Andrew Huberman· PhD
suppressing emotion repressing emotion even just feeling emotion is like very exhausting. The internet is selecting for the most emotionally activating things. So who which tweets get engaged with the ones that are the most polarizing? So then what happens is is people are dating and now you've got a problem because and here's the real tragedy is people will have a perception that if I don't say the right thing this will get posted online that is not what happens most of the time right but this is where we as human beings have certain cognitive biases where the extreme example like we get trained in this in medical school is you know once you miss a cancer diagnosis once it doesn't mean that every patient after that has cancer. But that's what the brain is designed to do. Our brain is designed for survival. Which means that if we get food poisoning from a restaurant even once, our brain doesn't look at that probabilistically. It takes the worst examples and that's what we have to base our behavior on, right? Like if I'm at work and I want to if I'm attracted to a co-orker, even though there's a 90% chance that if I express some romantic interest in them, I'm going to be fine. I can't make a strategy based on that. I have to ba base my strategy on the worst possible outcome. That's what we're seeing in data. >> You said that suppressing emotion is cognitively draining. Did I also understand correctly that being in constant arousal through different emotions is also cognitively draining. >> I don't know if I would use the word cognitive there, but it's absolutely draining. Right? So periods of extended arousal and this is where like I'm when I mean cognitive draining I'm referring to a you know a paper that's looking at the anterior singulate cortex. So I and that's where when the anterior singulate cortex and your frontal loes are suppressing your lyic system that's very draining