Tools to Bolster Your Mental Health & Confidence | Dr. Paul Conti

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And there’s far more going right in any of us, in all of us, than there is going wrong if we’re here, right? And if we’re listening to to educational material, we want to better ourselves, there’s so much more that’s going right in us, and it’s a good place for us to start because it helps us to be able to look at what’s not going the way we want it to be, what we where we want to bring change in our lives, but we should start from a position of strength. Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based [music] tools for everyday life. I’m Andrew Huberman and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr.

Paul Conti. Dr. Paul Conti is a medical doctor and psychiatrist and an expert in recovery from trauma. He is also one of the foremost public educators on how anyone can build a greater sense of agency, confidence, and well-being in their life. Today we discuss the practical aspects of building and maintaining mental health.

In particular, how to identify your natural strengths and the often unseen opportunities to improve your reflexive mental framework and relationship with self and others. Dr. Conti’s approach to building mental health and overcoming challenges with mental health are very different than most of the information that you’ll find on the internet and elsewhere. He has decades of clinical experience and he draws on that end data to explain the specific questions that we all need to ask ourselves when we’re facing things like lowered motivation, mood, or challenges overcoming bad habits. Today we discuss all of that as well as how to balance action and introspection.

And this is very important because I think a lot of people think about mental health as merely an introspective process, but as Dr. Conti points out, it’s really a balance of thinking and doing and often involves more doing than thinking. So during today’s episode, you’ll get a specific framework of questions to ask yourself repeatedly, that is every day or every week, and specific action steps to take so that you can truly become the best version of yourself and derive the greatest sense of meaning along the way. I’d like to point out that Dr. Conti also has a new book coming out which is aptly entitled What’s Going Right, a powerful new method for optimizing your mental health.

And I’ve read the book from front to back and I have to tell you it’s a wonderful resource that includes both information and simple worksheet-like prompts that can help anyone through sticking points as well as to build on what the title suggests, what’s already going right. So if you’re currently suffering or if you’re doing well and you want to level up your mental health further, today’s conversation is definitely for you. 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, today’s episode does include sponsors.

And now for my discussion with Dr. Paul Conti. Dr. Paul Conti, welcome back. Thank you.

Thank you for having me back. >> Uh congratulations on your book, What’s Going Right, uh a powerful new method for optimizing your mental health. It’s an amazing book and you also hold the record not incidentally, I think, for the most viewed and downloaded episodes of this podcast ever, so Wow. >> Um you know, you got a lot of Huberman podcast listener fans out there, so um >> they’ll be reading if if they’re smart and they and they want to be better, they want to feel enriched in all the ways. So let’s talk about um >> Let’s talk about individuals first and then I also want talk today about um interactions between people, which we probably haven’t talked quite as much about, okay, at least not here.

The self, right? We all have a a name, a self-concept. We wake up thinking and knowing essentially who we are, what bothers us, what we’re excited about, and um the question I’ve been living with for a long time is how malleable is our self-view, right? Our and our relationship to our self and and we can define those, right? If we’re not super comfortable or completely happy with our relationship to ourselves, how much flexibility is there on the on that whole picture?

I think it’s very malleable. I think there’s a lot of flexibility, but we have to be willing to look at ourselves. You know, very often we’re not looking at ourselves. We’re afraid of what we’re going to find or um we don’t know how to understand or how to bring change, so so we don’t look at ourselves and then we we can see ourselves as inflexible and and and think that we’re just stuck in the same place over time, but if we’re willing to look at ourselves and we bring the compassionate curiosity to ourselves of, hey, what what can I learn about myself and what might I be interested in changing in myself or in emphasizing in myself, we we I think we can bring a lot a lot of change. And the title of your book, uh What’s Going Right, uh is that a good lens to start uh looking through when we look at our self, like like what what works, you know, um 10 fingers, 10 toes, in my case I’m that a good place to start, uh you know, that I feel some sense of agency over a number of areas of my life.

Is that the way to start wading into the questions about self? >> I think to start off with what’s going right, it’s not just a way of looking at it because it feels better, but it but it’s consistent with truth. I mean, there’s far more going right in any of us, in all of us, than there is going wrong if we’re here, right? And if we’re listening to to educational material, we want to better ourselves, there’s so much more that’s going right in us, and it’s a good place for us to start because it helps us to be able to look at what’s not going the way we want it to be, what we where we want to bring change in our lives, but we should start from a position of strength. And the mental health system really tells us to look at ourselves in the opposite way, to look at ourselves through what is going wrong and to put labels on ourselves that that often just make us feel worse or make us feel more helpless or hopeless in understanding, but but if we start with what’s going right and we bring curiosity to ourselves, then there are processes we can follow to understand and to bring real change.

What are some of those processes that um people could use to explore and if you would, what are some questions that people can or thoughts or or landscapes to explore where people can ping themselves with specific questions? So good places to start are they looking at your self-talk. You know, what are you saying to yourself in quiet moments when no one else is listening or when there’s there’s a pause in the action in your life, what are you saying to yourself? What messages are you giving yourself? And often times we’re telling ourselves things that about ourselves that are often negative or often critical and we’re not aware that we’re we’re saying these things over and over to ourselves.

So so that’s just one strategy. And another strategy can be to think about the life narrative that we’re telling ourselves. So if you just tell yourself about yourself or if you’re telling someone else about you, what what is it that you say? What is it that you that you say in a reflexive way and does it match what’s real and true about your life? You know, we both all people have these two foundational pillars and and in the first part of the series that we did in 2023, we really sort of hashed this out and it was the first time I really put together, hey, there’s a structure of self and we all share this and