2023-10-09-how-to-increase-your-willpower-tenacity-huberman-lab-podcast.txt

 welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today we are discussing how to build tenacity and willpower previous episodes of The hman Lab podcast have focused on the topic of motivation and while motivation and willpower are linked thematically and mechanistically today we are going to discuss tenac that is the willingness to persist under pressure and resistance of different kinds and willpower which has to do with both the motivation to do things and the motivation to resist certain things today you will learn about the Psychology and Neuroscience of tenacity and willpower and I must tell you this is a fascinating literature in fact you will learn about a brain structure that at least to my knowledge most neuroscientists are not even aware of and yet in researching this episode I absolutely fell in love with this brain structure because of its incredible ability to integrate the very sorts of information from within and from outside of you to harness and build tenacity and willpower and indeed today you will learn research supported tools for how to enhance your level of tenacity and willpower in any circumstance before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is Maui Nei venison Maui Nei venison is the most nutrient-dense and delicious red meat available I've spoken before on this podcast in Solo episodes and with guests about the need to get approximately one gram of highquality protein per pound of body weight each day for optimal nutrition now there are many different ways that one can 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huberman for up to $350 off and two free pillows okay let's talk about tenacity and willpower and how to enhance your level of tenacity and willpower I will also mention certain cases we're having too much tenacity and willpower can be problematic for mental health and physical health but for most people I believe that enhancing one's level of tenacity and willpower would be advantageous now you'll be relieved to know that while there are a near infinite number of different circumstances where one would need to draw on tenacity and willpower in order to succeed there is one major mechanism within the brain indeed one major mechanism by which tenacity and willower are generated and it arrives through the activation of a particular brain center that is a hub but that is it lies at the interface of many other neural circuits and has input from all the critical neural circuits that one would need in order to generate tenacity and willpower now we are going to return to that particular neural circuit a little bit later after we talk about the psychology of willpower because in talking about the psychology of willpower it will frame up as to why understanding this one particular brain Center or Hub of inputs and outputs from different neural structures in the brain and body will indeed allow you to get the most out of the tools that have been shown in scientific research to enhance your level of tenacity and willpower in other words understanding the psychology of tenacity and willpower while valuable if it's coupled with an understanding of the underlying neural mechanism and notice I use the singular neural mechanism not mechanisms for generating tenacity and willpower will allow you to use and to tailor the specific protocols for enhancing tenacity and willpower to your unique circumstan es so this is yet another case where certainly life circumstances vary from one person to the next the need for tenacity and willpower varies tremendously for instance some people may need more tenacity and willpower in order to engage in certain behaviors others of us might need more tenacity and willpower in order to resist certain types of behaviors today you will learn about the brain Center that governs all of that and then you can frame it within the psychological understanding of tenacity and willpower so that you can get get the most out of the protocols that we will discuss let's start by talking about what tenacity and willpower clearly are and separating tenacity and willpower from some other psychological constructs that they often get confused with because this will be important in understanding exactly what we are trying to build when we say we want to build tenacity and willpower so tenacity and willpower can be distinguished from habit execution habit execution is what you do anytime you wake up in the morning maybe you lie there for a bit maybe get out of bed immediately hopefully you get outside and get some sunlight in your eyes especially on cloudy days go brush your teeth use the restroom engage with others in your home if you live with others Etc all of those sorts of behaviors while on some days can be a bit more challenging especially the get out of bed part maybe you didn't get a great night's sleep the night before for instance but all of those sorts of behaviors are behaviors that you have the neural circuit to generate and that typically you can generate without a lot of willpower required now willpower sometimes also referred to as tenacity grit or persistence is a distinctly different phenomenon than habit execution because willpower and tenacity require that we intervene in our own default neural processes such as habits or particular patterns of thinking and essentially govern ourselves to do or not do some particular thing and that process requires effort it requires energy and I think all of us are familiar with that feeling of effort or energy that's required in order to engage in a behavior that we really don't feel like engaging in or avoiding a behavior or a thought that by default we would naturally just engage in and when I talk about energy in this context I mainly talking about neural energy remember that neurons nerve cells in your brain and body use chemical and electrical signaling to communicate with one another that's what allows you and all of us to do all the things that we do think feel move Etc now of course that chemical and electrical communication requires fuel sources that indeed come from things like glucose ketones the creatine phosphate system multiple fuel systems feed the energetics of the brain But ultimately when I talk about energy in today's discussion I'm talking about the energy required to engage in or to resist in a particular behavior and that level of energy can be quite High depending on how much resistance we are feeling internally or externally right somebody can be telling us you're not going to be able to do this you can't do it and you can say no I have a ton of resolve I have a ton of tenacity willpower and I'm going to push past all the barriers that you are setting up for me on the outside often times all too often I should say we experience resistance from the inside where we are feeling like we don't want to do something or we really want to do something and we are having trouble either engaging in the thing that we don't want to do or that we know we should do but we just don't feel that level of motivation for or we are having a hard time resisting the thing that's pulling us toward it so in that context it's important for us not to just distinguish tenacity and willpower from habit execution but also draw out a Continuum with tenacity and willpower at their most extreme on one end of that Continuum and apathy and yes depression on the other end of that Continuum and we will return to the topic of depression a little bit later but I can just ceue it up right now by saying that one of the Hallmark features of major depression is a lack of positive anticipation about the future that leads to this is important there's a verb tense here that leads to a much lower tendency to engage in the specific types of behavior that would allow one to arrive at a particular new different and positive future so I'm deliberately putting apathy and depression next to one another at one end of the Continuum and I'm putting grit persistence tenacity and willpower at the other end of the Continuum and a little bit later it will be become very clear to you why I put those particular items on the Continuum as opposed to other psychological constructs such as motivation because it turns out that motivation is what allows you to move up and down that Continuum but motivation itself as a verb is distinct from what we call tenacity and willpower and motivation itself is distinct from what we call apathy and depression but motivation is the engine or the motor the verb that allows you to move up and down that Continuum and today you will learn multiple tools that will allow you to move toward the tenacity and willpower end of that Continuum by engaging a very specific neural circuit before we get into the discussion of neural circuits I'd like to talk about the psychology of willpower and this is something that really has been considered by psychologist for well over a hundred years William James wrote about this the ancient Greeks wrote about this the topic of willpower is certainly not a new one and yet the formal study of willpower power in the laboratory context that is bringing human subjects into the laboratory and examining what sorts of conditions allow them to engage their willpower and tenacity what sorts of conditions really sap or drain their willpower and tenacity and of course parallel experiments done in what we call preclinical models which are animal Studies have revealed to us a lot about the sorts of conditions that allow us to generate willpower and the sorts of conditions that drain our willpower now if we are to throw our arms around that entire literature there is a big batch of that literature not the whole batch but there's a big batch of that literature that believed and still believes that willpower is a limited resource much like fuel in the body or fuel in a car now the idea of willpower as a limited resource is certainly not a new idea but again the formal study of willpower and willpower as a limited resource really dates back a little over 20 25 years when Roy bister and colleagues started to explore the idea that of course had been kicked around for years that with each additional decision that we have to engage across the day and with each additional bout of willpower that we have to draw on as a resource that we would drain this reservoir of willpower that we all have within us now bow meister and colleagues refer to that process as ego depletion now when people hear the word ego some people think Freud ego super ego id and so forth most people think ego like somebody having a big personality where they think a lot of themselves when Bal Meister referred to Ego depletion he was defining ego depletion as a concept of oneself and a concept of outside challenges and the degree of effort required to bridge one's concept of self and those challenges and so ego depletion is really a operational construct within the field of psychology so we don't want to get too distracted by that word ego there's a tendency anytime people hear ego if they hear narcissism or if they hear gaslighting to immediately assume that they know what that means when in fact the formal definitions of those quite often differ from the way that they're kicked around on social media the internet and even in a lot of popular writing about psychology okay so let's just note that ego depletion is the term that Bal Meister used to describe the ability for our willpower to be depleted with each successive attempt to engage willpower and by extension our ability to replenish our degree of willpower if we take a break from making decisions and engaging our willpower but ego depletion itself isn't the Focus right now the Focus right now is whether or not indeed willpower is a limited resource and whether or not with each decision that we make and each effort to either engage in an activity that we prefer not to at least in that moment and with each attempt to resist a behavior thought Etc that is pulling on us or that we feel that we want to engage in by default either you know eating the cookie or thinking the thought or engaging in a particular type of behavior of any kind and we need to resist that that it is draining that willpower resource now before I go any further I know that some of you out there are probably aware that ego depletion and the bow Meister theory of willpower as a limited resource has been very contentious especially in recent years and so today what I'm going to do is I'm going to first present present the Bal meister and colleagues work about willpower as a limited resource and then I'm going to present some of the conflicting evidence that Carol D my colleague at Stanford school of medicine and researchers elsewhere have carried out metaanalyses and entirely new experiments which indeed in some cases contradict the findings of Bal Meister but more often than not contradict the conclusions that Bal Meister Drew about willpower so if we are to understand the psychology of willpower and tenacity it's important that we understand and the concepts of ego depletion and willpower as a limited resource even if after hearing all the evidence you decide that willower is not a limited resource and in fact I'm quite confident that once you hear about the bow Meister work and then you hear about the work of DW and others which in some ways counters the conclusions of bow Meister that you'll have a much firmer and certainly much more complete understanding about what tenacity and willpower are and perhaps and here I'm revealing my own leanings when having examined the totality of the data that tenac and willpower in some cases is a limited resource that can be replenished by engaging particular processes within the body that's right within the body but that willpower and tenacity and most importantly how to engage tenacity and willpower especially when you have a lot of challenges in front of you not just one challenge but multiple challenges that need to be carried out throughout the day over weeks over months Etc that tenacity and willpower can be drawn upon repeatedly without them being depleted if you are clear on your beliefs about tenacity and willpower so I realized that what I just brought up was a controversy about something that I haven't even discussed yet so it might seem like a bit of a swirl of information for which there's really no context but the reason I bring up the controversy at this stage of our conversation is that the moment that the words ego depletion or willpower is a limited resource falls out of my mouth I can hear those voices out there saying wait a second I thought that was all debunked and I want to make very clear willpower is a limited resource and ego depletion have not been debunked it's simply a controversial area of psychological research and more importantly for today's discussion we have to understand the theory of willpower as a limited resource if we are to understand the controversy that is the counterargument of what willpower really is that comes from other groups so I really want to give you both sides of the story so that when we get to the underlying neural mechanisms for tenacity and willpower and we get to the tools and protocols for increasing your level of tenacity and willpower and your flexibility of willpower in different contexts that you'll be able to get the most out of those tools and protocols okay so let's take a look at the evidence that willpower is a limited resource I think most of us are familiar with what willpower feels like that is what it feels like to be tenacious and again there are two sides to this coin there's willpower and tenacity of the sort of trying to engage in a behavior when we really don't want to or when our impulse is not to engage in that behavior and I say when our impulse is not to engage in that behavior because often times we want to engage in the behavior we want to study we want to learn the instrument we want to perform well we want to exercise we want the benefits of all those things so it's not that we don't want the outcomes or the rewards of those things and in many cases it's not that we don't enjoy those activities but that for whatever reason we are feeling a lack of motivation we're drifting down that Continuum toward the more apathetic end of things hopefully not all the way to deep depression and apathy but we're drifting that way or we're not far enough up the Continuum and we're not engaging enough motivation to feel like the desire to do something either for its own sake or for the rewards and outcomes of that thing are sufficient to allow us to just do that thing hence the Nike slogan just do it which is a wonderful slogan except that in the absence of any understanding about the mechanisms of how we can get ourselves to just do something oftentimes it falls short and to be honest anytime I hear about people saying well just eliminate the thinking and just do it that is valuable advice until it doesn't work because when it doesn't work it simply doesn't work and then you need to rely on other tools and mechanisms which are the sort that we will talk about today so while I have great respect for the just doit Mantra when it doesn't work it doesn't offer any alternative solutions to engage tenacity and willpower and I do not know anyone on this planet I don't care if you're David Goggins or Courtney dwalter there will be days when telling yourself just do this or just don't do that is not going to be sufficient for you to engage in the behaviors or resist the behaviors or thoughts that you need to engage in or resist that's just reality and we should ask ourselves why is that reality and this is a very important point and in fact really illustrates the first bucket of tools and protocols for increasing tenacity and willpower and these are the tools and protocols that I would categorize under the rubric of modulators I've talked before on this podcast about the important distinction between mediators and modulators mediators are things either psychological or biological Etc that are directly in the mechanisms that generate some sort of action or emotion this could be neurochemicals like dopamine or serotonin and so on modulators are things that can modulate that is can change our probability of doing something or not doing something but they do so indirectly and in the context of tools and protocols to increase our level of tenacity and willpower I would be completely remiss if one of the sets of tools that is the protocols for increasing the probability that we can access high levels of tenacity and willpower didn't include at least some of these modulators so I'm just going to spend about three minutes on these modulators because what we know for certain is that the regions of the brain that generate tenacity and again there is literally a brainhub for generating will power and tenacity gets strong input from the so-called autonomic nervous system the autonomic nervous system has two major components they are referred to as the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system keep in mind because when most people hear the word sympathetic they think sympathy they think emotion it has nothing to do with that simpa means together and the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system I know that's a mouthful is responsible for generating states of alertness in our brain and body everything from Panic to being alert and calm our tendency to move or our likelihood of moving under pressure it is also responsible for our ability to resist movement when we need to resist movement and therefore it's an active process so the sympathetic nervous system is all the things of action and when it is involved in generating inaction those are cases where inaction requires energy okay I want to be very clear about this the sympathetic nervous system isn't just about moving our body although it has a lot to do with that it is also responsible for our ability to resist movement or thought or emotion when we need to do that clamp down on ourselves the parasympathetic aspect of our autonomic nervous system is the one that sometimes referred to as the rest and digest neural circuits and chemicals and that's true but there's a lot more to the parasympathetic component of the autonomic nervous system it's also responsible for falling asleep it's responsible for us feeling relaxed it is responsible for most of the states of Mind and Body in which we are quiescent where we don't feel an Impulse to move or when we have a difficult time getting into action so the sympathetic and the parasympathetic aspect of the autonomic nervous system are always in a push pull with one another think of them more less on a teeter totter when one end goes up the other end goes down they're really in competition with one another and it's their balance that reflects how alert or how sleepy we happen to be now the reason I'm giving you this rather geeky nerd nomenclature filled discussion about the autonomic nervous system in the context of willpower is that regardless of whether or not you believe willpower is a limited or an unlimited resource we know one thing for sure and that's that willpower and tenacity ride on our current autonomic function we can translate that to Everyday Language by saying that when we we are well rested for instance when we've been getting great sleep of sufficient duration the previous night and the night before that our level of tenacity and willpower to engage in things that we would not ordinarily engage in by default and our ability to resist behaviors and thought patterns that would otherwise be our default behaviors and thought patterns is much higher conversely when we are not getting enough quality sleep on a regular basis our ability to call on tenacity and willpower is diminished now that series of statements I just made is clearly going to be a duh for most people but it is very important to understand that when we are sleep deprived when we are in physical pain when we are in emotional pain and or when we are distracted when we are thinking about something else aside from what we are trying to engage tenacity and willpower in order to do or not do tenacity and willpower will be diminished now all of those things together are just a bigger duh we all know this if you got a splinter in your foot it's really hard to think about not thinking about something else if you are extremely hungry or if you had an argument with somebody that you really care about and they said something that was particularly vexing to you and it's looping around in your head it's going to be very hard to engage in something else that you need to do because you're going to be distracted likewise if you're sleep deprived likewise if you are a bit sick or run down or if you're in any kind of physical or emotional pain your ability to draw on tenacity and willpower will be diminished so it's an absolute truth that your ability to generate tenacity and willpower rides on a reservoir of autonomic function and today we don't really have a way of quantifying the level of autonomic function or dysfunction in a very simple way it's not like resting heart rate although resting heart rate is involved for instance if you haven't slept well for a few nights or if you're particularly stressed overtrained you wake up in the morning with a significantly elevated heart rate however there is no simple metric like heart rate or blood pressure or even cortisol level that can tell you whether or not your autonomic function is imbalance that is the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems of your autonomic nervous system are in the best possible balance to generate tenacity and willpower we don't yet have such a metric although there are companies that are starting to develop devices that hopefully will give us indices of autonomic function or dysfunction but it is important that we acknowledge that if you're not taking care of the foundational modulators of tenacity and willpower none of the subsequent tools and protocols that we will discuss are going to help you that much over time you might get tenacity and willpower to engage one day when you're very sleep deprived but it's going to be very difficult to consistently engage tenacity and willpower for that reason if you have any struggles with sleep that is getting enough quality sleep on a regular basis please see the zero cost toolkit for sleep that we've put at hubman lab.com please also see the perfecty Sleep Mastery sleep episodes also at huberman lab.com and please also see the episode with expert guest Dr Matthew Walker professor of sleep neuroscience and psychology at University of California Berkeley we just revamped the huberman lab website so if you go to hubman lab.com and you put something like sleep into the search function it will take you not just to the toolkit for sleep but to the exact time stamps that will queue up particular topics and protocols around sleep so if you were to put sleep and light it would take you to those particular protocols if you were to put sleep and magnesium 3 and8 it would take you to those particular protocols and so on and so forth okay I don't want to get too far off topic here during today's discussion but if you're not sleeping well and if you're not managing your stress levels well it's going to be much harder for you to engage tenacity and willpower regardless of the tools you happen to use and those tools could be everything from behavioral tools to supplements to prescription drugs you need to get those foundational mod ators in check and there are a lot of zeroc cost ways to do that that are all spelled out very clearly at the resources I just described likewise for stress if you're experiencing challenges with stress both short-term medium-term or long-term stress if you think you have elevated cortisol levels which by the way may not be the case there are a lot of tools for modulating stress in real time increasing your stress threshold Etc simply go to the hubon lab.com website and put in stress threshold tools or stress realtime tools and you'll get a bunch of zero cost tools will allow you to do that it's also worth mentioning that when we get to our discussion about the Neuroscience of tenacity and willpower that you will understand why autonomic health and autonomic function is so important for our ability to engage tenacity and willpower I'll just tell you right now it's because the neural circuits of the autonomic nervous system provide direct and robust input to this Hub in the brain this brain location that governs our ability to allocate our mind and body toward particular activities or to resist particular activities as many of you know I've been taking ag1 daily since 2012 so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that's designed to meet all of your foundational nutrition needs now of course I try to get enough servings of vitamins and minerals through whole food sources that include vegetables and fruits every day but often times I simply can't get enough servings but with ag1 I'm sure to get enough vitamins and minerals and the probiotics that I need and it also contains adaptogens to help buffer stress simply put I always feel better when I take ag1 I have more focus and energy and I sleep better and it also happens to taste great for all these reasons whenever I'm asked if you could take Just One supplement what would it be I answer ag1 if you'd like to try ag1 go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com / huberman okay so let's think about the bow Meister data on Willpower as a limited resource I'm going to briefly describe one of the first studies that really said to the field willpower is a limited resource but I want to be clear that there are other studies like it and they all generally follow the same contour and that General Contour is as follows bow meister and colleagues and now many other Laboratories have done experiments where they bring human subjects into the laboratory and those human subjects have to do something that requires mental effort or energy AKA willpower the classic example of this is you bring people into the laboratory some of them might actually be dieting or fasted although not always and there are two platters set out for them one platter contains radishes just plain radishes by the way I hate radishes unless they're pickled radishes I don't know why that is so these experiments picked my least favorite vegetable I love many other vegetables I disdain the radish that was just a personal editorial in any case the radishes are set out and next to them are freshly baked cookies and in the room is the wafting Aromas of freshly baked cookies so I think it's fair to say that most people because of a hardwired tendency to like sugar and fat especially when they are combined would prefer to eat the cookies versus the radishes I know that there are some mutant out there they're saying I like radishes more than cookies but look most people like cookies more than radishes the subjects in these studies are divided into two groups one group is told you have to resist eating the radishes the other group is told you have to resist eating the cookies and then the subjects are observed during this time typically but this is really not what the experiment is about per se this stage of the experiment is really designed to get people to resist a certain kind of behavior and the assump assion again this is an assumption because there's no brain recordings here no one's in an MRI machine looking at what brain areas are activated or not activated there's no cortisol being measured at least not in these early experiments these people are either resisting something that's pretty easy to resist radishes or they are being asked to resist something that for most people is going to be harder to resist than resisting radishes which is resisting freshly baked cookies and that challenge has been made even more Difficult by the wafting Aromas of freshly baked cookies in the room and in some cases has been made even more difficult because these people are dieting and keep in mind that when you calorie restrict or when you put yourself on a diet of any kind there is a wellestablished mechanism in the brain by which the neurons that engage hunger especially hunger for fat and sugar and that respond to things like Aromas and taste are heightened that is their activity levels are heightened which means that things that smell really good smell really really good when you're hungry things that ordinarily would taste really good taste really really really good when you finally eat them so the key component of this stage of the experiment is to engage people's willpower the second part of the experiment has all of the subjects separately engage in another challenging task and the challenging task that they are asked to engage in is to solve a particular puzzle and again different experiments used different puzzles different experiments use different contexts but the original experiments that b meister and colleagues did had people try and solve a puzzle that could not be solved so it's very very difficult in fact it's impossible but the subjects weren't aware of that and then what was measured was how long subjects persisted in trying to solve this impossible to solve puzzle depending on whether or not previously they had to resist the radishes which is pretty easy to resist or resist the cookies which is at least harder to resist and for some people would be very very hard to resist now you can probably already guess what the outcome of this and similar studies was because it birthed this entire belief Camp within the field of psychology that willpower is a limited resource the outcome was that if people had to resist the cookies which is harder to do than resisting the radishes that they would persist for less time when they had to try and solve a puzzle that unbeknownst to them could not be solved conversely if people had to resist something that was pretty easy to resist such as resisting eating radishes something that for me would be very very easy to resist well when they were subsequently faced with trying to solve a very difficult indeed impossible to solve puzzle they persisted much longer okay so put very simply the study concluded that if you have to resist one thing and it's a hard thing to resist well then you have less air quotes here resistance in you willpower to engage in another difficult task subsequently whereas if you had an easy challenge just prior or no challenge just prior to being faced with a challenge such as a very difficult puzzle well then you had more resource more willpower to apply to the solving of that puzzle so the conclusion that b meister and colleagues Drew from those results was that willpower is a limited resource but it didn't specify nor did they specify exactly what that limited resource is and this was quite an attractive Theory because it jived well with most people's perception of what willpower and tenacity was for them this idea that yes there are things that challenge us both to do and to resist but that we can do that but when we are asked to do that again and again and again while we may build up some capacity to engage our willpower and tenacity it and of course there are those rare individuals that we've heard about and some of us know that seem to have just a kind of bottomless reservoir of willpower and tenacity most of us have an intuitive understanding of how hard it is to constantly be in friction with life to constantly have to push ourselves to do things and to resist things and that while that capacity can expand and grow and we can get better at it that there does seem to be something here just subjectively speaking there does seem to be something about engaging tenacity and willpower that yeah it can feel good but it also requires effort this neural energy that we were talking about so that raised the question of okay if willpower is a limited resource what exactly is that resource at a physiological level so balme and colleagues subsequently went on to explore what I think is a really interesting and clever idea frankly I can't confess that I would have thought of this but they did they said okay you know in some cases people are are eating the cookie and then they're engaging in this very difficult puzzle in other cases they're eating the radish and engaging in this difficult puzzle and of course other experiments used non-food challenging choices but they came up with an idea which was the brain as one of the most metabolically active organs in our entire body if not the most metabolically active organ in our entire body requires a lot of fuel it requires a lot of glucose now of course the brain mainly runs on GL glucose but if you're following a ketogenic diet your brain will mainly run on ketones but for most people who are omnivores or eating carbohydrates glucose is the main and preferred fuel source for neurons for nerve cells in your brain and body for that matter Bal moister and colleagues raised the hypothesis that perhaps glucose availability itself is the resource that's limiting willpower and in a whole set of experiments they really showed that if people are asked to do a difficult task to engage their willpower and this could be done by resisting a particular Behavior or by engaging in a particular Behavior I'll just give you an example of engaging in a particular behavior that requires willpower or at least focus and mental energy to contrast it with the resisting radishes versus resisting cookies example that I gave earlier one common practice within experiments like this is to give people a very long passage of words so it's a story and then to give them some sort of rule about how to edit that passage maybe they have to cross out every third e or the E that arrive in the middle of sentences next to consonants but not other vowels you know stuff that takes a lot of energy so these are DOs as opposed to resisting behaviors like we were talking about earlier resisting the radish resisting the cookies although in many of these experiments there's a command to do something you know cross out certain letter E in this passage but also to resist the reflex to cross out other ease and of course all this is is under time pressure and often times it's being rewarded or scored this is the way that psychology researchers get people to engage in particular uh experiments and behaviors and resist certain things in the context of a laboratory environment when those things frankly are kind of boring and meaningless they'll pay you more if you do well at the task um they'll give you money and then subtract the money that you're going to get at the end of the experiment if you make errors and things like that and they'll do it under time constraint as I mentioned earlier so there were lots of different conditions were again here air quotes draining people's willpower and tenacity and certainly draining their mental attention and then they would have them do another subsequent task so in many ways this just mirrors the first cookie radish experiment done by Bal meister and colleagues but there was an important intervention put between the first and the second hard task and that intervention was to give one group a glucose beverage of about 150 calories or so so they would drink a glucose beverage to increase levels of blood glucose the preferred fuel source for the brain versus giving them an artificially flavored drink or just water or something that was of course matched for flavor but that did not contain any glucose or calories now this is a clever experimental design if you think about it because at least at a first glance the only thing that really seems to be different is the availability of glucose for the brain and you can probably guess what the outcome of these studies was the outcome of these studies was that when subjects are given glucose in between a first hard task that required willpower and a second hard task that required willpower and in some experiments a third hard task that required willpower that their levels of willpower were maintained consistently from one task to the next and in some cases increased from one task to the next if they had more glucose available because they drank this glucose drink so what's really interesting and frankly really nice about these studies is that they attemp tempted to bridge a psychological construct like tenacity and willpower and to test the argument that willpower is an Expendable resource and yet it's an Expendable resource that is replenishable by linking that to a physiological variable and the physiological variable they linked it to was glucose availability in the brain now this set the field of psychology and in fact the field of pop psychology that is the discussion about formal findings in the field of formal psychological research Ablaze people were so excited about this I mean this set of findings really pointed to the argument that if you could just keep levels of brain glucose elevated across your day or at least stable across the day that you would have more willpower and tenacity this thing that humans have been seeking more of since the beginning of time now all of that seemed fine and good and in fact a lot of products and courses were born out of that literature people were arguing that you should sip on glucose drink while doing any kind of hard task that you should sip on glucose drinks between tasks that you should be thinking about literally fuel that you ingest into your body as fuel for psychological processes within your brain that would allow you to perform better in work in school in athletics and relationships and all of the domains of life but of course anytime there is a prominence or a real excitement about a particular finding in any field of science but in particular in Psychology where it feels so applicable as did the Bal Meister results you are going to get other groups that are going to try and replicate those findings and that are going to dig into the findings themselves and look at the statistics look at how well or poorly powered those studies were we don't want to get into a full discussion about powering studies right now but powering studies has a lot to do with addressing the question of whether or not there were enough subjects in the study to really draw the conclusion that one Drew or whether or not the statistics fell out out as yes there was a significant effect of glucose ingestion on Willpower and tenacity but if there weren't enough subjects well then there are other variables that could potentially explain those results so there were a lot of metaanalyses and other studies trying to replicate the work of Bal meister and that's where things got controversial now we can take a step back from all of that controversy after all we don't want to spend too much time on the controversy itself rather we want to know what the counter interpretation of the bow Meister results was and I want to be very clear there was no real dispute as to whether or not bow Meister got the results that he and his colleagues claimed to have obtained they did get those results the question really was about the interpretation is willpower a limited resource and if it is is the physiological resource itself glucose availability to the brain so in 2013 a colleague of mine at Stanford Dr Carol D and our department of psychology did a study in which she examined this idea that willpower is a limited resource and the idea that the resource that's limited is glucose availability for the brain so D and colleagues did an experiment that in many ways mirrored the overall organization of the experiments done by Bow meister and colleagues there was a difficult task some cases the difficult task was that Crossing out of particular ease within a passage task followed by another difficult task and the difficult task that came second was the Stroop task this is a task I've talked about before on this podcast although some episodes ago so those of you that are not familiar with the STP task the STP task is where subjects are presented with words in different colors and they are instructed to either read the word so to pay attention to the content of the word or to the color in which the font of the word is written this might seem pretty easy to most of you right if I put up a card that says apple on it and apple is written in green you probably wouldn't have a hard time if you had been instructed to tell me what color is the word written in for you to say green okay but if I I were to hold up a card that said red but the font is actually in the color green it's a little bit harder and if I were to then do that for a 100 cards or 300 cards and put you under time pressure where you're losing money that you're sure to get if you make mistakes or you will earn money at the end of the experiment if you get answers correctly well then you start making more mistakes that's just the way these experiments work so they did a variation on the strep task that isn't exactly the way I just described it and the stoop task by the way is one that's used to probe prefrontal cortex function this area of our brain right behind our foreheads that is responsible for many things but in part is responsible for context and strategy setting given a particular set of rules so if you get onto the bus or get onto the subway versus walk into a black tie dinner the context and rules are very very different as to what you would say or not say how you would behave how you would dress your prefrontal cortex is largely although Al though not entirely is largely responsible for a lot of the context setting and Rule setting from one situation to the next and if you think about the stre task it's really just a context dependent strategy task you either have to pay attention to the meaning of the words or the colors in which those words are written and the number of mistakes that you'll make depends on how much time pressure you're under what sorts of neurologic or psychiatric challenges you might be facing or not facing so on and so forth but it's a very robust task that's existed in the scientific literature for a long period of time so the D experiment and by the way there were actually three experiments in this paper I won't go through all of them in detail for sake of time but I will provide a link to the paper in the show note captions but the major focus of the study was to have people engage in one hard task and then in another hard task both of which draw on Willpower testing the idea that willpower is a limited resource and then providing some of those subjects with a glucose-rich drink or other subjects with a drink that was artificially sweetened so it had no glucose no calor calories but tasted yes they match them for taste I know some of you don't like artificial sweeteners are saying those don't taste exactly like real sugar but they managed to match these drinks for Taste but in one case the drink would clearly increase blood glucose in the other case the drink would not raise blood glucose so the results of this study are really spectacular in my mind because what this study found was that yes indeed ingesting glucose can improve performance on these multiple challenging willpower requiring tasks however the degree to which the glucose containing drink could improve performance depended on whether or not you believed that willpower was a limited resource and whether or not you believed that resource was glucose in other words if you hear and believe that willpower is a limited resource well then indeed with each subsequent task that you engage in or life event of any kind that you engage in that requires willpower and tenacity you will have less willpower and tenacity to draw on whereas if you believe that willpower and tenacity are unlimited and in fact are divorced from blood glucose as the physiological source of willpower and tenacity well then you can engage in one challenging task and another challenging task and another challenging task without any diminishment in performance now that of course leaves us all in a very tough position because how are we to decide what to believe if we know that willpower can be a limited resource or willpower cannot be a limited resource ah well the results of the direct study and by the way I should share with you the title of the study the title of the study not surprisingly is beliefs about willpower determine the impact of glucose on self-control and this was a study published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences again I'll provide a link to this study in the show note captions there are three major experiments in this study as I mentioned before I just gave you the major conclusion of all of them sort of woven together and if it wasn't clear already the major conclusions are that yes ingesting glucose can improve your ability to engage tenacity and willpower AKA self-control from one task to the next provided that you believe that glucose is the limiting resource for engaging tenacity and willpower if you don't believe that well then you can engage tenacity and willpower without ingesting glucose and that's where the artificially flavored drink comes in I'll leave it to you to kind of unpack what that means experimentally but it's a very clever experimental design that DW and colleagues came up with because it argues that yes indeed it's hard to do a challenging thing right after another challenging thing but there's no reason to think that you can't do both of those things while engaging the utmost tenacity and willpower if you believe that tenacity and willpower exist within you as a single mechanism that can be harnessed and that it's not a single mechanism that has a reservoir that runs down as you engage in one hard thing thing to the next now this is very important because we are about to transition into our discussion of the physiological that is the neural underpinnings of tenacity and willpower which as it turns out is one major set of brain circuits now there could be others that are yet to be discovered but we know that there is one major set of brain circuits in particular one brain area believe it or not that an entire collection of more than two dozen studies really points to as the seat the or of what we call tenacity and willpower but before we transition to that and the tools and protocols that that physiological neural understanding set forth for us to all use and apply I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that bow Meister wasn't about to hear these results from dwen colleagues and just say Okay willpower is not a limited resource it's not blood glucose it's all what you believe about willpower it's all what you believe about blood glucose rather BME himself went back to the lab and did subsequent experiments that in some ways not all counter the d results so I'm not trying to confuse anybody but I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't give you both sides of the story now the good news is that the tools and protocols that we are going to arrive at work regardless of which psychological Camp you happen to be in the bow Meister camp or the D camp now I don't want to give the impression that these are Waring camps and I also don't want to give the impression that these are the only two camps of thought and experimentation within the field of tenacity and willpower there are many groups working on these subjects indeed there have been metaanalyses that have confirmed the major theories of Bal meister and there are metaanalyses that have refuted the major findings of Bal Meister I will provide links in the show note captions to a couple examples of each so that you have those to peruse if you like but let's discuss for a moment what B Meister found when they went back and re- researched I think that's a word re researched the idea that willpower is a limited resource and that glucose is the that limiting resource balme and colleagues looked at the D data and said okay fine the data looked great except for the fact that in real life and in many previous experiments that they and others had done it wasn't just two hard challenges back toback but often two or three or four and what Bal meister and others found was that when subjects are presented not with just two challenges back to back but three or more challenges so back to back to back to back challenge is that have to engage a lot of neural energy a lot of willpower tenacity resistance to do certain things and effort to engage in certain kinds of behaviors and cognitive processes that when subjects had glucose available to them in the brain by way of ingesting these glucose drinks sipping those in between the tasks sometimes even during the tasks that their performance that is their willpower and tenacity to engage in challenges was maintained across those multiple challenges and they conceded that one's belief about willpower could indeed dictate whether or not willpower was or was not a limited resource and whether glucose would or would not enhance one's ability to engage willpower but they argued that if one confronts multiple challenging circumstances as is very naturalistic as we say it's very typical of everyday real life then the availability of glucose during and between tasks the ability for the brain to engage in its external environment and take reads of its internal environment how we feel inside relative to what's expected of us was very valuable in allowing people to engage this thing that psychologically we describe as tenacity and willpower I'd like to just take a brief break and thank one of our sponsors which is element element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't that means plenty of salt sodium magnesium and potassium the so so called electrolytes and no sugar now salt magnesium and potassium are critical to the function of all the cells in your body in particular to the function of your nerve cells also called neurons now people of course have varying 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element sample pack with your purchase again that's drink element lnt.com huberman let's talk about the physiology of tenasity and willpower and I assure you that the conversation we are about to have is not going to be just a bunch of nomenclature and mechanistic understanding of the origins of tenacity and willpower rather it argues that tenacity and willpower have a unified source that is a specific set of brain areas that when active engage that feeling of tenacity and willpower regardless of what we are confronted with regardless of whether or not we are trying to engage in something that reflexively we wouldn't otherwise want to engage in and regardless of whether or not we are confronted with something that we have to resist and to me that's extremely reassuring because whether or not you believe that blood glucose is the limiting resource for willpower whether or not you believe that your beliefs about willpower and blood glucose impact your level of willpower what we know for sure is that there's a single set of brain circuits indeed there's a single brain area that seems to be able to largely if not entirely explain this phenomenon that we call tenacity and willpower and that should be reassuring because what it means is that tenacity and willpower is the reflection of a neural circuit function that is a skill it's an expression of something that we all have within us we all have this particular brain area and quite excitingly this is the third point this brain area is highly subject to plasticity there are specific things that we can do and there are specific mindsets that we can adopt that allow us to increase the activity of this particular brain area indeed to increase the size of this particular brain area so that we can call on tenacity and willpower not just in one circumstance like school or musical learning or athletic Endeavors or relationship Endeavors but rather that we can call on this brain area in the context of any and all circumstan ances where willpower and tenacity are required now we talk about Neuroscience a lot on this podcast but it's not often that I point to a particular brain area and can confidently say this particular brain area has an absolutely integral role in something as kind of highlevel psychological as tenacity and willpower but today we can do that and that's because there's a collection of more than two dozen studies that point to one particular brain area and of course its connections with other brain areas because no single brain area operates in isolation every brain area is operating in the context of neural circuits other brain areas that it receives inputs from and gives inputs to and so on but this one particular brain area really does seem to underly what we call tenacity and willpower and we know that through several lines of evidence first of all I'll tell you the name of the brain area although the name itself isn't going to tell you much unless you're a neuroscientist or anatomist so I'll give a little bit of background about it the name of the brain area is the anterior mid singulate cortex the anterior mid singulate cortex is part of a larger brain area called the singulate cortex and in humans versus animals it goes by slightly different names unfortunately it's just one of the consequences of different researchers and different Labs calling the same thing different things it could be really frustrating but we'll make it very simple because today we were referred to this area as the anterior mid singulate cortex which is a sub div vision of a larger brain area simply called the singulate cortex the anterior mid singulate cortex resides in the frontal loes so it's behind your forehead although that doesn't tell you anything because all of your brain is behind your forehead if you think about it and it's about a third of the way back toward the back of your head and you actually have two of these structures two anterior mid singulate cortices one on each side of the brain and they receive a lot of inputs from a lot of different areas and we'll talk about what those areas are because this is extremely important when thinking about the different psychological and physiological resources that you can draw upon to engage tenacity and willpower but for the time being let me just go through the evidence in kind of list format of why we feel so confident that the anterior mid singulate cortex is such a vital hub for engaging tenacity and willpower for each of these points that I'm about to make there is indeed at least one if not several quality reviewed studies in humans so there's a lot of data from animals both rodents and primate models Etc that we're not talking about today but I should mention all of which supports the human data and vice versa the data I'm going to describe now come from humans and from a variety of different types of studies so there are a lot of different ways that one can consider if a brain area is implicated in a given psychological or physiological phenomenon like motivation or sadness or visual perception and those include for instance if a brain area is active during a given phenomenon so one way to explore this is to put literally wire electrodes down below the skull record the electric activity of neurons and assess whether or not the electrical activity of those neurons changes when a person is say viewing faces or feeling a particular way like feeling tenacious or feeling bored or feeling aggressive and so on another way of assessing a particular brain area's role in a given physiological or psychological phenomenon is in individuals where that particular brain area is injured you might expect that a particular phenomenon like willpower like the ability to perceive faces is present or absent whether not it's exacerbated or whether or not it's diminished other ways of assessing whether or not a given brain area is involved in a given phenomenon is whether or not that brain area literally changes size whether or not changes in volume over the course of some sort of training so for instance if somebody is not able to play a musical instrument such as myself and then I or a subject in one of these experiments learns a musical instrument and the volume the size of the particular brain area is assessed across the learning or simply before and after that musical learning and it grows or perhaps even if it shrinks or changes shape one might determine that it is somehow somehow involved in the process of learning a musical instrument you couldn't unequivocally conclude that but along with other types of evidence one could perhaps conclude that so that's just a partial list of ways to assess brain area function other ways include assessing what other areas a given brain area gets input from so for instance in the case of the anterior mid singulate cortex we will soon discuss the fact that it gets robust input from the autonomic nervous system which you already learned about it gets robust input from reward systems of the brain such as the dopamine and serotonin based reward systems of the brain and it gets robust input from the context and strategy setting areas of the brain as well and many other different brain areas so there's a structural logic as to why the anterior mid singulate cortex would be involved in tenacity and willpower but no single anatomical or physiological or lesion-based finding is as compelling as when we consider all of the results about the anterior mid singulate cortex together and side by side so for instance recordings by neural Imaging of the anterior mid singul cortex in an unbiased way meaning people are put into a brain scanner and brain activity is examined and mass all of the brain areas are looked at and people are presented with either a hard task or an easy task revealed that the anterior mid singulate cortex shows elevated levels of activity in the hard versus the easy task and again I want to point out that the researchers were not looking for that result they simply observed that result in addition if people who exhibit high levels of academic performance across many different subjects are put into a brain scanner that evaluates so-called resting state connectivity so no task but simply levels of activity in different brain areas that occur spontaneously so they're just sitting in the scanner looking at a blank screen the resting or spontaneous levels of activity in the anterior mid singulate cortex of high achieving individuals is higher relative to those of lower achieving individuals in addition people that have lesions or disruptions of anterior mid singulate cortical function show increased apathy and depression and reduced levels of tenacity and motivation across the board regardless of what domain of life one is asking about whether or not it's athletic or academic Etc indeed successful dieters show elevated spontaneous and what's called evoked levels of activity in the anterior mid singulate cortex so spontaneous again just at rest they have higher levels of activity in the anterior mid singulate cortex and for those that are presented with food and they have to resist that food and they have to resist the smell of that food and the potential taste of that food the activity of the anterior mid singulate cortex goes up even further especially in those individuals who can resist that is who can engage willpower to not eat the delicious food item conversely individuals that have failed to exert sufficient willpower to lose their desired weight and this was for medical reasons related to trying to achieve Medical Health as well as people who are obese seem to have diminished levels of activity in the anterior mid singulate cortex in addition people who are depressed who Express a lot of apathy and here we're talking about clinically diagnosed major depression show reduced levels of activity in the anterior mid singulate cortex humans that Express a lot of what's called learned helplessness that is they've adopted the belief and the actions associated with the belief that no matter what they do the outcomes are not going to be what they desire Express lower levels of neural activity in the anterior mid singulate cortex so you can see this list goes on and on but it in fact gets even more interesting remember earlier I mentioned that successful dieters have elevated levels of neural activity in the anterior mid singulate cortex now that might seem like a good thing and indeed it can be a good thing but there's a pathologic condition associated with dieting and one's ability to engage willpower and resist food and that's in the case of eating disord such as anorexia nervosa now I've done a hubman Lab podcast solo episode about anorexia nervosa and on that podcast I made the point that I'll make again now which is that anorexia nervosa is the most deadly of all the psychiatric conditions leading to death in a very large percentage of people that have it now fortunately there are treatments and more emerging all the time but it's a very serious psychological and physiological condition that is extremely deadly individuals with anorexia nervosa exhibit heightened levels of activity in their anterior mid singulate cortex both at rest and when presented with food and I don't want to go on a full tangent about anorexia because we covered anorexia on the previous podcast episode about anorexia which by the way you can find at hubman lab.com simply search anorexia or eating disorders within the search function but one of the clear symptoms of anorexia nervosa is that the reward Pathways of the brain which we know feed into that is direct connections to the anterior mid singulate cortex seem to be activated under conditions in which people with anorexia avoid food as opposed to eat food and then there's a very interesting and positive literature about so-called super aers so what we know for sure is that as people age in particular between the ages of 60 and 90 there's a reduction in the size of many brain areas but the anterior mid singulate cortex in particular unless certain things are done to offset that we are going to talk about what those particular things are in just a few minutes but there's a particular category of humans that's alive now and that live a very long time these are the people that stand the greatest chance of becoming centenarians and many of them are centenarians so-called superagers but also within the category of superagers are people who are 60 years old or more because not all of them have reached 80 90 yet and have the cognition of 40 olds 30y olds and often even of people in their mid 20s now there are a lot of things that are different about these super agers super aers in the sense that they are maintaining very youthful levels of cognition but one of the things that's become very apparent from the neuroimaging data is that super agers maintain a volume a size of the anterior mid singulate cortex that is significantly greater than their ag- matched cohorts so the exciting thing is that there are many many lines of evidence pointing to the fact that the anterior mid singulate cortex at least has something to do with our ability to generate tenacity and willpower and that it when active moves us up that Continuum away from apathy and depression toward states of being able to engage in or resist particular types of behaviors so what I just described as a bunch of neuroimaging structural volume data blood uptake data lesion studies and so on and so forth but we can simplify all of that and in fact address something that perhaps I should have said earlier which is that when we're talking about tenacity and willpower we're really talking about one of two things we are either talking about that sense within us that has us saying I will no matter what you tell me no matter what you put in front of me no matter what is rolled my way I will blank now the other expression of tenacity and willpower is that within us within you within me when tenacity and willpower are active we have that sense within us that feeling in our body and that thought pattern AKA feeling in our brain that no matter what you say no matter what you do no matter what you put in front of me I won't so really willpower is either an expression of I will or I absolutely will is perhaps a better way to State it or I absolutely won't now that might seem like just a simple subjective reordering of a bunch of physiological data and psychology studies but it's not it's actually far more important for us to understand this I absolutely will and I absolutely won't aspect of willpower because if indeed there is a single brain area that can govern willpower and willpower is not one but is at least two things the sense of I absolutely will no matter what you say do Etc or I absolutely won't no matter what you say do Etc well then this brain area can't be a simple switch it can't be willpower on Willow off willpower on Willow off it can't be absolute as we say it must be graded it must have levels so it's more like a slider on a light switch than an on versus off light switch in addition to that if there is truly one brain area that plays a critical role in generating tenacity and willpower and tenacity and willpower is something that it's required from us in a lot of different contexts where we have to say I absolutely will yes this I absolutely won't know that I absolutely will also yes this etc etc right because life is complex even just the simple thing of say dieting or trying to get a particular degree or trying to navigate even a simple illness like I'm going to get through this weak despite feeling lousy I'm going to take good care of myself you know all of these things in some sense require tenacity and willpower and the behaviors we need to engage in and avoid engaging in is very Dynamic depending not just on who we are and what we're trying to do or not do but also where we are that day that moment well that means that the anterior mid singulate cortex also needs access to information about context it needs to understand what's rewarding or non-rewarding in the cont of what we're trying to accomplish not just what feels good in the moment now fortunately there have been a number of studies exploring not just the activity levels of the anterior mid singulate cortex or the size of the anterior mid singulate cortex in the various conditions we talked about before depression obesity successful dieters successful students successful athletes Etc but a lot of anatomical tracing studies both from fixed that is from Dead brain tissue so postmortem brain tissue in humans but also nowadays they're certain types of neuroimaging particular something called diffusion tensor Imaging that allows one to examine the flow of information in and out of different brain areas through so-called white matter tracks tracks meaning TR r a CTS track so these are the wires that connect neurons are called axons and those axons are in sheathed with a fatty substance called myelin and that enement with milin allows them to transmit information very quickly you'll see where I'm going with all this in just a moment and what we know is that the anterior mid singulate cortex again of which you have one on each side of the brain about a third of the way back from your forehead to the back of your brain approximately right above the so-call Corpus colossum this very robust collection of white matter tracks that connects the two sides of the brain well it gets input and sends input to a number of different brain areas including but not limited to the following autonomic centers that control for instance cardiovascular f function increases or decreases in heart rate respiration how fast and how deeply you breathe or how shallowly and slowly you breathe immune system inputs and outputs with the spleen not directly but through a couple of different stations with the very organs in your body that can release B cells and t- cells and immune molecules that can combat bacterial viral and fungal infections and that can repair physical wounds and it communicates with the endocrine system with the systems of the brain and body that release for instance estrogen and testosterone which by the way are present in both males and females and on a previous episode of The hubman Lab podcast with Robert spolski as my guest we talked about for instance the role of testosterone and many people think oh testosterone is all about aggression testosterone is all about attack testosterone is all about mating that is completely false while it can be involved in those different processes what Dr spolski and I discussed is that one of the major functions of testosterone in the brain is to make effort feel good and you can see and we'll talk a little bit more about how that links up very directly with this concept of tenacity and willpower so the first point is that the anterior mid singulate cortex is in direct communication with all of the areas of the brain and through a couple of other stations the body that modulate our sense of tenacity and willpower which we talked about earlier the need for Sleep the need for pain pain or lack of pain or emotional Comfort or discomfort to modulate our level of tenacity and willpower the interior mid singulate cortex is also directly linked up with premotor centers these are the centers of the brain that organize particular patterns of behavior and indeed that can suppress particular patterns of behavior as I tell you that you're probably filling in the blanks this is engaging in a behavior or resisting a behavior the interior mid singulate cortex is also directly wired in with the reward Pathways of the brain it can trigger the release of dopamine it can also respond to the release of dopamine and that dopamine release could be generated behaviorally it could be generated through some sort of food reward it could be pharmacologic there are a number of different ways that the dopamine system can communicate with the anterior mid singulate cortex the point here is that it is in direct communication with the anterior mid singulate cortex and the anterior mid singulate cortex is in direct communication with the dopamine system and what I just gave you was frankly just a partial list of the different areas of the brain that are communicating robustly with the anterior mid singulate cortex it gets information about interoception our readout of how we feel in our body it also has robust inputs and outputs with the areas of the brain that are associated with exteroception our perception of what is out around us so all of that provides a logical basis for the neuroimaging data the lesion data the volumetric data that we talked about a few minutes ago in the context of depression anxiety high performance anorexia and so on but one of the most important arguments that's ever been made in favor of the anterior mid singulate cortex being a major seat for tenacity and willpower comes from Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett who is soon to be a guest on the hubman Lab podcast we've actually recorded that episode already and it should be out very soon Lisa's laboratory is well known for pioneering research on emotion and affect I strongly encourage you to listen to that episode once it comes out and it was actually Lisa herself that cued me to the importance of the anterior mid singulate cortex and Lisa and colleagues have written several spectacular reviews about the anterior mid singulate cortex and its role in tenacity and motivation I will provide links to a few of those in the show note captions the one that I'm particularly excited about the one that I've spent now an immense amount of time with is entitled The tenacious brain how the enter mid singulate cortex contributes to achieving goals so if you have a background in biology even if you don't I think you'll find that review view to be very interesting and it further substantiates a lot of the points that I made a few moments ago about the different scenarios and types of individuals that seem to be able to engage their anterior mid singulate cortex under different conditions and to a greater or lesser extent than others so hats off to Lisa for queuing me to this incredibly interesting brain structure I had known that it existed after all I teach neur Anatomy to medical students at Stanford and I taught neuron Anatomy for many many years but I don't think enough people and indeed very few professional neuroscientists could tell you what the anterior mid singulate cortex does but it has this apparently incredible function in generating tenacity and motivation along those lines one of the most incredible and important studies about the anterior mid singulate cortex and its capacity to generate feelings of tenacity and willpower comes from one of my colleagues at Stanford Joe parvy who essentially went into human beings who needed brain surgery for other reasons and stimulated particular brain areas with a very high degree of precision the title of the paper that I'm referring to was published in 2013 in the journal neuron cell Press Journal excellent journal and it's entitled the will to persevere induced by electrical stimulation of the human singulate gyrus now you'll notice the title said human singulate gyrus not anterior mid singulate gyrus but because they had electrodes and a stimulation technique that would allow them to stimulate in very small regions extending as little as 5 mm but no more away from the stimulation site they were able to march their stimulation around different sub regions of the singulate gyus of humans while those people were awake and then asked those people how do you feel what are you experiencing In This Moment In addition to that they were recording various autonomic parameters from those people so heart rate breathing in addition to brain wave activity so what the subjects report when their anterior mid singulate cortex was stimulated is that in their words something was about to happen they felt as if there was some sort of pressure upon them from the outside not physical pressure but that something was about to happen in fact one of the subjects described the sensation as it's as if there's a storm off in the distance but I know I need to go into the storm and I know I can make it through the storm okay another subject described the experience of having their anterior mid singulate cortex stimulated as okay something not necessarily good as going to happen but I know that I need to Marshall resources and resist and I'm confident that I can push through now because Parisian colleagues are excellent scientists they of course did control experiments where they would tell the person okay we're stimulating that same brain area that a moment ago you told me created this feeling of some pressure upon you that you have to resist some sense of fight or urgency to push back but in reality During certain control conditions they were not stimulating those brain areas and the sub objects then reported I don't feel like anything's about to happen yeah I don't feel anything at all in other words it was the stimulation of the anterior mid singulate cortex and only the anterior mid singulate cortex that created the sensation within people that there was something to resist that there was something putting pressure on them again not physical pressure but psychological pressure and that they were going to have to Marshall resources in order to push back upon in fact they reported feeling as if their body was getting ready to do something one subject said something along the lines of yeah I feel like I'm about to do something I'm about to go someplace or do something to resist this foreoing sense that's now coming over me so this is very interesting and of course is in line with all of the data that we discussed before about neural activity patterns both spontaneous and evoked about brain volume changes in the anterior mid singulate cortex so on and so forth and it really points to the idea that the anterior mid singulate cortex is a hub a hub Hub that receives information from A diversity of brain areas that we talked about a few minutes ago and that generates a particular sense within us that we are going to be forward Center of mass that we are going to resist something and that perhaps we are going to move or act in some particular way or as we've been discussing all along resist action in some particular way but that it requires that we Marshall resources which takes us back of course to the studies of bow meister and indeed of dck where they explored willpower as a limited resource perhaps glucose perhaps as that limited resource beliefs about willpower and glucose probably with a high degree of certainty are going to be involved there too but regardless of that controversy it's clear that there's an energy required there's an activation state of Engagement or resistance to a particular Behavior or thought pattern that we all associate with this phenomenon of tenacity and willpower and in a kind of miraculous way you know as a neuroscientist we're generally taught nowadays that individual brain areas don't really trigger individual functions and perceptions of the brain there are a few exceptions to that you know you have a fusiform face area that really does seem to be involved in the perception of faces and when lesion you can't recognize faces but outside of just a few limited contexts it's very rare that one comes across a literature that across all of the studies involved point to a single brain structure and its networks as giving rise to something as complex and flexible as tenacity and willpower but in the case of the anterior mid singulate cortex it really does seem to meet those criteria as the brain Hub responsible for tenasity and willpower now a key idea that Dr Feldman Barrett has contributed to studies of the an mid singulate cortex as a structure that helps us generate what we call tenacity and willpower to help us achieve different types of goals is this idea of allostasis most of you have perhaps heard of homeostasis which is the idea that all of our cells all of our organs indeed our entire body and psychology are always seeking homeostasis the perfect balance of sleep and activity of food and burning fuels of oxygen and carbon dioxide and so on and so forth and while homeostasis certainly exists and is a valid phenomenon there's also a concept that we hear far less about but that is equally important which is the concept of allostasis allostasis is the idea that much of what our brain and body need to do but especially our brain is to allocate right allostasis to allocate resources to particular functions depending on our motivational goals and the challenges upon us and in every way what we understand about the structure and function of the anterior mid singulate cortex is that it is doing just that it is deciding how much glucose should a given brain area consume perhaps a brain area that's involved in visual perception because you're involved in a motivational task where in order to succeed you need to pay careful visual attention to particular things or you're involved in a task where you have to listen to particular things or perhaps you are involved in a physical foot race where you don't want to allocate a lot of energy towards thinking about your stride or your step unless that's necessary and you actually want to shut down your brain activity as much as possible except for the brain areas that are required to get you to continue run in that sense the interior mid singulate cortex as a sort of a dial on how much fuel is consumed not by the brain and body as a whole but by individual brain and body parts meets all the criteria of what you would want for a brain area that controls things like tenacity and willpower because even for those individuals who seem to just have an endless supply of tenacity and willpower they too have to go into habitual Behavior they can't simply lean into every aspect of life with the kind of resistance from outside and the resistance against those outside forces or even resistance to internal forces voices in their head Etc on a constant basis they still need to sleep they still need to be functional in that expression of tenacity and willpower they need to be able to strategy switch and they need to be able to come off the gas as we say not because tenacity and willpower are necessarily a limited resource but because for so many aspects of Life engaging tenacity and willpower is not advantageous hence the example I gave earlier about eating disorders where an apparently hardwired function of our brain to be able to generate some sort of reward for resisting a given Behavior goes too far and then can actually threaten one's own health or even life so the concept of allostatic load allostatic balance and alistic function is something that we get into in a fair amount of detail in the discussion with Dr Feldman Barrett in that episode which is coming out soon but in the meantime if you are to think about the anterior mid singulate cortex as having a single function the function that Dr Feldman Barrett has ascribed to it as controlling how much energy different brain and body areas should get in a given context well that makes a lot of sense to me and I think it's the one that best describes all of the functional data indeed includes or jibes with all the anatomical data about the anterior mid singulate cortex as well one of the really important twists in all of this is that the anterior mid singulate cortex is not just sitting there to allocate and Dole out different amounts of energy and activation to different brain areas it is also receiving input from both the brain and body and in sort of a beautiful Twist on the whole story of what the anterior mid singulate cortex does we know that when we move our body we are activating the anterior mid singulate cortex and we know that when we move our body because we in some way forced ourselves or encouraged ourselves to do it we activate the anterior mid singulate cortex more similarly and because the Anor mid singulate cortex is so flexible in the different context in which it can be activated if we are simply reading or we are listening to something that we're supposed to learn or trying to learn a piece of music or trying to do anything for that matter the anterior mid singulate cortex yes will be activated but that its levels of activation are far greater when we experience a lot of resistance that we have to overcome remember the earlier result and by the way I'll provide a link in the show note captions to this particular study or set of studies there are about two one really spectacular one and a couple of others that um tangentially point to the same finding that when people engage in a hard task not an easy task but a hard task that the anterior mid singulate cortex activity is elevated so the way to think about the anterior mid singul cortex is that it's not just sitting there as a hub that you have to reach into and activate it's also receiving inputs that can activate it and that's what allows us to now talk about the tools and protocols that don't just allow us to engage our anterior mid singulate cortex and access more tenacity and willpower but that allow us to exercise not in necessarily in the context of physical exercise although it could be that too but to exercise our anterior mid singulate cortices ability to engage not just in that challenging context but in other challenging contexts as well in fact I'll just tell you right now that studies in non-human primates and to a limited extent in humans but here we think there's a strong analog between the non-human primate data and the human data the anterior mid singulate cortex is choa block full of the expression of molecules such as cyas 2 receptors to various neurotropins particular types of nmda and methylaspartate receptors all of which if none of those names mean anything to you just know that all of them refer to different aspects of and a capacity for synaptic plasticity which is the ability for Connections in the brain to change they can get stronger you can actually grow new Connections in other words the anterior mid singulate cortex can be built up as a structure to engage tenacity and willpower by activating it through one or a limited number of different types of behaviors meaning engagement in behaviors that frankly we would rather not engage in as as well as not engaging in behaviors that reflexively we really want to that we're sort of drawn to engage in both of those contexts the I absolutely will even though frankly I don't want to or you're telling me I can't as well as that I absolutely won't even though you're tempting me to do that or that's tempting me to do that or even I'm tempted to do that that buildup of the anterior mid singulate cortex has extensive carryover into other domains of life because it's the same structure that is then used for other types of behaviors and learning that require tenacity and willpower so that's incredibly reassuring in fact it's downright exciting because as I mentioned earlier while there are a near infinite number of different circumstances where we each and all need tenacity and willpower it seems that there's a very generic mechanism for generating tenacity and willpower and that means that if we can build up our capacity for tenacity and willpower by engaging particular types of behaviors and resisting particular types of behaviors will then it's going to carry over in a very functional way to the other aspects of life that we find challenging and that we may find challenging in the future okay so by now I like to think that I've convinced you because frankly the data are very convincing that the anterior mid singulate cortex is a vital Hub within your brain for allocating energy and resources to generating tenacity and willpower and perhaps it's taking you a lot of tenacity and willpower to get this far through the episode waiting with baited breath presumably to to learn how exactly you can improve the functioning of your anterior mid singulate cortex now fortunately there are published peer- rreview data that explain how to do that in fact there's a study that was published in 2006 by colum and colleagues entitled aerobic exercise training increases brain volume in aging humans and before you go runoff literally and engage in cardiovascular exercise I'm just going to describe to you the Contour of this study and what specifically was done so that you can best implement the best protocols for your particular circumstances this was a study exploring why and how certain brain areas and brain volume generally decreases as we age it's well known as I mentioned earlier that individuals aged really 50 and older and maybe even as early as 30 and older experience a decrease in brain volume with particular brain areas shrinking faster than others but of course there are other people that include include the superagers that we talked about earlier and many many other people who are not superagers who don't experience the same decrease in brain volume so why is it that they maintain the same brain size that they did when they were younger or undergo less decrease in brain size that's what the researchers for this study were initially interested in understanding and they did come to some really interesting conclusions about that but they also came to some interesting conclusions that relate to today's discussion on tenacity and willpower this study involved having individ ual who were 60 to 79 years old divided into one of two groups one group did cardiovascular exercise the other group did more calisthenics SL stretching type exercise both groups did one hour of exercise three times per week the group that did cardiovascular training initially started off by doing and by the way they just simply called it aerobic training but this could be rowing on the rower this could be running this could be cycling I think for sake of understanding application of tools and protocols you would want to pick any kind of activity that you could do consistently without injuring yourself that's what's really important and that gets your heart rate elevated they started off these individuals with relatively low intensity cardiovascular exercise for that hour getting their heart rate up to about 50% of their maximum heart rate but very quickly had those individuals increase the intensity of those cardiovascular training sessions so they were doing again three 1 hour sessions per week getting their heart rate up to about 75% of their maximum heart rate sometimes a little less 60% sometimes a little bit more but in that General range so for those of you that think about different zones of cardio this is probably in the area of zone three not quite Zone 2 cardio maybe zone three cardio so where one can not carry out a conversation very easily but where one is not completely gasping for air as one would if they went to their maximum heart rate or near maximum heart rate okay so three 1hour episodes of cardiovascular training per week at a moderately high intensity the other group simply doing calisthenics and stretching for the equivalent amount of time and they had another group within the study that were much younger that did similar activities or no activity simply as a control for the brain Imaging data now I'm summarizing the study with a fairly broad brush both for sake of time and of course I'll provide a link to the study in the show note caption so you can access it and impres in more detail if you like but I wouldn't be talking about this study if it were simply a study about cardiovascular training and brain volume I'm talking about this study because the specific brain areas that maintained or in some cases increased in volume as a consequence of doing these three hours per week of moderate intensity cardiovascular training included of course the anterior mid singulate cortex that was actually the primary location in which the maintenance of brain brain volume was observed and in some cases increases in brain volume were observed right this is a group of people who normally would be losing volume size of their anterior mid singulate cortex but for which 3 hours a week of moderate intensity cardiovascular training maintained the volume the size of that anterior mid singulate cortex and in some cases increased the volume the size of anterior mid singulate cortex and they also observed a maintenance or increase in the size of the anterior white m matter tracks remember t r a c TS I didn't spell that out before just to spell it out for fun although that is the sort of thing that I would probably do those white matter tracks are the communication routes by which different brain areas communicate and this anterior white matter tract that maintained size in the people that did cardiovascular training as compared to those that simply did the calisthenics training and stretching is the very white matter tracks that connects the two sides of the brain the frontal l that allows the anterior mid singulate cortex on one side of the brain and the anterior mid singulate cortex on the other side of the brain as well as other brain structures to communicate with one another so this is really spectacular I mean the authors of the study didn't embark on the study to find or even look for increases or maintenance in the volume of the anterior mid singulate cortex and the communication routes in and out of the anterior M singulate cortex it just so happened that cardiovascular training done three times per week for an hour at a time at modern intensity increased the size of the anterior mid singulate cortex and as I mentioned the white matter tracks which allow information to go in and out of the an mid singulate cortex now we should all be asking ourselves why would that be the case I mean somebody gets on a stationary bike and pedals or goes out on a road bike or runs is there something inherent to running or cycling or rowing or swimming or an aerobics class dancing Etc that gets the heart rate up that directly feeds into the ENT mid singulate cortex after all is the anter mid singul cortex responsible for generating the activity of running or cycling or swimming no rather the interpretation is that in order to engage in this one hour three times per week set of sessions of cardiovascular training they had to allocate resources they had to get up out of a chair they had to get off the couch they had to say no to other potential obligations social engagements meals Etc and get to these exercise classes or sessions that they did with others or alone now an interesting and in fact important aspect of the study is that the compliance with this three hours per week of cardiovascular training was very high 85% of individuals engaged in these sessions across the six-month period of the study I should have mentioned that earlier the study was carried out over the course of six months they did not have the opportunity to do neuroimaging after say a week or two weeks so they image these people's brains before and they image these people's brains after this six-month period it's anybody's guess as to whether or not they would have observed the same or maybe even greater increases at the one month interval Etc we simply don't know there's a great cost both energetic and financial to doing these kinds of studies so they looked at a six-month period but setting all of that aside this is a very important study in the context of today's discussion because what it means is that if we acknowledge that the anterior mid singulate cortex and the volume of an mid singulate cortex is related to one's ability to generate tenacity and will power for any number of different Endeavors well then having access to a tool or a protocol that can increase the size of one's anterior mid singulate cortex is going to be extremely valuable so what's the takeaway from this study the takeaway from the study is not necessarily that you should be doing three one-hour bouts of cardiovascular training per week for six months to maintain or increase the size of your anterior mid singulate cortex I do think that's the case if you're not already doing sufficient amounts of cardiovascular training and what constitutes sufficient amounts well I think there's General agreement now both between the material that I've covered in our foundational Fitness protocol and in the series on exercise physiology with Dr Andy Galpin and in various discussions with Dr Peter AA the general agreement is that everyone should be getting somewhere between 150 to 200 minutes of so-called Zone 2 low intensity cardiovascular exercise per week but the results of this study really point to the idea that we should all be doing perhaps hours but certainly we should all be doing some form of physical exercise but for any of us that are interested in increasing tenacity and willpower across domains both for cognitive and physical Endeavors emotional Endeavors too for that matter that we should be engaging in some exercise and again we're going to talk about cognitive exercise in a moment but that we should be engaging in some exercise that we are not already doing now that of course will lead many people to think wait I'm already doing two 100 minutes per week of Zone 2 cardio how can I add 3 hours more of cardio that's not what I'm saying what's important to understand about this whole discussion about tenacity and willpower is that the ability to engage the anterior mid singulate cortex and to build up its volume literally and increase its activity relies on one critical feature which is that you have to be in some degree of resistance some lack of Desire or I should say lack of reflexive desire or ability to engage in that behavior okay this is super important if you're thinking about tools and protocols to increase your level of tenacity and willpower if for instance you love cold showers and Ice baths well then it's very unlikely that taking cold showers or getting into an ice bath is going to increase your level of tenacity and willpower further it might reinforce the tenacity and willpower that you've already built but it's not going to increase it further you need to add something or subtract something that makes it harder not easier to engage in or resist a behavior okay I want to be really clear about this in the study that I just described from col and colleagues they took individuals that were not exercising prior to the study and those people had to therefore generate significant amounts of motivation in order to regularly engage in these three one hour per week episodes of cardiovascular training okay now the fact that there was no comparable increase in the volume of the anterior mid singulate cortex or anterior white matter tracks in the group that did the calisthenics and stretching is also important because it implies that activities that are easier to carry out that don't get the heart rate elevated as much are not going to create changes in this brain structure that is associated with tenacity and willpower and there's a nice confirmation of that in the study in fact because they observed as one would expect a significant increase in V2 Max in the individuals that were assigned to the group that did cardiovascular training but they did not observe a significant increase in V2 Max in the individuals that did three 1 hour per week sessions of calisthetics and stretching across the six-month period okay so the important Point here is if you're already doing let's say an hour a week of moderate to high-intensity cardiovascular training or resistance training for that matter you're going to need to add something in order to get further activation of this brain hub for tenacity and willpower and of course the idea here or else we wouldn't be talking about it is that that activation and that increase in volume in the an mid singulate cortex would then be applicable to other endeavors for instance academics or some aspect of your professional life or relationship life that you can build up tenacity and willpower as a capacity within you or we should say within your anterior mid singulate cortices but that the route to activating and increasing the robustness of your anterior mid singulate cortex requires that you engage in something that you don't really want to do and certainly not something that you're regularly engaging in already remember way back at the beginning of today's episode we compared willpower and tenacity to Habit execution right well this is a simple case where if you're already doing something simply continuing to do it might maintain what you've already got but it's not going to further build up your tenacity and willpower so along those lines I don't want you to Simply take the three 1hour cardiovascular sessions per week protocol that they use within the study and expect it to increase your levels of tenacity and willpower unless of course your Curr only doing 1 hour of cardiovascular training at moderate to high intensity per week in which case increasing to two hours may very well increase your interior mid singlet cortex and overall level of tenacity and willpower and certainly doing three hours per week would be expected to do it even further and I should mention that we can extrapolate from this study in a meaningful way I think in a grounded way that's related to mechanism and say well if you for instance like me can't play a musical instrument or are not bilingual in language that taking on the challenge if indeed it's a challenge and for me it would be a challenge perhaps for you as well to learn an instrument as an adult or to learn a second or maybe a third language if that's challenging and in fact that's something that you're resisting doing well then great it's going to provide an even greater opportunity to engage the activity of the anterior mid singulate cortex remember that study that showed that hard tasks hard challenges are what activate the entor mid singulate cortex easy challenges don't okay habits that are reflexive simply do not so you have to pick something hard you have to pick something that's either physically and or psychologically hard and of course we want to highlight the fact that you never want to engage in anything physical or cognitive emotional or otherwise that is psychologically or physically damaging to you right because this is something that you're going to want to maintain or carry out for some period of time now alone those lines we could imagine a huge number of different protocols that one could engage in but I think there are a couple of key things that extend across all of those opportunities first of all it's clear now based on our understanding of the anatomical inputs to the anterior mid singulate cortex that while exercise is great and certainly movement of the body when we don't want to move our body AKA running AKA weightlifting AKA learning a new skill like dancing or gymnastics or something of that sort is going to engage this hub for tenacity and willpower the an mid singulate cortex but there are a number of other opportunities to do that and we can think of those in a kind of playful context but one that is both playful and highly functional and applicable so for instance if you already resistance train and you're doing what we now generally agree as a field is the minimum of six hard working sets per muscle group per week in order to maintain or build muscle size and strength some of you don't want to build muscle size but everyone should be trying to maintain muscle strength there's a very high correlation we now know between muscle strength and cognitive function especially as one gets past 40 years of age but even younger so maintaining neuromuscular function and strength is very very important even if you don't want to increased muscle size you can learn how to do that by the way we have zeroc cost protocols they're all listed out by going to hubin lab.com check out the series I did with Dr Andy Galpin check out the key toolkit takeaways from that series also available at hubn lab.com just put exerc protocols into the search function but let's say you're already resistance training you're already doing cardiovascular training what can you do to build up your tenacity and willpower for application in not just that endeavor but other endeavors well pick something that you don't want to do these are what I call in a very non-scientific way micro sucks these things suck but they suck a little bit and they're safe right you have to pick things that are safe for you but they suck enough that they require some effort they require getting over some friction engaging in something that you don't reflexively want to do so for instance that might be one extra set at the end of a round of three to five sets of a given exercise or it could be for instance 100 jumping jacks at the end of what you consider a hard run it could be for instance finishing out that language lesson and then deciding to do five minutes of sitting still thinking about the material that you learned when you so desperately want to just jump on your phone right pick circumstances where the degree of resistance is very high where the degree of impulse to do something else than the thing that you know you need to do is very high and then start applying those on a regular basis it could be after every workout it could be in the middle of the workout for instance some people have a really hard time not looking at their phone during a workout I like to listen to podcasts or music during a workout but I really try and resist text messaging and reading email and things of that sort while working out so the harder that becomes the more I think about it and the more I resist it the more presumably activation of the anid singulate cortex I'm getting and that you would get as well so these little micro sucks like ah it sucks not to look at the phone right now it sucks to do 100 jumping jacks at the end of a run of course if you're excited to to the 100 jumping jacks at the end of The Run that's not going to be a good Avenue into activating and increasing the volume of your anterior mid singulate cortex everything we've talked about up until now supports the statement I just made easy tasks desirable tasks don't do it it's the thing you don't want to do so imparting these little micro sucks can be very useful you'll have to think about what particular micro sucks you incorporate into your exercise routines your cognitive routines and your daily routines and how often I don't think you need to go completely berserk on this doing them all day long but keep in mind that these are the sorts of behaviors and resistance of behaviors because again certain micro sucks might be you know if you're somebody who practices intermittent fasting you know we don't want to send you into the realm of eating disorder but you know maybe you really do wait an extra 15 minutes before your usual first meal time which for me would really suck that might even move from micro suck into macro suck because I like to eat when I'm hungry but waiting a few extra minutes for no other reason than allowing oneself to activate that anterior mid singulate cortex circuitry would be one way to try and build up one's tenacity and willpower so at some level they should all seem pretty logical it actually doesn't even require a firm understanding of the L Neuroscience for it to of make sense right you want to do something you resist doing it that's building up tenacity and willpower you don't really want to do something you do it that's building up tenacity and willpower well I do believe in fact there a lot of data to support the fact that our understanding of the mechanisms underneath things like tenacity and willpower can be very advantageous when trying to carry out these different types of behaviors to increase tenacity and willpower why well today we learned that that there's a huge variety of contexts in which one can activate the ENT mid singulate cortex which means that it's not cardiovascular exercise per se it's not resisting the cookie per se right it's not waiting 15 more minutes to eat or making sure that you sit still and don't look at your phone at the end of a learning bout and really think about what you learned a little bit more even though it really really sucks to do that it's really hard it creates a lot of agitation it's not about any one of those protocols if you will per se rather it's about deliberate engagement in the behaviors that we least want to do in a given moment or if you're trying to build up willpower and tenacity to not engage in certain types of behaviors it's about our ability to suppress behavioral action now I do want to highlight the potential hazards of this type of approach to building up tenacity and willpower and indeed to life and we can call on the earlier example of Eating Disorders as a very safe alient one right there is a way in which all of this can run a muck and we can get so heavily into stoicism we can get so heavily into the idea of building up tenacity and willpower that it takes us into Realms that are unhealthy for us psychologically emotionally Andor physically and that's certainly not the goal here and I certainly don't want to motivate that type of behavior or resistance of behavior we should all be seeking a relationship with life and with goals Etc that involves yes I believe some degree of activating tenacity and willpower really finding that fight within us that Parisian colleagues found when they stimulated the anterior mid singulate cortex of people right all of a sudden they're like yep I'm driving into a storm or there's something about to happen and I'm going to have to resist I'm either going to have to do something or resist doing something but there's something activated inside of me I think it's very important that we are all able to Garner those resources and to activate those States within us voluntarily but I also know from experience and from observing others and indeed from the literature on the anterior mid singulate cortex as it relates to eating disorders and other aspects of neurologic and psychiatric challenges is that we also need to learn how to turn that off with that said the little micro sucks that we discussed you know the addition of 100 jumping jacks at the end of a cardiovascular training session when you would much rather just shower up and go home getting into the cold shower or cold plunge when you absolutely don't want to do it well provided you can do it safely that's going to be the best time to do it if your goal is to build up tenacity and willpower to say nothing else of the known benefits of things like deliberate cold exposure and exercise like jumping jacks Etc there are also entire Landscapes of life and academics and sport that afford US the opportunity to build up tenacity and willpower I for instance can recall taking my so-called qualifying exams in graduate school where they ask you questions until you say I don't know until you don't know the answer it's just like that puzzle in the bow Meister study they're taking you to the point where you basically can't win and that turns out to be a very important lesson that extends beyond the information that they're asking you about and of course every student at the end of their qualifying exam runs off and figures out the answer to the question that they couldn't get the right answer to sometimes there is a right answer sometimes they not if the committee is pretty diabolical they'll give you an impossible to answer question because there's no answer but the point being that whether or not it's in martial arts whether or not it's in sports whether or not it's in music whether or not it's in academics whether or not it's in relating to others there is some value to getting to that point where you can't solve the puzzle and I think that's an important message for us to understand and maybe to incorporate into our tools and protocols that there are some Endeavors that have no end point right there's no winning there's no Finish Line and those type of Endeavors are extremely important extremely important for continually building up our tenacity and willpower so much so that we can even take a somewhat 3,000 mile view from the top down onto everything we've talked about today and think about those superagers those superagers that somehow are able to maintain the cognitive function of a much younger person and if you look at the Daton super agers and people similar to them you'll find are always engaged in some activity that's hard for them they're always trying to learn something and they have a sort of playfulness about it but they seek out those friction points both resistance of certain behaviors right trying to not do certain things but perhaps more often doing certain things learning learning a new skill learning Pottery learning music placing themselves into novel environments that are a little uncomfortable or a lot uncomfortable provided that it's safe so from that standpoint one could even entertain the idea that because these people are living much longer than everybody else in addition to maintaining the cognitive function of much younger individuals that perhaps the inter mid singulate cortex in its ability to allocate resources to different parts of our brain and body to meet C certain motivational goals is actually associated with this thing that we call the will to live now the concept of the will to live is certainly getting a little bit squishy for scientists like me who yes I'm happy to entertain discussions that relate to psychological constructs such as tenacity and willpower but as you've probably noticed I'm very comfortable with and very excited about the idea that okay maybe it's relate somehow to brain energetics and glucose maybe not certainly I'm on board the idea that belief impact our physiology and Physiology impacts our beliefs I'll Dr Ali Crum who was a guest on this podcast previously talked about belief and mindset effects which are very powerful they change our physiology literally and the D data that we talked about today but of course also that there are brain areas and circuits that underly these things that we call tenacity and willpower so when we get into a discussion about tenacity and willpower and then find ourselves as we are now talking about the will to live I don't think it's going too far to say that when one looks looks at the data on longevity both physical and psychological longevity it's very clear that there are underlying physiological explanations not the least of which is likely to be the maintenance if not growth over the lifespan of this anterior mid singulate cortex but also that the people that are achieving that are continually forging in their environment they're continually looking for new environments they're continually exploring they are not becoming complacent they are not becoming sedentary they not existing down at that end of the Continuum that we call apathy and depression but that they're not existing down there and they are existing up toward the end of the Continuum that we call tenacity and willpower and engaging motivation to get there okay motivation again as a verb but in doing that that they're reinforcing the very circuits that give rise to tenacity and willpower this is what in engineering terms is referred to as a closed loop it's like you do a which leads to B which leads to C which feeds back onto a and makes a that much more likely to occur it's like turning the little a into a capital A and then turning into a bold face Capital underline a you know the buildup of neural circuits so while today we focused a lot on an individual brain area anterior mid singulate cortex and in many ways I presented it as if it's the Beall end all of tenacity and willpower it is not the Beall end all of tenacity and willpower it's our ability to engage the anterior mid singulate cortex that allows us to express tenacity and willpower but in this closed loop fashion it's our ability to express tenacity and willpower that then feeds back onto that circuit and makes it more robust and more likely to be accessible in the future when we encounter something that we don't want to do or that we have to resist very strongly in order to not engage in some sort of behavior or thought pattern so the big takeaway is that if you want to increase your tenacity and willpower you absolutely can you can do that by triggering activation of this incred inedible Hub within the brain the anterior mid singulate cortex for which there is now a very large amount of evidence is at least Central to the whole process of generating tenacity and willpower the I absolutely will do that and the no I absolutely won't do that it's the resistance Hub it's the thing that's allocating resources to do the thing that we don't want to do or that someone's trying to prevent us from doing it's also the brain area that's allowing us to resist doing the thing that we want to do or that someone else wants to do when we decide that's not good for us we can really be certain based on the psychology literature based on the Neuroscience literature and really based on this beautiful literature that's now emerging that includes the colum study but some other studies as well that perhaps we'll talk about in a future episode that we really can build up our capacity for tenacity and willpower it's a real thing and as a final point to this and indeed as a final protocol I was very excited to look into the early release of peer-reviewed papers out from neuron just this last week and to see that there was a study albeit in a pre-clinical model in an animal model that explored what is called stress relief as a natural resilience mechanism and I won't go into the study in full detail especially not now laid into a slightly long episode such as this one but what the study showed is that when an animal is in a state of despair or aidonia lack of pleasure when it's under stress and then that stress is removed there's a sense of reward there's a sense of of well-being that accompanies that release of stress and that's pretty obvious that's something that we've known about for a very long time but what's interesting about this study and they actually talk about this in terms of its applicability potentially to humans is that when we are able to withstand a stress maybe that stresses school maybe that stresses a particular relationship again you never want to do these things in a way that's unhealthy or dangerous but when we are able to do that the relief that we feel afterwards is its own form of reward that serves to reinforce that whole process of tenacity and willpower that got us through the stressor and an interesting thing about this study is that they went on to compound that reward they showed that rewarding oneself for having gotten through a stressful episode actually serves to increase the capacity to get through stressful episodes in the future in other words if you decide to develop certain tools and protocols to increase your levels of tenacity and willpower which frankly I hope that you will at least consider again provided you do it safely this seems like a very good thing to do for all of us especially as we age and guess what we're all aging from the time we're born if you decide to do that pick something that's challenging overcome that challenge again this could be the requirement to engage in a particular behavior when you don't want to or to resist a particular behavior that you would otherwise want to engage in but also when you've successfully completed that resistance when you've engaged that tenacity and willpower and you've activated that anterior mid singulate cortex well then occasionally not always but occasionally providing yourself with a reward of something that you like and here it's highly subjective you'll just have to pick something that you like again something that's hopefully Health promoting not Health diminishing can serve to further reinforce the behavior that you just engaged in which was to increase your tenacity and willpower and if you listen to the episodes that I've done on dopamine motivation and drive or on dopamine more generally you will know that I am not a fan of rewarding oneself for wins or for engaging tenacity or willpower for that matter on a regular basis or certainly every time this is the sort of thing that just randomly every once in a while when you've done the hard thing or if you've resisted the thing that was pulling on you that you should reward yourself but of course reward yourself in healthy and safe ways for those of you that are interested in learning more about how to reward the actions of tenacity and willpower I'll provide a link to the recently published paper in neuron in the show note captions I will also be doing a toolkit episode that relates to what we covered today as well as some additional tools gleaned from other papers and resources in the not too dist future thank you for joining me for today's discussion all about tenacity and willpower we talked about the idea gleaned from research in the field of psychology that tenacity and willpower are limited resources and that perhaps again perhaps they relate to this concept of ego depletion that relates to this idea that what is depleted or what's limited in our ability to engage tenacity and willpower somehow relates to brain energetics and fuel consumption namely glucose I also talked about the conflicting data that argues that if we believe tenacity and willp power are limited and that glucose is the thing that limits them well then that's exactly what happens so I talked about that controversy and some of the data that actually reconcile a bit of the differences there so in the absence of new data you'll have to decide for yourself what you believe about tenacity and willpower however it's very important to acknowledge the universal truth which is that our tenacity and willpower rides on the tide of autonomic function that is when we are sleep deprived when we are in pain when we are in emotional pain or when we are distracted our tenacity and willpower is diminished which calls upon all of us to make sure that we're taking care of our autonomic functions through viewing morning sunlight getting sufficient sleep adequate nutrition social connections things that I've covered extensively on previous episodes then we talked about the neural underpinnings of tenacity and willpower and this absolutely incredible brain structure that we'll call a hub because it's not operating in isolation but rather it's getting inputs from lots of different brain areas related to reward executive function autonomic function motor planning goal seeking Etc that we call the anterior mid singular cortex this phenomenally interesting brain area that seems to be able to generate this thing that we call tenacity and willpower and that when we engage or Express tenacity and willpower by doing the thing that we least want to do by not doing the thing that we most want to do in a given moment that we actually can build up our anterior mid singulate cortex and thereby build up our future capacity to engage the enter mid singulate cortex when we need to call on tenacity and will power and then we talked about some of the peer- review data that shows how that actually can be done where these individuals who were not previously exercising did a challenging three 1hour sessions per week of cardiovascular training and indeed their anterior mid singulate cortex and the connections two and away from it increased in a way that set them apart from their age related cohorts that is their brains stayed younger maybe even got younger whereas those that did not do the hard thing right that didn't engage tenacity and willpower did not experience the same effect and then we talked about how those data could be extended into a number of different Realms such as cognitive learning learning languages learning math learning art learning any number of different things or in the Physical Realm engaging in certain types of exercise that one is not already engaging in adding in a little bit of additional exercise specifically at a time in which you least want to do that or extending your fasting period if that's something that you're doing and that you can do healthfully simply because it allows you to exercise your anterior mid singulate cortex AKA tenacity and willpower and of course we highlighted that all of that needs to be done in the context of psychological and physical safety we don't want anyone to do things that are going to be physically damaging to themselves but if one simply takes the stance of okay what's something that I can do in a moment that will allow me to build up tenacity and willpower well it's going to be the thing that I least want to do in that moment or the thing that I least want to resist doing in that moment to periodically add in those little what I referred to as micros sucks a very um non-scientific frankly non- psychological term but I think we all understand what it means little things that we don't want to do but that if we do them you can be sure that you are activating the interent mid singulate cortex and thereby increasing the probability the likelihood that you can access tenacity and willpower more readily in the future so what I've done today is explain the scientific studies in the realm of Psychology and Neuroscience that explain what tenacity and willpower are and what allows us to build up our tenacity and willpower over time and then it's really up to all of us to you and to me and everybody else to figure out in which particular domains and with which frequency we're going to decide to build up our tenacity and willpower so it's clear that tenacity and willpower are not just resources that we need to call upon from time to time in order to overcome things but then indeed calling on our ability and building up our ability for tenacity and willpower can allow us much richer enjoyment of life and perhaps can even extend our life by engaging the will to live thank you for joining me for today's discussion about the science of tenacity and willpower and tools and protocols to increase one's ability to access tenacity and willpower if you're learning from and or enjoying 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