AMA #5: Intrusive Thoughts, CGMs, Behavioral Change, Naps & NSDR

The episode opens with the host identifying himself as Andrew Huberman, a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine, and describing this as an Ask Me Anything (AMA) episode from the Huberman Lab premium subscriber channel. The premium channel is presented as having two purposes: supporting the standard Huberman Lab podcast, which comes out every Monday at no cost on standard feeds such as YouTube, Apple and Spotify, and generating funding for research on human beings at Stanford and elsewhere aimed at mental health, physical health and performance.

Huberman states that the Tiny Foundation has agreed to match every dollar the premium channel generates for research studies, which he says doubles the total funding for studies of mental health, physical health and human performance. Subscriptions are described as $10 a month, $100 paid at once for 12 months, or a one-time lifetime payment, all available at hubermanlab.com/premium. Non-subscribers can hear the first 20 minutes of the episode to decide whether to subscribe.

Although the episode title also lists CGMs, behavioral change, naps and NSDR, the supplied material covers only the first question, on intrusive thoughts, before the free preview ends.

The first question concerns abstaining from thoughts, and Huberman begins by distinguishing the topic from obsessive compulsive disorder, which he calls a very serious disorder with a range of severity. People with true OCD, he says, suffer from obsessions, described as intrusive thoughts, and compulsions, the behaviors typically associated with those thoughts. He contrasts this with the casual use of the acronym, as in calling someone "so OCD" about something.

But true OCD is a situation in which engaging in a particular compulsive behavior does not serve to reduce the intensity or the frequency of the obsessions. In fact, it makes it worse.