How to Better Understand Yourself | Dr. Paul Conti & Dr. Andrew Huberman

There is a lot of emphasis, including on this podcast, on learning to sit with stress, anxiety and not just letting it out or experiencing it. And sometimes I wonder despite knowing the immense value of those tools. I mean, I've benefited so much from things like non-sleep, deep rest, and meditation and things like that, and I know others have as well. But I mean, how much should we be trying to control our states? I do wonder if it's good for us um to think that there's something wrong for us if we feel a certain way. Period. I think controlling our states in order to help us be at our best is different from trying to control our states so that we change ourselves, right? So, so if you you're finding um you know a deep state of peace that's not sleep, right? You find oh that helps you be a better you, right? that finding that peace just it gives you some groundedness and you feel healthier for it and you're better able to solve problems. So, you know, you're learning something and doing something because it serves you well and it helps you be at your best, right? That's different than thinking, oh, I need to be different, right? If a person thinks, well, I need to be different and I need to be calmer or more peaceful. What does that mean? And is that person imposing something external on themselves? So, there are people who are very active and yes, you could they can sit quietly sometimes, right? But they're not really built for it, right? They're active people and it works for them to be active and they may be quite meditative when they don't seem to be quite meditative, right? They can be doing something and you know we see a lot of movement in them but inside they can be in a meditative state. So it's so easy for us to we're it's well-meaning in that we're trying to understand, right? We're trying to understand ourselves and others find patterns, but it's so tempting to think that we know something, right? Because we're just observing someone in a certain state or we're observing someone talking or not talking, right?

To go, what does that mean? And we have to ask the right questions, right, in order to get there. So, so the only way we really know the answers for a person is we have to understand that person and their context. So, we must ask the right questions. You know, you had talked about trying to write practical routes of approach to ourselves in the book, right? I'm doing that because, you know, think of if someone wanted to learn physics, would you say, well, just stop, go somewhere and think about physics, right? Like, no, there has to be a route of approach of saying, well, here's some of the basic knowledge, you know, think about this, approach that way. um read from this book and then that book, right? Like there are ways that we're guided in how to learn things. And it's interesting that we don't have these guides for what's most important, which is learning about ourselves. So it brings us back to why it can make us so uncomfortable, so anxious to say, okay, we're going to sit with ourselves. It's like saying, well, sit with yourself and you know, learn horiculture. It's like, I don't know, like I'll sit with myself, but you have to help me. me figure out how to learn that or I'm going to feel anxious about sitting there if I don't know how to go about it. Right? So, so if we have the prompts to look at ourselves now, what we're doing is we're making it real. We're asking the right questions of ourselves to think, oh, what how do I function? What does work well for me? You know, how do I think of myself? How do others think of me? Am I introverted or extroverted? Am I a combination of both? Do I sometimes feel in one state and sometimes in another? Is it working for me? Right? me in the big picture? Are there parts of the small picture that work for me or things I really don't like or things where I really don't feel uncomfortable? Now, we're bringing curiosity. And yes, we want to learn from patterns and learn from all the knowledge we have of the world, but we're taking that and saying, "Hey, none of that actually means anything until it's directed towards me. If I'm the person reflecting

about myself or if it's a helping process, we're helping a friend or you know, we're in a process. " you know, we have to take everything that we know and then it's all seen through the lens of that person. We have to do it that way or we'll lead ourselves astray. If you're willing, um I'm curious about uh throwing out a sort of a generic clinical session example. Let's assume you know something about the family background of a patient and there's nothing glaringly obvious in the background about trauma or maybe there is but you know that there's nothing really to dig into there just yet and the person comes to you and says yeah I don't know I'm like work is okay but this and so at work at that and I guess this is good and you know and they're I don't know they're dating they're in their life and I swear I'm not trying to get a free therapy session Here I'm just trying to imagine so someone says you know and then like the news is really bothering me and that you know and just kind of reporting — right — you observe human patterns I mean your pattern recognition is presumably oriented towards where there's emotion where there's patterns in them how it matches to templates that only you could harbor the same way that a really amazing neurosurgeon would look into the brain and see a pattern of epileptic seizure and would be like okay this Even without remembering those specific cases, I know which direction to go at this to explore. When you hear all that stuff, and the stuff I'm talking about here is deliberately meant to reflect what you see a lot of on social media. Upset about that political team, upset about that politically. And my life is this. But this, but what does that tell you? And what does it tell you specifically about where that person should invest effort into thinking or doing? I realize it's impossible to give a pan prescriptive here, but like what does that mean when somebody's just really absorbed by all the things going on around them and things feel good, but — Mhm. — where do you start to probe and um encourage them at least until the next session? — The way to probe is to encourage reflection, right? Because with what you said, I think, well, I'm hearing somebody reporting, right? It's like they're just telling me the news, right, of what went on. I'm doing this, I'm doing that. my mom did this and my dad did that. — It's kind of an inventory or a laundry

list, right? So, what it makes me think is, huh, I [clears throat] wonder how much of that — you're really choosing, — right? Or how much of that is intentional just a reflex? — The behaviors that in their life, how much of it they're choosing or how or the reporting? — No, the behaviors, how much of what they're reporting, like how much of that are you really choosing, — right? How much of that is what you want to be doing? How much of that is working for you? Right? What we're trying to do then and what I want to do then is encourage like to have some interest in examination of like well why am I doing all of this right maybe some of this I really like and I am interested in and others of it I'm just doing because it's habit or it's routine I don't even know why I'm doing it or you know if I'm dating what who am I dating why am I dating how am I choosing is that also just something that I do how much am I just kind of along for the ride of what I'm doing — that just has forward momentum versus what am I really choosing Now, if we stop and we look at it that way, what are you really choosing? And also what's working for you now, we're off to the races of an examined life. And you know, we see this as I know you know, we do a lot of intensive work. We do it with individuals. couples where we try and move this process forward very very um rapidly of looking at one's own life. And it's very interesting that sometimes, you know, by midway through the second day of an intensive process, the person wants to revisit almost everything. They realize, you know, 10 20% of of all those things I just said, I this is what I do, right? I really I really value and I want to be doing more of the others. I'm not so sure of, right? I don't know why I'm doing some of those things. And now again, we are we're really along the process of change because we're looking at ourselves. And it may seem strange that someone would see the 80% of what I just told you I do. I don't know if I want to do or if it's working for me. But that happens all the time when we're not examining our lives. They just kind of run forward and we accumulate what we accumulate, right? And it's like, well, this is what we are because this is what I've accumulated by, you know, grabbing and carrying with me as I'm moving through life. And there's not an organization to it. So

so this idea that we must examine our lives is at the heart of all of this. That's how we keep mental health and our structure of self and our function of self. We keep our drives in balance. We set ourselves on a path where we are in a place to meet future challenges from the best health we can have and also to meet future opportunities. So, just like we want to do with our physical health, right? We want to build good physical health. Likewise, mental health when that's the best way to be when life throws us whatever curveballs are going to come our way. And it's also the best way to have a good life, to be on the front foot of life. But we need to examine ourselves and we need a process and a structure in order to build good mental health the way we build good physical health. And ultimately, that's how we build good health.