Welcome to the Huberman Lab guest series where I and an expert guest discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

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

Today's episode marks the second episode in our four episode series with Dr. Paul Conti about mental health.

The first episode in the series dealt with how to understand and assess your level of mental health.

Today's episode is about how to improve your mental health.

I do want to emphasize that you do not need to have heard or seen the first episode in order to understand or glean important information from today's episode about how to improve your mental health.

But I do encourage you to go and listen to the first episode at some point if you have not already.

Today's episode deals with several topics important to all of us, as well as protocols to improve one's mental health.

For instance, you will learn how to guide yourself through a process of self-increase in which you address certain key questions about your drives, your level of aggressive drive, pleasure drive, and the so-called generative drive.

These are essential things to understand about oneself if you want to guide yourself toward your aspirations and if you want to understand how your subconscious processing is influencing your thoughts and your behaviors and your feelings in ways that sometimes serve your aspirations and in other ways that can hinder your actions.

Dr. Conti shares with us a way of assessing our internal narratives as well as a way of creating a constructive self-awareness and an understanding of where those narratives and that self-awareness stem from in our childhood so that we can navigate forward with the greatest sense of agency.

We also talk about how to move past common hindrances to improving one's mental health such as overcoming intrusive thoughts.

And perhaps most importantly, today's episode provides information and protocols that anyone can use to cultivate their generative drive, which is a hallmark of mental health.

Just a reminder that Dr. Paul Conti has generously provided a few diagrams that we include as PDFs in the show note captions. They are completely zero cost to access, and they can help you understand some of the material that was discussed in the first episode of this series, as well as the current episode about how to improve your mental health.

And while those simple PDF diagrams are certainly not necessary in order to understand the material in today's discussion or in the other discussions of this series, many people find them useful, so I encourage you to check out those links in the show note captions.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research rules 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 BetterHelp.

BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out online.

I personally have been doing weekly therapy for more than 30 years.

And while that weekly therapy was initiated, not by my own request, it was, in fact, a requirement for me to remain in high school.

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