Overview: There are so many cool podcasts to listen to. But if you find any that interview Andrew Huberman I suggest taking a look. He is one of the more interesting people speaking in the personal optimisation, high performance space at the moment. Reading time ~ 2 minutes. Listening time > 2 hours.
People who’ve heard me speak are likely to have heard me mention neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, who runs the Huberman lab at Stanford but also the Huberman Lab podcast.
I think he is one of the more interesting people speaking about optimising performance at a professional and personal level in the world today.
My interest in Andrew’s work and similar work in the ‘performance’ space reflects a shift in my perspective as it pertains to mental health.
I trained as a clinical psychologist, which means I’ve generally viewed mental health primarily through a mental illness lens. Thus I’ve been primarily interested in techniques and tools and strategies that reduce distress and treat illness. To be clear, I think there is great value and wisdom in the clinical psychology literature. I remain very interested in it.
But when I think about all of us in the university sector (staff and students), identifying and helping people manage struggles is only part of the picture.
The other part is helping people develop the habits and practices to perform at a high level, to innovate, to manage challenging workloads, to balance productivity and wellbeing.
Thus I’ve started supplementing my ongoing interest in clinical psychology concepts and practices, with those from performance psychology and sports psychology. I have a coffee booked with a colleague next week in the sports psychology space to start the process of familiarising myself with the techniques used by elite athletes.
Those developments aside, I thought that Andrew’s conversation with Chris Williamson from the Modern Wisdom podcast is a great introduction to how Andrew Huberman thinks about the world and performance and health and more. You’ll find topics that definitely resonate with anyone trying to get their work done and a few more. Enjoy.
I’ve linked the video conversation (YouTube), but you could easily find the Modern Wisdom podcast in your preferred player and just do the audio.