Dr. Paul Conti – Inspired New Horizons

Emotional Airbags

Just envision this for a moment: When we are emotionally triggered, it is like an airbag exploding to protect us. However, it catches us off guard – the impact so sudden and so strong that our brains send out high emergency alerts to our bodies. We get hijacked rather than assisted. We feel like we can’t breathe fully, our hearts are racing and our ability to see clearly is limited.

I’ve never experienced an airbag deploying in a car, but I can imagine that it feels more scary than protective when it happens. While we know that air bags are a safety feature designed to protect us from serious and even life-threatening injury, it is not something that we get to practice. We can only imagine what it might be like and we can mentally prepare for how we would hope we can respond in such a situation.

Our natural human response to an emotional trigger is the equivalent of airbags deploying. Our emotions are intended to protect and inform us but a strong emotional trigger can feel surprisingly overwhelming.

Our very first experiences with our internal emotional airbags occur in childhood and they have lasting impacts.

For many of us who are older, the cars our parents drove back in the day didn’t even seatbelts let alone airbags. Those safety features only came along when a critical mass of human beings realized that we could actually save life and limb by being proactive and installing numerous safeguards. It is this very same analogy with our emotional airbags; back in the day, our parents did know about the profound benefits of emotional intelligence and most importantly, skillful emotional regulation.

We are now at a very important tipping point — we are fast gaining critical mass in the awareness that emotional integration is the human operating system upgrade that should be modeled, taught and integrated into our children’s developing brains.

The challenge for many of us is how do we teach something we were never actually taught? The truth is that we have actually done just that in many areas of life. Just look how quickly we taught ourselves to embrace technology, electronic banking and Zoom meetings. If we stop resisting what appears to be harder and even unpleasant work, we might discover that life and our relationships actually get a lot easier and more fulfilling with emotional integration.

I recently learned that we can gain a lot of traction in our own emotional integration education by being around children. This makes so much sense because we can witness in real time what happens in childhood when kids are given tools and support to understand and handle their emotions. It’s a visual aid more engaging than a magic act.

When something new comes along such as an upgrade to our phones, our laptops and even our car’s technology, we can readily see how the improvements enhance our life and address a problem we may not even know we had. The same is true with emotional health. When we become keen observers of children and their interactions with their parents, siblings, teachers and friends, we witness firsthand how having meaningful emotional tools would have made a huge and dramatic difference for everyone — most especially for children who have very limited cognitive resources for making sense of a complex world.

In my prior blog posts in this multi-part series on Game-Changers for our emotional upgrade, you may have noticed that no matter who is leading the charge, or what modality or field they represent, everything points us directly back to childhood.

All the behavioral patterns, the protective armor, the coping mechanisms that we deploy have been handed down to us for generations, with no real advancements at all. In fact, what once seemed so complex about personal growth, trauma and self discovery have been boiled down to some pretty obvious truths: we really had a “one size fits all approach” and a small closet of possible options for navigating childhood. We were so handicapped for how we made sense of what was happening in our world.

A quick review of psychology, neuroscience, the enneagram, behavioral science, etc. reveals that our small closet of options held just a handful of “one size fits all” behavioral patterns and coping mechanisms. We are people pleasers or contrarians, we hide or we fight, we avoid conflict or we create conflict, we numb, we run, we freeze. Normal, child-sized responses to emotional airbags exploding in us, as well as members of our family and community without warning.

No wonder we ran for cover and struggled to make sense of the unpredictability and scariness of it all. We ducked into those little closets to find something that would soothe us and keep us safe from things we were feeling but did not understand.

Dr. Becky Kennedy explains this so beautifully when she reminds us that a small child who is overwhelmed with big emotions – and is throwing a tantrum or having a meltdown – lacks the skills he needs to manage that big emotional explosion. She tells us that we teach our children the skills they need to learn to swim, ride a bike or read. So why — she challenges us — would we expect them to be able to handle big, overwhelming emotions coursing through them — without some helpful tools?

I’m hoping that this brought you to a full stop.

Take a moment to think about how you are handling your own “sudden, big feeling moments” in real time today when your adult emotional airbags get deployed — especially in front of your kids.

We teach our children a lot by osmosis. What skills and tools are we reaching for when we are emotionally triggered, extremely tired, or overwhelmed by others or events? We not only need to role model and actively discuss how our emotions impact us, we really need to engage in the installation of emotional intelligence in our children. We need to teach emotional skills just as we teach them good hygiene and manners, how to share with others and how to use their words. In fact, when we install the emotional upgrades, all the other things we are attempting to teach them will be greatly enhanced in the most remarkable ways. Honestly, the parenting job is less exhausting and more productive with strong emotional skills and tools.

The reason for this is that our brains release adrenaline and cortisol when we are emotionally unmoored. Since we co-regulate each other, if we overreact when our kids’ emotional airbags have deployed, it is like double-dosing all those stress hormones. We would never double-dose our kids cough medicine or Tylenol – but losing our cool with emotionally distraught kids is like giving them an extra dose of stress hormones and throwing back some for ourselves.

Here’s what happens when our bodies get flooded with cortisol: Our heart rate and blood pressure go up; our bodies fight or flight response kicks in; our digestive system slows; our immune system weakens we become anxious, irritable and on edge. Chances are you are now realizing that this is the exact opposite of being a calming first responder when emotional airbags inflate.

We cannot be at our best as parents and emotional first responders when we are over-reacting to our child’s emotions and out of control with our own.

Take a moment to think back to an experience that you had as a kid when your parents or caregiver lost control — do you recall how it felt? It was probably pretty scary and you put a bookmark in your memory banks of how you might avoid that reaction in the future.

This is how our childhood emotional triggers begin. It is precisely why all the intersecting research points us back to childhood for the tap roots of our emotional triggers, inner critics and insecurities.

Old parenting models exacerbated the problem because emotions were treated as a bug and not a feature of our core operating system. Kids and parents were flooded with emotions and cortisol and the parenting rule of thumb was to send us to our room til we were able to be with others. We were often punished or dismissed for our outbursts, while our parents got to return to whatever they chose to do. No consequences for them. No repairs for the relationship rupture. We made a mental note of that too. We got a lot of mixed messaging to go along with our repressed and unprocessed emotional experiences. This double standard also created a lot of issues with our basic need for a secure attachment – and resulted in many of us having anxious, avoidant or disorganized attachment styles. Yet another clue from our childhood about why we might be having relationship issues in our adult lives.

Our brains are prediction machines. While we are not consciously aware of it, we have mental notes and bookmarks on a clunky old database that it still uses when we get hijacked and go offline. Our bodies and brains coordinate all their defense mechanisms very quickly when something feels oddly familiar and we need to be on high alert. Our emotional triggers are in those childhood databases.

The pivot is catching ourselves in the act. We have to catch ourselves in the act of being hit with our own emotional airbags and realizing that we are off-line, defaulting to that childhood database.

When we are operating our incredibly complex cars today at high speeds in heavy traffic, we have the ability to stay fully engaged with our current knowledge and awareness. We don’t default to how anxious and insecure we felt when we were first learning to drive. We have the awareness, dexterity and maturity to handle a frightening situation like airbags deploying in a car in the event of a collision. We most likely would act like the adults our kids need us to be in that circumstance. We can do hard things. In fact, we are pretty proud of ourselves when we handle a crisis like this with confidence.

We can do the same for our kids’ emotional airbags; we can become the trustworthy, grounded first responders they need and deserve.

I believe that the reason doing our own emotional integration work gets a lot of traction when we interact with kids is that we get a lot of opportunities to both observe and practice. As we pay attention to the common emotional triggers our children have, we can get equally more in touch with our own.

Kids haven’t changed; what has changed is knowing that emotional integration is an incredible feature of our brains and bodies — not a bug. Our children will have the same big overwhelming emotional responses that we did when we were little. They will get scared, angry, frustrated, confused, belligerent, shy, bossy, sensitive — the list is endless. But instead of leaving them to their own devices and that small closet of coping skills, we will be showing up as caring, comforting emotional mentors.

We can teach them or we can repeat the past. This is where real change takes place.

Each emotion our children feel is legitimate and is real for them. Acknowledging that is huge. It reassures them that they will be ok, that they are seen and heard and that we will help them manage their big feelings. They do not have to do that alone. In fact, they unable to do that alone because they do not yet have access to “top down” executive functions in those small developing brains.

We become the training wheels for our children’s emotional awareness, intelligence and regulation.

No overdosing on stress hormones for you or your child. Helping your child return to their baseline is how we teach them to “ride out” their emotional waves. As they grow older, they will then have a lot of experience with how emotions come on strong, and can subside with a little skillful assistance. We can teach our kids to label their emotions, to understand what they are trying to tell them and to process them in real time. This is how we help our kids get more skillful at their own emotional regulation. We teach them to tolerate a little short term discomfort and to learn from it. This is the preventative step we take to help them avoid numbing their pain.

It is also how we introduce them to the incredible benefits of self-compassion. Rather than our children growing up with harsh inner critics, fixed mindsets and limiting beliefs, we will be helping them build resilience, resourcefulness, confidence and growth mindsets.

We aren’t born afraid of our emotions. In fact, emotions are a baby’s first language and how they get their basic needs met. Rather than pulling the plug on emotions when our children learn to talk and express themselves with more context and complexity, we help them differentiate between self-identity and their behaviors. Telling a child they are bad, stupid or too much is the root cause of adults who struggle with their core identity, self-worth and lack of inner confidence. Label the behavior not the child. We have good kids and sometimes they have unacceptable behaviors.

We use boundaries as guardrails for our kids – to help them learn how to make good choices on their own later. Our boundaries teach kids more about the consequences of their behaviors more than any lecture ever will. And we want our children to become very skilled at holding boundaries when they are teenagers and adults so that they can clearly let others know what is acceptable behavior to be in relationship with them. Boundaries are a relationship tool that keeps us safe and in alignment with our core values.

Did you know that children have this same inquisitive nature about emotions? We are the ones who grew up with emotions being labeled as good or bad, positive or negative, even gender restricted. It’s time to peel those labels and reframe emotions as neutral, necessary, invaluable internal information. Emotions are a feature, not a bug of our core operating system.

Both our parental teaching experiences and our child’s learning experiences will be markedly changed for the better when we integrate emotional intelligence into everything else we introduce to our kids. Without all those airbags exploding, we will have more room to fully engage in the dual process in healthy, relaxed and mind-opening ways.

Just out of curiosity, check in with yourself to see how you actually plan for big emotional experiences for your kids on purpose. A surprise birthday celebration, those costumes they will be donning for Halloween, unveiling an upcoming family vacation — these are all intended to evoke great joy, delight and wonder. How do we support our kids when we have bad or sad news to impart — we lean in, comforting, soft and assuring.

Imagine yourself growing up without the impediments of limiting beliefs, false narratives or restrictive social conditioning. Imagine yourself understanding that your emotions are helpful information, normal and acceptable. If you are capable of imagining this, you may find yourself smiling, feeling free and adventurous, even child-like with wonder and curiosity. That feeling right there is what we are going for — that is what happens with emotional integration and giving our kids the skills and tools they need to make sense of the world in a healthy, growth-mind set, ever evolving kind of way.

Magic happens when we begin to take our own adult emotional integration seriously; when we teach and learn simultaneously with our kids. If you are a parent or grandparent, you have the best environment for this “on the job” training.

We all have the potential to contribute in a meaningful way to integrating emotional intelligence for kids and for each other. Bear this in mind with each interaction you have. We can be the scaffolding that we all need to come fully online with emotional intelligence.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Our Collective Emotional Health Journey

This is the third part of my latest series of blog posts focused on all that we are learning about the integral importance of our emotional health — and how to proactively engage in a healthy emotional lifestyle.

The first two parts of this series focused on the breakthroughs in psychology, neuroscience and psychiatry that have created better parenting models, vastly improved therapy protocols and perhaps most importantly – destigmatized a lot of what we believed about “mental health.”

If you’ve followed along in this series, you’ll recognize the overarching theme of “mapping how we got where we are, and how we can better prepare for our future journeys through life with the firsthand knowledge we’ve gained from our past experiences, and the newer advancements and tools available to us now pertaining to emotional health.

In each of these posts, I am highlighting two influential change-makers who are instrumental in helping us navigate emotions more skillfully, both individually and within our relationships. You may already be familiar with the change-makers I share today — they are becoming household names- and for good reason. Both Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Paul Conti are having meaningful impacts in our knowledge about preventative mental health care.

“Compassion, community and humanity are intertwined in that they exemplify the full expression of who we are as humans. Compassion enables us to care about other people, to relate to them with kindness, and to consider the world from their perspective. Community is the embodied acknowledgement of our interdependence with other people — our behaviors affect one another.” – Dr. Paul Conti.

Back in 2010, Dr. Bruce Perry sounded the alarm on our escalating empathy poverty in his book Born for Love. It was almost as though he had a crystal ball and could see what our future would hold if we continued to operate without empathy for each other and especially for our most vulnerable – our children. He educated us about the need for relational webbing especially for children since their complex brains develop more slowly than any other species on the planet. He was dipping our toes in the realization that emotional integration was the missing piece in our internal GPS; and that we need to provide scaffolding for each other, especially during emotional duress. Empathy helps others feel seen, heard and believed. It can change lives; even save lives. Empathy is integral for healthy brains, to process and heal emotional trauma, and to be in stable relationships with others.

You’ll recall from my last blog post that this is exactly what Uncle Marvin did for Dr. Marc Brackett when he was just a young adolescent. Uncle Marvin listened to Marc’s stories with empathy and gave him “permission to feel.” It was the empathic support that Marc so desperately needed and it changed his life; it fuels his passion to teach us to become emotion scientists and to help children do the same.

It’s becoming more clear every day that when we know our own inner emotional landscape with greater clarity and understanding, we become more attuned to others’ emotions. We are less judgmental and more curious. Their stories matter to us because they give us valuable information to best support them. Simply put, we become more empathetic and compassionate with others. It has taken a very long time for us to heed Dr. Bruce Perry’s warning about empathy, but at long last we are now paying attention.

Empathy is becoming such a guiding principle that now it is even embedded in Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linked In and Inflection AI, has been instrumental in launching a pilot version of generative AI that is powered by a neural network model built on extensive data about human emotions and interactions. This new AI is Pi, the personal intelligence chat bot designed to respond to your inquiries in an emotionally intelligent manner. Imagine that, even artificial intelligence is being trained to be friendly, compassionate and empathetic.

We have the rare dynamic opportunity to show up more compassionately and empathetically in our personal relationships — and to be positive contributors to the growing data base for artificial intelligence that is also emotionally intelligent. That’s right, we can be part of the change we would like to see in the world — especially for our children — and believe me, our children will be using AI. Just check out Pi for yourself and you will see how young people are actively engaging with it right now — and how thoughtful and emotionally skillful the responses can be.

Today I’ll introduce you to two of my long time favorite change makers. They feel like friends to me because I soak up all that they teach through podcasts, books and interviews. They both have learned so much from each other’s fields of research, and they have supported each other through life’s challenges and healing personal growth work in large part due to their deep, connected friendship. It is not at all surprising that they recently teamed up to present a 4-part podcast series on “understanding and assessing our mental health”.

Dr. Andrew Huberman, Huberman Lab:

Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and the host of the #1 Health and Fitness Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. He is an associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Huberman launched his highly popular podcast, Huberman Lab, in the midst of the pandemic because he wanted all of us to have access to the information we needed to take care of our health in a proactive way. Compelled by a strong desire to make a difference in a time of major crisis, he educated us about how our brains and bodies operate and how to optimally care for them especially during long periods of uncertainty and anxiety. Very few of us really knew just how important quality, consistent sleep is for our brains, bodies and immune systems – but over 4.2 million people do now thanks to the Huberman Lab podcast.

Andrew Huberman heeded his intuition’s call to action to help us learn more about our brains, the breakthroughs in neuroscience and how we can proactively improve our mental and physical health. His podcasts make this learning so accessible to all of us.

In the spring of 2023, Dr. Huberman invited Peter Attia onto his podcast to discuss his book Outlive. Dr. Attia, a Stanford/JohnHopkins/NIH trained physician, has devoted his medical career to enhancing our longevity; most notably our ability to live longer, with a vastly longer health span and much shorter disease span. It was during this podcast discussion that Dr. Peter Attia shared that our emotional health is the most integral part of longevity, health span, and a deeply satisfying life.

Dr. Peter Attia also shared personal stories about his own emotional health and his road to healing with the help of Dr. Paul Conti, Terry Real and Esther Perel. In my first blog post of this series, I highlighted Terry Real, founder of Relational Life Therapy and his ability to help his clients understand how the impacts of their childhood are causing great difficulties in their current lives.

Dr. Peter Attia knew this firsthand – because in spite of building the life he wanted that included a successful career, marriage and children – it was his unchecked emotions that put all of that in jeopardy. He opens up about these painful truths in his book – and he did the same in his podcast conversation with Andrew Huberman.

It is these honest stories about the struggles we all are quite familiar with, that open up the much needed conversations about how we address mental and emotional health, both individually and collectively. Once Dr. Attia shared his emotional outbursts and the collateral damage they were causing to his family and relationships, it made it easier for others to do the same. This is the power of empathy.

Dr. Peter Attia subsequently invited Andrew Huberman to be his guest on his own podcast, The Drive; and it was during that conversation that Andrew opened up about his own struggles in childhood due to family dysfunction and all the trouble he got into as a result of either running from or numbing to the situation. Another relatable story that mirrors so much of what Dr. Marc Brackett experienced in his youth. In Andrew Huberman’s case, it was Tony Hawk’s parents that gave him some much needed relationship scaffolding. They made a lasting impression on a young Andrew stranded in Northern California when they took him in for the night after a skateboarding competition, taking him out to dinner, being empathic and non-judgmental and providing empathy when it was needed most. They were the mentors and role models that Dr. Marc Brackett encourages us all to be.

Can you begin to see how empathy opens us up by reflecting on our own life stories and offering to others what we ourselves also need. We need to be the Uncle Marvin’s who listen to learn what is really going on and to give others permission to truly feel all their emotions.

As Dr. Bruce Perry wrote in his most recent book about empathy, aptly entitled What Happened to You, we need to understand how our childhood shaped us and our emotional mapping. When we hear these vulnerable childhood stories of struggle and disconnection, we see our own more clearly. In turn, we become more aware that everyone has stories about feeling like they didn’t belong, about trauma or abuse of some kind, bullying, body image issues, feelings of unworthiness or not being smart enough, of being too needy or too distant.

Dr. Andrew Huberman launched his podcast in the midst of a pandemic to provide a public service. He believed that if we only knew the simple, no-cost steps we could be doing to help our physical and mental health, we could build stronger immune systems and each be a part of the solution. Using his highly successful podcast platform, he is now turning our attention to emotional and mental health – for this very same reason.

The proof was in the pudding – three friends, former colleagues, all had adverse childhood experiences that lingered long into their adult lives. Andrew Huberman, Peter Attia and Paul Conti all entered the health field but pursued very diverse branches of expertise. Yet now, their fields are converging and they all point to our emotional and mental health. Both Andrew and Peter turned to Paul Conti, a psychiatrist, to help them with counseling and therapy. In the process, they learned his own story, deepened their friendship and began to see how their respective fields fit together to solve another big human problem.

If you look at the trajectory of their work and their platforms, you can plot very clearly that the pandemic was a pivot point for this deeper dive into the prevention and proactivity approach to our emotional and mental health. The proverbial silver lining in that dark cloud.

In recent months, Andrew Huberman has had a number of noteworthy guests on his podcast to discuss how emotions and social factors impact children’s learning; how to foster growth mindsets in ourselves and our children; how to work on behavioral changes; the impacts of social isolation; and how risk taking, innovation and artificial intelligence transform the human experience.

Just a few weeks ago, his guest was the surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, about the challenges we face with public health. Included in this extensive conversation were the impacts of social media and the growing epidemic of loneliness and isolation (especially in teens and seniors).

Dr. Andrew Huberman is most definitely a change-maker — and he has fast become a household name. He has successfully created a huge interest in learning about how our brains work. It is unlikely that any of us would sign up for an adult neuroscience class at the local college, and yet there are millions popping those earbuds in and tuning in to listen to Andrew and his guests teach us what we need to know about our personal data processor.

The best part is that his followers are implementing best practices to improve their mental, emotional and physical health. More sleep, less alcohol, more exercise, less doom scrolling, more empathy, less isolation.

Dr. Paul Conti, Psychiatrist, Consultant, Author:

Dr. Paul Conti’s bio will tell you that he is adept at helping people untangle complex problems. He takes a holistic view of each client, to help them recognize the interconnedness of our past to our present, as well as our work lives and personal lives, of our individuality and our relationships. There is a very complex, integrated, inter-connected system at play in all of us. (Just as Dr. Richard Schwartz espouses with internal family systems and his book, No Bad Parts.)

In 2021, Dr. Conti published his revelational book, Trauma, the Invisible Epidemic. How remarkable that the COVID-19 pandemic would present an analogy that we could all viscerally wrap our heads around:

“A wise response to a viral pandemic is to become more closed until a vaccine becomes widely available. A wise response to a trauma pandemic is to become more open so that we ourselves become the vaccine.” — Dr. Paul Conti

Dr. Paul Conti was a recent guest on the Huberman Lab podcast and over a series of four episodes, he and Andrew Huberman provided an extraordinary public service about mental health. While this deep dive may seem unappealing and overwhelming, what you will discover is that Dr. Conti’s soft spoken demeanor, his humility and humanity, and his simple metaphors make a complex subject very accessible.

Here are highlights from each of the four segments. All of this content comes from Dr. Andrew Huberman’s show notes for each episode which aired throughout September, 2023.

Episode 1 – How to Understand and Assess Your Mental Health:

Dr. Conti defines mental health in actionable terms and describes the foundational elements of the self, including the structure and function of the unconscious and conscious mind, which give rise to all our thoughts, behaviors and emotions. He also explains how to explore and address the root causes of anxiety, low confidence, negative internal narratives, over-thinking and how our unconscious defense mechanisms operate. This episode provides a foundational roadmap to assess your sense of self and mental health. It offers tools to reshape negative emotions, thought patterns and behaviors — either through self-exploration or with a licensed professional.

Episode 2 – How to Improve Your Mental Health:

Dr. Conti explains specific tools for how to overcome life’s challenges using a framework of self-inquiry that explores all the key elements of self, including defense mechanisms, behaviors, self-awareness and attention. We also discuss our internal driving forces, how to align them and ultimately, how to cultivate a powerful “generative drive” of positive, aspirational pursuits. Dr. Conti also explains how to adjust your internal narratives, reduce self-limiting concepts, overcome intrusive thoughts, and how certain defense mechanisms, such as “acting out” or narcissism, show up in ourselves and others.

Episode 3 – How to Build and Maintain Healthy Relationships:

Dr. Conti explains how to find, develop and strengthen healthy relationships — including romantic relationships, work and colleague relationships, and friendships. He explains a roadmap of the conscious and unconscious mind that can allow anyone to navigate conflicts better and set healthy boundaries in relationships. We also discuss common features of unhealthy relationships and clinically supported tools for dealing with relationship insecurity, excessive anxiety, past traumas, manipulation and abuse. Dr. Conti explains how, in healthy relationships, there emerges a dynamic of the mutually generative “us” and how to continually improve that dynamic.

Episode 4 – Tools and Protocols for Mental Health:

Dr. Conti explains what true self-care is and how our mental health benefits from specific self-care and introspection practices — much in the same way that our physical health benefits from certain exercise and nutrition habits. He describes how the foundation of mental health is an understanding of one’s own mind and the specific questions to ask in order to explore the conscious and unconscious parts of ourselves. He describes how this process can be done either on our own, through journaling, meditation and structured thought, or in therapy with the help of a licensed professional. He also explains how unprocessed trauma can short-circuit the process and how to prevent that, and the role of friendships and other relational support systems in the journey of self-exploration for mental health. People of all ages and those with and without self-introspection and therapy experience ought to benefit from the information in this episode.

It is not necessary to listen to all four podcasts in the order in which they were presented to glean valuable insights that we can put into practice right away. However, each one does build on the foundational metaphor of an iceberg — our consciousness being the tip that juts out above the water; and the much larger unconscious part of us that drifts and drags underneath the surface. It is the unconsciousness that gets us into turbulent emotional waters. We’ve all heard this iceberg metaphor used often in personal growth and mindfulness arenas — but Dr. Conti’s explanation will crystalize what once seemed pretty murky.

Throughout the four part series, Dr. Conti anchors us to this important mental health work with two verbs — Agency and Gratitude. Again, we have often heard these two words bantered about a lot as though they are the fast track to personal growth and mindfulness. But they are not adjectives and they are not static.

In his book, No Bad Parts, Dr. Richard Schwartz describes “agency” as being “self-led”. We are adults now who have worked very hard to build the life we want. We are investing time and energy in our careers, we have chosen spouses and are raising our precious children. The catch is that we often self-sabotage our best intentions and hard work because it is the unconscious part of our iceberg that pulls us out of our agency and back into old habits and patterns. As Dr. Conti unpacks this for us, we come to have a greater appreciation for the value of pausing long enough when big emotions are hitting us to course correct. We can make conscious choices to respond more appropriately – and to be consistent with our emotional regulation in order to be good role models for our children; and to be better partners in our relationships.

As for gratitude, Dr. Conti reminds us that it is not just making a list at the end of each day. He stresses the importance of focusing on gratitude as a verb. Showing up in life with gratitude – for what we are able to do, for our diverse resources and tools, and for the people who support us.

We can be enthusiastically grateful for the breakthroughs in neuroscience and psychology that help us actively participate in shifting from old faulty models of parenting and relationships into healthier, integrated ones that break generational cycles.

Dr. Conti invites us to take a serious inventory of the places and times that our life gets out of balance. Are we able to stay more emotionally regulated at work or in public than we are at home and in our closest relationships? Do certain people trigger us and amplify strong emotions, while others seem to have a calming and uplifting influence on us?

Dr. Conti uses a cupboard metaphor as a compelling visual for this inventory. Take a peek inside your various cupboards and discover the different coping skills and self-regulation that you use ion different roles in your life. Investigate how you handle things when you are sleep-deprived, on overload, or feel resentful. What helps you get back to an emotional baseline when you are triggered? Sometimes our cupboards are bare; sometimes they have some expired items that are no longer working.

You will find the PDF’s that Dr. Conti provides in the Huberman podcast series to be very helpful guides for these metaphors and for the proactive, preventative mental health practices he espouses. The 4 part series is a worthwhile investment of your time if you want to gain real insight into a proactive, preventative approach to mental and emotional health.

SUMMARY:

Today, I pulled together a few critical pieces of our collective journey. We now know that Dr. Bruce Perry’s wisdom about our empathy poverty was spot on. Empathy plays a vital role in building the connections we all long for — and that science has proven — supports our most valuable relationships — those with our children and our partners. We live longer and healthier when we are deeply connected with each and supported by each other.

Friendship is often the engine of change and healing. We are not meant to do our inner work and emotional healing alone. It is far better done with others that we trust and who are good role models. We need emotion scientists and emotions mentors. We can become the relational web and scaffolding for our families and friends. It is especially good to have a buddy with whom to do some of this inner investigative work. Why? Because we are not alone — and we do see ourselves in each other’s stories. When we feel heard in a very meaningful way; we feel like we belong.

People who have done their inner work often pursue fields that take what they have learned to a whole new level. All three parts of this current blog post series on proactive and preventative emotional health have showcased such people. What these change-makers need are followers; they need others who take the courses, who soak up the knowledge, who put the practices into action. Then they need us to tell others our experiences with our own changes. When we give each other our personal examples of how this inner work and new tools, have dramatically improved our lives, we offer encouragement for others to try it out as well.

Do you know who the most excited little sponges are? Our children! When we begin to teach our children that they do have permission to feel their emotions and we start having calm, supportive, inquiring conversations about their feelings, we get tangible evidence of the power of empathy.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:

Click this link to listen to Part 1 of the Mental Health Series with Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Paul Conti https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110?i=1000626920013

You can use this link to discover all the episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast. This link will take you to Andrew Huberman’s webpage: https://www.hubermanlab.com/all-episodes

Use this link to go to Dr Paul Cont’s webpage to learn more about him and his book, Trauma, The Invisible Epidemic. Read endorsements from the Greater Good Science Center, Lady Gaga and more. https://drpaulconti.com

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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