How to Increase Your Willpower & Tenacity
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I am a huberman and i'm a professor neurobiology and optimize gy at stanford school of medicine. Today we are discussing how to build tenacity and willing wer.

Previous episodes of the huberman lab podcast have focused on the topic of motivation, and while motivation and willows are linked thematically and mechanistically, today we are going to discuss tenacity, that is, the willingness to persist under pressure and resistance of different kinds, and willows, which has to do with both the motivation to do things and the motivation to resist certain things. Today, you will learn about the psychology and neuroscience of tenacity and willpower. And I must tell you, this is a fascinating literature.

In fact, you will learn about a brain structure that, at least to my knowledge, most neuroscientists are not even aware of. And yet, in researching this episode, I absolutely fell in love with this brain structure because of its incredible ability to integrate the very sorts of information from within and from outside of you, to harness and build tenacity in the willpower. And indeed, today you will learn research supported tools for how to enhance your level of tenacity willows in any circumstance.

Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank sponsors of today's podcast.

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Again, that drink element L M T dot com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga eja, recessions and nsd r non sleep depressed protocols. I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing yoga edra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP, turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations.

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It's very different than most meditations. And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yoga ea and something similar to IT called non sleep, deep breath or and str, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy even, which is to a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial.

Again, that's waking up dot com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial. Okay, let's talk about tenacity and willows and how to enhance your level of tenacity and willing wer. I will also mention certain cases where having too much tenacity and will power can be problematic for mental health and physical health.

But for most people, I believe that enhancing one's level of tenacity and wheel power would be advantages. Now you'll be relieved to know that while there are a near infinite number of different circumstances where one would need to draw on tenacity and will power in order to succeed, there is one major mechanism within the brain, indeed, one major mechanism by which tenacity and willpower are generated. And IT arrives through the activation of a particular brain center.

That is, a hub that is, IT, lies at the interface of many other neural circuits and has input from all the critical neural circuits that one would need in order to generate tenacity and willpower. And we are going to return to that particular neural circuit a little bit later after we talk about the psychology of wheel power. Because in talking about the psychology of willow wer IT will frame up as to why understanding this one particular brain center or hub of input and outputs from different neutral structures in the brain and body will indeed allow you to get the most out of the tools that have been shown in scientific research to enhancer level of tenacity and willows.

In other words, understanding the psychology of tenacity and willows, while valuable, if it's coupled with an understanding of the underlying neural mechanism, and notice I use the singular neural mechanism or mechanisms for generating tenacity and wheel power will allow you to use and to tailor the specific protocols for enhancing tenacity and wheel power to your unique circumstances. So this is yet another case where certainly life circumstances vary from one person to the next. The need for tenacity and willpower varies tremendous.

Ly, for instance, some people may need more tenacity and willpower in order to engage in certain behaviors. Others of us might need more tenacity and willpower in order to resist certain types of behaviors. Today, you will learn about the brain center that govern all of that, and then you can frame IT within the psychological understanding of tenacious and whilst wer, so that you can get the most out of the protocols that we will discuss.

Let's start by talking about what tenacity and willows clearly are, and separating to action wheel power from some other psychological constructs that they often get confused with. Because this will be important in understanding exactly what we are trying to build when we say we want to build tenacity and will power. So tenacity and willpower can be distinguished from habit execution.

Habit execution is what you do any time you wake up in the morning. Maybe lie there for a bit, maybe get out a bit immediately, hopefully get outside and get some sunlight in your eyes, especially on cloudy days. Go brush teeth, use the restroom, engage with others in your home.

If you live with others, eeta all of those sorts of behaviors. Well, on some days can be a bit more chAllenging, especially to get out of bed part, maybe didn't get a great night sleep the night before, for instance. But all of those sorts of behaviors are behaviors that you have the neural circuits to generate, and that typically you can generate without a lot of willpower required.

Now, Wilson wer sometimes also referred to as to acid grit or persistence, is a distinctly different phenomenon than habit execution, because Wilson wer interactive require that we intervene in our own default neural processes, such as habits or particular patterns of thinking, and essentially govern ourselves to do or not do some particular thing. And that process requires effort. IT requires energy.

And I think all of us are familiar with that feeling of effort or energy that's required in order to engage in a behavior that we really don't feel like engaging in or avoiding a behavior or a thought that, by default, we would naturally just engage in. And when I talk about energy in this context, I mainly talking about neural energy. Remember that neurons, nerve cells in your brain and body use chemical and electrical signaling to communicate with one another.

That's what allows you and all of us to do all the things that we do think, feel, move at sea. Now, of course, that chemical and electrical communication requires fuel sources that indeed come from things like glucose key tones. The creating foss faith system, multiple fuel systems feed the energetics of the brain.

But ultimately, when I talk about energy in today's discussion, i'm talking about the energy required to engage in or to resist in a particular behavior. And that level of energy can be quite high depending on how much resistance we are feeling internally or externally, right? Somebody can be telling you're not going to be able to do this.

You can't do IT. And you can say, no, I have a ton of resolve. I have a ton of tenacity whilst wer, and i'm going to push past all the barriers that you are setting up for me on the outside. Often times, all too often, I should say, we experience resistance from the inside where we are feeling like we don't want to do something or we really want to do something.

And we are having trouble either engaging in the thing that we don't want to do or that we know we should do, but we just don't feel that level of motivation for or we are having a hard time resisting the thing that's pulling us toward IT. So in that context is important for us not to just distinguish to active and willows from habit execution, but also draw out a continuum with tenacity and willows. They are most extreme on one end of that continuum, and apathy and, yes, depression on the other end of that continuum.

And we will return to the topic of depression a little bit later. But I can just cue IT up right now by saying that one of the hallmark features of major depression is the lack of positive anticipation about the future that leads to this is important. There's a verb tense here that leads to a much lower tendency to engage in the specific types of behavior that would allow one to arrive at a particular new, different and positive future.

So i'm deliberately putting apathy and depression next to one another at one end of the continuum, and i'm putting great persistence to active and willows at the other end of the continuum. And a little bit later, I will become very clear to you why I put those particular items on the continuum as opposed to other psychological constructs such as motivation, because IT turns out that motivation is what allows you to move up and down that continuing. But motivation itself, as a verb, is distinct from what we call tenacity and willing wer.

And motivation itself is distinct from what we call apathy and depression. But motivation is the engine, or the motor, the verb that allows you to move up and down, that continue. And today you will learn multiple tools that will allow you to move toward the tenacity and willpower end of that continuum by engaging a very specific neural circuit.

Before we get into the discussion of neural circuits, i'd like to talk about the psychology of wheel power. And this is something that really has been considered by psychologists for well over a hundred years. William James rote about this. The ancient greeks rote about this. The topic of willow wer is certainly not a new one.

And yet, the formal study of willpower in the laboratory context, that is bringing human subjects into the laboratory and examining what sorts of conditions allow them to engage their wheel power, tenacity, what sort ts of conditions really sap or drain their willpower and tenacity. And of course, parallel experiments done in what we call preclinical models, which are animal studies, have revealed to us a lot about the sorts of conditions that allow us to generate wheel power and the sorts of conditions that drain our willing wer. Now if we are to throw our arms around that entire literature, there is a big batch of that literature, not the whole batch, but there's a big batch of that literature that believed and still believes that willpower is a limited resource, much like fuel in the body or fuel in a car.

Now the idea of willow wer as a limited resource, it's certainly not a new idea. But again, the formal study of William and willpower as a limited resource really dates back a little over twenty and twenty five years when roy bio ministers and colleagues started to explore the idea that, of course, i've been kicked around for years that with each additional decision that we have to engage across the day, and with each additional belt of willow wer that we have to draw as a resource, that we would drain this reservoirs of willow wer that we all have within us now about. Mister and colleagues refer to that process as ego depletion.

Now, when people hear the word ego, some people think froid, ego, super ego, IT and so forth. Most people think ego like somebody having a big personality where they think a lot of themselves. When balter referred to ego decision, he was defining ego depletion as a concept of oneself and a concept of outside chAllenges and the degree of effort required to bridge one's concept of self in those chAllenges.

And so ego depletion is really a Operational construct within the field of psychology. So we don't want to get too distracted by that word, ego. There's a tendency anytime people here ego, they hear narcisa or they hear gas lighting to immediately assume that they know what that means when in fact, the formal definitions of those quite often differ from the way that they're kicked around on social media, the internet and even in a lot of popular writing about logy. Okay, so let's just note that ego depletion is the term that balls are used to describe the ability for our willing wer to be depleted with each successive attempt to engage willows, and by extension, our ability to replace ish our degree of whilst wer if we take a break from making decisions and engaging our will power. But ego depletion itself is in the focus right now.

The focus right now is whether not, indeed William is a limited resource, and whether not with each decision that we make in each effort to either engage in an activity that we prefer not to, at least in that moment, and with each attempt to resist a behavior thought at seta that is pulling on us so that we feel that we want to engage in, by default, either eating the cookie, your thinking, the fault or I, engaging in a particular type of behavior of any kind. And we need to resist that, that IT is draining that wheel power resource. Now, before I go any further, I know that some of you out there are probably aware that ego depletion and the bonist theory of willows eras, a limited resource, has been very contentious, especially in recent years.

And so today what i'm going to do is i'm going to first present the bell minister and called legs work about willows as a limited resource. And then i'm going to present some of the conflicting evidence that Carol duc, my colleague at stanford school of medicine, and researchers elsewhere have Carried out meet analysts and entirely new experiments, which indeed, in some cases contradict the findings of our minister, but more often than not contradict the conclusions that bw minister drew about willpower. So if we are to understand the psychology of willpower and tenacity, it's important that we understand the concepts of ego depletion and willows as a limited resource, even if, after hearing all the evidence, you decide that willpower is not a limited resource.

And in fact, i'm quite confident that once you hear about the balm ist ter work, and then you hear about the work of duck and others, which in some ways counters the conclusions of bow master, that you'll have a much firmer and certain in much more complete understanding about what tenacity, wheel power are. And perhaps, and here are revealing my own learnings when having examined the totality of the data, that tenacity and willpower, in some cases, is a limited resource that can be replenished by engaging, particularly processes within the body that's right within the body. But that willpower in tenacity, and most importantly, how to engage tenacity in will power, especially when you have a lot of chAllenges in front of you, not just one chAllenge, but multiple chAllenges that need to be Carried out throughout the day, over weeks, over a months at sea, that tasini willows can be drawn upon repeatedly without them being depleted if you are clear on your beliefs about tenacity and willpower.

So I realized that what I just brought up was a controversy about something that I haven't even discuss yet. So I might seem like a bit of a sword of information for which there's really no context. But the reason I bring up the controversy at this stage of our conversation is that the moment that the words ego depletion or willing wer is a limited resource falls out of my mouth, I can hear those voices out there saying way the second I thought that was all deep bunk.

And I want to make very clear, Wilson wis, a limited resource and ego depletion have not been debunk, is simply a controversial area of psychological research. And more importantly, for today's discussion, we have to understand the theory of willpower eras, a limited resource. If we are to understand the controversy, that is the counter argument of what willpower really is that comes from other groups.

So I really want to give you both sides of the story so that when we get to the underlying neural mechanisms for tenacity and willows, and we get to the tools and protocols for increasing your level of tenacity and wheel power and your flexibility and willows in different text, that you'll be able to get the most out of those tootles and protocols. okay. So let's take a look at the evidence that willows is a limited resource.

I think most of us are familiar with what willpower feels like. That is what IT feels like to be tenacious. And again, they're two sides to this coin. There's willows in tenacity of the sort of trying to engage in a behavior when we really don't want to, or when our impulse is not to engage in that behavior.

And I say when our impulse not engage in that behavior, because often times we want to engage in the behavior, we want to study, we want to learn the instrument. We want to perform well, we want to exercise. We want the benefits of all those things.

So it's not that we don't want the outcomes are the rewards of those things. And in many cases, it's not that we don't enjoy those activities, but that for whatever reason, we are feeling a lack of motivation. We're drifting down that continuum toward the more apathetic and of things, hopefully all the way to deep depression and apathy.

We're drifting that way. We're not far enough up the continuum and we're not engaging enough motivation to feel like the desire to do something either for its own one, saker, or for the rewards and outcomes of that thing, are sufficient to allow us to just do that thing. Hence, the nike slogan just do IT, which is a wonderful slogan.

Except that in the absence of any understanding about the mechanisms of how we can get ourselves to just do something, often times IT fall short. And to be honest, any time I hear about people saying, well, just eliminate the thinking and just do IT. That is valuable advice until IT doesn't work.

Because when IT doesn't work is simply doesn't work. And then you need to rely on other tools and mechanisms, which are the sort that we will talk about today. So well, I have great respect for that.

Just do IT montreal. When IT doesn't work, IT doesn't offer any alternative solutions to engage, tenacity and will power. I do not know anyone on this planet.

I don't care if you're David goggins or courtney, do walter? There will be days when telling yourself just do this or just don't do that is not going to be sufficient for you to engage in the behaviors or resist the behaviors or thoughts that you need to engage in or resist. That's just reality.

And we should ask ourselves, why is that reality? And this is a very important point, and in fact, really illustrates the first bucket of tools and protocols for increasing tenacity and willows. And these are the tools and protocols that I would categorize under the rub brick of modulators.

I've talked before in this podcast about the important distinction between mediators and modulators mediators, or things either psychological or biological sea that are directly in the mechanisms that generate some sort of action or emotion. This could be neurochemicals like doping or sir tony and and so on. Modulators are things that can modulate, that is, can change our probability of doing something or not doing something.

But they do so indirectly and in the context of tools and protocols to increase our level of tenacity and willows, I will be completely remiss if one of the sets of tools, that is, the protocols for increasing the probability that we can access high levels of tenacity and willows didn't include these some of these modulators. I'm just going to spend about three minutes on these modulators because what we know for certain is that the regions of the brain that generate tenacity, and there is literally a brain hub for generating willpower in tenacity, gets strong input from the so called automatic nervous system. The automatic nerve system has two major components they are refer to as the sympathetic nervous system.

In the per sympathetic nervous system, keep in mind, because when most people hear the word sympathetic, they think sympathy, they think emotion. IT has nothing to do with that sympathy ans together. And the sympathetic ARM of the automation ic nervous system, I know that's a mouthful, is responsible for generating state of alertness in our brain and body, everything from pani C2Being ale rt and cal m, our tendency to move or our likelihood of moving under pressure.

IT is also responsible for our ability to resist movement when we need to resist movement, and therefore it's an active process. So the sympathetic nerve system is all the things of action. And when IT is involved in generating inaction, those are cases where inaction requires energy.

OK, I want to be very clear about this. The sympathetic nervous system isn't just about moving our body. Although IT has a lot to do with that.

IT is also responsible for our ability to resist movement or thought or emotion when we need to do that, clamp down on ourselves. The paris sympathetic aspect of our atomic nervous system is the one that sometimes referred to as the rest and digest neural circuits and chemicals. And that's true, but there's a lot more to the paris sympathetic component of the autonomic error system.

Also responsible for falling asleep is responsible for us feeling relaxed. IT is responsible for most of the states of mind and body in which we are quiescent, where we don't feel an impulse to move, or when we have a difficult time getting into action. So the sympathetic and the per sympathetic aspect to the automated ic, every system are always in a push pull with one another.

Think of them were less on a teater taught ter. When one end goes up, the other end goes down. They're really in competition with one another. And it's their baLance that reflects how alert or how sleepy we happen to be. Now the reason i'm giving you this rather geeky nerd speak nominal, clatter filled discussion about the automobile nervous system in the context of will power is that regardless of whether or not you believe Wilson wer is a limited or an unlimited resource, we know one thing for sure, and that's the willows and tenacity ride on our current automatic function.

We can translate that to everyday language by saying that when we are well rested, for instances when we've been getting great sleep of sufficient duration the previous night and the night before that, our level of tenacity and wheel power to engage in things that we would not ordinary, engaging by default in our ability to resist behaviors and thought patterns that would otherwise be our default behaviors and thought patterns is much higher conver sleep when we are not getting enough quality sleep on a regular basis, our ability to call on tenacity and White power is diminished. Now, that series of statements I just made is clearly going to be a duh for most people, but IT is very important to understand that when we are sleep deprived, when we are in physical pain, when we are in emotional pain, and or when we are distracted, when we are thinking about something else, aside from what we are trying to engage in acid and willows in order to do or not do, tenacity and willpower will be diminished. Now all of those things together are just a bigger duh.

We all know this. If you got a splinter in your foot, it's really hard to think about not thinking about something else. If you are extremely hungry or if you had an argument with somebody that you really care about and they said something that was particularly vexing to you and it's looping around in your head, it's going to be very hard to engage in something else that you need to do because you're going to be distracted.

Likewise if you're sleep deprived, likewise if you are a bit sick or run down, if you're in any kind of physical, emotional pain, your ability to draw on tenacity, power will be diminished. So it's an absolute truth that your ability to generate tenacity, and we will power rides on a reserve war of automatic function. And today, we don't really have a way of quantifying the level of automation, ic function or disfunction in a very simple way.

It's not like a resting heart rate, although resting heart rate is involved for insinuation. You haven't slept well for a few nights or if you're particularly stressed, over trained, you'll wake up in the morning with a significantly elevated heart rate. However, there is no simple metric like hearts rate or blood pressure or even cortisol level that can tell you whether not your automation ic function is imbaLance, that is, the sympathetic and paris sympathetic systems of your automation ic nervous system are in the best possible baLance to generate tenacity.

And wherever we don't yet have such a metric, although there are companies that are starting to develop devices that hopefully will give us indexes of automatic function or disfunction, but IT is important that we acknowledge that if you're not taking care of the foundational modulators of tenacity and wheel power, none of the subsequent tools and protocols that we will discuss are going to help you that much. Over time, you might get tenacity and will power to engage one day when you're very sleep deprived, but it's going to be very difficult to consistently engage tenacity and willows for that reason. If you have any struggles with sleep that is getting enough quality sleep on a regular basis, please see the zero cost tool kit for sleep that we've put a human man in lab dom.

Please also see the perfect your sleep master, your sleep episodes also he have been lab out com. And please also see the episode with expert guest doctor matt I. Walker, professor of sleep neuroscience and psychology and university california, berkeley. We just revamped the human man lab websites.

So if if you go to her lab that com, and you put something like sleep into the search function, IT will take you not just to the tool kit for sleep, but to the exact time stamps that will queue up particular topics and protocols around sleep. So if you were to put sleep in light IT would take you to those particular protocols. You were to put sleep in magnesium three rate IT would take you to those particular protocols, and so on and so forth.

I don't want to get too far off topic here during today's discussion, but if you're not sleeping well and if you're not managing your stress levels well, it's going to be much harder for you to engage tenacity and White power regardless of the tools you happen to use. And those tools could be everything from behavioral tools to supplements to prescription drugs. You need to get those foundational modulators in check. And there are a lot of zero cost ways to do that. That are all spelled out very clearly at the resources I just described.

Likewise, for stress, if you're experiencing chAllenges with stress, both short term, medium term or long term stress, if you think you have elevated quarters, all levels, which by the way, may not be the case, there are a lot of tools for moderating stress in real time, increasing your stress threshold that set us simply go to the huberman lab dcom website and put in stress threshold tools or stress real time tools, and you'll get a bunch of eo cost tools that allow you to do that. It's also worth mentioning that when we get to our discussion about the neuroscience of tenacity and willows, that you will understand why automated ic health and automation ic function is so important for our ability to engage tenacity and willows just tell you, right now, it's because the neural circuits of the automation ic nervous system provide direct and robust input to this hub in the brain, this brain location that govern our ability to allocate our mind and body toward particular activities or to resist particular activities. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic Greens.

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So let's think about the about minister data on wheel power as a limited resource. I'm going to briefly describe one of the first studies that really said to the field, William is a limited resource. But I want to be clear that there other studies like IT, and they all generally follow the same on tour, and that general countour is as follows about mystery colleagues.

And now many other laboratories have done experiments where they bring human subjects into the laboratory, and those human subjects have to do something that requires mental effort or energy. A K, A, whilst wer. The classic example of this is you bring people into the laboratory, some of them might actually be dieting or fasted, although not always.

And there are two plattner set out for them. One platter contains radishes, just plain radish. By the way, I hate radishes unless they're pickled radishes, and know why that is.

So these experiments picked my least favorite vegetable. I love many other vegetables. I distained the radish. That was just a personal editorial. In any case, the rat dishes are set out, and next of them are freshly baked cookies, and in the room is the wafting aromas of fresh ly baked cookies.

So I think it's fair to say that most people, because of a hardwired tendency to like sugar and fat, especially when they are combined, would prefer to eat the cookies versus the radishes. I know that there are some mutton out there. They are like, I like grandees is more than cookies.

But look, most people like cookies more than radishes. Subject in these studies are divided into two groups. One group is told you have to resist eating the radishes.

The other group is told you have to resist eating the cookies. And then the subjects are observed during this time, typically. But this is really not what the experiment is about.

Pursue this stage of the experiment is really designed to get people to resist a certain kind of behavior. And the assumption, again, this is an assumption because there is no brain recordings here, knows, and an M, R, I. Looking at what brain areas are activated, not actuate.

There's no court as all being measured, at least not in these early experiments. These people are either resisting something that's pretty easy to resist rations, or they are being asked to resist something that for remote is going to be harder to resist, then resisting radishes, which is resisting fresh ly baked cookies. And that chAllenge has been made even more difficult by the wafting aromas of fresh ly by cookies in the room.

And in some cases, has been made even more difficult because these people are dieting. And keep in mind that when you calorie restrict, or when you put yourself on a diet of any kind, there is a well established mechanism in the brain by which the neurons that engage hunger, especially hunger for fat and sugar, and that respond to things like a romas and taste, are heightened. That is, their activity levels are heightened, which means that things that smell really good, smell really, really good when you're hungry.

Things that ordinary would taste really good, taste really, really, really good when you finally eat them. So the key component of this stage of the experiment is to engage people's will power. The second part of the experiment has all of the subjects separately engage in another chAllenging task, and the chAllenging task that they are asked to engage in is to solve a particular puzzle.

And again, different experiments use different puzzles. Different experiments use different context. But the original experiments that about mistering colleagues did had people try to solve a puzzle that could not be solved.

So it's very, very difficult. In fact, it's impossible. But the subjects weren't aware of that. And then was measured was how long subjects persisted in trying to solve this impossible to solve puzzle, depending on whether or not previously they had to resist the radishes, which is pretty easy to resist, or resist the cookies, which is at least harder to resist, and for some people would be very, very hard to resist.

Now you can probably already guess what the outcome of this and similar studies was, because IT burst this entire belief camp within the field of psychology that Wilson wu is a limited resource. The outcome was that if people had to resist the cookies, which is harder to do, then resisting the radish, that they would persist for less time when they had to try and solve a puzzle that, unbeknown to them, could not be solved. Conversely, if people had to resist something that was pretty easy to resist, such as resisting eating radish, something for me, would be very, very easy to resist.

Well, when they were subsequently faced with trying to solve a very difficult, indeed impossible, to solve puzzle, they persisted much longer OK. So put very simply, the study concluded that if you have to resist one thing, and it's a hard thing to resist, well then you have less airport tier resistance in your willie to engage in another difficult task. Subsequently, we are as if you had an easy chAllenge just prior or no chAllenge just prior to being faced with a chAllenge such as a very difficile puzzle.

Well then you had more resource, more wal power to apply to the solving of that puzzle. So the conclusion that about myself and colleagues, drew, from those results was that willows is a limited resource. But IT didn't specify, nor did they specify exactly what that limited resource is.

And this was quite an attractive theory, because he dried well with most people's perception of what willows and tenacity was for them. This idea that, yes, there are things that chAllenge us both to do and to resist, but that we can do that. But when we are asked to do that again and again and again, while we may build up some capacity to engage our world power, tenacity, and of course there are.

There was rare individuals that we've heard about in some of us to know that seem to have, just like kind of bottom less reservoir, a wheel power in tenacity. Most of us have an intuitive understanding of how hard IT is to constantly be in friction with life, to constantly have to push ourselves, to do things, to resist things, and that, well, that capacity can expand and grow, and we can get Better at IT. That there does seem to be something here, just subjectively speaking, there does seem to be something about engaging international.

And willows that, yeah, I can feel good, but IT also requires effort, this neural energy that we were talking about. So that raised the question of, okay, if Wilson war is a limited resource, what exactly is that resource at a physiological level? So about my stern colleagues subsequently went on to explore what I think is a really interesting in clever idea.

Frankly, I get confessed I would have thought of this, but they did said, okay, you know, in some cases, people are eating the cookie and then they're engaging in this very diff ult puzzle. In other cases, they're eating the radish and engaging this difficult puzzle. Of course, other experiments use non food chAllenging choices, but they came up with an idea, which was the brain as one of the most metals icc active organs in our entire body, if not the most metabolic.

We're going in our entire body requires a lot of fuel IT, requires a lot of glue cose. Now, of course, the brain mainly runs on glue cose, but if you're falling a key ogen ic diet, your brain will mainly run on key tones. But for most people who are omnivores are eating carbo hydrates tes glue coast is the main and preferred fuel source for neurons, for nerve cells in your brain and body, for that matter.

About mastering, colleagues raised the hypothesis that perhaps glucose availability itself is the resource that's limiting willows. And in a whole set of experiments, they really showed that if people are asked to do a difficult test to engage their willpower, and this could be done by resisting a particular behavior or by engaging in a particular behavior. I'll just give you an example of engaging in a particular behavior that requires willpower, or at least focus and mental energy to trust IT with the resisting radishes versus resisting cookies example that I gave earlier.

One common practice within experiments like this is to give people a very long passage of words, so it's a story. And then to give them some sort of rule about how to edit that passage, maybe they have to cross out every third e or the ease that arrived in the middle of sentences next to consents, but not other valls stuff that takes a lot of energy. So these are dues as opposed to resisting behaviors like we were talking about earlier, resisting the radish, resisting the cookies.

Although in many of these experiments there's a command to do something, you know, cross out certain letter ease in this passage, but also to resist the reflects, to cross out other ease. And of course, all this is under time pressure. Often times it's being rewarded or scored.

This is the way that psychology researchers get people to engage in particular experiments and behaviors and resist certain things in the context of a laboratory environment. When those things, Frankly, are kind of boring and meaningless, they will pay you more. If you do well at the task, they'll give you money and then subtract the money that you're going to get at the end of the experiment of you make errors and things like that, and they'll IT under time concern, as I mentioned earlier.

So there are lots of different conditions for, again, hear any quotes, draining people's will, power and tenacity, and certainly training their mental attention, and then they would have them to another subsequent task. So in many ways, this just mirrors the first cookie radish experiment of my domini and colleagues. But there was an important intervention put between the first and the second hard task.

And that intervention was to give one group a glucose beverage about a one hundred and fifty calories or so. So they would drink a glucose beverage to increase levels of blood blue, cose the preferred fuel source for the brain, versus giving them an artificially flavor, or drink, or just water, or something that was, of course, matched for flavor, but that did not contain any or calories. This is a clever experimental design, if you think about IT, because, at least at the first gLance, the only thing that really seems to be different is the availability of glucose for the brain.

And you can probably guess what the outcome of these studies was. The outcome of these studies was that when subjects are given blue coast in between, a first hard task that required a wheel power and a second hard test that required wheel power, and in some experiments, a third hard test that required wheel power, that their levels of wheel power were maintained consistently from one task to the next, and in some cases, increased from one task to the next. If they had more glucose available because they drank, this, glucose drank.

So what's really interesting, and Frankly, really nice about these studies is that they attempted to bridge a psychological construct like tenacity and willows, and to test the argument that willows is an expendable resource, and yet it's an expendable resource that is replenish by linking that to a physiological variable. And the physiological they linked IT to was glucose availability in the brain. Now this set the field of psychology, and in fact, the field of pop system gy, that is, the discussion about formal findings in the field of formal psychological research of blaze.

People were so excited about this. I mean, this set of findings really pointed to the argument that if you could just keep levels of brain glue cos elevated across your day, or at least stable across the day, that you would have more willing wer in tenacity, this thing that humans have been seeking more of since the beginning of time. Now, all of that seems fine and good. And in fact, a lot of products and courses were born out of that literature.

People were arguing that you should sip on a glucose drink while doing any kind of hard task, that you should sit on glucose drink between tasks that you should be thinking about, literally fuel that you, and just into your body, as fuel for psychological processes within your brain that would allow you to perform Better in work and school and athletics relationships at all of the domains of life. But of course, any time there is a prominent or a really excitement about a particular finding in any field of science, but in particular in psychology, where I feel so applicable, as did the bell mister results, you are going to get other groups that are going to try and replicate those findings, and they are going to dig into the findings themselves and look at the statistics, look at how well or poorly powered those studies were. We don't want to get into a full discussion about powering studies right now, but powering studies has a lot to do with addressing the question of whether not there were enough subjects in the study to really draw the conclusions that one drew or whether not the statistics fell out as yes, there was a significant effect of glucose and gestion on willows in tenacity.

But if they're n enough subjects, well then there are other variables that could potentially explain those results. So there were a lot of meanwhile, sees and other studies trying to replicate the work about mr. And that's where things got controversial.

Now we can take a step backroom all of that controversy. After all, we don't want to spend too much time on the controversy itself. Rather, we want to know what the counter interpretation of the bell ministers results was. And I want to be very clear, there was no real dispute as to whether not bow minister got the results that he and his colleagues claim to have obtained. They did get those results.

The question really was about the interpretation is willing wer limited resource and if IT is, is the physiological resource itself glucose availability to the brain? So in two thousand and thirteen, a colleague of mine at stanford, doctor carl wyk, our department of psychology, did a study in which he examined this idea that willows ers are limited resource. And the idea that the resource that's limited is glucose availability for the brain.

So dan colleagues didn't experiment that in many ways mirrored the overall organization of the experiments done by bow mystery colleagues. There was a difficile task. Some cases, the difficult task was that crossing out of particular ease within a passage task, followed by another difficult task. And the difficult task that came second was the stroop task. This is a task i've talked about before on this podcasts, although some episodes ago.

So those of you that are not familiar with the stroop task, the stroop task is where subjects are presented with words in different colors, and they are instructed to either read the words, so to pay attention to the content of the word or to the color in which the fault of the word is written. This might seem pretty easy to most of you, right? If I put up card that says apple on IT and apple is written Green, you probably won't have a hard time if you had been instructed to tell me what color is the word written in for you to say dream, okay.

But if I were to hold up a car that said a red, but the font is actually in the color red, dream is a little bit harder. And if I were to then do that for a hundred cards or three hundred cards and put you under time pressure where you're losing money that you're sure to get if you make mistakes, or you will earn money at the end of the experiment if you get answers correctly, well, then you start making more mistakes. That's just the way these experiments work.

So they did a variation on the stroop task that isn't exactly the way I just described IT. And the stroop task, by the way, is one that used to probe prefrontal cortex function, this area of our brain right behind our foreheads, that is responsible for many things, but part is responsible for context and strategy setting, given a particular set of rules. So if you get onto the bus or get on to the subway, versus walk into a black tie dinner, the context and rules are very, very different as to what you would say or not say, how you would behave, how you address your profile to cortex is largely, although not entirely, is largely responsible for a lot of the context setting and rule setting from one situation to the next thing.

If you think about the street task, it's really just a context dependent strategy task. You either have to pay attention to the meaning of the words or the colors in which those words are written. And the number of mistakes that you'll make depends on how much time pressure you are under, what's worse of neurologic or psychiatric chAllenges you might be facing or not facing, so on and so forth.

But it's a very robust task that's existed in the scientific for a long period time. So the duck experiment, and by the way, there were actually three experiments in this paper. I won't go through all of them in detail for sake of time, but I will provide a link to the paper in the shown out captions.

But the major focus of the study was to have people engage in one hard task and then in another hard task, both of which drawn willow wer testing the idea that wheel powers is a limited resource, and then providing some of those subjects with a glue rich drink, or other subjects with a drink that was artificially sweden. So IT had no glucose, no calories, but tasted, yes, they matched them for taste. I know some of who don't like artificial sweet nes are saying those don't taste exactly like real sugar, but they manage to matched these drinks for taste.

But in one case, the drink would clearly increase blood blue coast. In the other case, the drink would not raise by blue coast. So the results of the study are really spectacular in my mind, because what the study found was that, yes, indeed, ingesting glucose can improve performance on these multiple, chAllenging whilst wer requiring tasks. However, the degree to which the glue cose containing drink could improve performance depended on whether or not you believed that willows was a limited resource and whether or not you believe that resource was glue cose.

In other words, if you hear and believe that wall power is a limited resource, well then indeed, with each subsequent task that you engage in, or life event of any kind that you engage in that requires willows tenacity, you will have less willing wer interactive to draw, whether if you believe that willpower interactive are unlimited and in fact, are divorced from blood glucose as the physiological source of willow wer tenacity, well then you can engage in one chAllenging task and another chAllenging task and another chAllenging task without any diminishment in performance. Now that, of course, leaves us all in a very tough position because how are we to decide what to believe if we know that willpower can be a limited resource or willing wer can not be a limited resource? Uh, well, the results of the dix study, and by the way, I should share with you the title of the study.

The title of study, not surprisingly, is beliefs about Willy wer determine the impact of glucose on self control. And this was a study publishing. The process is the national academy of sciences.

Again, I will provide a link to the study in the shown of captions. There are three major experiments in this study. As I mentioned before, I just gave you the major conclusion of all of them woven together.

And if IT wasn't clear already, the major conclusions are that, yes, interesting glue cos can improve your ability to engage tasini and willpower, A K self control from one test to the next, provided that you believe that glue cos is the limitation resource for aging to national and wheel power. If you don't believe that well, then you can engage task and willpower without interesting glue cose and that's where the artificial flavor drink comes in. I'll leave with you to kind of unpacked what that means experimentally.

But its a very clever experimental design that why can colleagues came up with because IT argues that yes indeed, it's hard to do a chAllenging thing right after another chAllenging thing but there's no reason to think that you can do both of those things while engaging the almost tenacity and willpower if you believe that tenacity and willows exist within you as a single mechanism that can be hardest and that is not a single mechanism that has a reservoir that runs down as you engage in one hard thing to the next. Now this is very important because we are about to transition into our discussion of the physiological, that is, the neural underpinnings of tenacity and willows, which, as IT turns out, is one major set of brain circuits. There could be others that are yet to be discovered, but we know that there is one major set of brain circuits, in particular one brain area, believe IT or not, that an entire collection of more than two dozen studies really points to, as the seat the origin of what we call tenacity and willows.

But before we transition to that and the tools and protocols that that physiological neural understanding set forth for us to all use and apply, i'd be remiss if I didn't mention that boyster wasn't about to hear these results from to action colleagues and just say, okay, will powers not a limited resource. It's not blood blue coast. It's all what you believe about willie, all what you believe about blue.

Cose rather, bell, mr. Himself, went back to the lab and did subsequent experiments that in some ways, not all counter the direct results. So i'm not trying to confuse anybody, but I ouldn't be doing my job if I didn't give you both sides of the story. Now, the good news is that the tools and protocols that we are going to arrive at work, regardless of which psychological p you happen to be in the balmy ster camp or the duet camp. Now I don't want to give the impression that these are warring camps, and I also don't want to give the impression that these are the only two camps of fought and experimental within the field of tenacity willows, there are many groups working on the subjects.

Indeed, there have been meet analysis that have confirmed the major theories about mysa and there are meet analysis that have refuted the major findings about mysseri will provide links in the shown te captions to a couple examples of each, so that you have those to prove if you like. But let's discuss for a moment, what about master found when they went back? And we researched, I think that's a word we researched, the idea that willows ers are limited resource and that glucose is that limiting resource.

Bw mistering colleagues looked at the direct data and said, okay, fine. The data look great. Except for the fact that in real life and in many previous experiments that they and others had done, IT wasn't just too hard chAllenges back to back, but often too, or three or four. And what bw minister and others found was that when subjects are presented not with just two chAllenges, back to back, but three or more chAllenges, so back to back to back to back, chAllenges that have to engage a lot of neural energy, a lot of willow wer tenacity, resistance to do certain things and effort to engage in certain kinds of behaviors and cognitive processes that when subjects had glue cos available to them in the brain by way of interesting, these glucose drinks, sipping those in between the tasks, but sometimes, even during the tasks, that their performance, that is, the willows, and tenacity to engage in chAllenges was maintained across those multiple chAllenges. And they conceded that one's belief about wheel power could indeed dictate whether or not willpower was or was not a limited resource, and whether glucose wood, or would not enhance one's ability to engage with power.

But they argued that if one confronts multiple chAllenging circumstances, as is very naturalistic, as we say, it's very typical of everyday real life, then the availability of glue cose during and between tasks, the ability for the brain to engage in its external environment and take reads of its internal environment, how we feel inside relative to what's expected of us, was very valuable in allowing people to engage the thing that psychologically we described as tenacity. And whilst wer. Let's talk about the physiology of tenacity and willows and assure you that the conversation we are about to have is not going to be just a bunch of naming creature and mechanistic understanding of the origins of tenacity and wheel power.

Rather, IT argues that tenacity and and willpower have a unified source that is a specific set of brain areas that, when active, engage that feeling of tenacity and will power, regardless of what we are confronted with, regardless of whether not we are trying to engage in something that reflexively we ouldn't otherwise want to engage in, and regardless of whether or not we are confronted with something that we have to resist. And to me, that's extremely reassuring, because whether not you believe that blood lue cose is the limiting resource for wheel power, whether not you believe that your beliefs about willpower and blood lue coast impact your level of willow wer, what we know for sure is that there's a single set of brain circuits. Indeed, there's a single brain area that seems to be able to largely, if not entirely, explain this phenomenon that we call tenacity and willows.

And that should be reassuring, because what that means is that tenacity and willpower is the reflection of a neural circuit function that is a skill. It's an expression of something that we all have within us. We all have this particular brain area. And quite excitingly, this is the third point. This brain area is highly subject to plasticity.

There are specific things that we can do, and there are specific mindsets that we can adopt that allow us to increase the activity of this particular brain area, indeed, to increase the size of this particular brain area, so that we can call on tenacity and willows, not just in one circumstance, like school or musical learning, or athletic endeavors or relationship endeavors, but rather that we can call on this brain area in the context of any and all circumstances where willows and tenacity are required. Now we talk about neusatz a lot on this podcast, but it's not often that I point to a particular brain area and can confidently say this particular brain area has an absolutely integral role in something as kind of high level psychological as tenacity and will power. But today we can do that.

And that's because there's a collection of more than two dozen studies that point to one particular brain area, and of course, its connections with other brain areas, because no single brain area Operates in isolation, every brain areas Operating in the context of neural circuits, other brain areas that IT receives inputs from and gives inputs to, and so on. But this one particular brain area really does seem to underlie what we call tenacity and willows. And we know that through several lines of evidence.

First of all, i'll tell you the name of the brain area, although the name itself isn't going to tell you much unless you're a neuroscientist, S R anatomies. So I give a little bit of background about IT. The name of the brain area is the antar ID singular ate cortex.

The anterior mid singular ate cortex is part of a larger brain area called the singular ate cortex. And in humans versus animals, IT goes by. slightly. Different names, unfortunately, is just one of the consequences of different researchers in different labs calling the same thing, different things.

You would be really frustrated, but we'll make IT very simple, because today we were referred to this area as the anterior ID singular cortex, which is a subdivision of a larger brain area simply called the singular cortex. The anterior ID singular cortex resides in the frontal lobes. So it's behind your forehead, although that doesn't tell you anything, because all of your brain is behind your forehead.

If you think about IT, and it's about a third of the way back toward the back of your head. And you actually have two of these structures, two interior mid singular courtesans, one on each side of the brain. And they receive a lot of inputs from a lot of different areas.

And we'll talk about what those areas are because this is extremely important when thinking about the different psychological and physiological resources that you can drop on to engage tenacity and White power for the time being. Let me just go through the evidence and kind of list format of why we feel so confident that the entered singular cortex is such a vital hub for engaging tenacity and willows. For each of these points I am about to make, there is indeed at least one, if not several, quality p reviewed studies in humans.

So there's a lot of data from animals, both roads and primate models. That said, a that we're not talking about today, but I should mention all of which supports the human data and vice versa. The data i'm going to describe now come from humans and from a variety of different types of studies. So there are a lot of different ways that one can consider if a brain area is implicated in a given psychological or physiological phenomenon, like motivation or sadness or visual perception. And those include, for instance, if a brain area is active during a given phenomenon.

So one way to explore this is to put literally wide electrodes down below the skull, record the election activity of neurons and assess whether not the electrical electives ity of those neurons changes when a person to save viewing faces or feeling a particular way, like feeling tanai us, or feeling bored, or feeling aggressive. So another way of assessing a particular brain area's role in the given physiological or psychological phenomenon is in individuals where that particular brain area is injured. You might expect that a particular phenomenon, like whale power, like the ability to perceive faces, is present or absent, whether not exacerbate, whether not it's diminished.

Other ways of assessing whether not a given in brain areas involved in a given phenomenon is whether not that brain area literally changes size, whether that changes in volume over the course of some sort of training. So far. Instance, if somebody is not able to play a musical instrument, such as myself, and then I, or a subject in one of these experiments, learn a musical instrument, and the volume, the size of the particular brain area is assessed across the learning, or simply before and after that musical learning and IT grows.

Or perhaps even if IT shrink or change your shape, one might determine that IT is somehow, somehow involved in the process of learning a musical instrument. You could done equivalent, conclude that, but along with other types of evidence, one could perhaps conclude that. So that's just a partial list of ways to assess brain ary function.

Other ways include assessing what other areas are given brain ery gets input from. So, for instance, in the case of the anterior ID single cortex, we will soon discuss the fact that IT gets robust input from the automatic and nervous system. Would you already learned about IT gets robust input from reward systems of the brain, such as the dopamine and serotonin based reward systems of the brain? And IT gets robust input from the context and strategy setting areas of the brain as well and many other different brain areas.

So there's a structural logic as to why the entire made singular cortex would be involved in tenacity in wheel power. But no single anatomical or physiological or legion based finding is as compelling is when we consider all of the results about the interview with singular cortex together and side by side. So, for instance, recordings by neural imaging of the entire amid singular cortex in an unbiased way, meaning people are put into a brain scanner and brain activity is examined and mass all of the brain areas are looked at, and people are presented with either a hard task or an easy task, revealed that the enter amid singular cortex shows elevated levels of activity in the hard versus the easy task.

And again, I want to point out that the researchers were not looking for that result. They simply observe that result, in addition of people who exhibit high levels of academic performance across many different subjects, are put into a brain scanner that evaluate so called resting state connectivity. So no task, but simply levels of activity in different brain areas that occur spontaneously.

They're just sitting in the scanner looking at a blank screen. The resting or spontaneous levels of activity in the anterior mid singular cortex of high achieving individuals is higher relative to those of lower achieving individuals. In addition, people that have lesions or disruptions of anterior ID singular critical function show increased apathy and depression and reduce levels of tenacity and motivation across the board, regardless of what domain of life one is asking about whether not athletics, academic sa, indeed, successful dietary, show elevated spontaneous and what's called evoked levels of activity in the entering singular cortex.

So spontaneous, again, just at rest, they have higher levels of activity in the entering singular cortex. And for those that are presented with food, and they have to resist that food, and they have to resist the smell of that food and the potential taste of that food, the activity of the entire minimum cortex goes up even further, especially in those individuals who can resist that is, who can engage. Wilson wer, do not eat the delicious food item.

Conversely, individuals that have failed to exert sufficient wheel power to lose their desired weight. This was for medical reasons related to trying to achieve medical health, as well as people who are obese, seem to have diminished levels of activity in the enter my singular cortex. In addition, people who are depressed, who expressed a lot of apathy, and here we are talking about clinically diagnosed major depression, show reduced levels.

Activity in the entering my singular cortex, humans that express a lot of what's called learn, helps lessen, that is, theyve adopted, the belief in the actions associated with the belief that no matter what they do, the outcomes are not going to be what they desire. Expressed lower levels of neural activity in the enter the singular cortex. You see, this list goes on and on.

But IT, in fact, gets even more interesting. Remember, earlier I mention that successful dietary have elevated levels of the neural activity in the enter omid singular cortex. Now that might seem like a good thing, and indeed IT can be a good thing, but there's a pathologic condition associated with dieting in one ability to engage whilst wer and resist food.

And that in the case of evening disorders such as an rex, I nerva. Now i've done a huberman lab podcast, solo episode about interrex. I nerva on that podcast.

I made the point that i'll make again now, which is the international universa is the most deadly of all the psychiatric conditions leading to death in a very large percentage of people that have IT. Now fortunately, there are treatments and more emerging all the time, but it's a very serious psychological and physiological condition that is extremely deadly. Individuals with an international nesa exhibit heighten levels of activity in their entered singular cortex that rest and when presented with food.

And I don't want to go to a full tangent about anorexia because we covered anoxia a on the previous podcast episode about anoxia, which, by the way, you can find that human man left out calm, simply search in a rex ion or eating disorders within the search function. But one of the clear symptoms. Of interactive nesa is that the reward pathways of the brain, which we know feed into that is sent direct connections to the interior ID singular cortex, seem to be activated under conditions in people with interrex.

Sia avoided food as opposed to eat food. And then there's a very interesting and positive literature about so called super ages. So what we know for sure is that as people age in particularly between the ages of sixty and ninety, there is a reduction in the size of many brain areas, but the anterior made singular cortex in particular, unless certain things are done to offset that, we are going to talk about what those particular things are in just a few minutes.

But there is a particular category of humans that's alive now and that live a very long time. These are the people that stand the greatest chance of becoming centenarians. And many of them are centenarians, so called super agers.

But also within the category of superagent es are people who are sixty years old or more, because not all of them have reached eighty, ninety yet, and have the cognition of forty year old, thirty year olds, and often even of people in their mid twenties. Now there are a lot of things that are different about these super ages. Super ages in the sense that they are maintaining very youthful levels of cognition.

But one of the things that become very apparent from the new imaging data is that superagent es maintain a volume a size of the entire ID single let cortex that is significantly greater than their age matched cohorts. So the exciting thing is that there are many, many lines of evidence pointing to the fact that the enter ID singular cortex, at least has something to do with our ability to generate tenacity and willows. And that IT, when active, moves us up that continuum away from apathy and depression, toward states of being able to engage in or resist particular types of behaviors.

So what I just described as a bunch of neuroimaging structural volume data, blood uptake data, lesion studies and so on and so forth. But we can simplify all of that and in fact, address something that perhaps I should have said earlier, which is that when we are talking about tenacity and willows, we're really talking about one of two things. We are either talking about that sense within us that has a saying, I will, no matter what you tell me, no matter what you put in front of me, no matter what is rolled my way, I will black.

Now the other expression of tenacity in willow wer is that within us, within you, within me, when the asian willows are active, we have that sense within us, that feeling in our body and that thought pattern, A K A feeling in our brain, that no matter what you say, no matter what you do, no matter what you put in front of me, I won't. So really will. Power is either an expression of I will, or I absolutely will is perhaps a Better way to stay IT, or I absolutely won't.

Now that might seem like just a simple subjective reordering of a bunch of physiological data and psychology studies, but it's not it's actually far more important for us to understand this. I absolutely will and I absolutely won't aspect of willow wer because if indeed there is a single brain area that can govern willpower, and willpower is not one, but is at least two things, the sense of I absolutely will, no matter what you say do is at a or I absolutely won't no matter what you say do IT seta. Well, then this brain area can be a simple switch IT can't be wheel power on, wheel power off, willows on, will power off.

IT can be absolute. As we say, IT must be graded. IT must have levels. So it's more like a slider on a light switch, then an on versus off light switch. In addition to that, if there is truly one brain area that plays a critical role in generating tenacity and willpower and tenacity and will power something that required for us in a lot of different context, where we have to say, I absolutely will yes, this, I absolutely won't know that I absolutely will also, yes, this a right, because life is complex, even just a simple thing of like dieting, or trying to get a particular degree, or trying to navigate even a simple illness like i'm going to get through this week despite feeling lousy.

I'm going to take good care of myself, you know, all of these things, in some sense, required to active and willpower and the behaviors we need to engage in and avoid engaging in very dynamic depending not just on who we are and what we're trying to do or not do, but also where we are that day, that moment. Well, that means that the enter remission uic cortex also needs access to information about context. IT needs to understand what's rewarding or non rewarding in the context of what we're trying to accomplish, not just what feels good in the moment.

Now fortunately, there have been a number of studies expLoring not just the activity levels of the entering ment single cortex, or the size of the entering signal cortex in the various conditions we talked about before, depression, obesity, successful directors, successful students, successful athletes at a but a lot of anatomical tracing studies, both from fixed, that is, from dead brain tissue, suppose modern brain tissue in humans, but also nowadays, there are certain types of neuroimaging, particularly something called diffusion tensor imaging, that allows one to examine the flow of information in and out of different brain areas through so called White matter tracks. Tracks, meaning T R A C T S. tracks.

So these are the wires that connect neons are called axons. And those axons are in sheet with a fatty substance called million. And that achievement with mile allows them to transmit information very quickly. You'll see where i'm going with all this in just a moment.

And what we know is that the entire middle ic cortex, again, in which you have one on each side, the brain about a third of way back from your forehead to the back, your brain approximately right above this called corpus callosum, this very robust collection of White matter tracks that connects the two sides of the brain. Well IT gets input and some input to a number of different brain areas, including, but not limited to, the following automated ic centers that control, for instance, cardigans. Cute function increases or decreases in heart rate, respiration, how fast and how deeply you breathe, or how shallowly and slowly you breathe.

Immune system input and output with the spring, not directly, but through a couple of different stations, with the very organs in your body that can release b cells and tea cells and immunity lead les, that can combat bacterial, viral and fung infections, and they can repair physical wounds. And IT communicates with the indecent system with the systems of the brain body that released, for instance, estrogen and testoon, which, by the way, are present in both males and females. And on a previous episode of the human lab podcasts with Robert suppose key as my guest, we talked about for insinuation, role of, and many people think, oh, testosterone is all about aggression.

Testosterone is all about attack, testosterone is all about meeting. That is completely false. While IT can be involved in those different processes, what dr.

Sport can I discuss is that one of the major functions of testosterone in the brain is to make effort, feel good. And you can see and will talk a bit more about how that links up very directly with this concept of tenacity and willows. So the first point is that the entire missing mult cortex is in direct communication with all of the areas of the brain.

And through a couple of other stations, the body that modulate our sense of tenacity and willows, which we talk about earlier, the need for sleep, the need for pain or lack of pain, or emotional comfort or discomfort to modulate our level of active and willows, the entire mits singular ate cortex is also directly linked up with promoter centers, these centers of the brain that organized particular patterns of behavior, and indeed, that can suppress particular patterns of behavior. As I tell you that you're probably feeling in the blanks. This is engaging in a behavior, resisting a behavior.

The enter midi uic cortex is also directly wired in with the reward pathways of the brain that can trigger the release of doping, that can also respond to the release of doping. And that document released could be generated behaviorally IT could be generated through some sort of food reward IT could be pharmacologic. There are a number different ways that the dopamine in system can communicate with the entering singular c cortex.

The point here is that that is in direct communication with the enter missing like cortex, and the enter mission like cortex is in direct communication with the dopamine system. And what I just gave you was, Frankly, just a partial list of the different areas of the brain that are communicating robustly with the enter of my singular cortex. IT gets information about interaction tion, or read out of how we feel in our body.

IT also has robust inputs and outputs with the areas of the brain that associated with extra reception, our perception of what is out around us. So all of that provides a logical basis for the new imaging data, the legion data, the volume metric data that we talked about a few minutes ago in the context of depression, anxiety performance and iraqi a and so on. But one of the most important arguments that ever been made in favour of the entire missing ute cortex, being a major seat for tenacity and willpower, comes from a doctor, lisa feldman barrett, who is soon to be a guest on the human man in lab podcast.

We've actually recorded that episode already in IT should be out very soon. Leases laboratory is well known for pioneering research on emotion and affect. I strongly encourage you to listen to that.

Epsom when IT comes out. And IT was actually lisa herself that queued me to the importance of the entire in single cortex, at least. And colleagues have written several spectacular reviews about the enter amid singular cortex and its role, interactive motivation.

I will provide links to a few of those in the showed captions. The one that i'm particularly excited about, the one that i've spent now in immense amount of time with, is entitled the tenacious brain, how the enter missing ulic cortex contributes to achieving goals. So if you have a background in biology, even if you don't, I think you'll find that review to be very interesting and IT further substantiates.

Lot of the points that I made a few moments ago about the different scenarios and types of individuals that seem to be able to engage their entering the singular cortex under different conditions and to a greater or lesser extent than others. So hats off to lisa for queuing me to this incredibly interesting brain structure. I had known that IT existed.

I teach her neun atomy to medical students at stanford. And I taught neun atomy for many, many years. But I don't think enough people, and indeed very few professional neuroscientists, could tell you what the entire ID singular cortex does.

But IT has this. Apparently incredible function in generating tenacity and motivation along those lines. One of the most incredible and important studies about the enter mid singular cortex and its capacity to generate feelings of tenacity and willpower comes from one of my colleagues at stanford.

Joe are busy who essentially went into human beings who needed brain surgery for other reasons and stimulated particular brain areas with a very high degree of precision. The title of the paper that are referring to was published twenty thirteen in the journal neuron, self press journal, excEllent journal. And it's entitled the will to persevere, induced by electrical stimulation of the human singulair jesus.

Now you knows the title, said human singulair jesus not enter amid singular gifs, but because they had elective roads and a stimulation technic that would allow them to stimulate in very small regions, extending as long as five millimeters, but no more away from the stimulation site, they were able to march the stimulation around different sub regions of the singular ate gives of humans while those people were awake, and then ask those people, how do you feel? What are you experiencing in this moment? In addition to that, they were recording various automated ic parameters from those people.

So heart rate, breathing, in addition of brain wave activity. So what the subject support when their intermit singular cortex was stimulated is that, in their words, something was about to happen. They felt as if there were some sort of pressure upon them from the outside, not physical pressure, but that something was about to happen.

In fact, one of the subjects described this sensation as as if there's a storm off in the distance, but I know I need to go into the storm, and I know I can make IT through the storm. Another subject described to the experience of having their enter middle cortex stimulated as, okay, something not necessarily good is going to happen, but I know that I need to martial resources and resist. And i'm confident that I can push through now because our vision and colleagues are excEllent scientists.

They have courted control experiments where they would tell the person, okay, we're stimulating that same brain area that a moment ago you told me, created this feeling of some pressure upon you that you have to resist some sense of fight or urgency to push back. But in reality, during certain control conditions, they were not stimulating those brain areas. And the subjects that reported, I don't feel like anything about to happen.

Yeah, I don't feel anything at all. In other words, IT was the stimulation of the enter amid singular cortex, and only the enter amid single cortex that created the sensation within people, that there was something to resist, that there was something putting pressure on them, again, not physical pressure, but psychological pressure, and that they were going to have to martial resources in order to push back upon. In fact, they reported feeling as if their body was getting ready to do something.

One subject said something along lines of, I feel like i'm about to do something about about to go some place or do something to resist this for boating sense that's now coming over me. So this is very interesting, and of course, is in line with all of the day that we discuss before about neal activity patterns, both spontaneous and evoked, about brain volume changes in the entering ment, single cortex, so on and so forth. And IT really points to the idea that the enter my single cortex is a hub, a hub that receives information from a diversity of brain areas that we talk about a few minutes ago.

And that generates a particular sense within us that we are going to be forward center of mass, that we are going to resist something and that perhaps we are going to move or act in some particular way, or as we've been discussing along, resist action in some particularly way. But that IT requires that we martial resources, which takes us back, of course, to the studies of balmy ister and indeed of dwg, where they explored willows as a limited resource, perhaps glue cose, perhaps as that limited resource beliefs about willpower and glue cose, probably with a high degree of certainty, are going to be involved there too. But regardless of that, controversy is clear that there's an energy required, there's an activation state of engagement or resistance to a particular behavior or thought pattern that we all associate with this phenomenon.

Tenacity and willpower, and in a kind of oraculous way, know, as the neuroscientists were generally taught nowadays, that individual brain areas not really trigger individual functions and perceptions of the brain. There are a few exceptions to that, you know, have a few form face area that really does seem to be involved in the perception of faces. And when legion, you can't recognize faces.

But outside of just a few limited contacts is very rare. That one comes across the literature that cross all of the studies involved, point to a single brain structure and its networks as giving rise to something as complex and flexible as tenacity and willows. But in the case of the enter ID single cortex, IT really does seem to meet those criteria as the brain hub responsible for tenacity and willows.

Now, a key idea that doctor fell in barrett has contributed to studies of the enter M, A simulate cortex as a structure that helps us generate what we call tenacity and willpower to help us achieve different types of goals. Is this idea of allow states. Most of you perhaps heard of homeostasis, which is the idea that all of ourselves, all of our organs, indeed, our entire body and psychology, are always seeking homeostasis, the perfect baLance of sleep and activity, of food and burning fuels of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and so on and so forth.

And while homeostatic certainly exists and is a valid phenomenon, there's also a concept that we hear far less about, but that is equally important, which is the concept of al stasis. l. Stasis is the idea that much of what our brain and body need to do, but especially our brain, is to allocate right, allow status, to allocate resources to particular functions, depending on our motivational goals and the chAllenges upon us.

And in every way, what we understand about the structure and function of the enter my singular cortex is that IT is doing just that. IT is deciding how much glue cos should have given brain area consume, perhaps the brain that's involved in visual perception, because you're involved in a motivational task where, in order to succeed, you need to pay careful visual attention to particular things. Or you're involved in a task, we have to listen to particular things.

Or perhaps you are involved in a physical foot race where you don't want to allocate a lot of energy towards thinking about your strider, your step, unless that's necessary, and you actually want to shut down your brain activity as much as possible, except for the brain areas that required to get you to continue run. In that sense, the enter emitting cortex as a sort of a deal on how much fuel is consumed, not by the brain, im body as a whole, but by individual brain and body part, means all the criteria of what you would want for a brain area that controls things like tenacity and willing wer. Because even for those individuals who seem to just have an in less supply of tenacity and willpower, they too have to go to habitual behavior.

They can't simply lean into every aspect of life with the kind of resistance from outside and the resistance against those outside forces, or even resistance to internal forces voices in their head at sea on a constant basis, they still need to sleep. They still need to be functional in that expression of tennessee and wherever. They need to be able strategy switch.

And they need to be able to come off the gas, as we say, not because to nasty and willows are necessarily a limited resource, but because for so many aspects of life, engaging tenacity in wheel power is not advantages. Hence the example I gave earlier about eating disorders, where an apparently hardwired function of our brain to be able to generate some sort of reward for resisting a given behavior goes too far and then can actually threaten one's own health or even life. So the concept of elastic load, all static baLance, an alathea function, is something that we get into in a fair amount of detail in the discussion with darker filled in beretta, that episode, which is coming out soon.

But in the meantime, if you are to think about the enter of ID singular cortex as having a single function, the function the doctor filled me there has described to IT as controlling how much energy different brain and body area should get in the given context. Well, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I think it's the one that best describes all of the functional data, indeed includes or jobs with all the anatomical data about the enter and simulate cortex as well.

One of the really important twist in all of this is that the entire medical mula cortex is not just sitting there to allocate and doll out different amount of energy and vision to different brain areas. IT is also receiving input from both the brain and body. And in sort of a beautiful twist on the whole story of what the enter midd singular cortex does, we know that when we move our body, we are activating the anterior mid singular cortex.

And we know that when we move our body, because we in some way forced ourselves, or encourage ourselves to do IT, we activate the enter mid singular cortex more similarly. And because the entire its singular cortex is so flexible in the different contact in which IT can be activated. If we are simply reading or we are listening to something that we're supposed to learn, we're trying to learn a piece of music or trying to do anything for that matter, the answer of middle uic cortex, yes, will be activated, but that its levels of activation are far greater when we experience a lot of resistance that we have to overcome.

Remember the earlier result in by the way, i'll provide a link in the showed captions of this particular study or set of study there, about two, one really spectacular, one in a couple of others, that ten generally point the same, finding that when people engage in a hard task, not an easy task, but a hard task, that the enter amid simulate cortex activity is elevated. So the way to think about the enter of its single cortex is that it's not just sitting there is a hub that you to reach on to an activate. It's also receiving inputs that can activate IT.

And that's what allows us to now talk about the tools and protocols that don't just allow us to engage our entire ment singularity cortex and access more tenacity and whilst wer, but that allow us to exercise, not unnecessarily, the context of physical exercise. So that could be that too, but to exercise our entering my single courtesy ability to engage not just in that chAllenging context, but in other changing context as well. In fact.

I'll just tell you right now that studies in nonhuman primate into a limited extent in humans. But here we think there's a strong analog between the non human primate data and the human data. The enter amid single cortex is chock a block full of the expression of molecules such as kim kind's two receptors to various a trophy, particular types of N M D A and method aspirate recept tors. All of which, if none of those names mean anything to you, just know that all of of them refer to different aspects of an capacity for synaptic plasticity, which is the ability for connections in the brain to change that can get stronger. You actually grow new connections.

In other words, the entering mid singular cortex can be built up as a structure to engage the nasi willows by activating IT through one or a limited number of different types of behaviors, meaning, engagement and behaviors that, Frankly, we would rather not engage in, as well as not engaging in behaviors that reflexively, we really want to, that were drawn to engaging both of those contacts that I absolutely will, even though, Franklin, I don't want to, or you're telling me I can't as well as that I absolutely won't, even though you're tempting me to do that or that's tempting to me to do that, or even I tempted to do that. That build up of the entire middle la. Cortex has extensive Carry over into other domains of life because it's the same structure that is then used for other types of behaviors and learning that require tenacity.

And whilst wer so that's incredibly reassuring. In fact, it's downright exciting because, as I mentioned earlier, while there are near infinite number of different circumstances where we, each and all need to active and willpower, IT seems that there's a very generic mechanism for generating tenacity and wherever. And that means that if we can build up our capacity for tenacity and willows by engaging particular types of behaviors and resisting partial types of behaviors, well, then it's going to Carry over in a very functional way to the other aspects of life that we find chAllenging and that we may find chAllenging in the future.

okay. So by now, I like to think that i've convinced you because Frankly, the data are very convincing, that the entire missing ulic cortex is a vital hub within your brain for allocating energy and resources to generating tenacity and wheel power. And perhaps it's taken you a lot of tenacity will power to get this far through the episode, waiting with bated breath, presumably to learn how exactly you can improve the functioning of your enter amid singular cortex.

Now, fortunately, there are published peer review data that explain how to do that fact. There's a study that was published in two thousand six by colum and colleagues entitled a robic exercise training increases brain volume in aging humans. And before you go run off literally and engage in cardiff al exercise, i'm just going to describe to you the contour of this study and what specifically was done so that you can best implement the best protection for your particular circumstances.

This was a study expLoring why, and now certain brain areas and brain volume generally decreases as we age as well. Known, as I mentioned earlier, that individuals aged really fifty and order and maybe as early as thirty and older experiences a decrease in brain volume, with particular brain areas shrinking faster than others. But of course, there are other people that include the super agers that we talked about earlier and many, many other people who are not superagent, who don't experience the same decrease in brain volume.

So why is IT that they maintain the same brain size that they did when they're Younger or undergo least increase in brain size? That's what the researchers for the study were initially interested in understanding. And they did come to some really interesting conclusions about that, but they also came to some interesting conclusions that related to today's discussion on to native.

And whilst wer this study involved having individuals who were sixty to seventy nine years old divided into one of two groups, one group did cardiovascular exercise, the other group did more cellist n ics slash stretching type exercise. Both groups did one hour of exercise three times per week. The group that did cardio askar training initially started off by doing, and by the way, they just simply called the erotic c training.

But this could be rowing on the rower. This could be running. This could be cycling.

I think for sake of understanding application of rules and protocols, you would want to pick any kind of activity that you could do consistently without injuring yourself. That's what really important. And that gets your heart rate elevated. They started off these individuals with relatively low intensity cardio ashlar exercise for that hour, getting their heart rate up to about fifty percent of their maximum heart rate. But very quickly, had those individuals increase the intensity of those, cardiff asked lar training session.

So they were doing, again, three, one hour sessions per week, getting their hearts rate up to about seventy five percent of their maximum heart rates and has a little less sixty percent, sometimes a little bit more, but in that general range. So for those of you that think about different zones of cardio, this is probably in the area of zone three, not quite zone two cardio, maybe zone three cardio. So where one can not Carry out a conversation very easily, but where one is not completely gasping for air as one would if they went to their maximum part rate or near maximum part rate.

Okay, so three one hour episodes of cardiff asia training per week at a moderately high intensity. The other group simply doing cal listener s and stretching for the equivalent amount of time. And they had another group within the study that were much Younger that did similar activities or no activity simply as a control for the brain imaging data.

Now i'm summarizing the study with a fairly broad brush bath for save time. And of course, i'll provide a links to study in the show. Note captions. You can access IT and prove in more detail, if you like. But I ouldn't be talking about this study if I were simply a study about cardiff, asked lar training and brain volume talking about this study because the specific brain areas that maintained, or in some cases increased in volume as a consequent of doing these three hours per week of moderate intensity cardio ashlar training, included, of course, the entered ID singular cortex.

That was actually the primary location in which the maintenance of brain volume was observed, and in some cases, increases in brain volume was observed, right? This is a group of people who Normally would be losing volume, size of their enter in singular cortex, but for which three hours a week of moderate intensity cardio ashlar training maintained the volume the size of that interior singular cortex, and in some cases, increased the volume the size of enter amid single cortex. And they also observed a maintenance or increase in the size of the entered White matter tracts.

Remember, T R A C T S, I didn't spell that out before, just to spell IT out for fun, although that is the sort of thing that I would probably do. Those White matter tracks are the communication routes by which different brain areas communicate. And this, enter your White matter tract that maintained size in the people that did cardio accused training as compared to those that simply did the callistonian training.

And stretching is the very White matter tracts that connects the two sides of the brain, the frontal lobes that allows the enter amid singulair cortex on one side, the brain, and the enter amid uc cortex on the other side of the brain, as well as other brain structures to communicate with one. And so this is really spectacular. I mean, the authors of the study didn't embark on the study to find or even look for increases or maintenance in the volume of the enter of mdi singular cortex and the communication routes and out of the entire ment singular cortex IT.

Just so happened that cardiff asked lar training done three times per week for an hour of time in modern, increased the size of the enter amid singular c cortex. And as I mentioned, the White matter tracks, which allow information to go in and out of the entering ment, single protects. Now we should all be asking ourselves, why would that be the case? I mean, somebody gets on a stationary a bike and pedals, or goes out on a road bike runs.

There's something inherent to running, or cycling, or rowing, or swimming, or a robs class dancing at seta, that gets the heart rate up that directly feed into the enter amid singular cortex. After all, is the enter its single cortex responsible for generating the activity of running or cycling or swiming? no.

Rather, the interpretation is that in order to engage in this one hour, three times per week set of sessions of cardiff, asked lar training, they had to allocate resources. They had to get a bit of a chair, they had to get off the couch, they had to say no to other potential obligations, social engagements, meals at set and get to these exercise classes or sessions that they did with others are alone. Now in interesting and in fact important aspect of the study is that the compliance with this three hours per week of cardiff asked lar.

Training was very high. Eighty five percent of individuals engaged in these sessions across the six month period of the study. I should have mention that earlier the study was Carried out over the course of six months.

They did not have the opportunity to do new imaging after, say, a week or two weeks. So they image these people's brains before and they image these people's brain after this six months period. It's anybody's guessed as to whether not they would have observed the same or maybe even greater increases at the one month interview.

Let saturday, we simply don't know. There was a great cost of energetic and financial to doing these kinds of studies. So they looked at six month period. But setting all of that aside, this is a very important study in the context of today's discussion, because what that means is that if we acknowledge that the entering its singular cortex and the volume of the entering its singular cortex is related to one's ability to generate tenacity and willpower for any number of different endeavors, well then having access to a tool or a protocol that can increase the size of one's enter amid singular cortex is going to be extremely valuable.

So what's the takeaway from the study? The take away from the study is not necessarily that you should be doing three one hour bouts of cardiff, asked lar training per week for six months to maintain or increase the size of your enter single cortex. I do think that's the case if you're not already doing sufficient amount of cardiovascular training and what constitutes sufficient amounts.

Well, this is general agreement now both between the material that i've covered in our foundational fitness protocol and in the series on exercised physiology with doctor any galin and. In various discussions with dr. Peter atia, the general agreement is that everyone should be getting somewhere between one hundred and fifty to two hundred minutes of so called the zone to low intensity cardio aspar exercise per week.

But the results of this study really points the idea that we should all be doing perhaps three hours, but certainly we should all be doing some form of physical exercise. But for any of us that are interested in increasing tenacity and wind power across domains, both for cognitive and physical endeavors, emotional endeavors to, for that matter, that we should be engaging in some exercise, and again, we're going to talk about cognitive exercise in a moment, but that we should be engaging in some exercise that we are not already doing. Now that, of course, we lead, many people think quite.

I'm already doing two hundred minutes per week of zone two cardio. How can I add three hours more of cardio? That's not what i'm saying. What's important understand about this whole discussion about tenacity and willpower is that the ability to engage the enter amid singular cortex and to build up its volume literally and increase its its activity relies on one critical feature, which is that you have to be in some degree of resistance, some lack of desire, or I should say, lack of reflective desire or ability to engage in that behavior. Okay, this is super important if you're thinking about tools and protocols to increase your level of tasia.

Wilson wer, if, for instance, you love cold showers and ice bath, well, then it's very unlikely that taking cold showers are getting into a nice bath is going to increase your level of tasia willows. Further, you might reinforce the tasking wheel power that you ve already built, but it's not going to increase IT. Further, you need to add something or subtract something that makes IT harder, not easier, to engage in or resist your behavior.

Here, I want to be really clear about this in the study that are just described from column colleagues, they took individuals that were not exercising prior to the study, and those people had to therefore generate significant amount of motivation in order to regularly engage in these three, one hour per week episodes of cardiff. Asked lar training right now, the fact that there was no comparable increase in the volume of the enter mid singular cortex or enter White matter tracks in the group that did the palliser ics. And stretching is also important because they implies that activities that are easier to Carry out that don't get the heart rate elevated as much, are not going to create changes in this brain structure that is associated tenacity in willpower.

And there is a nice confirmation of that in the study, in fact, because they observed, as one would expect, a significant increase in vo 2 max in the individuals that were signed to the group that descarte vascular training， but they did not observe a significant increase in view two max in the individuals that did three one hour per week sessions of callosities s and stretching across the six months s period. okay. So the important point here is if you're already doing, let's say, an hour a week of moderate to high intensity Carter vascular training or resistance training for that matter, you're going to need to add something in order to get further activation of this brain hub for tenacity and willpower.

And of course, the idea here, or else we wouldn't be talking about IT, is that that activation is that increase in volume in the enter, missing the cortex within be applicable to other endeavors, for instance, academics or some aspect of your professional life for relationship life that you can build up to nasi willows as a capacity within you, or we should say, within your entire amid singular courtesy. But that the road to activating an increasing the robustness of your enter missing you like cortex requires that you engage in something that you don't really want to do, and certainly not something that you're regularly engaging in already. Remember, way back to the beginning of today's episode, we compared wit, power and tenacity to have an execution, right? Well, this is a simple case where if you're already doing something simply continuing to do IT might maintain what you've already got, but it's not going to further build up your tenacity.

Willow wer, so along those lines, I don't want you to simply take the three one hour cardiff asked lar sessions per week protocol that they used within the study and expect IT to increase your levels of tanzi wheel power, unless of course you're currently only doing one hour of cardiff asked lar training at mother to high intensity per week, in which case increasing to two hours may very well increase your interview singular cortex and overall level tenacity and willows and certainly doing three hours per week would be expected to do IT even further. And I should mention that we can extrapolate from this study in a meaningful way, I think, in a grounded way that's related to mechanism, and say, well, if you, for instance, like me, can't play a musical instrument or are not bilingual in language, that taking on the chAllenge, if indeed is a chAllenging for me, IT, would be a chAllenge perhaps for you as well to learn an instrument as an adult or to learn a second or maybe a third language if that's chAllenging. And in fact, that something that you're resisting doing something great, it's going to provide an even greater opportunity to engage the activity of the entire ID singular cortex.

Remember that study that shows that hard task, hard chAllenges are what activate the entire ID single cortex. Easy chAllenges, don't kay? Habits that are reflective simply do not. So you have to pick something hard. You have to pick something that either physically and or psychological hard.

And of course, we want to highlight the fact you never want to engage in anything physical or cognitive, emotional otherwise that is psychologically or physically damaging to you, right? Because this is something that you're going to want to maintain or Carry out for some period of time. Now along those lines, we could imagine a huge number of different protocols that one could engage in. But I think there are a couple of key things that extend across all of those opportunities.

First of all, it's clear now based on our understanding of the anatomical inputs to the enter of missing uic cortex that while exercises is great and certainly movement to the body when we don't want to move our body A K A running, A K weight lifting, A K learning, a new scale like dancing or gym tic or something of that sort, is going to engage this hub for tenacity and willows, the entering its single cortex. But there are number of other opportunities to do that, and we can think of those in a kind of playful context, but one, there's both playful and highly functional and applicable. So for instance, if you already resistance train and you're doing what we now generally grees, a field is the minimum of six hard working sets per muscle group per week in order to maintain or build muscle size and strength.

Some of you don't want to build muscle size, but everyone should be trying to maintain. Muscle strengths are very high correlation. We now know between muscle strength and cogent function, especially as one gets past forty years of age, but even Younger.

So maintaining no muscular function and strength is very, very important. Even if you don't want to increase muscle size, you can learn how to do that. By the way, zero cost protocols that all listed out by going to human and lab dot com.

Check out the series I did with out any gin. Check out the key took IT takeaway from that series also available. Who were in lab docs just put exercise protocols into the search function.

But let's say you're already resistance training. You're already doing cardio accused training. What can you do to build up your tenacity? And whilst wer for application in not just that endeavor, but other endeavors will pick something that you don't want to do.

These are what I call in a very nonscientific way microsofts. These things suck, but they suck a little bit and their safe, right? You have to make things they're safe for you, but they suck enough that they require some effort.

They require getting over some friction, engaging in something that you don't reflexively want to do. So for instance, that might be one extra set at the end of a round of three to five sets of a given exercise. Or IT could be, for instance, one hundred jumping jacks at the end of what you consider a hard run.

IT could be, for instance, finishing out that language lesson and then deciding to do five minutes of sitting still, thinking about the material that you learned when you so desperately wanted. Just jump on your phone, right? Pick circumstances where the degree of resistance is very high, where the degree of impulse to do something else, then the thing that, you know you need to do is very high, and then start applying those on a regular basis.

They could be after every workout that could be in the middle of the workout. For insinuation, people have a really hard time, not looky at their phone during a workout. I like to listen to podcasts, er, music, daring a workout, but I really try to resist text messaging and reading email and things that sort while working out. So the harder that becomes, the more I think about IT and the more I resist IT, the more presumably activation of the international simulate cortex i'm getting in that you would get as well.

So these little microstructure like that sucks not till look at the phone now, its sucks to do one hundred jumping jacks at the end of an of course, if you're excited to to the hundred jumping jacks at the end of the run, that's not going to be a good avenue into activating, increasing the volume of your enter my singular cortex. Everything we've talked about up until now supports the statement I just made. Easy tasks, desirable task.

Don't do IT. It's the thing you don't want to do. So in parting, these little microstructure can be very useful. You'll have to think about what particular microstructure you incorporate into your exercise routines, your cognitive tines in your daily routine, how often. I don't think you need to go completely preserve on this, doing them all day long.

But keep in mind that these are the sorts of behaviors and resistance of behaviors because, again, certain microsofts might be you. If you're somebody who practice this is intermit and fasting, you know, we don't want send you into the realm of eating disorder, but you know, maybe you really do wait in extra fifteen minutes before you're usual first meal time, which for me would really suck, that might even move from microsoft micro sock. I like to eat when i'm hungry, but waiting a few extra minutes for no other reason, then allowing oneself to activate that interior with singular cortex circuitry would be one way to try build up one's tenacity in willow wer.

So at some level they should all seem pretty logical. And that actually doesn't even require a firm understanding of the underlying neo science for IT to. Make sense, right? You want to do something you resist doing IT that's building up to nasi and wheel power. You don't really want to do something you do IT that's building up to nasi.

Whilst wer 我要 i do believe， in fact there are a lot of data to support the fact that our understanding of the mechanisms underneath things like tenacity and White power can be very advantages when trying to Carry out these different types of behaviors to increase to nasi and willpower. why? Well, today we learned that there's a huge variety of context in which one can activate the entering, seeing like cortex, which means that it's not cardiff asked lar exercise per say.

It's not resisting the cookie per say, right? It's not waiting fifteen more minutes to eat or making sure that you sit still and don't look at your phone at the end of a learning about him. Really think about what you learn a little bit more.

You know, I really, really sucks to do that. It's really hard. Creates a lot of vegetation. It's not about any one of those protocols, if you will, per say rather is about deliberate engagement in the behaviors that we least want to do in a given moment or if you trying to build up will power in tenacity to not engage certain types of behaviors. It's about our ability to suppress behavioral al action.

Now I do want to highlight the potential hazard of this type of approach to building up to nasi and wheel power, and indeed, to life. And we can call on the earlier example of eating disorders as a very silent one. right?

There is a way in which all of this can run a muck, and we can get so heavily into stoicism, we can get so heavily into the idea of building up to nasi and willpower that IT takes us into realms that are unhealthy for a psychologically, emotionally and door physically. And that certainly not the goal here. And I certainly don't want to motivate that type of behavior or resistance of behavior.

We should all be seeking a relationship with life and with goals that set up that involves, yes, I believe, some degree of activating tenacity and wheel power, really finding that fight within us. That part, visions and colleagues found when they stimulated the enter made singular cortex of people right of a like, yeah driving into a storm or there's something about to happen, i'm going to have to resist. I'm either going to have to do something or resist doing something.

But there's something activated inside of me. I think it's very important that we are all able to garner those resources to activate those states within us voluntarily. But I also know from experiencing, from observing others, and indeed from the literature on the enter of my singular cortexes IT release to eating disorders and other aspects of neurologic and psychiatric chAllenges, is that we also need to learn how to turn that off.

With that said, the little microstructure that we discuss, you know, the addition of one hundred jumping acts at the end of a cardio accused train session when you would much rather just shower up and go home getting into the cold shower or cold plunge, when you absolutely don't want to do IT well, provided you can do IT safely, that's going to be the best time to do IT if your goal is to build up to ask and will powered to say nothing else of the known benefits of things like deliberate called exposure and exercise, like jumping to access. There are also entire landscapes of life in academics and sport that afford to the opportunity to build up to nasi and willows. Every incense can recall taking my so qualifying exams in graduate school where they ask you questions until you say I don't know, until you don't know the answer.

It's just like that puzzle in the bali ter study they're taking to the point where you basically can't win. And that turns out to be a very important lesson that extends beyond the information that they're asking you about. Of course, every student at the end of the qualifying exam runs often figures out the answer to the question that they could get the right answer too.

Sometimes there is a right answer. Sometimes there are not, if the committee is pretty diabolical to give you an impossible to answer question, because there's no answer. But the point being that whether not in marsh alarms, weather nuts, in sports, where are not in music, whether not in academics, whether not in relating to others, there is some value to getting to that point where you can't solve the puzzle.

And I think that's an important message us to understand and maybe to incorporate into our tools and protocols that there are some endeavors that have no end point, right? There is no winning, there's no finish line. And those type of endeavors are extremely important, extremely important for continually building up our tenacity and White power, so much so that we can even take somewhat three thousand mile view from the top down onto everything we ve talked about today.

And think about those superagent es, those super aggers that somehow are able to maintain the cognitive function of a much Younger person. And if you look at the date on super age and people similar to them, you'll find are always engaged in some activity that's hard for them. They're always trying to learn something, and they have a sort of playfulness about IT. But they seek out those friction points, both resistance of certain behaviors, right, trying to not do certain things, but perhaps more often doing certain things, learning a new skill, learning pottery, learning music, placing themselves into novel environments. They are little uncomfortable or a lot uncomfortable, provided that is safe.

So from that standpoint, one could even entertain the idea that because these people are living much longer than everybody else, in addition to maintaining the cognitive function of much Younger individuals, that perhaps the intermix singular cortex in its ability to allocate resources to different parts of our brain and body to meet certain motivational goals, is actually associated with this thing that we call the will to live. Now, the concept of the will to live is certainly getting a little bit squishy for scientists like me. Yes, i'm happy to entertain discussions that relate to psychological constructs such as tenacity and willpower.

But as you've probably noticed, i'm very comfortable with and very excited about the idea that, okay, maybe it's related somehow to brain energetics and glucose. Maybe not. Certainly, i'm on board the idea that beliefs impact our physiology and physiology impact our beliefs.

Doctor alley chrome, who was a gust on this podcast, previously talked about belief in mindset effects, which are very powerful. They change our physiology literally and the data that we talked about today. But of course, also that there are brain areas and circuits that underlie these things that we call tenacity and willows.

So when we get into a discussion about tanai willows and then find ourselves, as we are now talking about the will to live, I don't think it's going too far to say that when one looks at the data on longevity, both physical and psychological angevine, it's very clear that they're underlying physiological explanations, not the least of which is likely to be the maintenance, if not growth, over the lifespan of this enter in its singular cortex. But also that the people that are achieving that are continually force ging in their environment, they're continually looking for new environment, they're continually expLoring. They are not becoming complacent, they're not becoming sedentary.

They're not existing down at the end of the continuum that we call apathy and depression, but that they're not existing down there. And they are existing up towards end of the continuum that we call active and willpower and engaging motivation to get there a motivation again again as a verb. But in doing that, that they're reinforcing the very circuits that give rise to tenacity in whilst wer.

This is what, in engineering terms is referred to as a closed loop, like you do a, which leads to b, which leads to c, which feeds back onto a and and makes a that much more likely to occur. It's like turning the little a into a capital a and then turning into a bold face capital underline a in the build up of neural circuits. So while today we focused a lot on an individual brainer, enter middle cortex.

And in many ways, I presented IT as if it's the ball and all of to nasi and willows. IT is not the ball and all of to nai and wheel power. It's our ability to engage the entire menu late cortex that allows us to express tenacity in whether wer, but in this close loop fashion, it's our ability to express, to ask Wilson wer that then feeds back onto that circuit.

IT makes IT more robust and more likely to be accessible in the future when we encounter something that we don't want to do or that we have to resist very strongly in order to not engaged in some sort of behavior or thought pattern. So the big take away is that if you want to increase your tenacity in whilst wer, you absolutely can. You can do that by trigger ing activation of this incredible hub within the brain.

The entered singular cortex, for which there is now a very large amount of evidence, is at least central to the whole process of generating taci and will power that I absolutely will do that. And the no, I absolutely won't do that. It's the resistance hub. It's the thing that's allocating resources to do the thing that we don't want to do or that someone's trying to prevent us from doing. It's also the brain area that's allowing us to resist doing the thing that we want to do or that someone else wants to to do when we decide that's not good for us.

We can really be certain based on the psychology literature, based on the neuroscience and really based on this beautiful literature that's now emerging, that includes the column study, but some other studies as well that perhaps will talk about in a future episode that we really can build up our capacity for tenacity and willpower. It's a real thing. And as a final point to this, and indeed as a final protocol, I was very excited to look into the early release of peer reviewed papers out from neuron just this last week and to see that there was a study i'll be IT in a preclinical model, in an animal model that explored what is called stress relief as a natural resilience mechanism.

And I won't go to the study in full detail, especially not now laid into a slightly long episodes such as this one. But what the study showed is that when an animal is in a state of despair or a hedonist, a lack of pleasure, when it's under stress and then that stress is removed, there is a sense of reward. There's a sense of well being that accompanies the release of stress.

And that's pretty obvious and that's something that we have known about for a very long time. But what's interesting about this study, and they actually talk about this in terms of its applicability potentially to humans. Is that when we are able to withstand a stress, maybe that stress is school, maybe that stress is a particular relationship.

Again, you never want to do these things in a way that's unhealthy or dangerous. But when we are able to do that, the relief that we feel afterwards is its own form of reward that serves to reinforce that whole process of tenacity and wheel power that got us through the dresser. And an interesting thing about this study is that they went on to compound that reward.

They showed that rewarding oneself for having gotten through a stressful episode actually serves to increase the capacity to get through stressful episodes in the future. In other words, that if you decide to develop certain tools and protocols to increase your levels of tanzi and wheel power, which, Frankly, I hope that you will at least consider again, provide you do IT safely. This seems like a very good thing to do for all of us, especially as we age.

And guess what, we're all agent from the time we're born. If you decide to do that, pick something that's chAllenging, overcome that chAllenge. Again, this could be the requirement to engage in a particular behavior when you don't want to, or to resist a particular behaviour that you would otherwise want to engage in.

But also when you've successfully completed that resistance, when you've engage that task in will per you've activated that entered amid single cortex, well, then occasionally, not always, but occasionally providing yourself with a reward of something that you like. And here, highly subjective, you'll have to pick something that you like again, something that of the health promoting, not health diminishing, conserve, to further reinforce the behavior that you just engage in, which was to increase your tenacity and will power. And if you listen to the episodes that i've done on dopamine motivation and drive, or on dopamine more generally, you will know that I am not a fan of rewarding oneself for wins or for engaging to ask your world power, for that matter, on a regular basis.

Or certainly every time this is the sort of thing that just randomly everyone's in a while when you've done the hard thing, or you resisted the thing that was pulling on you, that you should reward yourself, but of course, reward yourself and healthy and safeways. For those of you they are interested in learning more about how to reward the actions of tanzi and willows. I'll provide a link to the recently publish paper in neuron in the shown note captions.

I will also be doing a tool kid episode that relates to what we covered today as well as some additional tools clean from other papers and resources in the not too distant future. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion. All about tenacity and will power.

We talked about the idea clean from research in the field of psychology, that tana asi and willows are limited resources, and that perhaps, again, perhaps, they relate to this concept of ego depletion, that relate to this idea that what is depleted, or what's limited in our ability to engage to nasi willpower, somehow relates to bring energetics and fuel consumption, namely glue cos. I also talked about the conflicting data that argues that if we believe to nasi wheel power limited, and that glue cose is the thing that limits them, well, then that's exactly what happens. So I talked about that controversy and some of the data that actually reconcile a bit of the differences there.

So in the absence of new data, you'll have to decide for yourself what you believe about tenacity and willpower. However, it's very important to acknowledge the universal truth, which is that our tenacity and wheel power rides on the tide of automatic function, that is, when we are sleep deprived, when we are in pain, when we are in emotional pain, or when we are distracted, our tenacity and wheel power is diminished, which calls upon all of us to make sure that we're taking care of our autonomic functions through viewing morning sunlight, getting sufficient sleep, adequate nutrition, social connection, things that i've covered extensively on previous episodes. Then we talk about the neural underpinnings of tenacity and willows and this absolutely incredible brain structure that will call a hub because it's not Operating in isolation, but rather it's getting inputs from lots of different brain areas related to reward executive function or anoma function.

Motor planning goal seeking at seta that we call the enter amid singular ate cortex, this phenomenally interesting brain area that seems to be able to generate this thing that we call tenacity in wheel power, and that when we engage or express, to ask the in wheel power by doing the thing that we least want to do, by not doing the thing that we most want to do in a given moment, that we actually can build up our entire ID singular c cortex, and thereby build up our future capacity to engage the enter amid english cortex when we need to call on tenacity and will power. And then we talked about some of the pure review data that shows how that actually can be done, where these individuals who were not previously exercising did a chAllenging three one hour sessions per week of cardiff asia training. And indeed, their enter missing ut cortex and the connections two and away from IT increased in a way that set them apart from their age related cohorts.

That is, their brains stayed Younger, maybe even got Younger, whether those that did not do the hard thing right, that didn't engage to ask whilst wer did not experience the same effect. And then we talk about how those data could be extended into a number of different realms, such as cognitive learning, learning languages, learning math learning art, learning any number of different things, or in the physical realm, engaging in certain types of exercise that one is not already engaging in, adding in a little bit of additional exercise, specifically at a time in which you least want to do that, or extending your fasting period if that's something that you're doing and that you can do help fully, simply because IT allows you to exercise your intermission cortex A K to active in willows. And of course, we highlighted that all of that needs to be done in the context of psychological and physical safety.

We don't want anyone to do things that are going to be physically damaging to themselves. But if one simply takes the stance of, okay, what's something that I can do in a moment that will allow me to build up tenacity and willpower, well, it's going to be the thing that at least want to do in that moment, or the thing that at least want to residues in that moment to periodically add in those little what I refer to as microsofts, a very nonscientific, Frankly, non psychological term. But I think we all understand what IT means, little things that we don't want to do, but that if we do them, you can be sure that you are activating the enter of medicine like cortex, and thereby increasing the probability, the likelihood, you can access to asia wheel power more readily in the future.

So what i've done today is, explained the scientist, studies in the room of psychology and neuroscience that explain what to nasi in wheel power are and what allows us to build up our taci and willows over time. And then it's really up to all of us, to you, into me and everybody else to figure out in which particular domains and with which we're going to decide to build up our task and willows. So it's clear that tenacity and wheel power are not just resources that we need to call upon from time to time in order to overcome things, but they indeed calling on our ability and building up our ability for sassi wheel power can allow us a much richer, enjoyed ment of life, and perhaps can even extend our life by engaging the will to live.

Thank you for joining me for toy's discussion about the science of tenacity and wheel power and tools and protocols to increase one's ability to access tenacity and will power. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.

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