Andrew Huberman· PhD
even if you don't like horror movies you might like you know maybe a spicy food that feels kind not not even good it feels awful in the moment or super hot bath or you know cold like really cold plunge right I like getting out of the cold plunge for exactly the reason we're talking about yeah or even you know honestly for me like I'm not a super fan of exercise but like a really really hard workout that feels miserable when you finally stop it feels I do a lot of yoga and my favorite thing is at the end when they're like and now you can do shasa Shas is always good if you've worked the worst you're just really like ha you know we it's helpful to kind of have these moments to like have this contrast and so building the contrast in where you kind of give yourself some negative emotion you know whether it's a kind of imagin negative emotion like negative visualization or a fictional one a lot of our favorite fictional experiences are pretty terrible like a novel is really boring if the protagonist like has nothing bad happen just going to coast along and things are just mildly positive no we want them to go through some terrible stuff even when we really associate with them and sort of see them as ourselves and so yeah these like fictional worlds where we can play with negative emotions a little bit um are super interesting psychologically because like why would we do that but you know as you're saying even when you get you know these like neural stimulation we kind of want some of the negative stuff