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 marks the fourth episode in our four episode series with Dr. Paul Conti about mental health.

Today's episode deals with the topic of self-care.

We hear the phrase self-care a lot nowadays, but rarely, if ever, is self-care precisely defined.

For instance, is self-care about pampering oneself? Is it about self-acceptance? Is self-care about just making sure we get enough sleep and enough exercise and have healthy relationships?

Well, it turns out that, yes indeed, adequate self-care is about all of those things, but true self-care, the topic of today's episode, is about far more as it relates to our mental health.

True self-care is also about constructing a life narrative in which we frame our past, our present, and future in a way that allows us to see

what's gone wrong, what's gone right, and the best path to navigate forward.

So in many ways, true self-care is really about fostering a sense of self-awareness and doing so within the context of a framework that is known to work.

And today, Dr. Paul Conti shares with us exactly how to do that.

He also touches on some of the things that, if not properly understood and processed, can inhibit our ability to take excellent care of ourselves, including how to properly process traumatic experiences.

Something that he has expert in among many other topics as well. He also touches on some of the things that can potentially serve as barriers to excellent self-care, including traumatic experiences, and explains how to frame those traumatic experiences so that we can best move forward.

He also shares with us various practices that include therapy, but also practices that we can carry out on our own, such as specific forms of meditation, journaling in other ways of examining the self and fostering better self-care toward our mental health.

As I mentioned before, this is the fourth episode in our fourth episode series, All About Mental Health.

I realize that perhaps not everyone has had the opportunity yet to listen to the previous three episodes in this series.

If you haven't, it certainly won't prevent you from gleaning important information and protocols from today's episode.

But I do encourage you, at some point, to try and listen to all four episodes in this series, because at some level, they are interwoven at the level of concepts and of practices.

I'd also like to highlight that Dr. Paul Conti has generously provided some simple diagrams that can help you navigate today's material and the material in the other episodes.

They are available as zero-cost PDFs by simply going to the show note captions where you can view them or download them.

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.

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