I wasted 33 years trapped in my own head before Dr Andrew Huberman explained this in 33 minutes…

0:00 You know, we get very much caught up in the how to reach goal A or B, how to write the book, how to make the money, how to grow a social media account, and we forget that at the core of everything is our relationship to our surroundings, to our inner landscape, and to each other. And it always comes back to safety and acceptance. [music] The circuits that are responsible for feelings of social connectedness are deeply [music] deeply rooted in our need for safety. We could say this about any organism but humans included need two things I believe. We need the feeling of safety and acceptance. [music] So safety and acceptance then we can

0:46 break down in the following way. If we look at it through this neuroscience lens, safety is really about the ability to predict outcomes. Okay? And the brain after being responsible for all these housekeeping functions, heart rate, etc. is largely a predictive organ. It wants to understand [music] what's going to happen next to the extent that it can then free up mental real estate, neural real estate to work on creative projects or to build things or to imagine things. Right? There's no creativity. There's no building in the absence of safety. Then it just becomes survival. when we are in the company of people or we know we have people available to us should we need something food maybe we need a monetary loan maybe we need a word of encouragement maybe we need somebody to bounce ideas off of

1:31 whatever it is that constitutes safety for us it's highly subjective highly individual well then [music] when those circuits can quiet down it's as if you know that they can finally quiet down and we have enough so safety so that then we can start to explore or [music] iterating what we have in terms of new jobs, new creative ideas, new art, new, you know, take a walk with somebody you care about, right? Those are not the sorts of things you do when you feel that you are under siege. >> Mhm. >> Either real siege, physical siege, or emotional siege. What do we know about friendship? Friendship is one of the most reliable sources of predictability there that exists within human interactions. Why? Because you can have many, many friends and you don't have to break up with one friend to have another friend. When you were when we're little,

2:17 they say, "Who's your best friend?" And maybe then you could only have one. But pretty soon, we realize that we can have [music] many great friends, many best friends. With friends, we can both hope for and expect safety and acceptance by virtue of having lots of different kinds of friends. Um, friends with whom we play sport, friends with whom we just hang out, friends with whom we don't really talk too much at all, and friends with whom we drop into deep conversation [music] with. So one of the things that I personally have found to be immensely beneficial in my own life and for which it's clearly had an outsized positive effect relative to the time required is a simple good morning text that comes on a reliable schedule meaning every single morning. Now, this might sound almost trivial, but when I wake up in the

3:03 morning, I either [music] receive or send a good morning text to [music] right now there are about three people in that kind of collection. They're not talking to each other, but if I don't receive that text by noon, it activates something in me. It's not a ton of anxiety, but it activates something. Are they okay? What's going on with them? You know, it isn't, why aren't they checking up on me? I assume something's come up. But the simple receivable of a text from somebody saying good morning, I think has both ancient and modern significance. And [music] I really believe that if there was one thing that we could each and all do to better our lives, no matter how busy our social schedule or our at home environments, is to have [music] at least one but probably one to three,

3:50 depending on your bandwidth, one to three friends that every single morning when you wake [music] up, you text them and they text you back. Just a simple good morning. Why? Because it's the reliability. It's this notion of expectation being fulfilled. It's not a huge expectation. And [music] this brings us back to safety and acceptance, right? No one's going to text us good morning if they don't accept us, if they dismiss us. And the safety is in the predictability of the interaction. Friends with whom [music] we can just be one version of ourselves are wonderful. Friends with whom we can be all versions of oursel is uh especially wonderful. That's the acceptance piece. Uh typically I think we look more for that in romantic relationship. this notion of just like safety and acceptance being

4:36 hallmarks of of healthy romantic relationship. I think those are also the hallmarks of healthy friendship. It's [music] just that with friendship, we can be a bit more segmented in terms of the number of different aspects of [music] self that we need um safety and acceptance with. >> Um and I think one thing that [music] I'm also very eager about these days is breaking down some of the um traditional stereotypes like you know for anyone that's listening to this and goes, "Oh, you know, I didn't you know men don't talk that way or something." And it's like actually they do. Um they do and if given [music] the chance they will open up about things that perhaps they hadn't even thought about. And I confess I'm one of those people. Maybe it was my Y chromosome got in the way of me thinking like wait what do you want me to talk about? What's in my heart? Hey actually that's a really great question. Thank you. [music] And so I think this brings

5:22 us back to these early circuits that are all about safety and acceptance [music] that are all about being able to predict things and basically to say, okay, I don't have to be vigilant. That's really what safety is about is about turning off the neural circuits for vigilance. When we turn off the neural circuits for vigilance, we can start to direct our neural circuits, vision, auditory, whatever thoughts towards an awareness of things that are both inside us and around us that keep us in that calm state. I mean, vigilance is associated with stress. Stress is associated with a narrowing of the visual field, a narrowing of the auditory fields. I'll just use this analogy because my sister and I last um last summer, we always go to New York for our birthdays together. We went and [music] saw what the Harry

6:07 Potter play. Oh, it's so good. >> Okay. Right. And then I swear in New York, too. It's >> Yeah. Is wild. I mean, the effects are so unbelievable. She's a big Harry Potter fan. I'm not, but just just spectacular effects. It was just so wild. I I couldn't believe it. But there's this library in [music] in the in the play where it's it's a magic library where when one of the books is taken out about a particular subject, the books around it actually morph and change to reflect the same subject material. And when I saw that I immediately said that's how the brain works. The way the brain works is a kind of pseudo hypnosis. Hypnosis is about context [music] and context setting and narrowing of context. All of us have such a wealth of historical [music] present and future thinking cognition in our brains. But when we [music] get

6:52 anchored to a particular emotional state or topic, what ends up happening is that the the available topics around it change in reference to how stressed we are. When we are stressed, all the topics, all the books on the shelf around that stress are about that thing and [music] how to solve it. And actually, this is why stress enhances our memory for solving [music] that the things that can help us solve that particular issue. But guess what is given up? All the other distantly or not so distantly [music] related topics that lend themselves to creativity, to thinking about novel combinations of things. This is why our friend [music] Rick Rubin, I think, is such a a spectacularly creative individual because [music] he spends a lot of time putting his brain and body into a state in which he can

7:38 remain in contact with these other related or seemingly unrelated topics. Whereas, [music] when we're in a stressed mode, when we have to problem solve, when we are in vigil vigilance, excuse me, we absolutely narrow our cognitive fields, our visual fields, our auditory fields. limit what we think is possible. And so I think great friendships, to bring it back to it, great relationships of all kinds have enough safety and acceptance in them that we can make our way through the practical constraints of the relationship in the day, the week, and the year, but that there's also a sense of creativity that there are new elements allowed to be brought in because there's enough safety and acceptance that we can turn down those vigilance circuits. with circuitry

8:24 that's built for safety and acceptance. [music] When you're talking about everything that you talk about on the Hooverman Lab, things that we I talk about from a maybe more spiritual wisdom perspective, they're all hard things. And safety and acceptance generally in our current understanding of those words feels like comfort and security and easy and simple. And then all of a sudden you're saying cold plunges, infrared sauna, beginning of circadian rhythm in the morning, strength workouts, like all this other stuff which initially is discomfort. It's difficult. It's doing hard things. And I know this was something you've been thinking about a lot, but I'm just trying to make that connection. We're wired for safety and acceptance, but then all the stuff that's good for us seems to be hard, at

9:10 least in the beginning. >> Yeah, it's a great question. So the twist in all of this is that the nervous system loves predictability. [music] even if the predictability is arriving through hard things. >> So I would say the major theme of the Huberman Lab podcast has been tools. We call them protocols [music] to anchor one's physiology in some predictable states. I've never actually articulated that, but that's really what it's about. [music] So why get sunlight in your eyes in the morning? Because it wakes you up. I [music] could tell you it increases cortisol in a good way early in the day, that it sets a timer on your melatonin secretion for later at night. It helps you sleep at night, and that's all true, [music] but it creates a sense of predictability. It allows you

9:56 to know that [music] for the next series of hours, you're going to feel more alert, and at night, you're likely going to be able to fall asleep more easily. Cold plunges, to [music] my mind, people debate whether or not they're valuable for combating inflammation. They are. Whether or not they're valuable for increasing metabolism, probably not to a huge extent, but one thing we know for sure is that they, if done correctly, they're uncomfortable. But after you get out, you have an increase in these three neurochemicals that we call the catakolamines dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine, and you feel more energized and slightly blissed out for the next 2 to four hours. It's a real effect because those are real chemicals and they've served that role for hundreds of thousands of years in humans and they will continue to serve that role in humans. So the cold plunge is

10:44 not so much about pushing yourself as it is figuring out a way that you can overcome a sense of of stress and then safely or overcome a sense of of kind of resistance to getting in the thing and then safely increase these neurochemicals that then predictably shift your state to be more alert [music] and at the same time relaxed and a little bit blissed out if we if we want to call it that. So, [music] I think I'm very glad you brought this up because I think people hear, "Oh, goodness, another thing to do." But if you think about it that way, it's going to be self-limiting. But if you think about it as each one of these things takes a minimum amount of time and you can do the walk and sunlight thing in the morning combined and maybe if you miss a day, no big deal. No big deal. These are slow integrative systems. Your system will recover just fine. done on a consistent basis, you're going to feel

11:31 much better and you're going to have more energy and you're going to be able to think about what you might want to do in your creative life. So, I think what we're what we're getting to here is that the human brain, like all animals, all animals [music] need to know where they're going to sleep that night. I mean, a dog goes into a new environment and is like trying to figure out where's its spot. It's all about space. You talk to any expert dog trainer, they'll tell you, you know, it's all about negotiating space. [music] Can they touch you? Can they not touch you? Are they allowed to be near you? Do they have to stay a a far? Can they go into every room? You know, you look at small children foraging an environment, however rambunctious or calm. They're they're trying to figure out like what am I allowed to do here? What am I not allowed to do here? Sometimes by testing [music] us. As as adults, we do the

12:18 exact same thing. We need to know where we are. We need to orient in space and in time. And then we need to know [music] like what what's available to me? Where where am I going to stay tonight is one of the most fundamental questions that we ask ourselves every single day. Except if you know where you're going to stay tonight, you [music] don't ask yourself that and you have mental real estate to devote to other things. So what we're really talking about here is is kind of bookending the extremely basic fundamental drives of the human brain for safety and acceptance. [music] And then at the very other end is these aspirational things that we all seek, right? these notions of connectedness of of purpose of of fulfillment of of peace. Again, I'm borrowing from Martha's beautiful list because I think it's so fundamental and and it captures most if not all of what we all seek. But

13:03 I think that, you know, we get very much caught up in the how [music] to reach goal A or B, how to write the book, how to make the money, how to grow a social media account. And we forget that at the core of everything is our relationship to our surroundings, to our inner landscape, and to each other. And it always comes back to safety and acceptance. [music] And where we feel uncomfortable, um, where we feel like we didn't do things right or others didn't do them right for us or to us, it always boils down to those two things. >> Yeah. You reminded me of a question I often ask people is, "What's your most repeated thought?" Because when I was looking at the research on thinking, the idea was that not only were we having a lot of thoughts every day, but a lot of

13:49 the thoughts we have are repetitive. And going back to your point on protocols, I feel like the reason we have repeated thoughts is because we haven't yet built a protocol to help that thought go away. So if you built a protocol like [music] I know where I'm sleeping tonight, you're now no longer having that thought of where am I sleeping tonight. And we may be asking ourselves a very different thing today because we've figured out where to sleep. But we might be thinking like how am I going to pay that bill? How am I going to deal with that uh issue at home? What should I say to my kid? You know, whatever it is, right? We all have different challenges. Everyone has a different set of issues that they're struggling with or dealing with. [music] And because we haven't created a protocol, we keep asking that question. And that question then creates panic and creates anxiety and creates stress and

14:36 eventually could lead to burnout if someone just keeps propelling [music] that thought and doesn't create a protocol. So I love the idea that people should build the protocol that links with their most repeated [music] thought rather than having to think, "Oh god, I've got to do 25 things." It's like, well, no, what is the thing that [music] is keeping you up at night or what is the thing that's causing you the greatest anxiety? And try [music] and solve for that. It's like if you're out of milk, you go and buy milk. You don't say, "I've got to buy 25 other things." You just go fill the part of the refrigerator that's empty. >> I'm a big big believer in physiology driving mental states. They go the other way, too. Emotional states drive physiology. [music] It's birectional. Of course, one of the reasons why I've been so emphatic about respiration protocols is a my lab

15:23 published a clinical trial on this in collaboration with David Spiegel in our department of psychiatry which basically could be summarized the following way. If you emphasize exhales, [music] you tend to calm down, meaning you make them longer, more and [music] intentional. Normally, we inhale actively and we passively exhale. Other species do it the other way around. some other species. If you deliberately emphasize your exhales, the [music] duration, the intensity, or just even control the exhale actively, your heart rate slows. When we emphasize inhales, we don't necessarily have to do hyperventilation or tumo breathing or anything like that. We could, but those forms of breathing tend to bring up our activation state. [music] And they emphasize inhales both by virtue of vigor, duration, or just

16:10 putting more conscious attention to them. And there's a reason for this. It's called respiratory sinus arhythmia. It's a it's an actual phenomenon that links the the heart and the vagus nerve and our diaphragm and our lungs. It's a beautiful mechanism. When I'm overthinking at night and I want to fall asleep, I start doing long exhale breathing through [music] my mouth. Now, sometimes I'm out. I just fall asleep. I know that because I wake up sometime later, realize it worked again. Other times it doesn't work so well, right? And one of the most common questions I get is [music] how to turn off repetitive thoughts. >> Now there it's a bit of a skill because you know frankly repetitive thoughts often times are serving an adaptive purpose but we can get stuck on them right. Okay. What do we know about let's just call it it's a its original name

16:56 yoga nidra. The goal is to stay awake to be conscious while [music] deliberately relaxing the body. That's a very useful practice. feels similar to meditation in a way could be called a meditation but it has some distinct benefits. First of all, a beautiful study that was done in Denmark at a medical school in Copenhagen showed that people that do a yoga nidra practice get a 60% increase in baseline dopamine levels in the basil ganglia, a brain area that's associated with the preparation for movement and the withholding of movement for so it essentially can be looked at as a practice that changes neurochemicals in the brain that restore mental and physical vigor. That's how I think of yoga nidra. Yoga nidra I think is

17:42 perhaps the most powerful [music] practice for learning how to turn off one's thoughts. And so when one steps back from the research literature and says okay [music] what do we know for sure about yoga nidra and SDR we know that this can be done for 10 [music] minutes 20 minutes 30 minutes or an hour. We know that it can very reliably improve levels of wakefulness cognition and vigor post nidra. We know [music] that it restores dopamine levels to a marketked extent in the basil ganglia. We know that the brain goes into little pockets of sleep-like states. This needs to be explored further. And we know that it mimics rapid eye movement sleep. And we know that people who do it find it easier to make themselves fall back asleep should they need to. And they

18:28 develop much stronger powers of autonomic regulation, their ability to take themselves out of stress if they need to. I mean, if ever there was a powerful practice, yoga nidra is that practice. >> If ever there was a practice that I wish every human being on the planet would do besides go out and view morning sunlight, it would be yoga nidra. And of course, this has been available for thousands of years. And unfortunately, it has not gotten the traction worldwide that I think it deserves. For me, yoga nidra is the practice to do when I wake up in the morning, but I don't feel completely rested. [music] I'll do anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes of that and then in the afternoon instead of a nap I'll do nidra and sometimes I'll fall asleep admittedly [music] and then if I wake up in the middle of the night nidra is my solution. >> I think that mind active body still is

19:16 such an interesting and frankly unusual state unless we're in rapid eye movement sleep [music] that most people until they try it can't really appreciate the immense value that it brings. But the beautiful thing is it works the first time and it works every time. What I do have is uh a piece of neuroscience knowledge that was at least new to me that most neuroscientists aren't aware of, but I think this is one of the most important discoveries in the last 100 years of neuroscience. It's a collection of studies on an area of the brain called the anterior mid-sulate cortex. Most people have never heard of this brain area, including many neuroscientists. [music] Talk to a neurosurgeon, they know where it is. You talk to a neuroscientist, unless they teach neuro anatomy, which I happen [music] to, most don't know where it is in the brain and most didn't know what

20:02 it did because it hadn't been explored. And then a colleague of mine at [music] Stanford School of Medicine named Joe Parvey did an incredible study where he was doing neurosurgery and stimulating different brain areas as a means to try and find the location where he needed to do the surgery. and he stumbled upon an area called the anterior mids singulate cortex where if he stimulated with an electrode people because they were [music] awake during the neurosurgery would report feeling as if there was some conflict pressing on them some one even [music] described as I feel like I'm driving into a storm but I feel ready I can I can do this others reported a different set of words but the words [music] essentially converged around the same set of subjective experiences which I'm I feel challenged but I can do it.

20:49 This kind of forward center of mass. And then other studies, separate laboratories discovered that people that take on a new practice that's challenging for them, their anterior mid single cortex grows in volume. Other people who fail to [music] um successfully engage in a regular challenging activity, the anterior midsulate cortex didn't increase in volume in the same way. So very interesting brain structure. And there's I would say about a dozen or so really quality studies in humans, a bunch in animal models, but there a bunch in humans that point to the anter midsulate cortex as a site in the brain associated with the feeling of tenacity and willpower to push through. >> It's heavily interconnected with the dopamine reward system, heavily connected, frankly, with a lot of different brain areas. It's a hub for a lot of inputs and outputs. So what do we

21:34 know about the anterior midsulate cortex? Perhaps most interesting of all is that this is the brain area that seems to preserve its size and even grow in size in what are called superagers. Super aers are people that maintain their cognition later into life. These are people that don't undergo the normal age- related decline in cognition. Separate from Alzheimer's type dementia, you know, everybody as they get older develops less working memory, the ability to keep ideas in mind in in the short term. Super aers seem to overcome all [music] that and they live longer. So you could say, well, this is a case of reverse causality. They live longer, so they have a bigger brain area called the inter midsulate cortex. We don't really know what the direction of of causality is. Could just be correlation, but it all gets ultra interesting when

22:21 [music] you start to tack together willpower, the taking on of new things, learning things in neuroplasticity and lifespan. [music] And it may be that that quadfecta represents what we think of as the will to live is associated with an intense curiosity and desire to bring in new ideas and [music] modes of thinking. And new ideas and modes of thinking then feedback on our feelings of how we could gain reward, internal reward. Of course, dopamine being the universal currency of reward as a means to move forward. What does this mean? This means that everybody, [music] I believe, can become a better human being by taking on challenges. What is a challenge that can [music] grow the anterior mids singulate cortex? Well, unfortunately, it's a challenge that you don't want to engage in. So, if you love

23:07 running, this is not it's not going to do it. If you love resistance training, it's not going [music] to do it. If you don't want to meditate in the morning and you do 5 minutes or 10 minutes of meditation, then you just enhance the activation of your anterior midsulate cortex. [music] So, it's about it's not just about doing hard things. It's about really pushing through resistance. And the reason [music] I bring this up now as opposed to in a discussion about like how to get more tenacious or have stronger willpower, it will do that. Okay, we know that when the enter mids singlet cortex gets bigger, it translates to a lot of different areas of challenge, not just the area in which you challenged it. If you're enjoying the challenge, it's no longer the challenge, right? If you're It's always like I remember a training and conditioning coach used to tell me like JJ if you're sitting in the cold plunge just to get your minutes up so you can

23:52 tell someone how long you sat in there. He goes then that means it wasn't hard beyond that certain point. He was like you should get out once it's easy cuz it's not having the effect you want it to have. >> That's right. It's no longer an adaptive stimulus. [music] >> Correct. >> Can can I offer an alternative protocol? People always ask me how cold should the cold plunge be or the cold shower and how long should I stay in? And it's so variable depending on the person, the time of day. Obviously, only do what's safe, right? So, don't go so cold that [music] you can, you know, you can get a cardiovascular effect that's not good. But it's very simple, actually. If you want it to translate into the real world in the best way, you ask yourself right before you get in, on a scale of 1 to 10, how badly do I not want to get in? And I would say that if it's 5 to 10, well, that's a wall. If it's anywhere in

24:38 the five that that's one wall you have to get [music] over. So then you get in and then at some point there will be the desire to get out. That's the second wall. Maybe it comes within 5 seconds. Maybe it comes within 20 seconds. That's the second wall. So what I would do is count walls. What are the quote unquote walls? The walls are are waves of adrenaline being released into your body. And sometimes they are very close together, those waves. And sometimes they're more distantly spaced apart. Now of course at some point you go numb and then you don't feel them anymore. We don't suggest that. But if you think to yourself, gosh, today I really don't want to get in. That wall is a really tall wall. Well, just getting in for 15 20 seconds is going to accomplish something meaningful for this anterior midsulate cortex. It's going to accomplish something meaningful [music] for the adrenaline release that you're going to experience. So, it's less about

25:26 the temperature. I mean, obviously, the temperature plays a role than it is your subjective relationship to the whole thing. For instance, if you do cold exposure at night when you're tired, it's a far and away different experience than in the morning after going for a run and you're too warm. So, I can't say 45° Fahrenheit for 90 seconds. Although, if you want to start there, that's fine, provided [music] it's safe for you. But, as you watch these walls of adrenaline come at you, as it were, pay attention [music] to what they feel like, that's what you'll recognize outside the ice bath in a hard conversation. >> That's what Yeah. that it's not that you can make yourself so resilient that your adrenaline system doesn't work. [music] Correct. >> It's that you learn to recognize the state of having adrenaline in your system and staying calm. And then I actually had this happen the other day. I was [music] in a really hard yesterday

26:13 hard conversation. Something first thing in the morning. I was like, "Wait, what? Seriously? Misunderstanding. Hard conversation." And I [music] remember here we are. Our voices are going up. We weren't yelling, but like it was it was a peaceful morning until that moment. And we you could kind of feel the energy in the room going up. And I was thinking to myself, okay, how am I and I thought, "Oh, this is like a wall in the in the thing." And I said, and I said, because we have this this language at home, I said, um, I feel like there's a wall of adrenaline hitting us. We both kind of started laughing and then we kind of reverted to what we were doing, noticing those walls of adrenaline and realizing that when we're in those uh adrenaline-filled states, our cognition is shifted. We don't have solutions that we had 5 minutes ago. So, learning to watch those pass in the cold plunge, in

27:01 the cold shower on a hard run or whatever it is, but the cold seems to be the universal stressful stimulus for everybody is so valuable more than marking off, you know, 15 minutes or 5 minutes in the cold plunge. And some days it's 15 seconds, sometimes it's 30. And for somebody learning the cold plunge, it's like, hey, can you just even get near the thing or in it? And I think there's real value there in my home growing up that there were many beautiful emotions and concepts and things I was exposed to by virtue of the wonderful people that my parents were. They had flaws like everybody else. [music] But one of the things that I've really tried to discard as I've gotten older is cynicism. It's one of the things that my sister and I talk a lot about. Like it never served anyone well to be cynical. You can be [music]

27:46 critical and discerning, but cynical doesn't accomplish anything except to separate us from people. >> That's my belief. And and I'm not trying to encourage people to be um soft in a way that's unsafe for them. Like I said, be be discerning. Uh you know, safety is important. [music] Uh but cynicism, I don't know what it is. It's like an egofed [music] um negativity that that sort of implies one is better than other people, but it actually is usually the opposite. It usually comes from a place of deep insecurity, right? It's a very dismissive stance. And so I almost caught myself a second ago saying, oh, you know, making a kind of joke about it's a cynical joke about, well, there are probably people who can't. I actually believe that we are all capable of having access to this

28:32 [music] uh reasonable feature within ourselves. Yeah. But it involves a state of calm, a feeling of safety. [music] >> You know, I I've kind of gotten to the point now where I feel like >> if I don't say it now, >> when am I going to say [music] it? And and how old do you have to be? I used to think you had to be 40 years old to write a book. I thought that I thought I have to be 40 years old to write a book. And I realized that's ridiculous. people much younger than 40 write amazing books, amazing and important books. And then I thought, well, how how old do you have to be in order to have had enough life experience to be able to say things that are aspirational about how you'd like to see the world change or people change for the better? And you know, I've decided that the the age on that is is one day, you know, like like one day. So this is a bit of an encouragement for people out there if if you have ideas

29:20 about u ways that you and others can be [music] better to to really like write them down and evolve them, right? They often need some evolution to be able to be received in the right way and but then share those. You know, we we think okay well how do you get safety? Well, you have to get rid of vigilance. How do you get rid of vigilance? Well, you decide what you do and don't have to pay attention to. And at [music] some point, if one decides, I I can't control all of this, you [music] have one of two options. Either that means you're just waiting for that wave to come demolish you, wave of whatever, [music] or you trust like you you trust in something to make everything okay. >> Mhm.

30:05 >> Even if that wave comes, you know. And I've talked before on podcasts, I I believe in God. I do, you know, and and of course I [music] believe in everyone's right to believe or not believe what they believe in. I think that the notion of of giving up trying to control everything and giving over control to more universal forces or a universal force, whatever one's mode of thinking happens to be, I believe they're entitled to is probably the most peace inducing step I've ever taken. And you know, I also am thinking about the the [music] kind of uh counterintuitive nature of the fact that, you know, we're talking at once about letting go and not trying to control

30:50 everything, but also pushing oneself to be more resilient and tenacious [music] and things of that sort. And so I I feel like all of life is like that. All of life is about yes, you need to take care of your physiology. You need to get your sleep at night, but it's also okay to get a bad night's sleep every once in a while. It's okay to not do every protocol. In fact, it's encouraged to not do every protocol. The expectation on us is [music] not perfection, right? It's it's I think being able to toggle between these different states. We're all just being ourselves. >> That's the beauty of it. It's like Costello being Costello. And to some extent, sure, there's, you know, edits and production, all that kind of stuff, but it's just you being you. And to me, that's the most beautiful thing. >> It's what really works. And it's what really matters. And I think it's what

31:36 people should do even when there's no recording. You certainly do. You know, you're the same on mic and off mic. It's one of the things I love about you and [music] I think it's what people we need to do. We all need to like also embrace that unique wiring that we each have. >> So, we all want to feel safe and accepted, but in order to do that, we want all parts of oursel to be accepted. Otherwise, we can't truly feel safe. [music] And so, if I'm only accepted for one part of me, then I don't feel safe. and I feel safe only sharing one part of myself that I'm not truly accepted. And so I think everything we've talked about today comes around beautifully full circle. And uh thank you for making me feel safe and accepted. Thank you for

32:21 being safe and accepted. And and I hope everyone who's listening and watching today focuses on doing that for themselves and the people they love. That would be a beautiful ripple effect from this show that people go off and create that space for the people in their lives. Since I was a kid, I was one to venture out a little bit further than the rest. Uh usually with a [music] with a pack, but sometimes alone. And you know, I'm trying to um embrace positive change in myself by example. I mean, I am fallible and flawed like everybody. I have areas that still need work certainly. And um I'm going to keep working away and sharing what I learn. [music] And I'm grateful for all of