Controversial (for other reasons) neuroscientist Robert Heath found long ago that given the option to self stimulate different brain areas to experience different feelings most people opt to stimulate areas that evoke feelings of mild frustration & anger. Arousal is reinforcing.
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What’s remarkable is they preferred this feeling over sexual arousal, happiness, laughter, drunkenness. Arousal with mild frustration in anger is indeed a drug. It’s just that we make it ourselves. Watch your behavior. Chances are you’re hooked.
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And if you’re going to look up these studies, I’ve covered them before on the podcast, but there’s a collection of them. Not many subjects in each one because it was human self brain stimulation. Those are hard experiments, but if you look across the different experiments it’s a
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And for you aficionados, the midline thalamus was the hub for this. My friends who are neurosurgeon tell me they observed this from time to time and experiments where they are hunting for epilepsy foci.
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@hubermanlab What is immoral about anger & frustration (something you teach is essential to learning) if you don’t act on it violently and you are able to use it for moral, goal-directed behavior?
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@hubermanlab This really hits home. I’m consistently trying to help friends and family be present , happy and grateful. I give best practices and share research while the whole time they may prefer this mild frustration and I’ve been viewing it from the wrong lens.
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@hubermanlab Perhaps anger is more accessible than those other “feelings” that require access to resources like an attractive mate or good friends. Stoking the machinery of anger rapidly induces energy and ambulation, so some people simply use it instrumentally.
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@hubermanlab Is this why stimulants are addicting? Used ~3-4X a week in college & they make me mildly angry when on them but super driven & goal oriented. But when I go too long w/0 them (Ie a week) I’m “happy” & sitting around talking to family, watching TV, etc but something feels missing
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Excited to announce the release of Yubico’s fourth annual Global State of Authentication Survey 2025! 🚀 Discover the latest trends and shifts in security, from device-bound passkey adoption and MFA usage, to which countries are leading the charge for a passwordless future.
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