Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
Today's episode is going to be all about the science of emotions.
And today we're going to talk in particular about.
About something that most often is called stress.
You might be thinking, wait, stress isn't an emotion.
But stress really lies at the heart of whether or not our internal experience is matched well or not to our external experience or the events that are happening to us and around us.
And as you'll soon see, those converge or combine to create what we call emotions.
I'd like you to come away from today's episode with what I call an organizational logic, a framework for thinking about these things that typically we just call happy or sad or depressed or anxious.
And I'm going to make sure that you have tools that are grounded in physiology and neuroscience that will allow you to navigate this otherwise complex space that we call emotions, that will allow you to ground yourself better when you're feeling like life is weighing on you or you're kind of being pulled by the currents of life as well as to support other people.
Whether or not that's in a psychological practice, if you're a practitioner or you have clients or children or spouses, really to be able to support other people in your environment better.
And as you may recall, the nervous system, which includes the brain and the eyes and the spinal cord, but also all the connections with the organs of the body, includes the brain and body and those organs of the body, your gut and your liver and your spleen, they're also communicating with the brain.
So I look forward to a day, in fact, when we no longer think about neuroscience as just the brain.
And many neuroscientists now also think about the body.
Of course, the brain controls the body, but the body is also having a very profound and concrete influence on the brain.
Today we're going to talk about objective tools that match the brain body experience or separate the brain body experience in ways that leverage your ability to lean into life better, to feel better, literally to just feel better about what you're experiencing.
And believe it or not, to be able to control your emotions when that's appropriate.
Okay, so what is stress?
We hear all the time that stress is bad.
We hear people saying they're really stressed out.