Dr. Paul Conti: How to Understand & Assess Your Mental Health | Huberman Lab Guest Series

Our character structure includes for instance whether we prefer to socialise or isolate or what we use humor for.

Our character structure is mostly determined by action states, how we interact with the world and what actions we take.

By understanding the self we can understand the components underneath the self.

Anxiety can be good because it protects us. However, too much anxiety without a specific reason is bad and it takes away from agency and gratitude. We have to understand the anxiety in order to deal with it.

Anxiety can be caused by our genes or by past experiences and traumatic events.

• It is important to look at your conscious mind: What are you thinking about?
• Consider your defenses: Do you avoid it?
• Take note of your character structure: What decisions are you making and how are they affecting you?

With that in mind you can see what the experiences of the self are.

Confidence is the ability to handle situations. It can also be dependent on states: Are you confident in a specific area or in general?

You can ask yourself the same questions from above: What is your experience of being confident?

Too much confidence is also not good as it can lead to narcissism.

Our beliefs and internal narratives are extremely important to our mental health and people normally are aware of them but they are often not very healthy. It is hard to change our beliefs but through enough practice they can go away. Because we crave instant gratification we often say someone failed at changing their beliefs instead of being a little more patient.

Everything in the mind is addressable: What is going on inside the mind? What got them into the pattern? There are answers to everything and it is important to approach people as individuals.

This is our actual engagement and our defense mechanisms in action. Our defense mechanisms can also work for us, for instance when using humor or when talking to people. However, most of the time they don't. Here are three common defense mechanisms.

• Projection: Projecting our feelings outward.
• Displacement: Saying our feelings come from somewhere else.
• Projective identification: Making people feel the way you feel. You project your feelings onto someone and they identify with it.

Awareness of our defense mechanisms is key.

• Humor: Cynicism and sarcasm can often be defense mechanisms. Humor can be used to feel better but as soon as it goes against another person, it is bad.
• Repetition compulsion: We often do things we know we shouldn't be doing. We repeat our toxic behaviour patterns because we think we can fix them and "change the past" but that usually does not work.