Ryan Soave
Appearances
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
The short answer to that is both. The addiction is really the solution to some sort of discomfort or stress that they're experiencing, but then the addiction itself becomes problematic. I would say that addiction is the solution in the sense that it's the person's attempt to solve or to find relief from whatever stressor they're experiencing, but it's a solution that becomes problematic.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So it takes on a life of its own. It becomes...
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
its own trauma itself you know that drinking alcoholically and blacking out is a trauma to your body to your brain the things that people do in addiction become more traumatic i think there's this cycle that i always use in the background called it's trauma stress and addiction and expanding the definition of trauma to wound it starts with a wound and then stress is the relationship to that wound much like a limp after a broken leg
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And when stress gets big enough, people look for relief. And so they look to behaviors or substances, which then can, if the stress is big enough and repeated, can become alcoholic. So that stress is not really the wound. It's the relationship to it. Like I said, the limp after the broken leg, but that limp
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
while it's not the broken leg, informs how we walk or don't walk, how we run or don't run, how we view ourselves, how we view the other people in the world view us. And all of those things together can lead to a level of stress where people find relief. And since it's chronic, then they keep using.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But then the behaviors and things that they do while they're using or drinking create a trauma itself, which then leads to more stress, which then leads to more addiction. So it becomes kind of this perpetual motion machine, if you will.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I believe that there's some initial research going on that it can help with cravings and addiction in general. It makes sense to me. I mean, I've heard that anecdotally over the years that people that were diabetic and also alcoholic, but the diabetics that maintained their blood sugar properly, had less chance of relapse. I mean, there's this very simple
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
kind of an acronym called HALT, you may have heard of, hungry, angry, lonely, tired, which seems so simple. It used to drive me crazy, but it's so true that, you know, people tend to be at higher risk for relapse or using when they're either hungry, they're angry, they're lonely, or they're tired. And sometimes those things are all together.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And those are times in which I would imagine their system is looking for something to I mean, if you're hungry, you're looking to elevate your blood sugar. And if you can maintain that, I would imagine that it would have some interesting effects. I was just at a meeting with some of the executives of the major insurance companies, our company, and has a private meeting with them.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And they were talking about that some of the things that they're looking for. I don't know that I'm sure it's been used off label, but I don't know of anybody that's using it yet on label for any of that.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I think that people can be set, have their nervous system set in a way that they need that level of stress or activation in order just to kind of get to baseline, in order to kind of feel alive. You know, I've seen that a lot when I've worked with especially special forces combat veterans, you know, coming home, like a lot of the mundane stuff almost didn't feel like they felt alive.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, and of course this isn't everybody. This is the ones that were coming to me, but that they needed to be involved in like really risky behaviors or really high adrenaline behaviors kind of felt like they were just getting to kind of baseline of being normal. It wasn't even like taking them to another edge.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And, you know, that makes sense to me because a lot of like what basic training or the training that they do later on for more special forces is while it's skills training, it's really nervous system training, right? It's the ability to do those skills under an extreme amount of stress or lack of sleep and everything.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
like that so if they're kind of oriented in that way then when they come home or they're in environments where it it doesn't it takes a lot to bring them up just to that level of like what might feel normal for them their their kind of system is set up much higher than here and they've got to get up to that to just feel alive so i don't know if addicted maybe it is addicted i feel like they have a need
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, it's a drive. It's a drive.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Well, they're not going to meet a diagnostic criteria. Progressive, et cetera. Yeah. What is the diagnosis? It's always this progressive. I don't know if it was, was it on your podcast or did I read about this somewhere else where when they took, you know, there's the classic study about taking rats with cocaine and
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I think that's a great test. I mean, probably more than an afternoon or a week, but can I quit for a month? And if you're If when you're when you've stopped, if all you're thinking about is either doing it or when you're doing it, all you're thinking about is how can I how can I stop doing this?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And they had water and cocaine and they would like press that lever thousands of times to get the cocaine. Somebody else repeated that but added one that had sugar in it and their cocaine use went significantly down when sugar was also present. Well, meth addicts will consume sugar and meth more readily than either one alone. Different drug.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
We see this when people get sober, that there's people that will get very heavy. They'll engage in what looks like a food addiction. And when we peel that back, I can't tell you how many times I've heard of people recognizing their first addictive behavior was going to the sugar bowl and taking spoonfuls of it.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I've actually heard people say that food addiction and probably specifically around sugar is often the primary addiction for people. It's kind of like how they get in there. I'm sure that's not true for everybody. But I think if we broaden the term of addiction beyond what – use disorder is in the DSM and move towards, do you have it or does it have you? Absolutely.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I mean, I don't think we can become sugar dependent in a way that if we stop it, we're going to go into some sort of major withdrawal, but I would imagine there'd be some sort of withdrawal. Same with caffeine. I've seen people go into psychosis with caffeine. I never want to find out what happens if I quit caffeine. You might just always be in psychosis, caffeine psychosis. Thanks for that.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
No, not you. I meant all of you. Yeah, I mean, I love caffeine, but I keep it in check. You can take that out. I can sleep well. No, no, that's fine. I actually can sleep on it too.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I don't either, but once in a while I do and it doesn't. You're definitely getting less REM sleep in there. I'm sure I am. But you look rested, so.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I've seen some pretty incredible things happen with people. And I'm glad that the studies have been going on specifically around psilocybin in the U.S. I'm not really aware of any around Ibogaine. So anybody that is doing Ibogaine treatments are either – I don't know if they're finding it in the U.S. or they're going to Mexico or wherever.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
That's a pretty good indication that it has you, you know, and, you know, you also have to look at, like, what are the things that it's impacting in your in your life? And that's one of the things we can help people kind of orient to. And they might think that if it's somebody that comes to us at their family saying this is a huge problem, they may not see it yet. Or they may be avoiding it.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So they are doing some studies around it.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So I don't know enough about the studies happening before like they were doing this where Stanford was doing a study and taking people down to Mexico or people going down there to do it. It was kind of a lot of, I don't know how else to say it, but renegade folks doing it outside wasn't always, you know,
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
run by medical teams and people making sure that everybody is safe, at least from my experience, although then I've seen some amazing things around it. My general take on psychedelics, if I look at PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, I really see that as you could almost substitute state disorder in there for stress because people get stuck in a certain state and call it the survival state.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And, you know, that's, as I've said, one of our biggest challenges is that we go into survival mode and we don't need to go into survival mode, an appropriate response at an inappropriate time. And so things like psychedelics or we actually can see this with breathwork and can help people have an experience where they recognize another state.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
you know, that they can be in another state, not another state of the US, but like they have access to something other than survival. And those touchstone experiences can really give them something to build on. I think like any other approach to medicine that seems miraculous at times, there's a lot out there of this worked for me, so everybody should try it.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
There's what I'm most concerned, I'm not concerned about the effectiveness of
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
overall of psychedelics because i think there's definitely a place for them but i'm really most concerned about the ethics that we develop around them who's delivering it what are the rule outs you know i know we weren't we were going to leave mdma out but i know some of the map studies it was like three sessions i think it was over and i i i don't think that the the world that kind of sees those is then taking that especially in the personal development world going
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
we're going to do three sessions that can kind of come be something that we do all the time, you know, or micro dosing all the time. I don't know enough about it to see if that's going to have an impact. And, you know, it, there are people with psychological and psychiatric disorders that it can really impact in another way, you know, definitely schizophrenic bipolar.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And, you know, you know, I look at it like, you know, antibiotics like penicillin saved a lot of people, but then there's people that it kills, right? I can eat peanuts and get protein out of them. And I know people that eat peanuts and they can die. So we- Lousy source of protein, by the way. Lousy source of protein, eggs, let's say.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
We call that denial. But a lot of times there's something deep down where they know that, you know, I'm really disengaged from life. I'm lonely. I don't have the quality of relationships. I'm not able to be motivated to do the things that I want to do.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But there's a real, we need to really understand the ethics around it and the timeframe, and then make sure that people are following that up with something. Because I think you've used this example before of like kind of being on a trampoline and you can jump up and see the top of the building. And you can see where you want to be, but you haven't built a staircase or the elevator yet.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
We got to go out and build a staircase in the elevator. So I think they're a great window into how we can be in an experience of this person that I can be. But I don't think that there's going to be like some immediate structural change that's going to last. And the danger in that is then people start using that over and over again and can lean on that as a crutch. Last question.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I think one of the biggest things we can do is talk to them but also without shaming them. And if you don't know how to talk to them, reach out for some help. You know, there's like I said, there's there's family support meetings like Al-Anon that you can go to. If you reach out to a treatment center like ours, you can.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
We're happy to talk to the families and help point them in the right direction. But having an open conversation without shaming them and understanding that this is a, you know, approaching it with the idea that this is a disease and a and a like a like like we're talking to a sick friend now that we're talking to a bad a bad person.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
In a lot of places, they don't even do around the circle. So you could take them to a meeting.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And reach out and find a therapist that can do an assessment. In our mission to create access, we have been really doing some kind of innovative stuff around virtual care and in-home care. So when there are people that are resistant and maybe if they even
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It is true that they need to go to a residential treatment center, that we can offer this different service that's much lower cost and covered by insurance, that we can come in and kind of build a relationship with them. And, you know, in some ways, sometimes it works for them and they're able to move through it.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And other times we're able to help them witness their failures and then having done complete assessments with them, get them to the correct level of care and make sure that the family has everything they need. So those options are out there as well.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I was reflecting on this a lot before coming out here, but, you know, I really appreciate what you do in the world and especially knowing you and knowing how and why you started it. And there wasn't this grand vision at the end. It was like, I'm just going to help people today. I mean, you literally was like, I'm going to help people today.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I'm going to write, do these little diagrams and these little things, and I'm going to help them today and helping people today and the next day and the next day. has led to you having such an impact in the world. I was telling someone on your team earlier, your work makes my work easier. I've had men specifically, mostly men that come to me more open because of what they've heard you talk about.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And conversely, I've had men that we're working with that are very closed off, and then I'll have them listen to something that you've done, and it opens them up. My wife wanted me to tell you she's a therapist too and she was running a group this morning with a group of kind of more mentally ill folks and they were doing a group on stress management and she used a video of the physiological sigh.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So she wanted to say thank you for that. I know lots of therapists that are using that and it's just, you make our jobs easier by bringing awareness to the challenges and problems that are out there. So I really, really appreciate that. Plus I just appreciate you as a human being and very much value our friendship.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I'll relate it back to drugs for a second. You and I are the same age and you probably remember the, you know, this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs when they cracked the, you know, showed the egg, this is your brain.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And then this is your brain on, well, it did call the egg a brain. So that was pretty good. Oh, that's true. Your logic is impeccable. Thank you. And this is your brain on drugs and it showed the fried egg. I think that was a terrible example for kids because Most of the time when people do drugs the first time, it doesn't feel like that. It feels good. It feels great.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It's over time when you keep doing that, especially a kid that doesn't have all of the responsibility and the things in life that they might have or want to have later on, they're not going to – they're not going to see that that's a problem necessarily. Right.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It also wasn't as highly concentrated when we were kids. I mean, this is pretty intense these days and can have some really long lasting effects on people. And there's some people that it's not going to affect in the same way other, you know, it does others. Some people are going to be able to, smoke that amount of THC or vape it or however they're doing it, right?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I mean, the delivery methods are very, it's crazy these days because, you know, people used to have to roll a joint, go behind the store, you know, it was like an event to go do that. And you had to break the law. You had to break the law. Now it's everywhere. It's in a candy. I mean, it's candy, right? It's gummy bears. Wild. It's really wild. And, you know,
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
the thing with those people that are succeeding at it, like when we really look at that, like what, what percentage of the people is, is that right? It's a very, very small percentage. Of course, kids are going to look at that and say, well, I can do that.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know I would, I've had a conversation with my teenage son about that, you know, and even if he's playing, if they're playing games four hours a day, I imagine those guys that win these video game cover, they're the YouTubers that are making all kinds of money. I mean, they're, they're approaching it like a, like a pretty intense job. You know, they're really working at it.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But, you know, we don't want to take away that imagination and creativity from kids. But, you know, it's our job as parents to look and see, you know, the kids aren't going to see what's happening. Their kind of timing is like now or not now. They're not really looking too far into the future. And that's a beautiful thing about being a kid as well. It's our job to put those guardrails on.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And as parents really understand what are the things that may impact them over the long term? But we also have to understand, you know, it's easy for me to look at, you know, I had video games when I was a kid, you know, but it was Nintendo and Sega and, you know, it was not as, it didn't pull you in as much. And we were outside all the time.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It was a little bit, you know, it was a different, we'd come in and play video games at night, you know? you know, now these things really pull you in and you're interactive and they communicate with other people. You know, they, a lot of kids have their social connection out of playing video games.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I actually had a, a mentor once who was involved in a leadership program with all these other adults and they did their leadership program. They were all over the world and they would meet in, I think it was World of Warcraft and, and play together And they had different things that they would do to work through their – whatever they were doing in the leadership program.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So there is some benefits to it for people. These kids can really connect with each other when they – and especially through the pandemic, this happened. I'm going to come back to what I was going to say about as a parent, it's easy for me to look at and say, well, there's too much social media. It's too much video games. It's too much this. It would be great if all that stuff was taken away.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Well, guess what? It's not going anywhere. And I can't really relate to it in the same way that my kids will relate to it. I have younger kids that I have no idea what's going to be there when they're of age to look at screens or be in the world or communicate with others.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But it's our job as parents to look at and get to know our kids in a way that we can see what are the things that are going to benefit them and what are the things that aren't. I don't think every kid shouldn't play video games.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
First, I'd like to make a little bit of a distinction. We're going to talk about addiction. When we look at the DSM, the diagnostic manual that we use for diagnosing psychological disorders, not really addiction as a diagnosis.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Yeah. And I want to be clear, while I said it's not necessarily a problem for everyone, I believe It can absolutely – the video games as an example can absolutely be addictive. I mean there's been studies that have shown that it's impacting the brain in the same way as a lot of drugs are. I've worked with kids who were –
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
video games were taken away and they were like, and their wifi was shut down and they were somehow stealing some console and like in the bushes near another home, somehow pirating their wifi to play the video games during the day. I mean, it sounds like an addict, like a crack addict, you know, or, you know, In the streets? A kid. It was probably a 15- or 16-year-old kid.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It's the thing that makes them feel good. And we have these adolescent treatment centers, and these kids come in, and they'll be very dysregulated, even if they're – They've been off of drugs or usually it's a lot of marijuana these days. And, you know, they start to clear up from that. But they're extremely dysregulated, agitated, reactive.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And, you know, after sometimes three, four weeks, we start to see a completely different person. And one of the things I'm convinced is that they haven't been with their phones. They haven't been on social media. They haven't been playing video games. And I'm not saying the answer is to take that away. but you can start to see the impact that that has on them.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
They're so anxious about not being connected in that way or being, I would imagine, in that universe that you're talking about that's hot fudge sundae all the time. Who doesn't want to eat hot fudge sundae all the time?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
That's not super important necessarily because we can talk about it in the term of addiction, but we can look at people and look at biological, psychological, and social factors and make a diagnosis to see that they've got a substance use disorder, an alcohol use disorder, whether it's moderate or severe, or they're dependent on it. And
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Yeah. And in the trough, you're still not going to go back to a plate of broccoli. You're going to keep going after, you know, the hot fudge Sunday feeling, even though the hot fudge Sunday isn't giving it to you anymore.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I think that's a very important point because I see people as having spiritual relationships with alcohol and drugs. You know, I mean, they use them as something that makes them feel connected. They feel whole. I mean, what do we, what is alcohol called? Spirits. You know, that it's something that can
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
allow them even for a period of time to feel the way that maybe they want to feel or not feel the way that they don't want to feel, you know?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
not to give people an out, but not all people that show up with an alcohol use disorder for a point in time are necessarily an addict. They may not be forever. It might been a life circumstance that kind of brought them there.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Even the people like him that are talking about alcohol like that, and I've heard this story thousands of times from people that never read that book, that that's how they felt. They couldn't have been... using it most of the time to get away or to move away from how they're feeling because they didn't even recognize that's how they're feeling. That was just the world they were in.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, we're especially a lot of times this is kids and adolescents who that's the first time they're drinking and they don't realize that they could feel the way that they're feeling. You know, the way that we grow up are just the waters we swim in. We don't often know that there's a difference between who we are and how we can be.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And to be able to – a lot of people, even the first time they'll do it – and it's not always like that for everybody, right? Some people just are using it socially and then later on when there are stressors, realize that I can use this to medicate as well. But the ones that are having the relationship that you just described is – They didn't even know.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
They had no idea that life or their emotional state or their physiological state could be different than it was.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, St. Augustine said, and I'm not going to get it exactly right, but he said something like, you know, well living depends on reordering your loves. And he was talking about people living with a disordered life. And the question it begged is, what are you loving the most? And his argument, I think, was whatever you're loving the most becomes your God, your higher power.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, if I'm loving money the most, if that's the most important thing to me, then money is my higher power. The thing is money will fail me, right? Like you just talked about, like the guy could get a billion dollars and want to kill himself, right?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Or if I put my relationship at the, you know, if I said, you know, the most important thing to me is that my wife is happy, you know, and that's my most important thing. that sounds great, but she's not going to be happy all the time. And when she is, I'm going to feel great. And when she's not, I'm going to feel like I'm doing something wrong. You know, are we making sex the most important thing?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
That said, someone that at a point in time in their life could have an alcohol use disorder or a substance use disorder, you know, they're probably prone to that and they probably shouldn't continue down that path or gamble with it. So, Talking about addiction in general, I like to broaden that definition to really, you know, question I'll ask people is, does it have you or do you have it?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Are we making, you know, and his argument was love God first and then do as you do as you will, like find the highest power because these powers don't, that we're putting up there, like money, sex, food, all things that aren't problematic. We need them. They only become problematic when they're problematic, right? When they're, when we're making them that thing that's going to solve our problems.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Yeah. And it's great that you made a distinction about just being language because, you know, people can say those things. Like I, my kids are very important to me. Probably I would say, you know, one of the most important things in my life is to be a father, right?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But if the energy in the house again and again, is that my kids are my life, what, what are, what a burden that is for that child, right? That means that, you know, like that child might in those instances show up in a way that they need to be happy. They need to perform. They need to they can't show sadness. They in order for that becomes their job to make their parents OK.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a covert form of abuse to use our children to meet our needs. You know, we're there to meet their needs depending on their age, right? I mean, we're going to, you know, you have an infant, you're their highest power. You have to do it. They, they, they, uh, they can't survive without you. You know, they can't feed themselves and you carry them all the time. Right.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And then, you know, eventually they start crawling and walking and you carry them more than, than you don't. And then eventually they're walking all the time and you're carrying them just a little bit. And, you know, then you're not carrying them anymore. If you're still carrying them all the time when they're 16 or 17, that's a, that's a problem.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But when we're using them to meet our needs again and again, now it becomes their job to care for us. And most parents that do this, and I see this all the time, are not setting out and saying, I'm going to use my child to make me happy. They really have the best intentions. And it probably comes out of however they were shaped growing up and how their family was
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, I see this, you know, with my kids, you know, sometimes I come home to their six and three and I come home from work and they're like, daddy, daddy, daddy. And they're running to me and they jump on me and it feels amazing. And other times I walk in and like they've got a show on or something and I'm like, hey, kids. And they're like, they don't even say anything now.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
That doesn't feel great. But what I know is that doesn't mean they don't love me, right? If every day I came home and they were like in the middle of this and I forced them to get up and give me a hug, you do this once, it's not going to be a problem necessarily.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But if I did that every day and now I need them to give me a hug in order for me to feel safe and comfortable coming in the home or just feel happy, they're going to start having the job of we got to hug daddy in order for him to have a nice evening. That's a big job for a little kid to have.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Is it driving you and your behaviors? Are you really leaning on it in a way that that's your medicine? Because I don't really see addiction as the problem. You know, addiction is the solution. Whatever they're addicted to is the solution to some underlying stressor.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And I see that play out a lot in the people that come to us and that they've unconsciously been assigned to these roles in childhood. Like, you know, they're the hero of the family. You know, we can use those the terms or the scapegoat or they're the you know, but really, what was the job that they were given? You know, it's my job to take care of mom and dad.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, maybe they were in the middle of the relationship or, you know, mom and dad are fighting all the time. But kids are often assigned these roles early on and then they don't know how to shed them later on. And so then they just use that role later in life. I mean, my field is full of people who are assigned roles, you know, therapists and nurses and things like that.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, we want to care for people. But it's hard to parse some of that stuff apart.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Because we don't want to blame parents for how their kids end up, but when we're doing work with our clients, we want to understand the patterns that were developed, not to blame them, but to start understanding what were the systemic challenges in the family system so that we can develop and deploy systemic solutions for them.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, I think as humans, we when we're when we're uncomfortable, when we're experiencing pain, our kind of immediate reaction is to get out of that. And when that stress becomes really big, we're going to look for the things that are going to impact us a lot quicker. You know, taking a drink, using a drug.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Now, once people start doing that, depending on what it is, you know, if it's heroin or fentanyl, they can become physically addicted to it very quickly or alcohol over time. But I think the definition can be expanded to a lot of other things, maybe even things that seem mundane.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I mean, I think, how are you using it and what is it impacting if, if anything, but to be, be able to be honest with yourself about it, you know, it's very hard to be, it's, it's easy to say, be honest with yourself about it, but it's very hard to be honest with ourselves. You know, that's where being in relationship with others, sharing what you're experiencing. If you're taking 30 days off,
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
really communicating to somebody else, whether it's a therapist or a trusted friend, you know, how am I thinking about this? You know, am I waking up every day wishing I could be doing this other than some, am I sitting in a business meeting completely dissociated from what's going on because I'm really focused on that I'm not gambling or that I'm not drinking?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, you've got to be able to look at what it's impacting in the way that we're thinking and the way that we're feeling.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And we can have addictive behaviors at different points in our life and maybe have the same behavior that sometimes is addictive and sometimes isn't. This is very mundane, but sometimes I'm binge-watching Netflix because I'm on a plane and don't have anything to do or I'm sick and I can't get out of bed.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Reordering of our lives, yeah.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Something like that.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
This is a great discussion point, you know, that, you know, people will come and say, I just want to be happy. I just want to be at peace. First thing we have to ask them is what does that mean? We have to define it. A lot of times maybe they're saying that happiness is kind of the absence of all this bad stuff or that peace is everything outside of me is going okay. Everything is fine.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
We've got to really explore with them how would they know when they got there? You know, what a balanced life is going to be different for everybody. And especially like with behavioral addictions, you know, it's not about necessarily removing those forever. In fact, a lot of those we can't remove. Food addiction. You can't remove food.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I mean, the things around sex addiction, you know, you're not going to, I suppose someone could not have sex, but really a lot of that is about connection and relationship and love and intimacy. You know, even gambling, you know, people don't have to gamble, but you're dealing with money, right? you know, and you've got to touch it and spend it and be around it.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Yeah, buying a house is an investment. Or a gamble sometimes, as we've seen, you know, and we've got to look at how we're using these things, you know, and going back to drugs, you know, you look at like we've got pain medication, you know, aside from being abused, right? We've got opioid pain medication and then we've got heroin and both of them
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
either came from or derivatives of the poppy, which is a beautiful flower, right? So we've taken this flower and we've been able to make these drugs. And one of them, you know, of course, prescription pain abuse and fentanyl that we see is, you know, it can be deadly. But I think an argument could be made that it's probably saved more lives than it's killed when used appropriately.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
We're able to have surgeries that we probably never would have been able to have before because of the medications that people can use. And then we've got people who are either abusing that or taking heroin and dying, you know, having a, you know, we started calling it the opioid epidemic. I think 50,000 people died. It like surpassed the number of the people in the U.S.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And other times I might have a really stressful day or have something going on that I don't want to deal with. And I end up watching TV too late and then I don't sleep. And now is that a addiction that I need to get treatment for or be pulled away from my family for? Probably not.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
that died by car accidents. Last year, it was something like 100,000, right? 100,000 people died. At least, you know, it's more than doubled. You know, now it's in a lot of different things. There's a lot of kids that are taking something that they think is a less harmful pill, like a Valium or Xanax, and it's got fentanyl in it and they die.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, it's doubled since we started calling it an epidemic. And, of course, that 100,000 doesn't include all of the other drugs and alcohol. But, you know, it goes back to how did we use it? You know, we manipulated this flower in a way that we can save lives and kill people. or die. That's a more extreme example, but how are we using the things in our life?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, are we using exercise as a way to completely, you know, to dissociate from things? If I take away that exercise, am I going to fall apart? Am I not going to be okay? You know, and that doesn't mean don't ever exercise again, but understand, like, if I were to stop for a week, do I fall into a deep depression?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Not everybody's going to do that, but if somebody's oriented in the way that it is a problem, that may happen for them. And then it begs the question, like, what am I using this for? What I think is so important about treatment for addiction and then recovery from addiction is that, you know, at first it's about eliminating something. It's about moving away from something.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But that's not sustainable just to cut something out because it's being used for something to give them that sense of relief or that sense of peace or that sense of connection or spiritual or otherwise. You've got to eventually start building towards something. What's the life I'm going to create?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
If you look at the 12 steps, the last part of the 12 steps is to practice these principles in all our affairs, which means go out and build a life. You know, don't find yourself really small. We were talking beforehand, there was a, I think he was a biophysicist. I can't remember, E.M. Jelinek. He was at Stanford for a bit at the end of his career.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And he had done a lot of research on alcoholism and wrote a book in the 50s or 60s called The Disease Concept of Alcoholism. And out of that book, there was a curve, and you can look this up. It's called the Jelinek Curve. I don't think he actually created the curve. It was credited towards him. In fact, I think he even kind of dissociated himself from it, but it came out of his works.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But I think in talking about addiction, we want to understand what is it that people are using, whether it's a substance or a behavior, and why are they using it? While I say it's Addiction is not the problem. It's the solution. It's a solution that becomes very problematic for people. And, you know, you will know this better than than I will be able to explain it better than I would.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And it starts off with, at the top, and it's for alcoholism, like where people start drinking. And it's in the crucial phase as they start drinking more. And at first, when people are drinking more, their tolerance increases, but they start to experience some problems. They're hungover. They're late for work. They're having arguments, but it's nothing that drastic.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And as they keep drinking and descending down this curve, actually they enter the, I think it's called the critical phase. And that's where actually tolerance decreases, right? They're dependent on it. They need it just to get by. They need it to get to work, you know? They can't keep the job. They can't keep their relationships. Their physical body is starting to fall apart.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
They're getting sick because of it. There's a lot of other factors in it. And then they come down to the bottom of this and it's this cycle of drinking and stopping and drinking and stopping. Drinking until I can't anymore, physically sick, and then going back to it as soon as they can.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
when those people are able to get treatment and find recovery, now the curve starts to go back up, the recovery side of the curve. And in the beginning, they're not feeling that great. They've lost the thing that helps them get through life.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
but if they can stay in a contained environment and that contained environment could be a treatment center or contained environment, like in a 12 step program, you know, where they're engaged in something, I don't mean contained by the walls that you're in, but in some sort of in a community and they can stay away from it.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Eventually they start seeing that they see in others that they can build a life, that they can go after the things that they wanted to go after. And they start finding pleasure from, life rather than from the substance. They start to be able to handle the stressors of life. Their tolerance for stress, instead of their tolerance for alcohol building, their tolerance for stress starts to build.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And then eventually they're kind of moving towards what we would call in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the self-actualization. They're able to build a life that they never thought they could have before. You'll hear people say, a life beyond my wildest dreams. You know, and a lot for a lot of those people, that's just that I'm able to meet anything with some sort of sense of peace.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And when I'm not, I think recovery is it's not about finding a let's just use the word peace. It's not about finding a sense of peace that you stay in. You know, balance is not I'm on both feet standing still. Balance is like like this. Right. And as we're taking risks in life, as we should to really build awesome lives, sometimes we're going to feel way off kilter.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But the recovery process to be able to recognize when I'm out of balance sooner or out of peace sooner and return to it quicker, recover again and again. you know, and have the tools to know, you know, what are the emotional conditions that I might be facing on every day? And what am I made of? And who am I that might bring to that?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So for instance, something I give to a lot of my clients is we call it like the emotional weather forecast. You know, when... the first part of this is they've got to really know themselves.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And that's something that we see in 12 step a lot where though we hear if, if, you know, people identify their character defects, not everybody I know is familiar with 12 step, but that's one of the, but as part of identifying your defects, you're also identifying your virtues, right? Just like a balance sheet. You want to know your liabilities and your assets. And sometimes those things are
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
sometimes they change. And it's something that's a liability in this situation might be an asset in this situation, right? Like if uncontrolled anger and violence in my home when my kids do something wrong, and I'm not doing this, but it is a liability. If my family's attacked, it's an asset, right? So understanding what these defects and virtue or assets and liabilities are so that I really
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But, you know, they get. a benefit in their brain and body for feeling the sense of relief that they'll feel when they use the substance. You know, one of the doctors who initially supported the people who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, his name was Dr. Silkworth. And he wrote this opinion and he said, men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
know myself. And that can be through a process of sharing with others. And in 12 Step, that's how they do it. We do it in therapy all of the time to kind of know who I am. You know, actually, there's a line in one of the AA literature that Bill Wilson wrote, and he gives a definition of humility.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And it goes something like this, that humility is an honest recognition of who and what we've become, followed by a deep desire to become who we can be. And it's not about like that I'm all bad. It's just to note it, to, to, to recognize who I am. If I don't know where I'm starting, I can't know just like finding directions.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
If I asked, you know, to get directions to the studio and your team started giving me directions from over the Canyon, but I was, you know, South of here, they're going to give me the directions to turn left on this road and right on this. And I'm going to, I'm not going to know how to get there. I'm not, I'm going to be disoriented. I'm going to feel lost.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It starts with really knowing where I am, who and what I am. And from there, then we can start to build a life. So one of the things I give people a lot is once they kind of understand these assets and liabilities of theirs, to look at each day ahead and say, first we start off with gratitude. You know, it kind of gives a mindset. And gratitude just isn't about being thankful for things.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I really believe gratitude is meeting what is as it is. You know, that I always, when I give people this and when I practice it myself, I try at least to be one of the things I'm grateful for to be something that I'm challenged by. And not just to say, I'm going to learn a lesson from this, but I might not know what that is, but to really express gratitude for some challenge I'm having.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So that's kind of a mindset. And then the next thing is just laying out your plans for the day and not like a detailed calendar, but like, you know, I'm going to wait, you know, take the kids to school, go to work, travel, you know, have a business dinner tonight. Right. And then, so I kind of know what's happening that day.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And then from there, look at what are my, what's my emotional state currently? What am I experiencing now? Especially if it's like fears, resentments, anger, guilt, shame, it could be something else. It could just be like, I'm feeling I feel really solid today.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But when I can take what's going to happen today and what I'm already experiencing, I can look at what I'm doing today and think, you know, there are some character liabilities or defects that might come up. Like if I have to travel today and I've got to take three flights instead of one, I can know that if I know myself, I might say I could have the ability to become impatient, controlling.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And look at my day to say – almost predict what are the emotional disturbances that can happen that day. And then coupled with the state that I'm in, if I'm already upset about something else, I've got a higher likelihood of going into these reactive patterns that I don't necessarily want to go into. And so much like going on a trip where I would look and see what the weather is going to be.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
If it's going to be – it looks like it's going to be rainy the whole time I'm there, I'm going to pack a raincoat. Now, that doesn't mean I'm not going to get wet. But once I start getting wet, I can go get my raincoat and put it on. Same thing in this.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
The last part of it is to look for what I'm gonna watch for because of my plans and my emotional state now, I know that I have to watch for being like maybe short or controlling. I wanna watch for these character defects or liabilities. And then what do I wanna strive for? I'm gonna strive for being patient, tolerant, kind.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I believe that effect is relief. So people are looking for some sort of relief. And the question has to be, I think when we're talking about addiction, what is it that they're looking for relief from?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Now, just because I write this down just like the rain jacket doesn't mean I'm not going to experience these things. But when I can look at like a day as an example, I can break it down in a chunk where I'm not going to be shocked by I'm being impatient. And as soon as I get impatient, I can remember, oh, this is what I'm looking – this is what I want to watch out for today.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
What do I need to – and I wanted to strive for being tolerant and patient. So then I can use one of the tools that I might have that I've laid out. It might just be if I'm in the airport, walk away, take a breath, and recognize and remind myself this is what I'm striving for today.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And in this exercise, we're putting out in front of us what we might be experiencing based on what we know about ourselves and what we've learned about ourselves. And when we can do that, you know, we can start living each day a little bit better, or at least I find this with my clients, that they can chunk it down and say, you know, they're not surprised by these emotional reactions.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And, you know, like I said earlier, we want to help people. I try to help people learn how to feel bad, you know, to recognize that, okay, I'm feeling disturbed. I'm in a reaction. Let me lean into it rather than run away from And we run away from it in different ways.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I might be snapping at the lady at the counter or, you know, might be someone that now I just totally withdraw and don't say anything. Yeah. Numbing out is very common. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Connection with others is so important, especially when I share something like this that's vulnerable with them because it's not just about holding me accountable, but Now I'm expressing it in a way that others see it and we can have communication with them about having them share it back with you too. I have like 10 guys that I share this with every day.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And not that the way that I do things is the way that everybody should, but I ask other people that I give this to to share it because you're now expressing it. And expressing something kind of brings it more into existence than if I'm just doing it myself internally. And we've got to put these things in front of us because we will forget very quickly.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Or like you said, coming out of a morning journaling or meditation session feels great. I think most people decide to make a change. And then, you know, on one day, and then they don't think about it again in the way that they thought about it for months. Like it happens every year on New Year's.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
They're not putting it out in front of them every day to be a reminder of what I'm going after, what's important to me.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
What is this list? Just like an emotional weather forecast. I mean, call it whatever you want. But I think it can be part of a daily inventory too, where at night you could look at and see how you did. I mean, I think you just talked about being your best self. It's a way to kind of define what our best self is that day.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Because what our best self is is going to change depending on the circumstances we're in. I've run into problems before in my own life where
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
you know, it's like the weekend and I'm really looking forward and like the weekend's going to be, and I don't, let's say I don't do this actually, cause it's a, it's a Saturday and I, it's going to be, you know, I'm home and it's going to be an amazing, I live with four other people, you know, two of three of which are children.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
They might have other plans, you know, and, or someone gets sick and we can't go to the, the, do the, the thing that we were going to do. And I, and I can find myself, you know, really grumpy and right in those character defects or liabilities and, I also think being your best self isn't never engaging in those. It's not never getting angry. Right.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I remember a teacher I had was talking about – and I can't remember the – he was talking about some Indian yoga master that the student asked him like, do the masters ever get angry? And he said, of course. But when they get angry, it's like writing on water. It's there and then it's gone. They're not holding on to it.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
If you try to write on water, those letters are going to disappear right after you write them. There are emotional disturbances that we're going to have and it's part of life. We can't ignore them. We should embrace them and lean into them. I mean I think a real secret to having a really fulfilling life is being able to embrace all aspects of ourself, the light and the shadow.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Because we can't just try to run from the shadow and go to the light. It's just, they're hand in hand. In fact, they don't exist without the other. Well, because they're both inside of us. And they're both inside of us. And they both have their purpose.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Let's talk about the most acute first. So I serve as a chief clinical officer for Guardian Recovery. We do treatment in different states. You know, we serve thousands of people a year and we have medical detoxes that we start with. So if somebody needs to be detoxed from alcohol or drugs, they're going to come in. We're not going to start asking questions about what the underlying stressor is.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
being able to navigate the experience of being human. Right. Because the stride, what we're striving for is not our like specific goals. I'm not striving for like success in this meeting. I'm not striving for making this money today.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I'm striving for ways of being, you know, how I'm going to be that day in the face of the stressors, whether that meeting goes well or not, whether I make the money or I don't, whether I get the answer that I wanted or I don't, that I'm striving for this way of being. And there's a,
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
A line that I heard from a country singer once that I think he heard in a 12-step meeting that said, you know, peace is not finding calmer seas, it's building a better boat. You know, that, you know, how are we going to navigate the storm, not how are we going to avoid the storms?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
We're going to first do medical assessments, nursing assessments. Sometimes we have to send them to the ER if they're in dire need or they're so acute that they can't even be in the facility that we have. We're going to just get them physically stabilized. And as we're getting them physically stabilized, the thing with addiction is a lot of people just say, stop.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Yeah. We want to be able to tolerate that distress enough to make choice and respond rather than react to whatever it is. It doesn't mean that we're not going to navigate out of the storm. I think of it like this. If we go back into the 17 or 1800s when the only way to get from England to America was to navigate or to sail in a wooden sailboat, right? Sail ship, whatever it was called.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And let's say we took the most experienced sailor with the best ship. But this time, rather than using his skills of navigation and sailing, he said, the seas are calm and the weather's good. I must be going the right way. But if the seas are rough and the weather's bad, I must be going the wrong way. And every time The seas were calm. The weather's nice.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
He just kept going in the direction he was. But every time he came across waves and rain, he'd turn. Is he ever going to get there? Potentially. Let's say it's calm the whole way. Or he might end up navigating all the way down around South America and then coming back up. Neither one of those is the answer. The answer is that when he meets the storm –
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
He can use his skills of navigation as a sailor and understanding the weather and his experience to say, okay, this is something I navigate through. This is something I navigate around. But he doesn't just react based on the external conditions. And we react constantly to our external conditions based on what we're perceiving is going on. I'll preface this by saying I think
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I believe one of our biggest, if not our biggest challenges, human beings in our psychology is that we confuse discomfort with threat and respond to discomfort as if it's threat. You know, and this goes back, I can use the, the, uh, uh, diagnostic criteria for PTSD.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Not that everybody that experiences this has PTSD, but when you look at the diagnostic criteria criteria and the DSM five, which is the fifth version of the, it's the most recent version of the, Diagnostic manual, it says that the person was exposed to death, actual or threatened death, or actual or threatened violence, or actual or threatened sexual violence.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
In the DSM-IV, it said real or perceived. And what that means is we can have a similar or exact reaction to something that is actually happening, like you're attacking me, hopefully you're not going to attack me, but like you were, as if you threatened to attack me.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, if I believe that I'm in danger, then I can have the same, I'm going to have the same fight or flight response or the same reaction in my body as if I am actually in danger. It's interesting that our, I think our legal system recognizes this in that you can be arrested for assault or battery. Battery is you hit me. Assault is you threatened to hit me or threatened to kill me.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
We actually, in a way, recognize this idea of perception in our legal system. It's actually it's also I believe what the forgive me for saying it in this way, but the quote unquote successive terrorism is it's not that. this event happens. It's that we leave that event thinking it's not that those buildings came down.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It's that we think, we believe that all of the buildings are going to come down, right? It's terror.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But for people that just stop and assuming they're not in danger, like in alcohol, if you just stop, you could, you know, you can have seizures and die, you know. Other drugs, if you just stop, it can be extremely uncomfortable. But even if they went to a detox and were able to stop, their life doesn't generally get better right away. In fact, a lot of times it gets worse.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Well, we're going to experience the stress. We experience it all the time. And I think it's, it's, and you may be able to articulate this even better than I can, but you know, I think we need to look at stress, right? Not all stress is bad. We need stress. We need stress to move around in this chair. I need, I need to, I need to be able to, um, to walk around.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
My muscles need to tense and I need that stress. It was at Hans Selye's work around eustress and distress. We're going to experience distress and it's not about avoiding distress. It's, you know, how are we going to walk through that distress? And so I like to break practices down into a couple of different ways. So proactive and reactive. Proactive are going to be things that we schedule.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You talked about yoga nidra. We can talk about that a little bit more. You call it non-sleep, deep rest, other forms of mindfulness and meditation that actually allow us to raise capacity in our nervous system. Going to therapy, coaching, being involved in a community, doing physical exercise.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
These are things that we're going to schedule, going into the cold plunge, which does allow us to experience something and stay a little bit longer. And it gives us you know, it's so many, it's, we have one at home and when friends come over to use it, it's so funny because like the first time they're going to do it.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And I know you've had a lot of people, we actually, I was at your home a couple of years ago and there was a guy who was doing it for the first time. And he's like a big, I don't remember this, but he's like a big athletic guy. And he, he was freaking out getting into terrified. Right. And it's just cold water. There's no, it can't,
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I mean, it could hurt you if you're in there for however long to get hypothermia, but it's not going to hurt you. So having practices like that that allow us to move through that level of fear can translate to fear or distress, can translate when it comes in real time for something that we that I know I can walk through this.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Now, maybe it's better in the fact that they're not about to die. You know, they don't have these physical symptoms, but emotionally, you know, they've been using this substance or this or alcohol as a, as a medicator. Now all of a sudden the medicine's gone, you know, and they've got to deal with life. And so they can actually feel a lot worse right when they come in.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Yeah. So that would fit into the proactive, right? So that's something that you can proactively start to be able to manage that adrenaline, as you're telling me, in the body, right? We're able to manage those feelings. Because what does it come down to? these sensations in our body that we're experiencing that feel really uncomfortable.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Right. And so that's what's happening when we get experienced, when people say get triggered by something that's uncomfortable for us, right? You really... you get a text message from your boss or your partner that says, we need to talk later, right? A lot of people, I don't know about you, but when I get, we need to talk later, it's not my favorite text in the world to get, right?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So someone might get that text and then they immediately go into like their perception or their beliefs or their kind of narrative about what that means. I'm This is going to be disappointing. It's going to be really hard. And those perceptions or beliefs are coming out of their past. So now sitting there looking at a text message, which is really just a neutral, it's all events are neutral.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
We bring the meaning to them and we want to bring meaning to them, but it's just words on a screen. And we don't even know what it means yet. You're looking at those and you're not even in the present that more you're in the past. And we're never really out of the present. People say get present. that's the only place we live. It's where are we oriented? Past, present, or future.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
In this moment, now that I'm going into this narrative from all the other times that I was, let's say I'm making up that I'm being rejected or I'm not going to get what I want. Now I'm oriented to the past. So we can say I'm disoriented in that moment. Or to the future, you're anticipating what might be said, what's going to happen. You're out of the moment. But I would say that
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
the anticipation is still something that's coming out of what we've experienced before, right? And then from there, we go into an automatic reaction and it's like a fight or flight response. It might not seem like that because we don't, we might not be thinking I'm going to die from this, but if, you know, we might be thinking I'm not going to be okay. And what is, I'm not going to be okay.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
That gets carried out and it's triggered in the body, I would say in the same way as I'm at threat, I'm in danger. And this is where were confusing discomfort. Because even if I am going to be not going to get the answer I want, or I'm going to be abandoned, it's not life-threatening. It's not actually threatening. It's perceived threat.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But I respond to that perceived threat as if it's actual threat. And I might respond by kind of going after the person, like, I need to know right now, being obsessive about it, I might respond by withdrawing completely and hiding from it. But it creates this cycle of kind of an automatic reaction to things that doesn't allow me to build tolerance for that stressor, right?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So first, what we're going to do is really understand what's going on with them biologically so that we can make sure they're safe. And then as we can support them over the days that they start, you know, becoming a little more comfortable, they're, they're their physical conditions start to stabilize, then we can start to really understand what's going on with them and their environment.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
The solution to that is first be aware that that's happening. And once you're aware that that happens and it happens to us all the time, once I recognize that I'm in this cycle below to find a way to stop, to intervene on that, to take a break from it. It might be just those 20 seconds. It might be something that it might be taking a few breaths. It might be walking away from it.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I think the concept is stilling leads to seeing. I love that. the more that we can still the mind, the easier we can see what's actually happening versus what we perceive is happening. So what you say is so true that it is hard. If the first step is to, after we recognize that this is something that's happening, is to stop when we're in the middle of response, how do we stop?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Something that I work with the people, and I actually heard you talk about in a different way that I really appreciated in one of your Essentials podcasts, where You know, in that moment, when we're in that reaction, you know, the sympathetic nervous system has been activated. The solution, though, is not to deactivate the sympathetic. It's to activate the parasympathetic.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So our practices and tools that I think are the most beneficial is how do we activate the parasympathetic?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
A great question to ask ourselves once we recognize that we're in some sort of stress response, I like to tell people to ask, is am I or is anybody around me in immediate physical danger? And if the answer is no, first off, if I can ask that question, it's probably the answer is no. But most of the things that we experience every day are not life-threatening.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Actually, probably the thing that we experience every day that's most life-threatening that doesn't bother most of us is driving in a car, right? I mean, we're hurtling down the road and just trusting that someone's not going to cross over that other line. But that won't scare us, but, you know—
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
getting someone that you're in a committed relationship with or that you're emotionally attached to that says something you don't like might throw you into a spiral.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, what is their pattern of use? You know, when do they use? What are the effects that it's having in their life? You know, because we want to understand how it's playing out everywhere. Like I said, biologically, psychologically, and socially, and really get a clear picture of
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I mean, from what I've read, tribes would basically shame someone out of it if they did something really terrible. They would send them out of the tribe, and that was like death. They only survived together. Now we can live alone because of... you know, technology and human advancement, but like live physically alone. But, you know, we're not at the top of the food chain, really.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, if we were out in the jungle or back when we were nomadic and we still have that within us, that we need that connection. We need that.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I think this is where we get hijacked by the part of our nervous system that is kind of binary and looking at its life or death. You know, if we perceive this as danger, it's going to respond as danger. We don't want that part of the nervous system and we don't want it having discernment.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
We want it really when we're actually faced with, you know, I say if you and I were walking across the road here and a car is about to hit us, and you see it, I don't want you to stop, breathe, meditate, have compassion for the driver. I want you to react immediately, push me out of the way. Even if we get hurt and break a leg, we need to live.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
who this person is you know and sometimes people come in more motivated than others you know sometimes they get brought to us like you said and I've seen it work either way that someone who's comes in and says I need help you know I'm willing to do anything that they end up not following through with their treatment and other people that come in fighting and screaming end up you know doing very well over time I actually like it when people come in in that kind of struggle I think
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
The problem happens when I go home and I say something to my wife and she disagrees with me and I react to her like she's a car about to hit me. It becomes an appropriate response at an inappropriate time. We don't wanna lose that.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And so it becomes so hard because we're in this kind of, I believe, this fight in our nervous system to say, one part of it saying, you need to act or you're not going to be okay. And the other part saying, I don't want to keep doing this.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
In your mind, I know that I'm in this room or in your lab with virtual reality goggles on, but that one part of my body thinks I'm falling when really I'm watching a video game.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Thank you for doing that.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I was working at a place in central Florida and near there, it was a treatment center, and not far from there, there happened to be an ashram started by an old Indian guy who had come over from India in the 50s or 60s. He's in his 90s now and is kind of credited as one of the people that bring yoga to the West, one of many.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It was the Amrit Yoga Institute and they were running some workshops and I ended up doing a training there. That opened a door for me to start doing some other things. I'd been practicing breath work and This was all part of my own journey. And then I got introduced to Yoga Nidra and it was just a very powerful tool.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And in these workshops that I was in, I saw some pretty amazing things happen for the people that were taking trainings. We were there for, I remember we were there for, it was a 10 day training and you could take it as 10 days or you could take five days and then come back for five days. And there was a woman who had been there for a five day and was, was coming back.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And when she was there at the first part, she, she was a single mom. She had two boys. They were probably under 12 and she was completely stressed by them, like completely stressed. She was, could not almost handle being a mom. And she practiced this. She decided to come to this training and, And then she went home and it was several months in between.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And when she came back, I remember in the opening like group, she shared that she'd gone home and had not changed anything. The only thing she did was practice yoga nidra, I think twice a day in the morning and the evening. And she's like, my boys changed.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
you know, the more people kind of struggle with something up front, it's kind of like the, you pull an arrow back, you know, the further you can pull the bow back and hold it, the more tension in it, the farther it's going to fly.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I actually don't think the boys probably changed at all, but she was someone who was filled with anxiety and stress and the kids were picking up on that. And she wasn't able to tolerate the discomfort or distress of her children or boys just being boys. I don't even think they were really probably behaving more than an eight and 10 year old does differently. But She couldn't handle it.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And now she was able to kind of build this distress tolerance by practicing this meditation. And Nidra means sleep. So it's a sleep-based meditation. Yeah. Do you want to just briefly describe what it looks like? Generally, what it looks like is first, a person lays down. And ideally, they'd be laying on their back unless they can't lay on their back.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But you lay on your back and get in a very comfortable position. It's a guided practice, and one of the reasons it's guided is it kind of becomes a technique that disappears the technique. And what I mean by that is if you're sitting doing meditation and you're doing something where you have to focus on a mantra, which is – This is not an exclusion of that.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But when you're doing that, you kind of have to focus on that mantra. So sometimes having to focus on something can bring you out of it. And in those practices, bringing you out of it is – beneficial too, because you want to be brought out of it and then you can find ways to get back into it, it being the meditative experience.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And I really like when we have people who say, I'm not going to do this, or I'm going to leave, you know, they're actually telling us something about themselves and where they are. And we can be there with them in that struggle.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So you're laying down and there's generally a series of kind of, I'll say physical movements. It's not like yoga doing stretching. It might be something like tensing and relaxing your muscles. It might be something like massaging your face as you're being guided through this to kind of just relax the body. And after a certain point,
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And in a lot of the teachings that when I do it or I've been taught, there's a certain point at which all movement stops and you just want to follow the, you're just instructed to follow the person's voice. In Yoga Nidra, we, or Nidra, we set an intention, like an intention might be like, I'm at peace with myself as I am in the world as it is.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Something like that, something that you want to bring in or, a state that you want to experience. I know that you distinguish, I believe you distinguish non-sleep deep breaths as like yoga nidra without intention.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
If you fall asleep, it's okay. But, and actually sometimes people think they're asleep, but when I'm guiding them and I'll, I'll, I'll give a direction like, you know, uh, to roll over on their right, uh, on their side at the end and they do it, but they thought they were asleep. So they, What we believe is happening in that is they're in the brain states of sleep while still being awake.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, sometimes people come in and they're just like checking the boxes and they're going to be a good student and everything's fine because they're not drinking anymore. And then we're never able to really get to kind of the causes and conditions of it. You know, when they're in a treatment setting, we'll have them for anywhere from, you know, seven days to 90 days.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Once they're in that relaxed space after doing some movement in the beginning or the space to be relaxed and still, I should say still versus relaxed, still physically is through breath, different breath exercises, specifically ones that have long exhales, right? That's like you said, it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. And then- guiding them through their body in some way.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So it might be, there's one called 61 points where you identify all these different points in the body, starting with the forehead down to the pit of the throat and then all different parts from your shoulder down to your fingers and then all the way down to your toes.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And people being able to kind of move their awareness in their body kind of gets them away from that thinking and doing into the more feeling and being. They're putting their awareness on their body rather than everything external.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Does that capture it? I believe so. I might take that, uh, the train example, a little bit different direction where I always will say it's like, you know, you're either on the back of the bus and you're being driven around or you're driving the bus.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, it's not that you're just on, and he may not have been saying this, but just not on these rails experiencing it like this, that you have, uh, control autonomy and have the ability to be authentic and authentic in a way, not authenticity gets kind of thrown around and people like, I just, I just am who I am.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, we like to keep them, you know, and understand, you know, what's going on with them so we can meet them at their different stages and the environment. We kind of try to create a microcosm of their social universe so that, you know, they can experience some stressors while we're not creating the stressors, but we're having them communicate with their families. We're having them
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Well, most times when people are doing that and they're just acting, however they're feeling in the moment, they're not who they are. They're who they were, or they're, you know, they're, they're acting out their past experiences. Authenticity in the way that I'm talking is more like auth is the same in author, right?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It's like authorship that you become the author of your life, that you're able to write the story going forward because a lot of what we're doing before that is just plagiarizing from our past, stuck in the cycles of our kind of programmed reactive patterns that came out of the ways that we were shaped. And things like Nidra, where we can start to activate the parasympathetic nervous system
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
again, distinct from deactivating the sympathetic and be able to pause and be able to look at kind of choice. In that cycle I was talking about earlier where we're being reactive, the first thing is the stop. Well, how do we stop? It's by building these abilities to have this distress tolerance, even if it's for a few seconds and take a moment to be able to get present and look.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And what I mean by that is look at what's actually happening. This isn't every time someone sent me a text message or every time someone's ever abandoned me or disappointed me or every time I've been afraid. It's just this one moment where I get a text that says we need to talk later. And from that, now that can break the cycle enough that I – instead of automatic reaction, I'm in choice.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And I'm making a choice out of kind of all options of how I'm going to handle this. Now, it might still mean that I go, could we talk about it now? Right? in a text response, but that would be very distinct from kind of sending 20 text messages in rapid succession saying, what do you need? Why are you doing this? Am I in trouble?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, whatever it is we're saying, but you've been able to move to the front of the bus and now you're driving it, right? You're moving kind of out of, you're being, instead of being at the effect of life, you're being at cause.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Yeah, and there's a great line in an Indian text, it's called the Atma Gita, I think it is, where it says something like, the end of this is like, man thinks his enemy is out there, but really the man's uncontrolled mind is his only true foe. I don't know if we need to garner complete control over the mind.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I think the way to do that is to be able to kind of find ways to relax back from what the mind is doing and saying. And like you said, ignoring the thoughts between two and five. I think there's a lot of thoughts that we have that we can ignore. Our thoughts are not fact. It's this input that I'm getting. And we tend to grab onto the thoughts that I think that we've had before that have helped us
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
survive situations, even if the way that we've survived those situations is to cause destruction. You know, we know how to live, you know, example would be someone who's in an abusive relationship again and again, right? That person, I've never met that person that said, I can't wait to get in the next relationship. So it's abusive.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
face some of the things they don't want to face. And we have a saying that says, you know, treatment can't really begin until the crisis occurs. And what that means is more of the internal or existential crisis. If someone's coming in and going, well, I'm great. Everything's great.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, it could be a man or a woman in this case, let's say it's a woman, you know, maybe the only men that she was around growing up or controlling or abusive. And she had some experiences with men who were very similar. And then that's the environment or the waters that she started to swim in. She knows how to survive that kind of man, or if you're a man, that kind of woman.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And when they, they would find, even if they want that relationship, that's loving, caring, kind, and patient, no conflict or not that type of conflict, even though they want that when they get into it, it doesn't make sense. because they've never done it before. They're still going to be potentially relating to that person with these past reactive patterns.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I always say this when my wife and I, if you're in a relation, we have a great marriage and great marriage also includes disagreement and argument, right? It also includes love and connection and all of that stuff. And when we're in an argument, it's almost like I'm not talking to her and she's not talking to me. It's like my past is talking to her past and her past is talking to my past.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
When we can stop and get out of that cycle for just a moment, then we can make a choice that will move us toward the direction that we wanna move. And that choice can seem risky because if we haven't done it before, it goes against every, or let's say that that choice might go against everything that we've developed in order to survive the situations that we've come out of.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So now, instead of arguing I'm gonna be vulnerable, that's gonna feel very scary.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, why were they, maybe things are feeling great right now, but why were they drinking or using in a way that was harming themselves, others, you know, ripping their lives apart? sometimes people will say addiction is a choice. I don't buy that all the time, but people will say that. And what I would say to that is,
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
We just, instead of authoring something new, we're plagiarizing from our past, just again and again.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I think, I think I've told you this before, right? The first, probably the best time is to do something in the morning and in the late afternoon. Second best time would be in the evening. And third best time would be anytime you, you can. So it's not easy. You know, it could be anywhere from 20 to 35 minutes, right? So it's not easy for people to find that based on,
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Find that time based on the schedules they have, but set a time that you're going to do it. When we schedule and have proactive tools, we don't know if we're going to need them in that moment. What it means is regardless of whether I need it or not, I'm going to do it. It's kind of like I tell people about therapy and coaching all the time.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
The second best time to get therapy is when you're in crisis.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
best time is when you're not that's when you can we can grow so scheduling proactively will allow us to either um maybe solve a crisis that we're in or help us have the tolerance in that moment like i wake up stressed and i'm able to then do this this practice and then i'm not stressed or i wake up not stressed and i'm able to do this and it helps to build the ability for me to kind of drop back into that state because that's what i i think as we practice things like yoga nidra um we're
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
able to more quickly move from a dysregulated state to a regulated state. I don't know if you've had that experience.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Yeah. And also, I have found in practicing... You're going to draw a non-sleep deep rest that it makes other practices easier that like when I want to do a five minute meditation, you know, and one of the things that I think is super valuable for people is to to set aside, you know, proactively schedule these times that you're going to do longer periods of of rest or a practice.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But also recognize that you don't, you know, there might be things that you can do for a minute or two minutes.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
even if it is a choice, even if people could wake up and say, I'm going to do this or I'm not, like, why would they continue to choose a life that they're hurting themselves and others? So while they're in treatment with us, you know, we want to start to really understand who they are, start to understand, you know, what is happening in their environment.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And it can be very simple. You know, one of my teachers used to say that the breath is the mind made visible. And if you want to change your mind, change your breath. I mean, of course, do a Yoga Nidra. It might take 30 minutes, right? But if you're in a moment where you're feeling really activated, change your breath. Specifically, like a long deep, a long exhale.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It's the quickest way to move us to create an activation of the parasympathetic nerve system. Quickest way, you know, and this is where, you know, People will think meditation is so hard. Breathwork, which there's many different forms of breathwork, are hard, which they can be, I suppose, you know, hard in the way that we've got to find the time and it can be uncomfortable.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But, you know, I'll tell people, take a minute and breathe. And if even a minute sounds long, take seven breaths. Like who can't take seven breaths at any point in the day? You're going to do it anyway, right? We never aren't breathing. But if we can bring our attention to that and you can schedule that, like, you know, I'm going to do that before I get out of the car to go to the office.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I'm going to do it before I go to lunch, after a meeting, before a meeting. Or you can just say any time that I'm feeling like this, I can take seven breaths. It might end up being two minutes, like a TV commercial. And those things add up and they build on each other. And the more that we practice those, the more that we do raise that capacity to experience success.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
First, it helps us activate that part of the system and teaches us like your analogy in the gym, but we also start building a habit around doing something like this so that we can weather whatever storm's coming and we start to orient toward it.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And then as they, you know, stabilize more physically, and then they stabilize emotionally, as we can start to raise their capacity to experience difficult emotions. I mean, I say this all the time to my clients, you know, what I really do with them is help them learn how to feel bad. You know, we don't put that on the website because no one's going to come to us to say, how can I feel really bad?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Alcohol is an interesting one. I think alcohol and most drugs have a lot of similarities. Although alcohol tends to be the one that is the most like socially acceptable. I mean, drinking is part of our culture.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Oh, yeah. I mean, I think some of that's been changing and some of it thanks to you. I mean, I can't tell you how many people that I've ended up talking to because they listen to your podcast. Podcast on alcohol, you know, just from a health standpoint. So people are starting to look at that.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It's become, you know, it's less like the Mad Men 50s people drinking at lunch, but it's still very much part of. the culture and everything, happy hour, happy day. You know, I mean, look at the, have you ever been in one of these retirement communities, like in where people are retired and just drinking all the time or, oh yeah, there's a real stigma to not being able to drink for people.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, I, I, you know, I don't mind sharing. I've been sober for quite some time and That was a challenging thing, like the first wedding I went to or the first work event that I went to. I didn't know how to talk about it. with people. Now I, it, it's no big deal. I don't, it doesn't bother me at all.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Um, and if it does, you know, sometimes I don't like to be around people who are just getting wasted, but I, you know, so I'll leave the wedding at 10 instead of two, you know, most of the people thought I was there till two, but I, I left it, I left at 10 cause they're, they're doing whatever they're doing. But, um, it, it's, it's very challenging cause you know,
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But I think that's, that's at the core of it. You know, how can we build a distress tolerance so that they can face discomfort, they can face pain and not choose the thing that gives immediate short-term relief and that's going to end up hurting them and those around them to allow them to really lean in to whatever that discomfort is.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
having a glass of wine at dinner or, you know, a beer after work or, you know, thinking about, you know, people, you know, there's like a, it was always a thing like the first time a dad and a son share a beer, right? There's a lot of romanticizing around it. And alcohol, I don't think alcohol is evil.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I mean, I think listening to what you've talked about, it is poison, but I don't like anything else in moderation. I don't think it's going to, it's a terrible problem. I'm not anti-alcohol, but, you know, what is it doing to you and what are you using it for?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So I think what the good side of that being part of the culture is when people can find a community, like a 12-step community or some other sort of peer community where people aren't drinking, it can, you know, that is really what helps them a They're not alone in this. And I think the movies and TV do a terrible job representing what 12-step meetings are like.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It's usually like they show a circle in a church basement and everybody's talking about how they can't drink that day. I'm sure you've seen that in television, right? And in reality, of course, that happens sometimes. But most people are there really trying to use that program as a design for living and to build really amazing lives.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
When you look at the 12 steps, when it comes to alcohol, alcohol is only mentioned in the first one. Everything else is about how you live your life. You know, that first step is about admitting we were powerless and that our lives had become unmanageable. And powerlessness is actually an awesome concept. I mean, people will look at powerlessness and think that means I'm weak.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
That means I can't control my life. But really defining where you're powerless is the first step in finding great power. Because if I just keep going out every day and I start fighting a battle that I'm going to lose every single day, and even if it wasn't addiction, like every day I just go out and I am taking on the five biggest guys on the block when I'm a kid, I'm going to lose that every day.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I'm not going to start winning until I realize I can't beat them in the way that I'm doing it. So go do something else. Powerless, when we identify where we're powerless, then we can go find great power. And that's where the concept of higher power comes in. And higher power to a lot of people is God and whatever their concept of it. Sometimes higher power is just the group of
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
people in the community. I will see that anywhere from the relationship with God to me and you talking is a higher power. Two heads are better than one. I'm going to be able to reflect to you and you're going to be able to reflect back. I'm going to share with you and you can reflect back to me and help me see things differently and shift a perspective.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Because a lot of our healing is just a perception change. I'm just going to see things a little bit differently than I did before. So that community and the ability for them to be in service to each other and help each other is a – I think that's the antithesis of I'm part of this drinking culture.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
that's not only unique to alcohol, but because there's such that, you know, there's not usually like a socially acceptable, like you don't see crack advertised on television, right? You see alcohol and it's in, it's in everything. Now we do see gambling on television quite a bit, which is incredible. Yeah, let's talk about gambling.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And when people are able to be available for the depths of discomfort, then they're really become more available for the heights of joy and satisfaction in life. So we start to build that capacity so that then we can start looking at the beliefs that maybe, the limiting type beliefs that have been driving them that are often set from earlier on in their life and the way that they were shaped.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Love that. Gambling. Not everybody that gambles has a gambling problem just like everything else. But when it does become problematic, it's a very challenging disorder to treat. I mean it's – I don't know where the study came out of, but at one point I had seen some research that said that the highest rates of suicide were among gambling addicts.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And what I've seen with that is it's like their whole world starts to get really small. You know, it's weird because in the way that I look at it, it's really the only addiction if it's an addiction for that person, right? Not everybody that gambles is gambling, but for the ones that are addicted, it seems to me to be the only addiction that the next hit can solve all your problems.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So you're down $300,000. You could bet that and win it. I don't think anybody thinks like really thinks, I mean, in the moment they're probably out of their mind, but they don't think, you know, if I shoot this next, if I take, if I, if I shoot heroin, my life is going to get better in the long run. They might be thinking it's going to get better right now because I'm not going to get sick.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I'm going to feel good or whatever it is for them, but they don't, they're not thinking that this is going to solve their problems. They know it's not. And so it, it, it, it fortifies what you were talking, we were talking about before is continuing to go after the hot fudge Sunday, except they can, they can get it, you know?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And it's interesting because I've talked to different people and sometimes the hit isn't in the winning. Sometimes the hit is in the losing for them. Really? I've had people tell me that I don't, I don't really understand that, but I, I think then they have to go back after it again. I mean, I believe them. They're the ones suffering from it, but wow. And it's becoming a real problem with kids.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
There's a lot of sites to gamble on now. They can bet on a lot of crypto sites. You can bet on anything. And kids are playing in these online casinos that are probably operated overseas that are not regulated at all. And casinos that are regulated become very wealthy, winning on a very small margin. I'm sure these casinos don't ever lose. They're making it up. Um, it's in our face all the time.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It was, uh, I was reading Willie Mays died recently as a baseball player, um, San Francisco giant, uh, before we were around, but he, uh, was banned from baseball for life. I think they ended up letting him back in because he took a contract from, I think it was Bally's. He wasn't betting on sports, uh, So this is in the 80s.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
He took a contract because he would go there and meet with their high rollers once a year for like a week. Just play golf with them, hang out with them. He wasn't betting on baseball and he got banned from baseball. Now you watch a baseball game or go to a baseball stadium and different betting sites are mentioned all over the place. You watch any sporting event. And it's it's out there.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And that's not the only thing people are gambling on. But I don't know if you watch sports right now with the basketball on or the Super Bowl is on. I mean, it's showing people with a phone showing that they're winning, you know, 100. There's a celebrity on there winning one hundred and eighty six thousand dollars. I think the number was, you know, and then couple that with.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
kids that are pretty susceptible already looking at those unicorn type people that are making millions on YouTube, playing video games or started a poker player. Yeah. Professional poker players, or even ones that aren't gambling that, you know, they're out there and they became a, a creator and they're making millions of dollars a year by having people follow them like that.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And that's often what we talk about as trauma, not always a big event that happened on a single day, although that does occur. But the shapings that people had in their life that were adaptive. People are very adaptive. And kids, and as they're in their formative years, develop strategies to live life that adapt them in a way that they can survive the environments that they're in.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
This, this, there's a way to make a, you know, that their significance is going to come from making a lot of money really fast and And then they see this way to do it without having to work or anything like that. And it's rigged to lose. I mean, they're going to lose. Dopamine without effort. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
betting on like what we think we might traditionally think of betting on a sporting event or something like that. It's, you know, we see it in cryptocurrencies, not that there's nothing against cryptocurrencies, but people going into it without any knowledge or any sort of sophistication and just putting all their money in it. And, you know, up and down, we see it.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
We see more sophisticated people doing it as adults on, in real estate investments or stock market or owners of company taking big bets on things. And it doesn't mean that there aren't people that are taking calculated risks. I'm talking about people who are like day trading when they, you know, and there are people that day trade and do great.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But then there's a lot of people that see this person day traded in great and then they do it and don't do so great, right? Their lives collapse.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Yes. It's not always then the primary thing, though. There's a lot of people that are coming in with substance abuse or substance use or alcoholism, and we find out that they're also doing that. The thing is, people addicted to gambling aren't always seeking treatment. By the time that they are ready to, they might not have the money for it. you know, who might not have the job with the insurance.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And, you know, if we are talking about insurance and treatment centers, there's not really a benefit for long-term gambling treatment. You know, you have to kind of look at the anxiety and depression around it. And sometimes they get put in with people who are just, who are suffering from anxiety and depression, and we're not really focusing on the specific gambling issue.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
We also see people that, you know, they stop drinking and they're able to stay sober that way and they haven't really organized and ordered their life in a way that they're building towards something. And that energy from the addiction of alcohol or drugs goes to gambling.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Do you think that that increased VO2 max allows for ability to handle distress better?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And if that adaptation, which was appropriate in their family, their school, their environment, whatever it was, maybe all of those was something that was more toward like a survival response, like a fight or flight type response, And now that's never resolved in some way, in a way.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
For me, nothing changes my mind, my mood and nervous system better than even a 20-minute run. I mean, I think they're also getting the benefits. If you're walking or running, you're getting the benefits or similar benefits to what people get from EMDR. I mean, just the natural movements of the eye.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
In fact, EMDR, which is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, was the woman who discovered it, discovered it by going for a walk and realizing when she put something that she was distressed by in her mind at the end of the walk, she felt better.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So I mean I think that's the – I mean anecdotally they'll say that a 30-minute – yoga nidra is equal to about three hours of REM sleep. I don't know that that's true or not, but... It's hard to equate, but... Yeah, of course, but I'm just saying anecdotally, you know.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Well, they want to lose, but they recognize that they felt that that was the hit. Or they felt one there. I'm sure they felt it when they won as well.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
This is so important because I think, you know, what is discomfort? What is the distress we're experiencing? It's not our thoughts. We don't feel our thoughts. We feel our feelings. They call them feelings, right? Because we feel them. What are we feeling? We're feeling some sort of sensation in our body. It's energy. It's energy, which is energy.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And then later in life, they're still applying these adaptive strategies in situations that it's not appropriate for.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And when we're feeling that energy in an appropriate situation, like I'm feeling intense adrenaline and excitement when I'm going on a roller coaster that I like, And I'll pay money and stand in line to do that. If you wake up on a Tuesday morning in your bed and you start feeling that, it's anxiety, fear, desperation. It's still just energy in our body.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
everybody will experience things differently. I could probably ask you because you've got insight, you know, if you're experiencing anger, where it is. If somebody asks me, you know, I can experience that in my hot belly, like heat between my eyes, my shoulders feel really tense. You know, if I'm scared, where do I feel that?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, I feel like an emptiness in my stomach and a kind of tension in my body. You know, people can name it. And sometimes just naming it, you know, what it is versus kind of Running through like I'm anxious, I'm afraid. Instead of saying I'm anxious or afraid, being able to go, well, my heart's racing. I'm feeling tension in my shoulders. Talking about the experience.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And the goal isn't always just to dissipate it, but we can be with it because the idea that I'm anxious and I can't get out of it then causes more anxiety.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And so these practices that we can, anything that we can build where we just kind of lean into the discomfort a little bit and then lean out, we start to build capacity. We pendulate through kind of activation and resource until we have a larger range of motion.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I think in the, up until sometime in the 80s, I'm not going to have this right. They didn't even... I think they didn't really see cocaine as addictive because you didn't become dependent on it like you would heroin or alcohol.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Somebody wrote a book called, I think it was Dr. Gold, 1-800-COCAINE, where they were starting to see that we could classify addiction as a psychological addiction. I might have that a little bit off, but I think it's somewhere in that neighborhood. There's not a physical detox from stimulants like amphetamines or cocaine like there is from – heroin, opioids, or alcohol and benzodiazepines.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Coming off stimulants is really hard. It's really hard. It's really hard. Right. But there's an obsession of the mind that gets triggered. And it's this psychological addiction that they can't seem to get out of. I would imagine that you could probably describe what's happening with the huge surge in dopamine and then dropping off of it. I'm not sure exactly where it falls in that. But
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, there's, they used to think that people couldn't, you know, recover from crack cocaine.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
in working with those, I mean, there's a lot of energy that goes into just having them kind of still. I mean, I think a lot of, you know, stimulants kind of, I see it as they help the physical body kind of match with the internal state of the nervous system. I mean, I think that's one of the reasons we see stimulants work for ADHD.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I mean, you probably understand the biological reasons, but it seems to me that it kind of levels out their experience. I mean, I've seen people that when they take stimulants, they get really calm.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I remember, and again, I don't know this study, but I remember somebody referencing many years ago when I was first getting in the field that porn addiction at the time specifically related to video pornography, which is what it all is now. it was having the same impact on the brain and young men as crack cocaine.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I mean, it's extremely powerful, has a lot of other effects in that it sets up a very unrealistic idea and perspective of what sex and intimacy is. You know, it also, uh, can help, uh, or can lead to kind of setting their sexual template. You know, they can quickly escalate just like you would escalate and you kind of back to the, the, um,
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
hot fudge sundae where it doesn't work anymore from you know something that might seem like normal sex to violent sex to really out there things that um can bring a lot of shame that they're even watching and it can escalate quickly and then have an impact on their own lives and relationships because they're playing out those relationships or that amount of intimacy intimacy depending on what they're doing also if there's masturbation along with it in in
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Yeah. This was probably 10, 15 years ago. where we're treating a lot of soldiers that had come back from Afghanistan or Iraq. And this was like the first wars where they had access to the internet. And there's a lot of other things. So there was a lot of kind of combining of sex and violence, right? They're around a lot of violence and then they're watching sex.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And then that kind of sexual template would set around like an order for them to get pleasure out of sex. It would need to be aggressive or even, even violent or risk, very risky, you know? So there's all these things that kind of collapse and, together. There were other things going on.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It was like the first time that they had also really had access to video, video chats to be able to like be on a battlefield and then come back and be talking to their spouse about something that's going on with the kids. It was very confusing environment for those guys and men and women. You know, the, the porn addiction is a, is a tough one, you know, because it, It's everywhere.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I mean, now you can find it on any social media almost, maybe not anyone, but it's not really limited. And even if it's not, I know certain states have just put in where you have to put in your ID to get it, but there's tons of ways around that and other sites that people can go to.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And I've run into that with a lot of, it does seem to be young men, you know, and it's a way for them to play out some sort of fantasy around connection and relationship. And it makes their world really small. I don't think it's the same as gambling, but it can make their world very, very small in that they're, instead of finding relationships out in the world,
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And it's not necessarily a relationship, but what they believe they're getting out of a relationship, they're then getting out of watching porn.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
These are people that are asking you how they can stop. You know, they're telling you, I can't stop. How do I do it? So it can be similar to other addictions. You know, I mean, first the admission part that it's a problem or awareness that is, and then being able to start to talk to somebody and start to take some accountability around it, not accountability, like you're doing something wrong.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
but to be able to have some sort of identify the behaviors that start leading to that. I mean, that can be done in therapy. There's other 12-step groups that can help people with that to identify what their sobriety would look like, if you want to call it sobriety, what it looks like. And if it does involve not watching any porn, then that's the rule set that they have.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And then they figure out either with their therapist or in their treatment center or with their sponsor or community in 12 step, like how am I going to be held accountable to that?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And that might be doing the things like we talked about, laying out, looking at your, your day ahead at the beginning, they might need to look at things like, you know, there's ways and software out there to not be able to look at that on your phone or have an accountability partner that can, you know, you have to, they have to approve websites you go to. And,
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And that's not to say that they have to do that forever, but it's something that's available right – 50 years ago or 30 years ago, someone had to like find their dad's porno mag somewhere and then look at it. Now it's on their phones or computers.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
If people look it up, I'm sure there's meetings out there that are specific to that. There are Some treatment centers that have tracks that deal specifically with that. There's therapists that work very closely with that.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And I believe that there are some 12-step – I mean there's pretty much 12-step programs for any sort of – within things like SA or SLA, there will be subsets of meetings for people that are with a very specific condition.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
A key to that is what you said about we look at them differently. They're going to keep it secret. And there's a saying, secrets keep us sick, but I believe there's like a real, almost a biology to that in that if you're holding it in, not sharing it, there's no really place for it to go but shame.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
and shame separates us and separate we're not connected and not connected we're alone and alone we're you know we keep carrying that forward alone we're dead you know maybe not in that sense anymore like we talked about earlier but like we're not really living and so they're you know these guys are hearing you on a podcast and then DMing you, right?
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
They're probably not in a personal close relationship with you, right? It's easier to send it there than maybe go ask for help with somebody in their area or go to a meeting or something like that because of the stigma. So it's good that you've opened up the ability for people to do that, but to continue to direct them back to
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
you know, let's try to treat this like we would any other addiction, at least from the standpoint of you've got to talk about it. You've got to have some sort of admission. You've got to be able to find a community around it. You want to be able to do work, you know, most likely with a therapist or a team of therapists that can help you understand what's driving that behavior, you know, and,
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, you and I have had long discussions about trauma before. That's something I've worked with for many years or most of my career as I came into being a therapist. You know, and in trauma therapy, we're often going back to seeing – we do a history and really kind of understand where the patterns started, you know, and –
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It's really helpful for me as a therapist when I can see where it is because I can start making sense of how people are behaving this way as adults when I can see all of the experiences they had and especially the more negative impactful ones which tend to impact the brain. Like you always say, the fastest way to plasticity is through a traumatic event.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It just takes a little bit longer. I think that's where addiction comes in too, because you can kind of feel a sense of plasticity if I'm drinking or if I'm doing drugs, right? I don't know if that's the actual term for it, but I'm not feeling like my brain is so stuck in that direction. I can act a little bit differently.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And if there's no process or no effort, I mean, and we don't struggle. In one way, we're struggling with so much. And in other ways, we don't struggle, you know, with the stuff that we probably need to struggle with to move the energy out of our body. You know, I mean, Michael Easter's book, Comfort Crisis is great.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, it's like, you know, we used to walk like 10 miles a day and, you know, we're not burning that energy. So we're just sitting there. with this energy that used to just get disseminated. We'd like wake up in the morning, move through the stressors of the day, good, bad, and even good things are stressful.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
If you have to go to three birthday parties on a weekend, even if they're fun, you're tired at the end. Sounds like a dad. Yeah, it is a dad. I go to a lot of birthday parties and try not to get... sick because of, you know, at them, especially when they're at these little indoor gyms and ball pits.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Isn't it that we're kind of built to expend energy and then sleep? and then wake up the next day and expend energy and sleep. And if we're not expending the energy, how can we sleep? And then we wake up with more and we just carry the stressors from the day before, rather than just breaking it down.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I mean, that's, that's one of the beauties of, you know, recovery where they talk about one day at a time. Well, one of the, um,
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Well, there are a lot of options for people out there. Sometimes they don't think that they have them because they don't have means, but you know, in our centers, we, you know, strive to create access and I know a lot of others do too.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So it's not just people that pay with out of pocket, there's insurance and, you know, we build some quality treatment centers for people with Medicaid in different states, you know, that's, we don't know what's happening with that at the moment, but, you know, it's currently they can get treatment for that. So if they're in a state where they needed like
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
detox or, you know, they're in a place where if they try to stop drinking or using, it gets pretty significant. There's services out there for them. Another great thing, though, is to just go straight into a 12 step meeting. They're everywhere. How do people find those meetings? Go online, Google 12-step in your area.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
If it's, you know, there's Narcotics Anonymous, there's Alcoholics Anonymous, there's Cocaine Anonymous, there's Overeaters Anonymous, there's Gambling Anonymous. I mean, if you, every one of them has a central office. The organizational structure, especially of like Alcoholics Anonymous is really incredible. We could do a whole episode on it. There's no... There's no leaders.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It's a very flat organization.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Politically unaffiliated. They have a vow of poverty. If somebody died and donated a million dollars, they can't take more than 10,000.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
Yeah. There's only trusted servants. There's no leaders. There are people who are employed that do administrative work, but everything else. And it's been like this for 80 some years. It's really quite incredible. And there are online meetings. There's online meetings. They're all over the world. You can find them at any time. That's one of the beauties of 12-step meetings is that...
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
you know, I obviously I'm a therapist. We have treatment centers. I, um, it's nice to get people to come to those and it's, it's great for people to be able to step out, but there's things that we can do that they can't. I mean, they're not going to medically detox them. They can't keep them out of like, you know, in a safe environment for a period of time.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
They can find a meeting. Yep. They can find a meeting and You know, I always tell people to try six different ones. They're free. You know, you're going to find your group. I mean, listen, they're run by peers.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
So this is like something that was developed as it would be like if somebody developed a therapeutic modality 80 years ago and then passed it on to everybody that they gave every client they had and then they ran it. I mean, it's not.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
It's not run by professional counselors, although there are professional counselors, and then there's every walk of life from... I've been around people who are anything from priests to rabbis to doctors, there's no prejudice in the disease. But you can build a community where people are willing to help and be in service to each other, and
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, you can't call a therapist any time during the night. You can't just look up and find a meeting and go. And at this point with things online, you could find a meeting 24 hours a day anywhere. And the meeting is not going to solve it necessarily. But the fact that you're moving in that direction, you know, you're spending an hour – if you're spending an hour –
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
thinking and reflecting and talking about it. Even if you're not like in silent meditation, it's almost like a meditation. If you're spending an hour hearing people talk about how they recovered and helping you, it's an hour that you're not doing the other thing. And in the beginning, that might be the white knuckling of it, right? But the idea is to get out of white knuckling.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And so the beauty of the 12-step programs, which was founded by the guys that started Alcoholics Anonymous and then Dr. Bob Smith and Bill Wilson, and the way they discovered it was by helping each other. Bill Wilson had been trying to get sober for a long time.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
He'd been introduced to something called the Oxford Group, which was more of a religious group based in Christianity, and they had like a – I think it was a four-step process, which the 12 steps are just kind of really expanded on. But there's a – in the literature, there's this beautiful moment where Bill Wilson had been trying to stay sober for a while and he was.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But he was really white knuckling it and he had been at his home in New York. He had been going into the hospital and helping others and he found by trying to help others, he stayed sober. He's a guy that had struggled for a very long time. And none of those guys were staying sober, but he was, which was kind of he first kind of conceptualized this.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And then he was on a business trip in Akron, Ohio, which is where this Dr. Bob Smith lived. And he was staying at this hotel. I think it was called the Mayflower Hotel in the history. And he had come out of a business meeting. I think it didn't go the way he wanted. And he walked in and in the story he's describing
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
hearing the bar and the kind of clinking of the glasses over here and the kind of the call of the bar. And he had some change in his pocket and it was in the 1930s, early 1930s, maybe 34, 35. And then there was a bank of phones over here. And so he was kind of pulled between the bar and the phones. And for whatever reason, he went to the phones. He paused and he went there.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And he called, I forget who he called, maybe the hospital. And he asked if there was, I think he basically asked if there was any drunks in the town he could help. And they directed him to, in some way, to this doctor who was like the local town doctor, Bob Smith. And he was also an alcoholic who had struggled for a long time. And they met.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And I think he went to his house or he might have been in the hospital at the time. I could have the history a little bit wrong. but they met and started talking. And I think Bob relapsed one more time, but they started talking and helping each other. And then they went and helped another guy. And then they went and helped another guy.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And there's a whole history to like how it developed and then how they wrote a book together. The book was really meant to send, it was written like four years later, send the information about alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous to people everywhere in the country where they didn't have meetings.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
They started having these meetings and helping each other through this step process that they developed. And it's really interesting because this was one man's decision. You know, instead of going to the bar or going to the phone, instead of going to the bar, he made one phone call and that transformed millions of lives. I mean, there's millions of members around the world.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, he was like, I think he was called either Time Magazine or Life Magazine's 100 most influential people of the 20th century. And there's still people who find recovery. And then he gifted those steps to all of the other things like Cocaine Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous. And, you know, it's not for everybody. And they'll even say that in the literature.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
That's why I don't, I wouldn't consider it a cult because they'll say we don't have a monopoly. You know, and of course you're going to meet personalities in there, but the organization itself is agnostic to religion, to ideas, to politics. And it's a place that people can come in with a common problem and find a common solution. And these meetings can be the place that hold people as a container.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
You know, I always see our treatment centers as like a container of space and time where people can come in. and really kind of let themselves fall apart and we can start helping them build their life back. But these 12-step meetings are like a container and people are excited in there to reach out and connect with you. And it's in those moments of connection that we can really find
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I mean, look at what happened to him instead of going into the bar and connecting with the people in there and drinking. And, you know, he had enough evidence to show that drinking would, you know, it didn't take him in the right direction. He was able to make a phone call, connect with somebody else, and it created all these connections later on, you know, and.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
it's not a place that people go just to white knuckle it. I mean, that's why they might get in there. Nobody usually comes there because they, you know, had one bad night of drinking. It's usually, as some people say, no one comes in here a winner. You've been on a losing streak and, uh, and that's okay.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
But to be able to admit that and really discover who you are and share that with others and find frivolity and joy in, in, in, in like in the depths of people's pain. And they can really understand that there's, there's hope there's promise and there's a way out.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And these people who are struggling aren't going to necessarily find that in their first meeting, but they might get the hope and the connection with others. And so they're available out there.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And if you don't like the 12-step and the spirituality, there's other recovery programs out there or other peer support groups out there like Smart Recovery or Refuge Recovery, and they'll talk about things in a different way. So it's not about finding a specific dogma. Go out and try different things. Even the act of trying different things
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
is gonna help them move out of being stuck in if it's like the porn addiction, right? And then people do reach a certain point in acuity, especially with drugs and alcohol that they need to be in a facility. you know, and that might be a hospital, it might be a treatment center. And, you know, you can, there are resources for that.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
I think it's a good place for people to start if they don't have the resources to be able to attend a treatment center or work in therapy.
Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
And for the families. Al-Anon is for the families. There's Codependents Anonymous. There's Families Anonymous. There's Adult Children of Alcoholics Anonymous. Or Adult Children of Alcoholics is really about dysfunctional family systems that people might have grown up even if their parents weren't alcoholics. So there's stuff out there for everyone.