Tools for Managing Stress & Anxiety |

Huberman Lab Podcast #10

Cyclic deep breathing can be used to build psychological
control and stress thresholds, reduce symptoms
associated with infections, and provide alertness or
anxiety, but should only be done with a doctor's
clearance due to potential pulmonary effects.
November 12, 2022 — 11 minutes read

[Summary] Tools for Managing Stress & Anxiety | Huberman Lab Podcast #10

Key Takeaways
1. Stress is a natural response that can enhance our immune system, but it can
also lead to negative emotions. By understanding how stress affects us and
learning objective tools to control our emotions, we can better manage our

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 internal experience and live more fulfilling lives.
2. Stress is inevitable, but we can control our response to it. Our stress
response is initiated by a chain of neurons and is generic regardless of the
type of stressor. By understanding the biology behind stress, we can use
tools like meditation and breathwork to de-stress in real-time.
3. Deep breathing or meditation can reduce stress quickly and understanding
the stress response is crucial for effective stress management. Telling
oneself or others to calm down does not work.
4. By controlling your breathing with physiological sigh, you can directly affect
your heart rate and reduce stress response. Inhale longer or more vigorously
to speed up your heart rate, exhale longer or more vigorously to slow it
down.
5. Exhales are the quickest way to calm down and the physiological p sigh, a
double inhale and long exhale, helps to eliminate stress response in real-
time. You can voluntarily control your diaphragm to double or triple
inhales/exhales, modulating emotionality and stress response.
6. Take control of your stress levels in real-time by using the physiological sigh
technique. Double inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth.
Repeat one to three times for fast relief from heightened alertness.
7. Our breathing and level of stress affect our emotional and physical health.
By activating our para facial nucleus through the physiological sigh, we can
improve our speaking and relaxation. Understanding different types of
stress can help us better manage our well-being.
8. Controlled short-term stress can prime the immune system to fight
infections, but it's important to balance stress levels and avoid overuse of
stress-inducing techniques like hyperventilation or exposure to cold.
9. Short-term stress can be beneficial for healing and focus, but chronic stress
can harm the immune system and overall health. Learn to turn off your
stress response and use stress wisely, while avoiding risky activities like
hyper oxygenated breathing near water.
10. To manage medium term stress, try activities that increase adrenaline such
as cold showers or sprinting, and then mentally calm yourself. This increases
stress capacity and makes stress more manageable.
11. Widening your view from tunnel vision to panoramic vision can calm your
mind and release stress response in the brainstem. This can be trained over
time to make stress more manageable and improve sleep through regulating
heart rate with breathing.

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 12. Exercise, sleep and stress management tools are important for managing
long-term stress, but social connection is crucial. It activates our
neuromodulation systems and mitigates the negative effects of stress,
leading to feelings of wellbeing.
13. Maintaining social connections can suppress harmful molecules and
promote positive functions in our brain and body. Paying attention to
feelings of comfort and delight can have positive effects on our immune
system and neural repair.
14. Practicing gratitude and implementing stress-management techniques,
such as social connections, a healthy diet, exercise, and quality sleep, can
positively impact overall wellbeing. Non-prescription compounds like
ashwagandha and theanine can help, but be cautious with high-dose
melatonin supplementation.
15. Theanine and Ashwagandha can be helpful in reducing sleep issues, chronic
stress, and anxiety by increasing GABA and reducing cortisol levels
respectively. They should only be used during times of chronic stress and in
appropriate dosages. Avoid tourine found in energy drinks.
16. Matching your internal state with the demands placed upon you is crucial for
interpreting emotions. Tools like proper diet, exercise, and sleep can help
control stress. Understand your emotions better through a physiological and
neuroscience perspective.
17. Learning to modulate stress can improve our ability to process information
and react more effectively. Tools anchored to our body, brain, eyes, and
diaphragm can help control our internal levels of alertness or calmness,
improving sleep, work, and social connection.

Podcast Summary
Understanding Stress, Emotions, and the Importance of
Control

Stress lies at the heart of our internal experience not matching our external
experiences, creating emotions. Emotions have a strong physiological
component involving the brain and body's communication. The nervous system,
which controls the body and brain, has a concrete influence on each other.
Stress is not always bad, and it can enhance the immune system. Mindfulness is
a vague concept, and today we're discussing objective tools to control emotions

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 and lean into life better. This gives us greater power and control over our inner
real estate, allowing us to control our emotions when appropriate. It's important
to understand what stress is and that it's not just an ancient leftover from times
when we were being attacked by predators.

Understanding and Controlling Your Stress Response

Stress is a universal experience for all species, and it is not something we can
completely eliminate from our lives. However, we can control our stress response
with hardwired biological mechanisms that exist in us, allowing us to de-stress in
real time. Stressors can be physical or emotional and our response to them is
generic. Our stress response is initiated by a chain of neurons called sympathetic
chain ganglia, which become activated in response to stress. Understanding the
underlying mechanisms of stress and our response to it can help us better
incorporate stress-reducing tools like meditation and breathwork, and to modify
them as our circumstances change. Our ability to control our stress is a powerful
tool, and through the right tools and understanding, we can learn to
breakthrough it in real-time.

The two-pronged reaction of stress and practical solutions

The stress response is a two-pronged reaction in which the body activates

certain systems while shutting down others. The result is an agitation that is
designed to make you move or speak. To reduce or eliminate stress quickly in
real-time, tools that have a direct line to the autonomic nervous system, such as
deep breathing or meditation, are recommended. Telling oneself or others to
calm down does not work and can even exacerbate stress. Understanding the
stress response and learning how to work with its agitation is crucial for stress
management.

The Power of Physiological Sigh for Stress Management.

The parasympathetic nervous system has levers that allow you to push back on
stress in real-time and feel relaxed quickly. One effective technique is
physiological sigh, which involves controlling your breathing to directly affect
your heart rate. Inhalations and exhalations affect the size of your heart and the
speed of blood flow, which can elicit different responses from the sinoatrial node

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 and impact heart rate. By inhaling longer or more vigorously than exhaling, you
can speed up your heart rate. Conversely, if you want to slow down your heart
rate and reduce stress response, exhale longer or more vigorously than inhaling.
Understanding these mechanisms of physiological si can enable you to
conveniently and self-directedly manage stress in your daily life.

The Physiology of Stress Control Through Breathing

Techniques

Controlling stress can be achieved through the relationship between the body,
the meaning, the diaphragm, heart and brain. Exhales play a vital role in calming
down quickly and require no learning. The physiological p sigh, a double inhale
and long exhale combination, reinflates little sacks of lungs and rids the body and
bloodstream of carbon dioxide, relaxing you immediately. You can control your
diaphragm voluntarily to double or even triple up your inhales or exhales.
Physiological p sigh, the fastest hardwired way to eliminate the stress response
in real-time, can modulate emotionality and stress response. Huberman and
David Spiegel's ongoing studies explore the effective modulation of stress
response through various breathing patterns.

The Power of Physiological Sigh Breathing

The physiological sigh, which involves double inhale through the nose and exhale
through the mouth, is a powerful tool for controlling stress levels in real-time
situations. When we are stressed, it is difficult to control our mind with our mind,
but using physiological breathing techniques can quickly bring our levels of
autonomic activation down. This technique should be done one to three times,
bringing fast relief to a heightened state of alertness. It is important to note that
the heart rate may take time to come down to baseline, so repeat the
physiological sigh as necessary. This tool can also improve our brain and mind's
availability to control the stress response and react to it. Additionally, exhale
emphasized breathing can be used to induce sleep and relaxation, making it a
useful tool for those with trouble sleeping or relaxing.

The Connection Between Breathing, Stress, and Our Health

Breathing and stress have a profound impact on our emotions and functioning.

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 The para facial nucleus in the brain is responsible for helping us breathe while
speaking and relaxing our jaw. By using the physiological sigh, we can activate
this neural circuitry and speak more clearly. Stress can be short-term, medium-
term, or long-term, and each type of stress has different effects on our bodies.
While chronic stress is harmful, acute stress can boost our immune system by
combatting bacterial and viral infections. It's important to understand the
boundaries and guidelines around stress to better manage our emotional and
physical health.

Short-term stress can boost immune function but should be

used with caution

Short-term stress and the release of adrenaline, specifically through deliberate

hyperventilation or exposure to cold, can be beneficial in combating infections.
Adrenaline released during the stress response primes the immune system to
fight against invaders like bacteria and viruses. This was demonstrated in a study
where participants who did deliberate hyperventilation were better able to
combat a bacterial wall that mimicked infection. However, it is important to note
that short-term stress narrows our focus and may not be ideal for seeing the big
picture. It is also important to control stress thresholds and not overuse this tool.
This breathing technique is called whim Hoff breathing and it involves rapid
deliberate breathing for 15-25 cycles. Overall, short-term stress and adrenaline
release should not be overlooked in the context of fighting infections.

How Short-Term Stress Can Be Beneficial and How to Use it

Wisely

Activating your stress system through short-term stress can be beneficial for
combating infection and healing wounds. Deliberately activating your stress
response through methods like hyper oxygenated breathing can be beneficial,
but it is important to know when to press the break and turn it off. Chronic stress
can have negative effects on the immune system and overall health. Therefore, it
is crucial to learn how to turn off your stress response and achieve good sleep.
Short-term stress is not always intense and can help with tasks like focusing on a
deadline. It is important to remember that stress acts like a powerful neutropic or
smart drug and can be used to your advantage but should be used responsibly
and with caution depending on one's health conditions. Lastly, it is crucial to

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 avoid certain stress-inducing activities such as deliberate hyper oxygenated
breathing near water to prevent any health risks

Building Stress Resilience with Simple Tools

Managing medium term stress involves raising our stress threshold through
simple tools such as placing ourselves in situations where adrenaline is increased
and then calming ourselves mentally. This helps things that once felt
unmanageable feel manageable. Such tools include cold showers, cyclic
oxygenation breathing, sprinting, or biking. Dissociating mind and body in a
healthy way is important. To do this, we need to relax the mind while the body is
very activated. Physiological responses help calm the mind when it's stressed.
By doing this, it increases our stress capacity and makes medium term stress
more manageable.

Dilating Your Gaze to Manage Stress and Improve Sleep

Dilating your gaze can help in managing stress. By deliberately widening your
view from tunnel vision to panoramic vision, you can calm your mind while your
body stays in high alertness, high reactivity mode, high output. It creates a
calming effect on the mind because it releases a particular circuit in the
brainstem that's associated with stress response. Training yourself to be calm
when your body is activated can make stress more manageable in the medium
term. Long-term stress is bad, and you want to be able to fall asleep at night,
stay asleep for most of the night, and go back to sleep if you wake up. Breathing
can modulate heart rate through the loop that includes the brain and the
parasympathetic nervous system, and this is the basis of H R V heart rate
variability.

The Importance of Social Connection in Managing Chronic

Stress

Chronic stress is bad for our health and can lead to heart disease. To manage
long-term stress, engaging in regular exercise, getting good sleep, and using
real-time tools to manage stress response are essential. However, the best
mechanism to reduce long-term stress is social connection. Humans are social
creatures, and we need to stay connected to one another. Social connection can

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 mitigate the long-term effects of stress by activating neuromodulation systems
like serotonin and blocking certain harmful elements like tacky kinan. While
oxytocin is not associated with the release of social connection, serotonin
generally gives us feelings of wellbeing and makes us feel like we have enough in
our immediate environment.

The Power of Social Connection and Delight in Mitigating

Chronic Stress

Social connection and finding delight in things can mitigate the negative effects
of chronic stress and improve various aspects of our life. It's important to invest
time and effort in maintaining connections, whether it's with humans, animals or
even inanimate objects. Chronic social isolation leads to the secretion of
tachykinin, a harmful molecule that makes us more fearful, paranoid and impairs
our immune system. Suppressing tachykinin is crucial as it promotes good
functions of our brain and body and prevents bad ones like irritability and fear.
Paying attention to feelings of comfort, trust, bliss and delight can help recognize
the release of serotonin in the brain which has positive effects on the immune
system and neural repair. Social connections are powerful and worth the
investment of time and flexibility.

The Power of Gratitude and Stress Management

Practicing gratitude by recognizing and writing down small things you're thankful
for can have a positive effect on the serotonin system, which can help reduce
long-term stress. It's important to also focus on social connections, finding the
right diet and exercise schedule, and getting quality sleep. There are non-
prescription compounds like ashwagandha, theanine, and melatonin that can
help modulate the stress system, but it's important to be cautious with
supplementing melatonin at high doses as it can have negative effects on
reproductive hormones and the adrenals. While there's no such thing as adrenal
burnout, taking melatonin at high levels for too long can cause a pseudo adrenal
insufficiency syndrome. Overall, practicing gratitude and finding ways to
modulate the stress system can greatly benefit overall wellbeing.

The Benefits of Theanine and Ashwagandha for Sleep, Stress,

and Anxiety

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 Supplementing with theanine and Ashwagandha can help alleviate sleep issues,
chronic stress, and anxiety. Theanine can improve sleep quality and reduce
stress by increasing GABA, an inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain. It can also
help reduce anxiety related to task completion. Ashwagandha, on the other hand,
can reduce cortisol, which is associated with the negative effects of chronic
stress. It can also reduce fatigue, cognitive impairment, and depression. Both
supplements should be taken during times of chronic stress and not on a regular
basis. Examine.com is a great resource to find dosages and the human effect
matrix. Tourine, found in energy drinks, may have negative effects on the
microvasculature and isn't recommended for everyone.

Controlling Stress through Physiological and Neuroscience

Perspective.

Matching your internal state with the demands placed upon you is crucial for
interpreting emotions. When our internal state of stress or calm matches the
demands, we tend to interpret them as good, and when it's mismatched, we tend
to interpret them as bad. Understanding stress and controlling it can help us stay
in a better position to handle demands. Tools like respiration, dilation of gaze,
social connection, and proper diet, exercise, and sleep can help control stress.
Emotions are context-dependent, and having a physiological and neuroscience
perspective helps understand it better. Stress will happen, but our ability to
modulate and control it in real-time using tools can help take control over it.

Modulating Stress Response for Optimal Performance

Learning to modulate your stress response can help you hear information better
and react to things in a more effective way. This can be achieved in real time by
using tools that are anchored to the neuronal systems in our body, brain, eyes,
and diaphragm. Poor rest, overwork, and feeling like the world is bearing down on
us can make us grumpy, anxious, or depressed. Therefore, it's important to have
tools that can help us modulate our stress response. Stress isn't necessarily evil,
but it's powerful and useful in certain contexts and problematic in other contexts.
What's in our control is how we react to events in the world. By using tools to
control our internal levels of alertness or calmness, we can lean more effectively
into life, including sleep, social connection, and work.

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