Dr Andrew Huberman – Inspired New Horizons

Architects of our Experiences

Surely you recall that childhood pleasure of a rainy day when mom or dad would drape blankets over couches and chairs, then stand back prepared to be amazed at what their creative little geniuses would do next. An ordinary living room suddenly transformed into a sensory wonderland that started with a simple blanket fort.

I came upon this sight a few days ago and marveled at the ingenuity of the little architects who began with a pint-sized castle that just kept morphing into something even grander with each “lightbulb” moment and the addition of another toy bin.

As the plans grew in size and complexity, there was a lot of trial and error. Shrieks of joyful delight filled the room as the framework collapsed and a new idea took shape from the rubble.

What a lesson to be learned from two small children actively engaged in an organic, evolving, complex and creative process. They were little architects of their playful experience.

Are you aware that we adults can become skillful architects of our own experiences?

It’s true — and the beauty of it is, we can tap into the creativity and positive outcomes that comes so easily to kids, by using our brains and bodies in a powerful new way.

Just imagine being able to construct experiences and supporting emotions that more consistently align with your goals and big aspirations. Fewer self-made obstacles, more smooth sailing.

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is breaking new ground in the science of emotion – overturning long-standing beliefs that our emotions are universal, automatic and hard-wired in different regions of the brain. Instead, we actually “construct” an instance of emotion through a remarkable interplay of our brain, body and our culture.

Anyone who has ever experienced a strong emotional trigger from an event that happened decades ago, has some appreciation for how quickly this remarkable interplay coalesces. It’s no wonder we believe it’s automatic and has become hard-wired into our systems.

And yet, we also know that it is possible to “re-wire” our brains and release old emotional triggers – freeing us from being snagged by that old experience over and over again. The neuroplasticity of our brains enables us to re-organize our old connections in new and improved ways.

This rewiring process is analogous to children reorganizing their fort framework to become something more useful for an even more incredible structural masterpiece.

It turns out that becoming “architects of our emotions and experiences” it is not as big a stretch that we once believed. How remarkable is that?

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is gifted at making this new concept readily accessible to all of us. There are three key components that we need to know more about when it comes to curating our architectural tool bag: body budget, emotional granularity and cultivating more current, diverse experiences.

Today’s post is the first in a three part series about becoming skillful architects of our experiences. Prepare to be amazed at the role our body budget plays in our emotional reactions to life.

Body Budget

A major part of becoming skilled architects of our experiences involves mastering our emotions. We erroneously believe that our emotions that are the first system to get activated — and we have to “manage” those strong emotions in order to respond effectively to our circumstances. But this is not the case.

What actually happens first is that our brains are estimating what’s in our tank and predicting how much of our inner resources are going to be required to meet the present moment. It would be analogous to us hopping in our car for a big road trip and looking at the gas gauge to determine how far we can get before refueling.

Our brains are only 2% of our body weight, but they use 20% of the oxygen we consume and 20% of the energy we consume. What our brains and bodies need in order to have a balanced body budget are consistent quality sleep, hydration, good nutrition and movement, i.e. regular exercise.

We are learning so much more than we ever knew about the importance of consistent quality sleep for our optimum brain health. Even while we are sleeping, our brain is storing and categorizing information, cleaning and purging, updating and rejuvenating. We are even cognizant of the disruption that caffeine and alcohol has on our sleep cycles and the integral neural processes that occur only during sleep.

The benefits of good nutrition, hydration and regular exercise are irrefutable. But while we know these components are needed, we often forget that we are also draining our resources throughout the day and should pay attention to when we need a break, should take a walk, or grab a healthy snack. How often are we literally running on fumes?

Let’s just pause here for a minute and think about the amount of time we devote to charging our phones, making sure we have 5g network and cooling it off if we get a heat warning. What if we were to become as knowledgeable about our brains which are operating 24/7 for us – and often without any awareness of the drain on our inner resources?

All this time that we believed we were at the mercy of our emotions, we may simply be attempting to function optimally on an empty fuel tank. Very often what we are “feeling” is not an emotion, but rather an indicator that our body budget is out of balance.

Since our brains are lightening fast at the estimation and prediction process, they get our body ready for a response that might include an increased heart rate, shallow breathing, or release of chemicals and hormones such as adrenaline or cortisol. We “feel” these sensations and “assign” an emotion to it. We might tell ourselves we feel scared, angry, anxious, uncertain, elated or surprised.

We’ve been doing this for most of our lives without a second thought, so it has become second nature to associate an emotion with whatever we are sensing in our bodies. Once we assign an emotion, we are off to the races – and often unconsciously,

Since our brains are prediction machines, it will quickly run through our historical database to find past events that simulate what we are feeling in the present moment. This complex retrieval system is on auto pilot most of the time; we are unconsciously running an algorithm that reviews our personal history looking for matches.

After the match is made, our amazing brain has one more remarkable feature — it runs a prediction error model. This is the brain’s way of giving us the opportunity to discard old data and replace it with newer, more appropriate data that suits the current situation.

For the record, we often bypass or override this integral prediction error process. If it “feels” like a past experience, we pull the “all systems go” switch. This is how we’ve forged our “go to” behavioral patterns and protective armor. Without a moment’s hesitation, we assign an emotion, recall a past similar experience and jump into a memorized and familiar reactive pattern.

When we are pivoting to becoming architects of our experiences, we can start to pay more attention to both predictions and prediction errors. We can take the time to see if we are simply relying on an old database that no longer serves us well. This is how we “re-wire” those old outgrown behavioral patterns and replace them with new responses better suited to our lives today.

If the first brain system to get activated is simply an assessment of internal resources that are needed for the present situation, then we can start paying attention to body budget first and emotional responses second. This is a game-changing pivot in both mindfulness and self awareness. Think of this as a little “self check-in”. Are you resourced internally? Have you assigned an emotion and if so, does it feel appropriate to the current situation?

If we can make the distinction that our body budget is actually causing us to be under-resourced and not some big emotional reactions, we can begin to dis-engage from strong emotional triggers and respond with more cognitive skills.

We think that emotional regulation is really hard and that changing our old behavioral patterns is even harder, but Dr. Barrett’s research is showing us that we just might have been making things much more challenging for ourselves all along by not understanding the role body budget plays.

It is the very reason that we have “variation” in our moods, emotional states and our ability to think clearly. Dr. Barrett offers us a welcome sigh of relief — it turns out that “variation” is the norm.

There are times when we do feel in control, cognitively and emotionally. We meet even the most stressful moments calmly, with a good sense of humor, a healthy acceptance of reality. We can even help others calm down and self-regulate when we feel this way.

Then there are times when we are short-tempered, can overreact to the smallest of events, or work ourselves into a state of frenzy. We set off a chain reaction of emotional reactions in others and things can escalate quickly.

Variation is the norm. And now we know what might be the real cause — a body budget deficit.

We get notifications throughout our busy day from our brains and bodies about what is needed to keep us running optimally. We even have terms we’ve created to diagnose our body budget deficits – such as hangry, brain fog, getting on our last nerve and no bandwidth. But unlike the ding of a notification from our phone, we often ignore the alerts we are getting from our brain about our own energy drain.

We frequently overlook the small investments we can be making all throughout the day to keep our body budget in balance. We may start with a full tank in the morning after a good night’s rest, a tall glass of water and a healthy breakfast; but we are going to begin to drain our body budget resources as the day goes on. Exercising, staying hydrated, making healthy choices for snacks and meals, taking breaks, getting outdoors, and unplugging from our devices are just a few of the multitude of ways we can restock our inner resources.

The biggest paradigm shift in understanding how we “make our emotions” is coming from a deep understanding of the role our body budget plays in our daily lives.

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a pioneer in her fields of neuroscience and psychology – and she is helping us to get very savvy about our incredible, complex brain and body systems. If we take better care of ourselves, and pay attention to our body budget, this whole business of emotional regulation might just get a whole lot easier.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett will captivate you with her compelling Ted Talk about how emotions are made. Click this link to listen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gks6ceq4eQ&t=140s

Check out this episode of the Huberman Lab podcast where Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett is Andrew’s guest to discuss How to Understand Emotions https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110?i=1000631446646

The Baggage We Should Be Unpacking

It’s no surprise that we all have family and emotional baggage that has never been unpacked – mostly because it feels like opening Pandora’s box. Who would ever want to do that?

What if we were to reframe it as exploring a treasure chest instead? The clues to unanswered questions; the keys to unlock some of our hidden assets; a mystery solved; a weathered, yellowing journal of unknown and revelational history.

We are fearful of what we might discover in our family and emotional baggage. Many of us don’t care to relive the painful memories we stashed in there decades ago. But we are not the same as we were then – we are older, have had more life experiences under our belt and have more nuanced perspectives. Maybe we can unpack the baggage and clear up much needed space for a lighter way of being.

We are not alone when it comes to complex family histories and generational patterns. We are all in the midst of a big unraveling of old societal conditioning, gender stereotyping and poor parenting models. As Maya Angelou espouses “when you know better, you do better.” Thanks to the major breakthroughs in neuroscience, psychology and emotional science, we now have much better resources and tools available to us for personal growth, self-awareness, relationships and parenting.

In fact, it is these very breakthroughs that provide an entirely different framework for hard conversations and more productive dialogue about the elephant in the room –debilitating family dynamics.

If we wait until parents or grandparents pass away, we miss asking the questions we would like answered. Have you ever sifted through cardboard boxes of old photos and had no idea who the relatives were or the stories that went with each photographic memory? It is just like that with family baggage. So many secrets boxed up and sealed tight. If family members are courageous enough to enter into these challenging conversations with honesty and a desire to learn, it will jettison that cumbersome family baggage.

Just look around at all the complex family dynamics the next time you attend a graduation, wedding, family reunion or holiday gathering. You can readily spot familiar family patterns, passed down from one generation to the next, taking its toll on our younger generations; families dealing with the same adversities, just a different cast of characters.

The baggage may be invisible, but its impacts are as apparent as blue eyes, tall stature, the shape of a mouth or nose and even personality traits.

No generation is immune from common life events including genetic health issues, divorce, co-parenting, behavioral issues, co-dependency, estrangements, blended families, addiction, mental health issues and trauma. Hard things happen in life. We can, and must, stop making them harder than they need to be.

Today, we have the rare opportunity to involve four living generations — grandparents, parents, siblings and grandchildren — to do the work necessary to break generational trauma and address dysfunctional behavioral patterns. It may be the first time ever that we also have evidence and impetus to come together to do this multi-generational unpacking of emotional and behavioral baggage.

A good starting point would be to collectively acknowledge that the old ways of parenting and dealing with emotions are primary root causes of ongoing family dysfunction and our growing emotional health crisis. We got it wrong and now we need to be actively involved in turning the tide on that old paradigm. Just acknowledging this truth can lift the fog of shame, guilt and blame. These conversations are long overdue and we don’t want our grandchildren being burdened by the weight of unhealthy, unproductive family secrets. We can stop spreading harmful patterns and limiting beliefs from one generation to the next.

When we can overlay the new template for parenting and emotional health onto our past experiences, we gain clarity where once there was only murky confusion. There are a lot of stories embedded in our family history that are horribly inaccurate. Imagine discovering this and realizing that we’d been making incorrect assumptions and judging others when we really could have been showing up and offering each other support and emotional scaffolding.

Yes we are afraid to have those hard conversations, mostly because we are feeling very strong negative emotions arise in us each time we even think about it. It would be analogous to refusing to go to the doctor for a suspicious lump. We can no longer afford to let our fear and anxiety prevent us from learning and discovery.

The biggest challenge in having these hard conversations and unpacking family baggage together is the massive entanglement of old, unprocessed emotions, traumas and false narratives about each other. The only way we can do this work is to become very skillful in interpersonal and emotional skills.

If we are going to do a deep dive into the dark, deep waters of our generational family history, we want a seasoned, skillful dive master and tools to help us see clearly, cut those falsehoods that keep us tethered, and avoid getting re-snagged on past trauma. Emotional triggers, limiting beliefs, fixed mindsets and jagged remains of adversities are hard to navigate without compassion, empathy and powerful listening skills.

For the record, we may have attempted to do this in the past, but all we really had to guide us was “hindsight”. While hindsight can shine a light on our regrets and help us own the consequences and outcomes of our choices, it often leaves us at a dead end. Problem identified, but no meaningful path to healing and prevention.

In 2009, Dr. Dan Siegel introduced a new concept for personal growth and self-awareness. He was planting the seed of what would become “other awareness”. But there was no way for us to get to “other awarenesss” without knowing ourselves deeply. Dr. Siegel called his revolutionary personal transformation concept “mindsight”. Mindsight picks up where hindsight stopped. No more dead ends.

Dr. Siegel framed “mindsight” this way: It is a powerful lens through which we can understand our inner emotional lives with more clarity, integrate our brain and our emotions, and enhance our relationships with others.

Mindsight is how we put our own oxygen mask on first. There is no way that we can be of meaningful value in helping others on their emotional health journey if we ourselves haven’t done our own work. Full stop.

In my previous blog post, “Learning What We Need to Teach”, I shared the steps and the benefits of Dr. Siegel’s concept of mindsight and whole brain parenting. Doing the hard work and committing to a lifetime of personal growth is not for the faint of heart. But as we often say with physical fitness, “no pain, no gain”.

Dr. Siegel encourages us to use this “mindsight” lens to go back and look at our own childhood to discover how our experiences and our caregivers shaped us. Imagine being able to do this – AND have conversations with siblings, parents and grandparents about those experiences that would provide context and nuance, not to mention long overdue accountability and the possibility of repair.

Do you know what your emotional triggers are? Are you aware of the limiting beliefs that were baked into your inner critic when you were a child? Are you still having meltdowns like a two year old when big emotions consume you? Do you expect more emotional regulation and better coping skills from your partner, kids or friends than you can muster in stressful situations?

These are the warning signs of compromised emotional health. If we do not attend to our emotional health, two things will happen — (1) our physical health and quality of life will also be compromised and may even go into serious decline; (2) we will pass down to our children similar unhealthy emotional patterns. Ignoring our emotional health has perpetuated the multigenerational family dysfunction since the dawn of time.

When Dr. Dan Siegel introduced mindsight in 2009, he was an advance scout for what has now broken wide open into the mainstream of our lives. Over the past two decades, multi disciplines have merged and reverse engineered what we need to do in order to address our growing mental health crises.

We need to undo and unlearn all the things we got wrong about parenting, about emotions and about relationships.

It has taken several decades, a ton of research, and more family heartaches and brokenness than we can imagine to bring us to this moment in our collective evolution. We are now able to visibly see and feel why we need to commit to this work when we look at our children and grandchildren. Not only do they deserve better, we are motivated by our hearts to take this work seriously.

In the past, each generation entered adulthood and parenthood with a strong desire to do better than the prior generation. Good intentions, but faulty information and poor diagnostic tools. We labeled kids, rather than naming emotions. We unplugged their first love language (emotions) as soon as they learned to talk and express themselves. We had blindspots and blurred life maps. We unconsciously repeated the same old patterns and reactions from which we recoiled or hid from as kids. We numbed our pain rather than extracting it and healing.

The reverse engineering that neuroscience, psychology, epigenetics, neurobiology, emotional science and social sciences have done is now extending a call to action that cannot be ignored. This call to action is meant for all of us — all 4 generations to become involved. We need to do some serious excavation work on generational baggage.

We each need to make our own emotional health a priority. We need to plug it back into the core foundation of a meaningful, satisfying and rewarding life. We need to upgrade our default systems that were never integrated in childhood. Plug those emotions into our operating systems and get more skillful at regulating them, learning from them and growing because of them. We need to unpack emotional and family baggage that is putting more obstacles in our way than we realize.

We do not have to wait until we are at the master class level to dive into teaching our kids and helping our partners. We can learn together. In fact, our children and grandchildren are the best teachers in the world. If we can step back and ask ourselves, “what did I need when I was their age?” we will instinctively know how to meet the moment. Instead of asking “what’s the matter?” we can pivot and learn by asking them “What matters most?”

This blog post is the first of a new series I’ll be sharing about the life-changing benefits of personal growth and self-awareness not only for our own quality of life, but for all of our relationships. Let’s explore how we got here, what is fresh and new for our emotional health, what we are discovering about the connection between fixed mindsets and limiting beliefs, better ways to help kids through divorce and blended families how we can improve the education system from preschool to college and so much more.

There is an “emotion revolution” rising from the ashes of old parenting models, lack of emotional regulation into our human operating system, and the hard lessons learned through a global pandemic. Are you in?

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

**DR. PETER ATTIA is the renowned resource on Longevity — and now he is the front-running** **force for this emotion** revolution. Watch his relatable reels on Instagram, listen to his interviews on YouTube for his book launch. Read his book, Outlive to learn why our emotional health is the most integral component for our quality of life. **Listen to his podcast, the Drive.**

We Are the Change Agents

I’d like to give an enormous hat tip to Dr. Peter Attia for championing the integral role our emotional health plays in the overall quality and length of our life. He is shining a beacon on the many ways that our emotional health impacts our physical and cognitive health, our most treasured personal relationships and maybe most importantly — how well we actually know ourselves.

From the outside looking in, Dr. Peter Attia certainly seems to be a shining example of living the good life. He has a hugely successful career in medicine, is a renowned authority on the subject of longevity and good health, is in great physical and cognitive shape, and is married with three children. He practices what he preaches. In other words, he has checked all the boxes for a successful, happy life.

Yet in recent years, while writing his newest book, Outlive, Dr. Peter Attia became acutely aware that there was a gaping hole in the complete picture of longevity and quality of life — emotional health. What good is checking all the boxes that outwardly give the impression of success and happiness, if in fact inwardly we are miserable?

Yes, we can be physically and cognitively very healthy; we can be proactive with preventive measures and early detection to ensure we live longer — and possibly longer without illness, disease or cognitive decline. But if we are unhappy, discontent and lack emotional regulation, we will continue to be miserable no matter how physically fit or mentally sharp we are; no matter how many measurements of success we seem to have achieved.

This is a true fact for so many of us. We have a very big blind spot about how our emotional health has taken its toll on us and our families, all while we have been actively checking off the boxes.

We can be so unaware of the impacts of our emotional health that we will unconsciously sabotage ourselves over and over again. Dr. Peter Attia uses the metaphor of Formula One racing to help us grasp the magnitude of ignoring our emotional health:

Just a few short decades ago, Formula One racing had a very high rate of death among its drivers because of the risk factors. The cars were engineered for performance not safety. Today that risk factor for death and serious injury has been dramatically reduced. What changed? The cars are now engineered for safety first and performance second. Minimize risk.

As Dr. Attia points out, we use risk factors all the time to help us minimize the risk to our physical and cognitive health. We intervene early to prevent infection, illness and disease. Yet we have been ignoring emotional health all the while.

No one asks the questions — “What is your risk for poor emotional health and what are we doing about it?“

It has become very clear over the past decade or two that it behooves us all to reflect on how the old parenting models impacted us — and especially our emotional health. The risk factors for our emotional health are imbedded in those old parenting paradigms that disconnected us from understanding and effectively utilizing our emotions. Our emotions are an integral part of our brain/body connection and we are long overdue for a major upgrade to our human operating system.

Just look at all the advances that we have made in modern medicine to fight genetically inheritable diseases. We have been blind to the generational inheritances of poor emotional health. And now our eyes have been opened – we have a brand new pathway to addressing the quality of our emotional health.

Not only are we able to intervene early for our own emotional health, we can begin to ensure that our children get a head start on a lifetime of good emotional health.

We are the change agents; the ones that will break the cycles of dysfunction that got passed unconsciously from one generation to the next. We will advance human evolution by proactively integrating our emotions with our complex, developing brains.

Dr. Peter Attia shared with Dr. Andrew Huberman in a recent podcast that for most of his life he got really good at drywall repair – because he was dealing with an unconscious inner rage from trauma in his childhood – and that anger often had him punching a hole in the wall. In fact, it was that same anger and strong urge to punch a guy in a parking lot that made him realize he had to get help for his emotional disregulation. He realized in that moment that he could have lost everything he had spent his whole life building — his reputation, his career, his marriage and family – because of unchecked emotional health.

I just have to say that Dr. Attia still packs a punch — a positive and very healthy one. He punched a big hole in our blindspots when it comes to emotional health and the integral role it plays in the overall quality of our life.

As I was reading Dr. Attia’s book, Outlive, I was delightfully surprised to discover that he had turned to two of my favorite resources to help him in his search and recovery process for emotional health — Esther Perel and Terry Real. I have long followed their work, participated in their seminars and read their books. It was Terry Real’s relationship summit in May, 2022 that prompted my blog post “Whatever He Has, I Want It” featuring Hugh Jackman’s journey with personal growth and emotional awareness.

Little holes have been being poked into our need to focus on emotional health from a diverse array of sources for several decades. Neuroscience has been paving the way as we make tremendous breakthroughs in understanding how our brains, bodies and emotions need integration in order to function optimally.

Changes are happening at a very fast pace now. Old methods once used for parenting, for treating trauma and mental health issues are being tossed out and replaced with protocols that focus on integration of emotions. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk even emphasizes that it is not necessary to go back and revisit all the re-traumatizing details of a childhood event. Instead, the focus and therapy becomes on how a person is feeling today, what they are experiencing in the present moment – and integrating that into more manageable responses to current experiences.

Dr. Attia explains that we can reframe this work as an “invitation to view our own young experiences through the eyes of our own child”. I wouldn’t be surprised if he learned that from Terry Real, who often says that the best motivation in the world for personal change is our children. Terry says that we might not change for our partners or ourselves, but we rarely resist change if we know it will help our kids.

Our emotional health is rooted in our childhoods. There is no doubt about that. It is crystal clear that we will be the change agents for breaking generational patterns of poor coping skills, unhealthy attachment styles, maladaptive patterns of behavior and lifelong poor emotional health.

Dr. Attia would encourage each of us to view our emotional health and its risk factors the same way that we view our physical and cognitive health. Dig into our family history, intervene early, develop healthier approaches and incorporate a daily maintenance program to support an ongoing healthy trajectory.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Develop a list of podcasts that become your “go to” playlist to support your emotional health. Here are a few of my favorites:

Emotional Health

Imagine my surprise when I recently discovered that emotional health is fast becoming a foundational pillar for the length and quality of our lifespan. A subject that was once relegated to the self-help and personal growth space is now being integrated into a healthspan revolution.

Healthspan is not just living longer, it is about living longer without chronic and major health issues, living with vitality, strong cognitive and physical abilities and strong emotional health.

Dr. Peter Attia, host of the very popular podcast, The Drive, and author of “Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity” emphasizes that while cognitive and physical health are germane to the quality and length of our lives, our emotional health may potentially be the most important component of all. “After all, what good is a long life if you are miserable?”

“Emotional health encompasses happiness, emotional resilience and distress tolerance, mindfulness, stillness and fulfillment, among others. It touches on our sense of individual purpose, as well as our ability to engage in meaningful and supportive relationships with those we love.” — From the Mental & Emotional Health Archives of Dr. Peter Attia (https://peterattiamd.com/category/mental-health/)

While listening to Dr. Attia discuss his new book Outlive with Dr. Andrew Huberman, I found myself completely captivated by the last 48 minutes of that podcast conversation. What he shared so openly about his own emotional health journey fit like a puzzle piece into my recent series of blog posts about the negative impacts of old parenting models. His personal story is so relatable on many levels – and proof positive that it behooves us all to take our emotional health as seriously as our exercise, nutrition and sleep.

From the outside, most of us would just assume that Dr. Peter Attia was living a happy, successful life. A Stanford/John Hopkins/NIH trained physical, he has built a thriving medical career focusing on the applied science of longevity. He has won prestigious awards, was the first person to make the round trip swim from Maui and Lanai, and has a huge following for his extremely popular podcast about longevity. He’s married and has three kids. Sure seems like he checked all the boxes for a good life.

Yet he shared both in his book and in the Huberman Lab podcast that he was driven to be a perfectionist and his inner critic was harsh and unrelenting. He also admits to becoming very skilled at drywall because he was prone to break a lot of things — both when he was younger and into his adult life. It took not one, but two, rock bottom moments in recent years to motivate him to get serious about his emotional health. The root causes of his core emotional issues were in his childhood — unprocessed trauma, lack of emotional language and lack of skillful emotional regulation.

Boom – there it is — the inescapable fact that what has happened in our childhood gets carried right into adulthood — and even when we work hard to build a successful life and check all the boxes, we still can get tripped up by our own unconscious obstacles.

In my recent blog post “Learning What We Need to Teach”, I shared that Dr. Dan Siegel recommends going back and examining our childhood so we can understand our relationship attachment style, how our parents influenced our development and how we made sense of what happened to us.

While Dr. Siegel readily acknowledges that most people are very resistant to revisiting a painful or dysfunctional childhood, it is a clear path to addressing the behavioral patterns and limiting beliefs that become our unconscious obstacles. Dr. Attia would likely frame this examination of our childhood an early intervention for our adult emotional health — and that framework comes from his personal experience and his scientific approach to longevity.

It was just a few years ago, as that second “rock bottom” was hitting hard for him, that Dr. Peter Attia’s good friend pulled him aside and told him he really needed this intervention. His good friend knew firsthand why unpacking family dysfunction and childhood trauma is of paramount importance for a good life. He is none other than Dr. Paul Conti, also a Stanford/Harvard grad, who is a psychiatrist and author of Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic; How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal From It.

The synchronicity of Dr. Paul Conti being a psychiatrist whose focus is on healing trauma and Dr. Attia being a medical doctor whose focus is on longevity and quality of life is not lost me. I have been witnessing the emerging integration of multiple disciplines and modalities for several years. So many significant neuroscience breakthroughs are deeply connected to the mind/body connection; the very integration of emotions with the lower and upper parts of developing brains for which Dr. Dan Siegel advocates the whole brain parenting approach.

We got emotions wrong for generations. Full stop. Emotions are the very first part of our human programming that needs to be installed. Emotions are how we learn to care for, and meet the needs of a precious baby. It is second nature for us to respond appropriately to an infant’s cries or their engaging laughter. How could we have been so blind to the obvious? The old parenting models actually had us overriding the most integral software component of being a human being. This is precisely why we have so many interpersonal difficulties, why our inner critic is so debilitating, and why we perpetuate problems from one generation to the next.

Peter Attia took Paul Conti’s sage advice. He did a deep-dive into this healing work in a 3 week program in Arizona, where he discovered a lot about his childhood that provided answers and insights. He learned tools and practices to help him pivot to the healthy end of his emotional health spectrum.

I was not at all surprised to learn that Dr. Attia was able to go back and look at blocked memories from childhood through the lens of an adult, who is now a parent himself, and discover deep compassion for a little boy who had no way of processing what he was experiencing; a little boy who strived to be “perfect” in order to feel safe and loved. His inner critic who was so hard on him when he missed the mark of “perfection” was parental message playing over and over….for 5 decades of his life.

This transformational experience was an enormous pivot for Dr. Peter Attia. He came to fully comprehend that all the work he was doing to help people live longer, without disease, chronic or major health issues, to ensure they stayed physically active and cognitively healthy was missing one compelling component — emotional health. In his mind, there could be nothing worse than living a very long life and being miserable, discontent and emotionally disregulated throughout it all.

As I listened to Dr. Attia convey all of this to his longtime friend and colleague, Dr. Andrew Huberman, I thought about a very familiar story that really brings this message home — Scrooge in the Christmas Carol. Past, present, future. See how our past influences our present….and where our present blindspots predict our future. We have instinctively known this for generations.

As he was going through what he calls his “rehab and recovery”, Dr. Attia was also deeply entrenched in writing his book, Outlive. There was no way he could not include his profound discovery about emotional health and it’s direct impacts on the quality of our lives — and although his editors and publisher thought it belonged in a separate book, he strongly disagreed. Integration of emotional health was essential to the pillars of longevity and quality of life.

This is so profoundly important, I am going to share it again:

Integration of emotional health is essential for our longevity, physical and cognitive health and the overall quality of our life.

Dr. Attia likes to create a dashboard for his patients as part of his comprehensive approach to mitigating health problems in the future. Not only does he seek to improve the length of their lifespan, he also wants to increase the length of their “healthspan” and shorten the length of “diseasespan.” He acknowledges that we have many ways to predict future possible health consequences by taking into account family history, genetics and using the wide array of medical tools (blood work, MRI’s, bone density, colonoscopy, mammograms, EKG, etc). There are many tools available for pre-screeening and preventive actions for our physical health; and a plethora of ways to measure and mitigate risk.

The same cannot be said for emotional health. There are no clearly defined ways of measuring it. As Dr. Andrew Huberman acknowledged, measuring emotional health is tricky — and language is our dissection tool. If we have a very limited emotional vocabulary and equally limited understanding of our inner emotional world, it would be like trying to do a biopsy with a blindfold on.

Not having a concise way to measure emotional health does not preclude Dr. Attia from adding it to the longevity dashboard for his patients however. He firmly believes that like cognitive and physical health issues, intervening early is key.

Can you imagine the positive and transforming impacts that are on the horizon for our mental health crises if there is a major pivot to include emotional health in comprehensive medical care? And it doesn’t stop there — we have growing evidence that stress and anxiety, unprocessed trauma, dysfunctional environments as well as generational trauma and addictions (epigenetics) contribute significantly to our physical health. Could it be that early intervention on our emotional health be the gateway to solving some of our most perplexing medical issues, including cancer, ALS, dementia and more. I firmly believe that it will.

For the record, Dr. Andrew Huberman was recently a guest on The Drive (Dr. Peter Attia’s podcast) and in that episode, Andrew really opened up about his own childhood, his parent’s contentious divorce and the debilitating impacts that it had on him for a great part of his adult life.

The candor and vulnerability that both of these dynamic, successful young men shared on each other’s podcasts is proof positive that we are witnessing a game-changing breakthrough that is long overdue. The skeletons are coming out of the closets! No more sweeping emotional health under the carpet.

Dr. Attia did not hesitate to point out that the top priority on his personal longevity dashboard is emotional health. He shared that “it is the easiest to get out of balance, the hardest to manage and the one that creates the most pain in his life.“

When Dr. Andrew Huberman pressed his friend for a definition of emotional health, Peter told him that it’s hard to specifically define it, and perhaps more relevant to recognize the components that make up strong, positive emotional health. The following is excerpted from his conversation in the HubermanLab podcast:

“Connectivity with others just seems to be an inescapable part of this (emotional health), so the ability to maintain healthy relationships and attachments to others; having a sense of purpose; being able to regulate your emotions; experiencing fulfillment; experiencing satisfaction — all of these things matter. And, if we take an honest appraisal of ourselves, we will notice that we have deficits is these areas.”

“Being “present” — which may have been less of an issue a hundred years ago than it is today — Being present is very difficult; thoughts about the future, not being satisfied with what is happening in the moment. I have to work hard to overcome those things. When you are present, you generally are in a much better frame of mind.” –Dr. Peter Attia

Connecting the Dots:

When Brene Brown began her research on shame and vulnerability back in 2001, she was an instrumental part of the necessary paleontologist team to excavate our human emotions. There were so many fossilized clues embedded in the stratifications of unprocessed emotions and traumas passed from one generation to the next over centuries.

When Dr. Bruce Perry published his book Born for Love in 2010, he unearthed what happens to infants whose basic needs and emotional pleas are not addressed in calm, loving and supportive ways. He was helping us grasp that there was a serious problem and he sounded an alarm for our growing empathy poverty. It was even more than a disconnect from our shared humanity and empathy – it was a snowball rolling down the hill toward our individual and collective declining emotional health — because we were not fully installing our basic emotional programming.

Also in 2010, Dr. Dan Siegel introduce us to his developing concept of “mindsight”- the newest science of personal transformation made possible through integration of the various parts of brain and mind/body connection. For more than a decade, Dr. Siegel continues to expand on his research and has introduced the most profound contemporary parenting model – The Whole Brain Child. Dr. Siegel is leading the charge for this dynamic pivot that “integrates” our fundamental emotional GPS system with all the parts of a child’s brain, slowly over time, as the child’s brain develops along with their physical bodies. Future generations who are nurtured with a whole brain parenting approach will most certainly be more “emotionally healthy” as adults and in turn, more physical and cognitively healthy as well.

This single pivot will have dramatic and positive impacts on our epigenetics and has the potential to stop generational cycles of inherited health issues, addictions, trauma and dysfunction in its tracks.

Stealing a line from Hamilton – “Look around. Look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now.”

We can all be participating in this evolutionary pivot. We start by attending to our own emotional health and then we teach and model this integration for younger generations – for our children, grandchildren and our grandchildren’s babies.

Take advantage of all the resources that are integrating and cross-pollinating to help us live longer, live healthier both physically and cognitively — and most importantly to live a well-balanced, emotionally well-regulated, purpose-filled, satisfying, deeply rewarding life.

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