How to Understand, Assess & Improve Your Mental Health from Huberman Lab
How to Understand, Assess, & Improve Your Mental Health
Source: Huberman Lab
Contributor: Selena Garcia
DISCLAIMER: This is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read on this website.
“We all want to be mentally healthy; there’s a rhyme and reason to it. Yes, it follows science, and yes it also follows common sense. And if we apply those things, we get to answers.” — Dr. Paul Conti
Plug in. We’re going deeeep on mental health.
Here’s the deal: most of us are tossed into the whirlpool of humanity without a clue about how our minds work. Once we start to unravel the intricacies of our own psychology and understand the basic building blocks of who we are, it's like finally getting a huge piece of the owner's manual. We can wake up to this inner compass to resilience. It will help us distance ourselves from the drama, gain some perspective, and navigate the choppy waters without constantly feeling like we're at the mercy of our own thoughts and emotions. Let’s get into the driver’s seat, snap out of autopilot, and move toward the messy trenches of our minds. Let’s figure this stuff out together, because there's no time like the present to start living a more conscious and fulfilling life.
Below, is a link to two episodes from a four-part series from Huberman Lab and Dr. Paul Conti. Each episode is over 3 hours long (we’re seeking the teachings most of us were never offered because we are proactive and awesome like that). It’s not only informative (they really break things down); it’s so thorough, and as usual, offers so much more than is shared here.
“Healthy self approaches life through the lens of agency and gratitude […] If we have those two things, it’s interesting, you almost never see someone go wrong.” — Dr. Paul Conti
DESCRIPTION: “This is episode 1 of a 4-part special series on mental health with psychiatrist Dr. Paul Conti, M.D., who trained at Stanford School of Medicine and completed his residency at Harvard Medical School before founding his clinical practice, the Pacific Premiere Group. Dr. Conti defines mental health in actionable terms and describes the foundational elements of the self, including the structure and function of the unconscious and conscious mind, which give rise to all our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. He also explains how to explore and address the root causes of anxiety, low confidence, negative internal narratives, over-thinking and how our unconscious defense mechanisms operate. This episode provides a foundational roadmap to assess your sense of self and mental health. It offers tools to reshape negative emotions, thought patterns and behaviors — either through self-exploration or with a licensed professional. The subsequent three episodes in this special series explore additional tools to further understand and improve your mental health.” For the full show notes, including articles, books, and other resources, visit hubermanlab.com.
**Recommended: Look at the timestamps on the Huberman site to see the range of this conversation. While you may want to skip to certain sections that interest you most, there’s a foundation of understanding the self that they set up in the beginning. The entire conversation builds, so if you can listen to the whole thing, it’s encouraged. Should you choose to skip around to your preferred sections, that’s ok too, but please keep this structure in mind in case the key ideas do not fully click into place.
08:45 – Dr. Huberman: “When it comes to mental health, concepts of the self, things become much more abstract. […] Can you tell us, what is the healthy version of self? What should we all be aspiring to?”
09:27 — Dr. Conti – “Healthy self approaches life through the lens of agency and gratitude […] If we have those two things, it’s interesting, you almost never see someone go wrong. Even if there are difficulties, even if things happen in life that can make some unhappiness, it doesn’t take away the person’s engagement in life, a person’s enthusiasm for life.
48:35 – Dr. Conti: “We all have some degree of anxiety in us. We all have some awareness that we’re navigating the world and not everything is perfect, right? This is not nirvana. So, there’s some anxiety within us, and the thought is that that anxiety can keep us vigilant about the things we should be vigilant about: health and safety. But too much anxiety becomes counter-productive.
1:58:04 — Dr. Conti: “If it’s a deep seeded, trauma driven, unconscious motivation, that is resulting in an unhealthy array of defense mechanisms, let’s go look at that. Let’s look at the trauma. Let’s take the thing that’s unconscious and bring it to consciousness. We can make that better. And that array of unhealthy defenses, we’re not going to change it overnight, but can we change it very, very significantly, pretty rapidly? Probably yes, and we can almost entirely change it across time. […] We all want to be mentally healthy. There’s a rhyme and reason to it. Yes, it follows science, and yes it also follows common sense. And, if we apply those things, we get to answers.
3:24:14 — Dr Conti: “We can do a lot of this on our own, and we can get so much from talking to other people; people in our lives who are close to us, who love us. We can talk with them about what’s going on inside of us, and that is such an amazing mechanism of learning. And, there are also professional resources. […] You might come at it through one lens, and then another lens, because everybody’s different and we can bring different modalities, but ultimately that’s what good therapy is doing. It’s looking in all ten of the cupboards, and it’s seeing ‘where is the issue.’ Let’s follow the clues. It’s a spirited inquiry. Whether we’re doing it on our own, or we’re doing it with other people in our personal lives, or we’re doing it with someone professionally, it’s a spirted inquiry to follow the clues. Because if we follow the clues, there are answers. And if we have the answers, then we can bring things into better alignment, and then we’re in a better place. Those pillars are more stable, and we can build on top of them what we want to build on top of them. […] It’s a process we can use over and over.”
“It’s from the character structure that we are engaging in the world in the ways that we’re engaging. […] By going back and looking at the structure, we can learn a tremendous amount.” — Dr. Paul Conti
2) GUEST SERIES | Dr. Paul Conti: How to Improve Your Mental Health, Huberman Lab (Watch or Listen, 3 hrs, 13 min)
DESCRIPTION: “This is episode 2 of a 4-part special series on mental health with Dr. Paul Conti, M.D., a Stanford and Harvard-trained psychiatrist currently running a clinical practice, the Pacific Premiere Group. Dr. Conti explains specific tools for how to overcome life’s challenges using a framework of self-inquiry that explores all the key elements of self, including defense mechanisms, behaviors, self-awareness and attention. We also discuss our internal driving forces, how to align them and, ultimately, how to cultivate a powerful “generative drive” of positive, aspirational pursuits. Dr. Conti also explains how to adjust your internal narratives, reduce self-limiting concepts, overcome intrusive thoughts, and how certain defense mechanisms, such as ‘acting out’ or narcissism, show up in ourselves and others. The next episode in this special series explores how to build healthy relationships with others.” For the full show notes, including articles, books, and other resources, hubermanlab.com.
07:49 – Dr. Huberman: “If you could just give us an overview of what this structure of the healthy self looks like as a roadmap for where we’re all headed today.”
07:55 – Dr. Conti: “Revisiting the pillars is I think the best place to start, because there really are routes to understanding, and if we understand then we can strategize, we can make change, we can make things better. So, the first pillar of the structure of self starts with the unconscious mind—this incredibly complicated biological supercomputer that’s firing a mile a minute underneath the surface in us and is throwing up to the surface all sorts of thoughts and ideas and states that then the conscious mind apprehends, and our awareness comes into play. And then we have defense mechanisms that sort of rise up from the unconscious mind, and they circle and sort of gird themselves around the conscious mind, which they can do in an unhealthy way or in a healthy way or anything in-between.
“And then there’s the character structure, sort of the nest around all of that, and it’s from the character structure that we are engaging in the world in the ways that we’re engaging. It’s our active engagement with the world around us and the idea is that the self grows […] out of that nest sitting on top of the unconscious mind to the conscious mind rising about the defense mechanisms and the character structure. And if we go back to that when we’re trying to understand ourselves, trying to understand states of health as well as states of unhappiness or states that aren’t healthy — by going back and looking at the structure, we can learn a tremendous amount.
“And the other side, the other pillar, is the function of self. It really starts with the self-awareness. The awareness that there is an ‘I, I am in the world.’ […] to some very significant extent deciding how I’m going to engage in the world around me during that time. So, on top of that are the defense mechanisms in action. Defense mechanisms, remember, are unconscious. So, there’s a lot then going on inside of us that’s determining the sort of field set of options. There may be a lot of automaticity that narrows down the set of options of what we may entertain, what we may be aware of, what we may decide. And that can happen for better or for worse, depending on the health of the defense mechanisms. But on top of that lies salience.
“So, the idea we would next visit — ‘What are we paying attention to? What’s coming from inside, what’s coming from outside?’ And we have to not pay attention to many, many, many things in order to pay attention to whatever our attention has alighted on in the moment. So, it’s a complex process, and it’s worth looking at very closely if we want to understand ourselves. After thinking about the defense mechanisms in action, the unconscious aspects of how we’re engaging in the world, then next to consider is salience, which is sort of where does the mind arrive at at rest? Where does the mind trend towards? Is it something internal or is it something external? What are all the things we’re not paying attention to in order to pay attention to something, and is that thing healthy, is it not healthy, is it serving us well?
11:02 – “The next step beyond that is understanding behavior. How are we engaging with the world around us? What are our behavioral choices? What are our automatic behaviors? And then sitting on top of that are our strivings. So, we have a sense of wanting something in the world around us. What is that and how are we trying to get to it and how does it make us feel? If we look at the ten elements — the five under the structure of self — and the five under the function of self then what we’re really looking at is sort of like looking at ten cabinets. And if we’re trying to understand ourselves, whether we’re just trying to generally understand ourselves, or we’re trying to get at a problem then looking at all ten of those cabinets makes sense.”
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