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4 Things You Must Do To Fix Your Life - Dr Andrew Huberman – Transcript
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- James Hollis outlines four unifying features for having a great life, starting with shutting up to practice gratitude.
- The unlearning process for dealing with bad experiences involves four steps including acknowledgement, feeling emotions, uncoupling, and transmutation.
- Neuroplasticity follows specific steps including alert, focus, agitation through genuine errors, and reinforcement through sleep and self-testing.
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People of the UK and Ireland, if you are coming to see me on tour, I want to hear from you. I want to know what problems you're dealing with, your worst first date, and any questions you've got for me. And I will be bringing some of you up on stage to talk about it. So, if you're coming to see me on tour this October, go to chriswilliamson.live/stories, submit them, and I might see you with a mic in front of your face very soon.
chriswilliamson.live/stories. >> What are the unifying features of how to have a great life? Let's just start with how to have a great life. James Hollis came on my podcast, 84 years old, surprised the [ __ ] out of me when he said, "Here's how you have a great life. It involves four things. The first three are shut up."
That's the first one. I go, "Shut up." And he goes, "Yeah, someone's always got it worse than you. Nobody wants to hear you whine. Have gratitude for what you do have. If you're alive, you got something to be grateful for." >> Mhm. >> [clears throat] >> I didn't really expect that from him, you know? He's like this 85-year-old Youngian analyst. He talks about the unconscious mind. He goes, "Shut up.
Your day should start with Huberman, shut up. Whatever has got you bothered, shut up. You've got it better than somebody." >> I actually wish someone had said that to you earlier, but that's okay. >> Thank you. Um second, >> >> you can keep this in.
>> Is this a continuation of >> Next, he said, "Chris Williamson, go [ __ ] yourself." >> true. Sorry. >> >> First is shut up. Second is suit up. What is suit up? Suit up is you have a role to fulfill each day for other people and for yourself and for the world. Suit up is get prepared. Shower, organize your room. We've heard this stuff from Jordan and from other people, but get your act together so that you
can then do the third thing effectively, which is show up. Go find a role in life and fulfill it. Might not be the role you fulfill your entire life, but if it's a summer camp counselor, if it's a babysitter, if it's a a nanny, if it's a firefighter, if it's whatever you you are doing at some point in life, you in order to have confidence and be a healthy happy person, you need to fulfill roles for society, meaning for people in your life, not just for you. You have to be in service. Now, some people might
think, well, I want to make as much money in the world as possible. So, that's not me, but a lot of people feel that way. Great, to do what? Go fulfill that role. So, get dressed properly, do those things. See, it sounds so basic, right? So, shut up is about gratitude, suit up is about prepare and practice. Don't show up, you know, don't for me I delayed the publication of the book three times. Why? Cuz I want the book to be something I'm truly proud of and that people will feel that they were honored as smart people who deserve quality
information. Period, end of story. And I was willing to tell the publisher and everyone else, look, I'm so so sorry, but I'm going back in again and again and again. Eat the shame because ultimately I had a higher value, which was that the book be of good to extreme value to anyone that that that read it or even just looked at a chapter for instance. And then that last one of show up is actually go do the work, like chop wood, carry water.
Like, no one gives a [ __ ] that you don't want to do it today, just do it. Great confidence comes from those. But, then he said the fourth thing, the pitfall is that when we get too much into role playing these roles and doing these things, we we don't often enough or excuse me, many people end up down a road that they don't really want to be on.
And everyone fears that. So, he said the solution to this is very simple. Once a day, go into your mind and get out of stimulus response. You either meditate or just breathe. You draw, you listen to music, you don't look at your phone, you don't think about your role in the world and all you do is you try and listen to and it sounds real squishy, but when it's next to shut up, suit up, show up, I feel comfortable saying it, which is you ask yourself like, what is my
deeper wish, my heart's desire? What do I need to be focusing on now? Maybe I have enough career, enough money, enough enough whatever, you know, colleague respect etc. Maybe now it's time to uh focus more on relationships. Maybe it's time to focus less on one's role as a mother or father, not completely, but focus more on an artistic creative side that if you don't satisfy, you're not going to feel like you had a good life. So, personal
development, if you look at those bins, it's not about shut up, suit up, show up and do this internal practice of getting out of stimulus response. It's That's just one example. You look out across the landscape of personal development and almost everything slots into one or two, but usually just one of those.
Entire books are about the first one or just the the last one or two of the two of the four. And I go, that's very satisfying to me because as my colleague said, putting a structure on things is is very helpful because it helps us navigate without feeling like there's all this information. Wait, I'm supposed to journal and I'm supposed to do therapy and maybe psychedelics, maybe not and I'm supposed to have social connection and and like pretty soon you're like, when am I supposed to do the morning sunlight thing?
>> It's a lot. >> So, the idea is that you you understand the framework. And then when it comes to the trauma piece, for unlearning, right? Like there's a tremendous amount of information in the book on how to focus and learn better. But then also, what about unlearning? >> Mhm.
>> All of getting over bad stuff is four steps. The process is four steps. The first thing you need to acknowledge the bad thing. You can't just deny it anymore. You can't suppress it. What are you suppressing? You need to acknowledge this happened, this sucks.
Two, the second step is you need to feel the feelings completely. There is no working around this. There are entire books and workshops written around breathing into psychedelic-ing into, talking into, hugging into, shaking into >> Yep.
>> feeling the full suck of the horrible thing that happened or things. But that's not where it stops. People will often just end there. The next piece is feeling calmer, even slightly, and more peaceful around the accurate, detailed memory of the thing.
You're now uncoupling the emotion from the thing. You can't just live in the feel your feelings. We have an entire generation of people and collection of people online who are only there, and they wonder why they're still there. >> At the mercy of their feelings. >> At the mercy of their feelings, but also they're not effective in the world.
They're not affecting change. They think they are, but they're not affecting change. This is actually why I think they hate One of the many reasons why successful people are often hated, because they're moving along. They're like, I feel like sometimes online I look and I'm like, you remind me of those kids when I would go home, cuz I left I went to college then came back, and that scared the [ __ ] out of me. Cuz I was like, oh my god, you guys could write a textbook on how to become a like a world-class loser.
And some of them weren't like drugging out or anything. I was just like, you guys are still talking about stuff that Well, today I talked about stuff that happened in high school that was helpful for me, but you guys are like stuck. It's like these people that hang out in the parking lot of bars for years and years talking about this thing I mean to it's the saddest thing in the world. And men do it one way, women do it another way.
It's this fixation on the things that happened that we feel wronged about, and we all have them, right? And granted, some people were genuinely wronged. That's not the point here. It's not whether they were wronged or it's that they're stuck there. And the third piece is about the uncoupling, and then the fourth piece is what we kind of think of as the magic of life, where people take the hard thing and the experience and their journey of moving through it, and they transmute it into something of beauty and goodness
for the world. These are the people that go and talk at bereavement workshops. Talk to people who've lost a child. Talk to people um who have experienced horrible things. Talk to Maybe they even just plant a flower and put it in the windowsill and every morning they appreciate not the pain they went through, but the pain they went through that they no longer experience and the beauty that's there representing it. A small detail, right?
A small detail in their life. They've transmuted the pain. But you can't just go, "Oh, you know what? You had this horrible thing happen. You know, plant a flower. Put it in the windowsill and think about how beautiful it is." You can't take somebody who's struggling in number one or two >> Yep.
>> or three and put them there. So for me >> Go back through those four for me. >> What's that? >> Go back through those four. >> Acknowledge the thing. >> Yep. >> Straight on. Exactly what happened or how many thing, you know, what is the thing that sucks, that hurts so much.
Two, you have to in a safe environment. This is why there's an interest in clinical trials on MDMA because it's this empathogen makes people feel, you know, love and safe, but you need that's not the only way. I mean, there's therapy, there's journaling. I talked about this in Talk about all the different approaches to each of these steps. That's the second step. You have to feel the feelings completely of the horrible thing that happened.
The third thing is once you've done that enough, and we talk about what enough is, you need to be able to recall the details and specifics of the horrible thing that happened with less emotional load. The emotional load starts to peel back.
And it's a hard step to get to, but once you get there, it's a process. It's not like you go in and you go, "Okay, today I'm going to remember everything, but it's not going to bother me at all." Little by little you start to uncouple the >> memory exposure therapy. >> Some people do EMDR. That's one way Some people do hypnosis. Some people do talk therapy. Pennebaker has people journal four times for 15 minutes each about the horrible thing that happened. This takes them through steps two and three.
15 minutes one day, 15 minutes the next day, 15 minutes the next day, 15 minutes the next day. No more, no less. And by the fourth day, tens of thousands of data points now. Not just individuals, but many, many papers, even if you know, manuscripts, scientific manuscripts. But even if you tear up the writing afterward, even if you delete the file, you find that people move through steps two and three to a significant degree.
>> Yeah. >> And then the fourth step is not just letting it hover there as this thing that you got through, but finding some way or ways, it can be many, of transmuting that entire experience, the thing that happened and the way you moved through it, into some point of beauty or contribution to your own well-being and to others' well-being. Could be your dog. And the dog represents every
bit of your ability to love unconditionally and their ability to love unconditionally. That represents the unconditional love you didn't get. Maybe it's the Someone who has suffered a horrible trauma is helping people who suffered similar traumas, or maybe it's some just symbol, right? I mean, you know, in a very Jungian way, it can just be a symbol of like maybe you have this paperweight, and that symbol is the the weight of your your certainty that you made it through. And you just you know, the the human mind can assign