Andrew Huberman: evaluation

Transcript context

…So one of the processes for achieving mental health is to bring those things to the surface. So fish the subconscious mind. Yes, and Paul describes 10 cupboards that one can look into for exploring the self. There’s the structure of self and the function of self. Again, this will all be spelled out in this series in a lot of detail. Also in terms of its relational aspect between people, how to pick good partners and good relationship. It gets really into this from a very different perspective. Yeah, fascinating stuff. I was just sitting there. I will say this, that four episode series with Paul is at least to date, the most important work I’ve ever been involved in in all of my career because it’s very clear that we are not taught how to explore our subconscious and that very few people actually understand how to do that. Even most psychiatrists, he mentioned something about psychiatrists. If you’re a cardiothoracic surgeon or something like that and 50% of your patients die, you’re considered a bad cardiothoracic surgeon. But with no disrespect to psychiatrists, there are some excellent psychiatrists out there. There are also a lot of terrible psychiatrists out there because unless all of their patients commit suicide or half commit suicide, they can treat for a long time without it becoming visible that they’re not so good at their craft. Now, he’s superb at his craft, and I think he would say that yes, exploring some shadows, but also just understanding the self, really understanding like, “Who am I? And what’s important? What are my ambitions? What are my strivings?” Again, I’m lifting from some of the things that he’ll describe exactly how to do this. People do not spend enough time addressing those questions, and as a consequence, they discover what resides in their subconscious through the sometimes bad, hopefully also good, but manifestations of their actions. We are driven by this huge 90% of our real estate that is not visible to our conscious awareness. And we need to understand that. I’ve talked about this before. I’ve done therapy twice a week since I was a kid. I had to as a condition of being let back in school. I found a way to either through insurance or even when I didn’t have insurance, I took an extra job writing for Thrasher Magazine when I was a postdoc so I could pay for therapy at a discount because I didn’t make much money as a postdoc. I mean, I think for me, it’s as important as going to the gym and people think it’s just ruminating on problems, or getting… No, no, no. If you work with somebody really good, they’re forcing you to ask questions about who you really are, what you really want. It’s not just about support, but there should be support. There should be rapport, but then it’s also, there should be insight, right? Most people who get therapy, they’re getting support, there’s rapport, but insight is not easy to arrive at, and a really good psychologist or psychiatrist can help you arrive at deep insights that transform your entire life. Well, sometimes when I look inside and I do this often exploring who you truly are, you come to this question, do I accept… Once you see parts, do I accept this or do I fix this? Is this who you are fundamentally, and it will always be this way, or is this a problem to be fixed? For example, one of the things, especially recently, but in general over time I’ve discovered about myself probably has roots in childhood, probably has roots in a lot of things, is I deeply value loyalty maybe more than the average person. And so when there’s disloyalty, it can be painful to me. And so this is who I am, and so do I have to relax a bit? Do I have to fix this part or is this who you are? And there’s a million, that’s one little……

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