Matt Abrahams: We can be more confident communicators when we
sync our biology and psychology.
I'm Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford
Graduate School of Business.
Welcome to this Rethinks episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast.
Recently I had the privilege to be a guest on the Huberman Lab podcast.
Andrew is a colleague and I'm a big fan of his impactful show.
Back before his show launched, Andrew was a guest on Think Fast Talk Smart.
I wanted to give all of you a chance to listen to our conversation about
how to leverage neuroscience to help us be more confident, calm communicators,
and to gain insight into Andrew's best practices for clear accessible messaging.
Take a listen as we open up the vault to this Rethinks episode.
I am really looking forward to speaking with Andrew Huberman, who is a professor
in the neurobiology department at Stanford University's School of Medicine.
Andrew's research focuses on understanding the brain mechanisms controlling anxiety,
cognition, and performance under stress.
Additionally, Andrew works diligently to bring neuroscience research to the
public through his teaching, his videos, and his Huberman Lab podcast, which
needs to be in everyone's playlist.
Thanks for being here, Andrew, shall we get started?
Andrew Huberman: Delighted to be here.
Matt Abrahams: Like me, I know you're fascinated by fear and its impact.
As we all know, communicating in front of others in high stake
situations can certainly involve fear.
From a neurologic point of view what's going on?
What happens to our voice, our speech, and our hand movements when we get nervous?
Andrew Huberman: So when we get nervous, we are entering a state which
is perfectly natural, but reflects one station along what's called the autonomic
continuum, and really the autonomic continuum can be conceptualized as a
continuum between states of very high alertness, think maximum excitement or
fear, all the way down to deep sleep.
So the, our states of mind and body are not discreet entities.
They are along this continuum, this autonomic continuum.
So when we are excited or we are nervous, we have a number of physiological
responses that are purely autonomic, meaning they're purely automatic.
The most important thing to realize is that it is a continuum and that there's
no difference between the physiological response to something that you're
excited about and something that you're nervous about, or that you're dreading.
And so there's an additional component there that we need to consider.
But the most important thing above all, and I guess if people are gonna take away
anything from our conversation today, it's that despite these responses being
automatic, there are direct control points through which we can control the
autonomic nervous system, meaning that we can dial down the level of alertness
or increase the level of calmness.
Those actually turn out to be two different things.
So while it's called the autonomic nervous system and the autonomic continuum, it's
a bit of a misnomer because there are two specific levers, or entry, points
that we all have from birth that require essentially no learning, you have to know
what they are, but that will allow people to control voice level of alertness,
level of shaking in their hands.
So it's a quite remarkable system in that it has this asymmetry, autonomic
on the one hand, but with very powerful entry points for control on the other.
Matt Abrahams: I wanna get back to the notion that you brought
up about how we experience the physiological arousal that we get.
You said it, it, in some cases, it's due to anxiety and fear.
In other cases, it's due to excitement.
Part of that, I think has to do with how we label what we're experiencing.
And I know that there's some research from my academic field that says
one way to help manage anxiety is just to work on how you perceive the
physiological symptoms that you're having.
So if you say, hey, even though my heart rate's going up, I'm getting a little
sweaty and shaky, it's 'cause I'm excited to share the information I'm sharing.
Versus, oh my goodness, everybody's looking at me and I'm feeling nervous.
So part of it I think, has to do with how we frame the situation.
Does that ring true?
Andrew Huberman: Absolutely.
When we are in a state of alertness, whether because of excitement or fear,
the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system, let's just call it the
alertness system, deploys a hormone from our adrenal glands, adrenaline, and it
deploys the equivalent chemical in the brain, where it's called epinephrine.
The same chemically identical structure, but called two different things 'cause
neuroscientists and physiologists like to make things complicated.
The role of adrenaline slash epinephrine is to create agitation in the body
and to create focus in the mind.
And this is a, an important concept because that agitation makes it harder
to be still, which is sort of a duh.
That's the definition of agitation.
But it was designed to move us, to physically move us so that we
would be biased toward ambulation or biased toward shifting what,
from one position to a new one.
And so one of the toughest things for many people is to tolerate that
level of adrenaline or alertness when they have to be still.
The simplest example I can give of this that I think most people will be
familiar with is if in the days where we congregated in person, there's this
traditional practice of going around the room and introducing yourself and
saying something about what you do.
And most people actually find that to be very stressful.
Especially if they sit toward the end of the line.
Now, why would that be, right?
Most people know their name and can say their name.
Most people know what they do and can say that.
It's anything but a high stress circumstance.
And occasionally there's some social pressure where if someone's
very funny before us or they say something in a particularly nice way
than we feel like some additional pressure to do that as well.
But it really has more to do with the fact that when we're in a room listening
to somebody, we can, we're comfortable with the fact that we're not gonna
speak or walk or do much, and we could just sit there and write or listen or
text or whatever it is we have to do.
As we are called on to say something, the reason that it's easier to do
early in the line is because we are holding on to a reverberatory circuit.
There are circuits in our brain that anticipate action and prepare us for
action, and the longer we keep that in check, the more challenging it becomes.
When we are trying to withhold action, but we're preparing for action there's
a lot of reverberatory activity in our nervous system, and it feels like stress.
Getting ready to go up to the podium is tough.
When we get up to the podium, many people, including myself, find that
if we rock back and forth a little bit or we can engage some movement in
our body suddenly we start to relax.
And that's because adrenaline slash epinephrine was designed to move us,
and it wasn't designed to move us in response to incoming large predators, it
was, but that's not its primary function.
Its primary function was to move us from whatever position we're in to a
new position, sometimes towards things, sometimes away from things, depending
on whether or not we want the experience or we want to avoid the experience.
But the actual inner experience, what we call interoception, our perception
of our internal landscape is identical for something that we want to approach
versus we want to move away from.
Absolutely identical, from the neck down that is.
Matt Abrahams: Really interesting.
So if you can reframe the physiological response, you can see it very differently.
And I find fascinating that when we see somebody who is nervous
moving one way versus the other way, as an audience member, we
have very different perceptions.
So if somebody steps up on a stage and then takes a step back as they're starting
to speak it looks like they're retreating and therefore maybe nervous or shy.
But if somebody actually steps forward, we have a perception that
they're confident and stepping into the challenging situation.
So it's not only what we perceive, it's how the audience perceives it as well.
Andrew Huberman: It might be useful for people to think about the fact
that there's only three responses we can have to any circumstance.
One is to stay still, one is to move forward, or one is to move back.
Back in 2018, a graduate student in the neurosciences program did her
thesis with me, Lindsey Salay and I published a paper in the journal Nature.
Lindsey discovered a brain circuit that controls the movement toward threat.
Now, this isn't the kind of movement that will get you killed.
This is the kind of movement toward, in an intelligent way, in an adaptive way,
towards something that, in this case, an animal or a person wants to do, but
feels a tremendous amount of autonomic arousal of stress and nervousness about.
The take home message is the following.
Forward movement under conditions of anxiety or high levels of alertness,
AKA stress, triggers the activation of a circuit deep in the brain that
releases the neurochemical dopamine.
Dopamine, of course, is a molecule that is most commonly associated with a sensation
of reward, and it is released when we achieve something that we want to achieve.
But the other very interesting function of dopamine is to increase the
probability that we will move toward similar types of goals in the future.
So dopamine is not just the molecule reward, it's the
molecule of motivation and drive.
And so Lindsey's results have a number of different implications, but I think
if people can just conceptualize that the anxiety or stress response is
the same as the excitement response they feel different because of some
top-down perception or verbiage that we introduced to it, but they're
actually identical physiologically, and that forward movement, provided its
adaptive, toward a goal, triggers the activation of chemicals in the brain
and body that will make the subsequent pursuit of those same or similar goals
more likely and more pleasurable.
Matt Abrahams: That's really cool.
So learning to take the stage and step forward, leaning in
when you're virtual can help.
And I believe in some of the work of yours that I read, you don't
actually have to even physically move.
If you simulate movement with your eyes, you can have a similar effect,
and I'd like for you to talk about that.
Andrew Huberman: Back in the early eighties, someone actually in Palo
Alto, a woman by the name of Francine Shapiro is a psychologist, developed
a technique for, it was actually developed for trauma treatment.
She was a psychologist, did some work at Stanford, but also at a nearby clinic.
And essentially, she had found that taking walks was helpful
for her anxiety and stress.
Something that everyone now I think says, okay, duh.
But we always thought that it was because of movement of the body, but
she wanted to import some of that self-induced relaxation to her clinic.
And she was clever enough to create this thing that they call
EMDR, eye movement desensitization reprocessing, which simply involves
moving the eyes from side to side.
It looks a little goofy if you see someone do it, but moving the eyes
from side to side, not up or down, but side to side eye movement actually
triggers, we now know, suppression of the amygdala, this fear center in the brain.
For years, people would ask me about EMDR, 'cause I'm a vision scientist
and I work on stress and I thought it was totally kooky and crazy
and I didn't believe any of it.
My response was, in my mind anyway, was sort of like, okay, take your
EMDR and your magic carpet and head down to Big Sur and, and let's talk
later if you want to talk science.
I was really quite wrong because a couple years ago there were no fewer
than five papers published in very high quality journals, including Nature,
in mice, non-human primates, and humans showing that these lateralized
eye movements lead to suppression of this fear center in the brain.
So.
It's a quite long lasting effect.
I should just mention if people are gonna use it to deal with
actual trauma, that should be done with a real trauma therapist.
It works best for specific circumstances like public speaking.
It's not great for sort of reducing your stress about your entire childhood, or
your entire divorce, or your entire 2020.
It's, that's gearing toward specific circumstances, but here's how it works.
You move your eyes from side to side for about thirty seconds,
which is actually quite a long time.
You don't do this during the event.
But that creates a state of reduced alertness, AKA stress, not so much you
fall asleep, in your system, and then you're able to better approach things
with more ease and with less alertness.
Matt Abrahams: I've heard you mention on your podcast that there are two
approaches to addressing stress.
Can you share those with us?
Andrew Huberman: The two approaches are you can either
reduce your stress in real time.
Things like these eye movements right before you go into a stressful event,
like up on stage or hard conversation, or even if you're just experiencing anxiety.
There's a breathing tool I'll share with you in a moment that's grounded
deeply in physiology as well.
Or you can raise your stress threshold.
So things like ice baths, running up steep mountains, exposure therapy, those
are actually designed to increase your tolerance, your cognitive tolerance for
high levels of agitation in your body, increasing the probability that you'll
stay still, not say the wrong thing, not strike anyone, not lose your cool.
So it's learning to be calm in storm, or what is sometimes referred to as
being comfortable being uncomfortable.
That is a distinctly different set of practices then things like the eye
movements I described, or the second thing, which is a real time tool for
calming oneself that my laboratory is working closely on with David
Spiegel's laboratory in the Department of Psychiatry, which is we ask the
question, what breathing approach is the best to calm oneself in real time?
Because meditation is wonderful, TM is wonderful, if you're of drinking
age and you can tolerate it without going into excess, a nice glass of
wine is also another way to activate the, the parasympathetic system.
So is a massage, so is a, a dip in the hot tub or a sauna.
Matt Abrahams: Sounds like you're describing a nice date.
Andrew Huberman: Exactly.
Or remember it's called the rest and digest system for a reason.
One of the most powerful ways to shift your autonomic nervous system to one of
more calm, is to fill your gut, food.
Then the distension of your gut sends signals through the vagus nerve to
a little set of neurons right behind your ear called the nodose ganglia,
which projects into your brain, gives you a little bit of a dopamine hit,
this is well established, as well as activating areas of the brain that
are involved in calming you down.
And there are a lot of ways to control the autonomic nervous
system slowly and indirectly.
Massage, hot tub, big meal, et cetera.
We're talking about real time control fast.
So the best way that we know, and this is work that's still in progress, is to
use what are called physiological sighs.
So these were discovered back in the thirties.
Turns out that when you are stressed, you are breathing less deeply.
The most common advice is to take a deep breath.
Turns out that's exactly the wrong advice.
The exhale emphasized breathing leads to much more rapid activation of the
calming arm of the nervous system.
And it turns out you don't just want to exhale.
You want to do a double inhale.
So inhale twice through the nose, so inhale through the nose, and then
before you exhale, sneak in a little bit more air and then do a long exhale.
You do this just one to three times, so it's inhale again, even if you
just sneak the tiniest bit of air.
Ideally, the inhales are done through the nose and then exhale through the mouth.
Now, why does this work?
Turns out that your lungs are not just two big bags of air.
They are billions of little tiny stacks called the alveoli of the lungs.
Those little sacs are contiguous, more or less, with the
vasculature, with the blood supply.
So when you exhale, you offload carbon dioxide and a lot of the
stress response is due to elevated carbon dioxide in the bloodstream.
If you've ever been to a kid's party and you're asked to blow up a balloon and
you blow on the balloon, sometimes it inflates right away, but if it doesn't,
you give two hard pushes with air.
One, two, and the same thing happens with the alveoli of the lungs.
As we get stressed, they start to collapse, they flatten out, and to
reinflate them, the double inhale brings maximal air into the alveoli of your
lungs, and then you offload the maximum amount of carbon dioxide when you exhale.
So this is very simple, very fast.
You can actually do it during exercise as well.
So if you ever find that your heart is pounding and you want to
calm down, first thing is exhale, then maybe try the double inhale.
And then exhale to follow.
Usually, at least what we find in our studies, is that within just one to three
of those cycles, meaning within about five seconds, autonomic nervous system
starts to shift more towards calmness.
And then if you like, you can start using your eye movements
or whatever cognitive reframing.
But one of the things that I think will resonate with people, and I
hope it does, is that it is very hard to control the mind with the mind.
When you're stepping up to the podium and you are nervous, you can say, oh yeah,
that nervousness is actually excitement.
And I think, you know, and this is, I must be really agitated
'cause I really want to do this.
And, but in that moment of stress, it's very hard to control what's going on.
So under conditions where your mind is not where you want it,
use the body to control the mind.
Matt Abrahams: So you've just shared techniques for what we can do when
we're directly experiencing anxiety.
What can we do to prepare for anxiety in advance?
Andrew Huberman: The other thing to do is the stuff that you do away from
the podium, away from the big event, or the hard conversation, and that
involves deliberately taking yourself into states of heightened alertness.
As my colleague David Spiegel likes to say, it's not just about the
state you find yourself in, it's how you got there and whether or
not you had anything to do with it.
And what he's really saying is that when you drive your nervous system into a state
of high alertness and you learn to be calm there, you achieve a certain kind of
superpower such that when real life puts you into those states without any warning
and very fast, it's like driving in fog.
The first time you do it it's scary as heck.
The fifth time you do it it's still scary, but you've been there before.
And so you're now a good driver.
So the way you do this can be of different, you know, practices, but
one of the best ones is a very cold shower and trying to stay calm for one
to three minutes in a very cold shower.
Not something that I like.
And there you use a protocol of breathing that involves taking twenty
to thirty deep inhales for reasons that now should be obvious, increase
your heart rate, and then big exhale.
Matt Abrahams: Hyperventilating like.
Andrew Huberman: You're hyperventilating and by the twenty-fifth one,
you will be very stressed.
Now, I want to say that if people have, are panic attack prone or
anxiety attack prone, this is getting, I do not recommend this.
Very uncomfortable.
But then what you do at the end of that twenty-five breaths is you offload all
your air, you empty your lungs, and then you sit for about fifteen to, some
people can go longer, sixty seconds or so, of lung's empty, and you try
and feel peaceful with that heightened level of adrenaline in your body.
Now, never do this near water.
I wanna be really clear because there is this thing called shallow water, but don't
even do it in a puddle because I, I don't want anyone injuring themselves or worse.
But if you repeat that for two or three cycles, what you will
find, it's pretty remarkable.
There's some nuance to these practices, but they all kind of start
and end with vision or breathing.
Matt Abrahams: And I love how you make them simple for us to understand.
So they're the things we can do in the moment or right before
the moment of the anxiety.
And then there are things we can do to, in essence, desensitize ourselves in advance.
Now we are all communicating in this virtual world these days.
Is there anything from your experience of how eyes work that
would indicate what we should do?
For example, people often say you need to look at the camera,
so it looks like you're looking at the person on the other end.
Any insight you have about this virtual communication we all do?
Andrew Huberman: First of all, it's a very unnatural time because we are not used
to seeing a little picture of ourselves moving while we look at other people.
Everyone's carrying a little mirror around on their shoulder
for us now in the Zoom world.
So turn that off or get it outta the way because it will interfere
with your presence to the conversation and other people's
perception of how present you are.
The other thing that's really important is that there's a lot of research on gaze
and eye contact and frequency of blinking.
The most powerful way to connect with somebody through Zoom or just
in person is actually not to stare directly at them the whole time,
is a combination of direct gaze, averting gaze, and closing one's eyes.
A real conversation involves moments where you're looking away trying to,
I, like I'm doing right now, I'm trying to, you know, grab a concept and say
it, uh, in a way that makes sense.
But then also where we reengage, and so a conversation is actually
a process of looking directly at the other person and then breaking
gaze and then coming back again.
The other thing that works quite well, if people are experiencing eye fatigue
from looking at screens up close, and there's a whole other conversation,
is one thing that works well is to see someone's face at the beginning.
Say hello, because faces are a powerful, you know, they collects
a lot of context for the brain.
Saying hello, but then going into pure audio and then going back
to visual before you part ways.
That may actually be a more effective form of Zoom communication than pretending
we're all in the same room and trying to stare at one another the entire time and
sometimes see that reflection of ourself.
Matt Abrahams: Right.
That's advice that others on this podcast have given that, that you don't
have to show your video the whole time.
So before we end, Andrew, I'd like to ask you the same three questions I ask
everybody who joins me on this podcast.
Are you up for that?
Andrew Huberman: Definitely.
Matt Abrahams: If you were to capture the best communication
advice you've ever received as a five to seven word presentation
slide title, what would that be?
Andrew Huberman: Speak to inform and teach, not impress.
Matt Abrahams: Ooh, I like that.
So it's about getting the information across and you are certainly a master
at that, and I encourage everybody to search out some of the work you've done.
Your podcast is fantastic because you do such a nice job of something we talked
about on an earlier podcast, how to make complex information accessible.
You do a great job of that.
You certainly don't dumb it down, but you make it accessible
as you've done for us today.
Let me ask question number two.
Who is a communication that you admire and why?
Andrew Huberman: There are two forms of communication that really
appeal to me and the they will seem at odds with one another.
I love poetry because really great poetry doesn't really
make sense at a cognitive level.
It gets to a kind of what probably is some sort of deeper universal meaning.
It probably is tapping into brain circuits that are more on a emotional level or
that reside in the brain body connection.
I really believe that.
So that speaks to some sort of quote unquote truth.
So I love poetry, and I'm a big Wendell Berry fan.
I'm also a big Joe Strummer fan, you know, most famous for being the
singer of the Clash, for the things he said, not while he was on stage.
Was brilliant in terms of his offstage speech.
I've referred people to check out some of the things that Joe said later
in his life were really remarkable insights into human beings and humanity.
There's some real core truth there.
And in the world of science, Claude Desplan is a biology professor at NYU
who studies insect vision, and the only word that I can use to describe what
it is to hear one of Claude's lectures, whether or not you're familiar with
biology or not, is pure enchantment.
He transports you into a world where, frankly, I don't really care about
dragonfly vision on a regular basis.
But when I listen to Claude speak, I think about human vision.
I think about love.
He talks about the love spots of the dragonfly eyes, that for pursuing mates
and food, and it is just remarkable.
Anyone that can do that is incredible.
But Claude is the world heavyweight champion of making biology
fascinating and delightful.
Matt Abrahams: I'm gonna check his lectures out for sure.
Last question for you.
What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?
Andrew Huberman: Passion.
The speaker has to love the topic.
And organizational logic, there has to be a structure to the information.
It just can't be bullet points and beginning, middle end kind of thing.
And clarity.
If people walk away understanding more than they did at the
beginning, then you won.
It's back to the most important thing to do is to teach
your audience, educate them.
Matt Abrahams: Passion, structure and clarity.
PSC, we're gonna add that as another acronym to your list of many
acronyms I've heard you talk about.
Andrew, it was fantastic to have you here.
I'm taking a deep breath to calm myself down from all the exciting
information that you shared.
Thank you so much.
It is my true hope that all of us listening in can apply some of these tools
and hacks to optimize our communication.
Thank you.
Andrew Huberman: Thanks so much for having me.
Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for a special Rethinks episode of
Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast.
This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams.
Our music is from Floyd Wonder.
With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company.
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