Why You Need Emotional Discomfort | Ido Portal & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Feeding Your Emotional State

00:00emotionally I don't feel well let's say what do I tell people what are you feeding yourself what is your emotional food emotional foods that are important that I bring into the practice of my students of myself one discomfort we've mentioned it it's important it's clear why emotional contradiction two I love you and I hate you for example when you work with boxing when When you let people have this physical and you can point at it.

00:32Look up. Watch what happened now. I love you and I hate you and I feel it. I can at the multistability. Another one is the aesthetic intensity

Tool: Aesthetic Intensity

00:46that we talked about bringing moments of awe of curiosity but also of melancholy or or many other intensities that are important. We've removed this from our lives, from our movies, from our books, definitely online, you know, as you pointed, we took it away.

01:08So, of course, we're not feeding ourselves those things. Restraint,

Tool: Restraint

01:15stimulating, and requiring restraint, very important quality. All those are practices for me. Those are nutrients that I want to feed my emotional state. The same thing I have for my intellectual faculty schema, the conceptual, the abstraction.

01:33How do I become smarter? What is thought? Is thought just this knee-jerk reactions, these levers, this associative quality? Is this thought? I refuse to accept it. That's not thought. So you're you're lucky uh you're not lucky. you you are right to refuse it.

01:52Uh we could talk about thoughts and what they are. I actually have a segment in my book. I'm not trying to advertise my book that's all about how to think about thinking so that you can literally control your thinking. Use thinking as a tool, not just have it be this like wherever you go some dynamic attractor states.

02:09The neuroscientist would say you just kind of fall like a clang association in a psychotic person. Yeah. is just they're they drop into a groove of of thought that is disjointed, makes no sense to the rest of us. Many people, including myself, sometimes we live in those modes of thought that are equally psychotic.

02:29We just don't express it. But they're psychotic because we're taking something as valuable as like a a beautiful vehicle and we're just kind of using it to like prop something up at the side of the house. my colleague Carl

Tool: Thinking in Complete Sentences

02:44Daiseroth, one of the best neuroscientists alive, maybe ever, um when he told me that every night after he put his five kids to sleep, you know, he would go and sit and force himself to think in complete sentences as a practice. I remember you told me before I was humbled and I thought, [laughter] "Oh, that is the that is hard.

03:09That is a smart person. He's a very smart person. That's an intelligent person. He's a very intelligent person. That sounds like it. It comes from that place of knowing like, you know, I never I I almost never truly think. It's rare. He taught himself to think.

03:30Yeah. Yeah. Without realizing it. Without realizing that you're just playing a different game in that sense that it's it's hard to develop it. And again what are the practices that we engage with you know we need those things nutrients so it's stomachs the emotional faculty is a stomach it's digestion and it asks you feed me and you got to take care of it there is metabolism involved there is a protection layer there is immunity to it right there is the marov boundary around it the membrane there is a model to it simulates things out but so it's also a

Movement & Athlete Standards

04:08very important way to look at it and of course the body movement nutrients. What is the quality of that? If you look at those gym practices, those weightlifting, they're of very very low quality in terms of movement. Every dancer will tell you that.

04:23Every athlete of a high level will tell you that. Where did we move to a ridiculous situation where our athletes are learning and are inspired by the fitness people instead of the fitness people be learning and be inspired by the the athletes, the the movement people?

04:44You're telling me that the athletes are paying attention to the fitness people? Yeah, of course. That seems crazy. Why? That's Don't you see it? Boxers training like fitness people. They're fitness athletes. They're not boxers these days. Why social media?

04:58Why? What is there approachable calls the attention?

Challenge of Attention

05:06I don't know why you brought me in today, but it might be one of the less times if not the last time as it becomes less and less what the attention calls for. I don't know. I think I believe that the the system that is human curiosity which drives a lot of social media not all of it.

05:30I do think that when you have a lot of low resolution stuff, the signal to noise becomes people, our senses, I almost said this earlier, but our sensory apparatus, whether or not it's our skin or our smell or our vision or our hearing, as you know, has levels of granularity.

05:50The receptive fields, as we call them, go from very fine to uh to very coarse. We love the feeling of a hug with somebody we love. We also love the feeling of a light caress, you know, or just a hand on ours. These things matter and they're part of our experience.

06:06And even without being aware of that desire for it, we have it's it's it's a drive. I think I do think people like to learn and they like to think. Some people perhaps not. They're lazy. But I believe that the sorts of things that you talk about and do the real effort like the movie that you showed earlier of you this incredible movie like the amount of care that went into that right now relatively brief it might be longer going forward the amount of care is what makes that high signal to noise.

06:39Thank you for that calming and and and positive words. They are important and they they touch my heart as well. And I know personally with you I feel this. I'm talking about this exposure. This is great exposure. It's not not possible anymore to talk about certain things and certain sizes.

07:04And I know you are a person who is challenged by that tremendously because you went huge and at the same time your original search is not going to serve that. This is not the motive. This is not the deep thing that drives you. So I'll always be available and and and free to come for a wonderful conversation with you.

07:30But I I I lament sometimes the situation with the masses and the public and where a lot of attention the the big viral things are going to in the sense that it's it's sad. It's it's very very pricey. It's very expensive. [music]