Shadowing Practice: Rewire Your Brain for Success | Best Motivational Speech | Andrew Huberman - Learn English Speaking with Video
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And this is really the holy grail of neuroscience, is how can I modify my brain?
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Well, you modify it by placing yourself into discomfort and using that as a propeller to move you into action.
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There's an interesting process that occurs when people start to realize that rewards are all internal.
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And what they start to do is they start linking this duration path outcome thing to their internal rewards.
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And so to put this simply, one of the most powerful things that any person can do is to learn to control this idea of duration,
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path and outcome and attach an internal sense of reward, just that you're doing well to reward yourself mentally just say, I'm doing well, I'm actually on the right path.
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To do that inside of the demands that come from the external world, the more often that we can self-reward some aspect of the process,
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provided it's in the right direction of what we're trying to achieve, the more energy we're going to have for that, the more focus we're going to have for that.
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And remember, the reason I say energy, I don't throw that around loosely, is that limiting amount of noradrenaline is constantly being kept at bay.
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You're literally buffering the quit response.
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And so when people start realizing that
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if they set the goals inside of the larger goal and self-reward each one of those,
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they essentially have an infinite amount of energy to pursue those goals.
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They have an infinite amount of focus to pursue those goals.
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But what I can say is, whatever it is that David has figured out how to do,
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it clearly involves taking whatever adrenaline pulse he feels and understanding something fundamental to biology,
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which is that adrenaline response was designed to move us, not to keep us stationary.
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He uses behavior as the way to shift sensation, perception, feelings, and thoughts.
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He understands how to run that program in the right direction.
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Whereas most people, when they don't like what they feel, they start negotiating sensation, which will never work.
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They start trying to control their perception, which is hard, right?
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They're like, I'm not going to think about that, or I'll think about it differently.
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Very hard to control the mind with the mind.
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He knows that's a tough one.
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Yeah.
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Feelings, Lord knows what those are and how to control them.
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I mean, we'll eventually figure that out as a field, but thoughts are complicated.
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So he just goes immediately to action.
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He goes forward, right, towards it.
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So when he says, just for clarity, when he says, I don't like sharks, he's basically saying, put me in the shark tank.
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Like, he's cueing you to say, this is the thing I'm afraid of, and I'm going to be the first one to volunteer, I know you're gonna put me in the shark tank if I tell you that.
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Exactly.
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And I think one of the things I think is very clear is that he's tapped into this neuroplasticity process
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through the door, through the portal of agitation and stress.
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He's figured out, and this is really the holy grail of neuroscience, is how can I modify my brain?
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Well, you modify it by placing yourself into discomfort and using that as a propeller to move you into action.
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So the number one brain area that people want to stimulate, they finally hit this lever where they go, oh, I like that.
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And they just keep hitting that thing and hitting that thing and hitting that thing.
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Frustration and mild anger.
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What that told us is it's clearly tapped into the dopamine reward system.
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It feels like a hit of dopamine to them more than anything else.
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So we need to put that on the shelf
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and keep it visible as we kind of march into this sort of answer to your question.
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The other thing is an understanding that, and there's some recent data on this that are really impressive, not from my lab, but from another lab,
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which is that beliefs and information that supports our prior beliefs also increases the activity of these reward systems.
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So the more I see stuff that verifies what I already think or feel, that they are bad and they are good, or that we are good and they are bad,
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the more dopamine and adrenaline is released into my system, which we now know from our discussion a few minutes ago, changes the way I view the world.
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It actually changes the way I view the world.
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It means that I'm gonna see certain things and not see others.
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And this also relates to the auditory system.
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I'm gonna hear certain things and not hear others.
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The things that verify my beliefs, I'm going to feel rewarded for.
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The things that are counter to my beliefs, I'm not going to be as rewarded for.
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So we have all these barricades to empathy and to really listening
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and to really hearing what the other side is trying to say.
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And we have all these support networks in our body and our brain which are building a bigger and bigger divide.
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And that's all very depressing.
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So the question is, what's the boat that's going to get us across that divide?
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And I believe, and I'm not just defaulting to this because it's what my lab works on, but I fundamentally believe
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that the boat that's going to get us to the other side is our ability to control our internal state,
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to be able to ratchet down our level of autonomic arousal just enough
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so that I can dilate not just my vision of what's happening in my immediate environment, but I can dilate my cognition,
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my thinking, to the possibility that there may be a kernel of value in what somebody else is saying.
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Even if it's about me and I don't like what I'm hearing.
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Now, as somebody who spent time in the addiction treatment community, you probably know, this is a lot of what you get good at as you learn to move through
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something that to you feels very good.
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And you know all the reasons why it would probably be good to change it.
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But you know what?
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You don't want to because it feels so good.
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So we're talking about an addiction to entrenched thinking.
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We're talking about an addiction and neurochemical systems that support lack of change, my refusal to change, and stubbornness.
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And I actually think just like in for the treatment of addiction and trauma,
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the key is to get people to learn to tolerate progressively higher levels of stress and maintain dilation of sensory experience,
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of thought experience.
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We've got to create some small little
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Portals through
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which information can come in a lots of made of mirror neurons I hate to break it to the crowd
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But the data in support of mirror neurons in humans is not
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that impressive And now the mirror neuron people are gonna come after me, but fine.
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There are circuits in the brain
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That control emotional contagion and those are what's powerful my ability to recruit you into stress is
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is much more powerful than my ability to recruit you into empathy for something good.
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That's a well-established neurobiological fact.
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We don't like the way other people feel.
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The first thing is to bring the level of urgency that we feel internally down.
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We need to learn to calm ourselves in order to really have the information start to come in.
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Now, the system right now and people out there, everyone's in a frenzy.
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And you can see it, the collective consciousness is kind of losing its mind.
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It's kind of out of its mind.
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We need to learn how to turn off those amygdala circuits So are we all gonna get together and do EMDR?
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Probably not.
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What we need to do is start to figure out
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How we can I think especially for the next generation of
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kids how to teach them to regulate their nervous system So
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that they recognize that pulse of adrenaline as placing them in a compromised position
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Like we have to leverage the idea that being able to hear and listen hinges on the ability to be calm
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So therefore the ability to be calm is crucial to hearing
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and listening and hearing and listening is crucial to our advancement as individuals and as groups.
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The problem is everyone's been trying to do this backwards.
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They've said we all have to get along.
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We have to cancel cancel culture.
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We all have to, you know, listen to one another.
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And I think again, we have to start from the inside.
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We have to teach it physiologically.
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Now, I don't have a master plan on how to do that.
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But one of the reasons I'm here and one of the reasons I'm, you know, teaching neuroscience on instagram and not just in my laboratory is until we can learn to regulate the self
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i don't think we're gonna get where we want to go
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as a culture i think it really does start with our in own individual ability to to do
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that that it really doesn't matter
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if you come at something from a place of joy
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and love and that would be wonderful
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but there's a whole other set of ways to approach this
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that involves slogging through the discomfort the doubts the wish for things to be different
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and starting with behavior and it's incredible because
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if you think about sensation perception feeling thought
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and behavior actually the way to control our nervous system
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and feel the the way we want to feel is to run that backwards.
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Behavior, thoughts.
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So if you change your behavior, then generally your thoughts, your feelings, and your perceptions change.
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And everyone tries to come at it from the other end, but he's figured out through whatever process led him there and incredible life circumstances,
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how to run it in this direction of behavior first.
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And I really think that if neuroscience has anything to offer, it's some understanding of what the underlying chemicals and neural circuits are,
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but the sooner that the human animal,
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the human species can start to understand that our feelings and our thoughts and our memories and all that is very complicated,
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but that when behaviors are very concrete and they are the control panel for the rest of it, I don't want to relegate feelings.
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Feelings are extremely important.
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I don't want to relegate perception.
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They're extremely important.
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But when it comes to wanting to shift the way that you function, to get better or to perform better or to show up better or to move away from things like addictive behaviors,
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it's absolutely foolish for any of us, me included, to think that we can do that by changing our thoughts first.
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It's behavior first, thoughts, feelings, and perceptions follow.
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Mood follows action.
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Some people are just hypo aroused.
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They're just not motivated enough.
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And those people would benefit greatly from cultivating practices like super oxygenated breathing.
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So this is something along the lines of like tumor type breathing.
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So rapid, and we look at this in the lab, we're actually running a human study on this now.
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So 25 or 30 deep breaths through the nose and out through the mouth, then exhaling the breath and holding, learning how to self-generate adrenaline.
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An ice bath is doing the exact same thing, stimulating adrenaline response.
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It actually improves the immune system.
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There's a published paper on this.
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Releases adrenaline, which buffers the immune system against infection.
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But getting good at taking yourself from low energy to higher energy.
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Some people are so agitated, the monkey mind, they got too many things going on and they're thinking, okay, they're trying to sit down and write, I suffer from this, and I'm feeling like,
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wait, I've also got this person I need to connect with, and I'm kind of being drawn off course by not being able to put the blinders on.
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For people that have that issue, I think learning how to calm the nervous system is very powerful.
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And the best way that I know how to do that is based on two studies, one published in Nature, one published in Cell Reports recently,
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showing that physiological sighs, there's actually a thing in the literature called physiological sighs,
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are one of the fastest ways to bring our overall levels of autonomic arousal down.
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And a physiological sigh is two inhales followed by an extended exhale.
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So it's like, it's not just a deep breath, it's two inhales followed by an exhale, okay?
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And what that does, and this has been shown several times now in humans and other species as well, is it dilates the little sacs of the lungs,
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and that second inhale dilates them a little bit more, and it pulls a little bit of carbon dioxide out of the bloodstream so that when we exhale,
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we offload the maximum amount of carbon dioxide, and it perfectly adjusts the ratio of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the bloodstream and lungs.
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And sometimes it only takes one of these double inhale exhales.
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Sometimes somebody needs to do two or three.
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But that's the fastest way to bring the autonomic nervous system down.
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The question is, why do we quit?
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Like, what is that?
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And it turns out that every time we exert effort, a certain amount of noradrenaline in the brain is released.
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And there's a sort of a counter in the brainstem.
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And at some point, enough noradrenaline is released, and it shuts down cognitive control, deliberate control over the motor circuitry, and we quit.
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That's it.
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But the thing that can restore those levels or can sort of reset those levels lower and give us more gas, more mileage, is dopamine.
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And it makes perfect sense
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because our species had to move against very challenging things in nature
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and in culture at every stage of our evolution, including now.
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2020 is a good example of this.
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And when a good example would be if you're really slogging it out
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and things are miserable Just think like the worst family vacation everything is a disaster
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or a very hard physical event and Someone cracks a joke You're almost immediately feel a sense of relief
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You see this in the team
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that wins the Super Bowl both teams slogged it out You
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have to believe they were both at max effort the entire game look at the team
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that wins they have extra energy They're jumping all over the place.
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So it can't be physical energy.
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It can't be glycogen related.
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It's not ketone related It's nothing in the body in
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that sense It's dopamine's ability to take that level of norepinephrine
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and smack it back down And so we can learn this right?
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I mean I think this is where there's real power like in your story
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Or the story that I'm familiar with from your book like the the ability to push through those pain points
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is something that we really can export to other aspects of life because it's the same neurochemicals that are involved.
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So when you get to a particular location or maybe you're, I recall, you know, a portion where you're just, you're feeling lousy, you know,
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you're injured or you feel like you're hurt and you can reframe it mentally and think I'm actually still on the ladder.
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I'm still holding on to a rung.
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I know at least that much.
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I'm still breathing.
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I know that much.
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And the lift that we get is not some psychological pump-up.
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It's a neurochemical thing.
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It's dopamine suppressing norepinephrine and saying, you're on the right path.
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You can keep going.
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It's a permission to keep going.
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And we grant that permission to ourselves.
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No one grants that permission to us.
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I think one of the other kind of misconceptions
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that we want to dissolve is this idea
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that external rewards can actually propel us down long paths of success and high performance.
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They can't.
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It's internal rewards.
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That's a unsustainable fuel source.
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I have a friend from the SEAL teams and somebody asked us recently, we were giving a talk,
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and somebody said, how can I make sure that I continue to self-reward and I'm not driven by these external rewards?
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How can I continue to have that drive?
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And his answer was very good.
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He said, give away all the external rewards.
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Now, not everyone can afford to do that.
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And it's just about you and you.
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You and you.
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And the more attached, there's a famous Stanford study done at Bing nursery school, probably not far from where you were in the dormitory.
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There's a little nursery school in Escondido Village.
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And they did this study where they looked at kids that liked playing during their recess.
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It's all recess in nursery school, but they're drawing.
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And they took the kids that really liked to draw, and they started giving them little gold stars on their drawings.
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And then they liked the gold stars for a kid.
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That's an extrinsic reward and then they stop doing that and the kids stop drawing.
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They just, they associate the good feeling of doing it with the external rewards.
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We have to be very cautious about how much of our internal dopamine we attach to external rewards
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if we wanna continue to grow and pursue and focus and work hard.
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If you just wanna get to some place and cash in, then fine.
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But most people find themselves in a pretty miserable place because their dopamine was so attached to external rewards, they need more and more of that the world.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “Rewire Your Brain for Success”. This video has 222 sentences and 2986 words to shadow. The speech runs for 16:18. The speaker talks fast, about 183 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| dopamine noun | /ˈdoʊ.pəˌmin/ | A monoamine C₈H₁₁NO₂ that is a decarboxylated form of dopa, present in the body as a neurotransmitter and a precursor of other substances including adrenalin. |
| adrenaline noun | /əˈdɹɛnəlɪn/ | Epinephrine, the hormone and neurotransmitter. |
| exhale verb | /ˌɛksˈheɪ̯l/ | To expel air from the lungs through the nose or mouth by action of the diaphragm, to breathe out. |
| dilate verb | /daɪˈleɪt/ | To enlarge; to make bigger. |
| inhale verb | /ɪnˈheɪl/ | To draw air into the lungs, through the nose or mouth by action of the diaphragm. |
| neuroscience noun | The scientific study of the nervous system. | |
| modify verb | /ˈmɑ.dɪˌfaɪ/ | To change part of. |
| autonomic adjective | /ˌɔt.əˈnɑm.ɪk/ | Acting or occurring involuntarily, without conscious control. |
| neurochemical adjective | Of or pertaining to neurochemistry, the study of the chemical basis of nerve and brain activity | |
| neuron noun | /ˈn(j)ʊɹɑn/ | A cell of the nervous system, which conducts nerve impulses; consisting of an axon and several dendrites. Neurons are connected by synapses. |
| noradrenaline noun | /nɔːɹəˈdɹɛnəlɪn/ | Synonym of norepinephrine. |
| physiological adjective | /ˌfɪz.i.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪ.kəl/ | Of, or relating to physiology. |
| discomfort noun | /dɪsˈkʌmfɚt/ | Mental or bodily distress. |
| dioxide noun | /daɪˈɑksaɪd/ | Any oxide containing two oxygen atoms in each molecule. |
| nursery noun | /ˈnɝsəɹi/ | Especially in European countries: a room or area in a household set apart for the care of children. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| back down verb | To take a less aggressive position in a conflict than one previously had, or has planned to have. |
| draw off verb | To remove by using a siphon. |
| get along verb | To interact or coexist well, without argument or trouble. |
| get together verb | To meet, to gather together, to congregate. |
| give away verb | To make a gift of (something). |
| push through verb | To force (legislation or a plan) to be passed or agreed to or a decision to be reached. |
| show up verb | To appear, arrive, or attend, especially suddenly or erratically. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- You're literally buffering the quit response.
- I'm gonna hear certain things and not hear others.
- You don't want to because it feels so good.
- The question is, why do we quit?
- How can I continue to have that drive?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being kept · was designed · is released |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | sensation, which will · perception, which is · brain which are |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has figured · They've said · has been shown |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 72 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, you're, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: sensation /sɛnˈseɪʃən/, agitation /ædʒ.ɪˈteɪ.ʃən/, cognition /kɑɡˈnɪʃ.ən/, dilation /daɪˈleɪʃən/, misconception /ˌmɪs.kənˈsɛp.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: adrenaline /əˈdɹɛnəlɪn/, autonomic /ˌɔt.əˈnɑm.ɪk/, noradrenaline /nɔːɹəˈdɹɛnəlɪn/, physiological /ˌfɪz.i.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪ.kəl/, norepinephrine /ˌnɔːɹɛpɪˈnɛfɹɪn/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like dopamine, adrenaline, exhale.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.