much better in a number of important ways, such as energy levels, digestion, sleep, and more. So while many supplements out there are really directed towards obtaining one specific outcome, AG1 is foundational nutrition designed to support all aspects of wellbeing related to mental health and physical health. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs with your order, plus a year's supply of vitamin D3 K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com/huberman. There was something that popped to mind. There are all these little things that also go into my perfect day that we don't have to go into every detail about-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah, you go through your whole evening

Andrew Huberman:
... like working out and the whole thing.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But I just want to maybe mention a point of contrast that served as one of the reasons why I did this practice in the first place-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... was that in real life, I was waking up, and sometimes still do wake up with this underlying tension, like something's not right.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I don't feel good.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I wasn't anxious. But something's not right.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I went through years of kind of gnawing and scratching at different things that-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... I quickly discovered, like going out for a couple drinks with people made me feel worse.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I don't judge people who drink whatsoever. I'm like, "I don't like this."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But this unease-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh. Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... it's like a restlessness-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... that lived inside of me for so long and still can surface-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... as a signal that this is not the right life. And at that point-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... at a laboratory-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Wow

Andrew Huberman:
... writing grants, we're publishing papers, all these things that I loved doing and that I loved the trajectory that I took to arrive there and the people that were in my life, but I just knew. I could just say, like-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... "Something's not right." And I felt terribly guilty. The reason I'm telling you this is I felt terribly guilty. I owned a home, right? I was in my mid-30s, and it wasn't an expensive home-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman:
... certainly not by today's standards, but I was able to buy a home-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Wow

Andrew Huberman:
... on my own. I had my dog. I had people in my life. But it was almost like a gear that was grinding.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And that was the stimulus for exploring this perfect day. My life looks completely different now.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Really?

Andrew Huberman:
And it's far from, quote-unquote, "perfect," meaning there's still work to do in a lot of domains. A lot. But I feel like the trajectory is right.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. And I really believe the source of all my work-- I was getting my doctorate at Harvard. I'd gotten my bachelor's there. I'd been there since I was 17. And halfway through my doctorate, during that time, I'd gotten married, had a child. My second child was prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome, and I was six months into the pregnancy almost, and I had like two weeks to make a decision. And I'm politically very pro-choice, and I would, again, never judge anyone who made the other decision, but I couldn't do it. I was already sort of bonded to him. And I kept asking the question of myself, "What makes a human life worth living?" Because the doctors at the Harvard Medical Clinic and all my advisors told me, "You have got to, at the very least, institutionalize this child the second he's born."

Andrew Huberman:
Institutionalize?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah, for sure. They said, "You're throwing your career away." The head of the obstetrics committee, there were five obstetricians, and the chief dude came in, and there I was sitting on a bed in my little hospital napkin, and he said, "This is like a cancerous tumor. You've got to let us take it out. It will ruin your life." And I just looked at him, and I had the weirdest experience, Andrew. I looked at this very intimidating guy, and I'm there sort of young and naked and pregnant. And suddenly it was like I could see two faces on him, and one was this very stern, knowledgeable doctor, and the other one was a terrified child.

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Terrified. And it was so striking that I started looking at him strangely. I'm sure he thought I was completely nuts. But I looked at him and I thought, "You're afraid. You're afraid of this baby." And that's when I realized that a lot of people don't go to Harvard because they know they're smart. They go there because they're afraid they're stupid. And he was-

Andrew Huberman:
Probably true for a lot of higher education institutions.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And I thought, he's afraid of the, in quotes, "stupid little boy inside me" because he's afraid of the stupid little boy inside him. He's terrified of being the person he's worked so hard not to be. He's afraid of being like my son, and he thinks that should be thrown away. And that was the point at which I said, "I will not make my decisions based on social pressure." I have to do something from a very, very deep place within. And so I kept that... I mean, he's home right now. We're having a great time.

Andrew Huberman:
Adam, right?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Adam. My son, Adam.

Andrew Huberman:
I only know his name through your books, of course.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But I feel like I know him a little bit, because I love the story about him peeing on the doctor.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes. The very first thing he ever did in this life was the doctor pulled him out of my body, and I saw this arc of urine go straight into the doctor's face and I was like-

Andrew Huberman:
Beautiful

Dr. Martha Beck:
... so proud of my child at that moment. I thought, if only I'd thought to do that.

Andrew Huberman:
I want to just, for lack of a better way to put it, double-click on two things. First of all-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... I wonder, if we're going to speculate, no need to, but if the perfect day exercise is really about accessing the subconscious.

Dr. Martha Beck:
That's why I told that long story. That when I had to make that decision, it was the first time I had dropped everything conscious and logical from my mind and come from a place that was, I believe it's part of our neurological apparatus, but the cognitive structures are so-- Cognitive function is just a tiny fraction of what our whole nervous systems are able to detect and tell us. And for the first time, I was making a decision from every cell in my body instead of just my neocortex. And I realized my life is not meant to go like his life. And the person in the next bed, their life isn't meant to be like mine. But we all have this programmed into us somehow. And when we start to leave it, in my last book, I called it "Leaving our integrity," because to be in integrity just means to be one thing. It doesn't have any moral implications in the original Latin. It just means integer, one thing. So, we're born knowing who we are. But at some point, usually not long after birth, we get socialized away from expressing exactly what our own truth is telling us. We get socialized to behave in ways that please other people. Very simple. And as you're describing it, I had a great life. I had a lab, I had a dog, I had a house. Those are all socially recognized items that say your life is working. But they have nothing to do with your personal destiny.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. In my case, again, I loved, and I still love doing science. My lab has certainly shrunk.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I made sure people got placed in jobs and faculty positions, et cetera.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm still involved in some clinical trials, but one thing that pained me about the work, I'll just come clean about this. This makes my throat lock up a bit is, I've been an animal lover since I was a kid.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I do eat meat. I eat it from sustainable sources. But not all, but a lot of the work that I did in my laboratory was on animals.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And at some point, it was approximately halfway through my first position, I realized, I was like, "I don't like this."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And we could talk all day about animal research, non-animal research.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I decided to work on humans instead- ... because they can consent, and they house themselves.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
So there were some pain points, but-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... I think my unconscious was pulling at me.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Like, "This isn't good. This isn't good for me."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I do think that the conscious mind, and the logical mind, as you're referring to it, it's very tactical.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And part of the problem is it works so well-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... works in quotes-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... to move us forward on metrics related to that.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Exactly.

Andrew Huberman:
But there are very few people that I know who are truly aligned with their, I guess what you've called essential self.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
One who I'm fortunate to be good friends with, he just so happens to be famous, for lack of a better word, who resonates with a lot of what we're discussing is the great Rick Rubin, the music producer-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... who's produced all these different types of-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... music. And one thing that's really interesting about Rick, I've spent a lot of time with Rick, and we communicate all the time, and one thing that is very interesting about him is he has incredible powers of observation.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
He can really feel the energy-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... of a musical artist or-- And he's produced other things, too. He does a great documentary. He's got his own great podcast. But he doesn't get absorbed by it.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And I wanted to talk to you about this because I think for people that are very feeling-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... very sentient, or really in touch with that, the ability to feel music, to feel-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... other people's emotions-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... to really-- That's a beautiful life. To taste food. But there's a threshold beyond which we kind of lose ourselves in the experience of others and what's going on.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Rick can go right up to that line-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Wow

Andrew Huberman:
... and really see it and enjoy it, but it doesn't absorb him.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
In a way that he has a place that he returns to that's in him. And the reason I discovered this is I said, "Wait, you don't drink alcohol?" He said, "No." I said, "No drugs?" He said, "No." Doesn't judge it, but he doesn't do it. I said, "Did you ever?" He said, "No." And I said, "Who comes up through music-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and never takes a sip of alcohol?"

Dr. Martha Beck:
Wow. Wow.

Andrew Huberman:
Goes to college and never took a sip of alcohol or tried any drug. And again, I don't judge. I've talked about psychedelics on this podcast. I've talked about my own relationship to those, what I think are very interesting clinical trials and things of that sort.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I think there's tremendous potential there.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I agree.

Andrew Huberman:
But what is it to be able to experience life in the richest way, but make sure that we don't get- Lost in feeling or in thought.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's like this ability to move back and forth seems to be the best definition of a great life-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... in my opinion, because we need to do things each day.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I would say you don't even have to go back and forth. You can do it all at once. You can feel, you can think, and you can stay in the driver's seat and not be overwhelmed, either intellectually or emotionally. But I think it has a lot to do with, you were talking about Asian, Eastern meditation practices.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
There's a little exercise I like to do with people where if they're struggling with a bad habit, I say, "Imagine the part of you that is always doing the bad thing," like smoking 20 packs a day or whatever. Imagine them as a wild thing in your left hand, and then imagine the part of you that hates him and says, "Stop smoking," in your right hand, and look at them, and begin to see that they're both well-meaning, they're both exhausted, and you can wish them both well. So the wild child part is not thinking, it's just feeling. The controlling part is not feeling, it's just thinking. And if I can get people, and I have them put their hands out because I know it's going to activate both sides of their brains, and then I have them wish these people well, "May you be well, may you be happy." When they can feel compassion for both sides of themselves, then I ask them, "So who are you?" And who they've become is a compassionate witness-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm

Dr. Martha Beck:
... which is not thinking, and it's not feeling in the way we think. It's not emotional. The word emotion means movement disturbance. This part of one's being is not ever disturbed or moved. It's totally still and totally peaceful and completely compassionate.

Andrew Huberman:
It's like the ultimate parent.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes. It is.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And Dick Schwartz, who came up with the model of internal family systems theory, I don't know if you've had him on the show.

Andrew Huberman:
Have not, but I'm learning more about internal family systems models.

Dr. Martha Beck:
It's powerful.

Andrew Huberman:
I learned about this first in the context of visiting a trauma healing center.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. That's great for trauma.

Andrew Huberman:
And then people are now applying this to addiction as well.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'll get his name from you later.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. Richard Schwartz. Anyway, I was talking to him and he said, we all have different parts. There's a part of you that feels like a little kid and wants to curl up in bed. There's a part of you that wants to go rule the world, whatever your parts are. So he talks to people about these different parts, and then sometimes they say, "Oh, I've just come up against-- There's someone here who's very still, who's very huge, who's very kind." And he calls it Self with a capital S. And he says after thousands of patients, he'll say, "What part of you is that?" And they say, "Oh, this isn't a part like the others. This is who I am." And he believes that it's just one unified self. And for me, if I don't find and lock into that self, I am immediately swept away by my emotions and my brain-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm

Dr. Martha Beck:
... just like in the gale force winds. So I have to be very, not grounded, but centered and identified with this self before I can even leave the house.

Andrew Huberman:
How do you go about doing that? And one of the reasons I'm asking this is because I think everyone, including myself, would do well to be able to access this-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... compassionate witness self.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But also because so many people are on social media nowadays-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... where you can almost feel yourself getting pulled down these trajectories, like the gravitational pull-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... of a battle or a video or even something that's delightful, but then you find, like, two hours went by and-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... you over-consumed and-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and under-created in some sense.

Dr. Martha Beck:
It's like junk food. It tastes delicious, but then you feel like, "Blah."

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, it goes nowhere.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
This sort of goes nowhere. So do you have a practice that you use to make sure that you're in that place?

Dr. Martha Beck:
I do, and it's called suffering. It's very reliable.

Andrew Huberman:
I don't know why that made me laugh. Forgive me.

Dr. Martha Beck:
My best friend, suffering. I have a deeply love-hate relationship with suffering. If I'm, for example, I can barely look at Instagram because I will watch a monkey nursing a kitten-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Martha Beck:
... and then I will be down that rabbit hole so far.

Andrew Huberman:
You and me both.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And eight hours later, I'm meh. But I will start to suffer. I will start to physically feel cramped. My eyes will start to hurt and water, and I will start to feel what you were saying, the grinding of the gear that is wrong. The machine, it's not in structural integrity. It's like when your car starts making a funny sound, and you're like, "I should not ignore that." And it always feels like discomfort, tension, anxiety, anger, any of those things. And then the practice of my life is to notice those sensations at a finer and more granular level, so that the moment I'm off true, I can stop and say, "Okay. Whew. Out of integrity. Okay." Now I'm into anxiety because a divided person is always anxious, so to get away from that, from anxiety, and back to true, I use the body, sit back, straighten my spine, take a deep breath, do all the things that I'm sure you do when you meditate, and then I sink into that part of myself that I was just trying to pull up for people with the two hands exercise. And I believe, you could probably tell me the truth of this, I believe that I've wired a pretty strong super highway in my brain that goes, "Oops, suffering. Find Self with a capital S." And I've done it so many thousands of times that I think I have, like, a highly myelinated circuit that just goes there. Shoop. And then no matter what's happening, I can usually just find it, feel it, and it's an exquisite sensation. It's like coming home completely over and over again. It's... Oh. And now when I do an ideal day, everything else is incidental.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
The key is I'm in that self.

Andrew Huberman:
So the state is what's key.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes. And it has so much fun in this world.

Andrew Huberman:
And so you can walk around in that state.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah. For sure.

Andrew Huberman:
So to be sure I understand, so say I wake up in the morning and I'm just not feeling right or something triggers me-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... or, I don't know, just like I'm off center.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
You take that sensation of suffering-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and you don't fear it, you don't amplify it, you just pay attention to it.

Dr. Martha Beck:
You pay attention to it. And here is the key thing. This is in my new book. I kept this a secret because it sounded so silly, and I thought this would never go in the Ivy League. But there's something I call KIST, K-I-S-T, and it stands for kind internal self-talk.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
So what do you call yourself when you think to yourself, Andrew, Andy? What do you call yourself?

Andrew Huberman:
You.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, just, yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
So you'd be sitting there and you don't feel good, you don't feel right. The first thing you do is allow yourself to register every sensation without pushing back, without restricting it. People talk to me about bringing down their anxiety. And I say, "How'd you feel if I told you I was going to bring you down?" That's not a nice thing to say. If I told you I'm here to understand you and care about you, better. So just allow yourself to feel all the suffering, and then start saying kind things to the one who is suffering, even if it's just tiny suffering. Just go, "How are you? How you doing? Not great? Ah, okay, so there's some anxiety. Oh, your sinuses are blocked, too. Oh, let's see. What could we do for you? Let's get you a hot drink and a call with a good friend or a book or something." And you just actively work as your own caregiver from the moment you are conscious in the morning. And what that does is it makes you so compassionate to other people because you're not fighting the suffering in yourself.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, people in pain are usually agitated and grumpy and-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... so it's the inverse of that.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. I love this. In some sense, the words self-parenting keep coming up in my mind.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah. Sure.

Andrew Huberman:
Because a lot of this is about learning to parent ourselves from the inside.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I do think that most-- We hear about inner child stuff, and I think inner child work is very interesting. I also think that as a biologist who spent the early part of my career on developmental neurobiology, the same neural stuff is repurposed-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... in adulthood. That's something that it's kind of obvious, but we overlook.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right. I'm like, "I've got some inner adults here who aren't very happy, too."

Andrew Huberman:
Right. But the notion that our attachments when we're young, somehow those neural circuits are set aside, so then we can form more mature adult attachments. It's like, no, that's crazy. We repurpose them.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
So we're working in an adult landscape with child-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... based algorithms.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And depending on how childhood went, that either can be spectacular or so-so or a complete disaster.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But usually, it's a combination.

Dr. Martha Beck:
That obstetrician at Harvard, I would bet my last dime that he was still working on the same circuits he used when he was five, and they were pretty scary. So yeah, we all have multiple causes of suffering, but we also have, I wouldn't actually call it inner parenting, because that basically implies that only parents give that to children, and I think it's just humaning.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
If you are truly humane, if you are truly in a state of Self with a capital S, there is nothing in you that wants to cause suffering for any other being.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And there's nothing in you that doesn't want to help ease the suffering of the entire world. So again, now I'm into a kind of Asian modality of, there's this Bodhisattva prayer that goes, "For as long as space endures and as long as sentient beings exist, may I also abide that I might heal with my heart the miseries of the world." And that part of us is in everyone. And if we become those people, it won't just be parents being kind to children. It will be humans being kind to each other, the Earth, and all other beings. And we may actually make it into another century.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. No, it's looking a little sketchy right now.

Dr. Martha Beck:
It's looking sketchy.

Andrew Huberman:
Things are tense. It sounds like it starts with self-love, compassion.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Always.

Andrew Huberman:
Only from that place of compassionate witness, Self with a capital S, excuse me, can we be at our best for-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... others.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I believe it's actually the only part of us that's real. I talked a minute ago about people who are dying. They drop the pretense. They don't need the pretense of belonging to the material world or the material body anymore, and that radiance begins to gather in their eyes. And it's not new. It's what they came in with. If you've looked into the eyes of a young child, a little baby, you see the same thing, and it's only when people die that they put down everything else. Unless, as Eckhart Tolle says, "You die before you die and learn that there is no death," because that self does not feel physical. It feels metaphysical.

Andrew Huberman:
If you would, let's drill into this a little bit more, because this is a high level, but at the same time, basic and yet abstract-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... concept. And it's not often on this podcast that we talk about abstract concepts.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
We probably don't do it enough. I talk about protocols, you get your sunlight-

Dr. Martha Beck:
I love that stuff

Andrew Huberman:
... on clear days. And I love that stuff, too, but as probably people realize by now, I think a great life is bridging as many things, at least for me, as possible-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and seeing the overlap in the Venn diagrams.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So it's the only part of us that's real, meaning the other parts are just conditioned? I think you've said-

Dr. Martha Beck:
The other parts are impermanent.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
They will vanish. As Shakespeare says, "Everything will just disappear and leave not a wreck behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on." There is an experience that is common to individuals all over the world in different cultures at different times, where they start to say they feel as if they've awakened from a dream. Plato did it with his cave analogy. He said, "Imagine that we all live chained in a cave, and there's a fire behind us, and we see shadows on the wall, and that's what we call reality." And then someone gets out of the cave and goes outside and sees this three-dimensional world where everything's bright and mobile, and goes back and says, "People, the shadows on the wall are real, they're real shadows, but they're not the ultimate reality. You should come outside and see it." And Plato said everybody would say he was crazy. And that's what academia says now. You're crazy. If you've ever had an experience where you felt like there was something realer than your physical self, you're crazy. Read Plato.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm. Well, it's interesting because a few years ago, so many concepts that I was intrigued by, breathwork-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... for instance, psychedelics-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... meditation. Now people get federal grants to study this stuff.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And we do reductionist work to try and understand it. In fact, I had to disguise breathwork as respiration physiology.

Dr. Martha Beck:
There you go.

Andrew Huberman:
Which we did, and we did a clinical trial, and lo and behold, certain patterns of breathing shift your internal state, and your sleep, and your anxiety. It's like a duh.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Who would have thought of that?

Andrew Huberman:
It's like a giant duh, but it was scary territory for a while.

Dr. Martha Beck:
It is, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And now, psychedelics have broken through as-- I just have to say this while touching my forehead and like- ... they adjust neuromodulators just like, but differently than-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... certain drugs that adjust neuromodulators, and everyone accepted. So the idea of-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... changing neuromodulators to change conscious experience-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... and in that altered experience, to be able to achieve neuroplasticity is like a, it's also a big duh.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Of course it works that way. But six years ago, you'd get fired-

Dr. Martha Beck:
I know

Andrew Huberman:
... from a university if you said, "Well, maybe psilocybin could be an interesting compound for depressed people." And by the way, I'm not suggesting everyone run out and take a bunch of psilocybin, especially if you're depressed. But there-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah, and not without supervision. But if you can get somebody really good at it.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I'm not saying do it, either, but I'm not saying don't do it.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. And if you're more gun-shy on these things, contact a local university. They're likely doing a clinical trial on this. We can provide some links to clinical trials. I think the data are incredibly interesting. In any case, I guess the point is that I feel like academia is kind of coming around-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... probably due to the suffering of people in it-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... where then they know somebody who achieved some relief through meditation or some benefits of meditation. So now, everyone, I think, accepts that meditation can be very useful-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... for lowering stress and altering conscious experience. This is not new stuff, as everyone knows. It's gone back thousands of years. So it sounds like getting into the capital S self, the compassionate witness, is step number one. And so I just want to make sure that we make clear how one does that.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. Step number one is suffering.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Martha Beck:
We all have that. You may have never felt good in your life, listener, but you have suffered, that's for sure. That's the first noble truth of Buddhism. There is suffering in this life. Pay attention to your suffering without fighting it. Allow it to be there. I did this meditation, if something's physically painful or emotionally painful, I used to say, "Let go, let go" to myself. Didn't work. So one day I said, "All right, you can stay." Let it stay. And so I do a let stay meditation. If there's pain, let it stay. If there's sorrow, let it stay. And as soon as I let it stay, it begins to change. So the first step is suffering, second step is compassionate attention to one's suffering with no resistance. And the third step is to follow the compassion that is naturally being directed toward that suffering until you find yourself centered in it. And that is a huge relief. And I've done this in massive physical pain. I've done it when I just lost people I love. It's a very powerful, maybe not a panacea, but not that far from it if you can get there. You're still suffering, but there's a peace that holds the suffering so lovingly that it no longer concerns you. So on one level, you're suffering, and on a different level, which feels more real to me, there's only peace and compassion and wonder and joy and Somebody asked me once if there's a metaphysical reality, why is there suffering? And I just heard coming out of my mouth, "Because the self loves experience and is not afraid to suffer." So it's not afraid. So then staying in that is highly motivated by the suffering you feel when you leave. So to me, that's first step, suffer. Second step, pay attention to suffering. Third step, follow compassion to its origin. Fourth step, never stop doing that.

Andrew Huberman:
And every day.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Every minute.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, this is very relevant to me. I have always wondered about, do you push back against the feeling? Do you live with the feeling? Do you let it amplify? There's so much contradiction-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... inside of the typical discussion of these kinds of things.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
That's one of the reasons I love your work so much, is that you don't tell people what to do, but you provide paths.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Hope so.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, absolutely you do. Absolutely. I'd like to talk about two things. Before I came in here, I did a little meditation.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, good.

Andrew Huberman:
I do this before every episode, but today it took only a minute because it came to me so fast, which is the two words that popped to mind were, what's real, what is true?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
I think so much of what we're talking about and so much of life is like, what's real, what's true?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Certainly out in the world, but like in us.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
What I'm hearing is that at some level, we need to not trust our thinking.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But of course, there are times when we need to trust our thinking.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And then, of course, we're receiving messages about what's real, what's not real, what's true, what's not true, sometimes about us. There's all this childhood programming.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
How do we start to sort through this? I'm guessing that it has something to do with being in that compassionate witness place.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But let's say what you've experienced in your life, I know because you've written and talked about this, and I certainly have now that by some interesting twist of fate, I'm a public-facing person, people saying things about you or about me that are not true.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Or that are judgments that don't feel good.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And we are not alone in this. You don't have to be public-facing in order to experience this. People all the time are being told they are stupid. Sometimes they're being told they are brilliant, and they know they're not brilliant.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
This can go in every direction.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
How are we supposed to hold the narratives, the voices that we hear in our head and outside us in a way that really allows us to be our best essential selves?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Well, can I reverse it and talk about what's true first?

Andrew Huberman:
Please.

Dr. Martha Beck:
So I remember sitting when I was 17 in the Lamont Library at Harvard, contemplating ending my life and like-

Andrew Huberman:
Actually ending your life?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, yes. And looking at the equally miserable scratchings that other teenagers had put in the wood there, and I thought, "Okay, they say the truth will set you free. All right. I'll give it a try." And I just started trying to find out what was true, and I read through all the works of the greatest philosophers until I got to Immanuel Kant, who says, "Everything is screened through our perceptions, so we can't know that anything is true for certain." And I felt such relief. Okay, I can't intellectually know what's true. Then if it's not true, if I can't intellectually know something's true because everything's subjective, what's useful? What feels like truth to the body? And I was interested that, for example, polygraph machines work because the body hates to lie.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
It starts to send up a whole bunch of activation of stress systems and puts you in fight or flight and everything when you tell a lie or when you keep a secret. So I just started thinking, all right, what makes my body contract and weaken, and what makes my body feel peaceful, centered, and grounded? And you do so much work with the body. I love that you're a brain-body scientist because the body is incredibly wise. So I just started letting myself test things. Like I was raised Mormon, and very Mormon. So, okay, Mormonism. Oh, boy, that doesn't make me feel good at all.

Andrew Huberman:
It wasn't for you.

Dr. Martha Beck:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
No.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And okay, so God is not a white man who lives near the planet Kolob. Okay, that is not true. Okay, that feels better. Okay. So I started following what made my body relax because my whole body, as I said a few minutes ago, is far more sophisticated, has spent far more time being tinkered with by evolution than my human ability to think in language. So it has a response to truth or falsehood that's more subtle and sophisticated than my intellectual knowledge. That's how I made the decision to keep my son. That's how I've made almost all my decisions. Does it make my body relax? And then does the mind come to the party and make the math work? Okay. Mormonism says that all the American Indians were descended from a group of Israelites who came across in 600 BC in a boat to the Americas. Okay. Does the math work? What does the genetic evidence say? No, they came over the Aleutian Straits and down into the Americas. When I was living in Utah, they excommunicated a DNA expert from the Mormon Church for finding the data that said That Mormonism's claims were wrong. So something that makes my body relax, where it's also logically coherent. That's the first thing. And then what you find is if you really pursue that, what is true? What is true? What is true? Everything that makes you suffer turns out to have flaws in the logic.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Including I will die. Because I can't know. I have no idea. So to say that I will go out like a candle when my body dies is just as fundamentalist as saying I'm going to go sit on a cloud and play a harp. I don't know.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Nisargadatta Maharaj, one of my favorite yogis, says, "The only true assertion that the mind can make is I do not know."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
But you can feel what feels right to you, so that's what ends up being real. What's left over when you eliminate all the things that feel deeply untrue to your body and don't make logical sense. And some of those are things that our culture's very fond of, like everything has to be measured or it's not real. Is that true?

Andrew Huberman:
Right. So it sounds like challenging or sitting with doctrine-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... and labels-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... and stories that we've heard and that maybe we've internalized, and just-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, we've internalized them, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, and systematically exploring how those make us feel in our body.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Waking Up. Waking Up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and more. I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old, and it made a profound impact on my life. And by now, there are thousands of quality peer-reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our focus, managing stress and anxiety, improving our mood, and much more. In recent years, I started using the Waking Up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice. Many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits, but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice. What I and so many other people love about the Waking Up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from, and those meditations are of different durations. So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice, both from the perspective of novelty, you never get tired of those meditations. There's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation. And you can always fit meditation into your schedule, even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate. I also really like doing yoga nidra, or what is sometimes called non-sleep deep rest, for about 10 or 20 minutes because it is a great way to restore mental and physical vigor without the tiredness that some people experience when they wake up from a conventional nap. If you'd like to try the Waking Up app, please go to wakingup.com/huberman, where you can access a free 30-day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com/huberman to access a free 30-day trial. I recall the inverse of the perfect day exercise-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Ooh

Andrew Huberman:
... was another one that I did, which was like, just call it what it was, it was like the sucky day, like the shitty day, right? Or just where you'd imagine something really terrible, and then how it would cause the body to contract.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And to recognize the other side of the coin.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? And just learning that relationship between the body and thought.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I can say from my own experience that one of the biggest mistakes I ever made was teaching myself to be more resilient to certain forms of stress.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Really?

Andrew Huberman:
One of the worst mistakes I ever made.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Say more.

Andrew Huberman:
And my lab studies stress, and I talk about stress relief and physiological size are a great way to reduce real-time stress, and I stand by that, so I'm not talking about that. I stand by meditation and saunas and all the things that make us feel-- Vacation-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... the things that relax us. So I'm not saying the ability to modulate stress is incredibly powerful and useful. I believe that.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
For sure. But, when I was a kid, I wasn't the kid that was going to hold the firecracker till the last second.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
I wasn't the kid that would do the really daring thing.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
I had friends like that, and I felt kind of sheepish about that.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Those friends are probably dead by now.

Andrew Huberman:
They're not doing well. That's true. And I grew up in the then very parent-less community of skateboarders. A lot of us were really wild. We were very free, which I loved-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... the freedom part. But there was a lot of mayhem and craziness, especially back then.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And it's a beautiful culture. I'm still friends with a lot of-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman:
... those folks. But those cultures, yeah, split off basically into thirds over time. About a third-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... dead or in jail, about a third-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Wow

Andrew Huberman:
... doing incredibly well personally and professionally-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman:
... incredibly well.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
And then a third doing well, but they're not still as ambitious about that. They're more focused on their personal lives-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... and I hope that's what they want to be doing.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Sure.

Andrew Huberman:
So that's kind of how it broke down. But I remember as a young kid, and then in that culture, learning to push myself-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... past the feeling of like, this is dangerous.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
To the point where as I got older and my body eventually got stronger, because back then I was always getting hurt, which is why I left that sport. Wasn't very good. For the record, wasn't very good. Good enough, but not where I wanted to be. That over time, I remember when I started doing science, I realized, this is crazy. Skateboarding, you fall, you hurt yourself so badly you can't do it anymore.

Dr. Martha Beck:
So badly, yeah

Andrew Huberman:
That doesn't happen with studying, so I'll just study until I collapse.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'll just work until I'm sick.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Been there, done that.

Andrew Huberman:
Like that person down the hall puts in 80 hours, well then, I'll do 100.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I'm not a competitive person by nature.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh.

Andrew Huberman:
Or even worse, in my- ... mid-40s, getting into stupid stuff, like cage exit great white shark diving to the point where I had an air failure.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh my God.

Andrew Huberman:
And this whole thing, and then coming back from that-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh my God

Andrew Huberman:
... and realized, what am I doing? And what had happened is I learned to override the signals of the body.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And it was like, when is enough, enough?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's like when the reaper comes.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And so I think that if we don't listen to the signals that our body sends-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and we learn to override them repeatedly and systematically, we can place ourselves into real psychological-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... emotional, and physical danger.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I don't know why, I just felt like this was a need-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... to do this in order to grow up. And now I try and do the exact opposite.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And then I feel bad. I feel kind of lazy. I'm like, "Oh, I'm not running at 5:00 a.m." I'm sleeping at 5:00 a.m.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Ah, that's so much cultural flak, bro.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm doing Yoga Nidra at 7:00 a.m. because I didn't feel I slept enough, and then I have friends in the public-facing health space that are like, they push so hard.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I know.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm lazy. And so it can go too far.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Well, we have this culture of push, push, push, produce, produce, produce. One of my favorite heroes, along with Oliver Sacks, is Iain McGilchrist at Oxford.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I love that man. He may wake up someday just to find me crouched on his bed, watching him sleep. He's not just a neurologist.

Andrew Huberman:
Iain, don't be scared.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Not in a creepy way.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. Not in a creepy way.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Not in a creepy way, sir. But he talks about how our particular culture, for the last few hundred years, has veered towards stuff that is preferentially favored by the left hemisphere of the brain, and it has to do with grasping things, and producing physical things, and getting things to happen, controlling them. Where the right side of the brain, and of course, I'm oversimplifying massively, but functions like meaning, synthesis, combinations of different bits of knowledge, we're moving away from those. And one of my good friends is Jill Bolte Taylor. She was a Harvard neuroanatomist, and she had a massive left hemisphere stroke.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, right.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And so she suddenly watched her left hemisphere go off. She had a brain bleed, and it would pulse. So her left hemisphere would be there, and she'd see everything as solid, and measurable, and verbal, and then it would go off, and she was in a world where she was like a fluid the size of the universe. She was in the shower, and she watched her hand on the tiles dissolve into fields of energy. And you were talking about energy earlier. She said, by the time her left hemisphere had shut down completely, she managed to get a phone call made. She couldn't talk by the time the phone call went through. She got to a hospital. Took her eight years to come back to full functioning. But she said, "During that time, I did not know people's names, I didn't know the word person, but boy, could I feel people's energy." And as she healed, she didn't bother to get rid of her ability to feel people's energy. So she's a great fan of using the whole brain. "Whole Brain Living" is her latest book, and it's great. But Iain McGilchrist talks about how when we don't use the whole brain, his book, "The Master and His Emissary," says the part of the brain that knows meaning should be the master, and the data collector is just the emissary. But the data collector has taken over in Western society, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, if you want to get technical. And so what you were doing to yourself was completely irrational. You should get the Darwin Award for taking yourself out of the gene pool.

Andrew Huberman:
It was the stupidest thing. I remember thinking, "What am I doing?" And of course, we used it to get virtual reality for our lab.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Sure, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
We did a bunch of things that I thought were useful, that we transmuted into studies on stress, and so there was always a purpose and a story that could justify being there.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, there is. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And one that was really rooted in goodness and adventure. I love adventure, and I'm super curious.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Well, I think it's cool that you did that. I think it's really useful. There are many situations where your ability to do that could be really useful, like a pair of scissors could be really useful, but when you're trying to rediaper the baby, you put the scissors down. It's a tool that you can use, and it's fascinating. I did martial arts for eight years, and I loved pushing myself to the point where I was bruised and bleeding, and my doctor thought I was a victim of domestic abuse. I think it's useful and even fun, but you have to know when your heart's in it and when your heart is not in it, when your self is delighting in the adventure, and when self says, "No, Andrew, peace. Be still."

Andrew Huberman:
Enough.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. That's a perfect segue, but before I move on, I want to make sure that I link back what you said because I think it's exceptionally valuable about what's real, what's true.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So to really evaluate what's true, you need to sit, or maybe one can learn to do this while in motion, and sense within one's body what feels liberating-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and opening, versus what feels contracting. Is that right?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. The Buddha used to say, he said this often, that wherever you find the ocean, whatever it looks like, you can know it because the ocean always tastes of salt. And wherever you find awakening or enlightenment, no matter what it looks like, you will know it because it always tastes of freedom. So it's not that you stop suffering, it's that you are free. You are free to interact with your own suffering in a new way, and that is peace. So you look for-- And it literally physically affects the body as not free, free. And if anybody out there listening, go to a really rough time in your life and imagine it. Go to that time in your life when you were pushing yourself, and you can actually remember the tightness in your throat, in your back, it's contracted. And then remember the best moment of your life and what was happening then, and all your muscles will loosen, relax, and open.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And that is my gauge of truth. Does it set me free? The truth sets you free. So whatever sets you free is the truth.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Then reality's going to start changing for you, with or without psychedelics. And I remember sitting in the-- I had this overwhelming obsession with meditation when I turned 50, and I just bought this place in the woods in Central California, and I'd go out and sprinkle myself with birdseed and meditate in the forest all day while the chipmunks came and the birds would land on me.

Andrew Huberman:
Nice.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, it was amazing. And about six months into really meditating for hours every day, I kind of had an experience like Jill Bolte Taylor in the shower where I was in the forest with the chipmunks and the birds, and then it was just light. And it was like, it was so startling, it was like I'd fallen off a cliff. I couldn't see the ground. And then everything was back. And then it started happening a lot. And I read in shamanic traditions, they call this experience stopping the world, and it can happen through the guidance of a shaman or a plant or whatever. It was happening to me through meditation. And in that space of light, which I stopped fearing after a while, it looked as if this thing we're doing now is a video game. And if you and I were sitting and playing a video game, you would choose a character, I would choose a character, you'd stab me with a sword, I'd hit you with a mace, and we would say, "You are hurting me. You are killing me." But really we'd be talking about characters in a video game. And then somebody would come say, "Let's go get lunch." And we would put it down and go stop stabbing each other and be friends. It feels to me as if this is more like a game than reality, the whole physical everything. And I call this you me, and you call that me, and I call it you. And when the game stops, however that happens, there's a level of reality as different from this one as a video game is from three-dimensional life. There's a world outside the cave. And I don't know what it is, and I may be wrong. I don't care.

Andrew Huberman:
I love it. I'm going to mention Rick Rubin again. A few years back, I called him up and I just said, "Rick, you're not going to believe this." And I relayed to him a story about someone that I knew really well and this very just kind of wild set of discoveries that someone else had unearthed about their life being completely different than it had been presented, and their business failed. The whole thing just collapsed. And Rick just wrote back, he said, "Back to nature, the only truth."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That's very Rick. That's how he talks.

Dr. Martha Beck:
See, that makes my body relax.

Andrew Huberman:
Exactly. Well, actually, sorry, it was preceded by, I said, "Did you read this? Did you see this? I can't believe this," and I know this person really well, and I can't-- like for a very long time, and he just said, "It's all lies."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
"Back to nature, the only truth."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And that just got tattooed in my brain.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Because so much of what we see, and the shock, and like I can't believe it, and I think he was referring to something similar.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
He also has said, and you're going to get a kick out of this, I think, so Rick loves professional wrestling. He watches 10 hours a week-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, my goodness

Andrew Huberman:
... of professional wrestling. Why? Well, first of all, he believes that it's the only thing that humans have created that's real. Why? Because everyone agrees that it's not real.

Dr. Martha Beck:
It's fake.

Andrew Huberman:
It's fake.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And that he likes that no one gets hurt.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I mean, people actually can get hurt, but that no one's trying to actually hurt the other person.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
They're collaborating in this kind of Shakespearean dance that they do.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I love that.

Andrew Huberman:
And you have the different characters, and so I went to see professional wrestling with Rick thinking, like, "What am I doing here?"

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, my goodness.

Andrew Huberman:
It was loud, and the flames, and all this. Not a scene I would normally take myself to on a Friday. And it was so much fun. Mostly because of how delighted Rick was-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, I love that

Andrew Huberman:
... in seeing it, and his son as well. So we can distinguish or really identify what's true through this practice.

Dr. Martha Beck:
As close as we can.

Andrew Huberman:
For us.

Dr. Martha Beck:
We can't ever know completely what's true.

Andrew Huberman:
For us, right.

Dr. Martha Beck:
The whole Baconian method is accept nothing until it's proven true. Well, we can't prove anything true. We could all be dreaming this.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
So I decided that I would accept everything until I'm convinced that it's false. So I don't really believe anything, but I'm willing to-

Andrew Huberman:
Like a scientist.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. I don't believe anything because nothing can be absolutely proven. But I do know what's most useful to me, what makes me healthy. I've had a really, really sick, weak body most of my life, and it became a big part of my navigational system. I now think I have the MCAS, mast cell activation syndrome.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Martha Beck:
You put out a podcast on that.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
My daughter's been diagnosed with it. I probably have it. And it's just this weird random thing where you get symptoms in different parts of your body.

Andrew Huberman:
It's overactive immune system.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. It'll protect you from cancer.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Does it really?

Andrew Huberman:
Well, it turns out that people that run more towards autoimmune conditions-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman:
... like people who have skin conditions that are autoimmune-based, have fewer skin cancers.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yay.

Andrew Huberman:
Because the immune system is combating all these invaders.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes. It curates everything.

Andrew Huberman:
So there's a... Yeah, if there's an upside, I mean, this is the basis of a lot of the logic related to immunotherapies for cancers, is trying-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... to have the immune system fight off these mutations that are always occurring in the background.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Wow. Super cool.

Andrew Huberman:
So I'm not trying to take away-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Anyway

Andrew Huberman:
... from the suffering it's created, but that's an upside.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah, and my mother had it, and I just wish she had lived to see the diagnosis even exist. But my daughter called me from England the other day, and we were talking about the fact that she has that diagnosis. And she said "I am allergic to my own goddamn emotions." And I was like, "Yeah, we both are." And my whole journey has been really, really accelerated by the fact that if I go off true for myself, emotionally, psychologically, metaphysically, whatever, I immediately get physical symptoms of some kind. But when I am true to myself, they all subside, and I get this unbelievable health. So I've been told that I had five different progressive incurable diseases. I don't have any symptoms, but if I allow myself to be untrue to myself, if I allow myself to get out of integrity, I suffer intensely and immediately and in a very real way. So I don't know what's true, but I know what keeps me healthy, and I know what feels like freedom. And if I hit a thought like, there is nothing to us but physical matter, and it feels like tension, like when I put down my dog and I felt something go through me as she died. It was like, I don't know whether that I was feeling something that was real, but that's as close to the truth as I can get. And if I... See, right now, what's happening to me, I'm getting into this self thing, and as I'm talking about this dog, I feel that dog. And I can feel... I'm going to sound crazy.

Andrew Huberman:
No, not if you're talking about dogs and feeling.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I know, right?

Andrew Huberman:
You might make me cry because I'm thinking about-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Because I-

Andrew Huberman:
No, because I think I can sense it.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I think I can sense it. And forgive me if I'm now sounding totally crazy. If anyone's listening, I will say, and I'm just going to be blunt, I got a lot of training in neuroscience. I got decades of training in it. And I'll tell you, the notion of energy is not mysterious at all.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I mean, neurons are electricity and chemical exchange.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And that happens locally, and it happens at a distance.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. Our phones are electronic circuits that communicate at a distance. We are electronic circuits. Why shouldn't we communicate at a distance?

Andrew Huberman:
That's right. And the really forward-thinking neuroscientists are starting to put multiple people into scanners and- ... putting people in scanners in different locations. And I know it sounds like people are going to go, "Oh, no, what are you talking about? This is like spoon-bending stuff." No. The idea that thought and emotion at one location can impact thought and location-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... in another one, is that magnetoreception has been-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... published in the journal "Science."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So we're not outside the bounds of reality. We are actually finally, as a field, starting to acknowledge that this stuff exists-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and starting to poke and prod around in there.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But people have known about this. So for you, the sensing of your dog passing, or you can feel them present?

Dr. Martha Beck:
My dog was a physical entity, but my dog was also an energetic entity, and that entity was something I could feel. And this is, I don't know how many, a couple of years later, I start talking about that dog. I feel it again. Okay, so when I was pregnant with my son, Adam, one of the big reasons I chose to keep the baby is that from the moment he was conceived, I started having experiences that completely blew apart my understanding of reality. My husband at the time was traveling in Asia a lot, and when I would think about him, it would happen a lot at night for me, I'd be lying in bed, and I would think about him, and it would be daytime in Asia, and I would suddenly be in a three-dimensional movie where I'd be walking down a street in Japan or flying over a thunderstorm in an airplane, and I'd see these very specific things. Very specific. And then he would call me the next day and say, "Oh, I was walking down this street in Japan, and I saw this very specific banner, and I flew over a thunderstorm, and the lightning was amazing." And I started to realize I was picking up information that he was seeing. And it was testable. It kept happening.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
So what is that? It would have been so non-scientific of me to say, "That is completely insignificant. Don't pay any attention." It just was too weird. And so that's when I decided I'll believe anything until I'm convinced it's false.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And that throws your whole mind open to understanding the universe as being far more mysterious than our culture likes to say it is. And yes, there's a danger of getting woo-woo and crazy, but as I said, the math has to work too, and you're just telling us how the neurophysics of energy are being tested and shown to be operative. It's not woo-woo. It's just at the outside edge of what our culture is willing to accept.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, and the instruments we have to measure things are just not there yet.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But the same was said about Most everything that has been-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... clearly discovered and is rock solid over the last 50 plus years-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... at least in neuroscience. I can't help but just briefly share, when I put Costello down, because I did that myself-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Aw

Andrew Huberman:
... which sucked.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. But I didn't want-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Damn

Andrew Huberman:
... the vets, they came to the house.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh.

Andrew Huberman:
But it was at home, and I was right there.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
I didn't do the injection.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Okay, good.

Andrew Huberman:
No. Originally, I thought I would, because unfortunately, because of my previous job, I had to do that a number of times.

Dr. Martha Beck:
That's, ooh.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
That is not an accident.

Andrew Huberman:
No. But what was interesting is, he let out a big like, sigh right there at the end. But the wildest part of it was, and I swear it sounds like I'm making this up, but at the moment he went, I felt my heart heat up. I thought I was going to be crushed, like a broken heart. And I swear, it felt as if he was giving me all this energy back.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Wow.

Andrew Huberman:
And it's because I had been spending so much time. He was up in the middle of the night a lot. He must have had some dementia or that kind of thing.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I had that dog on everything. I was injecting him with testosterone-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh

Andrew Huberman:
... for the last part. Made him a lot healthier, folks.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh.

Andrew Huberman:
Don't let your dog breed indiscriminately. But I've got my theories about all this stuff in hormones and animals that a lot of the vets are aligned with me on this one. Talk to your vet. Talk to a progressive vet. I had him on a bunch of different drugs. He was really unhappy. It was the right thing to do.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And, I'll stop talking about it because I'll get too worked up. Forgive me. But that feeling, it was like whoa, and I can still feel it.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's like he gave something back that now-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... I think enough time's passed, I go get another dog.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It was almost like, oh, here's all this resource-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and like gratitude. And so these things sound kind of woo, right?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Could you do an experiment where you put me in the lab while I go through that? Sure.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Well-

Andrew Huberman:
Would you see huge physiological changes? Sure. I don't see the point of that kind of experiment, because I think enough people have experienced these kinds of things-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... that it's not necessary.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
In any case, I want to talk about integrity and your book-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... "Way of Integrity."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
You ran a very interesting experiment-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... that frankly, it's going to sound a little scary to some people, and maybe re-

Dr. Martha Beck:
They don't have to do it

Andrew Huberman:
... and maybe reflexive to other people, which is, I think it was one year-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... of no lying.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
But like, no lying of any kind.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Not even to yourself.

Dr. Martha Beck:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
And-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Especially not to myself. Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... right. And previously on the podcast, we had my colleague, Dr. Anna Lembke, who runs our dual diagnosis addiction clinic.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, wow.

Andrew Huberman:
She's done a tremendous service to the world, talking about all the various kinds of addiction.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Addiction as a disease, yes, but also something that people can overcome. And one of the things that I love so much about Anna's message, she wrote the book "Dopamine Nation." But-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, I love that book.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, wonderful book... is she talks about how recovered addicts are actually her heroes-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... because they've learned to navigate this internal process that-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... most people, perhaps who aren't addicts or don't think they are, are constantly being yanked around by these dopamine systems.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Huh.

Andrew Huberman:
But they've learned to conquer their own dopamine system.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
So, they represent the heroes of her world.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I love that model, because we tend to look at addicts and think about as like, there's all this judgment on it. But-

Dr. Martha Beck:
No, I think it's amazing. I think addicts are people who are hypersensitive to the suffering that they are told to accept, and so they're trying to medicate the suffering that comes from being out of integrity, and the society says... I talked to people, I interviewed people for this book who would go to their-- This one woman went with her husband to the psychiatrist, and they said, "She's not happy doing the traditional wife role." And they sat there and talked about what medication would enable her to fulfill this social role that she just didn't like. It never occurred to anybody to say, "Maybe don't do it-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Martha Beck:
... if you don't like it that much." And people are medicating themselves into a conformity with social systems that are not in line with their true nature. And addicts hurt, and they sometimes, they find a substance, or they find an activity that gives them relief, and so they use it because they're in a lot of pain. And one-

Andrew Huberman:
Until it becomes the source of pain.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. And it always does, and it's horrible. But one addiction specialist I know says it's like they're standing on a nail and trying to take enough drugs to stop the pain. But that is not what you need to do when you're standing on a nail. You need to take the nail out. And the nail is the part of your life that you're living that's out of integrity with your true nature because other people want you to live that way.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And they will force themselves. They want to stay in the position of pain or fear, push past it, be stronger.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I've spent a lot of my life there, I'll confess, and it's super unpleasant, and it's always led to like shitty things.

Dr. Martha Beck:
But how-

Andrew Huberman:
You know? So that-

Dr. Martha Beck:
How laudable is it that you took what the culture told you was good, and by God, you learned to do it

Andrew Huberman:
And we tell ourselves stories like, "Well, if we achieve certain things, then we'll be in a better position to do more for other people." Like, there's the martyrdom version of it, too. The reason I brought up Anna was she was the first to alert me to these studies that have been done about how myelination and growth of the prefrontal cortex is actually accelerated when people tell the truth-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Huh

Andrew Huberman:
... especially around truths that are somewhat uncomfortable.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And it's a beautiful literature that's small, but starting to really emerge. Yeah. And a big part of the recovery from addiction is people first acknowledging the truth to themselves-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and then to other people. And again, All of that's kind of shrouded by how we think about addicts.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Sadly, in any major city, and even small towns now, you can see the bent over-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... fentanyl addicts, and we judge. We're like, "Oh," or we say, "It's so sad" or-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... but that's just an example of how far gone people can get in that particular-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... addiction. Ana offers an interesting idea, which is that the more we tell these little micro-truths, the more connected to reality we are.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And in "The Way of Integrity," you talk about this experiment that you did.

Dr. Martha Beck:
My first integrity cleanse.

Andrew Huberman:
An integrity cleanse. So maybe you could explain what it is, and it sounds incredibly scary. It's not just the telling the truth part, it's the realizing the truth part.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. I guess I'm going to start with the woo story. I was very sick, and at one point they rushed me into surgery, didn't know what was wrong with me. I had some internal bleeding going on. That's a long story. Wrote about it in another book. Point is, during the surgery, I regained consciousness and sat up and looked at them operating on me, which was surprising-

Andrew Huberman:
Whoa

Dr. Martha Beck:
... because I was lying down there, and so I was very disconcerted, and I lay back down and I looked up between the surgical lights, and between them appeared this ball of light that was much, much, much brighter than the surgical lights, which are very bright. And it was so beautiful. You can't describe it. It's outside the cave, and I was just completely obsessed by it, and then it started to grow, and when it touched me, and it filled things, it didn't bounce off things, it filled them. When it touched me, this incredible joy and love and warmth flooded my body, and I started to cry, and my body was crying, and the surgeons noticed these tears coming out of my eyes, and they freaked out because they thought that I was feeling the surgery, and crying was the only thing I could do about it. So they were panicking, and the anesthesiologist, they told him, "Bump up the medication." Later, because I grilled him later, "What did you give me? What are the side effects? What happens? Can I have some more?" He said afterward that when he went to increase the medication, he said a voice said to him, "Don't. She's crying because she's happy." And he said, "I just did what it said." And he was white and shaking and he said, "Did I do the right thing?" So I kind of told him a little of the story. Anyway, this light was there.

Andrew Huberman:
Wild.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. And I was just like, "Home, home, home." And it said, "Yeah, okay, so this is what you really are, and you're about to have a pretty tough time for a while. But just remember, I'm always here, even though you can't see me." And so I came out of that surgery and I thought, "I will not allow anything to my life that doesn't feel like that light." It wasn't like it used language, but it said, "This is not the way you feel after you die. This is the way you're supposed to learn to feel all the time. So in your body, out of your body, doesn't matter. This is how you're meant to feel." And believe me, when I worked with heroin addicts, they would describe their first high, and it was as close to that as anything I'd heard people describe. And I would say, "I believe you're meant to feel that way, and also keep your teeth."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
So I didn't tell a lie for a year. I came out of it and I thought, "Well, lying is definitely not going to feel like that. That light does not lie." So no lies ever.

Andrew Huberman:
Of any kind, even the little micro-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Of any kind

Andrew Huberman:
... like, "When are you going to be home?" And you know it's 12 minutes and you say 10.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Can't say that. Have to say 12. "Do you like my outfit?" "No, I do not." I found ways to, I would sort of try to soften the truth.

Andrew Huberman:
Did it mean also telling every truth that was in your head?

Dr. Martha Beck:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
Or you would keep certain things to yourself?

Dr. Martha Beck:
No, in fact, it felt untrue to say certain things to certain people. It felt invasive or offensive, and that didn't feel true. Sometimes silence was the greatest truth I could tell, but I didn't even know that that was the case until I started my experiment. So I did not lie for that year, and I've done it many, many times since. But I would not recommend jumping into it 100% from a life that hasn't already been pretty examined.

Andrew Huberman:
What Ana has said, and I think in the backdrop of what you're saying, is that everybody does these little micro adjustments or-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. Constantly

Andrew Huberman:
... constantly. And you've said that this is largely to smooth social interactions.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That most of lying is to smooth social interactions.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah, the research shows that most people lie at least three times within 10 minutes of meeting another person. They lie to them. And men are socially conditioned to tell lies that make them seem a little bit cooler than they maybe think they are for real, and women, people identified as women, are socialized to tell lies that make other people feel good about themselves. So it takes you in different directions, but I just wasn't going to tell any lie at all. And let me just say that that year, I could say I lost these things, but the fact is I dropped them. I walked away from them. My religion. With the religion went the family of origin. Every friend I had growing up, because to leave Mormonism is worse than murder in that community. I was cast into outer darkness. My marriage, realized I was gay. Oops. I hadn't figured that out at 29.

Andrew Huberman:
That came to you as a realization in that year?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It must have been in your- Unconscious someplace prior.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
There'd never been a-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Sort of, but I was-

Andrew Huberman:
There'd never been a kind of like, "Knock, knock. Hey." No.

Dr. Martha Beck:
No, I was so bent on being a good person according to my socialization, the same way you were bent on being a brave, strong male according to the skateboarding culture. I would never have let that anywhere near my consciousness, and it had to be a series of experiences. And my ex-husband was gay as well, so I'd known that about him for a while. And I knew he was his best self when he was his gay self. So, that kind of helped, but the marriage ended because of that. Let's see, what else happened? Oh, yeah. I quit academia, so my industry, the thing I'd gone to all those years of school for, my job, means of support. I was living in Utah at the time, and I sort of fled for the border, so I lost my home.

Andrew Huberman:
How were you feeling during this time?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Better and better and better.

Andrew Huberman:
Sorry, I just-- I expected you to be like, "It was horrible." You're like, "No, better and better."

Dr. Martha Beck:
It kind of was-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah

Dr. Martha Beck:
... but not as horrible as staying in all those things.

Andrew Huberman:
And the part that intrigues me at the moment is the losing of friends.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
Like, losing of people and the structures that we relied on also for safety.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That's got to be hard.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, it's very-- Yeah, for parts of the psyche that are very attached to socialization and attached to people that are familiar to you, it's heartbreaking. Really heartbreaking. But that light gave me a full-on experience of the self and what it told me was it's always there. My son, who has Down syndrome, one day told me, after his friend's mother died, we were coming home from the funeral, and he said, "I didn't cry." And I said, "It's okay if you cried. Strong men cry, and this is a sad time." And he said, "It's not as hard after the light comes and opens your heart." And he can barely talk, and so it was very garbled and I was like, "What? A light came and opened your heart?" He said, "Mm-hmm." I said, "Well, when did this happen?" He said, "May 10th." I was like, "This year?" "No. I was 13."

Andrew Huberman:
Wow.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And I was like, "You're holding out on me." So this light had appeared in his room when he was having a really hard time. Kids with Down syndrome don't have easy lives, and it touched his heart, and he said since then, nothing was as hard. And I said, "You know, I saw it, too, and it said to me that it's always with us even though we can't see it." And he said, "Oh, I can see it." And I was like, "You can?" And he was like, "Yeah." Like, he was sort of disappointed in me. And I said, "Well, where is it? Is it like up there, down here in your head, in your heart?" And he just looked at me and he said, "Mom, it's everywhere." He just sees the whole world illuminated, and I think that's what I saw in the forest when suddenly the world would just turn to light. It was that light. So that was the field, and as I lost each friendship, as I lost each job, as I faced the fear and the heartbreak and everything, those parts of me were dissolving, and I was becoming more identified with that light. And that was the thing. It was completely selfish. I was not going back to the way I felt before I felt that light. Never going back there.

Andrew Huberman:
Did you feel as if you had to accomplish certain things, degrees, et cetera, first in order to allow yourself this? Because I hear this a lot. And in the backdrop of this entire conversation, I have one little piece of neural real estate which is devoted to the audience that is saying, "Okay, I can do these things once I have a job, once I have blank-"

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... once I have the resources." But at the same time, I do want to highlight for people that everything that we've talked about in terms of practices and things to do-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... like, you just do them. There's no purchase. It's inside of us.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
There's no looking to something-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... in a package or in even a program. It's all within us.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So it can be done at really anywhere and with any-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... amount of resources or lack thereof. But-

Dr. Martha Beck:
But be gentle with yourself. Don't quit your jo-- I mean, I was very violent. I was quite a lot like you. The way I got into Harvard was I had a part of myself called Fang that did not care what hurt me. I'd go running in the snow. I remember once I bought running shoes that were too small, and all my toenails came off during that run, and I just kept running. And I'd stop and take off another toenail and keep running. I was able to be very brutal to myself.

Andrew Huberman:
Just living in Boston is brutal to me.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Well, on the plus side, my feet were completely numb because of the cold, so.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. Okay, there's that.

Dr. Martha Beck:
But-

Andrew Huberman:
So you have the capacity for extreme resilience.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And it perhaps took you too far.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah, and I think that's why I did this massive integrity cleanse when I was at a place where I was far, far away from my true self, and because of that, it was a kind of violent breaking of connections. So now if I'm coaching somebody, I'm like, "Be very gentle." I call it one-degree turns. If you're flying a plane, and you turn one degree north every half hour, you won't even notice it's turning, but you'll end up someplace very different. So just gently move away from what causes you to suffer. Get yourself the hot cup of tea in the morning to soothe your throat. Listen to your own sorrow Cancel a meeting because you just don't feel like doing it. These are the things that bring you back to your truth, and it's always loving. And it's not loving necessarily to just say, "I'm going to say the truth about everything, and I don't care who hates me for it."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
That was just my way.

Andrew Huberman:
And inevitably, a much kinder, more generous version of ourselves emerges when we're living our truth.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's a foregone conclusion, but still worth stating. Yeah, I can personally say that most of my suffering has been the consequence of the fact that I love love.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And, I'm blessed with many great friends and things of that sort, business partners, et cetera. But I have a tendency to get into relationships quickly-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... and ending them feels near impossible.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh.

Andrew Huberman:
And this has caused me and, and also others, too much suffering.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And so a lot of that is, the reason I raise this is that, it's about holding two truths at the same time-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... which feel incompatible. On the one hand, really loving and caring about someone.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And at the same time, knowing that the loving-

Dr. Martha Beck:
It's not going to work

Andrew Huberman:
... caring thing to do is to go separate ways.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And it's this relationship to loss that I sort of can't accept-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... or haven't been able to. I can accept that people die.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
All three of my academic advisors, wonderful people, suicide, cancer, cancer.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oof.

Andrew Huberman:
So I had to come to the conclusion pretty early on in my academic career like, "Wow, I'm the common denominator." I joke.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Wow.

Andrew Huberman:
And it took me a long time to realize, this might not be my fault. I know it's crazy. How would that-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But I think that it also woke me up to the idea, life as we know it in this life ends, and so to try and make the most of it. But the idea that people would move apart-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... even in circumstances where death doesn't separate them-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... to me, it's so painful.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. Was it Keats who said that, "Of all the ways there are to lose a person, death is the kindest?"

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Like that.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. And this has roots in all sorts of things in me, of course, but the reason I raise it is that I think that when we have two incompatible truths-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... that's when we feel stuck. Like we love people, we want to take care of them.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
Maybe we want them to remain in our lives, but we have to, like the letting go process-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah, well-

Andrew Huberman:
... sucks

Dr. Martha Beck:
... there can't be incompatible truths. I think what happens is that you, and just tell me where I'm wrong, okay? I could be completely full of crap. It sounds to me like you're one of the people who have a huge heart, who sometimes confuse love with self-abandonment.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Who loves so deeply that you want the joy of the beloved more than you want your own joy.

Andrew Huberman:
100%.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And that is not love. That is a hostage situation, okay? There's something I call spider love. If you say to a spider, "How do you feel about flies?" It would say, "Oh, I love them." And it expresses that love by immobilizing them, wrapping them up, and injecting them with poison, and then sucking out their life force whenever it needs them. And it loves those flies. Yum. But love always sets the beloved free, okay? So there's a consumptive love, and when you are a fly and you meet a spider, and you give your whole self to this person who goes, "Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, I really want that," you find yourself starved of your own validation, your kindness to your true self, and you've given it all to the other person, and that's when it will not work. And you may be missing the people who aren't looking for flies or who want to just, I'm not going to extend this metaphor any further, who just want to be with you as a whole human, who want to know what your limitations are as well as their own. Who will say to you, I have a new friend who, I had pneumonia, and I wanted to talk to her on the phone, and I told my assistant, "I don't care if I have pneumonia." And she wrote me a text, and she said, "Do not impinge on your own health because you want me to feel loved. I don't like it. I want you to be healthy." And I was like, "Well, whew." So I would examine the moment where you become so entranced with another that you stop caring about yourself and try to feed your whole life to them, because that is not love. It's just something our culture defines as love. A lot of parents love their children that way, but you have to be able to know exactly what you want, to communicate to the other person, and to have them say, "I completely respect that." Or you don't have a love situation, you have codependency.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm. That's very useful. Thank you, and I know it will be very useful to many people. What is the suggestion for people that are trying to figure out what they want or need or both?

Dr. Martha Beck:
I'll relate it to this relationship thing because it applies across everything, but it's hardest in relationships. And that is, start to notice the first moment when part of you, a deep part of you, knew you were losing your thread, you were losing your integrity. So if you think about a relationship you had that ended poorly, where you loved the other person by giving your whole self to them, which you've been taught is called love, even though I don't think it is called love. So and then- Look back on the first moment that she wanted something and you abandoned yourself to give it to her.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And it's usually very early in the relationship.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Like day one.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, it's like, "This isn't safe."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Exactly. And you just crushed right over that boundary, that very sensitive inner vigilance that's saying, "This is how we stay whole, Andrea. This is how we stay in integrity." So most people with a job, with a relationship, with any choice they make, they can trace it back. When I pick up the pieces for them years later, they're like, "Oh, that, I knew that the first week, and I stayed in there for 20 years." So it's about, as I said earlier, being really granular in your experience of your own suffering and knowing that you are not here to suffer. There's this big thing that men in our society are taught, there are love songs like, I can't remember his name, he won the Nobel Prize for literature, "I would crawl down the avenue black and blue to show my love, to make you feel my love." And it's like, okay, that's not showing me love. You don't have to hurt yourself to show me love. But maybe that's why you have to pull back six inches from your own eyes to brutalize yourself for other people, that martyr archetype. It's, no, it doesn't work.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, it's caused me, and I think others, a lot of suffering because I think what ends up happening is that when we get separation from that person, then we do a little bit of self-recovery-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... but then it's all fractured.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And repeat. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And repeat, right, exactly. What you just described is extremely helpful. I'm curious, in your role as a coach to many people-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... how often are romantic relationships, partnership type things-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... whatever form that takes for people, how often is that the bulk of what people struggle with? At least in terms of what they bring to the table. Or is it more often, "I don't like my job, I'm in the wrong life professionally." If you had to give us the non-peer-reviewed study, but kind of crude breakdown.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. I think because they identify me as a coach, they go to a therapist with relationship things, but people come to me with, "My life's just not working." That feeling you were describing.

Andrew Huberman:
Like the whole thing. Oh, great. Nice. So they give you the whole thing.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah, the whole thing is not working. But in my job, I need to change my job, I need to get my purpose, I need to have my life's meaning. And it always ends up ending up to be about the relationship as well.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Anybody, anything we do that's dysfunctional for any part of ourselves is dysfunctional for every part of ourselves.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
The way we do anything is the way we do everything. So if you come in with a job issue because you've got a horrible boss but you never complain, you're going to end up telling me that you're in a horrible marriage with a spouse who's awful, but you never complain. The same issues come forward as a kind of gift to show us over and over, not that way. No. Okay. See that pattern? No.

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
See that pattern? No.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, it's interesting that you say that because I feel like professionally, it's like there's a gravitational pull.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I wanted to get into tropical fish when I was a kid, and I was like, "Tropical fish, tropical..." I would spend all day at the tropical fish store.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
Then it was birds.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
Then it was skateboarding. Then I wanted to be a firefighter, whatever. Eventually, it was neuroscience, then it was podcasting. It's just like I can't miss. When I say that, I mean I can't keep myself from doing what I really want.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I would say likewise with friendships, I'm fortunate to have a great relationship to my biological family.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
It was really rocky for a lot of years, but it's like-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Cool

Andrew Huberman:
... the work has paid off. And they've done a lot of work. In romantic partnership, it's like a carve-out. It's been much more challenging.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Huh.

Andrew Huberman:
I've had some amazing partners and partnerships. Like amazing.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm still on excellent terms with many of them.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And then I've had some really, really brutal, like barbed wire-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, gnarly

Andrew Huberman:
... just like... And I've had to take a look at my role in that, too, right?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
So in this case, for me, it's like a carve-out. I think of it as like this-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... wedge shape carve-out. It just seems so much more challenging. But I think in talking with you today, it's clear that it's because of this thing of like, I'm not approaching it from the standpoint of like, I want to do this and it's good for me-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... to be frank. Whereas in the work domain, it's like what feels good ends up being really good for me.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. Because for a while you did things that hurt you, and then you realized, "No, the things that hurt me, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do the things I like." When you bring another human being into it, when it's a romantic partnership, I think you still have the pattern of I will do things that hurt me. I will abandon my sense of safety. I will go over my own experienced internal boundary, and you've done it in other areas of your life, but this is, yeah, this is a big one for you, where you just haven't applied the same wisdom you've learned in other areas, and I would guess that it's because you don't feel that that's loving to the other person. If you decide you're not going to kill animals at your job, the people at your lab aren't going to be heartbroken. But if you decide you don't want to live a certain kind of life with another person, that person's heart could get broken. Or at least they could feel that way. They could genuinely feel pain. So I think maybe that's why it's a cut-out thing, because changing your job doesn't hurt someone, but changing your relationship pattern, somebody could get hurt, and If you don't change your pattern, someone will also get hurt.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. Well, and that's often the case, right?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So this notion of others getting hurt when we make the choice that's most in line with our own integrity-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... whether it's relationship or family or the decision to move or leave a job, how do you sit with that?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, gosh.

Andrew Huberman:
How does one sit with that? I think I have clearly internalized some script that says if someone else is really upset, even-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and obviously the right thing is often not the thing that makes people feel best, et cetera.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But how do you work with that?

Dr. Martha Beck:
So there are different ways of reframing it, and one example, since you know a lot about addiction, if somebody is addicted to you pleasing them, you're pleasing them and going out of your integrity to please them, to give them whatever they want that pleases them. Your addiction as a codependent is giving them that emotional energy, whatever gets them high. And their absorption of that energy and the imbalance that results, it's as if they are getting high on you. And an alcoholic, if you take away the bottle of booze, will tell you, "You are hurting me. This is the worst thing you could ever do to me. You have no idea how much I'm suffering." And the thing you have to do in an intervention is, "No, it's the alcohol that's doing the hurting. It's the over-giving. It's allowing someone to consume your energy and to get high on it. That is an addiction. I will not let you do it. I will separate from you, person to person, if you continue in your addictive pattern." Doesn't mean that we won't be together in the great self and that we're all one self and we can all love each other forever, but it is not kind to feed someone's addiction to eating your energy. Does that make sense?

Andrew Huberman:
Yes. Yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
You have to do some tough love.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. The compassionate thing is to do-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... the right thing.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. "This is not helping you." And they say, "But I want more of you," and you say, "No. No, you really don't. You want something false I was creating for you, and it's actually not me." My friends who, "Why would you leave the church? Now you're lost to us." And I was like, "No, I was always a gay non-Mormon. I was just feeding you the story that I was a straight Mormon girl, and I can't feed you that anymore. It's making you sick, it's making me sick. It's not true." And some of them I never saw again, and some of them came around years later and said, "Oh, I figured it out." And some probably still are really happy and think I'm going to hell.

Andrew Huberman:
Sorry, I didn't mean to laugh at that, but I did. I don't know.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I find it hilarious.

Andrew Huberman:
Sorry. Not sorry. No, no. Just nothing to do but laugh there. Goodness. Yeah, I think this notion of things ending because we realized that we were telling lies.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And gosh, it even hurts to say.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's like because we weren't trying to tell lies.

Dr. Martha Beck:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
We didn't know we were telling lies.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. It's an innocent mistake.

Andrew Huberman:
To me, that often grows from what I think of as empathy.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Certainly not the best form of empathy.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But I think that there's a human phenotype that I'm familiar with where we feel other people's emotions, which I think is healthy.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Can be healthy.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And we love seeing people enjoy.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And we delight in it, so it feels good to us-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... to feed this addiction.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, I know the feeling.

Andrew Huberman:
It's like, "Oh, here I am martyrdom, like I'm bleeding out." But it's not in line with this essential self. And here, I guess the little vignette that's related to this is that I do think there's one very healthy form of this-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman:
... which is, I believe, at least for me, with a dog, I like other animals too, but with a dog, when we love them-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman:
... we are seamlessly attached to their love of us.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And so loving them and empathizing with them means double the love.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
We love them and we can feel their love and it just feels like a perfect circle. And with people, that can happen, too, I imagine.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes, it can.

Andrew Huberman:
I've felt that a few times. I certainly feel that in my friendships. I feel that with my sister.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And I've felt it in a few of my romantic relationships.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But the empathy for the other's pleasure-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... can go too far.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And then when we, quote-unquote, "lose ourselves," I think it's because there's a component of ourselves that's not attached to the part that still has our own needs. Does that resonate?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, totally, yeah. Here's the thing. You don't expect your dog to pretend it's not a dog. You don't expect your dog to stop loving walks and chasing a ball and just being a dog, and when it's tired, it'll go to sleep. But often when we fall in love, we try to make ourselves not who we are and try to become the person that will make the other maximally thrilled with us. And I know exactly what you're talking about. I love to give money to people-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I do, too

Dr. Martha Beck:
... because it makes them happy, and then it never works. Well, it works out only in cases where it feels true in my heart. If I over-give because someone's there saying, "I need," and it doesn't feel good in the giving, I am not being a dog. A dog would say, "No, this is where my limits are. I'm going to go lie down on the floor and sleep." But I will get an extra job to give money to people that I don't want to give money to after the first little while. So we bend ourselves out of our true being, and I think the reason we love dogs so much is that they love, but they love truly. They love honestly. They don't pretend to be something they're not. And they don't have the empathy that says, "If your leg is broken, I will break my own leg and lie down next to you so that I feel exactly the same pain you're feeling."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
It is not empathy to feel everything the other person is feeling. Take the broken leg example. If you got hit by a car, you're lying there screaming in anguish, and I felt your feeling so strongly that I couldn't cope, and I fell down in a faint. I had a client once who has passed away now, so I'll tell this anecdote. Her husband was like you. He would give himself away, and she gladly consumed all his life energy. And one day, he had a heart attack, a near fatal heart attack, and she called me and said, "I couldn't get him to take care of my needs while he was having his heart attack. He just had it." And I was like, "Yeah, he couldn't help that." And she said, "Well, I told him." He said, "I can't be there for you right now. I'm having a heart attack." And she said, "You're not the one whose husband may be dying from a heart attack." She was so into consuming his energy that she actually said that with a straight face.

Andrew Huberman:
Unbelievable.

Dr. Martha Beck:
She was expecting him to give empathy. That's not empathy. That's selling yourself out. Empathy acknowledges self-other awareness. There are four components to real empathy, self-other awareness, I am not you. As Byron Katie, one of my favorite spiritual teachers says, "My favorite thing about separate bodies is that when you hurt, I don't, it's not my turn."

Andrew Huberman:
So good. So good.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. Another one is emotion regulation.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
So you see something that's horrific, and you can like, this is where you can use your skills dealing with your emotions. You bring it down.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Okay, I'm a surgeon, I'm dealing with a horrible ER accident. I can't feel that. I have to get to work.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
So that's emotion regulation. You can do that. Self-other awareness, emotion regulation, there are two other components, but those are the two that I think we really need to focus on. If you hurt, I don't, it's not my turn, and when you're hurting and I start to hurt too much because you're hurting, I can bring myself back into my own body, relax, and be contented in my own skin so that I can be present for you.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
So here's the thing I love. It's a short quote from a poem by Hafiz, who was a 13th-century Persian poet. It's so simple. Remember it, though. "Troubled? Then stay with me, for I am not."

Andrew Huberman:
I love that.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. That's being yourself in a relationship. "Then stay with me, for I am not." "But I'm really, really unhappy." "I see that, and I'm not unhappy." "But I really, really want to be together." "I really see that that's how you feel, and I don't want it."

Andrew Huberman:
It's so interesting because I feel like in the domain of work, and with my friends, and largely with family, giving feels great, and then people are sated-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and then they go on their way. But I noticed a contrast with romantic partnerships when, as I've said, I maintain good relationships with a couple of-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... girlfriends that I had. In some cases, I'm good friends with their husbands. Actually, one just came and visited with her sister and her kid recently-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh

Andrew Huberman:
... and on just great platonic terms. But for years, I didn't worry about them, but I felt like I could still feel the energetic pull-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... even though they weren't asking for anything.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And then when I attended their wedding, this particular person's wedding-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... I was like, "Oh." I was like, "My work is done."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I got to enjoy and still get to enjoy the friendship with the whole family.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But it really showed me how so much of the relationship had been about trying to make sure the other person-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... was okay.

Dr. Martha Beck:
You make it your job to make them happy, and it is never your job to make another person happy. You can not do it. Happiness is an inside job. You cannot make another person happy. You can't go far enough into someone else's sadness to make them happy. You can't go far enough into their sickness to make them well. You have to get out of your own sadness and your own sickness, and then stay in your integrity with love for them and model what it is to be in your own skin, which is the only one you're ever going to have. My oldest child, as a teenager, I was so over-involved in everything, and they gave me a song called "Let Me Fall" by a man who had fallen from a tree and he broke his spine. He was a paraplegic, and he just says, "The one I will become will catch me. Don't catch me anymore." And it was so hard as a parent to let my child suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and what they were telling me, they/them pronouns, was that, "This is my life, and my suffering is my birthright, and I am here to figure it out as I go, and you are not loving me when you shove yourself into my affairs to try to take away my suffering. Let me fall."

Andrew Huberman:
What a mature and generous thing for them to say.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. They are extraordinary.

Andrew Huberman:
It sounds like it. This is your oldest?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
The contrast, and I think what drives a lot of what we're really talking about here is codependency.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. For those that don't know or who haven't caught on-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding

Andrew Huberman:
... Right. Exactly. Is that sometimes when we- Cut people off, or we just say, "Hey, I can give, but only to this point."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Or, "You can get this aspect of me, but not these other aspects."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Especially if they've been receiving them before, they get-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, yes

Andrew Huberman:
... pissed.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, so pissed.

Andrew Huberman:
And it's unclear, especially if the relationship had been different up until then, that's why it sometimes feels unfair to do. It's like-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... it's one thing to invite someone over for a drink, then to discover that they're an alcoholic-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... continue to fill their glass, enjoy the exchange, and then one day realize they're an alcoholic.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I guess that term isn't used anymore, I've been told by many audience members.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh.

Andrew Huberman:
Forgive me.

Dr. Martha Beck:
It's fine.

Andrew Huberman:
It's alcohol use disorder.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I said that, too. I'm sorry.

Andrew Huberman:
No, quite all right. I think that field of addiction medicine is nascent enough that we're still making the transition.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And I don't say this, by the way, for political correctness. I'm not a politically correct person. It's just I've had to learn to reframe these things for the specific purpose of trying to bring more people into the conversation. Also-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... I don't like the idea, but the words alcohol use disorder, the disorder piece is also controversial.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
But what I love is that as soon as we start to name things and rename things, we're all talking about those things, and then there's no way out of the conversation.

Dr. Martha Beck:
That's true.

Andrew Huberman:
So that's my kind of jujitsuing out of the... So that means we have to talk about it, just like autism spectrum disorder-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... or autism or neurotypical/atypical. Well, guess what, folks? Now we're all talking about it, and it needs to be talked about. So in any case, at some point, there's the idea, like, "I'm cutting you off," and the person says, "But this is what we do."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
This is the kind of promise that you made.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And so then we find ourselves in the other scripts of like, "Well, now I'm being bad. I'm doing the right thing, but I'm breaking a promise."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Which we're told from the time we're little you don't do.

Dr. Martha Beck:
But only in the eyes of the other person. If you come back into your own integrity, okay, did I promise to always give more than I can? Well, I did by my actions. I established a precedent. Isn't that a promise? They say it's a promise. No? Or if I did make a promise, I was in error. I apologize. I made a mistake. I promised something I couldn't really give. Have you heard the term extinction burst?

Andrew Huberman:
In the notion of galaxies developing or something like that?

Dr. Martha Beck:
No, it's when pigeons are... Well.

Andrew Huberman:
Awesome. I am way off.

Dr. Martha Beck:
The galactic pigeons.

Andrew Huberman:
Way off. I'm trying to be Elon Musk here, and you're talking, no, it's about pigeons. Cool.

Dr. Martha Beck:
It's about any animal.

Andrew Huberman:
I love pigeons. I even have a pigeon tattoo.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I do.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I love all the animals.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Anyway, if you give pigeons, they peck a lever, and they get a pellet at unpredictable intervals, which is highly motivating. It's the most highly motivating thing they can do. And then if the pellets stop coming, the pigeons go bananas.

Andrew Huberman:
They perseverate.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Just peck, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck. They peck it a lot more, and they peck it angrily. They insist that the researchers promised them those pellets, and then they just give up and go away because the pellets stop coming. When you have been giving too much, and you realize that, and you say, "To stay in my integrity, I have to pull back and care for myself, and that's where I stop," the other person will put on an extinction burst, for sure. And your job is to stay inside your integrity until they stop pecking, and they'll be much more healthy. I had a golden retriever once who would just come and bark to be petted. Bark, bark. Big, huge dog, but he was young. And it was so annoying, and we had to get a dog behaviorist to come in because he was just barking at everybody constantly to be petted. And she said, "When he does that, get up, walk across the room, go into another room, and shut the door in his face." And we were like, " That would be cruel." She's like, "It's not cruel. He'll understand it." And I'll never forget watching him bark. It's going bark, bark, bark, bark. And they got up, walked out, shut the door in his face. He stood by the door and went, "Ruff!" Then he went, "Eh." He went over and laid down. He was like, "All right. Well, that didn't work." And that's ultimately what happens when you stay inside your integrity and don't let people play with you that way.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Don't let them tug you around.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. It's interesting because with work, it's like I love learning-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... organizing information, having conversations like this, and sharing them with the world. It feels like the relationship to a dog. It's like this-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... reciprocity, and if people don't like it, okay. And if you like it, great, and if you love it, even better.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But I would be doing it anyway.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
That's like, I'd be doing it anyway. There's no feeling of loss.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
There's no metabolizing of self.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Any of that.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah, I know. In the book that I just wrote called "Beyond Anxiety," I talk about when people like you live that way, from their joy, they begin to create economic ecosystems. You create so much value, that in multiple ways, you can get streams of income, multiple.

Andrew Huberman:
And people pay me to do this.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I still can't believe it.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I know.

Andrew Huberman:
I come in here and I talk to my producer, who's also my business partner and my closest friend, Rob, and I'm like, "I can't believe they pay us to do this."

Dr. Martha Beck:
I know.

Andrew Huberman:
I can't believe it. And that's also how I felt about science the first time I looked down the microscope and saw a slice of a particular brain area-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Wow

Andrew Huberman:
... called the dorsolateral geniculate nucleus, and we had labeled this area. And I turned to Barbara Chapman, my graduate advisor there, and I was like, "This is amazing." And her response was so funny. She was also Harvard-trained, Radcliffe, to be specific, and she said, "Yeah, brains are really cool. They're like little walnuts." And I was like, "So Barbara." One of the smartest people I ever met, she was just like And I was like- And I thought, and then I looked around her lab. I was doing rotations where you get to sample different labs and you hope they'll take you in. And she had green counters in her lab instead of black counters.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, cool.

Andrew Huberman:
And she had pictures of mushrooms.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And she had this picture of a cat coming out of a farm silo, like it's hat.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
And I thought, "I really like this lady."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, that's awesome.

Andrew Huberman:
Like, "I want to work here. I want to do my PhD here."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I had already committed to another lab, and I started sneaking into her laboratory at night-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh

Andrew Huberman:
... to do experiments.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Did you break the heart of the other lab?

Andrew Huberman:
She got over it. So in the professional domain, I'm a completely different animal when it comes to these things.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I walked into the other woman's lab, I mean, she's done tremendously well without me, so and I just said, "Listen, I'm going to join this other lab." But I have no trouble doing that in the work domain.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
None. It's like when I started the podcast, sure, there were these voices in my head. What are my colleagues going to think? This and that, and I was like, "Nah, I hope they're living their best life. I'm going to live mine."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I see them, and some love it, some hate it, and some ... Like really, I can tell. Like I hear the judgments and I also hear the, "I love it," that kind of thing. It's a mix, because public-facing anything is going to evoke different responses from people. And, but I'm sort of like, "You do you, I'll do me-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and we'll both be good."

Dr. Martha Beck:
We live in this weird economy where you're supposed to get a job, and it's all based on factory work. You're supposed to go to a place and do something you don't really like to get your little allowance, and then you go home. And that has only existed for the last couple hundred years since the Industrial Revolution. Before that, people existed for hundreds of thousands of years, doing what? Hunting, fishing, gardening, weaving, singing songs, telling stories, doing the things that we do as hobbies. But we have this weird mindset that says, no. If I do things that bring me joy, like a hobby does, the things that people have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years, if I just put my joy out there and see what I can do with the wild new creations of our particular time, if I don't do the job, I'm being weird somehow, and it won't work. But what I'm seeing is the economic structures of this society are all being fractured. They're falling apart around us, and it's people who are afraid. I used to watch this video of a tsunami that hit Sendai, Japan, in 2011, I think it was. And this wave comes in, and it eats a city in six minutes.

Andrew Huberman:
Wow.

Dr. Martha Beck:
This one wave, and you watch the whole city-

Andrew Huberman:
Wow

Dr. Martha Beck:
... be ripped to shreds in six minutes. And people are running into the buildings, and then the buildings start to collapse, and you know there are people in there. And I watched this, and I thought, there is so much change in our culture. It's like that wave has hit us. And then accidentally, I hit something in YouTube or whatever, and it switched to Mike Parsons surfing one of the biggest waves ever filmed. It was a rogue wave, and it went up like 70 feet. And the camera pulls back, and here's this basically naked man on a board with a wave that is like the wrath of God, and he's this tiny little figure. The wave is seven stories tall. And he comes riding down the face of that, and it breaks over him, and you think, "Oh, he's dead." And then he shoots out of the spray just like shouting. And I thought, those are the choices we have right now. We can run into the institutions that we think will keep us safe, and change will crush us and drown us and kill us, or we can deal with the fact that there's a huge wave of change in our society right now, and everything's changing at an accelerating rate, and we can risk running out naked and just with our joy, and just balance on our joy and let the wave take us for a ride. You're surfing. You are an example to the world of someone who is balanced in his joy. Except in relationships, but you'll get over that. Anyway.

Andrew Huberman:
It's taking some work. It's taking some work.

Dr. Martha Beck:
There's a woman hanging onto the end of your surfboard. It's not going to-- It's not going to-

Andrew Huberman:
Unfortunately, it's a lot more complicated than that. But I am seeing a portal toward, I guess, what you're calling true integrity, where in the back of my mind, I have this very vestigial understanding of what all of that relationship stuff actually looks like and feels like when it's right for me.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I just, I think it's not going to look like the way I try to script it out.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Do an ideal day with that relationship, and it could be the weirdest thing you've ever heard of. It will work, I promise you. I have a very weird relationship life.

Andrew Huberman:
That's reassuring to me.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I can't believe I'm going to say this on this podcast. So I have two partners.

Andrew Huberman:
Your partner's awesome. Oh, I meant, well, I just met-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... one of them. Yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
One was the very first relationship I ever had with a woman. That was 20-some years ago. And then I was living on my ranch and meditating all day, and my partner, Karen, came to me, and this Australian poet, Rowan, was staying on our ranch with some other people. And Karen sat me down. She said, "Marty, I have to tell you, I'm having very strong, I don't know, maybe maternal feelings toward Rowan." I was like, "No, they're not maternal. I'm not getting a maternal energy." And I got hit by this blast of joy, joy, joy. It was like that white light thing. It was like... And I said, "You're in love with her. This is amazing. Tell her to come in. I'll go to the guest room. You guys can have the..." I was just like happy, happy, happy. And I looked for jealousy, and I looked for-- I was like, "This isn't supposed to work this way." So Rowan came up, and we all sat around talking, and we sat around talking a lot more, and we all sat on the same couch talking, going, "This isn't weird, is it?" And after a couple of weeks, we realized everybody was in love with everybody, and we couldn't live without each other.

Andrew Huberman:
And so that's how you exist.

Dr. Martha Beck:
That was eight years ago, and we have a three-year-old named Lyla, who's delightful.

Andrew Huberman:
Awesome.

Dr. Martha Beck:
It is, we call it feeling good by looking weird. And you can cut it out of-

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, I love it

Dr. Martha Beck:
... the podcast if it's too-

Andrew Huberman:
No. We have no master, no overlords.

Dr. Martha Beck:
So-

Andrew Huberman:
Are you kidding me? What we're talking about here is love-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... first of all.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
Let's just be, of all the things to cut out of a podcast, we're not going to cut love out of a podcast.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, I'd love that about this podcast, because a lot of people would.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Well, not me. And for people that balk at that, or it creates internal friction in them, then I just invite you to visit your compassionate witness self, see if it's still there.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And if it's still there, then, hey. I actually believe that humans, partially based on developmental wiring, like experiences, but also just differences in wiring.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I just fundamentally believe in this.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
One of my closest friends, my third postdoc-- My third advisor, who was my postdoc advisor at Stanford-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... is now, unfortunately, he died of pancreatic cancer. It's the late Ben Barres. He was born an identical twin girl.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Wow.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay. Then went up through medical school, living as a woman.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Graduate school as a woman.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And then transitioned to Ben pretty late in life. So I only met Ben. Ben was a close friend, and then unfortunately, probably because he had the BRCA2 mutation-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh

Andrew Huberman:
... died of multiple cancers, but that initiated by pancreatic cancer. First transgender member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Wow.

Andrew Huberman:
I wrote his obituary for the journal Nature. We were very close.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Aw.

Andrew Huberman:
And just an amazing, very quirky dude. And didn't have a romantic partner, at least not at the time when he passed-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... or in the time that I knew him, to my knowledge.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And Ben used to say there are components of our wiring that are ubiquitous.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
The parts that control breathing.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
The parts that control heart.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And then there are parts of our wiring that are just different.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And to me, as a scientist, it makes perfect sense.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
The notion that any of that would be controversial-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... is like, what? It doesn't make any sense whatsoever that one would not believe that people have differences in wiring, because most people-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... want to believe in differences in wiring when it's convenient for-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... themselves. So I really appreciate that you're sharing this, and because yeah, every which version works. And I also learned from my graduate advisor, Barbara Chapman, she used to say, "Tolerance has to go both ways."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
So I also love and applaud the whatever traditional nuclear family-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Absolutely, yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... is it still called that?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Oh, my gosh.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
So anyway.

Dr. Martha Beck:
But I would love you to really sit down, get incredibly authentic with yourself, and say, "Honestly, if I had the perfect romantic life, what would it look like?" And be what you will call very selfish. What I would call very much in your integrity. Don't tell yourself any lies about what you really want.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah, it's very strange, but both Karen and I felt like there was a tremendous absence in a couple of years before Roe came into our life, and it's like we're a three-legged stool. Two-legged stools do not make sense to us. They fall down.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Whatever comes into your vision of joy, whatever makes you feel free, write it down, and read it often. And when you get into a relationship, read it even more often.

Andrew Huberman:
Maybe have the other person read it.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And let the other person read it.

Andrew Huberman:
Totally. That would be-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
That I can do. As difficult as it is to have certain conversations, I could certainly write things down and just slide an envelope.

Dr. Martha Beck:
It's like a pre-nup.

Andrew Huberman:
Totally, like-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Here's what I'm after. Don't let me do the things in column B. It won't end well.

Andrew Huberman:
I love it, and I really appreciate that you shared that, and I know people listening will as well.

Dr. Martha Beck:
I hope so. And if not, I read a book by Samantha Irby, wonderful comedian, and she says, "Here's what you say when people tell you that you're horrible, and you're doing something awful. You say, 'I like it.'"

Andrew Huberman:
Love it.

Dr. Martha Beck:
That's it.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, one of the reasons I oriented very young towards, and still love, punk rock music-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... that genre, is because to me, I could be wrong, maybe classical music being an exception, but to me-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... it's the only genre of music where all the versions of self and emotions-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... are welcome. There's angry music.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
There's political music. There's sad music. There's music about friendship and camaraderie, about loss.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And you look at the community, I'm really into this stuff, so-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... look at the community, like my good friend Tim Armstrong has created around certain bands. He's going to be on the Mount Rushmore of punk rock, or the great Joe Strummer from The Clash.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Political music.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Or Laura Jane Grace, one of the first outwardly facing transgendered people in the punk rock community, and does amazing music. Well, it was Against Me!, and then Laura Jane Grace, I'm like, she's a hero of mine. One of my short list of heroes. I love what she's done at so many levels. And it's like there's this tapestry of all the different humans and human experiences in a kind of single genre.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I don't know much about other genres of music, but I don't see that.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I don't see that.

Dr. Martha Beck:
You're right.

Andrew Huberman:
Maybe across the totality of rock and roll or whatever, but if ever there was a sector of life that's all-inclusive-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... it's that. But not because it's loud, it's fast, and it's anti. It's like so much of it is pro-social.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Right?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So I think there's a big misunderstanding around that. So that ethos is something that's always resonated, and I feel the same way about relationships.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Or on social media, one of the reasons I can go on social media and not have it spike my cortisol constantly- ... is I'm there and I'm like, okay, there's some mentally healthy people here.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
Some mentally unhealthy people here. People are here to fight. People are here to love. People are here to find partners. People are here to flirt. And you know what? People are here to attack me, cool, I'm glad I'm giving you a purpose for your morning. That kind of thing. I try and just approach it all that way, where you just made all of this very clear in a much more succinct way, where you just said, "Great, I like it."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. I like it.

Andrew Huberman:
It's awesome. Yeah, yours with a real genuine sense of joy.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. And I am-

Andrew Huberman:
Like no, "Well, I like it." There's no friction in that statement. It's just, "I like it."

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. I really like it. I like a lot.

Andrew Huberman:
I love that you like it a lot and that you can say it that way.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Who can't? If it's all love, you can outlove almost anything. You're furious at me? I like it. I just outloved you. And I think that's why Jesus said, "Charity never faileth." It's not that you're going to win everything if you are a loving person, it's that no matter what happens, it's like that self, your suffering, your pain, your codependency, whatever, it loves it all. Bring it. It loves it all. And that means that no matter what you come at me with, I can hold that in a field of love, and my experience is love.

Andrew Huberman:
What was the quote from Jesus?

Dr. Martha Beck:
I don't know if it's from Jesus, but I think it's in Paul, says, "Charity never faileth." Love never fails.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And it's because I can say, "I hate myself." Yes, but I love the part of me that hates myself. Just outloved you.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, of course, the answer's going to be yes. I was going to ask, were you always like this? Meaning that you could hold this position on the balance beam, and then I feel like you've taken this balance beam and created this big mesa for-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... others to stand on. Because it's a really stable place to be once you're there.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
But getting to this place of essential self and the path to integrity, can I just say it the way I feel it?

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's fucking difficult.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah. I was about to use that same word. I think in order to become stable, I always say that the raw material for any good experience is its opposite. So I was messed-- I was F'd up beyond belief. There's SNAFU, these are both military terms. SNAFU means situation normal, all fucked up. FUBAR means fucked up beyond all recognition. I was FUBAR. Now I occasionally get SNAFU. But I was so FUBAR that the suffering was so intense that when I learned to come home, the contrast was very sharp and I never ever want to leave the consciousness that that light is always with us, and we can feel it if we're honest. And that's all we have to do, be honest, and there it is. Boom. It's Godess.

Andrew Huberman:
I feel like it starts with the scope of self, like we have to do this for ourselves before we can do this with-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and for other people.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And then at some point, the fantasy in my mind, it sounds like my mother. My mother, from the youngest age I can remember in myself, was talking about trying to heal the world.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I've seen the toll it's taken on her. She'll call sometimes, and I'll be like, "How's it going?" And something will have happened in the news. I can just tell it really wears on her.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And it's hard for me to hear and see, because I feel it, too. It's like, goodness. Do you feel like there's hope for our species? I'm trying to not throw the whole problems of the world at you, but-

Dr. Martha Beck:
No, I've been thinking about it

Andrew Huberman:
... I'm almost 50. I feel like at this point, I've seen enough to be like, there's so much goodness in people.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But there's also the capacity for so much-

Dr. Martha Beck:
So much

Andrew Huberman:
... misunderstanding, bad. You got the developmental wiring. You got the hurt people hurt people.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Everyone's doing the best they can.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Everyone wants safety and acceptance, and they're just trying to find it this way.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And then there are your truly bad actors because they're either-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... miswired or whatever-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... and they're creating havoc. Is there any real hope for a different version of things that's persistent?

Dr. Martha Beck:
The first time I remember worrying about this, I was four.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, Jesus.

Dr. Martha Beck:
And I'm 10 years older than you are, but I knew at four that I was here to try to help with something. And as I grew up, it just wouldn't go away, this feeling that I was supposed to help with something. And in my teens, it became, I need to help change the way people think. I don't know. And then I started noticing other people who seemed to be like me, and I would be like, "I think they're on the same team I'm on." And I was like, "What team? What am I talking about?" And it all came to a head when I was in South Africa in the wilderness, and I had a dream that my ancestors were coming to visit me, and I thought it was funny, so I told it to some friends from the Shangaan tribe, who reacted like this, and then they ran. And I was like, "What did I do wrong?" And later that night, we're all sitting around the fire. There are lions roaring. They bring this little woman from Mozambique, and she's a sangoma, she's a shaman. And she did her divinatory system, which is she threw the bones for me, because if you had dream I had, you have to see a sangoma right away or bad things will happen. So she said stuff about me that was true, but she could've Googled it. And it was weird when she looked at me, I felt like these ice needles going through me. It was not cute, but it was very intense. And what she said was, "There are people being born to be healers all over the world, just like there are in the traditional tribes. You need to go find them and tell them what they're here to do. They're here to heal the world, and they need the wisdom that the traditional people had, and they need their technology." And it was so interesting because she acted very frightened and confused by what she was saying to me. She had to get a group of people behind her who would chant, "We agree, we agree," because she was freaked out. But I think that in every traditional group of 100 to 150 people, there were a few healers that were recognized by the elders as people who were highly sensitive. They were interested in nature and science. They were interested in animals. They were interested in the mystery. They were interested in the arts. They were performers, but they were also very introverted and thinky. It's an archetype of healing, of medicine person. The coaches I coach, I call it wayfinders, which is a term from an anthropologist. If you're born in that archetype, if you have that phenotype, I believe it's a phenotype, and I believe it crops up in every 100 to 150 people several times, and our culture has no word for it and no path for it. But if we are going to save the world, we will draw on whatever was born into us that makes us want to heal things, and we will use the technologies we've developed, and we will use our joy and our refusal to participate in the nonsense of our culture, and we will hold firm, and we will try to change the way humanity lives on this planet. And I don't know which way it's going to go, but I'm in the game, and I think you are, too.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I have a feeling I am, too. And I'm certain that I'm in it thanks to you.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Aw.

Andrew Huberman:
And seriously, in large part. I told the story earlier that the path I'm on and the fact that anyone's listening to this and watching it is the consequence of having read your books and-

Dr. Martha Beck:
Aw

Andrew Huberman:
... done the exercises and will continue to do them. So I must say, there really aren't words to express how much this means to me that you would come here, take the time to share with us your wisdom, and to delve into some topics that are of particular interest to me, because I, like everyone else, am a work in progress who's curious about the best ways to move forward. And every time you speak, and just when you show up someplace, it's an incredible thing. Everybody learns, everybody gets better, and everyone walks away with tools and empowerment.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Aw.

Andrew Huberman:
And I just want to say thank you so much. There's really not a whole lot else.

Dr. Martha Beck:
Same to you. You're just looking in the mirror. Thank you.

Andrew Huberman:
Thank you. That might be the only podcast to ever end in tears. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Martha Beck. I hope you found it to be as informative and as meaningful as I did. To learn more about her work and to find links to her many excellent books, please see the links in the 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. In addition, please be sure to follow the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can 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 consider for the Huberman Lab Podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body." This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body." If you're not already following me on social media, I am hubermanlab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, Twitter, now known as X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlap with the contents of the Huberman Lab Podcast, but much of which is distinct from the contents of the Huberman Lab Podcast. Again, that's hubermanlab on all social media platforms. If you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, our Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes what we call protocols, which are brief one to three-page PDFs that cover things such as neuroplasticity and learning, dopamine optimization, how to get better sleep, things like deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol. We have a protocol all about habit-forming and much more. To sign up, again, at completely zero cost, you simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu function in the corner, scroll down to Newsletter, and you provide your email. 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. Martha Beck. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.