Tools to Bolster Your Mental Health & Confidence | Dr. Paul Conti | Andrew Huberman Transcript

Andrew Huberman interviews psychiatrist Dr Paul Conti on practical tools for building mental health, self-awareness, and behavioral change

Andrew Huberman speaks with Dr Paul Conti, a psychiatrist and trauma expert, about his new book What's Going Right? A Powerful New Method for Optimizing Your Mental Health.

Summary

Andrew Huberman interviews Dr Paul Conti about practical approaches to mental health, self-exploration, and behavioral change. Dr. Conti argues that the mental health system errs by focusing on what is going wrong rather than starting from a position of strength — a perspective he develops throughout his new book. He presents a framework for examining the self through compassionate curiosity, explaining how insight into unconscious patterns, particularly those inherited from childhood, is what gives people genuine agency over their behavior. A central claim is that people change not simply by being told what to do, but by realizing they are being controlled by something — whether a childhood pattern, a fear, or an unconscious drive — because humans fundamentally resist being controlled. The conversation also covers intrusive thoughts, the role of dreams, the balance between introspection and action, and what it means to live a genuinely happy life as distinct from a merely "happy-go-lucky" one.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

What's Going Right: Starting from Strength

Andrew Huberman: Dr Paul Conti, welcome back.

Dr Paul Conti: Thank you. Thank you for having me back.

Andrew Huberman: Congratulations on your book, What's Going Right? A Powerful New Method for Optimizing Your Mental Health. It's an amazing book. And you also hold the record — not incidentally, I think — for the most viewed and downloaded episodes of this podcast ever. So you've got a lot of Huberman Lab podcast listener fans out there. They'll be reading it if they're smart and they want to be better, want to feel enriched in all the ways.

So let's talk about individuals first, and then I also want to talk today about interactions between people, which we probably haven't talked quite as much about — at least not here. The self, right? We all have a name, a self-concept. We wake up thinking and knowing essentially who we are, what bothers us, what we're excited about. And the question I've been living with for a long time is: how malleable is our self-view? And our relationship to ourself — and we can define those. If we're not super comfortable or completely happy with our relationship to ourselves, how much flexibility is there on that whole picture?

Dr Paul Conti: I think it's very malleable. I think there's a lot of flexibility, but we have to be willing to look at ourselves. Very often we're not looking at ourselves. We're afraid of what we're going to find, or we don't know how to understand or how to bring change. So we don't look at ourselves, and then we can see ourselves as inflexible and think that we're just stuck in the same place over time. But if we're willing to look at ourselves and we bring this compassionate curiosity to ourselves — of "hey, what can I learn about myself, and what might I be interested in changing in myself or emphasizing in myself?" — I think we can bring a lot of change.

Andrew Huberman: And in the title of your book, What's Going Right — is that a good lens to start looking through when we look at ourselves? Like, what works? In my case, ten fingers, ten toes. I feel some sense of agency over a number of areas of my life. Is that the way to start wading into the questions about self?

Dr Paul Conti: I think to start off with what's going right, it's not just a way of looking at it because it feels better — it's consistent with truth. There's far more going right in any of us, in all of us, than there is going wrong if we're here. And if we're listening to educational material and we want to better ourselves, there's so much more that's going right in us. It's a good place for us to start because it helps us to be able to look at what's not going the way we want it to be, where we want to bring change in our lives. But we should start from a position of strength.

The mental health system really tells us to look at ourselves in the opposite way — to look at ourselves through what is going wrong and to put labels on ourselves that often just make us feel worse, or make us feel more helpless or hopeless in understanding. But if we start with what's going right and we bring curiosity to ourselves, then there are processes we can follow to understand and to bring real change.

Andrew Huberman: What are some of those processes that people could use to explore? And if you would, what are some questions, thoughts, or landscapes to explore where people can probe themselves with specific questions?

Dr Paul Conti: Good places to start: looking at your self-talk. What are you saying to yourself in quiet moments when no one else is listening, or when there's a pause in the action in your life? What are you saying to yourself? What messages are you giving yourself? Often we're telling ourselves things about ourselves that are negative or critical, and we're not aware that we're saying these things over and over. So that's just one strategy.

Another strategy can be to think about the life narrative that we're telling ourselves. If you just tell yourself about yourself, or if you're telling someone else about you, what is it that you say? What is it that you say in a reflexive way, and does it match what's real and true about your life?

We all have these two foundational pillars, and in the first part of the series we did in 2023, we really hashed this out. It was the first time I really put together that there's a structure of self and we all share this. Our talk helped me to pull together that there's something that applies to all of us just because we're human and we have a human brain and a human mind. There is a structure of self and a function of self. These foundational pillars are where we can look to understand ourselves better and to bring better health. If we are aware of where to look and how to look, and we're willing to look because we're not afraid of what we're going to find, and we have a belief that we can bring change — this is how we bring flexibility and malleability — we can approach ourselves feeling really good that if I do this, I am going to be able to make things better. There's so much hopefulness to that, and it's reasonably grounded hopefulness.

State Dependence and the Observing Self

Andrew Huberman: I have a question that might seem like a leap somewhere else, but I promise it ties back to what we're talking about. In your experience with psychiatry and the brain and patients and interacting with people in your own life, do you think that there's tremendous variation or little variation in how state-dependent people are? Some people, it seems, are so affiliative that when they're relating to somebody else, they think and feel completely differently than they do when they're on their own — not necessarily even extroverted for that to be true. But when they're suddenly alone, the internal state is very different, almost like it's two different lives.

There's a reason I'm asking this, but I'm wondering about the role of state dependence in how we think and feel and how we think about the things around us and think about ourselves.

Dr Paul Conti: For most of us, life is moving very fast and life has a lot of stressors in it. What ends up happening is we're kind of rushing just to keep up with ourselves. When that happens, we become very state-dependent as opposed to being able to observe ourselves. To be able to see — okay, I'm here, this is what I'm doing, these are the people I'm with, this is how I'm feeling and how I'm behaving — to be able to observe ourselves is how we knit together one self across situations. So we can be aware that I'm different in one situation than another. Some of the behavior and the sense of self is state-dependent, but there's a whole self that's riding above all of it. It's observing us and knitting us together — what is sometimes called an observing ego. This is how we can both be state-dependent but also have a self that is true across all of those states.

Social Media, Alone Time, and the Erosion of Internal Processing

Andrew Huberman: When somebody sits down to think about their strengths, or to think about their self-talk, or just to think about what they're made of and how they want to change or not change certain things, build on certain strengths — when and how should they do it?

Dr Paul Conti: I think all we need to bring is curiosity. That's all. And curiosity doesn't have to be overly serious or worried. It doesn't have to have a gravity to it. It can, but it can also be very lighthearted. There are so many things that we're curious about, so many things we want to learn about. But so often what we leave out of that equation is being curious about ourselves. That can be a sort of high-spirited thing to do — what is there in me that runs through all the things that I do? How is it that I feel so different doing one thing than another? What are the common threads of me that run throughout my life?

This is a great way to approach what's going right in us — to be curious about ourselves. And it's from there that it's easier to see: in one certain kind of situation, I'm really not doing as well, or I'm not as happy. Then we can think about that and we don't have to be afraid of it. Bringing curiosity to ourselves — what runs through everything we do, and also how we're different in different situations — can help lead us to all sorts of answers about what makes us happy and what doesn't. When are we presenting a true and honest self? When are we presenting a false self that even we know is false?

I think the only crucial ingredient is curiosity. And then we can approach with seriousness and gravity, or we can approach with lightheartedness. We can be alone or we can be thinking with someone else. There are all sorts of good places that curiosity can take us.

Andrew Huberman: It's interesting that you talked about true self versus false self. I think the more state dependence we have, the more confusing that becomes. And I think perhaps even more so in this day and age, there seems to be — not a complete but at least to me a kind of partial — erosion of etiquette. I'm not saying this to encourage people to be more rigid. It just seems to me — I'm 50 now — when I was growing up, people would dress and act one way in one context and dress and act one way in a different context. There's some overlap obviously, but now there's this propensity for not just oversharing, but there's information from all corners of the world coming through our devices all the time. And people are putting out information about many facets of their life all the time. Even people I went to high school with who weren't public-facing in the traditional sense are putting out pictures of their kids and what they ate and the wins and the losses. It's a very odd thing to do when in fact we evolved for so long just kind of experiencing ourselves separate from all the other activities that we were doing, and certainly that other people are doing.

In your clinical practice, are you seeing more challenges with people creating separation between aspects of self and aspects of life because of all the information coming at them — and maybe even that they're putting out into the world?

Dr Paul Conti: I think it can be different depending upon what the person is doing, how they're using that information. If you think of falseness of self, it's possible a person can be engaged in something that even they themselves know isn't real. Wanting everyone to see what's best in my life and to think that I'm doing really well — maybe I'm doing that to hide something. If I want to appear externally differently than how I am, there's a good place for curiosity about the falseness of that. What am I trying to protect against? Why is it that I want people to see me in a certain way that might be different from how my life actually is?

But another way can be to engage in ways that are more true to self. Someone who has an interest or a passion that it's hard to find people right around them, but they can find that more distantly. Or people who have a lot of sensibility and compassion for some of the difficult things in the world who can find kindred spirits through social media. So I think we can use or misuse anything around us — we can use it to be closer to ourselves and have a stronger sense of self, or we can use it to distract from who we really are and maybe find solace somewhere else or find accolades outside of us because we're protecting against something.

The important point is always to be honest with ourselves. And if we bring compassionate curiosity, then we're not mad at ourselves. We're not coming at ourselves with "what's wrong with me?" or "why can't I do this thing better?" If we look at ourselves, we don't have to be afraid of what we find. Maybe if we're worried people aren't liking us, we're spending time with not a healthy group of people. Or maybe there's something in myself I need to change if I'm feeling that. The key is just bringing honesty and curiosity and not being so afraid or so negative towards ourselves that we're going to hide from what it is that we can find to knit us together.

Andrew Huberman: I'm not trying to demonize social media, but we are in a strange new version of humanity where let's say somebody's sitting by themselves. Chances are their experience is vastly different than it would have been 30 years ago because they are most likely getting a lot of information about what other people are doing — could be good information, could be interesting, but nonetheless it's very different. Or they are doing things that hopefully they enjoy, but there's this additional layer where it's put out into the world. This is very unusual.

The reason I'm asking about this in the context of addressing the self and exploring the self is that I wonder to what extent being really happy with oneself involves being able to be curious and explore different ways of being and ways of thinking without the impulse of sharing that, and without the feedback comparison of what other people are doing. Because the moment we see something else — there's more sensory input — or the moment we think what we're doing needs to be shared, it changes the experience. It's not truly an alone experience. And I don't think it matters if you put it out to one follower or to a billion followers. It's still externalizing this thing that for thousands of years was just us with our thoughts, us with our emotions. Processing time alone has become, I believe, a very different thing altogether.

Dr Paul Conti: Yeah, I think that's true. I think there's a sweet spot of connectedness to others. We know that it's not good to have too little — that isolation isn't good for us. But where the modern world has gone is it offers us too much of the opposite, where there's not enough aloneness. If we're overconnected, then in order to decide what it is we even like or prefer, how we feel about things, we're looking for external cues. That sweet spot of having some external check-ins — how does the world around me feel, how do people I like and trust feel, how do people who seem like me feel, how do people who seem different from me feel — it's good to have those tests outside. But to have enough aloneness that I am still thinking about myself and the questions of my own life, I'm thinking about those on my own before I'm pinging outside of me for information or validation or even guidance.

Andrew Huberman: I'm willing to bet that many people will find just the being-alone introspective process to be pretty anxiety-provoking. In fact, there's been a bit of a semi-comedic exchange online recently because our mutual friend David Senra — who has a podcast with this very podcast production company — sat down with Marc Andreessen of Netscape and a16z fame. Marc made the statement that was very provocative, which was that great men of history didn't sit around thinking about their thoughts. And of course, knowing Marc, I think that was a bit tongue-in-cheek. I think he was pointing toward the idea that too much thinking and not enough doing can be self-destructive. Of course, the media ran with it, and in classic Andreessen fashion he just doubled down and tripled down on that message, which was fun for a while because it got people thinking about the role of introspection versus the role of doing.

I think what he contributed with those statements, however provocative, was useful in thinking about how much thinking, how much doing when exploring the self. We don't want to spiral into a tunnel that we can't get out of, but we also want to make sure that we're putting things out into the world. So when you have a patient who is not depressed, who is maybe just struggling — no clinical issue that needs dealing with first — how much do you encourage them to explore the self through doing versus thinking about their thinking?

Dr Paul Conti: It depends very much on who that person is and where they need to face to sort of break new ground of self. You mentioned that most people would find the idea of just being with themselves to be anxiety-provoking, and I think that's unfortunate. I think that comes from a lack of leadership in the mental health field and then the stigma of mental health and our fears — those black-box fears that we don't understand. So we're afraid of what we don't understand. What we don't understand is ourselves. So then the idea of being with ourselves becomes very anxiety-provoking, and I think that's not good. I think there are ways that we can go about being with ourselves that we don't have to be afraid of, and the reflection and the thoughts and the ideas and the learning that comes from it is going to guide us towards the best balance for each of us.

There are some people who are very assertive and they want to have high levels of doing in the world, but they still need some reflection. There are other people who are going to be very reflective and they're going to be doing less. We need to understand what profile works for one person. It's not one exact place, but we kind of have a profile of reflection and of doing. If we are well-balanced — where we're asserting ourselves in the world at levels that work for us and we're finding pleasure and gratification in ways that are healthy — now we're finding balance.

If there's too much doing and not enough reflection, not a lot of good will come from that. We'll find that there are diminishing returns. We feel unsatisfied because we're doing too much and maybe taking less pleasure in what we're doing. But if we're doing too little, then we can feel idle and there can be a sense of learned helplessness. So it's finding what is the optimal range for a person to be asserting themselves in the world and then finding gratification in what they're doing. If that's going well, we'll see it there — there's a happy, balanced person. And if not, we'll be able to figure out what is going on in that person. Is there an issue somewhere in the unconscious mind? Are they asserting more and too much and reflecting too little? By looking at the person and going through these steps, we can figure out what serves that person best and how they might adjust from where they are now to get there.

Andrew Huberman: Is it true that there are just some people who don't really think about their thinking very much — they just do stuff? I've had friends say they don't think about their thinking. They just get up in the morning and brush their teeth and go about their day and they're not very introspective. They're not called to think about their thinking. And in some cases these are people who are extremely busy, so maybe that's one reason. But in some cases there are people who just, for whatever reason, the mirror doesn't pop up in their cortex. They're busy doing and observing and they seem functional. Are they missing out on something fundamental, or is that maybe even the goal?

I ask this from a very selfish perspective because growing up I thought, how cool would that be — to just go through life, do stuff, not think about stuff from the past too much, not reflect too much, just get stuff done. And I'm a get-it-done kind of person, but like most people I'm also forced to think about my thinking from time to time.

Andrew Huberman: When you say forced, what then forces you?

Andrew Huberman: Oh, sorry — it just spontaneously happens. I reflect, and the reflections generally come from: is that something I should explore? Is that a problem? Is the way I'm thinking about or doing that a problem? Or is the way that they're thinking about and doing something a problem? This us-them thing — it's either positive or negative. I confess I don't really sit around a lot and think about all the things going right. I should. I have a gratitude practice. I generally don't sit around and think, oh, the walls are up and the ceiling's intact and I'm fed and I'm healthy — and of course until something bad happens and then we do our inventory. But yeah, I just kind of wonder whether or not there's a spectrum of reflexive self-exploration.

Dr Paul Conti: People have different reflective capacity and people have different reflective interest. There are people who have more, and that could serve them well to be more self-aware. But people may have less reflective capacity but be more naturally generative, and then they're just moving forward. The question is: even though we have different natural levels of reflective inclination, are we happy? Are our lives going well? If life is going well and that person is healthy, has good mental health and secure relationships, and life is going well and they're not reflecting very much — that sounds good. How I would characterize that is they're living through the generative drive. They're being productive, contributory people in the world. They're making the world better. They're learning. They're growing. They're making themselves better and just moving forward. That's a great way to be.

For most of us, in order to get there, we do have to be reflective. And some of what will happen is it will come to us. You said you're not planning to sit down and be reflective, but then it comes to you — hey, I should think about this possibility at hand. What are other people thinking? How is that impacting what I'm thinking? So you become reflective because your brain is leading you there. It's saying, "Hey, we need to stop and think about things. That's how we're going to make better decisions." So our brains will lead us to reflection. But if we're moving so fast or we're defended against it, then we're not reflective, and that's not good for us. That's how you could see someone who's always busy so they don't have time to reflect. But the big question is: is that person happy? If that person is not happy and they're complaining and they feel like they're working and never getting anything out of it or never getting any reward, then it's not good that they're not reflective. They're blocking themselves from something that they need.

There are spectrums that apply differently to different people, and we all reside on different parts of the spectrum whether it's reflective capacity, assertion, or pleasure. In terms of what we're doing and whether it's healthy for us, it's different — we're each and all unique. So we have to stop and look at ourselves: how's this going for me? How am I functioning? Is it working for me? Am I pausing and thinking enough? Maybe the answer is yes, maybe the answer is no, maybe I'm not sure. But if I'm not happy, let me go back and revisit that question. This curiosity of self can lead us to: how am I built to function? Am I functioning in a way that really works for me? If not, why not? What change might I bring? And here again we're using the ability to understand and to go through a process to make our lives better.

Internal vs. External Processing

Andrew Huberman: I realize these aren't clinical terms, but someone recently said about themselves that they are an external processor — they need to talk things through in order to understand what's going on for them and make decisions. And that implies that some people are internal processors. Is that true? Do you see in your practice that some people do best by sitting and thinking, walking and thinking, driving and thinking, kind of working things through — and other people actually work it out by talking, either to you or to a trusted person? Are those two semi-separate bins of people?

Dr Paul Conti: I don't know that they're separate bins of people. I think the ability to think and to be objective in our thinking differs among people. What happens often is we get stuck in our own minds. So then we're thinking but we're not thinking productively, because we get stuck in our own loops. And when we take the thought process outside of us — if we write the words down, or if we say the words to another person — we're bringing different brain processes online, different error-checking processes online. Some of us can do more of this inside. But a lot of times we just get stuck inside of ourselves and we have to bring different brain processes online. Making words and putting those words out there in writing or in speech is different. It sort of holds the brain more accountable. That's why sometimes we'll just say something out loud or say something to someone else and say, "Oh, I figured that out." Or, "Thanks for helping me figure it out." And we might realize all they did was listen. Because just by being there, the other person is prompting us to form words. We do more due diligence inside of ourselves that way.

Andrew Huberman: I must confess I'm fascinated by this notion of people differing in their tendency to work things out internally and then bring that forward into the world for more help or additional solutions. Or maybe they've figured it out, so they're bringing a vetted version of self into the world.

I notice I tend to respect that picture, but I realize that's not necessarily the way it always works. I had a conversation with my sister this morning — we're quite close — and there was no friction, but the direction she was taking what we were talking about and the direction I was taking it weren't aligned. So we did a little brother-sister pushback, and then at some point we both realized we weren't aligned with the other person. We kind of arrived at this overlap in the Venn diagram, and that's when there was some real clarity that came to something important. I thought, how cool is that? She has her way of doing things, I have my way of doing things. I don't think I could have gotten there without that conversation.

And yet for two-thirds of the conversation, I'm thinking to myself, "Oh god, this is an already difficult thing made more difficult by the fact that there's this other picture of it." And then boom, you hit this convergence. That's real synergy. I certainly couldn't have come up with that on my own.

Dr Paul Conti: Because you were doing something together that involved real and open communication. So you had to be able to say, "This is how I think and feel," and put that out there and test it and bounce it off the other person and take inside what the other person thinks and says. There's a really complicated process there, which is how human beings come to understand one another or come to agree or come to a place where there's a way forward even if there isn't complete agreement. We have to do these things outside of us.

Most often, if we're going to be at our healthiest, we do want to be able to do some of it inside. It's a good place to start, and we can do that alone with ourselves. Very often we haven't had a way of going inside and saying, "I'm going to think about myself and I want to do that productively." Part of what I'm trying to bring to the fore is that there are ways of going about being with yourself, thinking about yourself, thinking within yourself, that can lead us towards progress and sometimes answers. If we're doing that, we can probably all do more of that than we're doing. If we're given a way to do it where we think, "Okay, this works for me, I'm actually learning about myself while I'm doing this," then we're bringing a vetted self — our best self — to what we're going to find outside of us. That may be collaboration with another person, talking with another person and coming to some middle ground when there isn't agreement.

If we start with ourselves and we're able to reflect and to bring self-standing to the fore, we're much stronger — not stronger in that we're going to force our way through things, but much stronger in terms of both self-knowledge and ability to be flexible when we're out in the real world meeting other people.

Andrew Huberman: I think the picture of internal processors is one that — and maybe I've seen too many movies — is one of: okay, people who internally process bring the best version of themselves forward, they don't burden other people. But I think by now we understand as a culture that that person, while traditionally revered, is also a little bit disconnected from all the chatter. This is a kind of male-centric phenotype I'm drawing here — it could be about a woman as well. There's also this idea that they're a little bit disconnected from all the chatter.

But in my mind, I have this belief that if people are externally processing a lot, they're also revealing their uncertainty, and that's not a good thing to reveal to the world. Again, this probably reflects my age and the times when I was raised and a bit about the culture and my family. But I think in general — we never really talk about "strong, silent type but lazy," right? Like we're thinking strong and silent and therefore getting stuff done. The tacit message is strong and silent so they're not burdening other people with their internal stuff. We also assume that people who process internally are actually processing — that they're not just sitting there.

I used to joke: what's my bulldog Costello thinking about? I used to think it was white noise. Like maybe he was just sitting there experiencing the world as white noise. I don't know what he was thinking about.

Dr Paul Conti: Could have been quantum physics.

Andrew Huberman: Could have been quantum physics. I doubt that, but it could have been. And if it was, he was good at keeping a secret. Yeah. The picture actually works because he was a big, kind of stoic dog. He had his joyful expression. But there's something about this notion of somebody who processes internally, gets a lot done, and maybe even serves others more than somebody who's processing externally. And it's hard to probe this area without setting up natural gender stereotypes. The stereotype is that women externally process more than men. I don't know that that's actually true. It just might be that men process less overall. Who the hell knows what anyone else is thinking half the time? I don't know what I'm thinking.

So do you think that people who hold it in more are coming to a greater understanding and get more done in the world than those who externally process?

Dr Paul Conti: No, I think not necessarily. I think what's best for us is a balance. And again, it's going to be different for each person, but there has to be a balance. There are things that I know and understand inside of myself that aren't up for question, that I am sure of and resolved about. It might be a line not to cross because it's a certain moral boundary — I know how I feel about it and I know where I stand. There are issues of self that we want to feel very resolved. How I want to treat people in the world and how I want to be treated — it's good to know those things inside of us.

But it is good to then test externally about how we're interfacing with the world. Too much internal processing can be too self-referential, and now I may think that how I think it should be is actually how it should be, because I haven't tested outside of me and I haven't done enough of that testing to see that a lot of other people feel differently than me. There's actually more gray in it than I might have thought.

So there has to be a balance. A balance of what we discern and know inside, but bringing that vetted self to the world means that the vetted self also knows that it doesn't know everything, and it's testing in the outside world to learn what other people are thinking. Can I learn from that? Bringing openness is also very important. No one way of being is better. We all need a balance. That balance is going to differ. It involves knowing things about ourselves and feeling resolute, and also having the humility to face the world with openness and realizing there are a lot of things I may think I know, or think I know exactly how something is or how something should be. But let me hold on for a second and check that with the outside world, so that I don't become too self-referential — where we can become bigoted or prejudiced. Those can be outcomes, or we can just step a little bit into ignorance that there's more in the world than our own opinions.

Andrew Huberman: I want to kind of break down the notions of quiet versus verbal. Introspective doesn't necessarily mean calm. So many assumptions around all this, and none of it is necessarily true. And the reason I'm so genuinely curious about this is I think that most of the world is confronted with this Mark Andreessen provocative question: how much time should we spend in here, and how does it serve us when we're out in the rest of the world? And vice versa. If we're just talking and doing all day, maybe we are processing and we can be peaceful inside, lay our head down, and that's it. It's all out there for better or worse. But for us it's great.

Dr Paul Conti: Yeah. I think we have to be very wary of mapping some stereotype — "this is good and that's not good" — and applying some value system when we're outside of looking at a person in a context. Because all of those things — being internalized, speaking less, or being hyperverbal — they could mean anything under the sun. It has to be: who is the person and what is the context?

If you're describing Barbara Chapman in meetings, I interpret that as she's communicating judiciously. She's in a place where maybe sometimes people say excess things because they're self-aggrandizing or they want to bring something up or they're trying to guide a conversation one way or another. And you think, no, that's a place where less is more. Just communicating about something that matters when it matters. That's speaking judiciously. I don't know if her mind was going a mile a minute inside or if there was a calm equanimity, but I think who that person was and what that situation was — that was very adaptive.

Same thing if there's someone who's speaking a lot, but they just have a lot of ideas and they're really constructive ideas and they're talking to people about those ideas and they're enthusiastic and it's helpful. Well, that sounds good to me. That sounds very different than someone who's hyperverbal and you can tell they're saying the same thing but coming from a different angle and they're anxious and they may want validation. So the person in the context makes all the difference.

We want to be able to identify when a person might fit a certain profile. There are people who are quiet because they're strong and they're silent and there's not a lot going on inside, but they're resolute. Okay, that's a kind of person. But we shouldn't assume that someone is that way until we've looked at who that person is and what is the context in which we're assessing them. We're human, so we fit patterns. But we're all unique. So you won't know what pattern we may be fitting until you really look at us.

Probe Questions and the Examined Life

Andrew Huberman: One thing I love about your book is you have probe questions — questions for people to ask themselves. For me, that was a huge gift of the book and the work in it. When I got to see an advanced copy, I was like, okay, what do I ask myself and how do I go about doing that? How do I figure out what's going right as a stepping stone to maybe exploring what's not going right? But certainly to really understand where my strengths might lie. That's a really unique gift, because I think we don't have enough of that. We have a lot of "what's going wrong, where are the friction points, what's wrong with me" kind of stuff. And I think starting from a place of really knowing what the questions are to ask oneself is something I personally found immensely useful.

And I realize we're mainly discussing theory up until now, although I'm about to ask you a very practical question. Assuming no pathology, no life-crippling anxiety or depression or panic — how much do you think people should try and adjust what I call the autonomic set point? Some people are just more expressive with their hands, with their words. They want to move a lot more, and if they don't, it makes them anxious. Other people are more still. We again assume that if they're physically still, things are probably a bit more still internally — and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

But there is a lot of emphasis, including on this podcast, on learning to sit with stress, learning to sit with anxiety, and not just letting it out or experiencing it. And sometimes I wonder — despite knowing the immense value of those tools, and I've benefited so much from things like non-sleep deep rest and meditation — how much should we be trying to control our states? I do wonder if it's good for us to think that there's something wrong with us if we feel a certain way.

Dr Paul Conti: 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. If you're finding a deep state of peace that's not sleep, and you find that helps you be a better you — it gives you some groundedness, you feel healthier for it, and you're better able to solve problems — you're learning something and doing something because it serves you well and helps you be at your best. That's different than thinking, "Oh, I need to be different."

If a person thinks, "I need to be different, I need to be calmer or more peaceful" — what does that mean? Is that person imposing something external on themselves? There are people who are very active, and yes, they can sit quietly sometimes, but they're not really built for it. They're active people and it works for them to be active. They may be quite meditative when they don't seem to be. They can be doing something and we see a lot of movement in them, but inside they can be in a meditative state.

It's so easy for us — it's well-meaning in that we're trying to understand ourselves and others and find patterns — but it's so tempting to think that we know something just because we're observing someone in a certain state or observing someone talking or not talking. We have to ask the right questions in order to get there. The only way we really know the answers for a person is we have to understand that person and their context. We must ask the right questions.

You had talked about trying to write practical routes of approach to ourselves in the book. I'm doing that because think of it this way: if someone wanted to learn physics, would you say, "Well, just stop, go somewhere and think about physics"? No. There has to be a route of approach — here's some of the basic knowledge, think about this, approach that way, read from this book and then that book. 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 learn horticulture." I'll sit with myself, but you have to help 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. 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: how do I function? What does work well for me? 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? Is it working for 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 feel uncomfortable?

Now we're bringing curiosity. And yes, we want to learn from patterns and 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 we're in a therapy process — we have to take everything that we know and then see it all through the lens of that person. We have to do it that way or we'll lead ourselves astray.

The Clinical Session: Inventories, Questions, and Agency

Andrew Huberman: If you're willing, I'm curious about throwing out a sort of 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 there's nothing really to dig into there just yet. And the person comes to you and says, "Yeah, I don't know, work is okay but this and so and so at work, and I guess this is good, and I'm dating and I'm in my life." And they're just kind of reporting. You observe human patterns. Your pattern recognition is presumably oriented toward where there's emotion, where there's patterns in them, how it matches to templates that only you could harbor.

When you hear all that stuff — and what 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, in my life is this but this but this — what does that tell you? And what does it tell you specifically about where that person should invest effort into thinking or doing?

Dr Paul Conti: The way to probe is to encourage reflection. Because with what you said, I think: I'm hearing somebody reporting. It's like they're just telling me the news of what went on. I'm doing this, I'm doing that. Mom did this, dad did that. It's kind of an inventory or a laundry list. What it makes me think is: I wonder how much of that you're really choosing. How much of that is intentional? How much of that is just a reflex?

The behaviors in their life — how much of what they're reporting are they really choosing? How much of that is what they want to be doing? How much of that is working for them? What we're trying to do then is encourage some interest in examination: well, why am I doing all of this? 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 if I'm dating — 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 look at it that way — what are you really choosing, and what's working for you — we're off to the races of an examined life. And it's very interesting that sometimes by midway through the second day of an intensive process, the person wants to revisit almost everything. They realize maybe 10 to 20% of all those things they just said — this is what I do, I really value, and I want to be doing more of. The others they're not so sure of. They don't know why they're doing some of those things.

And we are really along the process of change because we're looking at ourselves. It may seem strange that someone would see 80% of what they just told you and say, "I don't know if I want to do that 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. It's like, "Well, this is what I am because this is what I've accumulated by grabbing and carrying with me as I'm moving through life." And there's not an organization to it.

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. Just like we want to do with our physical health — we want to build good physical health — likewise we want to build good mental health. 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.

Andrew Huberman: So what I'm hearing is: in order to gain more agency over any areas of our life, we have to ask the why question. Why am I doing what I'm doing now? And why aren't I doing this other thing that perhaps would serve me better? It starts with questions of self.

What do you do — and this must be incredibly frustrating, at least it would be to me — what do you do if somebody says, "Well, I know I should work out, but I don't." And you say, "Well, why not?" And they say, "Well, I don't know. I'm tired. I know I should." And then you say, "Well, why do you still hang out with Sharon when you always come back from it feeling totally exhausted?" And they say, "Oh, you know, I don't know."

How do you work past the person who's just like, "This is just life. This is just what life requires. I got to work. I got my friends. Like, what am I going to do — overhaul?" And this probably varies by region and by generation, the extent to which people are willing to look at things and think and kind of spin them around — rotate the cube as I like to call it — and look at it from underneath a bit. Some people are like, "Ah, that's just the album. That's just how I do." So how do you get somebody to do this?

Dr Paul Conti: If someone is talking in the way of the person you described — saying, "Well, this is just what I do" — and they're describing that every time they go out with Sharon, they come home and they feel kind of drained and they don't feel good, then they move on to something else and to something else, and they might talk about their job and something that's frustrating them all the time and they just keep going forward — then I might say: what you're doing is you're showing both of us where the X's are. The X's mark the spot to dig. So you're showing us, "Hey, here's where there's some treasure. Let's dig where this X is."

If you're going out with someone and every time you see that person you come home and you feel a sense of lethargy and a sense of time wasn't well spent and you kind of feel hopeless — it's really important to think about why you're doing that. And I would link it to something else. I might say, "You had said earlier on, or a couple of sessions ago, that you really want to find a partner and you really want to find a good relationship. So that's important to you. You told me that it was. And now you're telling me that you keep seeing this person where you know every time you go out the front door that nothing good is going to come of it and you're going to come back feeling worse than when you left. We should look at why. And we don't have to be scared to look at why, because this is where the fear comes in — 'Oh my gosh, what is wrong with me? Why would I be doing that?'"

Somewhere inside of them, that person knows that's not working for them but they're still doing it. So there's some fear of looking at that. If we say, "Hey, no harm, no foul — let's just think about why," it may be that that person really wants Sharon to like them. Maybe they feel a need to be liked. So they don't like this person, but they think they need this person to like them. Maybe they're a person who always takes too much care of others versus themselves and they don't like Sharon, but Sharon likes them. So they don't really want to end that relationship. There's something going on there because the person is saying, "Hey, I'm doing this thing that absolutely won't get me what I want and I'll keep doing it."

You say, "Well, that's not really what you want. If you are doing it over and over again, you think you're going to keep doing it. It's just because you haven't felt empowered enough that, hey, I can understand myself and I can bring some change so that my behaviors, my choices, are actually in line with my wishes, with my strivings." So now we get that person interested. We tell them that there is an X. Let's understand why it is that you're still going out with Sharon. There's got to be something to learn there. And there always is. If we dig where the X's are, we do get some treasure. It might be a little, it might be a lot, but we learn from that and we bring that learning to life. The rubber hits the road as that leads to real life change.

Andrew Huberman: That makes really good sense. And thank you for the clarity of that answer. It brings us back to asking why, to develop more agency around possibly making different choices. It's not always — I guess one could realize they really want that kind of relationship but with someone else, or they want a completely different kind of relationship with the same person. And to work on that. But it starts with asking questions.

I realize I'm going backwards into this, but it goes from: inventories are a start toward informing what questions are useful. Useful questions probe understanding that hopefully develops more agency. Do you encourage people, once they get to a point of "oh yeah, maybe I want a different sort of relationship to this person or thing or activity in life" — do you give them specific action directives? Like, how about between this session and next session you go to the gym twice? Do you tend to give people clear directives about what could really help if you sense that that could really help?

Dr Paul Conti: Sometimes, but I think it's much more effective if it's arrived at collaboratively. So if we decide, "Hey, you know what would be really good?" and we both agree — we've talked back and forth — and if you can get to the gym once before you come back next week, then we talk about that back and forth. Maybe that person wants to go to the gym five times before they come back, but each time they do that they get frustrated with themselves and they don't go at all. So we might say, "Look, we've been talking about this. I do want to be going to the gym. I want to be getting exercise, and I see I go between too much and too little. I go between taking on too much and I get frustrated and I don't do anything. How about something that's more measured? Maybe I'll try and go on Monday and Friday." Maybe they decide, "Yeah, you know what? Maybe twice is okay. Or should it be once? Because if you get once under your belt, you can get twice under your belt the next week."

We're just trying to understand so there's no mystery to it and we know what we're doing. Someone who wants to have a different relationship and says, "Maybe I could have a good relationship with Sharon, but I'd have to talk to her about A, B, and C that isn't really going well" — okay, how might you do that? Let's think about it. Because that communication isn't going to happen unless you bring it. And what's keeping you from that? How might you approach her in a way that you could really talk? What's holding you back?

We're trying to problem-solve, but we're doing so in a way that's open, where we know what we're doing and we're not bringing some magic or mystery to it. We're trying to move ahead and we understand it's one step at a time and we want to take those steps. We don't want someone to think that a process of change can occur so fast that it can't possibly occur as fast as we want it to, and then we get frustrated in two weeks. So we have to set reasonable expectations: "Hey, it might be that you could really get somewhere with this in a couple of months. It seems like that from our conversations. What do you think?" We make sure we're on the same page. And then we say, "Well, one week after another, we could put one foot in front of the other and we can get ourselves there."

It's not easy. It might not be easy to broach that first conversation with Sharon, or to get yourself to the gym that first time. But we can help you bolster yourself so all your arrows are going in the same direction. You set yourself up for success. You're not going to try to go the morning after a long night out. We set you up for success and you get a win. And small wins empower and embolden us to take a little bit more chances and get bigger wins.

And if our structure of self and our function of self are in good places, then what rests on top of that is empowerment. There's a sense of empowerment in us and also a sense of humility that lets us accept that we're human, that things aren't perfect, and maybe I have been making the same mistake over and over again. It's all okay. I'm human. And if I have the humility to accept that and I have empowerment, then I can meet the world through agency and this active gratitude. I'm grateful that Sharon's still here and I can talk to her. I'm grateful that there's a gym for me to go to. I'm healthy enough to get myself there and I've got enough agency inside of myself that I'm going to do these things that I've decided to do. This is how we make life change, whether it be small or big. And how do we get to big life change? It starts with small steps.

Childhood Patterns, Insight, and Behavioral Change

Andrew Huberman: Okay, so once again, we're talking about asking the right questions. There's no doubt that the families we're born into and the people we grew up around impact us tremendously. At what point does it make sense to try and think about the patterns that you were exposed to as a way to have more agency, to ask better questions?

Right now, in addition to this not-so-little debate about the value of introspection versus just doing — and clearly it's both — there's also a debate going on about how much to think about the past and traumas. The dilemma seems to be: do you look at your life as something that's happening now and focus on the why questions so you do what you need to do to make your life better? Or is there real value in identifying patterns that you observed or were forced to participate in as a kid as a way of having more agency? In other words, if someone sees or just verbally hears a pattern, does it actually help them make change?

Dr Paul Conti: Yes, it does. It's insight that sets us free and it's insight that puts us in the driver's seat of our lives. Otherwise, we're just reacting. Imagine a person who had a very overcontrolling parent. They don't have insight and they become overcontrolling themselves. They associate that high level of control with being powerful. They feel less vulnerable when they're being powerful. So they end up being overcontrolling with their own children just like their parents were.

But when the person does the opposite, that's not necessarily good either. A person could say, "Well, my parent was overcontrolling. I'm going to be easygoing." But if that person doesn't have insight, they can become too permissive. So now they're not exercising the healthy control of a parent. They could identify with what the parent did and do the same thing, or they could push away from it and do the opposite. But the opposite isn't good either.

It's insight that lets us say, "My parent or parents were overcontrolling, and maybe it even got to a place where it was very difficult and maybe even abusive, and I don't want to be like that. And I'm not going to be like that. But I'm not going to rush to the opposite pole either. Now I have to — and get to — figure out what's a healthy level of control. How much control does it make sense to exert to keep the child safe, but also to allow the child enough latitude to be growing and making their own decisions?"

So it's insight that says, "I see what that was in my past." And often we do need to do that. Often early childhood experiences, especially experiences within family units, have a great impact upon us and will guide our behaviors. Like automatons, we're acting one way or another and we don't know why. But it's insight that lets us gain the understanding: here's how it was when I was growing up. I can look at that. I can see it — good, bad, or otherwise. And then I can decide how I want to integrate that information, how the whole me is going to be in the driver's seat.

Andrew Huberman: There seems to be something fundamentally valuable about insights where we realize we want to push away from something, a pattern, or we want to get more like someone or something that would serve us better. And I realize that might just be a giant "duh" based on what you said, but I'm trying to think about what that means about the human mind.

I can imagine that there are instances where people are in patterns of behavior and they're struggling with them. They're not working for them and they know it and they want to make the change. This is the thing I hear all the time: "I know I should do it, but I don't." What you're saying is: when they can know that that pattern was something they observed, or they're doing the opposite of something they observed — doesn't matter which — suddenly they have agency. What do you think that is? Because my clinician can tell me, "Hey, you know what, you should really start to eat better and get to sleep on time because we both know this isn't serving you well." And the person comes back and they're not doing the behaviors. They're not changing. And then you ask them, "Hey, what is this about?" And you get to a place where it reflects something in childhood. You're telling me that that realization gives them a sense of agency. What allows that? What is the wedge that lets people change their behavior simply by understanding that some or all of it is inherited from a pattern?

Dr Paul Conti: When we realize that there's something — whether it's external or internal — controlling us, it diffuses that tension. Part of why it diffuses the tension and lets us see clearly and gives us control is because we don't like it. None of us want to be like in The Manchurian Candidate, where there's a sound and then we behave in a certain way and we're triggered and then we just do something automatically. We don't like that. And if we realize, "Oh, that's happening in me" — if I realize, "Gosh, I've been programmed, and if someone is disagreeing with me it makes me feel so bad or so vulnerable or insecure, it makes me feel like I felt when I was a kid" — so now what I'm doing is I'm being just like the parent was. I'm not giving my child a chance to have his or her own opinion, because I won't let myself tolerate that feeling. So it's just been automatic from when I was a kid, and it felt so bad, and now I'm in the position of trying to make myself feel good by imposing that on my own child. I don't want to do that.

Or realizing: because that happened and I wasn't allowed to have my own say when I was growing up, I'm letting my children kind of run wild in ways that aren't even safe for them. And wow, I pushed so hard against that.

This realization that something inside of us is being triggered and then we just do something automatically that we haven't thought about or decided to — that is a very strong effect on humans. We really don't like that. So if we can combine that with compassionate curiosity — if one of us were really, really hungry and there's food right outside the door but we're not getting up to get it, it's a reasonable question to ask why. It's got to be something very powerful to keep a person who's so hungry from just going and getting food. What are these forces within us that are exerting such control over us?

Now we get the person to be on their own side instead of saying, "I want to do A, B, and C, but I just can't, or there's just not enough time." They're like, "Whoa. Do I really want to do it? If I do, what's keeping me from doing it? How am I keeping me from doing it?" Now we bring our gumption, our resources internally and externally, to the problem, and the whole thing shifts.

Andrew Huberman: Oh man, that helps a lot. Not just me — I have to say, people not feeling motivated, people not being able to break a pattern that isn't serving them, whether or not it's action or inaction, is probably the most common question I get. It's the most common theme. It's probably the reason why podcasts like this can exist. I think people have a natural curiosity about the science and the intellectual aspects — neural circuits and hormones and all that kind of stuff — but I think ultimately people want more agency over their behavior. They want to feel that.

Dr Paul Conti: Yes.

Andrew Huberman: And I think what you said is just blaring in the room, at least for me: people don't like to be controlled. So much so that we know that we got kids to quit smoking back in the '90s and early 2000s by advertisements of rich old white men wringing their hands and cackling about the health problems that people are getting while they're getting rich. That's what stopped teens from smoking. It was "you're not going to control me." It wasn't that they didn't like smoking — nicotine is incredibly reinforcing. The moment that you have an enemy, you feel the sense of agency. You said, "No, you're on your own side."

So realizing one is being controlled — I realize I'm just saying what you're saying, but I want to make sure this really resonates — that's the essence of agency. You have to be on your own side. And to get on your own side, it's helpful to not necessarily have an enemy, but to say, "Oh, this was all about my parents, and I'm going in the opposite direction in ways that are defeating me. They're controlling me even though I think I'm controlling me." Boom. Behavior changes. Or, "Oh, this is just like my mom or just like my dad or just like the environment I grew up in," and now somebody can advocate for themselves.

Dr Paul Conti: Yes.

Andrew Huberman: I also see this in the media nowadays. So much of social media is about us-them, and people are perfectly happy — for understandable reasons — to be like, "You're not going to control me." We saw this during the pandemic. We see this at every level. What is this human thing about not wanting to be controlled that in this context is very positive?

Dr Paul Conti: Yeah. We don't like to be controlled, and that sense of agency can blossom out of that. We don't want to think or know that someone or something is putting one over on us. Humans don't want to be dupes. We don't like that. It makes us upset.

And here the magic realization is that there is no enemy. We can get in our own way. And who's most likely to thwart my efforts towards being healthier? It's absolutely me. So I can get in my own way, but it doesn't mean I'm my enemy. If I really want to be healthier and I want to get to the gym to be healthier — okay, who's standing in my way? It will be me. So why am I standing in my way? Do I secretly hate myself and want myself not to be healthy? No, it's not that. If I'm standing in my own way, there's a reason. Maybe I really think that I have so much to do and it's for other people and it means more than me. So really, I don't think I deserve the time and energy it would take. I'm not going to spend it on myself. Maybe that's why I don't go. Or maybe I don't go because I'm trying to protect myself, because I'm worried — the last couple of times I tried it didn't go well and I felt worse. So I don't even want to start. I'm standing in my own way because of fear of failure.

There are many, many reasons we could be standing in our own way, but we're not our own enemy. The realization of "why am I doing this? I don't have to do this" — actually, there's one me, and I could say: if I really want to go to the gym but I'm not going, I want to go and I don't want to go. It must be true or I'd be there. Why is it that I don't want to go? Am I not worth the time and energy? Maybe. Do I think there are more important things to do? Do I really think that, and am I not admitting it to myself? Am I afraid that if I try I'll fail?

As I've often said to further the example: hey, you get to decide if you go to the gym or not. We just want you to be on the same page with yourself. You can decide not to if you say, "Actually, there are more things that are bigger priorities for my time now. Someone else is sick. I'm taking care of that person. That really is what I'm choosing now." Okay, so I'm not going to go now, and the whole me decides that. But on the other side of this, when this drain on my time and energy is different, then I am going to go. Now the person's on the same page and they're not making themselves feel worse by wanting to go and not going.

Or I might say, "I really do want to go, but I know I'm standing in my own way because I'm afraid I'll fail. I got upset the last eight times I tried." Now we're really digging where the money's at. We go and look and say, "Okay, you're protecting yourself. How do we try and set you up for success so you'll want to go forward this time, because you'll see that it's different from the other times and you won't just be repeating something that just made you feel bad?"

That's how we get all our arrows pointing in the same direction. We realize there is no enemy here. There is me standing in my own way, but that's okay. I can look at that and I can figure that out. And now we're at that simple goodness principle where we're all on the same page with ourselves and we accomplish our goals.

Trauma, Insight, and Living Intentionally

Andrew Huberman: We wouldn't wish trauma on anybody. But how is it then that people who had reasonably healthy or trauma-free childhoods operate in the world? Are they moving toward things from a genuine place of curiosity and they're not pushing off anything — not countering a childhood example? Does that represent the ultimate goal — that we're moving towards things because we want them and we're not resisting anything, nor are we copying bad patterns from our childhood?

Dr Paul Conti: Yes, in the sense that I think that's what I would map to living intentionally — to being as self-aware as we can be while also realizing we can't be completely self-aware, and then living intentionally. Yes, that's what we're trying to get to.

The presence of real trauma that overwhelms our coping skills and leaves our brain function different going forward does make it harder to achieve these things, which is why we want to look at trauma if there are traumas in our lives and how they may have changed us. But it doesn't prevent that. People can have significant traumas and still be on this path and have some insight into how the trauma is affecting them — and even insight that the trauma needs more work to really get their arms around it. But that person can still get there.

Likewise, someone who hasn't had trauma might have real difficulty getting there. If I haven't had major trauma, but just circumstances or my own maybe overly ambitious approach with not enough time and energy — hey, I did try and get to the gym four or five times and it didn't work out, and I really do feel down on myself — it's not linked to any prior trauma. It's just that I've gotten into this cycle and every time I think about being healthier, now I'm telling myself, "Oh, you'll never be able to do it, you messed it up three times." And so I'm inadvertently making it harder for myself. Without any pre-existing trauma, that person could end up having much more trouble than someone who does have pre-existing trauma.

Andrew Huberman: How do you respond to the words, "I get tired just thinking about it"? Something that would be good for somebody — I get tired just thinking about it. It involves energy. I'm guessing you've heard those words before.

Dr Paul Conti: Oh, I want to understand a lot more about that. What that tells me is there's a lot of brain space and a lot of energy that's taken up in the thinking of it. For a lot of people, they get so tired of thinking about trying to go to the gym because thinking about trying to go to the gym takes more energy from them than actually being there. Because it's running around in their head how they failed and how bad they're going to feel and how they really want to do this and maybe they will, maybe they won't. There's so much going on inside of them that they're making something very, very complicated. I want to understand why all that energy inside. And is there a way that we can simplify that? That's a marker that there's something going on that we want to be able to get at, because it's not the healthiest process to say that there's a lot of internal turmoil about something that almost certainly can be better understood and simplified.

Andrew Huberman: So that statement represents ten mental workouts that are exhausting them, with no improvement in physical health. Let's take those ten mental workouts and figure out how we can turn that into one physical workout. That person's going to feel a lot better physically and mentally.

Questioning Common Psychological Assumptions

Andrew Huberman: I want to table a couple of common statements about the mind and psychology. I'm perfectly willing to accept that they're true, but I have a feeling they're at least not entirely true. One is: however you talk to others, that's also how you talk to yourself. Is this just nonsense? There are some people who are very harsh with other people. Are they walking around being harsh to themselves, or are they peaceful inside and externalizing all of it?

I had a former colleague — I'll keep him anonymous — who used to say, "I don't get stressed, I give stress." That feels true to me. He gave up all his cards by telling me that. But he was very proud of it. He's like, "I don't get stressed, I give stress." And I thought, I bet he's pretty stressed in there. And then I realized I don't know what the hell is going on in there. Maybe he's just absolutely right. So can we make that assumption that how people treat others is really how they treat themselves?

Dr Paul Conti: No. Sometimes that may be true, but sometimes that may not be true. You have to look at the person and look at the situation. For most people, when there's a difference between the two, it is not the person who is externalizing all that stress — giving everybody stress but feeling calm inside. That is not a healthy way to be, and there's something going on there that warrants really looking at and addressing. There's a problem there.

For most people, if it's different, it's the opposite — where people are treating others much, much better than they're treating themselves. They may say, "Well, that's okay. Everyone makes mistakes." I may say that to you, but then go, "What's wrong with me?" And maybe act very differently inside. And that's mostly what good people do — we'll give other people a kind word or a benefit of the doubt, but we get very harsh. Our language and our tone inside of ourselves can be very different.

This idea of: if you're going to make yourself special, don't make yourself special in a negative way. For most of us who are making ourselves special, it is in a negative way. Other people can get a pass about something — they made an honest mistake, we'll give them another chance. But for us we may use much harsher language: "What's wrong with me? I'm an idiot. I messed that up again." There's a lot of that going on inside of us.

So no — if we're treating other people kindly, it may be that we're treating ourselves kindly inside, but that is certainly not a given. And if we're being unkind to other people, most of the time there is some real turmoil and that person is not feeling okay inside. The person who's making other people unhappy and they themselves feel okay — that's a different kind of problem and it's not a common one.

Intrusive Thoughts

Andrew Huberman: In your book, you talk about intrusive thoughts and things that people can do to deal with them. If you wouldn't mind, could you give us a few examples of things that people can do to deal with intrusive thoughts?

Dr Paul Conti: Well, the first is we have to identify them. There are people who have intrusive thoughts — something they may say to themselves hundreds of times a day — and they're not aware of it until they stop and think: what am I saying to myself over and over again? What's running around? Being aware of our self-talk. The idea that we're not going to be safe, or worried about one's children and safety, or worried about getting fired, or worried that there's not going to be enough — these things can come to us over and over again without us being aware of it. So the first thing is we must be aware. And it may sound strange to say we could say something to ourselves hundreds of times and not be aware of it, but absolutely that happens.

So we have to be curious: what is it that I'm saying to myself in these quiet moments? And then: what purpose is it serving? If I keep telling myself that nothing's going to be okay — why am I saying that? Am I so afraid that nothing's going to be okay that I'm trying to save myself from the shock of nothing being okay? Maybe. Am I just so afraid about something? Something happened in the past, someone was hurt or there was a loss, and now the intrusive thoughts tell me that things can't be okay. But what it's telling me is I haven't processed that loss. There is going to be a meaning. There is a meaning to intrusive thoughts. There always is.

So we want to recognize them. We want to look for that meaning. And then there are strategies of what we can do. They can range from thought redirection — sometimes we think something because we're thinking it over and over again, and if we thought-redirect, it gives us greater control. Sometimes we diffuse some of the energy in it by understanding why we're thinking that thing and maybe taking measures. If I'm worried that I'm not safe and things aren't going to be okay, maybe I'm letting myself be in an unsafe situation and I need to change that situation. This is a place sometimes medicines can help. There are a lot of things that we can bring to bear, but we first have to recognize that they're happening. And then — running countercurrent to modern mental health — we have to actually understand why, if we want that to change for the better. If we want to really get into the engine and figure it out instead of just trying to polish the hood and not look at where that problem is coming from.

Dreams and the Unconscious Mind

Andrew Huberman: In keeping with commonly discussed themes out in the world that I question: are our dreams informative? And is there anything that we can know about ourselves — like patterns of thinking when we're awake — that make our dreams more informative? For example, if I tend to think in analogy or parallel construction, will the content of my dreams be more meaningful to me to understand through the lens of analogy or parallel construction?

Dr Paul Conti: I'm not sure about the last point. I just don't know. My clinical experience has been that people's dreams can have a lot of meaning regardless of what kind of thinker they are. Someone who might be a very concrete thinker may have dreams that are really telling us a lot, because what the unconscious mind wants to bring to the surface doesn't have a lot of room to do that — that person is thinking concretely and they're not opening up their mind that way. So the dream is expressing something there's no other way of getting to the surface. Or it may be that people who are very expressive and cultivate routes of expression have informative dreams.

I think the one factor is being curious about ourselves, because then we tend to remember more what went on inside of us. We tend to either think through enough or write down and become curious about ourselves. So I think being curious about what our brains are telling us during sleep can be very helpful. I haven't known of another quality or characteristic of a person that really points strongly one way or another.

And sometimes dreams don't have meaning, or they don't have meaning we can clearly discern. So we have to be careful. We have to be respectful of how complex our minds are. Sometimes we're looking to read something into a dream, or we want to see it as a marker along the path where our thought is going. So we have to be very careful and very levelheaded. But if we approach that way, it can be remarkable — amazing — what dreams can sometimes tell us, and how something can come out allegorically in a person that is speaking to events that have unfolded across years in a large family system, and you find in a very simple, allegorical way that the brain is capturing that. Curiosity about ourselves and our dreams can really give us a lot of insight, but we have to be careful about it and be respectful of our own complexity.

Anxiety, Time, and Emotional States

Andrew Huberman: In your previous book on trauma and in our previous discussions, you've said that anxiety, trauma, and stress don't know the clock or the calendar. Time is erased. The negative feelings that one feels in those states seem like they're going to go on forever, which is why it's so scary. So it sort of suggests that the way that we thread ourselves through our life is by kind of segmenting time — that was then, this is now. That's a healthy version. The past doesn't necessarily dictate the present, the present doesn't necessarily dictate the future. But I think for many people, the fear and anxiety they feel on a daily basis is so uncomfortable because in those states we just can't imagine feeling any differently, even though we cognitively know it's just a state, just a thing.

What sorts of tools do you offer people to try and anchor themselves in those states? Should they just feel them, perhaps just let them pass through? Or is it useful for them to anchor to some sort of thing outside the experience so that they don't get carried by it? I think what I'm trying to get to is a fundamental question: feel your feelings, or be careful of feelings that put you out of a sense of time passage, because those tend to be dangerous feelings.

Dr Paul Conti: It has to start with understanding. We have to be able to shine the light everywhere and look at what's true. You can say "that was then, this is now," but your limbic system doesn't care. Our emotion systems — and it's a simplification, but we can look at the brain that way — the logic mechanisms are telling us that and declaring it's true because the clock says it's in the past. But the limbic, the emotion systems, have a very different reality. They don't see it that way. They don't know that there's a clock or a calendar.

So it's not simply that "that was then, this is now." A trigger in the now can make then now. We want to be aware of the emotions that are going on inside of us and the strong emotional states that we can get into, because they're telling us something. If something happens in going through life — something that might even seem small from the outside — but I'm triggered or cued in a way to be in a very deep emotional state of fear or vulnerability, and I can map that to how I felt when X happened or how I felt 20 years ago when this happened — that's telling me something. It's telling me that time is not like a steel rod going in one direction. That's the logic systems. The limbic systems — it's like a string. Something just made me feel right now exactly the way it felt 10 years ago, and it put the two parts of the string together. That's real for me. And it's telling me there is emotion in something from that time that I have not worked through.

Was I aware of that? Am I kind of aware of it but pushing it down under the surface? If I'm having strong emotions where I'm lost in the past while in the present, it's a marker of something. And very often we get afraid of that. We turn away from it. We're worried that it's telling us we're not healthy, or we're worried we're going to go crazy. These are the things that people say when this happens. For us to know: that is not what's happening. This is normal and human. This is what will happen. These emotion systems that pay very strong attention to negative things — to fear and loss and terror and despair inside of us — they don't know the clock or the calendar. So they're going to bring to our present things from our past that are then markers of saying: go dig there, because that is not just in the past. Emotionally, it is still in your present.

Healing Childhood Trauma with Compassionate Curiosity

Andrew Huberman: At this point in time, what do you think is the most efficient way to root out and heal childhood traumas?

Dr Paul Conti: Bringing compassionate curiosity to ourselves, where we just look at our past without having a dog in the fight, so to speak — where I don't have to see it a certain way. Sometimes people will say they have to make it less bad than it was because they feel otherwise they won't be okay if they see all that was bad in it. Others might feel they have to look at the worst of it because they're trying to anchor to things in their life now that they're not happy with and why that might be. What it ends up doing is it brings so much emotion into it that we can't look in a way that has equanimity, because we're living in the emotion.

Now, we can't feel no emotion if we're thinking about difficult things that have happened to us. But to be able to have that observation of self — what is going on inside of me? What do I feel about it? Where does my own mind want to go? Do I want to minimize it? Do I want to take it and dial it up so that it'll explain why I did X or why I didn't do Y? We're trying to observe our own motivations as we look at our childhood. And if we can gain more equanimity that way, then we can come to understanding. We don't have to be afraid to go and do that. We can look at this part of my childhood, or this person in my childhood — that wasn't good, or wasn't okay, or maybe it was even abusive, it was wrong. We can look at that and say: okay, what am I going to do with that now? It doesn't define who I am. It doesn't determine any one single thing about me.

If I can look at it with a calmness of mind and I can see the realness of how it's affected me right now — and I started talking about malleability kind of where we started — I can start to make progress. But we have to be able to look at ourselves. Very often we just don't want to do that because we don't bring compassion. We bring fear and criticism. But if we can just observe ourselves, now we can get in touch with what did happen in childhood, and what do I make of that now? And then maybe I might want to put those words outside of me in writing or in speech, or I might want to talk to a trusted other, or I might want to see a therapist about it. It's taking the strong emotion that can keep us from understanding — which can get very complicated, because if we bring fear to our past, we're going to see it through the lens of fear — and if I know I can look at my past and I don't have to be afraid, even if it raises difficult emotion in me, I'm much more likely to keep a calm presence of mind and then to learn some things about myself.

Looking Back at What Went Right

Andrew Huberman: Do you think that people look back and think about good things that happened to them often enough?

Dr Paul Conti: No. I mean, this is a clear no. Not often enough. We tend to have a bias in us towards the negative. We don't stop and think, "Hey, I did that really well," or "That didn't come out the way I wanted it to, but I learned from it," or "It didn't come out the way I wanted to, but I really tried." We tend not to do that. And this bias towards the negative means we then start making the stories of ourselves about the negative, or we feel like: well, if I look at what I've done right, what's gone right in my life, I'll get complacent. What is there to be gained from that? I'm going to look at what's not the way I want it to be.

And quite the opposite is true. If we're looking at what's gone well in our life, at our successes, and even things that weren't successes maybe from the outside but where we grew, we learned something, the school of hard knocks taught us something — then we are bolstering ourselves. We're empowering ourselves by doing that. So no, we should all do a lot more of that, and we wouldn't become complacent. We would become happier, healthier, more effective in our lives.

Andrew Huberman: I think when we talk about looking backward, most of us including myself just kind of reflexively go to our family growing up or elementary school, middle school, high school, and so on. I have a colleague from the past, Larry Squire, who is a kind of luminary in the field of memory and worked out a lot of stuff about the human hippocampus. When I was visiting UC San Diego some years ago, there were a bunch of photos on his office wall. I was looking at some meetings and things. He said, "You know, having photographs on your wall of times that were really good is very good for your adult memory. And it cues up emotional states for you."

And this is where it got interesting, because he studied explicit and implicit memory — the ones that we're aware of versus the ones we're not aware of. And he said, "Even if you don't look at them deliberately each day, when walking past them, if you have some implicit understanding about what those are, you're surrounding yourself with positive memories."

And I thought that's pretty cool. And he's not just somebody saying this — this is arguably one of the people who knows more about human memory structure and function than anybody in the last 200 years or so. So I said, "So it should be parties?" And he just said, "Just things and people and experiences that you liked. You just put them up." And I said, "Do you find yourself looking at them on your wall?" And he goes, "Yeah, from time to time." But he's like, "I'm basically in a vessel of awesome memories." And it doesn't solve all his problems, but why wouldn't you?

I think that's such a cool idea. And these days we spend a lot of time looking at other people's experiences, a lot of news coming in and things like that. I wonder if we're just doing a lot less of this. And as a last point, I've always liked — who knows what's really going on behind the scenes — but you go into somebody's home and you walk down a stairwell and they've just got the wall lit with all these photos. Not necessarily a big family, sometimes yes, sometimes no. And you're like, "Wow." They're posting all their experiences. I think it's kind of cool. I don't tend to do it, but this is a version of thinking about and exposing oneself, kind of basking in the past in a positive way. Maybe we should do more of it.

Dr Paul Conti: Absolutely. I think what he's talking about and what you're talking about here is actually being able to have control over the climate within us. The structure of self, which is foundational, has at its foundation our unconscious mind. And the unconscious mind sets parameters for us. It's kind of the climate in which we're living. And if that climate is being predisposed — programmed — to have a bias towards the negative because we're thinking negative thoughts a lot of the time, thinking about what we did wrong or what we should have done differently or what's going to go wrong, then we're biasing the unconscious mind to throw to the surface the negative answer. Should I be able to do that? No. We're biased towards the negative. Now we don't know why. Why did I say no instead of yes? That arises from the climate inside of me, which is my unconscious mind.

So he's saying: hey, you can sort of pre-program a bias into you towards the positive. And it's not a false bias — those memories that are up on his wall are real. Whether he's looking at them or just kind of glancing and walking by and there's a registration inside that he's not even aware of, he is priming the unconscious mind to see the positive side of things. If he thinks, "Well, can I do that?" — yes, I can. It changes things inside of him and he's then able to exercise control over his own climate. And we can do that too. And often what we're inadvertently doing is creating a climate of fear and a climate that lacks confidence inside of us, because we're just looking at the negative all the time, whether it's about us or the world around us.

And that's a reason why the title of that book is What's Going Right — because there's way more going right in all of us than there is going wrong, or we wouldn't be here. So why not prime ourselves with that the way that he was doing with the photographs on the wall? It absolutely makes sense, and it's not a Pollyanna concept. It's not saying, "Well, just look at what's going right." It's saying, "No, this is consistent with what's real and true." And it's good for you too. It helps you be effective in the world. It helps your mental health, helping your mental health helps your physical health. Everything about this aligns with truth and it sets us up to be in better control of our lives and to be on the front foot as we're approaching life.

Andrew Huberman: I'm going to start printing out some photos and posting them, because I don't do enough of that. I just remembered this Larry Squire thing now as we were talking about this, but I'm definitely going to do that.

Dr Paul Conti: Yeah, I'm going to do more of it too. It's a good reminder. Our physical space impacts us so much. Yeah, there are a lot of good memories and some hard ones too. But put up the good memories. It makes perfect sense to me why one would want to do that.

Agency, Spirituality, and the Forces of Good and Evil

Andrew Huberman: Earlier we were talking about the sense of internal control that we feel, the sense of being on one's own side when we're pushing off against something. And I have to ask — I'm fascinated by scripture and by spirituality and notions of God and devil. We are told — many people are told — that there are evil forces out there, or perhaps even in us, and there are positive forces out there and in us. Typically this is presented as God and devil. Just for sake of conversation, we'll stay with that.

Do you think that it helps people choose better behaviors by being told and believing that there's a devil out there or inside of them to push against, and therefore to be more on their own side? And of course, if it's internal, it's an aspect of their own side that is better than the bad decision-maker in them. If so, this seems like a brilliant idea. If it's true or not is not up to me to tell people — one has to choose for themselves. But if the best way to change one's behavior is to be on one's own side, and the best way to be on one's own side is to not be controlled by something else and to actively be resisting that — this god-devil thing seems pretty rational.

Dr Paul Conti: I think maybe from the psychological perspective, yes and no. I think if we get too over-reductionist — there's a single force of good and there's a single force of evil — I think our major religious tenets do see the world we live in as more complicated than that. There's more than just a single force of good and a single force of evil. Because then I think what we tend to do is over-identify. Either I want to be the good force but I can't be good enough, and I've done something wrong, and now I feel bad about myself because I feel evil because I don't feel good enough. Or I feel that the evil in the world is clearly coming for me and it's directed at me. We can tend to personify good and evil and either over-identify or feel beleaguered. If we over-identify that we want to be good and we do something wrong, we feel bad. There can be a push towards self-persecuting or really not understanding ourselves if we oversimplify.

If we think in a broader way — which I do think is consistent with spirituality and with the spirituality of major religious traditions — then we see there are forces for good, pushes towards good in the universe around us and that includes within us. And there are forces towards what is not good — towards looking the other way from someone's needs, for example. Not something that's pure evil. Most of us aren't going to step on someone when they're down, but could we be tempted to look the other way? If we see there's a lot of subtlety and nuance to how good and evil plays out in the world around us and inside of ourselves, then I think we're viewing ourselves and the world around us much more consistently with what religion says. And I think also where science guides us and is more and more guiding us as we have more and more knowledge and understanding.

Now we feel that we're part of something greater than us. There are forces that push towards good and forces that push towards evil. Forces that push towards construction and towards destruction. And we know how we want to be and where we want to be in that spectrum. We want to be generative and we want to be making the world better than we left it. And we want to be bettering ourselves. Now we're being, I think, much more true to the reality that we experience, as opposed to being so reductionist that we see one good, one evil, and where are we going to be in that polarized opposition.

What It Means to Be Happy

Andrew Huberman: Is it a reasonable goal to want to be happy-go-lucky? Can I aspire to that and also be a productive person?

Dr Paul Conti: Unfortunately, no. Happy-go-lucky to me implies that there's not an awareness that there are difficult things in the world, and in fact there are difficult things in my own life. I think happy-go-lucky implies that we're not aware of how difficult life can be. And I think it's good that you can't be happy-go-lucky, because who wants to lose the grounding of the things that are real in life?

I think that you can be happy. And I think that's better than happiness that includes some turning away or some forgetfulness. So if we take away the "go-lucky" — which I think is not desirable or possible — I do absolutely believe that you can be happy. What we want, and I think there are studies that show us this, and just thinking about how humans have written in literature and philosophy across time about what we mean when we say happy — we do want to find peace, contentment, and the capacity for delight. We just want to be able to just be and not have so much going on inside or coming at us. We all say we just want a little bit of peace. I want to just sometimes walk around and be able to look up at the trees around me and see that the trees are pretty. For me, that's peace.

And I think yes, we can all find our way to peace. We may not be able to have it every moment. We don't have to have it every moment to be happy. So we need some peace and we need some contentment. And contentment means that there's awareness of our lives, of the things that have gone well and the things that haven't. I can find contentment in my life — not every moment, but I can find it even holding in my mind awareness of tragedies that have happened in my life, or things that I haven't done or performed about the way I would have ideally wanted to. I can be aware of those things inside of me but be aware of the whole arc of my life and feel good about it.

There was a thought about embracing our fate, embracing what we've created for ourselves — in early humanist Nietzsche this was sort of written about, of the fate that we create for ourselves. Can we embrace it and want to live it over and over again, even knowing the things in it that may be tragic or not great? Yes, I think we can find peace. We can find contentment and we can find the capacity for delight. We all had it as children. And if we don't have it now as adults, there's something we can do about that. We all need to be able to see something that just makes us light up.

I think the answer for you and me and everyone else is we can find happiness, because we can weave peace, contentment, and delight into our lives.

Andrew Huberman: So is it the case that the things that bring us delight make us for moments feel very joyful? What I'm hearing is that has to be on a backdrop of some hard things and some strivings — that the goal is not complete peace and ease.

Dr Paul Conti: I think complete peace and ease isn't possible. For most of us, life has brought difficulties for everyone in one way or another, and life does have its risks and its dangers and its vulnerabilities. So to think that we need to not have that anywhere in our minds in order to feel good, in order to be happy — I think that tells us that we can't be happy being human. And often times it leads us to say, "I just want to not worry about anything. I don't want to have anything weighing on me." And we start listing a bunch of things that sound like death when we're trying to talk about how we're going to be happy.

I do want to have times of peace when I'm not thinking about bad things that have happened. I'm just at peace and I'm looking at the tree or the bird sitting up in the tree, or the log floating down the river, which brought me a lot of peace not that long ago. We can have these moments. But it has to also be an awareness of our lives. We have to at times be able to have in our minds the things that are not the way we want them to be and the things that are tragic, and still feel good about our lives. I think that's how we find real happiness. We're not just looking for escapes. Often the happy-go-lucky part is we're looking for an escape. A person chooses an escape — it could be even in a substance — and okay, it felt good for a couple of hours, but at what cost?

What we're looking for is the ability to apprehend our own lives, feel enough in control of our own lives that I don't have to be really afraid of the future. I know that there may be scary things and I'm going to meet them as best I can. I don't have to be afraid of the future and I feel good about my life. I feel enough in control and I have enough understanding that I can say, "Okay, I'm good with me at the moment." And now that moment has become another moment and I'm moving forward and I'm doing the best I can, because this sequence of moments is the only time I'm alive and I want to be really present for it.

Nearing the End of Life: What Going Right Looks Like

Andrew Huberman: There used to be a lot of articles written — and you could still find the stuff online — about regrets that people had close to the end of their life. No one ever said they wished they spent more time at the office. I don't know — I know some people that loved their work and love their work. Did they love it to the detriment of their family? In some cases, yes. In a lot of cases, no. And so I don't like those lists. I think those lists serve as prompts for asking questions: am I overinvested in one area versus another?

But I'm guessing you've spent some time with people who are close to the end of their life or at the end of their life. Have you ever encountered someone who like really nailed it? You didn't think they were just telling you a story — they really felt good about how they had spent their mental life and their energies. We don't hear about those people very often. Are there any insights, or just feelings that arrived for you when talking to these people, that you genuinely believe — if they didn't hit the bullseye, they were darn close?

Dr Paul Conti: Yes. It makes me think actually of a real example in my own life where a family member — much older than me, he would probably be 120 or so if he were still alive — who had really made something of himself. He didn't have much in the way of education, and he'd been a successful member of the community. He'd given back to the community. He had no education. He started a bank, and the bank became international. He was so good and so helpful to the place he had come from. And he'd had real tragedies in his life — he'd lost a child.

When he learned that I was going to medical school a long, long time ago, he asked to see me. He was in his early 90s at the time. And he told me that he was happy with his life, and that he realized he could die at any moment and he understood and accepted that. He tried to do the best that he could and he'd made something of himself. There was sadness in his life and things he certainly wished would have been different, but he was happy with his life and he was okay with dying. And he wanted me to know that he thought that was a good way to feel. And that it was tempting to want to be so much and put so much pressure on yourself that you could achieve a lot and not be able to feel good about it.

It's not something I've forgotten. I do think of that with fair frequency. And it made me think of that here. I thought, that's a person who's lived a good life. Now — I wasn't thinking it at the time — but he was clearly describing being able to have peace and to have contentment, to feel good about his life even knowing the things that were not great, and then the capacity for delight. There were still things he was very, very excited about and his face would still light up. And I think that was probably earlier role modeling for me of: oh, like that — that's what I'd like to feel. I'd like to be in my 90s and be able to say that. And it's really stuck with me.

Andrew Huberman: That's awesome. I think we need to think a lot more about what's going right, what went right.

Dr Paul Conti: Yes.

Andrew Huberman: What went right. What's gone right in my life. What I've made go right in my life. What hasn't gone right and I showed up anyway. That's part of what's going right.

Dr Paul Conti: Yeah. We so easily default to the losses. Which can also be beautiful in some sense sometimes. But we so easily go to what's wrong, what's wrong, what's wrong. But I'm also hearing that happy-go-lucky and just thinking about what's going right — that's not the answer either. There has to be that contrast.

Andrew Huberman: Yes. This is what I'm hearing you saying today.

Dr Paul Conti: Yes. We have to be living an examined life in order to live intentionally. So yes, we do have to look at ourselves. But the good news is that's okay. Most of us don't want to be dragged kicking and screaming to looking at ourselves. But that's just because we're afraid. And if we know we're not going to find anything there that's going to really shock us — probably not going to find anything we're not already well aware of, even if we've been trying to hide it from ourselves — and then there's a process we can go through. If I look at myself, I can use the knowledge to make things better. That's the simple goodness of it: it's okay to look at ourselves. We have to, but we also get to. And that's how we're going to live good lives. It's how we live the best life we can, and maybe we get to that point where we can look back and feel good about the choices that we've made, and maybe feel okay about choices we've made even if they haven't led the places where we've wanted them to be — that we can still embrace ourselves and the lives we've led.

Writing the Book and a Final Note

Andrew Huberman: If you don't mind, I just want to ask a couple of questions that are a little bit different than the ones we've been exploring. Was writing the book informative for you about the mind, about people, in a way that all the clinical work and certainly the podcast you've done wasn't? Did it teach you anything? And if so, are you willing to share one or two of those things?

Dr Paul Conti: Sure. I think writing about what we know helps us know it better, because part of knowing something is also being aware that we don't know everything about it. So when we organize our thoughts and say, "I'm doing the best I can to put this down so other people can understand it," we just have to learn from that process. So yeah, I do feel that I learned as part of writing it, and incorporating clinical examples and events from life. It helped me have a fuller view of: I do think that this says a lot about how we're being humans in the world and how our mind is structured, that there is this parallel to the body. And I felt very hopeful and optimistic that it kind of holds together and leads somewhere. So yeah, I got a lot out of organizing my thoughts better in writing the book.

Andrew Huberman: Last question, which is completely outside the realm of what we've been talking about. Has Lex Fridman texted you back? Because he hasn't texted me back in a while.

Dr Paul Conti: I have not heard from Lex Fridman. Yeah. Despite multiple efforts, there has been no response.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, there are rumors that he's in Dagestan. There are rumors that he's in Austin. And Lex, we love you and you don't have to text us back, but just maybe throw up a sign that you're okay, or we're going to send a search party to Dagestan. And if you're not there, then we'll really be in trouble.

Dr Paul Conti, this was awesome. I have to say what I love so much about talking with you is that you can explore these caverns of things and then these gems just pop out — like this idea that we can be on our own side by seeing what we don't want to be controlled by. I think that's really going to resonate with people because behavioral change is like the hardest thing. And behavioral change when people realize they're not changing — it's like a double whammy. So that alone is enormous.

And the focus on what's right — I'm not trying to just repeatedly state the title of the book, but What's Going Right is just so vital, I think, especially in this time when you turn on the news and it's just all these things that are challenging to the world. Certainly many of them need attention, but focusing on what's going right, what has gone right — it's so essential right now. And what I've learned from you today is that it's really the lifeblood of what it is to be a joyous human being, with the caveat that we also have to address the challenges, and if they're there, the traumas. And there's really no other way. That's what I'm taking from this.

Dr Paul Conti: Yes. And that we can do that. And instead of thinking maybe that we can do that, or we have to do that — we get to do that. There should be an excitement, an enthusiasm, and a hopefulness that we bring to that process.

Andrew Huberman: Well, thank you for being here today. Thank you for writing the book. It's going to serve so many people. And thank you for taking your training and your clinical experience and putting it out into the world. You don't have any obligation to do that, and most everything that you know and that transpires in those sessions would not serve the larger world to the extent that it does were you not willing to get out here and share with people. So thank you. You're clearly one of the leading public educators on the mind and the self and navigating this life landscape. So thank you so much for coming here today, and come back again please.

Dr Paul Conti: You're very welcome. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do so.