Unlearn Negative Thoughts & Behaviors Patterns | Dr. Alok Kanojia

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Everyone's focused on changing behavior. Everyone's focused on increasing willpower to overcome this tendency. And it's like, why not just change the tendency? That sounds so simple, but that's literally what we do in psychotherapy every day when we come in and someone has a narcissistic personality disorder. This is personality. This is who they are. And we can psychotherapize them to be someone else, for their natural thoughts to change, for the way that they see the world to change, for their behaviors to change on its own. Willpower is necessary when you are trying to not be narcissistic. It is not necessary when you are no longer narcissistic. So we've done it in psychotherapy. We know that if your self-esteem changes, if your sense of being changes, treatment-refractory depression will change. Trauma, PTSD will change.

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. Alok Kanojia, also known as Dr. K. Dr. K is a psychiatrist and online mental health educator. He has a very unique background, having trained and earned his medical degree in the United States, but also having studied as a monk for seven years. Today, we discuss powerful tools for increasing your self-understanding and mental health, and for rewiring your nervous system, specifically how you can unlearn unhealthy thought patterns and behaviors and replace them with ones that truly serve you and those around you. Much of today's discussion centers around differences between Eastern and Western concepts of things like the ego and what makes up our self-concept. That portion of the conversation will no doubt have you rethinking why you do what you do in virtually everything, and he provides a roadmap for clearly defining your best goals and for increasing things like your energy and drive, not through hacks, but by tapping into deep intrinsic motivation. In fact, throughout today's episode, Dr. K explains specific practices that you can use to help rewire your nervous system, resolve traumas, and come to a much clearer understanding of how best to apply your efforts in work, school, and relationships. We also discuss social media, dating and relationships, addiction, and pornography. So there are a lot of topics covered. And I have to say, this is a conversation unlike any other that I've had on or off the podcast. Dr. K offers a completely new perspective on how to resolve common struggles that we all face. And in doing so, he offers a lot of practical tools. So this should be a very valuable conversation for anyone wishing to better understand themselves at the theoretical and psychological level, but also who wishes to implement specific tools to improve some or all aspects of their 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, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Alok Kanojia. Dr. K, welcome.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Andrew Huberman, thank you for having me.

Andrew Huberman:
So interested in you and the knowledge you hold. Today, we're going to talk about a number of things. Ayurveda and East-West medicine, motivation, and dopamine, but I want to start with the internet.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
You had an interesting upbringing, so very different than mine, not just because of our age difference, but you grew up on the internet.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And so you really have an empathy for people on the internet, on social media. Now everyone's on the internet. What was it that drew you to screens and that interface with such a degree of magnetism?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
I was a gifted kid growing up, and I think that one of the things that we don't really appreciate is how school moves at the pace of the slowest kid. So school was incredibly boring for me. And then I was also young, so I was a year ahead. And so I was early on when I was a five-year-old in first grade and I was competing against seven-year-olds on the playground or in gym class. I sucked at sports. So the one thing that I really got addicted to was this idea of a computer game where when you beat level one, level two is there. And then if you beat level two, level three is there. If you fail at level three, you get to try level three again. So it was the only activity that was cognitively to my pacing. And so that really drew me in. And I didn't realize that until years later. My parents were big fans of putting us into school young, and if you can skip grades, that's great, because life is a race, and the faster you finish, the better things are. But I didn't realize how developmentally challenging it is to be a five-year-old or a six-year-old in school with seven-year-olds or eight-year-olds. So I think that's what originally drew me in.

Andrew Huberman:
If you don't mind me asking, so you were first-generation immigrant-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... parents from India?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
I grew up in the South Bay in Palo Alto, so I'm familiar with intense academic environments.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Sure, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Increasingly so in the last 10, 20 years. But even when I was there, it was intense. Did you feel that as pressure?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Absolutely. My earliest memories are of my grandmother telling me I'm going to make a great doctor one day. And when I was 15 years old, people would ask me, I'd go to a party with my parents and their friends, and people would ask me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And so I was like, "I'm going to be a doctor." And everyone's like, "Wow, impressive." So my 15-year-old brain was looking at this amazing idea of what a doctor was. And both my parents are doctors. My dad was an amazing doctor. I suppose my mom is, too, but my dad was one of the seminal researchers in graft versus host disease. It's how he landed his job at MD Anderson. So he came from India and was an oncologist. And so I also remember back then, I think there wasn't even a HIPAA law. So he would have patients over to our house and stuff like that. He would throw a Thanksgiving party every year where he would invite all of his patients, all cancer survivors, and things like that. And so my dad was really like a mythical figure, incredibly charismatic. And so I was like, "Oh, yeah, I'm going to be that." And so it became a huge part of my ego, and then it turns out that ego is not a great way to motivate-- Well, it can be a great way to motivate yourself. But then I ran into trouble when I hit college because I had never learned how to study. So either I absorbed everything and did well on the test, so I went straight from A's to F's, and then got addicted to video games, failed out of college. But your original question was-

Andrew Huberman:
Sure

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
... was I into computers and why, and that probably has something to do with it.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, it sounds like you were so into computers you eventually went over the cliff of computers with this addiction. But I want to talk about the addiction, but I think this is a perfect frame, and maybe we'll jump back and forth as we move forward. This is a perfect frame for what I have heard and wonder about a lot, which is I'm Gen X.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
You're a millennial.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I'm told that the generations right behind Gen X perhaps had more love and encouragement to feel their feelings, notions of what trauma and addiction were, but maybe that there wasn't this universally high standards set for all of them. That's the narrative that you see in the news right now. Oh, this coddled generation, et cetera. You had high standards set for you. When you look out on your peers and you look out on the internet for millennials and younger, do you think that we can make a general statement about, oh, yeah, all this appreciation and understanding about what addiction and trauma and feelings are, that just was foreign to my generation, frankly, that it helped or hurt to have this awareness of self and what one needs and all of that? Do you think it helped or it hurt development?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Well, so Andrew, I'm delighted to be speaking to a scientist because I think it helped and hurt, right? So this is, as you know, things are multifactorial. It's rarely one thing or another thing. So I think a lot of people picked up ground with awareness of feelings. As a psychiatrist, I work with people who were unaware of the family dynamics going on in their life, in their household, unaware of their emotions, growing up with things like avoidant attachment and having difficulty forming connections. So I think it is always good to be more aware. I think actually awareness is probably the single factor that correlates the most with success and happiness. The challenge, the really subtle thing is that talking about emotions isn't the same as actually being aware of them. So I think what's started to happen is a lot of this dialogue around trauma, a lot of this dialogue around feelings, has actually been hijacked in very subtle ways by other parts of our mind, other parts like, for example, our ego. And so it's kind of like this therapy speak has like-- And this happens. So you can look at any population, and if you have someone who's sociopathic, or if you have someone who's histrionic or narcissistic, and everyone is talking feelings, they will do that too, but in a sociopathic way. Feelings have now started to be used as a form of manipulation, right? So people will use, like I see this all the time, speaking of the internet in its modern incarnation. We all talk about boundaries, but people have started to use boundaries as a form of control for other human beings. My boundary is that you don't text anyone after 8:00 PM. My boundary is that every time I call you, you need to answer the phone. So it's really bizarre how the basic psychological stuff can hijack. Our psychological patterns can hijack all this mental health speak. Another really good example of this is, so I remember I was seeing an assault victim in the emergency room at Mass General Hospital many years ago. And so the MIT chief of campus security was there. And so I was talking to them a little bit about, because there were other students with the student who had been assaulted, and they were kind of talking to me about safety, and I remember something that the MIT chief told me that I've never forgotten. We were talking about safety, and he's like, "My job is not to make people feel safe. My job is to make people safe." And there's actually a big difference. And so something interesting has happened. We have all become more narcissistic because that's what the internet does to us. And so now if I am hurt, that is no longer my responsibility. That is because you did something wrong. Does that make sense?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Fundamentally, if I feel hurt, that is oftentimes tied to you doing something wrong. So there's this tendency towards victimization, where you'll see even people who are playing the victim card, which doesn't mean that we shouldn't be believing victims. I think that's exactly what happens is we started to realize that we're not taking victims seriously, but then all the chameleons in our society were looking at this pattern, and they were realizing, okay, the fastest way for me to get ahead is to claim to be a victim. So there are all kinds of weird permutations that are happening right now with this sort of emphasis on feeling. One more evidence-based example of this is we're seeing the prevalence of mood disorders, anxiety disorders, addictions, body dysmorphia. Basically, everything is getting worse. And so one weird thing that's started to happen is as we've talked more about feelings- There is something called a transdiagnostic factor, which we can get into. I don't know if you're familiar with these or not. But if you look at all of the mental illnesses, there are certain attributes that are a risk factor for multiple mental illnesses. So a good example of transdiagnostic factors are perfectionism and rumination. So rumination doesn't make you depressed, doesn't necessarily make you anxious, but if you have a high index of rumination, you are more likely to have a major depressive disorder, you're more likely to have an anxiety disorder. Does that make sense?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
If you are perfectionistic, you are more likely to be depressed, you are more likely to be anxious. So there's one interesting transdiagnostic factor which has gotten way worse, which is something called distress tolerance. So human beings' capacity to sit with things and tolerate things that they do not find comfortable is starting to tank. And as that starts to tank, we're seeing just an explosion of mental illness.

Andrew Huberman:
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Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And so I think this notion of distress tolerance, like what are the standards for distress tolerance, for performance, for being a "functional member of society" while also "honoring one's feelings" about feeling one's feelings. There's no roadmap, I believe, to how to navigate that.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
What you said, there is no roadmap. That happens to be true, and it happens to be wrong. So I know that's confusing, so let me explain. So here's the first thing to understand. The way that we collect information, this is why I love being a clinician. So you talked about "The Last Lecture." So this person was saying if people don't push you, that means that they don't care about you, they're not invested in you. The moment that you give up on someone is the moment that you stop pushing them, right? Makes perfect sense. And then there are also people who've been pushed to the point where they crack under pressure. That's actually way more common. And so generally speaking, pressure, just like any other part of biology, if I exert pressure on some joint, on some part of soft tissue, will develop a callus. It'll become tough So this is where the reason there's no roadmap is because people aren't the same. Right? So we all have unique genetics, we all have unique experiences, we all have a unique internal dialogue. And so the whole point of personality, and we can define personality by the technical terms, which is it is the way that you interpret information, the way you perceive the world, your internal reactions, and the behaviors that you engage in. So you can take literally two different human beings in the exact same situation. I've worked with a couple of survivors of genocidal conflicts, and the really interesting thing about that is not everybody gets PTSD, which is really weird, right? If you think about it, this is a genocidal conflict. So we have tons of people who all experience the same thing, but their reactions to them are really different. That's what's fun about being a clinician. What I try to focus on and what I learned, I looked for a roadmap and what I found is that there's not a roadmap. There are thousands of roadmaps. And those roadmaps come down to, and this is, I think, a huge problem in the information-based world we live in. So everyone has problems, right? And they're looking for solutions, which is great. The biggest mistake that I see people make, especially high performers, is a problem of misdiagnosis. So a really good example of this, I had a patient come into my office, worked in finance, was at a very successful firm, came in and was like: "I have really bad anxiety. It's really starting. I can't eat. I can't sleep. My wife is really worried about me." So he's like: "I've got really bad anxiety." So we start talking about it, and he's like: "I'm afraid I'm going to get fired." And we work together for about 12 months, and then he realizes this environment is not where he's happy. And the reason he's going to get fired is because he doesn't fit in, and he decides to quit. So what's really interesting is if we'd made his anxiety go away, he would have perpetuated in an unhealthy system. And this is the thing that I think we forget when we're talking about our emotions. Andrew, which part of the brain does anxiety come from?

Andrew Huberman:
It's a circuit-wide phenomenon.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Sure. How is it taught? If you had to teach someone who's taking an undergraduate neuroscience class, and maybe you wouldn't teach it this way, but if you had to localize it to somewhere, where would you localize it to?

Andrew Huberman:
To one structure?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah, one-

Andrew Huberman:
Everyone would say amygdala.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
I know.

Andrew Huberman:
I teach neuroanatomy to medical students, so.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Or I did until very recently.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So I'm totally with the-

Andrew Huberman:
Limbic system

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
... limbic system as a whole, right? But the amygdala.

Andrew Huberman:
Sure.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And the really interesting thing is crocodiles have amygdalas.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right? So we sometimes forget that these negative emotions are actually really important for us. They're really healthy for us. One other really interesting example of this is, I work with a lot of gamers on the internet, so sometimes they'll try to engage in mating behaviors and they'll creep people out. And one of the really interesting things that I realized is embarrassment is the best way to not creep someone out. So if I violate one of your boundaries, and then I express embarrassment, that signals to you that I realize I did something wrong. So if I violate one of your boundaries and then I express embarrassment, that's a really important empathic signal. And now we have all of this content on the internet telling people to be relentlessly confident. And when they become relentlessly confident, they no longer express embarrassment. Embarrassment is a really important signal to send.

Andrew Huberman:
In the example you gave, it's very clear that somebody violated somebody's boundary. They felt embarrassment. Showing that embarrassment shows that they have some sort of empathic attunement or awareness-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... that makes them perhaps a little less creepy and a little bit safer.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
As opposed to if they just kept-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Exactly

Andrew Huberman:
... going forward, right? However, if it was a bit vague, let's say that they did something, a flirtation, and it wasn't really clear what it was, and the other person said, "Hey, that doesn't feel good to me," and then they acted very embarrassed, then the person who said it didn't feel good to them would quite understandably think, "Oh, it must have been really bad." Right? Oftentimes, the dynamics are subtle, where people don't really know how they should feel about something. At the extremes, we know.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So I'm going to reverse Russian doll us because I was all over the place. So you asked about a roadmap.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Then I gave the example of anxiety.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Then I gave the example of embarrassment as another emotion that's helpful. And now you're asking a question, so we're going to do it in reverse order.

Andrew Huberman:
Sure.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
But I want to get back to that roadmap because I think it's a beautiful question.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm. I wrote it down. We haven't forgotten.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Great. Let's talk about the ambiguous interactions. This is fascinating. So I saw a really cool study where when two people are flirting, and that's taped, and a neutral observer is watching it, they accurately detect flirting only about 30% of the time. Different studies show 24% to 42%. You're saying ambiguity is a problem. No, ambiguity is exactly what's supposed to happen. So if you think about what flirting is, flirting is a way to preserve plausible deniability. It's a way to make you feel safe, right? So if I am really interested, "Andrew, I'm really interested in your body, bro." But if I say that, unless you are matching that energy, it's not going to be safe. It's not going to be good. It'll ruin our relationship. So flirting, by nature, is supposed to be missed. So this is another thing where you're saying, like, yes, there's ambiguity. It could be interpreted this way, and it could be interpreted this way. That's not bad. That's good. That's how human beings actually interact. So Winnicott described this beautifully because flirting is a form of play. That's literally what it is. And play is about a potential space.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
When I'm playing dolls with my daughter, it's not defined, and the whole point is for it to be not defined. So in that absence of definition, which now everyone is sort of like we're seeing a social skills atrophy. So, you know the parts of our brain that interpret tone, body language, things like that, like people are becoming like we're seeing a rise of like ADHD, and everyone also feels subjectively like they're autistic. It's because they're losing some degree of social skills because we text back and forth. And our brains don't, our occipital cortex is not interpreting visual information of people's facial expressions. So that part of our brain like literally kind of shuts off. So people are having a lot of difficulty with ambiguity. People are saying like, "Oh, this person is sending mixed signals." Like, that's the point. In a relationship, you are going to have mixed signals. In a friendship, you will have mixed signals. We all have ambivalence within us. I want to eat a healthy lean protein during lunch, and I also want to eat a fried protein during lunch, right? So ambiguity is actually not something to be avoided. The really interesting thing, another transdiagnostic factor, really important one, the intolerance of uncertainty. So human beings who are capable of tolerating uncertainty, better mental health outcomes, more resilient, improved quality of life, right? So everyone needs defined answers. So I'll pause there for a moment just to address your flirtation example, but you're spot on. We can tell what the signals are at either end. The point of human interaction is that way we can adapt to each other. You know, if I put my arm around you, then how do you respond to that? Do you get up and go to the bathroom, or do you lean in? So these are how human interactions actually happen. There's a lot of back and forth.

Andrew Huberman:
Fascinating. A lot of younger guys talk to me about their challenges in the dating scene.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah, right.

Andrew Huberman:
And one of the things that they seem very challenged with is the fact that they feel like whatever happens on a date is shared on the internet.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And this is, of course, not related to assault or them acting highly inappropriate or, you know, this is really like they're reported as a good or bad kisser. They're reported as a-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... they pay or they don't pay. And so I think the room to explore ambiguity, to them, this is what I hear, feels very dangerous. It feels like a slippery slope-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... where they have to perform perfectly on every measure. And I'm sure women feel the same way, right? I just hear from more men.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. It's very tricky. So I think what we're seeing in the dating world and I guess this is what we're talking about, maybe it's top of mind for me because I just did a bunch of content on it. But, so what's interesting in the dating world is that now we're sort of adding the internet to the equation, right, which you'd sort of talked about. So let's just understand a couple of things about the internet. So the first is what the internet, in my opinion, this is sort of like a clinician's perspective, having read about 200 papers on various aspects of how the internet affects our brains and our psychology. First thing to understand is that the internet selects for emotional activation. It's not even dopamine, in my opinion. So if you look at like internet, right, so it's not just fun and games. Actually, the most engaging content is emotionally engaging.

Andrew Huberman:
Arousal.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Arousal. Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
Adrenaline.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And then the other interesting thing is that in order to maintain arousal, you need a dichotomy of emotions.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So I need to scare you, and then I need to make you angry, and then I need to show you a cat video, and then I need to scare you again, and then I need to tell you how AI's going to steal your job, and then I want to show you this birthday party where this baby did the cutest thing. So this is literally how they maintain engagement. And so what's really interesting about this is as our emotion, as our limbic system is like hyperactive over and over and over again, that's one of the biggest cognitive drains that we have. So like I think the top three cognitive things that drain our willpower the most, suppressing emotion, repressing emotion, even just feeling emotion is like very exhausting. The internet is selecting for the most emotionally activating things. So which tweets get engaged with? The ones that are the most polarizing. So then what happens is people are dating, and now you've got a problem because, and here's the real tragedy, is people will have a perception that if I don't say the right thing, this will get posted online. That is not what happens most of the time, right? But this is where we as human beings have certain cognitive biases where the extreme example, like we get trained in this in medical school is, once you miss a cancer diagnosis once, it doesn't mean that every patient after that has cancer. But that's what the brain is designed to do. Our brain is designed for survival, which means that if we get food poisoning from a restaurant even once, our brain doesn't look at that probabilistically. It takes the worst examples, and that's what we have to base our behavior on, right? Like if I'm at work and I want to, if I'm attracted to a coworker, even though there's a 90% chance that if I express some romantic interest in them, I'm going to be fine, I can't make a strategy based on that. I have to base my strategy on the worst possible outcome. That's what we're seeing in dating.

Andrew Huberman:
You said that suppressing emotion is cognitively draining. Did I also understand correctly that being in constant arousal through different emotions is also cognitively draining?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
I don't know if I would use the word cognitive there, but it's absolutely draining, right? So periods of extended arousal, and this is where like when I mean cognitive draining, I'm referring to a paper that's looking at the anterior cingulate cortex.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So, and that's where when the anterior cingulate cortex and your frontal lobes are suppressing your limbic system, that's very draining But I think high levels of arousal, through the reticular activating formation and things like that, just being on emotionally, hyperactivation of your limbic system is absolutely exhausting, is the word that I would use.

Andrew Huberman:
You mentioned distress tolerance is a valuable skill to have. It feels appropriate to say, okay, distress tolerance, I totally agree. Great to be able to tolerate distress to a point, but that sounds like it's very cognitively and generally draining. So how would you encourage someone to develop healthy levels of distress tolerance? But if that involves constant suppression of an impulse to shout, to react, that sounds like it could get very unhealthy. So I realize we're sort of staying on this tangent, but I feel like what defines healthy distress tolerance if pushing back an emotional reaction or pushing down an emotional reaction is not good for us?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So distress tolerance doesn't only include emotional suppression. Right? So what's really interesting about distress tolerance is a key feature of distress tolerance is not even suppressing, is the opposite, is accepting your emotions. It's actually moving in the opposite direction.

Andrew Huberman:
Feeling your feelings.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Feeling your feelings. Right? Recognizing that you feel your feelings.

Andrew Huberman:
What if somebody feels extremely angry, and they want to feel their feelings? What is a healthy way for them to do that?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Three things.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay, so if you want to learn how to control your emotions, you want to be tranquil in the face of your emotions is what I would say. Three things you can do. The first thing is putting words to your emotion.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So right now, I don't know if this kind of makes sense. The more angry you are, right, the more your amygdala is hyperactive. It is drowning out every other part of your brain.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So the first thing that you have to do is put words to it. And when you put words to it, you can't put words to, "Ah." There's no word there. So the moment that you try to put words to it, it has to calm down.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
In order for your linguistic centers, Broca's area, and all these, in order for them to articulate it, you have to understand it. So Freud understood this over 100 years ago, and there's something powerful about processing emotions by putting them into words. In order to put words to it, we have to tone it down some.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So that's the first thing. The problem is that people oftentimes think that that is sufficient. Right? So people will say, "Journal. Go see a therapist and talk about your feelings." Man, the number of times that I've had-- I had this patient who came in, if I can tell a story.

Andrew Huberman:
Please.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And so I was a third-year resident. I had done maybe 100 hours, 200 hours of psychotherapy. So I had a guy come in. He'd been in the clinic for eight years, had depression, was a dude in his 40s. He came in, and he would tell me about why he was sad every day. Every week he'd come in, he's like, "I got written up at work. People are complaining because I snapped at them. One of the patients is complaining because I didn't give him benzos." And so he'd come in every week. He'd talk about why he was depressed. I'd be like, "Why are you depressed, bro?" And he'd tell me some story about something bad that happened in his life. And then we did this for six months, and I didn't know, because I'm learning psychotherapy, right? So I'm like, "I'm supposed to be supportive, and I'm supposed to be like, 'Okay, that must be hard for you. How does that make you feel? That must be so hard for you. How does that make you feel? That must be so hard for you.'" We do this dance for six months. And then one day he comes in, and I'm kind of getting frustrated, and I'm like, "Hey, is this helping?" And he's like, "What do you mean, is it helping?" I'm like, "Is it helping? Do you feel any better than when you came in six months ago?" And he's like, "I thought this was what we're supposed to do. I'm just supposed to come in every week. I tell you about how I'm sad, and then you tell me it must be-- Isn't that what psychotherapy is?" And it was a huge light bulb moment for me because talking about your feelings, especially for men, is not enough much of the time. Fascinating neuroscience and endocrinology behind that. Putting words to it is just step one. Second thing, this is a really important skill, cultivating additional emotions. So if you look at people who are resilient, if you tunnel down into the internal dialogue of people who are resilient, you'll notice that they do something else, some interesting things. So my patients who are very severely ill, right, and literally what I try to do with them over the course of weeks is this thing happened, and I feel overwhelming shame. The moment that you start cultivating additional emotions. So I've been dumped by my boyfriend or my girlfriend. I'm really, really depressed. I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life. They start to catastrophize. They have a lot of negative emotion. And it's really easy in that moment to forget that, okay, I had three years of wonderful experiences with this person before things went downhill. It's really easy to forget all of the positives. It's really easy to realize that three years of experience followed by, let's say, one year of a toxic relationship is going to actually protect you from the next toxic relationship. So cultivating additional emotions is a huge fundamental part of EQ, and you don't just have to tolerate it or suppress it. These are the additional things that you can do. And this is really important. It's not just cultivating positive emotions when you're feeling negative emotions. It's the other way around as well. I've seen more relationships ruined by falling in love than anything else, and you just fall in love with the wrong person. You're in a relationship, and you fall in love with somebody else. So many people I've worked with, "I have this great business idea, and I get so excited about it, and I'm going to start this AI company." That's the time that you actually want to cultivate negative emotion. Cultivate a little bit of anxiety. What could go wrong? Make sure you ask yourself that question. Literally, in addiction psychiatry, we have a cool technique that we use with people where it doesn't really work so much anymore, but we tell people to play the tape through to the end. You're really excited right now, and you want to do this thing, but Play the tape through to the end. What are all of the negative things that could happen? So that cognitive flexibility, that emotional flexibility is really important. We have to understand what emotions are. So a lot of times, this is going around on the internet where feel your feelings, right? I'm just going to be authentic with my feelings today, which means that you're an asshole, Andrew, and this is my truth, right? So we've started speaking our truths as excuses to being assholes. That's what's happening on the internet. It's what's happening in real relationships because people are watching social media and they're like, "I should speak my truth," right? So the other thing that's really important is to understand that an emotion is not a behavior. An emotion is literally, from an evolutionary perspective, and you may know this better than I do, is information and is motivation. That's what emotions are for. So when you feel fear, when you're walking outside, walking to the outhouse in the middle of the night, and you feel fear, all this sensory input is being processed in parts of your brain that you have no conscious awareness of. The first thing that happens is that you feel emotion before you have any logical idea of what are you even scared of. That is your brain telling you something. The other thing is it's motivation, right? I feel like running away. And this is where, unfortunately, our brain evolved for a world that we don't live in anymore. So, back when I used to feel fear because I was being hunted by a tiger, the natural impulses that our fear encourage us to do don't work when you've got to pay rent at the end of the month, or you've got to pay your mortgage, or you've got to do well on your performance review. So oftentimes, what we do is we think that feeling authentically means letting our emotion run the show. We don't want to do that. We want to ask ourselves, "What is this emotion telling me? Why do I feel fear? What am I afraid of?" And I don't even think what am I afraid of is the right question. It's way too self-help.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
It's way too psychotherapy for me. It's what is my fear telling me?

Andrew Huberman:
What is the information and motivation that it's signaling?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. And then what is it telling me to do, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Like your client who was feeling very anxious all the time, by exploring that emotion, eventually it sounds like came to the understanding that it wasn't the job for him.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Perfect, right? And so he's trying so hard, right? So the anxiety is clinging onto his job, but actually once you understand the emotion, it's actually walking away.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And so once you have mastery over your emotions in this way, and I think mastery is maybe a better word, it makes life so much better, right? When we talk about distress tolerance, that's what I'm talking about. It's not just suppression.

Andrew Huberman:
Wonderful. I so appreciate your answer, the thoroughness of it, the clarity of it. Distress tolerance is putting words to emotion, adding additional language to it, and exploring the reverse context as well, the negative aspects of positive emotions-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah, absolutely

Andrew Huberman:
... the positive aspects. So it sounds like it's broadening the time domain, thinking about this in going forward, what does this represent in the past, present, and future, and then really thinking about what the emotion is signaling. What a beautiful description of distress tolerance, because it's also operational. People can put this to work. Thank you. That's fantastic. If you're a regular listener of the Huberman Lab podcast, you've no doubt heard me talk about the vitamin mineral probiotic drink AG1. And if you've been on the fence about it, now's an awesome time to give it a try. For the next few weeks, AG1 is giving away a full supplement package with your first subscription to AG1. They're giving away a free bottle of vitamin D3+K2, a bottle of omega-3 fish oil capsules, and a sample pack of the new sleep formula, AGZ, which by the way, is now the only sleep supplement I take. It's fantastic. My sleep on AGZ is out of this world good. AGZ is a drink, so it eliminates the need to take a lot of pills. It tastes great, and like I said, it has me sleeping incredibly well, waking up more refreshed than ever. I absolutely love it. Again, this is a limited time offer, so make sure to go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get started today. The roadmap. If we could go back to the roadmap-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... if you could spell out for us what do you think of as the roadmap to navigate this very complex landscape that we exist in now?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
And this could be relationship with this person. It could be a doctor, go to an Ivy League school versus be an artist or any number of different examples where we have to make the distinction of what's wished for us and expected of us versus what is true to us on the inside.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
That seems to be, to me, where the-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay

Andrew Huberman:
... where the friction of life exists.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
That, to me, is the most interesting question in life, frankly.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Let me just make sure I understand your question. The friction and joy of life is the rest of the world wants me to do all of these things, and sometimes this doesn't want to do those things. Sometimes it does want to do those things. When do I listen to this, and when do I listen to everything that?

Andrew Huberman:
Yes.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right? Okay, beautiful question. So this is where I'm going to lean into the Eastern stuff for a second. So I spent seven years studying to become a monk, and then I went to medical school, and I became a psychiatrist, and I had a really weird experience of training in psychiatry because everyone was teaching me how the mind works, okay? And this is good teachers at the Harvard Medical School, and they're like, "Here's how the mind works, and this is what the subconscious is," and there's cognitive behavioral therapy, right? So the Aaron Beck taught us that there's thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, and that all these things connect. And the really fascinating thing, my most instinctive response When people would tell me how it is, is, "No, it's not." So in the East, they have a completely different conception of mind, and here's the big problem with the Western conception of mind. You're a scientist, right? How do you learn about something, Andrew?

Andrew Huberman:
You have a question.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay, good.

Andrew Huberman:
You pose a hypothesis.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Excellent.

Andrew Huberman:
You design an experiment-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Good

Andrew Huberman:
... where you isolate variables.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
And you either refute or you, in some sense, support your hypothesis.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
And then you design another experiment.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Great. And it proves, right?

Andrew Huberman:
And you ask another question. You just keep going.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So Andrew-

Andrew Huberman:
And then you get tenure, and then you start a podcast.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Beautiful, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Just kidding.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
No, no. So let me ask you this. How do you study the mind?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And here's what's really interesting.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I do not know.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So here's what's really fascinating. Do we have any scientific evidence of the existence of thought?

Andrew Huberman:
We could define thoughts as some pattern of network activity.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
What I mean is if we literally look at it, we have no instrument that can detect a thought.

Andrew Huberman:
That's right.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right? So we have no proof. We cannot measure a thought. It is literally impossible. We can measure blood flow to the brain. We can measure electrical activity in the brain. We can induce thoughts.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right? We can do that, but we have no idea that a thought exists. So psychiatry is weird because every other part of medicine and science, we can measure what we are studying.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
In psychiatry, we can't do that. So along came Freud, and he made a fascinating discovery, which is when a human being speaks, we understand something about what's in their mind, and the whole reason we get trained and the reason that we can measure your mind, right? So we have validated scientific instruments using things like factor analysis and stuff like that, where we can use the Beck Depression Inventory, which will tell you how depressed you are. We have good ways to measure stuff, so there's a lot of science in psychiatry. The basic problem, though, is that we have a fundamental problem. We have insight into someone's mind, but we can't detect the mind.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
That is a fundamental problem with science, okay? Here's the cool thing. We have no scientific measurement of thought, but we as human beings have measurement of thoughts. Can I ever know what you are thinking using any instrument of science?

Andrew Huberman:
You're the psychiatrist, so I'm tempted to say yes, but no.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
No, right? Can you know what you're thinking?

Andrew Huberman:
I would like to think so, but I'm guessing-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... I can ask myself what's going on in there, but I don't necessarily have the ability to put language to it in a way that captures what I'm thinking.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Fine, but you are capable of observing your thoughts.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
You are capable of-- I'm not capable of observing your thoughts. Whether you detect all of them, whether they're right or wrong, that question is separate. Just the fundamental idea of you can measure an axon, you can detect your thought, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
We all live in this way.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right? So we can get to the edge cases later. So here's the cool thing. So when I went to India and I studied for seven years, the difference between the psychology that was developed from the contemplative traditions is its foundation is internal observation. So yogis are capable, we're all, it's not like some special ability, but they based their theory of mind on what they could observe. Whereas in the West, that is not something we have access to. So their theory of mind is very different. So when I was training to become a psychiatrist, people were like, "This is how the mind works," and I'm like, "No, that's not true." Right? There is a different way. So here's one example, getting to the roadmap. So the biggest thing that I think is different is the ego. So in the East, they have the concept of a part of our mind that is the ego. And in the West, we use the word ego. Freud defined it in some way. We all have this intuitive sense of identity, but in the same way that logic and emotions interact in a very mechanistic and defined way, in the West, our model does not include this piece, and the roadmap that you're talking about has to do with that piece. So if the rest of the world-- Because things get complicated, right? That's why it's so exciting for you and so challenging. Things get complicated, so everyone wants you to be something. And then we make a big mistake because we do this thing called internalize. And the moment that you internalize, now is it coming from the outside, or is it coming from you? Is this something that I've been conditioned to want, or is it something that I truly want? Which then begs the question, what the hell is truly want? Is there a difference between want from over here and want from over there? And the yogis will say that the answer is yes. So once you understand the ego, and the ego functions in a couple of ways. If I ask you, Andrew, who are you, what would you say?

Andrew Huberman:
Andrew.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay. Is that it?

Andrew Huberman:
I have a list of roles that I occupy in life.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Very good.

Andrew Huberman:
I mean, I-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Are those you?

Andrew Huberman:
They're facets of me.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay. Right. So anything that you can use to describe. Tenured professor at Stanford.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. I wouldn't put that first-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Sure

Andrew Huberman:
... but that happens to be true. I'm a brother.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Brother.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm a boyfriend.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Skater.

Andrew Huberman:
Once a skater, always a skater, but yes.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm a public educator.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Great.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm a son, a friend.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
All of that stuff is ego.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay, so ego is anything, when you say, "I am dot, dot, dot"- Anything that defines you after that is actually part of your ego.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And the interesting thing is that it's not that the ego is bad. This is a common misconception. But we all need ego to function in the world. If you are okay not functioning in the world and you're moving towards enlightenment, then you no longer need ego. But generally speaking, we need ego. So, if you're looking for a roadmap of what you truly want in life and what is healthy for you and not healthy for you, when you say you're Andrew, there's a lot of other people who can claim to be Andrew, but they're not you. You're talking about a fundamental internal experience of the self. And you were Andrew before you were a boyfriend. You've always been a son. But actually, you were Andrew before you even knew you were a son, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
You were still Andrew. So there's a fundamental bundle of experience. That's really what you are. And I think that the best roadmap, if you're trying to figure out what to do in life, try to peel away the layers of your ego. And I know that's getting complicated. But if we think about what is it that practically gets us jammed up in life is when I try to be something.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
I know this is going to sound weird. I'm sure you have ambition, but I don't think you are where you are because of your ambition. I think you are where you are because you listen to this internal voice, not try to live up to external expectations.

Andrew Huberman:
100%. I can truly say that every choice I've made to get into fish and animals when I was a kid, obsessed with birds and fish, and then skateboarding, and then biology and science, and where I'm at now, has been some sense of an internal passion and something pulling me from the outside, and it's just I just go.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Those choices were always made because I knew in my heart's heart there was no other option, in the positive sense.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm going.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm pulled toward it, and I'm driven toward it.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right. So you are listening to a part of you, right? So it is an internal thing that the world then meets you halfway, so it makes it possible, or there's a whole thing about that.

Andrew Huberman:
For me, it's a physical energy.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Fine.

Andrew Huberman:
If I feel physical energy coming up in my body and I want to move towards something, and for some reason, I feel it more in my left arm than anywhere else, that has always been true. I'll have a thought, and that's when I go, "Oh, my goodness, I'm going to do this thing." I know I'm going to do it, and there's no backing out because it has to happen. That's how it feels.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right. So any desire that you have that comes from the sense organs is probably not this thing. So the sense organs can trigger something within you. But if we look at social media, the hardest problem I have as a psychiatrist is convincing people that they don't really want the things that they say they want.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
It's so crazy, right? We're being programmed. We're being conditioned. And I realized this the other day when I was like, "Man, I wish..." I talked to my agent about doing more talks. I want to go someplace and get paid speaking engagements. And I realized I actually hate that. I don't like that. It's just what I thought people like us do. And I've done a couple of them, which have been really fantastic, and I really enjoy that, but I like sitting with people. So we're trained, and just think about it. Anyone who's listening to this, think about all the shit that you've seen that you think you want, but you don't really want. You just look at other people and you're like, "Yeah, I want that thing." It can be a particular kind of relationship. It can be a particular job. We all want all this random stuff, and it's all coming from our sense organs. This is why advertising is a thing. So stepping away from sense organs is really important for that roadmap. Second thing is anything that you want that is a comparison. That is born of the ego. The ego is what defines you. So we can say tenured professor. We can say associate part-time instructor. And so any comparison requires a definition. Does that make sense?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So all of the gold medalist, silver medalist, bronze medalist, that's a comparative thing. If I say I'm a silver medalist, then my desire for the gold medal can come out of the ego. Does that make sense?

Andrew Huberman:
Yes. The reason I'm sort of with my hand below my lip is because I'm so struck by this because I've had this feeling for a while now that most of the danger in life comes from the feeling that we need to prove something to others or to ourselves.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And yet, I know it's healthy to prove things to myself. It's felt good to be able to accomplish certain things. I did that. I could do other difficult things. But the origin of all of that work, in my mind, it's only healthy, at least for me, if it's not by virtue of trying to prove something. It's like there's a difference between a genuine heart's desire, for lack of a better way to put it, and what you're calling a pursuit of trying to win at some game in one's head. It's like a video game that isn't real.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. It's not that it's not real. So I agree with you 100%, and I think there's a couple of important things. So proving yourself is not wholly wrong.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
But understand that it is the ego. That's what it's going to gratify.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So if you have an ego of, "I am a loser," by all means, so this is part of the process. I have people in my office who are losers, for lack of a better term. 29 years old, living at home, playing video games all day, watching pornography, no job, dropped out of college.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And so what they want more than anything else is to be a winner. And so my work involves two steps. First, let's help you go from loser to winner, and then let's abandon the whole paradigm. Because I've also had people in my office who are billionaires and finally get to retire at the age of 52 after having sold their amazing third company, and then after retirement, it's not enough. They want to make another billion. They want to do something else. So that loser to winner, your mind will continually move the goalposts. If you were hungry before you got it, the thing won't fulfill your hunger. It may for a little while, and then you have to take another step of like, okay, losing and winning is now done. Right? And I think you've gone through that. I can hear it in your words, and people can probably hear it too. The way that probably at some point in your life, being a tenured professor, I don't know why, that is the thing that people are the lustiest for in the world that I think we come from.

Andrew Huberman:
It felt good to get.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And I won't lie, it felt good to get at a place like Stanford.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Even though there are many fantastic-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... and extremely challenging places to achieve that. It felt like the culmination of 20 years of very hard work that I enjoyed, but that it represented an important milestone for me.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But I knew, I'll just say, and of course, we're talking about this example, but hopefully, people are thinking about examples in their own lives, but I knew, for instance, I never want to be a department chair.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Tons of work, doing administrative stuff. I remember when they told me, "You'll be vice chair," and I'm like, "Oh my goodness. What do I have to do to avoid that?"

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I also knew that I didn't care about being a member of the National Academy. A close childhood friend of mine was just elected to the National Academy of Sciences. We've been friends since we were seven, and I'm so happy for him because he's doing exactly what he loves, but I never aspired to be a member of the National Academy, ever. Why? Because what came after tenure in order to go there was a divergence from what I really wanted to do.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. So I think this is the key thing about the roadmap, right? So we get conditioned by our sense organs. So just to keep it super practical, if you're trying to figure out what you should do, is this coming from my sense organs? If your sense organ triggers something that's always been within you, so if you see a frog, and you really want to be interested, you want to figure out how the frog works. But the interesting thing about the difference between the sense organ thing and an internal drive is your internal drive will find multiple objects in the outside world. Right? So first it was biology, then it was frogs. Now it's neuro-ophthalmology. Now it's this. So I don't know if this kind of makes sense.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
The drive is always the same, and it'll encounter different things in the world.

Andrew Huberman:
Yes. What is that drive?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
We'll get to that in a second. Okay? So first thing practically is if you're trying to figure out what should I do, first ask yourself how have you been conditioned by social media? Move away from that. Second thing is be careful about any comparisons you make. Any motivation that you have because of a comparison, it can lead to success. You can be successful, but you won't be happy.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Because it's so annoying, right? I work with a lot of influencers and YouTubers and stuff, and so it's like, "Oh, we want our first million." And if you're not careful, the moment that you get your first million, you want a second million, and then you want a third million. And then it's even scarier, right? So like, "Oh, I got three million subscribers. That's awesome." But then you know what's really terrifying, Andrew? Is the guy who started after me is getting followers faster than I'm getting them. Right? And so the ego is never going to be satisfied. The ego, by its nature, is comparative. And even if you're number one, people think the most anxious people I've ever worked with, not actually true, but-

Andrew Huberman:
Among them.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Is people who get to the top, and you think that you're done. You're not done. Then you're looking behind you at all of the people who are younger, harder working, have the benefit of AI tools, have the benefit of the path that you have carved, who are catching up on you and will overtake you soon enough. So one good example of why we compare is the more you are judged, the more your ego grows, and the more you will compare. Right? So this is almost like we're taught how to... When people judge us, we judge ourselves, and we get judged based on ranking.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And so this is what we see on the internet. As social media, as we start to get judged more and more and more, we become more and more narcissistic. This is the narcissistic defense that tries to protect us from judgment. And so it's happening to everybody, and it's escalating. The rate at which it's happening, people are more egotistical than they've ever been.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you think that's especially true for people who have large followings on social media?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Absolutely. So I work with influencers and was so curious about the work that I was doing that I tried to develop a program. So we now have a creator coaching program where we're collecting data about whether it's effective or not. And so the really interesting thing is I think it's a unique effect on our psychology. The closest thing is a lot of celebrities are really messed up, and that's because they have so many eyes on them. And people don't realize, just as a simple example, the brain just doesn't think probabilistically. So you can have 1,000 people love the work that you do, but all it takes is one person who's really nasty. That is what your brain is going to focus on. It's going to highlight. It's amazing. I can be looking at chat that is scrolling during livestreaming. There are messages that are faster than I can read, but if someone says something that is dangerous, my mind will flag it.

Andrew Huberman:
Wow.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right?

Andrew Huberman:
It's like a predator on the horizon.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Absolutely. So we have these circuits which were designed to look at a jungle and see a single pair of tiger's eyes.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And so the danger scanning mechanism ... makes it so that the bigger that you get and the more eyes that are on you, the more paranoid you have to be, the more narcissistic you will have to become. Because when someone turns to you and says, "You are ugly. You are stupid," in order to defend against that, you have to say, "No, I'm not. I am beautiful. I am intelligent." And the more times that you say that to yourself, this is where things get complicated, but that doesn't result in confidence. So I don't know if this makes sense, but if you are confident, you don't need to say that I'm smart or that I'm beautiful. Does that kind of make sense?

Andrew Huberman:
What about the to each their own mindset? Some people will like the content. I tell myself this. Some people will like the content and the way I frame it, and will look at it on the whole, some episodes more than others, certain things, and others won't. They'll hate it for whatever reason, or hate me for whatever reason, and I'm okay with that.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. So I think you're doing a really important thing, which is a key takeaway. So when someone dislikes what you do, you think about them and not you. That's the opposite of ego, right? So if we take someone who's very narcissistic and they receive a criticism, they say, "No, no, no, I'm great." Right? So this is where literally, I don't know if this is too abstract, but I'll give kind of maybe a simpler example of this. So I trained in Boston, and there was a lot of K2 use. So K2 is synthetic marijuana. And so sometimes you walk into the emergency room, there's a dude who's high on meth or high on K2. He's just saying all kinds of terrible things. That has nothing to do with me.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right? And the way that you framed some people are going to like what you do and some people are not going to like what you do, that's on them.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So if we want to step away from the ego, we have to understand that don't take it personally. Literally, that's the colloquial phrase, right? But it's hard to do. So if you're someone at home trying to figure out, "Okay, how do I connect with my true self? How do I step away from my ego?" Notice your reaction to criticism.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Is your reaction of criticism, are you actually being empathic?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right? So what empathic really means is are you putting yourself in someone else's shoes? And the other person, hey, maybe not everybody likes pineapple on pizza. Or are you taking it personally? Do their insults determine your value as a human being? And the moment that that starts to happen, the friction that you're talking about, which can be so fun, becomes torture, because now you have to make them happy. In order to feel good about yourself, you have to make the people around you happy.

Andrew Huberman:
So interesting. I think some of us grew up or somehow internalized the idea that if somebody is angry or is criticizing us, and it's being delivered in a certain way, that it must be true, versus the ability to just really step back and assess, "No, it could very well be they're in a bad mood. They didn't sleep well." I grew up in a community of academics. Some athletes, mostly academics. So everyone around me wasn't necessarily hyperverbal, but you know this from training in Boston. There was a way of delivering a criticism that felt like a poison dart-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... that would get right to the heart of it without calling somebody a name. This is actually a very prized skill in academia and medicine.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I think it's one of the more sinister aspects of higher education and medicine. But it exists in every field. But people aren't going to say, "Oh, dude, that was stupid." They're going to find a way to kind of thread that heat-seeking missile, right? And I think that sometimes getting to this thing about emotion versus language, the more primitive the expression, the "I hate you. F you," it's easier, like you said with the person in the clinic on K2, it's easier to say, "They're crazy. They're on drugs. They are ill." But when something is delivered in a way that's very articulate or calm, we tend to give it more credit as likely to be true. So on the internet, I see most of what comes at me that's negative as, I like to think there's also learning there, but the way it's delivered, the way I've noticed things get past my force field is I go, "Oh, wait, wait, wait." They'll say a PubMed ID. "You don't know what you're talking about." They'll give me a PubMed. Then I'll go to the paper, I'm like, "That actually doesn't say that." But in my mind, I thought, "Oh my goodness, I must have screwed up," right? They're not just telling me I'm wrong. They're telling me that I'm wrong-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay

Andrew Huberman:
... because of something on the Library of Congress PubMed. So do you see what I'm saying? So I think that knowing what our fences are good at filtering and not good at filtering is hard. It takes time. It takes years to cultivate.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Absolutely. Oh.

Andrew Huberman:
No? I would hope that it could be quicker, but it took me, excuse me, it took me many years to cultivate it.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. Let's just understand. So it's hard to cultivate. It took years for you to cultivate because you didn't have a teacher.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right? So let's be a bit precise here. And this is the key thing, so I hope people are following this because this is how you develop. So one of my colleagues in residency talked about this concept of a Teflon Buddha, right? This idea of being impervious. So how do you become psychologically impervious? And what you're talking about when you say a heat-seeking missile, your linguistic cortex is doing wonders. Because a poison dart, right? What they're doing, the reason it's so effective, Andrew, is not just because of the anger. We'll get to the anger in a second, but they are figuring out where your weak point is.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And they're attacking that weak point. It's not about the size of the missile, it's about the precision. Even in your language, you are talking about a precise attack. So that precision is in academia, people are really good at detecting other people's vulnerabilities, and they go for the nuts, right? That's what they do. Psychologically, they go for the nuts.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And there's all kinds of other things going on here, but let's be simple. So it is when someone has a high anger attack, okay, this means their amygdala is through the roof. So they are thinking in black and white. Their attack is in black and white. A black and white attack is easier to repel because it's not nuanced.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay? So when someone is angry, you're right, it is easier to dismiss their anger. And you are also correct that-- But it's almost like a f-- Everything you said is correct, but I'd say the model that you're assuming is that these are two opposite things. They're not. The other thing is, so when someone is not angry, they are not black and white. If they're not black and white, it is not easy to dismiss.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Just because it's not black and white, that doesn't activate your anger. It doesn't activate your black and white thinking, right? So when someone is coming at me angry, my empathic circuits are going to activate my own amygdala. I'm going to get angry back. "You did this." "No, I didn't." Right? So the most psychotic denial, or delusional denial, that's a better word. The most delusional denial that you'll ever hear is when someone's angry. "No, I didn't do that. I never did that. I never did that. I never did that. I never." And they can believe it because that's what happens. The amygdala makes your thinking black and white. When we have adrenaline collapsing or running through our system, it collapses peripheral vision down to a 30-degree cone. So we can only see this thing. So this is the first element of why heat-seeking missiles work. When they come at you angry, you're going to get angry. If you're going to get angry, it doesn't matter if they're right, doesn't matter if they're wrong, you're going to say, "No, it's incorrect." Doesn't matter the truth of it. So this is the first element of it, right? So is that they don't approach you, they approach you in an articulate way. When they approach you in an articulate way, it doesn't activate your amygdala. It does in a different way. But then the issue is their finesse. And you said a poison dart, really interesting imagery. It's something that hurts a little bit and then flows through your veins. So I can even imagine when they said that PubMed ID, your first thought was, "Not a big deal. I know my shit." And then the poison goes into your mind. "Well, maybe I don't know my stuff. Oh my God, what if there is a paper that I missed? What if there is something that I..." And then that injury will grow in your mind. And so all of your-- And this is the stuff, right? The stuff that hurts us when people insult us, what hurts are the things we believe about ourself. We all have these doubts because we're not perfect human beings, because we make mistakes. And when someone figures out, "Oh my God, this is this person's weak point." And the really scary thing is that humans have evolved to do this. All you have to do is go to any recess in the fifth grade, and kids will figure out what hurts, and then they will say it to you again and again and again and again. But I think it's really important to remember, if something hurts, that's your own insecurity. And insecurity, remember, if you say, "I am a loser. I am fat. I am ugly," those are all part of your ego. So there are certain things that you can do, and this goes back to the what is that voice on the inside? So this is where in the Eastern system, there is a self beyond the mind. So the mind is not what you are. The mind is an organ that you can observe in the same way that you can observe your hand. In the same way that your hand can change, your mind can change. Your mind changes every day.

Andrew Huberman:
What's the best way to learn to observe one's mind? Is it meditation?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Probably the best way to observe your mind is actually psychotherapy. You'll get better insight into your mind there. But if you want to move beyond mind, and I don't mean that in like a, "Oh, let's move beyond mind." What I mean is that if you look at your experience of existence, there is more to you than thoughts, emotions, and ego.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And so if you want to get to that and step outside of your ego, meditation is the best thing for that. And there are lots of studies that suggest that meditation shuts off the default mode network. Default mode network is our sense of self. There are also many studies that show that you can predict the therapeutic benefit of a psychedelic trip based on an ego death experience. So if someone has an ego death experience when they're using psychedelics, there is a greater likelihood that they heal from it, which has to do with deactivation of the default mode network.

Andrew Huberman:
When you say psychedelics, are there particular psychedelics that tend to promote ego death more than others?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
I don't know the answer to that question, but I would say that most of the studies that I've seen are in psilocybin.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
But that's just because there are more studies on psilocybin, I think. Arguably, MDMA will do it too because MDMA is an empathogen and will help people form bonds and kind of changes their perception of the self, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So meditation is the best way to dissolve your ego. Like that, I believe.

Andrew Huberman:
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Function. Last year, I became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. Function provides over 100 advanced lab tests that give you a key snapshot of your entire bodily health. This snapshot offers you with insights on your heart health, hormone health ... immune functioning, nutrient levels, and much more. They've also recently added tests for toxins, such as BPA exposure from harmful plastics, and tests for PFAS, or forever chemicals. Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to your physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors who are expert in the relevant areas. For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had elevated levels of mercury in my blood. Function not only helped me detect that but offered insights into how best to reduce my mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption, I'd been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC, N-acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification. And I should say, by taking a second Function test, that approach worked. Comprehensive blood testing is vitally important. There's so many things related to your mental and physical health that can only be detected in a blood test. The problem is, blood testing has always been very expensive and complicated. In contrast, I've been super impressed by Function's simplicity and at the level of cost. It is very affordable. As a consequence, I decided to join their scientific advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try Function, you can go to functionhealth.com/huberman. Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman Podcast listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman to get early access to Function. Meditation, potentially in a safe clinical setting, maybe exploring ego dissolution through psychedelics, although they're still Schedule I drugs, so we have to-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... have to be thoughtful in how-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... I communicate this, not just to protect myself, but-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
No

Andrew Huberman:
... to protect other people.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I know we both-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
I normally say that.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
But yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I always just raise it just to be clear what we're talking about. I understood your position on that. The thing inside that we know is our true heart's desire, that allows us to navigate the external pressures and the roles, these ego labels that we've given ourselves and that others have given us. Do you know any practices to help cultivate being in touch with that?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah, absolutely. So the meditation that I like the most for this kind of thing is meditations around something called shunya. Shunya means void. So if you really look at all of the attributes of you, right? So I'm a man, I'm a husband, I'm a son, whatever, boyfriend. All of those things are qualities. Even a loser is that presence of something, right? I'm a loser. I'm pathetic. That is the existence of a negative thing, a negative valence thing. So if you really look at what you are, imagine, Andrew, for a moment, this is going to be hard, but imagine that you only existed for 10 seconds.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
What would you be? You'd be almost nothing, right? You just-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
... get this flash of experience, but you have no narrative identity. You have no sense of self. All you are is just a raw receiver of an experience.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And I sometimes empathize with a child when they're first being born, that first shock of awareness, and you don't know what the hell is going on, and you start crying, right? You have no idea who you are, what you are. You're just a chunk of receiving. So there are shunya practices which allow you to connect with the void within you, and the void within us is actually the most basic part of what we are. It's actually what's at the bottom.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And so there are some ways to sort of understand what this is. So if you think about watching a beautiful sunset, and you cease to exist. You're just soaking in the sunset. You don't have any thoughts. You don't have any worries. It feels incredibly peaceful, right? And you are there. You're not comatose, but you don't have a personhood in that moment. Another really great example of this is if you really need to pee, and you're waiting to use the bathroom, and then finally you get your turn. The moment you start peeing, you cease to exist, whether you've got mortgages or you need to get a Valentine's Day present, or you have to do this, you have all those thoughts. You are just there as a nothing. So these shunya practices are a little bit-- You have to do them with a little bit more caution. There's some introductory practices. One example is if you close your eyes for a moment, this is going to sound kind of weird, but where do you feel your body? So think about proprioception, right? So pay attention to your arms-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
... your head, your nose. So what I want you to do is focus on the area of the solar plexus, and look for an absence of feeling there. As you breathe in and out, you can feel your ribcage expand. Maybe you can feel your heartbeat. But if you really pay attention to just the area of solar plexus, there's going to be a feeling of emptiness. And so as you meditate upon that, you'll get closer to shunya. The other really interesting, easy way to get a taste of shunya is close your eyes. I want you to breathe in, and then breathe out, and then when you're ready, breathe in again. And when you're ready, breathe out. Just breathe nice and slow. And now what I want you to do is pay attention to the time between breaths. Between your breaths, you will have stillness. Not during the breathing. During the breathing, you exist. Inhalation, exhalation. But in between exhalation and inhalation, there's a very beautiful stillness For people who are having trouble feeling that, I love this because there's an interesting cognitive technique. Catch the moment where inhalation becomes exhalation.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
In your normal breathing, not absence of breathing, because you're normally breathing in and out, in and out, in and out. Catch the moment where one becomes the other. That'll help you find shunya.

Andrew Huberman:
And shunya is defined as the void.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Void. It's also zero. Emptiness.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. There's no thought of roles or anything else when that-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And here's the beautiful thing. Once you find shunya, you can go into it.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So it's like as you practice this, right? So I'm sure that there's some neuroplasticity going on where your brain is wiring, and then when bad things happen to you, it's a flowing happening to my body, it's happening to my mind. In here, there's nothing. So I tested this when my dad passed away. So I remember going to the funeral and seeing his body. I remember touching his skin, his face, and shocked at how cold he was. It was my dad, but he's like ice. And so I was grieving, and I was sad, and I was crying, but I was like, "Is that thing still there?" And I found that thing was there, and I felt at peace. It is the mind that is sad, but I'm not sad. The body is grieving, but I'm not grieving. That's really what I am. That's just emotion. It's not really me. When we become identified with our emotion, right? When we're going through a breakup and we're like, "Oh my God," I become sadness. I become sadness incarnate. But then when you step away from sadness, when you are watching sadness from the outside, it can actually be wonderful, and that's why we like sad movies. We feel sad, but we feel great. The difference is, are you the sadness, or are you watching the sadness? And what is doing the watching? Because the sadness is in the mind. There's something outside of the mind observing it. That shunya will help you find that thing. And that's how you become-- That's the core of resilience. So when I work with these influencers who are being stalked and just no matter what they do, someone is there unhappy with it, right? Because you're talking about the internet where there are literally people out there who are delusional, who are projecting all kinds of stuff onto you. They've never met you, Andrew. And then they say that you're the incarnate of evil. And how are they making that-- They're living in a corner of the internet. And so in order to withstand that, in order to withstand the judgment, in order to withstand the poison darts, right? The interesting thing, if you want to be impervious to the poison dart, is you are inside. The poison dart hits your ego, it hits your body, and the poison flows through you and it hurts, but you are actually even beyond that.

Andrew Huberman:
He seems to come up almost every episode, but my good friend Rick Rubin, who you would absolutely enjoy spending time with, and he with you, I'm certain of that just talking with you today and knowing him very well, has talked a lot and written a lot about how this getting beyond or outside or separate from the ego is the essence of really the work he does with creative artists.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's really getting them outside of the perceptions of others. It's one of the reasons why when he's worked with artists when they're not yet famous, they're in their-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
They might be ambitious, they might want some of that, but they're just doing their art. They're not filtering it through feedback.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And there's something so beautiful-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... about that. Then it gets contaminated, and then the work over time is to ask whether or not people can get beyond that. But you're talking about shunya, is that how you pronounce it?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Accessing this void, getting away from the ego as a practice for everyone, everyday life. Not just people, not just influencers and on the internet.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Oh, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You're talking about the kid on the playground, the person on social media going with comparison or at the game looking at what the other kids' moms or dads have or are doing, wearing, et cetera.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. I'm talking about the older sister whose younger sister is getting married first. I'm talking about the sibling whose older sibling got admitted to an Ivy League university, and they didn't. I'm talking about the two of y'all that started the job at the same time, and your friend gets promoted and you don't. And all that stuff hurts, right? And the real tragedy here, I've worked with so many people who are incredibly successful, is sometimes when we get that hurt, we adapt. We become ambitious. We say, "I'm going to be that thing." And it leads us to success, but we pay the price of happiness. And the real tragedy is that some people believe that you get one or the other. You can be ambitious, or you can be happy. But I think you are a great living, breathing, walking example of when you tap into what really drives you, then you can be successful. I don't know if you're happy.

Andrew Huberman:
I actually am very happy and very peaceful at this stage of my life.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. So-

Andrew Huberman:
I am. I struggle like everyone else-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... with having to do work to clear the contaminants and my own and working on myself, certainly. One thing that I've done that I'd love your thoughts on, because perhaps it offers a useful tool for people, is whenever I feel I'm not as in touch with that part of myself as I would like, or I feel like I've drifted from it, or I'm just kind of caught in the current of whatever it is I've signed up for in life, which I enjoy, but now it's contaminated, and there's sewage floating next to me, so to speak-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... I find some way to bring things into my home environment ... that remind me of that feeling when I was a kid. So recently, for instance, I converted an art gallery into a living space. This is something that I can now do in my life that I certainly couldn't do some years ago. And I love fish tanks, so I brought in aquaria, and I've got my fish tanks, and I've got a pet octopus. And for Valentine's Day, I got her flowers. I said, "Oh, there are the flowers." We got back from dinner, they were there, and she goes, "I got you some plants." And I turned around, and the place was filled with plants. And I love animals and plants. I was like, "Oh my God." So she clearly gets me. And I was like, "Oh my goodness." And now when I wake up in the morning, I love those plants. I need her to take care of them because I walk near a plant, and it dies.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Fish and animals, I'm good. But when I'm surrounded by things that just feel really good and wholesome and just kind of basic to who I know myself to be at a certain level, then I feel like I can take that energy into everything I do, and it serves as a filter. Like bullshit shows up as bullshit at that point. People's issues show up as their issues. Real criticism that I need to internalize, I like to think, still gets signal above the noise. So I tend to put things outside me to reawaken that, but I love, love, love, love that you're offering tools that have nothing to do with building something, buying something, because those things are still external to me. This meditation is really about accessing it from within first. So anyway, that's just a reflection.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. So I want to point out, I think that this is such a masculine thing. So if I can-- So men are really interesting. So we're trained to not manage our internal environment internally. So I had a patient who I saw in a jail. He was 19, and he'd been in jail three or four times. And so I was talking to him about how he wound up here because he's 19. And so he was telling me that when he was 12, his dad passed away. He's got three sisters, all older, and a mom. And what they told him is, "You're the man of the house, and you have to provide."

Andrew Huberman:
Heavy.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And so he was like, "Okay, this is what I have to do." So men do this thing, it's really interesting. We do emotional regulation through our environment.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So if my environment makes me feel a certain way, if my mom, dad, brother, sister, boss is upset with me and makes me feel bad, if I make them happy, they will no longer be upset with me. And if they're no longer upset with me, I will be content. We shape our internal emotional environment through our external environment. And the scariest place I see this is when men I work with, and it's not that this doesn't happen to women as well. This is more the way we're socialized, and there's an effect of testosterone and estrogen here as well. There's a biological element to this. But then they fall into this trap of their emotions are determined by the environment.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So men are just, the way that they solve their internal emotional problems is by interacting with their environment.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
That's just very common. So it doesn't mean that we shouldn't utilize the outside space.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right? So I'm not suggesting, if you're pursuing enlightenment, then don't get aquaria. But most of us aren't doing that. So I think we should utilize, shape our external environment. There's tons of evidence that changing your environment is critical from recovering from addiction. Right? If you're still hanging out at a bar, it's going to be really hard to be sober. So we want to utilize those things, but we don't want to become dependent on them. So shape your environment for your benefit, but also be stable enough internally to where you don't need your aquaria to feel stable. Which I doubt you need.

Andrew Huberman:
No, no, no.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I raised that example. I see exactly what you're saying, and no, I use that example because it's like the ability to get in touch with a piece of oneself that feels very true, very wholesome, and not, for lack of a better word, contaminated by anything external-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... feels good, and I think it's the energy that one takes away from that, that I take away from that, that excites me.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. So I think it's a great point, right? So I think we sometimes forget. So I was giving a talk for executives about work-life balance, and I was like, "There's no such thing." So I think we try to, work is over here and balance, home is over-- Sorry. Yeah. Life is over here. That's not how it works. You as a human being carry yourself between both situations. When things are bad at work is when people have affairs. If things are bad at home, you're not going to be at your best at work. So I think you're really tunneling down into, I think, the most important part of it, which is that look at how you get shaped and look at the person that you carry into your next thing. There's a whole science behind that, which I think we probably don't have time for, but this idea of samskaras, which is almost like learning.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So if you sort of look at every experience that you have, you learn something, and you carry yourself forward, right, into the next experience. That's what we call learning.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, let's talk about samskaras, because years ago, 2017, I was exposed to Yoga Nidra.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
The guy that taught me Nidra said the whole purpose of Nidra is, yes, to learn how to relax the body with an active mind, et cetera, to make up sleep that perhaps you didn't get the night before, become a better sleeper, all that stuff. But he said the purpose is to burn the samskaras down to the roots. These are like weeds that come up in your life, and you're supposed to burn them down, and Nidra is one way that you You rid yourself of these things. Is he totally off base?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
No. So we have to be careful because you love Aquaria and you love frogs.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Now we're getting to what I love.

Andrew Huberman:
Great.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay. So-

Andrew Huberman:
Great. I prefer that

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
... let's understand what yoga nidra is and what a samskara is. So one of the biggest challenges that I have as a psychiatrist, my job is not in teaching people things. It is in helping them unlearn. So if you look at what trauma is, if you look at ambition, if you look at ego. You kind of said you try to connect to this childlike energy. I forget if it was Leonardo or Michelangelo or someone who's like, "It took me my whole life to learn how to paint like a child." So if you look at literally what happens with the human psychology is we accrue these microtraumas as we go through life. We accrue associations. I had a patient who was absolutely traumatized, so was dating someone engaged to a dude, okay? Discovered that her fiancé had been lying. So he was in med school, failed out. For two years, he pretended to go to class every day. And then when he graduated, he got a job.

Andrew Huberman:
But he didn't really graduate.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
He didn't really graduate. Here's the scary thing. So he would leave in the morning, drive to his parents' house, spend the day there. Parents would deposit money in their account. And so one day, I think what happened is she went to his parents' house, and she saw him there because she like-

Andrew Huberman:
Were they in on the-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah, they were in on it

Andrew Huberman:
... on the lie? They were in on the lie.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. Right. So they were in on the lie. And so she is just like, "What are you doing here?" And then she discovers not only him, but her parents have been depositing money into their account every month. And so she discovers this betrayal. And so now-

Andrew Huberman:
I'm shocked.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
It's insane. It's absolutely insane the lengths that people will go to, to deceive you.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, believe me, I've experienced somebody creating a world that was a complete fabrication, and it eventually all came tumbling down for them. But I remember being like, "Oh my God."

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. Right. So when you're about to marry this person, it leaves scars. So then what happens is she goes into her next relationship, and she has an immense amount of distrust, is paranoid about her next partner. Next partner didn't do shit, and this guy is getting, like there's so much paranoia, right? So if you look at life, life is a series of bad stuff that happens to us, and then we adapt. But the way that the human mind adapts is the same way that the human body adapts. Which is if we get really damaged, we get a callus. We get scar tissue.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Scar tissue's not functional. It's protective, but it's not functional. So most of our adaptations become maladaptations later on. Okay? So this is what a samskara is. So it's like this emotional energy that lingers with you and shapes the way that you see the world. So, it's really fascinating because we have all this trauma processing, and the yogis were talking about it for thousands of years as samskaras. And now you were talking about this thing down there that needs to be burned. So let's understand that for a second. If you look at your mind, stuff pops up, right? Have you ever wondered why certain things pop up?

Andrew Huberman:
No.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right. Have you ever thought, like, why aren't you interested in the scent of a rose? Like it's so weird. Our mind just generates thoughts. And everyone is trying to learn discipline and willpower. I think it's terrible. Willpower is so bad because why not just shape yourself to have the right desires? Then you don't need willpower. This is what the process of yoga is really about. This is what samskara generation is about. Did you learn a sankalpa when you did yoga nidra?

Andrew Huberman:
Well, they talk about it. I confess that I've maintained a very regular yoga nidra practice, but I've not explored these aspects of it.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. So I'll explain to you the mechanism of a sankalpa and literally, it's fucking wild. This is reprogramming your subconscious mind so that the things that your subconscious mind puts into your conscious mind, you can control. Okay? So in the case of trauma, all kinds of weird stuff gets put into our subconscious mind. Like, "I can't trust people." Then what happens is that floats to the surface. In my patient's case, every time her second fiancé, she doesn't know where he is, she's like, "Maybe he's scamming me," right? That's what she thinks. So I don't know if that makes sense. That's a thought in her conscious, which is being born out of something in her unconscious. We, in neuroscience, call this learning, right? So we're learning certain things. So in psychotherapy, we try to get rid of that bad stuff. But let's understand how stuff goes in, because if we can understand how the mind is programmed, and it's so simple, so neuroscientific, okay? Or maybe you can tell me it's not neuroscientific, but I'm pretty sure it is. Okay. The first thing is the one-pointedness of the mind allows things to sink in. So if I'm trying to study optic nerve anatomy, and I'm in a burning building with people yelling at me, I can have my eyes look at the paper, but I'm not going to learn anything. This is the really crazy thing is a lot of people study repetitively, right? So I read the paper again and again and again and again, but it's not like each time I read the paper, I get 10% of the knowledge. If you really pay attention to your mind, when you are focused, when your mind is one-pointed, you just need to read it once. What we're basically doing is we're rolling the dice. Am I focused this time I read the page? Am I focused this time I read the page? Am I focused this time I read the page? And this is also why we have studies on things like writing. So when you write, it improves your capacity to focus. So that's when things enter your memory a little bit more. So one-pointedness of the mind is what leads to things being learned. Now, this is how trauma works. So when you are intensely emotional, it actually focuses your mind.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, and as you mentioned before, and I'm so glad you did, as a visual system neuroscientist, when adrenaline levels are high, the visual field narrows, our depth perception change, everything becomes a microscope view of the thing in front of us.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Absolutely, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And when we're having an argument because you didn't get me what I asked for Valentine's Day, and then I tell you, "Andrew, you've never gotten me what I want for Valentine's Day," that laser focus, that one statement that I make, even though I told you right before that I love you and right after I'm sorry, that thing sinks in. It's that poison dart, right? It sinks in, and that's what you remember because you are focused on it. So when we are emotional, we are focused. So the way that I want you to think about your mind is like a pool of water that has a lot of waves.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And when the water is still, something can sink down to the bottom. But when the water is really active, nothing sinks in. So now we get to yoga nidra. So in yoga nidra, what we are doing is attaining a state of consciousness that is what's called in the yogic scientific literature a hypnagogic state. So it's not hypnosis, but it's not pure active consciousness. It is a very dormant awakeness, if that kind of makes sense.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right? You're in this trance. And so in that trance, you're in the edit mode for your unconscious mind. So this is where a sankalpa comes in. So a sankalpa is a resolve that you put in there. And then I don't know how to explain this except in this way. So when I work with a patient who has anxiety and they have this subconscious programming, when we have a therapeutic breakthrough, which there's tons of evidence for, right? So even Freud noticed this, that you have to activate the emotion in psychotherapy. Like my patient that I talked about a while ago who comes in, he talks about how he's depressed, didn't do shit for him. What we have to talk about is why he's angry, how he's been screwed in life, all the people that he's angry-- So then once that emotional energy activates, we become one-pointed, we activate that energy in the unconscious, and then if we vent it out, it disappears. That's how you burn away the things, by letting them out.

Andrew Huberman:
And in nidra, is there an opportunity for emotion? It's a deeply relaxed but mind-active state.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
No, no. Yeah. So you don't want emotion in nidra. So emotion collapses a scattered mind to one point.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
But there is a state of consciousness even beyond one-pointedness that we use in studying, where if you talk to people who engage in not even the flow state, but beyond the flow state. So there are people who, I know it's going to sound hokey, but people who channel divinity. I think divine is the best scientific term. So there are some human beings, and everyone has experienced this, where you're not you. You're like something else.

Andrew Huberman:
Tell me more.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
I think the Greeks' thought of genius is not a person, is like something you channel.

Andrew Huberman:
Something coming through somebody.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Something coming through.

Andrew Huberman:
We see this, I think, most readily in musicians.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Musicians, athletes.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right? So there are some times, like I work with esports athletes, and some of them know that they're going to win. They see the game that they're going to play, and they know exactly what's going to happen. And the crazy thing, it's not a calculation, it's an intuition. I'm sure that on some level they're calculating. So we call this stuff divine. I'm not saying it's divine. I'm not saying it comes from God. I'm saying that the subjective experience is qualitatively, fundamentally different from a regular logical experience.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So this is a state of mind that is even beyond emotion. It's in the edit mode. In scattered mind, emotion brings us down to some amount of focus, but then there's even a level of focus that's deeper.

Andrew Huberman:
And that's where the rewriting comes from.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
That's where the rewriting comes in.

Andrew Huberman:
The editing, yeah.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And then when you implant something there, that's what a sankalpa is. So when you do yoga nidra, the physiologic element, so this is what's not bad, but is a necessary step with where we are with science. All the weird mystical stuff I think is real, but we have to start with the basic science, right? So the way that science works is we start with, okay, let's look at cortisol production, and then let's look at what happens next, and let's look at what happens next, and let's look at what happens next. So yoga nidra, whether you're talking about cardiac coherence breathing, so there's the first stage of what we call Nadi Shuddhi Pranayama, which is alternate nostril breathing. But then there's a text called Vasishtha Samhita, which talks about a particular kind of cardiac coherence breathing with a ratio of one to four to eight. So you breathe in for eight seconds, actually you breathe in for 16 seconds, you hold for 64 seconds, and then you exhale for 32 seconds. If you do the Vasishtha Samhita version of cardiac coherence breathing, the subjective experience is completely different. You will feel prana. You will feel chi.

Andrew Huberman:
With that pattern of breathing.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
With that pattern of breathing.

Andrew Huberman:
Those are long inhales-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Oh, yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... holds, and exhales.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. So it's hard to get to, but literally the subjective experience that you will have is a sense of vibration at the periphery of your body. That's what it feels like to me.

Andrew Huberman:
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Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... clinical studies on breathwork. We call it respiration physiology for a reason. It's important to be able to fund studies and also to be able to communicate that information to colleagues who, if they just hear breathwork or meditation, it's a separator, right? The field of science can't go into the mystical right away.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But what's so interesting is nowadays there are discussions about meditation that are starting to get into the deeper layers, but it took 20 years or more of formal science to do. I'm not arguing with you.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I think some people will say, "Why not just cut to the chase?"

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
No, I mean, I-

Andrew Huberman:
I completely agree with everything you're saying. I think there are ways of editing the nervous system that are non-pharmacologic, that are behavioral. You're describing some of the more ancient ones. I do believe the yogis were and are neuroscientists. They come in through a different avenue. My recollection from Nidra is that there's an encouragement to two things that I would love your comments on. One is there's an instruction in the Nidras that I've done to move away from thinking and doing to being and feeling. You're trying to get out of the state of planning, out of-- Is there some-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... shift that's critical? And then the other one is "I am" statements. There's this instruction to talk about one's deepest heart's desire as if it's already happened. Is that BS, or is that real?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
No, it's not BS, but we have to understand mechanisms.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So let me talk about the science bit for a bit.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
I have a far, not simpler. I'm a clinician. I think there's a reason we have to start with physiology, because when a patient comes into my office, if I tell them, "Do yoga nidra," what is the effect size of the intervention? We need to know that, right? So here's the problem with studying meditation and the benefit of studying meditation this way. The problem is that we're teaching people to swim for eight weeks. That does not show us what an Olympic athlete is. So our science of meditation is in its infancy. The reason why this is really important is because not everybody is a Buddha. So the reason we have to start with physiology is because we're doing scientific studies to make predictions. Why are we making predictions? At least for me, it's to help a human being. So I don't care that there's some yogi who's been in the cave in the Himalayas for 60 years and attained some weird channeling of divinity. What I want to know is when a human being comes into my office and I tell them to meditate, how much can I pull back on their SSRI if they've been sticking with the practice? Right? So you have to start-- Science is about reliability, not about possibility. That sounds so new age, but it's about what we can reliably predict, and that's a really important place to start. Going back to the Nidra thing, this is the thing to understand. So if you think about planning, planning is a higher-order cognitive function that depends upon other baser cognitive functions. And I'll just give you a simple example. If I care about parties, my mind will automatically plan parties. If I care about avoiding other people, I will automatically plan how to avoid other people. So the planning that you do is whatever, but which things are you planning? That comes from the deeper stuff, for lack of a better term. So these people, they're not doing the sankalpa in the most classic form, but they're getting there. Because a being statement is the pluripotent stem cell of where you want to go. Okay? So what do I mean by that? Let's be precise, and I know it sounds new agey, but there's science here, okay? So let's look at something like self-esteem. So self-esteem is an assessment of yourself. And think about all of the ways if I have high self-esteem or low self-esteem, that will result in so many different-- Fuck, manifestation. It's the word, right? That will manifest in your life in so many ways. How do you respond to feedback? If someone asks too much of you, can you set a boundary? And this is the problem. The core of the work that I try to do is I try to help people get to their fundamentals. Everyone's focused on changing behavior. Everyone's focused on increasing willpower to overcome this tendency. And it's like, why not just change the tendency? And that sounds so simple, but that's literally what we do in psychotherapy every day when we come in and someone has a narcissistic personality disorder. Andrew, this is personality. This is who they are, and we can psychotherapize them to be someone else, for their natural thoughts to change, for the way that they see the world to change, for their behaviors to change on its own. Willpower is necessary when you are trying to not be narcissistic. It is not necessary when you are no longer narcissistic So we've done it in psychotherapy. We know that if your self-esteem changes, if your sense of being changes, treatment-refractory depression will change. Trauma, PTSD will change.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you have your patients do nidra?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Some of them.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So I also have a whole-- I just started this research and then left academia, but I was trying to develop evidence-based protocols for particular diagnoses for certain kinds of meditation practices.

Andrew Huberman:
Beautiful.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right. So for narcissism, I would lean into Sunya practices. For trauma healing, and specifically the patients who come in who need a fundamental belief change, if they just didn't believe this thing about themselves. So I had one patient who had a lot of trauma, and the sankalpa that she came up with, or that we came up with together, is "I deserve to be whole," not "I am whole." And then if you think about a sankalpa, that's a compass that you will navigate life with. So the main thing is, once it gets into her mind, "I deserve to be whole," if people, even her own-- She had a lot of self-sabotaging behaviors, and it's like, no, I deserve to be whole, right? That is something that she-- And this isn't telling yourself. This is the problem. I want to be precise. I know it sounds weird, but telling yourself is like there's a lot of mental activity, and you're trying to say something from the outside. Like you can tell yourself, "Hey, Andrew, I'm going to remember this mathematical formula." Doesn't work. You can tell yourself all kinds of things, but telling yourself is very surface-level mental activity. That's not how change happens. So when we're talking about narrative reconstruction post-trauma, and this is what's so terrible about social media, everyone's consuming this like, tell yourself every single day that this is true. That's not how you change your beliefs. The science of how beliefs change isn't by telling yourself things over and over and over again. That's gaslighting yourself. It's just trying to drown what you really believe with like, it's like taking a piece of dog poop and putting icing on top.

Andrew Huberman:
It's not how neuroplasticity works.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Exactly. Well said.

Andrew Huberman:
I can say that with 100% confidence-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... as a neuroscientist, and I don't claim any relationship to the work, but my scientific great-grandparents won the Nobel Prize for neuroplasticity. It is a process that has certain requirements. They have to happen in a certain order and at a certain depth of the nervous system, which is what you're describing, and so no amount of repeating a phrase-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... positive or negative, is going to engage neuroplasticity.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I wish that people knew that because it would provide them a filter through a lot of bullshit.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So I think this sankalpa idea and this idea of focus on being statements, because being statements are more primordial, and they will result in the mental fluctuations of your mind in a different way, right? So they'll automatically result in a certain kind of desire, in a certain kind of planning, in a certain kind of inclination. They're your most natural tendency. And I'm lazy. People don't realize this, but I'm lazy. I'm still the degenerate gamer. I don't like to work. I work seven days a week, but it's not work. The only way I can work seven days a week is to shape my experience of the thing.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And this is what a lot of people don't realize. There's a fascinating theory that I think is somewhat true called the theory of constructed emotion. So I forget who's the person who's the pioneer of it, but it's sort of this idea that we think that when something happens to us, the emotion is automatic, but we actually construct that emotion.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
We have a hand in how we receive the world around us, right? So people can criticize you, but you can take it constructively. The way that you mentally respond to something is huge. So when we're doing a sankalpa, when we're doing yoga nidra, are we burning away samskaras? Sure. The samskara is the negative emotional programming, then the adaptation that we made. So it'll burn that stuff away, so you will be free of that stuff. But that's not what I would do that practice for. It's really to put a positive thing in there. And by having a being statement, it may somehow counteract. I think this is where my science head, I can't be precise enough. I sort of know that how a sankalpa works. I've used it for myself. I've used it for many patients. It really is about attaining that neuroplasticity. It's about attaining that state of mind, and if you don't get there, it doesn't work. Then you're just repeating things to yourself, which is why there's such an emphasis on the physiology. Because in order to enter into that state of mind, we have to be really precise with what we're doing autonomically, physiologically.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you think that liminal states between sleep and awake are also a valuable opportunity for people to rewire their beliefs about themselves and engage neuroplasticity?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Absolutely. So hypnagogic, hypnopompic hallucinations are good examples of this. That state is really weird. So there is one of the 112 techniques that will bring you to enlightenment is to catch the moment of sleep. Beautiful technique. Incredibly hard to do. So this is something that people need to understand. When we're talking about meditation, I want you all to understand that this is a technique that I did for 12 years before seeing a single result. And this technique will give you, and now we're going completely off the rails, okay? Will give you a lot of insight into your past lives. So there's something, and we can get into the science of that if you want to. But there's something like when people come to me and they say, "Hey, I want to learn about my past lives," the technique that I give them is to focus on the liminal state between consciousness and sleep, and specifically to catch the moment of sleep. So to see yourself fall asleep.

Andrew Huberman:
So I do that in nidra. I can observe myself falling asleep And I'm aware that I'm falling asleep, but I'm not lucid dreaming. I'm watching myself sleep. And I literally feel like I'm falling. There's probably some deactivation of the vestibular system or something going on there.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Proprioceptive hallucination.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. So something going on. What we're talking about here is, to really just break it down, is deeply relaxed state. So autonomic tone is very parasympathetic, but alert enough to observe the self. So this is an unusual state, right? Because I normally think about the autonomic nervous system like a seesaw, parasympathetic, sympathetic. So alert, stressed, panic, or asleep, coma, dead, right? And it's going back and forth the entire time we're alive. But what we're talking about here is a weird kind of bending of the seesaw, where we're both very relaxed and very alert. And in that state, the brain is more available for instruction, for editing. Many people, I think, use psychedelics trying to achieve this state. That's one avenue. I think it would be amazing if there were more faster entry points. 12 years is a long time. I hear that. Other people hear that, like, "Oh, shit. That's a lot of meditating before I get-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... where I want to be." But do you think that there's opportunity for Nidra and, excuse me, Shunya, the void meditation, to be valuable in the short term as well?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
This is one of the 112 tantric techniques.

Andrew Huberman:
Ah, it's just that technique.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I see.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
That's a really hard one because it has no preparatory practice. It has no physiology to it. It's just catch the moment of sleep. That's it.

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So that technique is normally if you've trained yourself, then you can do it, but it's really hard to do just-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
... off the cuff. Nidra is very helpful from the get-go, right? So from an autonomic nervous system standpoint, very helpful. We tend to be hyper sympathetically activated, so Yoga Nidra is very good for parasympathetic activation.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yoga Nidra is also very good for the rotation of your somatosensory cortex.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So we have this idea of the homunculus. That's not really what it is. And we can, if I'm wrong-

Andrew Huberman:
The map of self.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right? So really what it is, your somatosensory cortex is plastic.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And when you do rotations of awareness through your body, it's really good for you. Really helps with things like chronic pain. So in chronic pain, what happens is patients, their somatosensory cortex is literally locked into the part of their body that's in pain. People think that... And it's a self-reinforcing thing where something hurts, so your brain is thinking about it, and the more that your brain thinks about it, the more that it hurts. So Nidra is really good from the get-go, and that's where I sort of think about the benefits of meditation as, first of all, scientific to woo woo. This we know works. This we have no clue. In my personal journey, it's been really weird. So I was brought to this weird mystical stuff, like kicking and screaming, where once you're meditating one day and you have a memory from your past life, you sit there and you're like, "What the fuck is that? Is this a hallucination? Is this some form of genetic memory? Is this epigenetic memory? What is this?" I have no idea. So I'm not saying that past lives even exist. All I'm saying is that there are things that maybe some people can do that will give you the illusion of a past life. That's all we know, right? And this is where I think a lot of people are very unscientific because they say, "If I have a memory of something that didn't happen, that means it hap-" No, it didn't. The human brain constructs memory all the time. Most of our memory is stuff that didn't happen, actually, technically.

Andrew Huberman:
I have to say, I don't want to interrupt your flow, but I just have to say because I'm feeling it. I'm not saying this to make you feel good, but if it does, great. You're one of the more intellectually supple people I've ever encountered. I hope that lands because I've been around a lot of well-educated people and a lot of practitioners, everything from former Mr. Olympias to Rick Rubin to David Cho. Martha Beck, who has three degrees from Harvard, but talks about spiritual downloads. And I have to say, I feel what's missing from health, public health, mental health, physical health, performance broadly speaking, is this ability to understand how the ancient practices are really of benefit, where the neuroscience and other forms of science can explain it, but also to acknowledge that even where we don't have mechanistic understanding, there's value in the practices. I really believe that the healing that everyone wants so badly for themselves and for the world, I really believe that most people want that, resides in this business of going inward, that we can only do for ourselves and seeing where our bullshit is, burning it down, and unlearning the stuff that makes us unkind to ourselves and others, and unproductive. I think one of the dangers in discussions around yoga and these things is some people will think, okay, this is navel-gazing. This is all me stuff. You just got to get out into the world and do stuff. But when we hosted James Hollis, 84-year-old Jungian analyst, he said there are two things that are critical to a good life, if I may. He said, "Every day you have to shut up." These are his words. He said, "You got to shut up," meaning no whining. Be grateful. You need to suit up, meaning you need to prepare for your roles in life, and then you need to show up to your roles in life. But you also need to spend some time getting out of stimulus and response, going inward, and really touching in with what he called your genuine heart's desires. And when he said that, I thought like ... perfect. This is the ambition, the doing, the getting things done in life that we have to do because no one wants to be the loser you described earlier. No one wants to be that person. And at the same time, many people think they want to be, but nobody wants to be the person that sold the company, got the marriage and the kids, and is miserable because they took a path that wasn't really for them, that they should've done that with someone else. They literally have the wrong-- No one would say they have the wrong kids, but they have the wrong life. Right? And so I think that what you're describing is the roadmap, and it involves this going inward. And I think that the language around yogic practices for Westerners is the separator. It's where people brace and they go, "What are they really talking about here?" And so as a practitioner in the West with this Eastern mindset woven in, how do you bring that to your patients? How do you convince them that this is the path? Because I really believe it is the path, and I think it's actually the most important thing that any of us can do for ourselves.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
First thing is, I don't try to convince anyone of anything. So convincing is not an objective that I have. So I love research, consume a bunch of research, but there's a basic problem with science, which is when we do a randomized controlled trial, we learn about a population, we don't learn about a person. So we can say that SSRIs improve major depressive disorder by about 50%, let's say. But if a patient walks into my office, I have no idea if an SSRI is going to help them. Does that kind of make sense? There's a basic problem of external validity of all of our science, all of our medical science anyway. I'm not sure about opto- or neuroscience. But when you apply it to a person, some stuff works and some stuff doesn't work. So my focus is on helping a person. And then you don't need the woo-woo stuff. I think the important thing is understand your ego. That's a fundamental thing that is missing from Western psychology. But we all intuitively understand it. This person is egotistical, right? Second thing is things like perception. Understand your perception. Your perception, and you were talking about the Internet. The basic problem with the Internet is that it has allowed human beings to no longer live in the same world. This is where AI is even worse. So the more algorithmic you are-- So the problem with an algorithm is it shapes your perception. It radicalizes your perception. So an algorithm shows you thing one, and then it'll only show you things in that tunnel. Does that kind of make sense? So you go further and further down the tunnel, and you are living in a different world than everybody else is living in. AI is even worse at this, which is why it's really scary, but there's a first case report of really AI-induced psychosis in a patient that did not have any history of psychosis.

Andrew Huberman:
How does that even come about? What are they talking to the AI about?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
We can get into that if you want. It's actually really scary, but we know the mechanism. So here's the cool thing about this case report. This person got hospitalized for psychosis, was started on an antipsychotic. Psychosis resolves. They get discharged, stop the antipsychotic, start to use AI again, and become psychotic again. It's really scary. And the basic problem is that AI is so sycophantic. Our reality testing of the world requires contrary opinions. Right? So when you're like, "Hey, I have this idea. I want to throw something by you." And then I say, "No."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So how do we know what reality is? Because we have this perception, but this person has this perception, this person has this perception. So we modulate our perception. "Hey, I got you a gift." "No, you didn't." "What? I told you yesterday that I was going to pick this up." "No, you didn't tell me that." So we stay in reality because we get signals from reality. The thing about the AIs is they're language learning models. They don't actually know anything. All they do is scrape the Internet. This is a simplification. I'm not a data scientist or AI engineer, but here's my understanding because people wanted to build a Dr. K chatbot, and I tried to get into understanding the mechanism. What an AI does is it just says a word, and then it tries to figure out which words are going to make you happy. That's how it knows what's right or wrong. The user satisfaction is the ultimate thing that they're going for. So there's a lot of data that shows that literally, there's a really cool paper, I can send it to you later, but that shows that the number of statements that you have, the more sycophantic it becomes and the more paranoid people will become. So there's another case of someone who murdered their mom and then committed suicide because as they expressed concerns about their mom, the AI reinforces that and says, "Yeah, you're right. These people are leaving you out." Right? Because it's trying to make you feel good.

Andrew Huberman:
Why'd they kill themselves?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
I don't know the full details of the case. And this is what's really scary about the AI stuff is people will say, right, so a lot of people will make the claim, "Oh, yeah, if you're mentally unwell and then you use AI." So a lot of AI companies will say people who are high risk will use the AI, and it activates their delusions. But Andrew, here's what's really scary. In order to make that, I don't know if this makes sense, this is a kind of read my mind question, but in order to say only at-risk people will become psychotic from AI, what data do you need to make that statement?

Andrew Huberman:
I think you need people to be harmed by AI to have that basis.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. So in my mind, from a clinical perspective, in order to make the claim that AI only makes vulnerable people psychotic, mentally ill people psychotic, you need to have your control group-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
... which is people who are not mentally ill.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
You need to have your intervention group, which is people who are mentally ill.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
You need to give them an intervention, and you need to measure their psychosis at the other end.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
No AI company I've ever heard of has ever done that. Does that make sense?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Fundamentally, they are not ... determining ahead of time whether this person is mentally ill or not. And they're not monitoring psychosis.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I think the studies that have not been done, at least not until recently, that needed to be done and desperately need to be done, is to evaluate what are the neuroplastic changes that are caused by social media and AI. These are the digital anvils that we're shaping, especially young brains on.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And now we're surprised, like, oh, from 2010 to 2025, everyone's been using progressively more social media, online more, and oh, we got brain rot, and surprise. Well, no, there's this thing called plasticity that we knew about. It's just we didn't understand how the brain-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... gets modified on these platforms, on these algorithms. And instead, it was like we were so focused on the content, but not the algorithmic underpinnings of the content.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Excellent. So I am convinced there is not great data because it's early, but I am convinced that basically, because we know this from basic psychology, right? AI is basically like a cult of one. You get indoctrinated in your own thoughts. So whatever you say to the AI is what the AI will tell you back.

Andrew Huberman:
This is the narcissism.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
It is.

Andrew Huberman:
What you described before, the AI becoming more sycophantic, the person getting more paranoid, you know the image that was in my mind?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
What?

Andrew Huberman:
Was an eccentric billionaire who can control everything in their environment, but is terrified and is controlling of everything because they feel like they're vulnerable if they don't. That's exactly what you described-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... AI is doing to essentially everyone.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And we'll see it also not only in the billionaire. There are some cool studies that show basically who's at risk. So it's really fascinating what the risk factors are. The amount of usage is huge, so the more you use AI, the more likely this is to happen to you. But I kid you not, I'm not trying to be alarmist. As a psychiatrist, when someone comes into my office, I ask them, "Do you use meth?" Because I'm trying to assess their risk of becoming psychotic based on something that is not schizophrenia or type one bipolar disease. Now I'm starting to ask people, "Do you use AI? How much?" So I'll ask them these questions. How much do you use AI? Do you customize the AI to be more effective for what you want? So this is what's really scary, is this is what people call prompt engineering, right? Do you train the AI to give you more effective answers?

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Do you use the AI for mental health issues? And do you find that the AI's answers are far superior to humans? And these are four of the seven proposed risk factors for bad outcomes from AI. And the crazy thing is this is the use case, right? We want people to be using AI more. The whole point is that AI is better than other people. I'm going to use prompt engineering. And in my community, there's a lot of mental illness and a lot of mental struggles, so a lot of people will use AI. And it's really scary that the use case is the risk factor. And I really think that there's a chance, I don't think AI is evil or all bad or anything like that, but I think we really could be looking at 60 years from now, we're going to be looking back and we're going to be talking about AI the way that we talk about nicotine and tobacco.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm letting that sink in. When I think about the algorithm being the thing that shapes the brain, the analogy that pops to mind is, if I want to change a nervous system, I don't care if it's a rat, cat, monkey, bat, or human-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
I know what you're going to say, yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... I'm going to spike adrenaline, and I'm going to provide an experience. These experiments have been done by James McGaugh and others over many years. I can give an animal or a person a terrifying experience, give them a beta blocker, and their memory for it-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
They won't learn, yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... their memory for it will be meager, if any. If I don't, they're going to have a very salient memory. It's that one-pointedness that you referred to. So spiking adrenaline is the opportunity to create plasticity. Turns out, so is spiking dopamine. So is spiking acetylcholine. Turns out that there's this kind of equality to all the neuromodulators. If you can create a high amount of arousal or an unusual state, you can modify the brain for some period of time. I feel like what was never thought about until recently is that when we scroll social media or we are on the Internet, we're getting pulsed, like you said earlier. We're getting pulsed with typically norepinephrine, epinephrine, right? And so it makes perfect sense that the plasticity is both for what we're observing, but also for the action of scrolling and going through the wheel of experience that you described earlier. The puppy, the explosion, the political thing, the opportunity to make money, the relationship thing, and then repeat. And surely, the platforms knew this. And I don't think they're diabolical in the sense that they wanted to harm humanity. I don't. I think that they are businesses, and they wanted to make money. They wanted to drive engagement.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So many people don't like what I say about AI because they like AI.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And I'm also with you. I don't think the platforms are evil. I think they're just not looking at that dimension, right? So no one at an AI company is designing a clinical trial to be run through the FDA to measure. They're just not measuring safety issues, as far as I know. Not at the level that we do when we're looking at pharmacology. I think these people are someone, and I've worked with so many people who work at YouTube and Meta and stuff like that, Twitch. And I don't think they're bad, evil people. This is a very black or white thinking induced by social media content, where all these companies are evil, or they're totally fine. No, it's like-

Andrew Huberman:
No, I know some of the founders and owners of these companies and platforms well, and I think they are benevolent people.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Absolutely. And I think a lot of times, they're just like, okay, if I'm Instagram Reels, and I'm a programmer, a developer there, and someone's like, okay- ... this amount of the market share is TikTok. How do we bring those TikTok users over here, right? It's like if I have a car, and it's like how do I get someone who buys a different kind of car to buy my car? That's just what business is. I don't think they're evil. I think what they're doing, and this is how humanity works, right? So it's like we invent something, and then we figure out afterward that it's harmful. So I don't think people should stop using AI by any means, but I think that what I'm most concerned about is that the health effects are a lot more causal-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
... as opposed to uncovering. I think there's starting to be some pretty startling data behind that.

Andrew Huberman:
So what do you recommend for young men and women, or older men and women around two things, around social media use, AI use, and we have to talk about pornography.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
So let's talk about social media use. Do you believe that people should have prescriptions of amount of time, types of interactions they have or won't have? I realize it's hard to create a blanket statement there.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
No, no, no. It's not that it's hard to, it's that this is a whole other podcast. So I've studied this-

Andrew Huberman:
We're definitely going to have to have you back.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
We've got a lot of conversations.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So there's so much nuance to this because social media is not uniform in the way that it affects your brain. So, right? That's the number one thing.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So just because all drugs of abuse are in some way dopaminergic does not mean that their effects are uniform on the brain. So first thing about use of social media, I think a big thing that people miss, so there's some common stuff that's like, "Just use it less, bro." What a lot of people miss is the mental state that you are in when you use it determines a lot.

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right? So if you are feeling bad and you use social media, you're primed for salience. You will be programmed more, right? So this is where people who use it as a form of emotional regulation, big problem. Another interesting thing about social media, when to not use it. So you require a certain amount of frontal lobe function, executive function, and willpower in order to fall asleep. You need to be able to suppress your impulses in order to be able to go to sleep. Don't use social media before you go to bed, and the main reason for that is if you use social media to the point where you've missed your sleep window, then it's very hard to fall asleep because now your brain doesn't have enough willpower, and this is what happens to people. So there's a really interesting study about procrastination before bed, and what the study found is that there's two kinds of procrastination. There's before bed procrastination, procrastinating going to bed, and then there's in bed procrastination, when you procrastinate going to sleep after you're in bed. So don't use it when you're not feeling good. Don't use it before bed, especially because you're going to miss that window, and then it's going to mess you up for the next day. You'll be more emotionally fried, more emotionally vulnerable.

Andrew Huberman:
Like the hour before bed?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. Just nowhere near bed. There's the blue light stuff, but I think don't miss your sleep window. That's been such a useful clinical revelation when I'm working with a human being. Because if you get past 10:30 and you're on your phone, then it's going to become 12:30 because you no longer have the frontal lobe function to be able to stop yourself. That's the second thing. Third thing is understand that your brain is, how can I say this? You are developing the standards for yourself through social media. So we're seeing a rise in body dysmorphia. So this is interesting because it used to be that body dysmorphia was more common in women than men. We're starting to see that even out, especially as we have all these alpha male influencers. What you see is going to be your standard.

Andrew Huberman:
I'll put alpha in air quotes there.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. So everyone's expectations for what they should be. So I went to Germany recently, and I had my kids there. And we went to a spa, and there were a lot of-- We went in the middle of the day, so we were on vacation, but everybody else is at school and whatnot. There were a bunch of old German people there, and old German people in swimsuits are not the most attractive human beings on the planet. And my kids were kind of surprised because there's just a lot of German people who are old. But this is what normal people look like, and we've forgotten what normal people look like. We've forgotten what normal is, and the more time that you spend on social media, the more you will be divorced from normal. So I'd say those are the three things. And sure, if you want to use it less, use it less. The less you use it, the better off you're going to be. But I'm sure everyone has said that a thousand times. I think what people don't realize is that the impact of it is not always uniform, that your psychological vulnerabilities, and people know this. If you've ever stalked your ex after they get together with somebody else, people know what I mean, right? Your ex is now dating someone else, and then you look at their pictures, and you look at all their pictures, and you make yourself feel worse. Don't use it when you're vulnerable. That's huge.

Andrew Huberman:
I realize that my statement about alpha males in air quotes, I want to be very specific, not to protect feelings at all because no one I'm about to talk about needs protection for their feelings. But I think there are some incredible male educators and examples online, of people who are showing up in different aspects of their life in really spectacular ways. Good friend Jocko Willink, for instance, right? I think he has a ton to offer. My friend Ken Rideout has a ton to offer. There are many, many great examples. The people I was referring to in air quotes was in reference to this kind of newer trend of looksmaxing as-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... it relates to what you're talking about, about this over-obsession, in my opinion, on looks and on cosmetic perfection, which I do think is Going to be, if it's not already very hazardous for young men, the feeling that even just the idea that variation in looks is being discouraged, that there's sort of this need-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... need for everyone to look the same is so very different than how I grew up, where I feel very fortunate that there was a range of different appearances within the scope of healthy that define people's unique characteristics. And now, this looksmaxing thing seems to be all about everyone having this angle of jaw, this cheekbone thing, this type of skin, this type. And that's the part where I go like, "Hey, guys, please don't waste your life. This is a fool's errand."

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So-

Andrew Huberman:
It's going to destroy them

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
... here's what's really scary. So I'm not a couples therapist, but I just made a guide to relationships because everyone in my community is struggling with loneliness. And here's the really scary thing. If you look at the research, looks are not that important for a relationship. So there's some really fascinating studies on charisma. So looks are number six on if you do a multivariate regression analysis. Actually, I don't think it was multivariate, but if you look at the factors of charisma, looks is number six. And if you look at the most charismatic people on the planet, no offense, but Winston Churchill, amazingly charismatic, not the most looksmaxing guy out there. You know?

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And so I think the really scary thing is that a lot of this information on social media is just wrong. It's not based in science at all. Like what we talked about with flirting. People don't realize if you're flirting with someone and they don't get it, that's actually fine. That's why you have to make three attempts to flirt with someone, statistically. And then you should level up, escalate the signal that you're transmitting. Another really interesting data point, because I'm excited about this, but women who are of average attractiveness and high signaling are more likely to end up in a relationship and be approached than women who are very high attractiveness and low signaling.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, could you define signaling?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. Making it known that you're open for a relationship. Eye contact, smiling. So this is what people don't understand is they think, like, "Okay, if I'm hot, things will happen." That's not how it works at all. There's a lot about how to flirt, how to communicate interest, how to be embarrassed, and all of these things are positive things that people don't understand. That charisma is about having vision, because if you're looking for a long-term partner and they're trying to figure out, "Can I be with this person?" They have to have a sense of your vision of life to see if they fit with you. That's actually way more important than looks. The ability to handle adversity, huge element of charisma. So someone wants to know if stuff goes south, can I count on you? Way more important than looks. So the only thing with looks is that in online dating specifically, people will judge based on looks. But there are numerous studies that show, not numerous, actually, one study at least that I've seen, that shows that if your profile indicates purpose, man or woman, it increases your attractiveness. So the problem with all the social media stuff is not that it's wrong. I work with a lot of incels. I work with a lot of beta males. It's not that they're wrong. It's that they're woefully incomplete. They haven't done a study of the whole literature. Sure, if you're more attractive, it is easier to get dates. Here's the scariest statistic. Drive for muscularity is inversely correlated with length of relationship. Right? So the more that if you're watching social media and you're like, "I need to be pumped, I want to be pumped, I want to be pumped, I want to be pumped," that's what drives people away. It's hard to have a relationship with that kind of person. So by all means, get muscular, but want it less, which is really interesting, because what I see is people wanting it more. Like looksmaxing, "I want this, I want this, I want this."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm. So deprioritize it.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, it's so interesting. The drive and vision thing is, and purpose thing is so interesting because this is one thing where I'm not saying everyone should go into science, but in science, you apprentice yourself to somebody else and then to somebody else as a postdoc, and then eventually whether or not you get to succeed or not as an independent scientist is entirely based not on what you did. That's just proof of an ability, right? It's based on your vision. Like, is there something exciting?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And that's what we joke in science, every year there's a prom king and a prom queen on the job market, and it's the person who has the most interesting and compelling vision. That's who you're hiring. And yes, they tend to have been successful in the past. You need that, but that's necessary but not sufficient. It's so important that you're raising this. Do you think that young men are indeed falling behind in terms of, we hear this all the time, that they're falling behind their age-matched peers that are women in terms of just sort of life progression?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Oh, absolutely. I think there's no question of that. So I forget if it was 41% of college graduates are men now. So I think it's really lopsided. I think in 1975, the average age of marriage for a man was 23.8, and now it's 30.8. Oh, it's not average, median.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So half of the people are actually older than that. For women, it was 21.1 to 28.4.

Andrew Huberman:
People will make financial arguments around that. I see that a lot. People will say, "Well, it's very expensive to be able to raise a family," et cetera. That's often what you hear, at least in California. People say that they're waiting because they need to establish a certain level of income. Is that true?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Sure. I think that's what people are subjectively feeling. 50% of adults under the age of 30 live with their parents now.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
I forget what the statistic used to be 20 years ago. So we are absolutely seeing economic difficulties. So everything is slowing down Right. But I think that the biggest difference is as a society, men are the one group of people that we expect to help themselves. And I'm not saying women don't deserve help. So there's some examples of this that I think are not great. So there are homeless shelters for every gender, and then there are homeless shelters for women. There are no male-only homeless shelters. I think that's a good example of you don't need a male-only homeless shelter because that's an example of women who are in all-gender homeless shelters are really way more unsafe than if they're on their own. So that's an example of I don't think everything should be equal between all genders. But I think the challenge is that if you just talk to men, or if you talk about men, there are many things that we'll say, okay, the patriarchy is harmful to both men and women. Fair enough. But what are we going to do societally, systemically, to support the men who are struggling? So even though only 41% of people who graduate from college are men, the number of male-only scholarships is really small. So as a society, it's really interesting. I think we're not really supporting men in the way that we need to. Now, a lot of people will hear this as, oh, it is my responsibility as a woman to do things for my husband or boyfriend or whatever. I don't think it's women's responsibility. I think that's a big problem historically, that women have been responsible for certain aspects of men. I think the work that I do and the work you do, the work we do, is to try to help men, women, and everybody else take care of themselves.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
But I do think there's plenty of data that suggests that men are falling behind. If you look at rates of addiction, deaths of despair, this is a really interesting scientific measure that came a lot out of the UK. These are basically deaths that relate to suicide. Male suicide rates are four times what they are for women. So it's interesting. Now, hopefully, this is changing, but when I was in residency, we had women's mental health clinics. We didn't have male mental health clinics.

Andrew Huberman:
Do men in relationships, are they protected from some of the negative effects-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Oh, yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... that you're describing?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
This is fascinating. So do you know what takotsubo cardiomyopathy is? Have you heard of this?

Andrew Huberman:
This is when people die of a broken heart?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. So this is what's really fascinating. People don't realize this, but women are far more likely to initiate divorce. So I think the interesting statistic about this is you can look at gay couples. So gay men who get married have less than a 50% divorce rate. I think they get divorced maybe 30% of the time. Lesbian couples have the highest divorce rate. So they get divorced, I think something like 60% of the time. So it's even greater than 50%. So I did a lot of work on this because I've had so many patients who, when they go through a breakup, it really ruins their life. And there's research on this, okay? I'm not misogynist or anything like that. So if you look at qualitative research, if you ask a woman after she goes through a divorce, "What did you lose?" She will say, "I lost a relationship." If you ask a man, "What did you lose?" They say, "I lost a life." So it's just different. So women will oftentimes form many connections, so when they lose their relationship, they lose a relationship. But men are, by some amount of biology, by some amount of conditioning, by some amount of culture, oftentimes will have one emotional support in their life, which is their wife. And I've worked with plenty of women for whom this is overwhelming because they become their husband's therapist because their husband doesn't know how to manage their own emotions. That's not good. That's not healthy. But if we're looking at outcomes, the cortisol spike that men get after divorce is way higher. The amount of inflammation that they experience is way higher. I think they have an acute risk of heart attack that elevates. So some of this is probably biology. We're just wired differently. This is also another thing that's really interesting. The inflammatory response from a cold is greater in men than it is in women. So when my wife gets sick, she's able to do stuff, but my inflammatory response is actually like I'm out. And there's a lot of physiological evidence for why that is. And it may have something to do with if you sort of look at in the animal kingdom, a male lion is much more likely to fight baboons, much more likely to get scratches and things like that. So we need a more robust immune system, so we want a stronger immune response. But yeah, takotsubo cardiomyopathy, the mortality risk of divorce for a man is way higher than a woman.

Andrew Huberman:
It's interesting because, and these are individual cases, but not population studies. But I've had a lot of young men and their parents reach out to me, like, "My kid is really struggling. He's really languishing, and he's really falling behind. He's got these issues, that issues." There are all these loose correlations that I'll just throw out there. I often hear, and I'm not saying this is the cause, but I'll hear, "Oh, yeah," and even their moms will know sometimes. They'll say, "He's had some really serious sexual side effects. He was using these anti-hair loss meds. I wonder, is it that?" They always want to find what's the one thing that can put them back on track. And I'm not a psychiatrist, so I've talked to them before, and oftentimes will get a sense of what's going on more generally. And I actually have noticed that a number of these guys have relationships. They're very close with their girlfriend. They have very kind, loving, supportive girlfriends. And the girlfriends are doing well in life. They're moving forward professionally But the guy isn't. He's sort of stuck. And that was a surprise to me. I thought they would be totally alone. They'd have no access to dating or mates. No, that's not what's happening in many cases. They're sort of just stuck. They can't seem to find a profession. They can't seem to get ahead. And they've got these very kind, very patient girlfriends that are sitting it out with them for I don't know how long. I don't know if they'll stick around, but that seems more and more common. So they can find the relationship, but they can't seem to launch into being a grown man, frankly.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. So I think, first of all, that was me. So it took me five and a half years to graduate from college. I graduated with a 2.4 GPA, and then I started med school at 28. I couldn't support myself financially until I started residency at the age of 32. My wife started working at 16 and has never stopped. And so there was a period of five years where what was I doing? I had a research assistant position at Harvard, but I was basically applying to medical school, and so I was going nowhere real fast, and she stuck it out with me, which is quite amazing. I'm still surprised by her and her lack of pressure and also her supreme confidence that I was going to figure it out. So I've been in those shoes, and I think the big thing for me was I figured out how I worked. And so we have this picture, failure to launch, which is a lot of what I deal with. These are gifted kids who then hit a wall like I did. So had a lot of potential, just never really comes to it. They struggle a lot with things like discipline, motivation. I think oftentimes they will look for some kind of solution, right? Because we, as human beings, we don't realize that most of life is multifactorial, that if you do a multivariate regression analysis, you're not going to find that it was the hair loss meds. And so this is where we come back to the roadmap, where I think the most important thing, and I've helped anywhere between hundreds to millions, whether you consider YouTube or not. And the main thing is they don't know how they work. See, men are not taught to understand. They're taught to do. We're like, "Do this thing. Get a job, do this." And women have all kinds of expectations, have babies, and work, and do everything exceptionally well. But I think we're just not taught how to understand ourselves. So the biggest thing that I see is not a problem of treatment, but is a problem of misdiagnosis. And one of the things that you learn, I think people don't really realize this, but most of medicine is not treatment. I don't think treatment is usually the hard part. I think the diagnosis is the hard part, understanding really what's wrong. Just as another example of this, I've worked with so many people, young men, who are like, "I'm so tired. How do I increase my energy?" And what they don't realize is if you think about tiredness, tiredness is a signal from the brain. Tiredness is not always low energy. Tiredness is your brain's way of telling you that this is not worth doing. And the interesting thing is there are a lot of things that we do need to do that we will feel tired for, but the real solution to that sometimes is to force yourself to do it and get yourself out of it. There are some studies that show that exercise is equally effective to an SSRI, so there's a value to that. But I think what a lot of people are missing is their conception of the thing is what's making them tired.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
If you think about something that you haven't done before, and you're like, "Oh my God, I have to do this thing." And then when you do it, you're like, "Oh, it's not that bad." And then you procrastinate on doing the thing even though it's actually pretty easy to do. So changing your understanding of what you are tired to do is the fastest way to be able to do it. But the problem is we don't teach men what's going on inside them, right? We don't teach them about their emotions. We don't teach them about motivation. And so when I focus on that, that's really what I focus on doing. There's an old Sanskrit sentiment that avidya, which means ignorance, is the source of dukkha, which is suffering. All of your suffering in life has nothing to do with willpower, motivation, or anything like that. It's all a lack of understanding. And the more I've worked, the more I've realized that the most powerful thing that you can give yourself is understanding. Even if I were to ask you the things that are easy for you are the things that you understand, and before you understood them, they were hard. As someone who's lazy, understanding what motivates you is actually more important than discipline or willpower, for me anyway. I'm a degenerate. And I think this is what a lot of these young men who failure to thrive-- Like I had one patient who was 31 years old, struggled with addiction, drop out. Two years later, not only is he finishing therapy school, he's becoming a therapist, so he's supporting himself, making about 150K a year. He's also writing a dystopian novel. Two years later, he messaged me it had been published, right? And it's like understanding why he behaved the way that he did. And the more that you understand how the system works, then you can make minor adjustments, and you can make it work. A car is really hard to move if you're not driving it, and you don't know how to turn it on.

Andrew Huberman:
I totally agree. And I think that the false message that many people have received and that we hear all the time is that a focus on self, trying to understand the self, is really just indulgent focus on one's emotions. It's the me culture, navel-gazing. But that's not what you're talking about. You're talking about doing the work of addressing what parts of you are ego, what do you really want, doing a Shinnye meditation, learning to access the void so that you can really see the difference between who you really are and what's coming at you from the outside so you can steer. That's what I'm hearing, and I think that the challenge is that I don't think that there's a language for this exploring of self that makes it very clear from the outset in two sentences that it's not about just being a victim, not about just feeling one's feelings so that you can justify-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... everything as a trauma, right? And I do think there's trauma out there. I think there are a lot of traumatized people. I also think that we've left now the diagnosis of trauma in the beholder. Everyone's decided that they're traumatized by this and that, and it's created this other form of trauma, which is that people are fundamentally weak.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And the people with real trauma probably aren't getting the treatment they need and deserve. So it's interesting that we keep coming back to men and boys and the way that they're suffering. This is probably a good opportunity to talk about pornography. Do you recommend that young males just not look at pornography?

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
I think the majority of people report no problems from watching pornography. So some people will say it's healthy. I don't know that it's healthy or not. I think it's the way that you use it, just like any other addictive substance. So I don't think it is all bad. That being said, there are a couple of things that are really problematic. The first is that pornography is getting more neuroscientifically engaging. Here's the scariest statistic about addiction. So 5% of people under the age of 30 had erectile dysfunction, maybe like 20, 30 years ago. That number has climbed to like 20%. And a lot of that erectile dysfunction, if you define what erectile dysfunction is, it is inability to maintain an erection through the completion of the sexual act. A lot of people think that this means they can't get hard. It's not that they can't get hard. They can get an erection. It's just they can't achieve orgasm or climax. So I think we're seeing a lot of problems with pornography. We're seeing a lot of very young people having erectile dysfunction, being unable to achieve climax through penetrative intercourse. It's affecting the brain a lot more. So the colors are brighter, things are jigglier, things are bouncier. There's virtual reality, 8K, 4K. The bigger problem that I'm seeing, or the scarier problem, is pornography used to be something of passive consumption. So the porn is over there, and I'm over here. There's no emotional connection. There's no parasocial relationship. The really scary thing is with the things like OnlyFans, now the person that you're watching pornography for is interacting with you. They're saying thank you. They're appreciating you. You're asking them, and they're sending you a picture or making a video just for you. So I'm seeing a lot more scary parasocial relationships develop. I'm seeing emotional affairs. So now, we've added a dimension of our brain, the empathic circuit, the social circuits, the relationship circuits, are now starting to activate with pornography. So that's a whole different ballgame. And then there's a lot of data just about ease of access and things like that. I think pornography addiction, it's interesting, a very strong risk factor is prepubescent exposure to pornography.

Andrew Huberman:
Young kids who are on the internet.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Majority of people actually get exposed to their first pornography now before they hit puberty. But there's something about when you get exposed to pornography when your brain is developing before puberty, it increases your risk factor. It increases the risk of developing addiction later in life. So there is something just special about sex and the way that it affects our brain. We're talking about salience and things like that. We've basically evolved this whole thing to procreate. So when we get visual stimuli, when we get auditory stimuli, it turns our brain on in a very profound way. We see a lot of emotional suppression. So what a lot of people don't realize, I work with a lot of people who struggle with pornography, really the emotional regulation component is huge. They're not horny. It's not necessarily a lot of masturbation, which is what a lot of people assume. Oftentimes, it's second screen kind of stuff. It's watching pornography when you use the restroom and you're not jerking off or anything, you're just watching porn.

Andrew Huberman:
So it's sort of like a numbing out type of activity.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Absolutely. Right. So this is a key thing to remember is in order for something to be addictive, it needs two things. It needs to give us pleasure, and it needs to take away pain. And as we see addiction, over time, it shifts away from pleasure into taking away pain. When we become dependent on something is when we require it to numb ourselves. So I think we're also seeing more pornography because life for everybody, young people and young men, is getting harder. So as we become more socially isolated, as it's harder to find a girlfriend, as we get indoctrinated by social media, as we become delusional because of social media, as our social skills atrophy, all of these things are happening.

Andrew Huberman:
It's a pretty bleak picture.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
It is bleak. And I think the reason it's bleak is because we haven't been fighting back in a very focused way. So part of the reason I focus so much on relationships, because I'm not a couples therapist, but what I found is that my patients I could only do so much without having them have a relationship.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
You can be depressed, you can be anxious, but if you have a solid relationship, that is one of the most important things. At some point, I really started focusing on this. It was like literally I was down the street or on the opposite side of town filming a guide about what is the science behind arousal activation. How do you flirt? These are the skills. How do we help people? I think it's giving them the skills that we used to learn organically.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you think that a lot of the attention on muscle building, on looks maxing, is actually just a safer discussion for young males? They can talk about that. They can talk about trying to get body fat percentages, or they're doing mewing for their jaw or something. I think nasal breathing can be very helpful, but the whole thing of looks maxing is so insane to me. But maybe it's a way of talking about wanting to be different because the conversation about sex, about intimacy, about maybe someone has issues with porn or erectile issues, maybe that's just so scary that it's kind of a way of them getting close to the topic but not really in the topics. Because when people have approached me and said, "Hey, man, can you help me out? I'm really having problems," they're not talking to me about what I just described. They're talking about not knowing which career to have. But then they're asking me about how to work out. And it's almost like I have a feeling there's a lot more going on.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. So here's what I'd say. One of the great things I learned as a psychiatrist, the best way to run away from an unsolvable problem is to solve something else. So I think you're absolutely right. There's a displacement, because I don't even know where to start with how to flirt. But you know what I can control? Here's the thing about looks maxing. There's no other humans involved. There's no possibility. Getting somebody else to fall in love with fucking me? That's so hard. I don't even know where to start. I don't even like myself. How am I supposed to get somebody else to fall in love with me? When I look in the mirror, I see disgust. I cannot fathom or tolerate the idea of going on a date and having this person look at this. So I'm going to transform myself. I'm going to solve all of those problems by solving one problem. If I can just do this one thing, I'm going to take a multivariate regression analysis and hyper-focus on one variable. I'm going to do a very interesting selection bias and cognitive bias, cognitive filtering of ignoring all of the beautiful people who are still single or divorced. And the other huge cognitive bias that I'm going to do, when I go to a playground and I see lots of kids running around and I look at the parents of those kids, they're average looking, right? Most people who have relationships look average. Statistically, that's how it works. But the mind does not know how to grab-- The problem is too big. Where do I start? Do I learn how to flirt? I'm creepy. How do I learn how to flirt? How do I learn how to flirt without getting rejected? I'm tired of getting rejected. I don't want to get rejected. It hurts to get rejected. It proves all of my insecurities about myself, and that's just flirting. So if you talk to these people, a lot of times what you'll get is any time you tell them to move forward, what they'll say is, "But how do I solve the next thing? That doesn't account for this. Even if I looks max, it doesn't do this, it doesn't do this, it doesn't do this." And that's why the more that they go into looks maxing, because there's this idea that if you're beautiful, right, and this is some really interesting theory of mind. When they look at the people that they're attracted to, in their mind, if someone's a 10 out of 10, I'd date them in a heartbeat, and if I date them, someone would date me.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So I think this looks maxing thing is a really great way of displacing all of our terrifying, overwhelming feelings of, "How do I get another human being to accept me?" It's way more complicated. The good news is that I think we can actually figure it out. I don't know how many research studies are published, but I was blown away. Did you know that half the studies on charisma are published in religious studies journals? It's fascinating. There's so much science out there. We know so many things. We literally know how people fall in love. We know that one of the reasons that it's harder to fall in love is because the feeling of being in love, you know that feeling of just seeing someone and you feel amazing, and just their presence makes you feel amazing, floods your brain with dopamine. So as our dopamine system gets messed up by social media, it has literally become neurochemically harder to fall in love. So now when I have patients, I tell them, "Go for a walk for one hour before you go on a date and stay off of any technology."

Andrew Huberman:
Love that.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Literally, your neuroscientific capacity to fall in love is increased.

Andrew Huberman:
May I ask what you think about this? I'm a big fan lately of boring breaks in order to stay on task for things like writing, podcast research, et cetera. I find that if breaks between cognitive tasks, which are demanding, if those breaks are too engaging, that it makes it much, much harder to reengage in hard work. Which I love hard work, but I also experience some of the friction going into a bout of work.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. So what most people do on their breaks is exhausting.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Literally, right? So if you spend time on social media, your brain will be more tired at the end of the break So boredom is great. There's a lot of stuff around yoga and boredom and focusing the mind and things like that. But yeah, I'm with you 100%. So people don't understand what's happening to them. They don't understand also how to make people fall in love with you. I don't mean that in a minute. That's the wrong phrase. But so human beings have been falling in love since the dawn of humanity, literally, and there are certain circumstances that lead to that. There's a cool study that I cite over and over and over again. They had couples go on a date on a stone bridge or a rickety wooden bridge, and the couples that were on the rickety wooden bridge formed a stronger emotional bond. People don't realize that forming an emotional bond depends on shared emotional experience. So we have to feel the same thing, and this is such a problem in rehab. My biggest problem when I'm running a rehab as an attending is people keep falling in love. We're trying really hard, like, "Don't fall in love." These two are getting together. All the nursing staff is aware. They went to their rooms overnight. This is happening. We're like, "No love and no in rehab." But it happens over and over again because everyone is sharing. Trauma bonding is what people call it now. But when you share an emotional experience with someone else, that is what fosters love. But nowadays, what happens is dating is like interviews. Everyone's making judgments on each other based on a profile. None of those things actually correlate with the relationship success. Whether you're six feet, how much money you make, doesn't correlate with-- I'm sure maybe correlates on some level, but if you look at the big variables, it's not any of that stuff. And if you think about how you fell in love with your girlfriend, how I fell in love, I was going to be a monk. I told my girlfriend. I didn't know we were dating. I didn't even ask her out on a date. I was just like, "Hey, you want to grab food sometime?" I was going to be a monk. And then I even told her, I was like, "Hey, I'm going to be a monk. This is a temporary thing." And she's like, "Yeah, whatever."

Andrew Huberman:
Seven years later, you're back from India.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Oh, no. Well, so I would come back-

Andrew Huberman:
Okay

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
... back and forth.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
But, so we dated during that time. And the cool thing is as an educator, it's amazing if you teach someone how something works, and love is not that complicated, actually.

Andrew Huberman:
If given the right environment, internal and external environment.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah. Right?

Andrew Huberman:
So I'm not trying to be academic about it, but what you described about-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
No, no

Andrew Huberman:
... an hour off social media before going on a date, I think that's terrific advice to people. I think that this idea that our nervous systems are somehow able to pivot from one sensory experience to the next without the previous sensory experience completely either contaminating or supporting what comes next is so obvious in the case of you get a great night's sleep, you wake up, the next morning you feel great. You get a terrible night's sleep, the next morning you feel terrible. Everyone understands that, but people can't understand the idea of dopamine depletion or just over-arousal and then going into the next thing that should be arousing, and it's under-arousing. And I'm not even talking about sex here. I'm talking about social interaction.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So when I was looking at the mechanisms of this, I realized why going on a movie is a great first date. Back when we were growing up-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
... people would go on movies on first dates, right? And everyone's like, "Why would you go on a movie for a first date? You're not even talking or getting to know the other person." Well, it turns out that movies create shared emotional experiences, which is why people organically figured out that you can go to a movie, and it's a great first date. But I think things do seem bleak, but I think we've got the tools to reverse it. So I think the cool thing is we do have all of this information.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And so we know how to be charming, how to flirt, what are the situations that you need to create in order to foster interactions or foster a relationship, foster emotional connection. What makes you charismatic? What makes you attractive? Things like humor and kindness are incredibly important. Humor is a huge signal that signals both intelligence, because if you can make someone laugh, you can read them. And so it's also a signal of empathy-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
... and ability, like, does this person get me? If they can make you laugh, that means that they get you. And the last thing that I'll mention is that we were talking about how the internet is like people live in different worlds on the internet, and the really scary thing, I made a great YouTube video that was kind of controversial, but why women prefer beta males. And the really interesting thing is that a lot of people were really upset by it. It was about this drive for muscularity and some of the scientific research. But the really interesting thing was the male versus female response to the video, that women were like, "Yeah, this guy's right. We're actually these super alpha guys are not actually attractive. I would run for the hills." And then a lot of dudes were like, "Oh, this guy's like he doesn't know what he's talking about." So it's really interesting. Part of what makes it so hard is not only do we have these effects from pornography and atrophy of the social circuits of our brain, but then we're also like we just have bad information. And in my experience, once you get good information, I'm sure this is true of you too. Once you get good information and once you start applying it, once you start practicing it, you'd be amazed at how much understanding a system can give you mastery over it.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, absolutely. I can't claim it in the domains that you're so proficient in, but I'll never forget as an undergraduate working in a sleep laboratory over a summer at Stanford, and every afternoon, the entire laboratory would go outside to watch the sunset. And I asked, I'll never forget. I asked Seiji Nishino, I asked Emmanuel Mignot. These guys discovered the genes that underlie narcolepsy, and the druggable targets now exist, that drugs exist to treat it. But at the time, they said, "Oh, we do this to entrain our circadian rhythm, and you need to watch the sunrise, so you need to see sun within the first hours of your day." This was mid-'90s. And I remember thinking, "How could that be?" And I started reading about it, and the cells that regulate this had not yet been discovered. That was in the early 2000s. We didn't even know which retinal neurons mediated this. But these guys knew this from their own lives and their own practices and I started realizing, oh, there's a mechanism here, and as more got discovered, it was like this changes mood, mental health, metabolism. We now just all take this for granted, but understanding the mechanism behind something tremendously empowering.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I share that story because that wasn't but 25 years ago or so. So what that means is that the things that we think are kind of out there now that are a little bit woo or a lot woo, I guarantee in 10 years we're going to understand the mechanisms. They'll be called something different or similar or maybe the same, and people will be putting that to work, and it's going to improve mental health in a major way. In other words, the science catches up eventually, but the practices that work need to be talked about. And that's why, again, I'm so grateful that you're willing to go there.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
I think the reason there's skepticism-- So I'm a Reiki healer. I'm a crystal healer. I learned Bach flower remedies, and I don't talk about any of that stuff because I think there's no basis for it. Like maybe the energy healer. So I've studied all kinds of things, but I think the reason that people are so skeptical is because there's so much BS out there. So the reason I leaned into yoga and meditation are first, actually, primarily because of certain personal experiences I had, but those have the best evidence behind them.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And I think the real challenge right now, so the reason I do it this way is because if you look at some of the really powerful techniques from meditation, people can't wait. Like at least the people I work with, they can't wait 20 years to elucidate the mechanisms.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
When we're talking about Sankalpa and Yoga Nidra. So you can get all the autonomic stuff, great. You can get some neuroscience stuff maybe, right? That's kind of iffy. We don't really know. But then some of this other stuff, I think if people are not achieving what they want, what I encourage them to do is explore and be skeptical. Don't just believe it, but try it, right? So if you're doing cardiac coherence breathing, that's Nadi Shuddhi, right? Alternate nostril breathing.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Do it regularly the way that you were taught, and then do it for eight seconds for the inhalation, 32 seconds for the hold, and 16 seconds for the exhalation, because 16-

Andrew Huberman:
Alternating nostrils.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah, alternating nostrils.

Andrew Huberman:
Can I just insert one thing? Some people will hear alternating nostril breathing of plugging one nostril than the other, and they'll go, "Oh my God, this is crazy." We had the guy who works on olfaction and frankly breathing, because the two go hand in hand, Noam Sobel, and he explained that every 90 minutes around the clock, there's a switch in the dominant nostril through which we breathe. You can observe this even if you have a deviated septum, but air will flow more readily than to the other, and it's the alternation of parasympathetic dominant and sympathetic dominant breathing through the autonomic nervous system. And so he's a physiologist, and when he said that, I thought, okay, this alternate nostril breathing thing, for so many years, frankly, I heard about this from the yoga community, and I thought, all right, this seems a little wacky. And here he's sitting exactly where you are now, and he said, "Yeah, there's absolutely a physiological basis for this. When you breathe through one nostril, you get a very different effect on the autonomic nervous system than you do through the other nostril, and this is constantly alternating, even if you're not plugging your nostril every 90 minutes from birth until death."

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
There were certain things I would find in the yogic texts, and then I ran into this exact thing where there's, I think they call it an ultradian rhythm.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Right? That's, oh, this is like a physiologic thing. And so I leaned towards the practices that were physiologically sound, that there's some evidence for, because I was like, I'm not going to waste my time and nothing's going to happen. I'm going to do the stuff that at least I'll get a physiologic benefit. And then as you go into advanced practices, it's wild. And the really scary thing is that in my mind, there's a lot of this stuff is scientifically valid, but it's really hard to study. And then the really scary thing, the thing that bothers me the most is that I think there's a lot of stuff that's true that is not scientifically valid. I really think it's kind of like beyond what science is capable of measuring, at least now and in the foreseeable future. And-

Andrew Huberman:
Spirituality.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Spirituality. And I think the simplest example of this is a thought. We have no scientific evidence of a thought. The only reason that we know that the amygdala is where we feel anxiety for is because we measure what was going on in the amygdala, and then we ask the person, "What are you feeling when this part of your brain lights up?"

Andrew Huberman:
Well, you may be encouraged to learn that the great Anna Lembke, my colleague-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... at Stanford, right? An MD and psychiatrist like you who wrote "Dopamine Nation," has a book-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Amazing work.

Andrew Huberman:
Amazing work. She's an amazing woman at the level of clinician, human being, just all around, and such a pioneer. If you look back, she's been five to 10 years ahead of everybody else in terms of her-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... understanding and beliefs about where we're going vis-a-vis the neuroscience impact of social media, et cetera. She has a book that's coming out later this year on spirituality.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
So serious scientists and clinicians like yourself, like Anna, are starting to go there before we have the rat, cat, monkey, bat, then clinical trial and human work done.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
So what I love about spirituality personally, it scares me and it frustrates me, but what I like about it is it's the only scientific exploration that no one can do for you. So what I love about it, so I like learning. I'm not really a researcher, but I'm a very clinically oriented scientist, I guess you could say, or science-oriented clinician. And it's the one thing that You can never-- like an experience of shunya. You can look at the brain scan of shunya, potentially, but to experience it, to figure it out, you have to be the scientist. It is the only kind of subjective experience, which is what spirituality is really about, is attaining certain states, is not something that is ever transmissible. And that's why people are hesitant to talk about it, because we sound like crazy people. It's like if I mention, "This technique can give you insight into your past lives." They're like, "This guy is insane." But here's the struggle that I had. You're meditating one day, and then you have these memories. You have memories, but they're not from this life. And then it's like you're like, "What the hell is that?" And I'm not even saying that past lives exist. I want to be really clear about that. But for me, it was confusing. It's really destabilizing for your understanding of what the world is.

Andrew Huberman:
Especially as a psychiatrist.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Well, I wasn't a psychiatrist back then.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
And so then it's like, okay, well, now we have to figure this out. So if people are interested in scientific exploration, I think one of the sad things about the world is we've explored the surface, we figured it out. But within every single one of us is a dimension of exploration that only you can do. Do you think when we're talking about samskaras, sankalpa, the unconscious parts of our mind, these liminal states of consciousness, we can hear Andrew talk about it, but if you want to be there, you have to go there. No one can go there for you. And that's ultimately what I think is really cool about it.

Andrew Huberman:
Man, you are one of a kind I have to say. And I also have to say there's so many things that we didn't cover-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... but that I would love to have you back to cover at some point soon. But I just want to say you're really one of a kind. I've been kind of peppering our conversation with this from time to time, but again, the degree and the depth to which you're able to think about the practical concerns that people have, the real problems, the real challenges that they face right now, and then offer tools that are grounded in neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, and also ancient practices, it's spectacular. I have to say this is one of my favorite conversations I've ever had on or off the podcast. I'm totally lit up by it and-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... so grateful for what you do. You're an amazing public educator, and I can't thank you enough for coming to talk about these topics. And I know that there's lots more that we could talk about, and we will.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I really want to extend my gratitude. It's been an amazing thing to hear you touch into these things and to offer practical tools about ego dissolution, about distress tolerance, to make that operational awareness, to really define what that is, to talk about unlearning as such a critical component of our health. The shunya meditation example, and I was able to get moments of it during that-

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... instruction, even though it was the first time I've ever done it. So many people are going to benefit from this, and I really want to encourage them to try these practices, to explore. Just as you said, there's really no substitute for that self-exploration. Just thank you. It's fantastic.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Thank you for having me. Andrew, I got to say, you are also one of a kind. I feel like you could still go. I'm wiped.

Andrew Huberman:
I got more hours in me if we need to, but I want to be fair to our audience and to you.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
No, no. I mean, I can see that you've got more hours in you, and it's interesting. I felt that gravity the moment you came into the room. But yeah, you're really energetic. And so it's been awesome being here, and thank you so much.

Andrew Huberman:
Thank you. Well, the energy is only partially intrinsic. It's also the consequence of what you offered today. And again, this has been thrilling, so please come back again.

Dr. Alok Kanojia:
Sure.

Andrew Huberman:
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Alok Kanojia. To learn more about his work, 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 follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. 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." And if you're not already following me on social media, I am hubermanlab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's hubermanlab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the Menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to Newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Alok Kanojia. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.