Essentials: Improving Health With Stronger Brain-Body Connection

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are going to talk about our sense of self, or what's called interoception. Interoception is our sensing of our internal landscape, things like our heartbeat, our breathing. and our gut.

This discussion about sense of self and interoception has many important actionable items that relate to bodily health and brain health. Of all the topics I could cover, this thing that we call sense of self, which is also called interoception, has perhaps the most foundational level of importance for all that we feel, all that we do, and all that we are capable of doing. And I promise that if you can learn a little bit about the mechanisms of self-sensing, of understanding what's going on in your internal milieu, as we say, your internal environment, you will position yourself to do some very simple things that can lead to outsized positive effects on everything, from sleep to body composition, to mental focus, to mood, your ability to regulate stress, and indeed even your ability to heal and recovery from injuries of different kinds, brain injury and bodily injury. We have a system in our body that connects our brain to all of our bodily organs and connects all of those bodily organs to our brain.

And that communication between brain and body in both directions creates a situation where either we are positioned to do things well or we are positioned to do things poorly. So I really want to dive in and dissect what is this system of brain-body communication? What does it look like? What are the actual neurons and connections?

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