Master Stress: Tools for Managing Stress & Anxiety

Andrew Huberman opens the Huberman Lab month on emotions with stress. Earlier months covered sleep and wakefulness, then neuroplasticity. He plans four episodes on emotions, covering what they are, how they work, how they can be controlled, and when controlling them may not be wanted. He expects listeners to object that stress isn't an emotion. His answer is that stress "really lies at the heart of whether or not our internal experience is matched well or not to our external experience," and that the match or mismatch between those two combines into what we call emotions.

He also says he will correct common myths. His first example is the idea that stress impairs the immune system. He says this is true in certain contexts, but in other contexts stress "actually enhances your immune system and makes it function better." He gives no evidence for this claim in this part of the episode. A related theme is that being alert or calm is not good or bad in itself. Whether it helps depends on the circumstances.

He states the aim as giving listeners an "organizational logic" for states usually labeled happy, sad, depressed or anxious. He promises tools grounded in physiology and neuroscience, and says they can also help people support others, such as clients, children or spouses. The tools he lists include behavioral methods and some supplements. Depression, PTSD, attention deficit disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder will each get their own episodes. He argues that OCD carries "a very strong emotional component" in addition to compulsive behaviors and intrusive thoughts.

Huberman presents stress and emotions as the clearest case of brain and body working together. Feelings, whether pleasant or stressful, are "not just in our head, it's also in our body." He describes the nervous system as including the brain, eyes and spinal cord along with their connections to the organs. He adds that organs such as the gut, liver and spleen also communicate back to the brain. He hopes for a day when neuroscience is no longer thought of as just the brain, because the body has "a very profound and concrete influence on the brain."

He says he will not spend much time on mindfulness, which he calls "kind of a vague concept." His reasoning is that mindfulness and its opposite, mindlessness, are hard for one person to describe or to help others with. He wants instead to offer "objective tools" that work with the link between brain and body. He frames the goal as gaining control over "some of your inner real estate" so people can lean into life better, and he rejects the idea that this means "becoming robotic."

Huberman challenges a popular story: that stress is a "horrible ancient carryover" from when humans were hunted by predators, and has no use in modern life. He accepts that humans were often vulnerable to attacks by animals and other people. But he calls it "entirely naive" to think earlier people faced only those threats. They also faced infidelity, death, cold, famine and loss. Before phones, he notes, a person could leave on a hunt or a trip to visit a relative and never return, and no one would ever know why. He argues that the claim that earlier humans didn't worry is "entirely inconsistent with everything we know about the structure of the human brain" in earlier centuries.

the system that governs what we call stress is generic.

Huberman calls this the most important point of the episode. Stress "wasn't designed for tigers attacking us or people attacking us." It is a system that mobilizes other systems in the brain and body. He says its generic design helps it take over our state, but it also makes it controllable because it runs on hardwired biological mechanisms. He describes a matching de-stress system, made of cells, chemicals, pathways and tissues, that "require no neuroplasticity" and can brake the stress response. Both systems are genetically encoded and present from birth.

He separates these real-time tools from offline practices such as meditation or breathwork. Real-time tools are meant to push back on stress at the moment it hits. His lab works on developing and testing such tools, and so do other labs. He explains mechanism before giving the tools. His reason is that people who understand how a tool works are better able to use it, teach it to others and adapt it as their lives change.

Huberman first separates stressors, the things that stress us out, from stress, which is "the psychological and physiological response to stressors." He mostly discusses the response. Stressors can be physical, such as standing outside on a cold day without a jacket for a long time. They can also be psychological, such as preparing for too many exams while trying to keep up with sleep, food, rest and social connection. The response itself "doesn't distinguish between physical and emotional stress."

For acute, short-term stress, he describes the sympathetic chain ganglia. This is a chain of neurons running from about the neck to a little below the navel. He notes that the name has "nothing to do with sympathy." A stressor can come from inside the mind or from the environment, such as heights for someone who fears them, or a disliked person walking into the room. When it hits, this chain activates very quickly, all at once, "like a bunch of dominoes falling."

Those neurons release acetylcholine. In the brain this chemical is involved in focus. In muscles it normally makes them contract, and spinal neurons release it every time we move. Huberman explains that contracting every muscle at once under stress would cause a paralyzing rigidity, which he compares to tetanus. Instead, postganglionic neurons respond to the acetylcholine by releasing epinephrine, the equivalent of adrenaline, at particular organs.

Epinephrine has two kinds of effects depending on the receptor. Tissues that need to be active under stress, such as the leg muscles and the heart, have beta receptors. There, blood vessels dilate, blood rushes in and heart rate rises. In tissues treated as "luxuries for when things are going well," such as those for digestion and reproduction, epinephrine binds other receptors that constrict blood vessels.

Huberman sums up three features of the stress response: - It is generic. - It is two-pronged: "It's a yes for certain things, and it's a no, you may not right now, for other things." This explains the racing heart, the uneven sense of blood flow, and the dry throat. Salivary glands shut down because less blood reaches the neurons that control salivation. - It produces agitation that pushes you to move.

He describes the core message of the response as "Do something." That urge can come out as physical action or as speech. Under stress, people are more likely to say "something that probably we shouldn't say." Holding back the urge to move can be felt as a tremor. He concludes that controlling stress requires learning to work with this agitation.

Huberman pictures stress arriving at the wrong moment, such as at a podium or on a Zoom call, with a flushed face, racing heart and too much alertness. He says that, as far as he knows, the fastest tools have "a direct line to the so-called autonomic nervous system." That system governs general alertness and calmness. Its name implies it is automatic, but he says it has certain "levers or entry points" that allow some control.

Here's what doesn't work to control stress: telling yourself to calm down. In fact, that tends to just exacerbate stress.