Mental Health Toolkit: Tools to Bolster Your Mood & Mental Health
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I entered huberman, and i'm a professor of neurobiology and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. Today, we are discussing tools for mood and mental health.

I will include tools and resources taken from the guest episode that I did with doctor lisa feldman, beret t, who is a psychologist and neuroscientist whose laboratory focuses on mood and emotions. During that episode, he mentioned several important tools that I do believe everybody should apply, that indeed, i've been applying to my own life and have found to be extremely beneficial. I will also highlight some of the specific research articles those tools are based on, which were not covered in the podcast with lisa.

I will also discuss tools Green from the four episode series that I did on mental health with doctor paul ty, who was a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry, and that epo de is, some of you may already know, focused on mental health and the self, as well as relationships. And IT included a deep discussion of what is that, the self. We talked about the unconscious mind and the conscious mind.

And we also covered a lot of tools for understanding oneself, both within the context of therapy, but also within the context of things that one can do alone and that require zero cost. In addition, we talk about tools for improving relationships. We talk about first principles of self care.

So I will provide highlights and takeaway of those tools during today's episode. And thirdly, I will include tools, what we often refer to as protocols, clean from some recent publications and the publications that came out as recently as two weeks ago, which really emphasize specific things that we can all do that. Again, our zero cost that have been shown in quality p reviewed research to significantly improve mood and mental health.

For instance, if you are a regular listener of this podcast, you are probably familiar with my nearly constant reminder that people should view morning sunlight in, afternoon sunlight in, if you can't, to embrace some alternatives, like looking at the artificial light, although sunlight is best. Well, there was a recent paper published in the journal nature, mental health and excEllent journal, focusing on not just the positive effects of viewing light at those times of day, and indeed throughout the day, but also the independent and positive effects of being in darkness for sixty eight hours every night. That's right.

Not only as light during the day correlated with significantly improved mental health outcomes, but darkness at night, that is, avoiding lights, not just bright lights, but light for up to eight hours at certain periods of your twenty four hours circadian cycle has been correlated with improved mental health outcomes, and indeed, has been shown to significantly offset certain negative mental health outcomes. This is a spectacular study. Again, IT involved an enormous number of research subjects, more than eighty five thousand research subjects, and IT touches on a large number of action protocols that i've still down to just one or two things that all of us can easily do to improve our mood and mental health on a consistent basis.

Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at stanford. IT is, however, part of my 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 like to thank sponsors of today's podcast.

Okay, let's talk about tools for improving mood and mental health. I think goes without saying that these are extremely important topics for everyone, not just to know about, but in my opinion, also for people to implement. And the reason is that we are currently in a worldwide mental health crisis.

And while we could debate the reason why we are in a worldwide mental health crisis, it's very, very clear that mood disorders and chAllenges with mental health are bound. And of course, there are many different therapies for the treatment of mood disorders and mental health. Everything from talk therapy with a psychologist or psychiatrist or social worker, prescription drug treatments, their nutritional approaches, thematic approaches. And I want to be clear that I do believe that there is value in all of these approaches. What tends to matter in terms of what sorts of tools and approaches .

one adopts includes both access.

So whether or not people have access to these type of therapies, whether or not they can afford them on a consistent basis, and also, of course, the severity of the mood or mental health disorder. And i'd be remiss, of course, if I didn't make the statement, and I don't say this just to protect me.

I also say this to protect all of you and those that you know that if you are concerned about yourself for somebody else having a serious mood or mental health disorder, please do seek out help from a licensed clinical psychologist or psychiatrist or other health care professional who's qualify to help you in that regard. With that said, we can now have a discussion about tools and protocols for enhancing mood and mental health that truly applied to everybody, regardless of age. To start off, I want to talk about a fundamental aspect of mood and mental health enhancement that was discussed both in the guest epo de with doctor lisa felman beret t, as well as in the guest series with doctor paul county.

And that has to do with what dr. Paul county, referred to as the first principles of self care or mental health. The first principles of self care include, but are not limited to, taking excEllent care of one's biology, which, of course includes both the mind and the body. And in order to make this very simple and actionable, i've just killed out what I referred to as the big six. I sometimes referred to these as the six major pillars of health, both mental health and physical health, as well as performance for that matter.

But if we're going to talk about tools for mood and mental health, we absolutely can't discard discussions about our biology, that is, we need to make sure that we're taking care of our Normal biological function and indeed enhancing the production of specific or transmittals and modulators that we are optimizing. Yes, I use the word optimi zing, the function of our so called atomic nervous system, that aspect, our nervous system that's humming in the background all the time. It's Operating unconciously to regulate our sleep wake cycles. It's regulating how well or poorly we react to things.

It's regulating how much dopamine, serotonin, a penev, ana eto calling, we're producing all of this stuff is humbling in the background and sets the stage for all the conscious work that we might put to, for instance, try and understand what our life nerved is, what our unconscious mind is doing, what's worth of defenses in my producing all of the sort of high level and directed work that were going to talk about a little bit later, exist on a background of automation, ic function of neurotransmitter or production of hormonal production, not just testosterone estermen, but things like court is all proactive and on and on. So it's important to understand that if our goal is to be in the best possible mood given our life circumstances and to have the best possible mental health given our life circumstances and to improve our mood and mental health consistently over time, that we have to pay attention to what i'm referred to hear as the big sex are the six pillars of mental health and those ARM. Just to list them off.

Then i'll go into a little bit more detail. Sleep sunlight, although i'd like to modify sunlight because based on some new data that just came out a couple of weeks ago, i'd like to now make that second pillar, not sunlight, but light slash a dark. So we could even just think about IT as a light, when and how much light you get.

But what you'll soon learn is that how much dark you get is also extremely important. So you got sleep. Light movement is the third nutrition, social connection and stress control. Now these are topics that i've spoken about extensively on previous huber and lab podcast episodes.

So I don't want to go into a deep dive of each of these six pillars right now, but I am going to just give you a few highlights of each. And then, of course, we will provide links in the shown out captions forwards. You can go on the deep dive, if you like.

And I also would like to mention that if you ever have questions about specific protocols or tools you're seeking those out or previous episodes or specific timestamps or previous episode des of this podcast, you can go to our newly revamped huberman lab dot com website and put any topics of interest, even several topics of interest, into the search function. And IT will take you to the very specific time stamps and other resources that provide information on those topics. So i'm going to go into a few of the key bullet points about each of the six pillars, or what I also refer to as the big six of self care and mental health.

Again, this is a necessary list, but is not sufficient, again, necessary to do these things every twenty four hours, indeed, every twenty four hours if you want to have the best possible mood and mental health. But IT is not sufficient. That means you still need to do some of the other things that we're going to talk about in terms of directed approaches that improving mood and mental health, if you are to optimize your mood in mental health or if you are, let's just say, trying to constantly improve your mood and mental health.

But these are the necessary but not sufficient pillars of mental health. So under the heading of sleep, it's safe to say that most people need between six to eight hours of sleep per night. Some people can get away with five.

Some people need as much as nine or ten. Certainly growing kids, babies, teenagers and those that are suffering from some sort of illness are going to need more as much as nine, ten, maybe even twelve hours of sleep per night. However, most people do well to get somewhere between six and eight hours of sleep per night.

You're just going to have to experiment and figure out what's best for you. Now, one thing I heard recently, so I can't claim this as an original idea, but that I think is a really good way to think about sleep, is that sleep, much like physical fitness, is something that we have to constantly be working on. It's not the sort of thing where you can get a great night sleep one night and then the next night.

Just can't let all the protocols go and expect to get a great night sleep. You don't have to be neurotic. C about getting a great nights left.

Indeed, I do believe that we should strive to get enough quality sleep as many of the nights of our life as possible. If you can do that, hopefully it's for good reasons. But of course, things happen in life.

Reading kids. You have encies all nighters to studies so you can make sure you get the best possible grade on exam IT set up. But we should all strive to get.

The best quality sleep that we can in as much of the most nights of our lives. So it's important to look at sleep as a process that you're going to be working on for the rest of your life, just like fitness. And I don't say that overwhelm you.

I say that so that if on any given night you you get a poor night sleep, you don't stress that too much. You just get right back on the wagon and you try get the best possible nights sleep the next night and the next night and the next night. Much like fitness, there's no ten week program that's going to transform your physical fitness forever, okay, just like there's no sleep program that's gona transform your sleep forever.

It's a daily, or rather, I should say, nightly investment. Although some of the things that are going to positively impact your sleep or perhaps damage ously about things that you do during the daytime, right? So avoid that caffeine into late in the day, get that morning sunlight and on and on, but you sleep as something that you're constantly investing in.

And IT is a critical investment for your mood and mental health. The other thing that's not often discussed, and I really haven't talked about terribly much on this podcast, is the importance of having a fairly consistent sleep routine. Now I realized that not everybody can get to sleep at the exact same time each night and wake up at the exact same time each morning.

And Frankly, that's not practical. I certainly don't do that. However, what we know from the circadian health literature is that everybody should strive again, that strive, nobody is is perfect, but strive to get to sleep, but more or less the same I am each night, and wake up at more or less the same time each morning.

This turns out to be really important for regulating mood and mental health, and indeed for improving your overall levels of sleep, getting the up to amount of slow wave sleep, OK deep sleep and rabid eye movement sleep. And what we know is that ideally you're going to get to sleep within plus minus one hour of your regular sleeping. So if you're regular to bed time is ten o'clock, you're used to getting embed at ten o'clock and falling asleep somewhere around ten thirty.

Well then if the next night you fall, see at nine thirty, great, you're still within the plus minus one hour. And if the next night you go to to sleep and you don't fall asleep till eleven thirty, don't sweat IT. In fact, you're still within that plus or minus one hour. However, if you start getting into a habit of going to bed at vastly different times, deviating more than or less than one hour from your Normal to bed time, then you're going to start to run into issue s such as waking up feeling groggy, even if you ve got enough sleep.

So even if you slept the full eight hours, that you're used to getting people who go to sleep much later than they Normally do or much earlier than they Normally do, start getting into issues of mood regulation, energy regulation, not just in the morning, but in the afternoon, likewise trying to wake up at more less the same time each morning, plus or minus one hour. That's really going to help you anchor your overall sleep schedule, and it's really going to help lead to predictability of your overall levels of energy, mood and focus throughout the day. The second pillar in that big six is light, and I used to refer to this as sunlight, right? I'd say, and i'm going to say again now, although I covered this in a lot more details, so you just hitting the top con to our critical elements, try to use sunlight, that is, with your eyes, view sunlight as early as possible after waking.

Whenever I say that, the most common question I get is, what do I do if I wake up before the sun comes out? Well, unless you have superpowers that i'm not aware of, you can't make the sun come out any earlier. So just flip on artificial lights as needed until the sun comes out and get outside, face east in the morning, take off those sun glasses.

It's perfectly safe to look at low solar angle, sunlight without sun, lasses provide you're not driving in a bright lighting. You crash this kind of thing. Get outside.

Look at the sunlight definitely linked to protect your eyes as needed, but get that sunlight in your eyes early in the day. This has myriad positive effects on mood, focus on alertness and nighttime sleep later that night. And IT does so through a number of well defined biological and integrate hormonal pathways that i've discussed on many previous podcast episodes.

And you want to do this for about ten minutes on non overcast days, and as long as twenty or thirty minutes on overcast days. And that highlights the second most common question I get, which is, what do I do if there is no sun where I live? I live in an area where there is no sunlight, but if you live on planet earth, there's always sunlight.

There might not be very much of IT that you might be very overcast where you live IT might seem very dark. But trust me, there's far more foon light energy coming through that cloud cover, even in the darkest mornings of winter. Then there are at night in those dark winters.

So get that light in your eyes and do IT as consistently as possible and also do that in the late afternoon and evening. That's critical for regulating your circuiting clock for reasons that i've talked about previously. But i'll get into in the future pockets really explaining how those clock oscillation and mechanisms work.

But just to keep IT really simple, since this is a tool kit episode for mood and mental health, your mood and your mental health will benefit tremendously from getting morning sunlight in your eyes. Now if you need to get more light in your eyes, because indeed there's just not enough sunlight, or you don't have the opportunity to get outside and view sunlight in the morning, for whatever reason, you might invest in getting a bright light source that you can plug in. And you probably want one that as bright as ten thousand locks.

So that's pretty bright. Those fall into the category so called sad lamps, S A D, seasonal effective disorder lamps. And you can purchase those that can be some expensive.

You can also opt to get a nine hundred luks drawing tablet, by the way, have no financial relationship to any of these sorts of light sources. You can find them pretty easily. Ly, and in the case of the nine hundred, looks like tablet fairly inexpensively online.

And you can put that on your desk or where you have your morning coffee and try to enhance the total amount of light that you're getting in the morning. But Frankly, nothing is as good as sunlight. So if you kind of get sunlight, you might think about investing in one of those sad lamps.

And indeed, those sad lamps aren't as good as sunlight, but they're the next best thing if you really care at sunlight on a consistent basis. A few other fine points that I always get asked about. First of all, IT is absolutely OK to wear eyeglasses or contact lens is those sorts of collective lens uses are actually going to focus the light to your retina, which is where you want IT.

However, this whole process of viewing morning sunlight in afternoon light does not, again, does not work through a window or windshield, because windows and windshields filter out the relevant wavelengths of light that you want to get directly on here, retina. And so that's the reality of IT. In addition, please don't feel that you have to look directly at the sun, and certainly don't stare at this.

I never force yourself to look at any light, sunlight or otherwise that's so bright that it's painful to look at. So if it's comfortable for you to look directly at the sun and just blink, everyone's in a while. You can do that without any pain or discomfort. Watering of the ice, please do that. You're getting a lot of photons into your eyes, and they're transmitting that to your brain, and your brain to the rest of your body and on and on.

However, if you find IT uncomfortable to look directly at the sun, in that case, what you want to do is offset your gays, you know, ten or twenty degrees, which is nerd, speak for just a little bit to the right or a little bit of the left, and get the sunlight into ize indirectly. okay? And I often also get asked, well, can I stand in the shade while I do this? Would if I have an overhang in my apartment, the best thing is, of course, going to be to face directly to the sun and look either directly edit or slightly offset.

But if you can only get morning sunlight by going out on your balcony, and your balcony doesn't face east, rather faces west, you'll still get a lot of photons from the sun reaching your eyes there. But ideally you would find some way to look toward the sun. First thing in the morning, I realized that with kids in work in other obligations, this can be chAllenging.

But IT is a chAllenge worth meeting, meaning don't lose your job or forget to take care of your kids to do this. But you can bring your kids to do this, and indeed, you should. It's at thirteen rhymes also.

And people often ask, well, does IT work on dogs? Indeed, dogs and other animals have these exact same circuits and pathways for setting their circling rythm. So it's great for them too. Now there are also clear and documented benefits for mood and mental health to getting bright light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight throughout today, as much as you safely can.

Please don't get sun burn, don't get cat acts by getting too much sunlight, but getting outdoors and getting sunlight in your eyes during your lunch break or a walk here in there. Or if you have to remain indorse in the day, getting the lights in that environment as a bright as possible as is safely possible, I should say, is known to improve mood and mental health. why? Well, because there's a special so called absent within these cells of your eyes calls melon option that doesn't respond to the same differences in color that are present in sunlight in the morning, in the evening, but rather response to the overall brightness of light.

So very bright lights, either from artificial sources or ideally from sunlight, activate these cells. And these cells project these wires we call axons into specific parts of the brain that improve your mood and feelings of well being. So I can give you a specific number, you know, of five months a day or ten minutes a day.

Just get as much light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight throughout the day, as is safe for you, meaning where you're not getting sun burn and you're not damaging your retina. And if you want to know if you'd damaging your retina, well. Anytime you have to blank or turn away from light because it's really bright, that's a signal that the light is too bright.

So while you want to place yourself into bright environment, you don't want to place yourself into any environment so bright that it's painful to be in. Okay, to use that as a metric and you should be just fine. In the last point about light for mood and mental health is a relatively recent thing that's emerging from the scientific nature.

And that really was driven home by a recent study that I mention. We will be earlier in the episode. This is the study publishing nature mental health, showing that darkness ss, during a particular stage of your twenty four hour cycle is so called circadian rythm, is also very beneficial for mood in mental health and is beneficial for mood and mental health in a way that is independent from light and from sleep.

Now what do I mean by that? okay. Well, there are a number different ways that this can be examined. But in this particular study, which I like oh, so much, I entitled day and night light exposure are associated with psychiatric disorders.

In objective light study in more than eighty five thousand people, what the researchers did is they analyzed how much light and or dark people were getting across the tony four cycle and correlated that with mental health outcomes, looking at a range of different mental health chAllenges, including by polar disorder, schizophrenia, a depression, ptsd and much more. And i'll go into this study in a lot of detail in a future episode because it's such an important study with so many gems within IT that we should all know about. But one of the key things from the study is that the positive effects of daytime sunlight exposure in the positive effects of a nighttime dark exposure, that means, of course, the absence of light are independent of one another.

Put differently, making sure that you are in very dim to completely dark environments for a continuous sixty eight hours within every twenty four hours circadian cycle is correlated with much Better mental health outcomes. In other words, we should just think about the presence of light in the morning and throughout the day as positive for mental health. That's all true.

It's absolutely true in the study for verifies that. But that's been known for some time indeed decades from the scientific research. And of course, it's been known for thousands of years intuitively and objectively without detailed scientific measurement.

But in addition to that, this study shows that people who stay in very dimmed to dark environments for eight hours every twenty four hours, where, I should say, approximately eight hours in every twenty four hours cycle, they benefit from improved mood and mental health outcomes in a way that independent of how much light they're getting and independent of how much sleep they are getting. The point is this, the time when you wake up, consider that time zero. And then about, again, you know how to be superstruct about this, about sixteen to twenty four hours.

After that wake up time, you should be in a very dim to dark environment for that sixteen hour to twenty four hour period after waking up. Okay, what do I mean by this? I mean, if you go to sleep at ten P M and you wake up at six A M, well, that ten P M to six A M phase of your chadian cycle, you should be in very dim light, or entirely dark environment.

This is a great opportunity to reference another study, which is published in the purchase es of the national adem of sciences, which shows, but even having a small amount of light in the room, which isn't even that right while you're sleeping with eyes close, can disrupt morning glue cose levels. So in other words, keep your sleeping environment dark, keep your nighttime environment dim to the best of your abilities, right? Certainly go out to in every once I go to the movies, go out and have a party, enjoy yourself.

If you have to go to the hospital, go forbid. You have to tend to some emergency do that. But to the extent that you can control IT within the confines of life and its demands, keep your nighttime environment dim or dark, because that independently of any sunlight, another bright light that you're viewing during the daytime and afternoon is going to possibly improve your mood and mental health.

Now moving on to the other pillars. And these are going to move through a bit more quickly than I have the previous two because we've done entire series on these or I should like series s series is he pronounce someone put the plural of series is in the in the comments on youtube. The third piller is movement.

And when I say movement, I mean exercise. As you all know, we should all strive to get anywhere from hundred, eighty to two hundred and twenty minutes of zone two cardio per week. That movement that allows you to hold a conversation. But we're you to do IT more intensely, even a bit more intensely, wouldn't be able to hold that conversation. In addition, we should do some V O two max work.

We should get our heart rate very high at least once a week, doing some sort of movement that say, for you that could be running or cycling or swimming or paradies whatever IT is for you, getting your heart rate way, way up is also important. And to do that at least one a week, but daily movement, either cardy vascular training or resistance training, and it's very, very clear that we need both, maybe not on the same day. In fact, I split them to separate days resistance training, gone for anywhere from six to ten sets per muscle group, either close to or two failure.

This could be with weights, that could be with bands, that could be with machines. All of that was covered in detail in the podcast series that I did with doctor and I gAllen and exercise physiologist, this expert in all those areas. I also did an episode on a foundational fitness protocol that has been distilled into a very simple three page PDF that you can get for completely zero costs by going to huberman lab dot com and just put found fitness protocol P D F, you will be taken to that tool kit.

So all of the details of a weekly exercise routine that involves daily movement, but also, certainly my case includes at least one full day of rest per week, because many people do indeed need one, maybe even two, full days of rest per week. So that highlights the third pillar movement. But we know that cardiff collar training and resistance training aren't just great for our body.

They also improve mood and mental health. That's so very clear from the research literature. So we can't overlook those mean a conversation about mood and mental health.

Now the fourth pillar is nutrition. And nutrition is a big topic, is a very barb wired topic. If you get involved in the stuff online, you know got your people who believe that carnivore is Better than vegan.

You have the people believe vegan is Better than carnival. Most people are omnivores. Ever see oil debates and on and on and on. We're not going to touch any of that now.

Indeed, if you want to learn more about nutrition and what works and what doesn't work for sake of aesthetic changes, weight loss, muscle gain at sea, I would refer you to the guest episode that we did with doctor lane norton can find that, again, a huberman lab, dotcom, where we do a deep dive on all the variations in different nutritional protocols. But service to say that regardless of whether not your vegan omaar, carnival or kedo or whatever, everybody needs to consume sufficient amount, but not access amount of quality calories per day. Now you may do that by internet and fasting.

You may do that by a more traditional meal scheduling, but everybody's going to need to do that because your body and brain, and indeed the parts of your body and brain that translate to mood and mental health, require micro nutrient proteins thousand and curb hydrates as well as micro nutrients. So the key take away with nutrition is to make IT quality nutrition within the bounds of whatever sort of nutritional program that you're following. And that means getting most of your food sources from either non processed or minimally processed foods.

So these will be foods that you're going to need to prepare or foods that would perish over time. These are not the sort of foods that live in boxes and cans and other packages that would allow them to live on the shelves forever and ever. Okay, as I say that, I know many people are shouting, well, what about rice? You know, rice can live on the shelf a long time.

And yes, okay, I consider rice a minimum processed food of, because, of course, I can live on the shelf for a long period of time. And here I just gna back out of the whole conversation about nutrition at this point, because, as you can probably tell, it's a deep series of rabbit holes that we can fall into and really get distract at the point is, make sure you're getting enough food. Don't worry. We know energy toxicity is a problem for not as body composition, but for mental health. So you want to get enough calories, but not too few calories, and you want to make sure that you're getting them from quality sources.

And I say that because of course, food is not just the substrates for the the cellular repair and indeed production of tissues in your body, but is also the substrate for all the sorts of are transmittals right, which are derived from a minos ID preuves that are derived from fu right? All of that dopamine stuff and ceretani stuff is derived from a minos is that come from food sources? So the link between nutrition and mental health should now be an obvious one.

The fifth pillar in the big six is social connection. And we're going to talk a little bit more about this later in the episode. But let's just be very brief and specific about this. We all need to strive to limit the number of social interaction, things that we feel tax or even vex us, that caused us stress.

This is something that was covered in debt in the episode with doctor least filled in beret, where he talked about the fact that we don't just have a nervous system that regulates itself through experience and to our thoughts and our actions. We are, as a species, interacting with other nervous systems, both of our own species, other humans, as well as non human species, dogs and cats, and if you have any, horses and other animals. So we need to think about our nervous system as being both regulated from the inside and through our own actions and choices and thoughts, but also through interaction with other nervous systems.

And while we don't always have as much control over which social interactions or work interactions we have to engage in, we should really strive to understand and indeed to pay some serious attention to whether not certain types of social interactions or what he referred to as net savings neutral. Or taxing, right? Certain types of social interactions with certain people or groups of people just make us feel tax that makes us feel stressed.

IT leads to negative effect, that is not good feelings or emotions. And often elevated levels of automation ic arsa that leave us ruminating and leave us having chAllenges with sleep. We really should all strive to limit those interactions to the extent that we can. On the reverse side of that, at least, I fell in berra so beautifully pointed out, we also have the capability to regulate each other's and nervous systems in ways that produce savings, that is, that allow us to feel, and indeed cause psychological changes that make us feel not just happier, not just relaxed, not just happy because we enjoy interacting with somebody, but or a group, but that give us a savings that give us the kind of resources, literally metabolic neurochemical resources, that make us feel more capable and give us a sense of elevated mood and improved mental health when we are not engaging with those people. And this is highly suspecting, of course, but you should be able to distinguish.

In fact, I encourage you to spend a little bit of time, even you just five or ten minutes, thinking about, know who are the individuals and groups that I interact with, that leave me feeling text, you know, that really seem to drain my energy and have me ruminating. And in a not good space, when I leave whatever interaction I had with them, this could be a real interaction or an online interaction. Indeed, I did this the other day based on lisa suggestion.

I found IT to be tremendously useful, what I did as I decided to. And by the way, this was happening on a run where I was thinking, you know, a lot of my mind is in a conversation with people that aren't even here. I was of working through a conversation.

I was thinking about what I would say, what I did say, what they said in an interaction that unfortunate was pretty unpleasant. IT wasn't extremely unpleasant, but I was pretty unpleasant. And I realized, okay, that is a sort of interaction that I would like to avoided in the future, because IT wasn't happening right then.

But I was Carried forward into a portion of my day, my morning run, that for me is Normally very pleasurable and quite sacred to me, actually. So paying some attention to how much your internal dialogues with yourself forces with others, and how much of that is positive or negative is extremely beneficial. And not talking about always just thinking about oneself and not think about others.

To the contrary, we also need to think, as lisa a pointed out, about who are the people with whom we interact with or observe that lead us to have ongoing dialogue with them in our mind, or think about those interactions in ways that give us energy that lead to energetic savings, literally metal bolic savings, that we can apply not just in those interactions, but in our work endeavors and our solo endeavors, whatever that we're doing when we are away from those people. So while this concept of savings or neutral or taxation of our meta lic and our neurochemical systems might seem a little bit squshy, IT is not wishy. This is a neurobiological concept, is also a psychological concept.

And it's one that i'm so glad, at least a bad up because social connection, social interaction is so vital to our mood and mental health. But often times we hear social connection, we think, oh, that means we have to spend a lot of time with friends. We have to organize dinner parties.

Well, sure. That's all finding good if you can do that. And I do, of course, encourage people to spend time with those that they love. But it's also important to take a step back and just think a bit, maybe even right out a bit, who are the groups and sorts of individuals and interactions that really takes you? Who are the people that you find kind of neutral, and what are the individuals and groups that really provide what lesa refer to as savings?

That is, they tap into the metabolic neuroma pathways that lead us to have improved moodie mental health, not just during those interactions, but away from those interactions as well, and often pervasively and extremely so. So this is no small deal. This is a really important aspect of our mental health.

Now the sixth pillar in the big six is stress control. And the reason is included is that, look, stress is going to happen. Life is filled with so called stress ores. And for a good number of years.

In fact, the last fifteen years has been a lot of debate in the field of psychology and neurosciences as well, whether not stress is good for us, whether not stress is bad for us, whether or not we simply need to reframe stress as good or bad. And to some exchange, all of that is true. You know, we know that chronic stress is not good for our memory, our immune system or our health.

We also know that if you understand the reality, which is that stress also allows us to harness our mental and physical resources to perform Better than we would otherwise in certain circumstances. And that provided we can get to sleep each night, that perhaps stress isn't so bad and perhaps as even performance enhancing. I talked about this in the guest episode with doctor ali chrome from the psychology department at stanford, and i've talked about this in other podcast as well.

And i'm not here to tell you that stress is good for you. I'm not here to tell you that stress is bad for you. What I am going to tell you is that IT is extremely important that we all have readily accessible stress management tools that work the first time and every time.

And these fAllen into two categories. The first category are real time tools to tools that you can use to reduce your level of stress in real time. And the best way that i'm aware of that, grounded in excEllent physiology and neuroscience, to reduce your stress in real time, is the so called physiological site.

I did not invent this pattern of breathing is not breath work per say. This is a pattern of breathing that we all naturally do in our sleep to restore carbon dioxide and oxygen levels to their proper ratio. We also do IT periodical throughout today without noticing.

Indeed, we have a defined or specific neural circuit in our brain that extends to our dire frame and communicates with aspects of our heart and said at that, allow physiological size to commons down faster, at least of my knowledge, than any other directed protocol. And the physiological size, as many of you know, is very simple and forward. Anyone can do this.

You simply do a big in health through your nose, try and max ize the inflation of your lungs, and then before you excel, sneak in another brief inhalation, even if it's just a tiny microinsurance ation to maximum inflate the lungs. And that has an important effect on the little sex and the lungs called the evil I, the lungs. It's going to open up whatever evil were collapsed in there, and then you're going to do a long, extended x hail through the mouth.

And typically just one, although sometimes that requires two or three, but just one physiological side is effective in bringing down ones level of stress significantly enough that you don't need to do IT again. So this can be done essentially anywhere and by anyone, I suppose probably can do IT if you're underwater or certainly don't do IT if you're underwater, but otherwise it's a very safe and very effective way to calm down and reduce your levels of stress in real time, maybe before public speaking or in whatever circumstances you feel you need to calm down in real time. So i'll demonstrates the physiological side for you here.

I've done this many times before in previous episodes, but for those of you that haven't heard or seen those episodes, I feel obligated to do IT again now. okay. So it's a deep in health through the nose, followed by another brief in health through the nose and then a long excel through the mouth.

And before you start asking questions about what do I do if I have A D V, T, M can be just through them out. Do the first truth through the nose. Do the third through the mouse. So it's like this.

And indeed, I feel common and indeed if you do IT, you will feel commer you will notice that second in hill through the nose was sharp in the sense that I had to really push um put some physical effort into making that happen and you know my shoulders sheltered upwards.

If you are just listening to this and not watching my shoulder sheltered upt wards, that second in hill through the nose is important for a variety of reasons i've talked about elsewhere. So the physiological side is going to be the go to protocol for you, again, not invented by me. This is not huberman breathing.

This is pattern breathing, discovered in the one thousand nine hundred and thirties by psychologists. It's hard wired into our nervous system. And that's what makes IT so great. IT works the first time, and IT works every time. So that, to my knowledge, the best way to control your stress in the real time.

Why is that important for mood and mental health? Well, as we will talk about later, if you want to access you're so called general drive, a theme that we're going to get into in a bit more detail. This is something that came up during the series with doctor paul county.

You will learn that stress and anger and negative emotions, while they can be very motivating, very arousing, they are not going to be good for your long term mood and mental health period. So having tools to regulate your stress and your levels of anger, your levels of reactivity, and also to elevate your feelings of agency and control over your life, starting with agency and control over your physiology, your internal state is going to be vital. And what I love about the physiological, so is that, of course, it's completely zero cost, but also there's a dedicated circuit in your brain body for this particular pattern of breathing.

We do IT spontaneously, but you can do IT intentionally. And IT works just as well, if not Better, to regulate your levels of stress, that is, to bring them down, which has outsized positive effects on your mooted mental health, not just in the moment, but IT also should improve your confidence that when stress comes because the world is filled stressors, it's not if, it's when when stress comes, that you will have a physiologically scientifically supported tool to deal with and reduce that stress. Now in addition, I do believe it's important for sake of multiple tal health to also have a tool or a protocol to raise your stress stressed, that is, to increase your capacity to deal with life stressors without them feeling so stressful.

There are number of different ways to do this, but they all center around elevating your levels of a drennan at penetre and nor up and eren. Generally, those are the same thing. Just they have multiple names.

Forgive me, I didn't give the same two things, four names. So don't blame, blame the other scientists that did IT. The point is there are several ways that you can self induce elevations of, nor journey and a drennen.

And then to learn to anchor your mind and you're thinking to stay calm in those elevated a journal in states as a practice for when stressors hit you in the outside world and your genuine and nor journal ent Spike. Now one of the best ways to do this because IT works the first time and every time, and is also a zero cost. In fact, IT will save you money, is to put yourself in a cold shower or other deliberate cold exposure environment.

But most everyone has access to a cold shower, not everyone, but most people. And of course, by turning off the heat, you're going to reduce heating costs, right? Your water bill.

So getting into a cold shower for a minute or so to elevate your levels of a general and learning to either use your breathing, you can do physiological size, or to distract yourself or whatever tools and approaches you need to be able to stay calm while you have elevated levels of a journal in your body. And the reason deliberate cold exposure work so well to do this is that IT is pretty non negotiable. Even if you really love cold showers or cold plunges or things of that sort, you're still going to get that elevated a general and na generalin.

It's pretty much non negotiable for the first ten or fifteen seconds that you get into a cold plunge or cold shower, you should fully expect yourself to feel stressed and for your breathing to accelerate. And then your goal is to try and anger or control your breathing in that stressful environment. The reason for doing this is that it's a practice.

It's a practice that's going to translate to a Better ability to manage your internal state and therefore, your thinking, your cognition and your ability to make good decisions under stress. It's not about becoming untouched by stress. It's about being able to Better navigate stress. Indeed, I think of this is analogous to driving in fog, something that I had to learn to do because I grew in the the area that can be very fogging there sometimes. And of course, you don't learn to drive in fog.

The first day you learn how to drive, but the first time you hit heavy fog driving where you can only see one reflector in front of you at a time, IT is truly stressful, right? You don't know if you're going to come up on another vehicle in an instant, which of course, can happen. So you have to adjust a number of things.

You have to learn how to do that. And while I would never elect to drive in fog, learning to drive in fog teaches you how to be comfortable driving in different weather environment. Same thing with driving in a rainstorm.

For you east coasters from the northeast learning how to drive in a snowstorm, you would never elect to do that. But once you do IT a few times, you feel more comfortable in those extreme conditions. So that's really what raising your stress threshold is all about. Of course, do IT safely do IT under conditions in which you're not going to get hurt or anyone else will get hurt.

But learning how to do this can be extremely beneficial, of course, deliberate cold exposure and the only way, but Frankly, it's the most reliable way and it's the most versatile way to do that because you can do IT in your shower or in a cold plunge at homes. You can practice these things again. Safety first, always make sure you're not exposing yourself to code to the extent that you're going to damage yourself mentally or physically.

But it's a great practice and you could probably think of other ways to Spike your generalin that was safe. And of course, life will Spike your a general so you can also use real life as your um you know your stress inoculation to him. And we all have to do that anyway. What i'm suggesting is that you adopt a real time tool, physiological size, and that you adopt at least one off lying tool that you do anywhere from one to three, maybe seven days a week, but at least one day a week, that you put yourself into a cold shower, deliberate cold exposure, not for sake of increasing metabolism or anything else, but really just to learn how to calm yourself and maintain clear cognition when stress hits, because indeed, stress is gone ahead. So that's the big six for improving mood and mental health.

And the big six apply, that is, they are the corner stone for mood and mental health, regardless of who you are, regardless of your age, regardless of whether not you're dealing with acute or severe mood or mental health disorder, or you find yourself to be reasonably healthy with respective mood and mental health, and you simply want your mood and mental health to be stable and or improve over time. Now the reason why the big six, those six pillars are so important for mood in mental health, and indeed form a critical component of what doctor paul county referred to as the first principles of self care, is that those six pillars establish a mill u, that is, an environment of neurochemicals, including neuromodulators, such as dopamine, serotonin, epiphone, nor effort a seto, Colin and other newer chemicals, as well as well as hormones, testa, stern, esrom, en product and cortisol, l and immune molecules, and on and on that lead to a high degree of predictability in your brain and nervous system. Now, what do I mean by that? Why would predictability be such a key component of mood of mental health? Is IT really just about knowing that you're going to feel energized in the early part of the day and tired at the end of the day? Now that might be part of IT, but that's not the major take away.

The major take away is that, as doctor lisa feldman barrett so apply pointed out, your brain, and indeed your entire nervous system has a couple of major jobs, has the job of regulating your breathing and your heart rate at seta IT also has the job of regulating you're thinking in your planning and your memory. Those are the jobs of the brain and nervous system that we Normally hear about. But if we think about the more macro jobs that the brain has, the key function of the brain, certainly the parts of the brain that are more recently evolved, the ones involved in thinking and planning at seta, are really involved in generating predictions, predictions about what's going to happen next and whether not you're going to be prepared for what's gonna happen next.

An indeed, doctor release, a fell in barret also beautifully illustrated this model of the brain as regulating a brain body budget and moods, and a related topic, which he called the affect OK. You explain me what effect is in a moment, setting the stage for being able to Better predict what's gonna happen next, and therefore regulating your mood in the moment. Let's just take a moment and explore that state in a little bit more detail.

Essentially, what he was saying, and what i'm now again saying, is that your brain and body go through different states. Your state, at a given moment, can be labelled as your affect. Your affect includes a lot of different things, including levels of autonomic arouse, levels of horse, levels of transport, irs, all of that stuff.

But IT falls under the umbrella of affect. Affect essentially sets the stage for particular emotions to be more likely or less likely to emerge. So emotion, in effect, aren't the same thing. Effect is a bit more general. And sort of undergrads, the possibility of having certain moods, like feeling elated, happy or sad or depressed, he really sets the general stage for different types of specific emotions, even highly specific emotions.

So in that way, when you're taking care of the big six, when you're tending to these six pillars on a regular basis, and I should point out that we really want to tend to those six pillars every single day or every single twenty four hours we really need to make those a regular investment to the extent that we can. When we do that, we create A A neurochemical and a neural mill, you that allows the brain to be in a Better predictive state. IT allows the brain to give rise to certain effects.

Spell A F F E, C T S. So effects that lead to certain emotions being more or less likely to occur. Put very simply, when we're tending to those six pillars on a regular basis, we feel Better more generally. And therefore, the emotions that we tend to have under different conditions, even conditions of a difficult interaction with a coworker, with a family member, tend to be more positive than if we are not tending to those six pillars.

Now in some sense, that sort of a dust statement, for instance, if you're sleep deprived, if you're not fed well, like you have an eat in a few hours, of course you're going to be more irritable, you're going to be more reactive, you are going to be more emotionally label. But sleep and nutrition are just two of those six core pillars. When we talk about those core pillars and the necessity for tending to them on a regular every twenty four hour basis, what we're really talking about is creating a menu within our brain nervous system that allows the nervous system to do what he does best.

And in fact, what its main job is to do, which is to predict what's gonna happen next, because, as lisa fellman bett pointed out, emotions are really context dependent states that allow us to navigate not just our present circumstances, but they are are our nervous system and bring the best guest about the circumstances that we are soon going to encounter. Now I don't offer you all of that is kind of A A bunch of, you know, a tangle massive nerd speaks to confuse you. What i'm saying is that by tending to those six core pillars, you are shifting the likely affects that you experience, and therefore the likely emotions that you experience.

So you're spicing your whole system towards more positive effect and more positive emotions regardless of what your life circumstances happen to be in the stressors that you encounter. And indeed, you also including that six pillar of stress control. So when those stresses arrive, you'll be Better able to navigate them.

Now this view of emotion, regulation of mood and mental health is certainly not a novel concept. People have talked about the physiological regulation of mood from the time of Williams, James and even earlier. You know, it's been a long standing question, for instance, or debate in psychology and pho sophy.

You do we feel in our body and then label IT as anxiety? Or do we feel anxian our mind and then our body follows? That's been a long standing debate in, Frankly, there's evidence on both sides, which leads me to the conclusion, I think most news biologist s and psychologists to the conclusion that those things are interrelated in a way that we can't really associate them completely at any level, right? When your heart rate goes up and you start break thing faster, if I were to induce that state in you, you'd probably interpret that is feeling anxious.

In addition of that, something can make you anxious before your heart rate and breathing and increases, and then your heart right and breathing in increases. So no need to teeth those apart. But if you think about the brain in large part as a prediction machine, and your brain as a metal bolic regulator is trying to decide which organs need resources, how much resources can I dedicate to thinking, to creativity, to enjoying social interaction, to paying attention, to what somebody else saying, as opposed to what's going on inside my body.

All of those major functions of the brain, as they relate to affect and emotions, are going to be best supported that is, biased toward positive mood, positive effect, POS sive emotions, and therefore, positive mental health outcomes. When we're tending to those six pillars, dr. Least have felt beret referred to that whole process as the brain regulating a brain body budget.

And SHE had beautiful analogies for that budget. And that's what LED to the description of social interactions, is, either generating savings or being neutral, or generating a text feeling, literally taxing that brain body budget. And I love that concept, and that's one that you can keep in mind.

And indeed, we can inject a lot of specificity into this whole process of improving mood and mental health through specific protocols. If you simply remember, if you make a daily investment in the six core pillars, you are building up that brain body budget. You have more energetic resources to spend on whatever life circumstances come your way. Now, before we move into a discussion about protocols for how to Better understand your life narrative, to enhance your sense of self and confidence and things of that theme, I briefly want to mention that, of course, there are known tools out there in the medical community and psychological community for improving mood of mental health.

And while there are a variety of tools, one of the main tools of the psychiatrists is prescription drugs that target specific nor modulator systems in the brain, in body, for instance, S S R I selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or a typical anti depressants that target the dopamine and apple event system, such as, well beauty propria one or other types of entire presence, or for instance, nowaday. There's a lot of growing excitement about clinical trials using relatively high dosages of Sullivan, which, by the way, closely mimics the chemical serotonin. That's right, slyvia, which is converted to solon in the brain.

If you look at IT chemically, IT looks very much like serotonin, although has distinct effects from serotonin. I talked about so sib on and what's being done in terms of the clinical trials, safety considerations. I talk about the potential hazards, considerations and where the legality and all of that is going in that episode, if you want to check that out.

But the reason i'm taking a moment to mention these drugs, things like accessorize prose, EXO last to tell a prom well button, so siber and so on, is that all of them target specific neal modulator systems in the brain and body. And at the same time, it's fairly clear that mood disorder, such as major depression, are not necessarily deficits in things like Sarah, tony or dop mean they can be, but most often they are not. So why are such drugs prescribed for mood disorders and for mental health disorders? Well, because if specific nor modulators, like serotonin, dopamine or epinephrine, dramatically increased about baseline, that affords the brain the ability to required itself. Really, the way to think about accessorize, or a typical into depression, or solarian for the treatment .

of major depression.

is really to think about them as chemical tools to open or access neural plasticity. And that's why is also important that those drugs be combined with talk therapy, where people are actively working through the sources, the real life sources and the historical sources, maybe even the trauma bay sources of their depression.

And I mentioned this because there's a lot of debate nowadays to whether or not, you know, these drugs are useful, whether not the citified profiles justify their use, whether not you, they are applicable to Young populations. You know, there's lot of debate about this. And certainly in the case of the psychiatrically, there's a lot, a lot of debate because this is newly emerging area.

There's still not a lot of date, although it's starting to, you know, increase over time. But the key point here is that all of these drugs have the potential to work in some people, not others. Some people know they simply don't work for, and they cause more problems than solutions they solve. But they tend to work by increasing the propensity for neural plasticity, by changing the neuromodulator mill you in the brain.

And this is an important point when thinking about tools for enhancing mood and mental health, that when we think about tools for enhancing mood and mental health, in next, of course, we are going to talk about the tools that are specifically designed to target a specific aspect of one's life story or concept of self. All of that is always Operating on a background of two things that overall neurochemical menu and automation ic function that the six pillars relate to and support if we're tending to those. But any improvement in mood and mental health is going to be significant, it's going to be noticeable and it's going to be stable.

It's going to be perfect. Ve over time is going to require that some degree of neural plastics, some degree neural rewiring occur. So i'm not bringing up the topic of these particular drug tools to say that they are the best way to improve mood, tim, mental health.

I'm certainly not saying that they are but one way to potentially improve mood of mental health. And if they are going to work, they always work best when done in concert with talk therapy because they are opening the opportunity for neural plasticity. But then that neuroplasticity has to be directed toward a particular end point.

There has to be specific work that's being done by the individual or ideally the individual with an expert train clinically certified therapy or psychologist or psychiatrist in order to make sure that the neuroplasticity ges that occur lead to long standing improvements in mood and mental health over time. Indeed, the drugs that I just described were originally designed as tools to allow people to access changes within their brain that would then allow them to enhances mood and mental health, but not have to rely on the drugs themselves for improved mood and mental health. And along those lines, sure, some of you out there are thinking about the supplement based on nutrition based approaches to enhancing these newer modulators.

And indeed, while they don't have the same potent cy as things like, well, future and and sr arise at increasing things like doping and a tony respectively, there is a growing number of people out there that are relying on daily supplementation with anywhere from one to three grams with a altera acy acid preciate doping combined with often you know three hundred and six hundred milligrams of alpha gpc as a way to enhance doping and a city coin and to set the stage for elevated levels of neuroplasticity. But is very important to point out that the a mino acid precursors to the various snow modulators like altiera y like your trip to fan so altera acy preto doping trip to fan precor a sartori and so on, that those don't have the same degree of potency, that is, ability to enhance those neuro delatour and so extend to which they enrich the possibility for neal plasticity still remain somewhat obscured. There haven't been clinical trials on that yet, at least not clinical trials that I am aware of.

So I mention all of that stuff about drugs, whether not its psychiatrically or whether not prescription in the depression or whether not people are using a supplement based a mino acid based protocol for increasing certain or modulators. I feel is important to mention all of that because, well, first of all, it's quite prominent out there. Certainly in the case of prescription antidepressants, there's growing prominence and use of relatively hyda suicide.

Ben, again, always been done with support talk therapy. This has done in a legal setting, I said, legal, not illegal, illegal setting with a board certified therapists being done on university campuses within research labs. And of course, acknowledge that there are people who are using these compounds outside the realm of the university clinical study environment.

So I mention these chemicals are not because I am pointed to them as the path to improve mood and mental health. They can be, but they aren't always in as eventually before. They can sometimes cause problems that lead people to wish that they hadn't taken them or to decide to not take them any further. A decision that absolutely has to be made with a health care professional who is well certified to do that. I'm mentioning these tools because I want you to understand if they work, why they work.

And one key point that was really emphasized by doctor paul county, who, as I mentioned before, as a psychiatrist, so he uses from ecology and is practice, although he uses other non phmc logic tools as well, is that these phmc ology c tools are never to be viewed as the ball and all of enhancing moodie mental health. There are but one path to improving mooded mental health, and indeed should be viewed as a path to getting people who are otherwise unable to engage in those six core pillars, those first principles of mental health, to be able to do those things on a regular basis. And then perhaps based on the discussion with their clinician, these people could come off those pharmacologic agents.

Maybe yes, maybe no. IT depends on the individual IT depends on the circumstances. But those core six pillars, those first principles of mental health that include, but are not limited to, those core six pillars are absolutely essential.

There's no drug that can replace those core six pillars. okay. So setting aside the core six pillars, let's now talk about other tools for mood and mental health, the center around really what we more typically think of when we think of multiple tal health, which is emotions. But at least a fellman barret was a guest on the podcast. SHE said something that was really incredible, and it's something that strongly grounded in excEllent scientific data, which is the more specificity that we can put to labelling our emotions, the Better off we're going to be in terms of our overall mental health.

Let me restate that the more specific language that we can put to our own internal emotions, even if that language is just to ourselves in our own internal narrative, we only have to speak out that what those labels are, the Better that we're going to feel over time. And indeed, this effect can be quite rapid. And indeed, doctor leeza pelman bear has done research on this very specific topic, is something that's referred to as emotional granier ity.

So while some of us move through life with a sort of what I call a modification of emotions, you may get your happy face happy in your sad face, sad. Yeah, you're angry, depressed, anxious. You, those are labels for emotional states.

Or you could think of them as effects or emotions. I think of them as emotions, but they're not very specific. They're pretty broad bins.

We say sad or depressed or super depressed or super sad, anxious panic. And we think of that is nuance, but it's not very nuance. And least laboratory and other laboratories have explored two things.

First, if people are asked to are encouraged to put more granularity, more specificity on what they're feeling, then IT seems that their levels of emotional processing are Better overall. How does that translate to emotions? Well, IT translate to Better overall feelings of well being when one is placing more specificity on positive emotions.

And the flip side is also true. So this is important to know if one places more specificity on negative emotions. IT also can enhance one's kind of experience of those negative emotions. Now that means that this is a two sided blade, right? This isn't always a good thing.

And if one is thinking about protocols for improving mood and mental health, the data make very clear that adding more specificity to our positive emotions in terms of the language we use, but also just the depth with which we process and think about those positive experiences can be very beneficial for us. So there are two studies that i'd like to highlight that relate to this. The first is entitled effect of self monitoring through experience sampling on emotion differentiation in depression, and the second study is entitled emotional granularity increases with intensive ambulatory ory assessment method.

Logical and individual factors influences how much. Now each of these studies focus on something slightly different. The first study was mainly focused on people who have depression, and they were killed several, if not many times per day, to just think about and report on their emotional state.

And that was done in order to get people to place more granularity, more specificity on what they're feeling, but also simply to tap in to how they are feeling on a more regular basis throughout the day. The second study, which is one that included docker lisa film bear as an author, was slightly different because focused on non depressed individuals, and that killed them to touch into their emotions more times per day. And IT also included some physiological measurements and one in particular that we're going to talk about in some detail.

Now I don't have time to go into all the details of these studies. I may do that in the future podcast episode, but the key takeaway are very important for all of us to know, which are, first of all, the more often that you can ask yourself, you know, what am I really feeling right now? How do I feel and and this is so critical, the more that you force yourself to not use abroad labels, or simply violence labels, violence labels are good or okay or bad, and instead understand that good is not an emotion, okay is not an emotion, bad is not an emotion, but rather saying, you know, I feel curious, but a little anxious if that happens to be the case.

Or I feel board, but you also a little bit in positive anticipation about what's gonna en tomorrow. Things of that are putting more nuance and specificity on your emotions, but also touching into our thinking about your own emotional state more times per day, clearly has positive outcomes for mood in mental health. And the reasons for that are incredibly interesting.

And this is something everybody should understand. Why would IT be that putting more specificity on what we're feeling? So perhaps just in our own heads, like thinking, okay, how do I feel right now, like if I were ready to do that right now, I say I feel energized and happy.

I do. I really enjoy doing what i'm doing. So I wouldn't say i'm like off the chart in all relation, but i'm very happy and I feel energized. Earlier today, I was feeling a little .

bit fatigue and a little bit confused .

because I was trying to sort out something wasn't making sense to me. Um so assessments like that which can be told to somebody else or that we just hold internally done repeatedly throughout the day, anywhere from three to six times throughout the day, just periodical pinking ourselves. Maybe you said in an alarm or maybe you just decide every once in a while you maybe every time you you go into an elevator, every time you go a flight of stairs, you just ask yourself, yeah do I feel right now and thinking about that for a moment and you don't want to write IT down, although I suppose you could IT turns out that just that practice can really enhance our so called emotional granularity that can enhance our positive emotions and affect.

And in addition, IT provides us a Better sensitivity to Better understand those negative emotions, which sounds like you might be a bad thing, but those negative emotions have information in them, right? This is one thing that often lost in those broad categorization of anxious or sad or depressed. And keep in mind, of course, that some people are genuinely clinically depressed and that needs to be taken extremely seriously, just like some people are genuinely clinically anxious and that needs to be taken seriously.

But most of us, when we throw out the words depressed, angry, sad, we're not using enough nuance. And IT doesn't really apply to our internal states or the circumstances that we're in. And as a consequence, we suffer. It's not just about communicating our emotions.

We suffer because the data say that the more nuance, the more emotional granaries that we have, the richer is our experience of the positive aspects of life, and the more effectively we can navigate the negative aspects of life. right? Again, negative emotions perhaps is in the best way to even describe negative emotions, because that label negative implies that we should avoid IT.

And in fact, those negative emotions provide a lot of information about perhaps social interactions that we should seek to avoid in the future and so on and so forth. Now one of the most interesting things about this whole process of increasing emotional granularity and touching in several times per day into how we feel something that's completely zero cost, takes just a moment to do that we can get much Better at over time. That was clearly seen in these studies that people get much Better at doing this.

IT becomes more fast, ile for them very quickly is that IT correlates with improvements in physiological metrics that relate to overall improvements in mood and mental health. And the specific physiological metrics that i'm referring to is so called the vehicle tone. Some of you perhaps heard of the veggies nerve.

It's the tense cranial nerve. It's an extension piero nerve that IT goes out of the brain at the level of the the neck is one of the crony al nerves that extends to essentially all the organs of the body, the heart, the lungs that set up. But it's a two way street.

It's a superhighway of nerves out of the brain and into the body, and it's a superhighway of nerves back from the bodily organs to the brain. And it's involved in regulating a lot of social automatic function. So how faster heat is, how faster breathing is, rates of digesting and all of that waves together to create those things that we call effect our internal states.

So without going into a ton of detail about the vegas nerve, there's something that's called cardiac vegal control. Cardiac vegal control is extend to which that vegas nerve can impact your heart rate in your overall feelings of calm or alertness. Now the simple way to think about this is more commonly referred to as heart rate variability.

Heart rate variability is simply the distance between your heartbeats, or rather the time between your heartbeats, which we know if those timings betwen. Your heartbeats are somewhat variable that is correlated with positive physical and mental health outcomes. One of the ways that you can increase heart very variability is to get regular cardio accused exercise as well as doing resistance exercise.

And no surprise, getting sufficient amounts of quality sleeping at tonight is also going to be very beneficial for heart rate variability. Now, exercise and sleep, of course, are wonderful, but IT turns out that there is also a very rapid way to increase heart rate variability by activating the legal innovation of the heart and the way that the heart and some other circuits within the circled brain stem. Interact and that through something called the respiratory sinus, a rythmic respiratory sinus, a rythmic can be summarized very simply by saying, when you in hail, you speed your heart rate up.

And when you x hail, you slow your heart rate down. And it's that x tail slow in your heart rate down that's mediated by the vegas nerve. Now there's a more thro description of that, which i'll just give you now and it's not that lengthy.

So here's how IT goes. When you in here, your die frame actually moves down and as a consequence, your heart actually gets a little bigger as a little more space. As a consequence, the flow in your heart moves a little more slowly per unit volume.

And there's a neural signal to speed the heart up. Conversely, when you explain the dye frame moves up, that means there's a little less space for the heart in the general area where it's sitting. So the heart gets a little bit small, a little more compact.

That means that the flood in your heart is moving more quickly through that smaller space. And there's a neural signal media by the vegas to slow the heart down. So that's why inhale speed your heart up and excels slow your heart down. That is the basis of so called RSA, or respiratory sinus arithmetic. Now, what does any of that have to do with the granularity of language that we place on our emotions? Turns out there several studies showing that when people place more descriptive granularity on their emotions, that is correlated with, okay, it's not caught, but it's correlated with improvements in respiratory science, a rithmetic, which we know corporate, with improvements in heart rate variability, indeed, is one of the major basis for heart rate very ability, which we know is correlated with not just positive physical health outcomes, but positive mental health outcomes, including lower levels of anxiety, improve sleep and overall levels of mood.

This is a topic that i'm very familiar with this last year, my laboratory time for university school of medicine, in collaboration with a colleague, vine doctor David speel, our associate chair of a psychic, also its time for university school medicine, published a clinical trial and cell reports, medicine, showing that there's a particular pattern of breathing that people can do for just five minutes per day that is effective in significantly improving various metrics related to mood and reducing anxiety and also improving sleep. Although I should say the protocol mn about to describe didn't uniformally improve all of those metrics, s IT had a bigger effect on some versus others, or provide a link to that study in the showed captions. But if you're wondering what this protocol is that people did for five minutes today that allow them to, by the way, pervasively improve their mood.

So IT wasn't just their mood while they were doing this five minute day protocol. IT was improvements in mood around the clock essentially as well as improvements in other physiological metrics and other aspects of those six core pillars. IT was that physiological sign that we talked about earlier, although in this case, we didn't have people do just one physiological side.

We had people set aside at five minutes per day. So set a timer for five minutes, they could sit or lie down. They could do at any time of day.

And we just have them repeat that physiological side for a duration of five minutes total. So they would do two in hell through the nose, and then a full excell along the empty through the mouth. Then they would do IT again, and then they would do IT again and again. Until those five minutes, we're completed again.

The outcome of that clinical trial was that that particular pattern of breathing, which we called clic physiological sign for five minutes per day, again, done any time of day, had the most positive outcomes in terms of improving mood and mental health and automation ic function, those things related to sleep and heartbreak barribel. So that's a very simple, very minimal time investment, zero cost tool anyone can use that again, improves various metrics of physical health, but also improves metrics of mental health. And IT is right back in with what was observed in the work by doctor lisa felman baretti plorn.

How putting more word label emotional granularity on one's emotional states passively impact our physiological state, and the fact that thinking about our emotions more frequently throughout the day and deliberately putting more label granularity on those emotions frequently throughout the day is correlated with this improvement in respiratory sinus rhythm a and heart rate variability. The fact that these things all relate to one another should not surprise us, because indeed, there is a previous paper. This is a quite extensive review.

Actually, it's a very nice review. It's one that I encourage anyone who's interested in these topics to explore, especially psychologists who might have a interest in physiology or psychist are simply people who are interested in mind body stuff. This is a review publish in twenty seventeen in the journal biological psychology, entitled cardiac veo control as a marker of emotion regulation in healthy adult, a review.

And again, it's a really wonderful literature review of the peer reviewed primary research, which really establishes that this thing vegal tone, our ability to put the brakes on our automated ic err system and slower heart rate down deliberately through our breathing, and perhaps even just by stopping and reflecting on what our emotional states are, is really beneficial for overall mood in mental health. And I want to highlight, bolden underline that word overall, because it's not just the case that people experience elevated mood and mental health in the moments where they stop and go, oh, how am I feeling? Oh, you know, in my feeling bored or agitated, do I feel particularly excited? sure.

That can have some impact on physiological metrics and mutio tal health. But in all of these studies, the outcome seems to be that people's overall levels of mood and mental health are enhances, not just while they are thinking about their emotions or doing this five minutes a day select sign, but around the clock, which is really terrific, because I think that's what most all of us want, which is improved mood of mental health, not just in the moments when we do a practice or in a few minutes afterwards, but twenty four hours a day. I suppose we might segment out sleep, during which, you know, hopefully were having great dreams as opposed to other kinds of dreams.

But the point is, everyone I have to imagine would like to feel Better and have elevated mood of mental health during the times when there awake. And indeed, these sorts of protocols have been shown to do that or so, say the scientific data. Now we are going to discuss the tools for enhancing mood and mental health.

Cleaned from the four episode gas series with dr. Paul county, who is a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry, he also has particular expertise in trauma. However, the four episode gys series that we do with doctor county was really about expLoring the self as well as tools and protocols for not just gaining a Better understanding of oneself, but also for gaining a Better understanding and tools for relating to others.

A K A relationships thread through the series was a model of the mind and how IT works to create everything from feelings, thoughts to behaviors that doctor paul county described as an iceberg model. And I perhaps should refer you to the fact that he actually drew out this model. And we provided IT as a zero cost PDF in the shown note captions for every single one of those episodes in that for episode series.

We also provide a link to this model in the shoonoo captions for this tools episode. The model is called the iceberg model. As the name suggests, IT resembles an iceberg in which the vast majority of our minds processing occurs below our consciousness warehouse in our unconscious mind.

So that's the portion of the iceberg e that resides below the surface, whether the portion of our mental processing that we are aware of resides above the water surface, this so called conscious mind. So a key aspect of the iceberg del is that the unconscious mind is responsible for the vast majority of our feelings, thoughts and behaviors, but that we are not aware of how this unconscious mind is doing that. And by extension, the tools and protocols the doctor county described largely deal with going into the unconscious and figuring out how the unconscious processing is influencing our conscious processing, both in healthy and in unhealthy ways.

And when we say in healthy and unhealthy ways, we're largely referring to the presence of defenses. Some of you perhaps heard of defenses before. Some defenses can indeed be healthy, and others are unhealthy.

There are defensives, such as projection, sublimation, denial. And during the course of that four episode series, dr. County explained how projections are not always bad for us. Indeed, they can protect us from panic, from severe trauma, but they also can create difficulties in processing our own understanding of self and of our life experiences in ways that can actually be damaging toss. So a key take away from that four episode series is to understand and acknowledge that your unconscious mind is driving much of what you feel, think and do. However, by doing structured exploration of the self, and we will talk about how to do that, one can gain Better understanding of how that unconscious processing is influencing what you think, feel, believe and do.

So once you accept the important role of the unconscious mind and you make the decision that you want to Better understand how your unconscious mind and conscious mind are in this constant dialogue, and how you can have that dialogue Better serve you, there are a series of actionable tools that you can do that will allow you to Better understand yourself and how you relate to others. And the first of these tools is to really understand your self concept. Now, of course, most all of us know our own name.

Rarely do we ever forget that name. We have some concept of where we're from, who are parents are, what are present and future goals might be where we've succeeded, where we failed in life and on and on. But the self concept goes far beyond that sort of cv list or our biography of self.

Indeed, the self concept has a lot to do with our self confidence, our feelings of ability, both to overcome chAllenges, but also our ability to serve the world that we're in and our ability to change ourselves over time. Now, of course, the degree to which somebody might have confidence, or less confidence, or the degree to which somebody feels that they can exchange influence on their environment and their goals, is, of course, going to very based on their personal history. But as dr.

County explained, even independent of all that, if one puts in some work to Better understand their self concept, to really get a clear picture of oneself from that, one can develop more agency with which to pursue one's at suspiration and to reach their goals. And the key concept here is one that's particularly for both expLoring and building up one's concept of self. And that's a consciously and deliberately build a life narrative.

Now, a simple way to do this that can be very effective is to create a series of folders or documents that could even be a stack of papers. I'd preferred to do this in electronics form, and I confessed that even before learning about this tool from doctor county, I had initiated doing this tool starting back in two thousand and fifteen. And it's fairly straight forward.

But as I mention before, IT can be very powerful, and IT simply consists of building out separate folders or pieces of paper. And this could be done electronically or on real world paper with paper and panel, paper and pencil. And essentially what you do is you're going to debate your life history into some regular increments.

So for me, the way that I did this is I created a folder on my laptop that I actually called lifetime. So that's the title of the main folder. And then within that folder, I have a series of folders, each of which spends a particular phase of my life, so to five years of age, six to ten years of age, eleven to fifteen years of age and so on.

And so fourth, now i'm forty eight years old, so I have folders that extend to age fifty currently, although I will add folders going forward very soon. And the idea here is that for each of those folders, you're going to place a single word document into that folder. And then on that word document, you're not going to journal, you're not going to do any sort of extensive writing.

Rather, you're simply going to put down bullet points with titles that could be one or two sentences. But typically, it's just a few words describing some of the key milestone events that you remember from that particular phase of your life. So just for sake of example, i'll read off some of things that are included in the folders for my particular lifetime narrative. But of course, this relates to my lifetime narrative.

You should, of course, with the milestones and key bullet points that relate to your lifetime arraid but again, just to give you a sense of the sorts of things that made IT into this folder in my six years old to eleven year old folder um on that document I put where I was living at that time, the city I was living at the school that I went to. I put a couple of teachers names, teachers that had a particular influence on me, a particular summer camp experience um that was not a traumatic experienced, by the way, I was a happy experience. But for me, IT turned out to be a very transformative one.

And then there are a couple other things in there that are just recollections of childhood friends and names. Okay, so seemingly monae information perhaps, but IT looks more less like a biography and yet other folders. So, for instance, the folder that spends from twenty five to thirty years of age is the time that I was in graduate school.

So includes a note about graduate school, a note about particular hobby that I was interested in, in addition to my scientific research at the time, a couple of key relationships, a couple of key relationship chAllenges, as well as some things that at that time I was processing about prior years, in particular my teen years in high school. Now, the key thing here is that whatever goes into to these followers is what's important to you. IT could be positive events.

IT could be negative events. IT could be events that, for whatever reason, you remember, and that keep surfacing in your mind that you think might be interesting or important at some later timer that you're concerned you might forget. In fact, that might be a really good metric for whether or not you include something these folders or not.

If there's something that you want to make sure that you never forget but that you think you might forget, I would encourage to put IT onto that word document and put IT into that particular folder. Again, this isn't about creating a coherent life story. This is about creating a series of segments of small collections of key life events, positive, negative, neutral, inspiring, basically anything that was silly ant for you at that particular time.

And of course, if you want to put reflections about those particular events into that word document, you're more than welcome to do that. But the basis of this self concept developing exercise is just that is to develop a historical sense of yourself, of course, of bringing you up to present day, where you will continue to add things to whatever word document goes into that particular folder for the age you happen to be now. Now for some of you, this kind of autobiographical bullet pointing might seem like it's just that some attempt to build or right in autobiography, but it's very important to remember that these folders are for you.

These holders are not about writing a book about your life history, although if you decide to to do that with these folders at some point down the line. Now that sounds great, but that's not the goal here. The goal is for you to build a structured narrative representation of events that we're key in your life.

And as described in the series with dr. County, this goes way beyond just understanding your past. This is really about understanding past. It's about understanding yourself at present and indeed IT threads into your goals and aspirations for the future. An important thing to understand about this tool or protocol is that IT also has an incredible ability to anchor you in your perception of the passage of time. Now some of us track the passage of time Better than others, both within the day and cross days and years.

And so fourth, but this exercise in particular is very good at allowing you to see you know how much time you devoted in a given stage of your life to a given endeavor, whether not your stuck in patterns whereby you're still engaging in certain types of things professionally or relationship wise or in any other number of different ways that have you in a pattern that mayor may not be serving you well. I want to emphasize again that this exercises is is not about goal setting. It's about your ability to build a structured narrative pattern from which you can look at IT and then make a determination as to whether or not you know you feel that you're currently on the right path for you, but it's not about projecting forward as to what your goals are.

Will soon talk about that. Will talk about goals and aspirations in a moment. This is really about Better understanding what LED you up to the place that you now.

And I really helps you pinpoint the key work that you need to do in terms of expLoring your unconscious, unconscious mind using some tools that we're onna get into subsequently. So there's really no strict rules about how to do this exactly except that I do encourage you to make those increments across your life span manageable. I wouldn't suggest doing IT one for every year.

I won't suggest a folder one for every ten years. I think three to five year increment seem like a more reasonable, intractable way to go about this. So that's one of the sorts of tools that doctor country referred to as to how to build up one's self concept, which directly relates to things such as our confidence, our ability to track our own behavior, understand some of our motivations, both conscious and unconscious.

But of course, that practice is mainly a conscious exercise. It's really not tapping directly into the unconscious in any kind of direct way. As far as we know now, we can contrast that with the tools and protocols that are designed to tap into the unconscious mind.

And of course, there are a number of different ways to do this, that we're discussed four episode series with accuracy. But one of the most powerful ways to do this is by thinking about, and indeed sometimes writing about, even analyzing one's dreams. Now, dream analysis is something for which you can find a lot of books out there.

There are a lot of theories. There is also a lot of argument that perhaps dream analysis, which has roots in fortin psychology as well as other traditions, is perhaps and not accurate. I don't think we want to consider whether not dream analysis is accurate. Rather, I think we should just acknowledge that when we are dreaming, in particular, the dreams that we have toward the later part of our night, which are the dreams associated rapid eye e movement sleep, that tend to be very emotionally laid in dreams as compared to the dreams that we earlier in the night.

Well, when we consider the content of those dreams, even if we're not trying to interpret them, it's very clear that those dreams reflect the unconscious mind controlling more of our internal dialogue or what we are experiencing at that time, as when we are awake, our consciousness ind tends to take over more of the narrative, the internal narrative and the control of our feeling, thoughts and behaviors. But as I mentioned before, the unconscious mind is always exerting an influence regardless of whether we are sleep or awake. With that said, one way to explore the unconscious mind and begin to get a vender understanding about how IT might be influencing our waking states and behaviors is to actually record and think about one's dreams.

Now, of course, some people remember their dreams on a regular basis. Other people don't. Some people actually believe that they don't dream. Studies out of sleeve laboratories at stanford university, pensylvania, harvard and elsewhere all generally agree that everybody dreams, but not everybody remembers their dreams.

So if you're interested in tapping into an understanding of what your dreams are telling you, which is basically way of saying what your unconscious mind or dialogue consist of, I highly recommend putting a journal. So this would be any kind of paper in pen or paper and pencil type journal. And the idea is this, if you wake up and you can remember your dream, write down a few key bullet points from that dream.

If you feel you can write out the dream in a very of linear narrative, this happen, then that happen, this happen, and that happened. great. But most people find that their memory of their dream is rather fragmentary. Other people can't remember their dream, or at least they wake up, they feel like they were having a dream, but they can't remember all of IT or key components of IT. And for that, I suggest that you try keep your body completely still and closing your eyes.

Once again, we don't quite understand why this is, but when you look at the literature on dream recollection, IT seems that by keeping one's body completely still with eyes closed, we have Better access to whatever the contents of the dream that just occurred were. okay. So if you wake up and you can't remember your dreams, try lying still for a few minutes and keeping your eyes closed and seeing whether not that helps surface the content of that dream.

Other people find that they get up, they get out of bed, and then some time in the middle of the morning, maybe even later in the day. The contents of a dream will just come to them. Well, if that happens, great.

I also highly recommend that you have a way to write down contents of of that dream. Now what you're looking for when you do this sort of tool or protocol, I encourage you to be wary of any immediate interpretation of, for instance, okay, animals in a dream mean children, although they could. There's not a lot of science that really supports that as a firm statement.

And of course, there are books out there in podcast and a ton of information trying to help you interpret your dreams. And while some of that can be fun, and not all of IT is entirely useless, the goal here is not to interpret your dreams. The goal here is to start recording some of the key takeaway, maybe even the entire narrative of the dreams that you have just prior to waking, as a way to try to understand some of the themes that are occurring and recurring in the dialogue that exists within your unconscious mind.

So key aspect of this is that you're not going to take any one dream as an enormously informative dream IT might be. But more important in this particular tool is to write down the themes of a partial dream and then see whether not those particular themes resurface again and again across different nights or across different dreams. The idea here is that things that are repeating thematically will show up as different components and different dreams, but that by keeping a dream journal, you can start to identify some of these patterns that are occurring from one dream to the next, as opposed to having the same dream over and over.

But the point here is that you can explore the contents and the themes that it's really the most important word here, the themes of your unconscious mind that is occurring if you start thinking about what's recurring during your dreams. Because dreams are a time when your unconscious mind is dominating the narrative within your mind and brain. Now, for those of you that dream a lot and remember your dreams, as well as for those of you that do not, I would also encourage you to explore the contents of your thinking, that is, thinking about your thinking during so called liminal state.

And the liminal state during which this can be particularly useful, is right upon waking. So this is different than thinking about what you were dreaming about. This is about keeping your eyes closed and body is still, we do think that that's important for doing this well because when you start moving your body, you open your eyes and you start bringing and sensory experience, for that day, your mind dramatically shifts towards conscious processing.

But in that liminal state between sleeping and awake, when you wake up and you're little sleepy and you don't want to get out of bed, this happens to me all too often. Try closing your eyes in remaining perfectly still for maybe one to three minutes, maybe five minutes, and just pay attention to where your mind goes. Now you might fall back asleep.

Be mindful of that depending on what you need to do that morning. But a lot of people will find that their mind goes into this place that neither sleep nor a right. This is a state that very much resembles the state people achieve in things like yoga, nedra, yoga, sleep, or in non sleeve deep breathe.

Although IT tends to be more dominated by the unconscious mind, a little bit more sleep. Like now, some people find this practice to be difficult because of the sort of people that wake up, and they are just immediately ready to go. Most people, however, myself included, fine that when they wake up, you know, the mind doesn't completely alert yet.

And you can use that period again, just maybe two or three minutes, maybe five minutes, to start to pay attention to the contents of you're thinking. See whether not you're thinking migrates from, you know, something related to work or to relationship or to self or is something you want to do or something that you're anxious about and so on and so on. And here to you'll want to write this down.

So this is very much like the dream journey we just talked about, but it's slightly easier for most people to access, especially people who have a hard time remembering their dreams. And again, it's an opportunity to access some of the contents of your unconscious mind to learn to look at and see what's going on in your unconscious mind in a way that's very difficult, if not impossible, to do unless you're working with somebody who is very good at accessing the unconscious, such as a skilled psychiatrist or psychoanalyst. And in that way, allowing you to do inro's cal work, which is not structured in terms of thinking, trying to think about like, what do I want? What's going on you? Why did they do that? Why did I react that way? Nothing like that.

You're simply of observing your mind and seeing what's guiza up from the unconscious. That is, you're getting a portal into that portion of the iceberg that resides below the surface of the water. The next set of tools for expLoring the self, self concept eeta from that four episode series with doctor county is journaling.

I'm going to do an entire epsom of the human milla podcast about journey. And there a lot of different kinds of journal. And fortunately, there are a lot of great peer reviewed studies about the power of journal for processing all sorts of things like emotional states, trauma set a, they're basically two categories of journal that are very useful to Carry out on a consistent basis.

And when I say consistent basis, that could mean every day or IT could mean three times a week. That could even be once a week. There really no hard and festivals about this. But when we think about journal, the really two main styles of journ. One is going to be free association journal.

Sometimes people talk about this as a data dump, right? Typically people talk about the data dump as the morning notes, which is when you wake up in the morning, you know, you got a lot of your mind. You can organize your mind.

People who have a hard time structuring they're thinking and behavior often find this very useful, which is take out a journal or a piece of paper. Again, this is just for you. It's important that you realize and really make sure that you're the only person that's going to see these notes.

Because a lot of people getting to self monitoring when they're doing their journal, they are thinking about oil. How is gonna ck is my handwriting OK? How's my puntuated? What people going to think is this going to be a good book or not to go to listen? None of this journal that we're referring to is about your book or your autobiography.

This is really just for you. This is an exploration of yourself that's designed to help you enhance your concept, that is, your understanding of self, and indeed, translate tes to Better confidence, Better understanding of your goals and aspirations, Better understanding of your unhealthy patterns and defenses, and on and on. And so again, the two styles of journals are free association.

So where you literally just write down anything that comes to mind, or that you feel like writing down within a given period of time, for most people, ten minutes is ample time to do that. For some people, five will be enough. And for some who have the time, maybe thirty minutes.

But for me and I think for most people out there, anywhere from five to ten minutes of this data dump free association, you know, could be using existing ties. What you're thinking about, what you're anxious about really could be about anything that comes to mind. And this free association process can be very useful for clearing out the clutton, so to speak, the other style of journal that's equally useful, but for different reasons, is structure journal to have a goal for a given entry on a given day.

And again, this could be done in the morning, afternoon or night. The idea would be that you would set an intention, and by intention, I mean a specific topic that you're going to restrict your writing to, and that writing should be about self, in particular, goals and aspirations, what you've wanted in the past, yes, but also what you want at present, what you might want in the future for yourself. This could, of course, be material things, but in general, this is more about aspirations of things that you would like to accomplish or generate.

And the key word there is generate. And if you listen to the four episode series with the county, he talked about three drives that exist in all of us. These three drives are the aggressive drive, the pleasure drive and the general drive.

And we don't need to go to a lengthy description about these drives right now if you're curious about them and what they represent and uh, how they can be in baLance or out of baLance and how that serves us or doesn't serve us, please check out that four episode series with doctor county because he goes into that in a fair amount of detail and also in an actual way. But the key thing here is that we're generated. One of the things that I asked doctor county at the outset and throughout the entire series was, you know, what is mental health? We talk about physical health, and we have some idea of what that represents.

You know, healthy blood pressure, the ability to do certain forms of physical movement, cognitive abilities. I asked him, how can we define mental health? And his answer was very straightforward and very powerful. He said, what we all need to aspire to is to be in states, that is, in the verb, actions of agency, and gratitude for as much of our waking life as possible. Now that sounds great.

Write a sense of agency, the ability to exert influence over our internal state and affect the world around us in positive ways, positive relationships reach our goals, as well as gratitude, being grateful for the opportunities that we've been afforded, even grateful perhaps for some of the chAllenges that we've been afforded or that we're selected for us. Now we had no control over and Carrying that agency and gratitude forward, because IT gives rise to a sense of peace, contentment and delight. So all of that sounds wonderful, right? Be an agency and gratitude as a verb.

State experiences, peace, contentment and delight production kani acknowledge. And we spent a good amount of time discussing the fact that doesn't happen just because we decide we want to. In fact, agency in gratitude, peace, contents in delight guys are up from a whole set of other processes that we have to engage in on a regular basis.

And that really gets us back to those three drives. He talked about how people tend to have more or less aggressive drive, not just aggression in terms of violence, although some people do have that, but in terms of their determination. And they are leaning into friction, even seeking out of friction.

People are on a continuum with respect to the aggressive drive. You are talked about the pleasure drive. And the fact that people are on a continuum of the desire for pleasure to either be a head enim or somebody who really avoidance pleasure and kind of restricts pleasure from oneself.

And again, that these things can slide around depending on our life circumstances, our age at, said a, but that is, is very important, that we have a sense of where we are on that continuum. M, of an aggressive drive and a pleasure drive. And that, and here's the most important thing, that our aggressive drive and pleasure drive never outsides our generation drive, and that engaging our general drive is really the hallmark of mental health.

That leads to that sense of agency and gratitude, peace, contents and to light. And he defined the generative drive in the following way. He said, the gender of drive is our desire to create, build and contribute to the world in meaningful ways and appreciate the process to get there.

IT is the core feature of our mental health. So if you want to learn more about the various drives and how they interact and how to access more general drive, again, that's all containing in the four episode series with docker county. But taking us back to the tools and take away from that four episode series, the process of journal and free association mode, or the process of journal in a conscious structured way, is really about trying to access the general drive and to build up that generative drive.

And one of the key things about conscious journey is that IT affords us the opportunity in a way that's not going to be seen by anybody else to really think about what our goals and aspirations are. Now you might say, you know, I can't even think about my goals and aspirations, and I don't know what I want. Well, that's fine. Then you should journal about that. However, most people have some sense of what they would like, but most people are simply not comfortable with writing those things out or even thinking about them.

And if you reflect on that, how could I ever be that you would achieve those goals and aspirations if you're not even feeling comfortable enough to think about them or right about them? And so the process of thinking about and writing about your goals and aspirations is perhaps one of the key first steps towards being able to actualize those goals and aspirations. And for some people, this might be very easy to do.

You simply write down, down. I want to be married by this age, and I want to make example t of money, and I want to live here there. And certainly, those sorts of goals and aspirations are perfectly valid for this type of exercise, but so are the sorts of goals and aspirations that relate to feeling state, like I would like to feel part of a community, I would like to feel like an active contributor to a community.

And then the essential thing is to really flesh out the detail around those goals and aspirations. What size community? Where do you see yourself fitting into this community? Are you doing this, a longside other people, or by yourself, in other words, to really get comfortable thinking about what your goals and aspirations are, again, lately from the perspective of self, and that you are going to be the only person to see this particular document.

Now, I will be the first to admit that the exercise that I just described, not the free association journal, but the structure, journaling of goals and aspirations, I and many people find to be difficult to initiate, difficult to initiate because there seems to be a bit of internal anxiety and friction around doing IT. There seems to be something that keeps many, not all, but many people from feeling as if they are even allowed to think about their goals and aspirations because many people default too well then and i'll just be disappointed because it's not going to work out. I don't want to think about what I want because then i'll just be more disappointed.

And that particular frame of mine was actually discussed in the series with doctor county, and he convinced me and he's the expert, that the opposite is actually true when we are able to overcome some of our anxiety and really think about, in the dedicated way, what we would like to create for ourselves in our lives, both present and future, and keeping in mind our events of past, because we always Carry that life narrative forward, then we are in a far Better place to actually ze those goals and aspirations. And explained a variety of reasons why that's the case. And as clinical observations in some of the other observations that really support that statement.

So I highly encourage you to think about embracing a process of journal. Again, you don't have to do this every day. The journal and the dream analysis take a little bit more time, but they are also valuable for Better understanding oneself concept, and they really thread forward into real everyday actions that can positively enrich your mood and mental health.

Now, any description of science space tools for mood and mental health will be in complete without including some tools related to processing of traumas. Now the processing of traumas is something that, especially in the case of major traumas or repeated traumas, really should be Carried out in concert with a expert trained clinical, that is, a psychologist or psychiatrist who's trained in helping people work through traumas. However, even if you're working with somebody whose expert in processing trauma, there are specific tools that you can use on your own to accelerate that process.

And for people who are working through what are sometimes called more minor traumas, these are sometimes called big tea, big traumas and little tea, little traumas. However, you know that nomenclature doesn't take into account the fact that most of us can probably tell what the big traumas are for ourselves and for others. But sometimes it's hard to tell whether not those small traumas, the little tea traumas, actually are big tea traumas.

So this is one of the major reasons why working with the license professional is really going to be advantages and in many cases, necessary to work through trauma. That said, the self directed protocols for IT working through trauma have a lot to do with how we think about, but more importantly, at times, how we talk about those traumas and dr. Pu county talk about there's not so much in the four episode series with us, but in a particular podcast episode that he did with doctor Peter attia, who some of you perhaps familiar with, for his incredible podcast, the drive, but also for his excEllent book, outlive, which deals with hel span and lifespan or longevity.

Now in that particular conversation with doctor county and doctor tea to count, emphasize the fact that one of the ways that we hold ourselves back and he can exacerbate the negative consequences of trauma, are the ways in which we modify our language to describe those traumas. And what he said, which is so important, is that often times we don't allow ourselves to use language that as big as is necessary to explain that trauma and the impact of that trauma on us and on others. In fact, many people start to, you relegate their language to more possible in a given sentence or possible and given conversation.

Now, what we're not talking about here is the idea that, okay, you know, screaming at somebody else about your trauma, or using a lot of four letter words is necessarily the best way to process that trauma. Bi, however, we are talking about allowing oneself either in spoken form or in written form, to really allow the magnus de of a given trauma to be expressed with a fair degree of intensity and language that can capture at least some of what that trauma represented for us or for others. Now, as doctor county pointed out, all too often we do the opposite.

What ends up happening is people will experience some sort of trauma, either major or minor, may be singular, repeated trauma. And rather than being comfortable talking about IT, rather than using language that captures at least some of the magnitude de of that trauma for them, people start to talk about that trauma less frequently. They start to distract themselves to think about other things, instead of talking about, thinking about that trauma.

And what happens is that trauma roots into our unconscious mind and starts to impact us in negative ways. Now, those negative ways include increases and anxiety, disruptions and sleep. In fact, one of the common ways in which trauma manifests and disruptions and sleep by way of rooting into our unconscious is that people wake up at two, thirty or three o'clock in the morning, this to say, after several hours of being asleep, and immediately they're thinking about that thing that happened, and they're upset about IT.

The idea is that when we push those traumas down, when we don't talk about them with people that we trust, when we don't have a way to consciously process those traumas using language that at least partially matches the magnitude of the impact of those traumas for us, well then those traumas impact are unconscious money, ways that lead our unconscious mind to literally wake us up in mill the night and remind us of that thing as as if it's been a from back in our face over and over. Also, sometimes traumas will root their way down into our unconscious, and then they will resurface in the mode of compulsive or obsessive thinking about that thing, or perhaps other things. Again, the unconscious mind has a interesting and complicated number of different ways that IT defends us in ways that IT, you know, can create denial, distraction, that we might get hyper focused on work as a way to not think about the trauma, hyper focused on some details in our environment and just really trying to focus on that because it's much easier to process and handle that than these traumas.

Again, the processing of trauma is a whole landscape into itself that actually was um beautiful ly described in terms of how IT arises within us and how to process traumas in a really structured way in a just fabulous book that was written by doctor kanti called the invisible epidemic, how trauma works and how we can heal from IT. And in that book, dr. Ony explains the number of different ways that we can do self directed work as well as work with licensed professionals to process traumas and help us move through those traumas so that they are not negatively impacting us going forward.

So I really encourage anyone that's trying to process ramas from the past and represent to check out doctor county's book because it's a spectacular resource. But in terms of the tools, relates a processing trauma that we're talking about right now, like this point about really making sure that we allow ourselves to verbally process and emotionally process that trauma in a way that there's room for using language that capture some of the magnitude to that trauma and how I impacted us and others. It's going to be very important because otherwise what ends up happening is that we tend to adopt feelings of guilt and shame around those traumas simply by not talking about them, by having them go inward.

And then. They start to negatively impact our unconscious ous mind, and then our unconscious mind tries to throw them up to the surface for our conscious mind to recognized by waking us up from sleep, in some cases, by leveraging those unhealthy defences. Things like denial, like, you know, the over indulgence in alcohol, over indulgence of drugs, ways to distract ourselves, as well as projection and sublimation and the other types of defenses the doctor county talked about in the four episode series.

Again, those defenses are not necessarily good or bad. IT depends on the circumstances. The unconscious mind is not trying to harm us. Your unconscious mind is is part of you. IT is you.

But of course, IT is you acting in concert with your conscious mind? And so really, the tools and protocols from the four episode series with doctor county are aimed at helping you feel and access more sense of agency and gratitude on a regular basis, more peace, contentment and delight, and doing so by touching into those different drives, understanding what they are, the aggressive drive, the pleasure drive, and really making sure that your general drive going to love this description of the general drive so much, so that i'm gonna ad IT again, because this is really what IT means to be mentally healthy again. The gender drive is our desire to create, building, contribute to the world in a meaningful way and appreciate the process to get there.

IT is the core feature of our mental health. So being able to access that gender of drive on a regular basis is really what this thing that we call mental health is all about. And the tools that I just described, of course, can be combined with any number of different ways, with the tools that are described Green, largely from the episode with doctor least a feldman beret t and so what you now have is a kit of tools and protocols for improving mood and mental health, some of which are grounded in that core six.

The, you know, first principles of self care are always going to be getting your physiology right so that your psychology can be right as well. Of course, you want to emphasize tools and protocols that build up your psychological processes in concept themself. That's what the tools from the county series that we just described are all about. And then the tools from the episode of doctor lisa felman berretta ort of bridge, the two he talked about with the physiological and the psychological tools that really represent ways to enhance our mood and mental health.

And so by threats, these three things together, I believe, IT really arms us with the greatest degree of optimism and capacity to take control of this thing that we call our mood in emotions, and to course, allow ourselves to feel the negative things we need to feel, but then process them in healthy ways and to exist as much as as reasonably possible in generally optimistic, upbeat states that allow us to engage our general drive. And although we covered a lot of tools during this episode, again, I want to emphasize that the idea is not necessarily do all of them all at once, maybe just pick one or two and start to implement them on a regular basis. And by implementing those, there's no reason to think that you would be significantly eating into the your other demands on your time because ultimately, the whole purpose of having elevated mood and mental health is so that you can have Better relationship to yourself and Better relationship to others into the world around you.

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