Frustration and errors are the signal your brain needs to change

The Short Version

In conversations about learning, willpower and schooling, the same pattern keeps coming up: the moment something feels hard, wrong or frustrating is the moment the brain gets the signal to change. Andrew Huberman explains that errors release epinephrine and acetylcholine, which mark circuits for rewiring, and that dopamine arrives as soon as you start getting things even a little bit right [1][2]. In his episode on willpower, a brain region called the anterior mid-cingulate cortex grows when people do hard things they would rather avoid, and it doesn't grow from things that feel easy [3]. Joe Liemandt of Alpha School builds a whole school around the idea that children should "struggle and fail on their road to success supported by a caring adult" [4]. What ties these together is a change of interpretation. If you read frustration as proof that the process is working, and not as proof that you are failing, you keep going through the exact stretch where change happens. If you read it as failure, you tend to quit just before it pays off.

Table of contents

What They Said

Huberman on learning: errors are the trigger, not a side effect

In two versions of his episode on learning through failure, movement and balance, Huberman makes what he calls a highly underappreciated claim. The brain does not rewire just because you have an experience. It rewires when something tells it that what you are doing isn't working [1][2]. In his words: "The way to create plasticity is to send signals to the brain that something is wrong, something is different and something isn't being achieved" [1].

He starts from the idea that we carry internal maps of the world. When you reach for a pen, your maps of sensory space and motor space are merged, so you know how far to reach and how hard to grip, and you rarely miss [1][2]. "The way to create plasticity is to create mismatches or errors in how we perform things," he says [1]. A mismatch between what you intended and what happened is the only reason those maps would ever need updating.

Before the mechanism, he corrects a popular belief: "it's a falsehood that everything that we do in experience changes our brain" [1]. The brain changes when "certain neurochemicals, namely acetylcholine, epinephrine and dopamine, are released in ways and in the specific time that allow for neural circuits to be marked for change and then the change occurs later during sleep" [1]. So the practical question becomes what releases those chemicals, and his answer is errors.

He goes directly at the emotion most people treat as a stop sign. "The brain doesn't even understand frustration as an emotional state. The brain understands the neurochemicals that are released namely epinephrine and acetylcholine" [1]. Epinephrine raises alertness. Acetylcholine narrows attention onto the error margin, the gap between what you are doing and what you want to do [1][2]. Then comes the part that gets people through: dopamine arrives "when we start to approximate the correct behavior just a little bit. And we start getting a little bit right" [1]. His summary line is blunt: "And so errors are the basis for neuroplasticity and for learning" [1].

He draws a sharp consequence for how people behave: "humans do not like this feeling of frustration and making errors. The few that do do exceedingly well in whatever pursuits they happen to be involved in. The ones that don't generally don't do well. They generally don't learn much" [1]. Then he asks the question behind the whole argument: "if you think about it, why would your nervous system ever change?" [1] A system that already works has no reason to rebuild itself.

Quitting also has a biological cost. If you channel the frustration into drilling deeper, you set up plasticity to work for you. If you walk away at that moment, plasticity still happens, but it rewires you around whatever comes next, which is usually feeling miserable [1][2]. In the longer episode, Huberman calls staying with the process a bit past the point of frustration the most important thing for adult learning [2].

Huberman on flow, exercise and "muscle memory"

The longer episode adds several corrections that sharpen the point [2]. First, he rejects the idea that learning happens best in flow: "flow is an expression of what we already know how to do. It is not a state for learning" [2]. Flow feels good because nothing is going wrong, and that is exactly why it doesn't trigger change.

Second, he says ordinary exercise maintains the nervous system but doesn't change it. Exercise is great for the heart, strength and bone density, but going through your usual workout doesn't open plasticity. Behavior changes the brain only when it differs enough from what you already do well [2]. He also separates the burn of the last rep in a gym set, which he calls a distinct neuromuscular phenomenon, from what neuroplasticity actually requires [2].

Third, he dismisses "muscle memory" as a concept: "Muscles are dumb. The information for motor patterns is stored in the neurons and their firing patterns, so your ability to walk is not muscle memory. It's neural memory" [2]. The error signal has to reach neurons, and only a real mismatch does that.

The prism-glasses experiments: errors are the teaching signal

Huberman's main evidence comes from the lab of his colleague Eric Knudsen [1][2]. In a brain structure called the superior colliculus, maps of visual, auditory and motor space are stacked and aligned, so a sound 15 degrees to your right makes you look and reach there without thinking [1][2]. Subjects wore prism glasses that shifted the visual world, so a pen slightly off center looked far to the right. At first they reached for the wrong spot. Young subjects adjusted within a day or two. Older subjects took much longer, and some never adjusted [1][2].

The key detail is what drove the change. According to Huberman, the signal wasn't the prisms or the displaced image. It was the missed reaches, the errors telling the nervous system that something wasn't working [1][2].

The same lab found two ways adults could catch up with young brains, and both are about how errors are delivered.

Incremental errors. Instead of shifting the world by a large amount at once, the researchers shifted it by about 7 degrees, then 14, then 28 [1][2]. Adults could tolerate those smaller errors and stack them into a large overall change. Huberman's takeaway: "Put simply incremental learning as an adult is absolutely essential" [1]. In practice, that means short, focused learning bouts on small pieces of information, not cramming [1][2].

High contingency. When adult subjects had to use the shifted cues to find food, their plasticity became as dramatic and robust as a young subject's [1][2]. "How badly we need or want the plasticity determines how fast that plasticity will arrive" [1]. Going through the motions isn't enough. When something truly matters, such as eating or earning a living, the nervous system reshapes itself quickly [1]. In the longer episode, he links this to addiction: while sympathizing with its biological component, he notes that massive change becomes possible when people truly need it from within [2]. He also stresses that all these chemicals come from stores already in our brains, and the task is learning how to tap them [2].

There are limits. "If someone puts a gun to my head and says learn conversational French in the next 120 seconds," he says, pressure won't help, "because I can't stuff in all the knowledge all at once" [1].

How long to stay frustrated: 7 to 30 minutes

Huberman puts numbers on the productive struggle. Learning happens inside roughly 90-minute ultradian cycles. Your mind drifts for the first five to ten minutes, focus tends to kick in around 10 to 15 minutes, and you get perhaps an hour of tunnel-vision work before attention starts to flicker [1][2]. Inside that window: "You want to keep making errors for this period of time that I'm saying will last anywhere for about seven to 30 minutes it is exceedingly frustrating but that frustration it liberates the chemical cues that signal that plasticity needs to happen" [1].

The payoff is delayed, which is part of why people misread the struggle. "When we come back a day or two later in a learning bout after a nap or a night or two of deep rest. Then what we find is that we can remember certain things and the motor pathways work and we don't always get it perfectly but we get a lot of it right whereas we got it wrong before" [1]. He is emphatic that this isn't "some little hack or trick"; "it's really about trying to cue the nervous system that something needs to change" [1].

His personal example is his free throws, which he describes as terrible at age 45. He shoots until he hits frustration, then keeps going for somewhere between 10 and 100 more attempts [2]. He doesn't consciously analyze his knees or fingers, because the motor system largely teaches itself if you get the reps in. The condition is that you don't keep piling on new kinds of errors that confuse it; isolating errors in one aspect of a skill is what signals plasticity [2]. He was also teaching himself the sign language alphabet, and for an instrument he calls 7 to 30 minutes of full attention a significant stimulus [2]. Most people can tolerate one to three such bouts a day [2].

The benefit spreads beyond the skill itself. "Plasticity is a state of the brain and nervous system," he says, and after a session you stay in a heightened learning state for at least an hour, when you could read, study a language or even work on something in therapy [2].

Attaching dopamine to the frustration

This is where interpretation starts to matter chemically. Dopamine responds to hardwired rewards such as food and sex, but it is also highly subjective: it tracks what we believe is good for us [1][2]. Huberman describes it as a molecule of motivation, released when we think we are on the right path, and not only a pleasure molecule [2]. So his protocol is to tell yourself that the errors are good for your learning. Doing so combines two modes of plasticity, the error signal and the reward signal, and he says this accelerates the rate of change [2]. In the shorter episode, he describes the ideal as almost seeking frustration and finding some pleasure in it [1]. If you genuinely want to learn the thing, that alone is reason enough to reframe it [2]. He recommends the book The Molecule of More for readers who want to understand dopamine as a molecule of pursuit [1][2].

This is the clearest statement in any of the sources of why seeing discomfort as productive makes persistence easier. The reframing isn't only a morale trick. In Huberman's account, the belief itself changes the chemistry of the learning session.

Huberman on willpower: hard things build the tenacity circuit

The willpower episode approaches struggle from another angle [3]. Huberman defines tenacity as the willingness to persist under pressure and resistance, and willpower as both the drive to do certain things and the ability to resist others [3]. He separates both from habits, the daily routines like brushing your teeth that run on circuits you already have and take little effort [3]. Willpower means intervening in your own default processes, and that takes effort and neural energy [3].

The main character is the anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC), which Lisa Feldman Barrett pointed him to [3]. Several lines of human evidence converge on it. Its activity rises during hard tasks compared with easy ones. High academic achievers show greater resting activity there. Successful dieters show higher activity, which rises further when they resist tempting food. People with clinical depression or learned helplessness show reduced activity. Damage to it is associated with apathy and reduced tenacity in every area of life [3]. Super-agers, people over 60 with the cognition of much younger adults, keep a significantly larger aMCC even though this region normally shrinks between ages 60 and 90 [3].

The most striking evidence comes from Stanford colleague Josef Parvizi's 2013 paper The Will to Persevere Induced by Electrical Stimulation of the Human Cingulate Gyrus [3]. In patients undergoing brain surgery for other reasons, stimulating the aMCC produced a feeling that something hard was coming and that they would push through it. One person described something like a storm in the distance that they knew they needed to go into and could make it through [3]. Sham stimulation and stimulation of neighboring areas did nothing [3]. That is close to a neural picture of reading difficulty as something you will get through, not a reason to stop.

The aMCC doesn't only send commands; it also receives input. Moving your body activates it, and forcing or encouraging yourself to move activates it even more. Reading, listening or learning activate it too, but far more strongly when you're overcoming resistance [3]. It is packed with molecules linked to synaptic plasticity, such as CaM kinase II, neurotrophin receptors and NMDA receptors, which means it can be built up. Because the same structure serves every domain, building it through one challenge should carry over to others [3].

The evidence that it grows comes from a 2006 study by Colcombe and colleagues [3]. Previously sedentary adults aged 60 to 79 did either aerobic exercise or stretching and calisthenics, one hour three times a week for six months. The aerobic group worked up from about 50% to around 60 to 75% of maximum heart rate [3]. The main region that maintained or even increased its volume in that group was the aMCC, along with frontal white matter tracts. The stretching group showed no comparable change, and the researchers weren't even looking for this result [3]. Huberman's reading is that the benefit came not from cycling or running as such, but from what it took to show up: getting off the couch, saying no to other things and pushing into effort people weren't used to [3].

His crucial caveat mirrors the learning episodes exactly: the challenge must involve resistance. If you already love cold showers and ice baths, they won't build more tenacity, though they may maintain what you have. If you already do plenty of cardio, three hours a week may not be a new stimulus [3]. Learning an instrument or a language as an adult, if it's hard for you and you've been avoiding it, should engage the aMCC. Easy tasks and reflexive habits don't [3].

That leads to his "micro-sucks": small, safe things you don't want to do, done deliberately. Examples include an extra set at the end of your usual sets, 100 jumping jacks after a hard run, five minutes of sitting still reviewing what you just learned instead of grabbing your phone, resisting texts during a workout, getting into a cold shower when you really don't want to, or, if you already fast safely, waiting an extra 15 minutes before your first meal [3]. The more you want to do something else, the more the aMCC is engaged. If you're excited to do the jumping jacks, they won't help [3]. The discomfort isn't a side effect of the exercise; it is the active ingredient.

He adds two more points that echo the learning episodes. First, he values endeavors with no finish line. His graduate qualifying exams kept asking questions until he said "I don't know," much like the impossible puzzles in Roy Baumeister's willpower experiments, and learning to keep going in that situation carries over to life [3]. Second, drawing on Alia Crum's work on mindset, he describes a closed loop: using tenacity strengthens the aMCC, which makes tenacity easier to reach next time [3].

Belief matters here too. In Carol Dweck's 2013 study, a glucose drink improved self-control mainly for people who believed willpower is a limited resource fueled by glucose. People who believed it wasn't limited handled one hard task after another without any drop in performance, even without glucose [3]. Baumeister replied with experiments showing that glucose did help across three or more back-to-back challenges, while conceding that beliefs matter [3]. Huberman's own reading is that willpower may sometimes be limited and replenishable, but that it can be drawn on repeatedly without depletion if you are clear on your beliefs about it [3]. How you interpret the strain changes how much of it you can take.

Finally, he points to a preclinical study in the journal Neuron on stress relief as a natural resilience mechanism: when a stressor ends, the relief itself is rewarding and reinforces the tenacity that got the animal through, and adding a reward afterward increased the capacity to withstand future stress [3]. He suggests occasionally, not every time, rewarding yourself with something healthy after doing a hard thing [3]. This is the willpower version of attaching dopamine to errors.

Joe Liemandt on schooling: struggle, supported

Joe Liemandt, principal of Alpha School, brings the same idea into a K-12 classroom [4]. His summary of child development is: "The key to developing a child is that they struggle and fail on their road to success supported by a caring adult" [4]. In the conversation he calls it "the struggle and fail on your road to success supported by an adult. That's what the educational system needs to be and should be. And we do it a lot in sports and not a lot on education" [4].

Alpha pairs "high standards, high support," a framework from Dr. Yeager's book 10 to 25, and it builds the struggle-and-support loop into life-skills challenges such as kindergartners climbing a 40-foot rock wall [4]. According to Liemandt, 85% of Alpha parents said they saw their child do something they thought was impossible for their age [4]. The surprising result, he says, is that the high standards are why the kids are happy: 90-some percent of students say they love school, and 40 to 60 percent say they'd rather go to school than on vacation [4].

His sports analogy is about facing errors directly. If a player loses the ball 20% of the time, a coach works on ball handling, not dunks. School does the opposite: an 80% grade in fourth grade moves you on to fifth-grade material and the gaps compound [4]. "master the basics. Go back. You're not good at dribbling. Let's go back and work on your dribbling skills. That's the sign of a good coach," as it comes up in the conversation [4]. His most concrete example is a student stuck in the low 700s on SAT math who kept making "careless" errors. Once she went back and memorized her multiplication tables, she scored 790 [4]. The errors were information about a gap, not a verdict on her ability.

Huberman, in the same conversation, connects this directly to his plasticity work: "if a brain or a body can execute a particular thing, a movement or a cognitive process, a math problem, there is no reason for it to change. That the error signal is what actually drives the opportunity. for change. And so without errors, there's no struggle, and therefore, without struggle, there's no learning. So I don't see a world where you can teach without a kid or an adult feeling some degree of like mild agitation" [4].

Liemandt's school is also designed to change how students interpret difficulty. Individualized AI lessons remove shame: nobody knows an eighth grader is working on third-grade material [4]. He says the adults' job is to find and remove each child's blocks, such as "I'm not a math person" [4]. His daughter, who didn't see herself as a math-and-science kid, reached the top 1% after he bet her $1,000, and she later said it changed how she saw herself [4]. Huberman names the shift in self-image as the most important piece: "it's that recognition. I can do hard things. Or maybe that phrase should be changed. Maybe it should be, I can do what I thought were hard things" [4].

Liemandt also argues that grit transfers. Describing a student who pursued a demanding passion project: "she was doing what she loved and had to do hard things. And that taught her what grit and hard work and hard things are, which made it easier when she has to do hard things in other domains" [4]. On college athletics, he says coaches choosing between two equal athletes want the one "who's done hard things" [4]. And he frames Alpha's own mission the same way: "we wake up every day on this hard and struggle and say, how do we build a school kid's love, right?" [4]

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

The core agreement. All three perspectives treat difficulty as the working ingredient, not as a cost to minimize. For Huberman on learning, errors release the chemicals that mark circuits for change [1][2]. For Huberman on willpower, resistance is what makes an activity build the aMCC; the same activity done eagerly doesn't [3]. For Liemandt, struggling and failing with support is the definition of how children develop [4]. Huberman even says it in nearly the same words across contexts: without errors "there's no struggle, and therefore, without struggle, there's no learning" [4].

They also agree that comfort and routine don't produce change. Flow is "not a state for learning" [2]; routine exercise maintains the brain but doesn't change it [2]; cold showers you already love won't build tenacity [3]; and moving a student on at 80% only hides the errors that needed fixing [4].

And they agree that interpretation shapes the outcome. Huberman says telling yourself errors are good adds a dopamine signal to the error signal [2]. Dweck's study suggests beliefs about willpower change how much it runs out [3]. Liemandt's school works on removing beliefs like "I'm not a math person" and replacing them with "I can do what I thought were hard things" [4].

A real difference of emphasis: should learning involve suffering? When Huberman asked about suffering, Liemandt's view was that if something can be taught without suffering, it should be [4]. Huberman, by contrast, says he doesn't see a world where you can teach without "some degree of like mild agitation" [4]. These positions are closer than they look. Liemandt objects to pointless suffering: kids being "pounded into a cell they don't want" [4]. He believes people willingly struggle when they're pursuing goals they care about [4]. Huberman's point is about the error signal itself, which he says can be kept small through incremental steps [1][2]. Both reject misery for its own sake, and both accept the productive frustration of getting something wrong on the way to getting it right. The difference is that Liemandt designs to minimize unnecessary pain, while Huberman insists some discomfort is built into the biology.

Direct instruction versus struggle. In the same conversation, Huberman raises the open question in learning science: "should you have the kids struggle or should you just teach them directly? How can you teach them directly without struggle?" [4] Liemandt's school uses direct instruction, worked examples, spaced repetition and mastery, and he says schools of education rarely teach cognitive load theory or direct instruction [4]. So Alpha doesn't make students struggle by withholding teaching. The struggle lies in reaching mastery and in hard real-world projects [4]. That fits Huberman's incremental model: clear instruction plus small, manageable errors, not huge confusing ones [1][2].

Is struggle always good? Huberman adds limits the others don't discuss in detail. Frustration only helps if you are in the right state to begin with; too anxious or too tired and you never reach the starting line [1][2]. He warns that willpower practice can slide into unhealthy stoicism, and that anorexia nervosa, the deadliest psychiatric condition, shows heightened aMCC activity, with the drive to resist food turned against health [3]. Being able to turn the drive off matters as much as turning it on [3]. And he doesn't expect even the most tenacious people to resist constantly, since that isn't advantageous in most of life [3].

Why It Works

The sources offer several mechanisms that fit together.

The chemical gate. Change requires acetylcholine, epinephrine and dopamine released at the right time, with rewiring later during sleep [1][2]. Errors release epinephrine (alertness) and acetylcholine (focus on the gap). Partial success releases dopamine, which lets the changes happen quickly [1][2]. Frustration is how that chemistry feels from the inside [1].

The logic of adaptation. A nervous system that already succeeds has no reason to change: "why would your nervous system ever change?" [1] The prism studies showed the missed reaches, not the new image, drove map shifts [1][2]. Huberman applies the same logic to school math: if you can already solve the problem, "there is no reason for it to change" [4].

Dopamine is subjective. Because dopamine tracks what we believe is good for us, telling yourself errors are valuable adds a reward signal to the error signal, which Huberman says speeds up change [1][2]. That is the mechanism behind the claim that reframing makes persistence easier: the reframe changes the chemistry, not just the mood.

Contingency and increments. How much you need the change sets how fast it comes [1], and small errors that adults can tolerate stack into large changes [1][2]. Both make it easier to stay in the struggle without being overwhelmed.

Balance errors as an amplifier. When you are off balance and have to compensate, the cerebellum signals deep brain centers that release dopamine, epinephrine and acetylcholine [1]. These circuits evolved to recalibrate movement when our relationship to gravity changes, which is vital for survival, "and those chemical pathways are the gates to plasticity" [1]. What matters is novelty: a first-time skydiver comes back flooded with neurochemicals, a veteran doesn't, and a skilled handstander gets essentially no plasticity from time upside down [2]. Huberman says novel balance errors make learning faster and make errors more tolerable [2]. He wonders whether adults' reduced plasticity partly reflects increasingly linear movement, "as opposed to we can engage in the behaviors because the chemicals aren't being deployed" [1].

A trainable persistence hub. The aMCC connects to autonomic centers, premotor areas that start or suppress actions, dopamine reward pathways, and regions that sense the body and the surroundings [3]. It is activated most when you overcome resistance, carries plasticity molecules, and grew in older adults who took on unfamiliar aerobic effort [3]. Huberman recalls Robert Sapolsky's point that one of testosterone's major functions in the brain is "to make effort feel good" [3], another sign that the brain can attach reward to effort itself.

Working memory in school. Liemandt adds a cognitive mechanism. Working memory has limited slots, and anything memorized to fluency doesn't use one. A student calculating seven times eight has less capacity left for a multi-step algebra problem [4]. Going back to the basics, where the errors really come from, frees capacity for harder work [4].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

It applies broadly across domains. Huberman stresses that his movement and balance tools aren't only for motor skills; they create a brain state that helps with language, math and emotional learning [1][2]. The aMCC serves every domain, so tenacity built in one area should carry over to others [3]. Liemandt sees grit from hard projects carrying into academics and back [4].

It applies to adults, with adjustments. Plasticity is high until about age 25 and then tapers rather than switching off [1]. Adults need smaller increments and higher stakes to get the same change a child gets easily [1][2]. For young people, Huberman advises the broadest education possible, then extra effort on whatever excites them [2].

It doesn't apply to struggle you're already comfortable with. Repeating what you're good at, whether a workout, a cold plunge you enjoy or a handstand you've mastered, produces little change [2][3].

It doesn't apply when you arrive in the wrong state. Huberman's term "limbic friction" describes being either too anxious or too tired to engage. Both feel stressful, and either keeps you from the starting line [1][2]. Sleep deprivation, pain, illness, hunger and distraction lower willpower no matter what else you do [3]. Frustration in those states is just noise.

It doesn't apply to huge, confusing errors. Adults couldn't adapt to a large prism shift all at once but could to small steps [1][2]. Piling on new kinds of errors confuses the motor system [2]. And no amount of pressure makes the impossible possible, as in the French-in-120-seconds example [1].

It doesn't apply to struggle without meaning or support. Liemandt warns against pushing kids into shapes they don't want, and he frames the struggle as always "supported by a caring adult" [4]. Huberman warns against unhealthy stoicism and eating disorders [3]. For anyone with a history of disordered eating or a health condition, the harder-things approach to food, fasting or exercise is something to discuss with a doctor or mental health professional first.

What To Do With It

1. Reframe frustration while it's happening. When you start making mistakes, tell yourself the errors are good for your learning. Huberman says this adds a dopamine signal to the error signal and speeds up change [1][2].

2. Stay in the error zone for 7 to 30 minutes. Inside a focused session of up to about 90 minutes, once you start failing, keep going for 7 to 30 minutes [1][2]. With a physical skill, follow Huberman's free-throw rule: when frustration hits, do somewhere between 10 and 100 more attempts [2]. Aim for one to three such bouts a day [2].

3. Make errors small and single. Break the skill into small pieces and work on one kind of mistake at a time, the way the prism researchers shifted vision by 7, then 14, then 28 degrees [1][2].

4. Fix the basic gap behind "careless" errors. Treat repeated mistakes as a sign of a missing foundation. Go back to the equivalent of dribbling or multiplication tables until they're fluent, as Liemandt's SAT student did on her way from the low 700s to 790 [4].

5. Arrive in the right state. If you're wired, use a physiological sigh (two inhales through the nose, one exhale through the mouth) or widen your gaze into panoramic vision. If you're tired, prioritize sleep or a non-sleep deep rest protocol, or try caffeine or breathing with longer inhales than exhales [1][2]. Schedule learning when you're naturally sharpest; most people focus better at 10 a.m. than at 4 p.m. [1][2].

6. Give the learning a real reason. Tie the skill to something that genuinely matters to you, since how badly you need it sets how fast it comes [1][2].

7. Add safe, novel balance challenges. Try something unfamiliar that makes you slightly unstable, such as yoga if you're bad at yoga, a new swim stroke or surfing. Avoid dangerous stunts or inversions without the needed strength and bone density [2]. Use the hour afterward to study, since you stay in a heightened learning state [2].

8. Do one daily micro-suck. Choose a small, safe thing you'd rather not do, such as an extra set, 100 jumping jacks after a run, or five phone-free minutes reviewing what you just learned [3]. Pick the option you want least; if you're excited about it, it won't build tenacity [3].

9. Take on a hard new pursuit you've been avoiding. For older adults especially, the Colcombe study suggests unfamiliar aerobic effort, and Huberman lists an instrument or new language as examples [3]. Super-agers keep doing something hard with a sense of playfulness [3]. Check with a doctor before starting a new exercise program if you've been sedentary.

10. Reward yourself occasionally after getting through. Now and then, not every time, follow a hard effort with something healthy that you enjoy. This builds on the finding that relief and reward after stress increase the capacity to handle the next one [3]. If you teach or parent, pair high standards with visible support, measure progress by growth, and help learners drop labels like "I'm not a math person" [4].

Sources

1. How to Learn Faster by Using Failures, Movement & Balance | Huberman Lab Essentials · Huberman Lab
2. Learn Faster Using Failures, Movement & Balance · Huberman Lab
3. How to Increase Your Willpower & Tenacity | Huberman Lab Podcast · Huberman Lab
4. Joe Liemandt on Alpha School, AI Tutoring, and Learning Faster Through Mastery and Motivation · Huberman Lab