Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.

My name is Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

So let's talk about emotions.

Emotions are a fascinating and vital aspect of our life experience.

It's fair to say that emotions make up most of what we think of as our experience of life.

Even the things we do, our behaviors and the places we go and the people we end up

encountering in our life, all of that really

funnels into our emotional perception of what those things mean, whether or not they

made us happy or sad or depressed or lonely or we're awe-inspiring.

Now one thing that is absolutely true is that everyone's perception of emotion is slightly different,

meaning your idea of happy is very likely different than my idea of what a state of happiness is.

And we know this also for color vision, for instance, even though the cells in your eye and my eye

that perceive the color red are identical right down to the genes that they express, we can be certain based on experimental evidence and what are called psychophysical studies, that your idea of the most intense red is going to be very different than my idea of the most intense red

if we were given a selection of 10 different reds and asked which one is most intense,

which one looks most red.

And that seems crazy.

You would think that something as simple as color would be universal and yet it's not.

And so we need to agree at the outset that emotions are complicated and yet they are tractable.

They can be understood.

And today we're going to talk about a lot of tools to understand what emotions are for you to understand what your emotional states mean and what they don't mean.

And in doing that, that will allow you to place value on whether or not you should hold

an emotional state as true or not true, whether or not it has meaning or it doesn't, as

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