In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, I discuss the biology of emotions and moods, focusing on how development and neurochemicals shape our feelings and relationships. I describe how early infant bonds and puberty shape adult patterns of emotional connection. I explain that understanding emotions requires recognizing both internal states and external cues, along with strategies to enhance your emotional awareness. Additionally, I discuss the key elements of healthy emotional bonds and provide practical tools to deepen one’s understanding of emotions, leading to a richer emotional life. Read the full episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Huberman Lab Essentials are short episodes focused on essential science and protocol takeaways from past full-length Huberman Lab episodes. Watch or listen to the full-length episode at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Huberman Lab Essentials; Emotions 00:03:01 Sponsor: Eight Sleep 00:04:39 Emotions & Childhood Development 00:06:35 Infancy, Anxiety 00:08:04 Understanding Emotions; Tools: Mood Meter; Emotions & 3 Key Questions 00:11:45 Infancy, Interoception & Exteroception 00:12:48 Sponsor: BetterHelp 00:14:02 Strange-Situation Task & Babies, Social Bonds, Emotional Regulation 00:18:04 Tool: Exteroception vs Interoception Focus? 00:23:07 Sponsor: AG1 00:24:11 Puberty, Kisspeptin; Testing the World & Emotional Exploration 00:31:56 Sponsor: LMNT 00:33:13 Creating Healthy Emotional Bonds; Dopamine, Serotonin & Oxytocin 00:37:07 Vasopressin; Vagus Nerve & Alertness 00:41:34 Recap & Key Takeaway Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. My name is Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. So let's talk about emotions. Emotions are a fascinating and vital aspect of our life experience.
It's fair to say that emotions make up most of what we think of as our experience of life. Even the things we do, our behaviors and the places we go and the people we end up encountering in our life, And all of that really funnels into our emotional perception of what those things mean, whether or not they made us happy or sad or depressed or lonely or awe-inspiring.
Now, one thing that is absolutely true is that everyone's perception of emotion is slightly different. meaning your idea of happy is very likely different than my idea of what a state of happiness is.
And we know this also for color vision, for instance, even though the cells in your eye and my eye that perceive the color red are identical right down to the genes that they express, we can be certain based on experimental evidence and what are called psychophysical studies,
that your idea of the most intense red is going to be very different than my idea of the most intense red if we were given a selection of 10 different reds and asked which one is most intense, which one looks most red. And that seems crazy. You would think that something as simple as color would be universal, and yet it's not.
And so we need to agree at the outset that emotions are complicated and yet they are tractable. They can be understood. And today we're going to talk about a lot of tools to understand what emotions are for you to understand what your emotional states mean and what they don't mean. And in doing that, that will allow you to place a value on whether or not you should hold an emotional state as true
or not true, whether or not it has meaning or it doesn't, as well as whether or not the emotions of others are important to you in a given context. We're going to talk a lot about development. In fact, we're going to center a lot of our discussion today around infancy and puberty.
We're also going to talk about tools for enhancing one's emotional range and for navigating difficult emotional situations. I'm not a clinical psychologist, I'm not a therapist, but I do have some background in psychology.
And today I'm going to be drawing from the psychology greats, not me, but from the greats of psychology who studied emotion, who studied emotional development and linking that to the neuroscience of emotion. Because nowadays we understand a lot about the chemicals and the hormones and the neural circuits in the brain and body that underlie emotion.
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