## LIVE EVENT Q&A — Dr. Andrew Huberman Question & Answer in Los Angeles, CA
### Metadata
* Author: [[Huberman Lab]]
* Full Title: LIVE EVENT Q&A — Dr. Andrew Huberman Question & Answer in Los Angeles, CA
* Category: #podcasts
* URL: <https://share.snipd.com/episode/2fc08047-5df6-46a5-b297-c667eb017786>
### Highlights
* How to Navigate Stress and Enjoy Life
Transcript:
Speaker 1
You know, I would say if I could travel back in time as a 15-year-old, I would encourage you to cultivate some sort of mindfulness practice. It sounds a little cliche, but having some awareness of your thinking about your thinking is good, but I'm actually not going to say sit down and meditate for 10 minutes a day or do NSDR. I'm actually not going to tell you that. I think given how plastic your brain is, how much it's changing at 15, I would encourage you, and maybe you would set a timer for this, to actually develop just a really keen awareness of what stresses you out, what relaxes you, what delights you, etc., and just to simply develop an awareness of that, because those are your antennae. And I certainly had a meditation practice as a youth, mostly given to me because I was a little haywire, and I needed it. And it worked pretty well, but I think in retrospect, what I wish I had developed was more of a sense of how I navigated stress or things and things I enjoyed and things I didn't enjoy. And I would just encourage you to have a general awareness, try and detect and learn about what raises your adrenaline, what raises your dopamine, what raises your serotonin, and then start thinking about tools. But again, the awareness is going to be very valuable, and gosh, as a 15-year-old, you are in this amazing, blessed period of height and neuroplasticity, should we all be so lucky? So enjoy it. Next question, please. Clarity on adrenaline regarding cold water. Should we wait to feel the rise of adrenaline that get me out of here feeling and the fall of it before bailing? Yes. Provided it doesn't kill you. You know, I don't want to say cold water. It's hard to kill yourself with cold water. I don't want to provide your heads above and your breathing, but the... Sorry, my podcast producer is always like, I can't help that anyway. It's a great tool. And different days, it'll feel different. So for instance, doing any kind of adrenaline and deliberate cold exposure or adrenaline increasing activity early in the day, I find that you are more quote-unquote resilient than later. In other words, the wall, like I really don't want to do this. This is actually interesting for, I think, it extends beyond cold water. Let's say you really don't want to do something. Pay attention to the fact that maybe it's not the right thing to do. But assuming it's something that you know you should do, but you don't want to do, you are already in the first wall of adrenaline. You don't experience it necessarily as heightened levels of stress. You might experience it as heightened levels of fatigue or a hard time shifting on that kind of activation state that's required to move through the thing. But I do encourage you to take advantage of that. Of course, and we have an episode coming out tomorrow actually that answers questions like, should you train if you're sick and what if you travel and there's context always. But I think that you do want to experience, if you want to get the most out of the cold water exposure and to be more specific, the adrenaline, then you want to get to that point of, I really want to get out of here, but I know I can stay in safely, but I really want to get out of here. And it's a little hard to explain, but there's just so much learning in those short moments about where your mind goes. And this sounds very kind of, again, subjective and maybe a little wishy-washy. But you can realize great things about yourself in those moments. You can find insight in those moments. Also keep in mind that the degree of discomfort, not just physical but mental discomfort, is directly predictive of the pain to pleasure wave that you'll experience afterwards. The reason it feels so good when you get out of the ice bath and you're showered off, I always do the warm shower after. I don't do this end on cold thing. I don't know, it just seems a little too painful. And then take a warm shower and then you feel great. And that's the surge of dopamine that we know based on a paper published in the European Journal of Physiology, lasts many hours and it's a 100 to 200% increase in dopamine. It is not a subtle effect. And then people say, well, wait, is that dopamine going to crash my dopamine system? No, because it's a nice slow rise. In fact, I'm actually not aware of many things besides love and delight that can create this long, slow arc of dopamine lasting many hours. Maybe you're aware of other things if you are, let me know. But it turns out that long arc is a true antidepressant. And my colleague at Stanford, Dr. Analemki, who's ahead of our dual diagnosis, Addiction Clinic has talked about in her amazing book, Dopamine Nation, about patients of hers that have really helped themselves along and out of the more depressive phases. You know, working through addiction and just depression in general through directed cold water therapy. So I, you know, I'm obviously a fanatic about it in the sense that it's a powerful, relatively safe, if done properly, safe, if done properly way to modulate your internal dopamine. ([Time 0:12:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/73503c9c-4dcb-4cd5-b557-cccce4f31d09))
# LIVE EVENT Q&A — Dr. Andrew Huberman Question & Answer in Los Angeles, CA
## Metadata
- Author: [[Huberman Lab]]
- Full Title: LIVE EVENT Q&A — Dr. Andrew Huberman Question & Answer in Los Angeles, CA
- Category: #podcasts
- URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/2fc08047-5df6-46a5-b297-c667eb017786
## Highlights
- How to Navigate Stress and Enjoy Life
Key takeaways:
- Mindfulness can be helpful in managing stress and improving overall wellbeing.
- It is important to have a general awareness of your thoughts and feelings in order to navigate life's challenges effectively.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
You know, I would say if I could travel back in time as a 15-year-old, I would encourage you to cultivate some sort of mindfulness practice. It sounds a little cliche, but having some awareness of your thinking about your thinking is good, but I'm actually not going to say sit down and meditate for 10 minutes a day or do NSDR. I'm actually not going to tell you that. I think given how plastic your brain is, how much it's changing at 15, I would encourage you, and maybe you would set a timer for this, to actually develop just a really keen awareness of what stresses you out, what relaxes you, what delights you, etc., and just to simply develop an awareness of that, because those are your antennae. And I certainly had a meditation practice as a youth, mostly given to me because I was a little haywire, and I needed it. And it worked pretty well, but I think in retrospect, what I wish I had developed was more of a sense of how I navigated stress or things and things I enjoyed and things I didn't enjoy. And I would just encourage you to have a general awareness, try and detect and learn about what raises your adrenaline, what raises your dopamine, what raises your serotonin, and then start thinking about tools. But again, the awareness is going to be very valuable, and gosh, as a 15-year-old, you are in this amazing, blessed period of height and neuroplasticity, should we all be so lucky? So enjoy it. Next question, please. Clarity on adrenaline regarding cold water. Should we wait to feel the rise of adrenaline that get me out of here feeling and the fall of it before bailing? Yes. Provided it doesn't kill you. You know, I don't want to say cold water. It's hard to kill yourself with cold water. I don't want to provide your heads above and your breathing, but the... Sorry, my podcast producer is always like, I can't help that anyway. It's a great tool. And different days, it'll feel different. So for instance, doing any kind of adrenaline and deliberate cold exposure or adrenaline increasing activity early in the day, I find that you are more quote-unquote resilient than later. In other words, the wall, like I really don't want to do this. This is actually interesting for, I think, it extends beyond cold water. Let's say you really don't want to do something. Pay attention to the fact that maybe it's not the right thing to do. But assuming it's something that you know you should do, but you don't want to do, you are already in the first wall of adrenaline. You don't experience it necessarily as heightened levels of stress. You might experience it as heightened levels of fatigue or a hard time shifting on that kind of activation state that's required to move through the thing. But I do encourage you to take advantage of that. Of course, and we have an episode coming out tomorrow actually that answers questions like, should you train if you're sick and what if you travel and there's context always. But I think that you do want to experience, if you want to get the most out of the cold water exposure and to be more specific, the adrenaline, then you want to get to that point of, I really want to get out of here, but I know I can stay in safely, but I really want to get out of here. And it's a little hard to explain, but there's just so much learning in those short moments about where your mind goes. And this sounds very kind of, again, subjective and maybe a little wishy-washy. But you can realize great things about yourself in those moments. You can find insight in those moments. Also keep in mind that the degree of discomfort, not just physical but mental discomfort, is directly predictive of the pain to pleasure wave that you'll experience afterwards. The reason it feels so good when you get out of the ice bath and you're showered off, I always do the warm shower after. I don't do this end on cold thing. I don't know, it just seems a little too painful. And then take a warm shower and then you feel great. And that's the surge of dopamine that we know based on a paper published in the European Journal of Physiology, lasts many hours and it's a 100 to 200% increase in dopamine. It is not a subtle effect. And then people say, well, wait, is that dopamine going to crash my dopamine system? No, because it's a nice slow rise. In fact, I'm actually not aware of many things besides love and delight that can create this long, slow arc of dopamine lasting many hours. Maybe you're aware of other things if you are, let me know. But it turns out that long arc is a true antidepressant. And my colleague at Stanford, Dr. Analemki, who's ahead of our dual diagnosis, Addiction Clinic has talked about in her amazing book, Dopamine Nation, about patients of hers that have really helped themselves along and out of the more depressive phases. You know, working through addiction and just depression in general through directed cold water therapy. So I, you know, I'm obviously a fanatic about it in the sense that it's a powerful, relatively safe, if done properly, safe, if done properly way to modulate your internal dopamine. ([Time 0:12:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/73503c9c-4dcb-4cd5-b557-cccce4f31d09))