The standard approach to mental health treats the mind like a broken machine: find the part that's malfunctioning, diagnose it, and fix it. Psychiatrist Dr. Paul Conti has spent decades watching patients stall inside that framework. His new book, What's Going Right: A Powerful New Method for Optimizing Your Mental Health, flips the premise. The most powerful tool, he argues, is not identifying what's wrong. It's recognizing what's already working.

In a conversation on the Huberman Lab podcast, Dr. Conti and host Andrew Huberman laid out a practical toolkit for anyone who wants to build confidence, agency, and a more honest relationship with themselves. The core insight is simple but runs against the grain of most clinical advice: start from a position of strength, not weakness.

The truth about what's going right

"There's far more going right in any of us, in all of us, than there is going wrong if we're here," Conti said. "If we're listening to educational material, we want to better ourselves. There's so much more that's going right in us. And it's a good place for us to start because it helps us to be able to look at what's not going the way we want it to be."

That claim is not just a feel-good platitude. Conti insists it's consistent with truth. Most people who are alive and seeking self-improvement already have a baseline level of functioning — they hold down jobs, maintain relationships, get out of bed. That baseline is not trivial. Yet the mental health system often teaches people to overlook it by slapping labels on deficits. "The mental health system really tells us to look at ourselves in the opposite way," Conti said. "To look at ourselves through what is going wrong and to put labels on ourselves that often just make us feel worse or make us feel more helpless or hopeless."

Starting with what's right doesn't mean ignoring problems. It means you approach those problems from a place of agency rather than pathology. You already have evidence that you can cope, adapt, and improve. That evidence becomes the foundation.

Two specific exercises: self-talk and life narrative

Knowing where to start is one thing. Knowing what to do next is another. Conti offers two concrete processes that anyone can run on themselves, no therapist needed.

Audit your self-talk

"What are you saying to yourself in quiet moments when no one else is listening, or when there's a pause in the action in your life?" Conti asks. "What messages are you giving yourself?"

Most people are unaware of the running commentary in their heads. When you actually tune into it, you often find a stream of automatic criticism — things like "I'm not good enough," "I always mess up," or "Why did I say that?" You wouldn't talk to a friend that way, but you say it to yourself hundreds of times a day. The first step is just to notice. Conti recommends simply observing the self-talk without judgment, so you can see the gap between what you say to yourself and what is actually true.

Examine your life narrative

"If you just tell yourself about yourself, or if you're telling someone else about you, what is it that you say? What is it that you say in a reflexive way, and does it match what's real and true about your life?"

People tell themselves a story about who they are: the shy one, the overachiever, the person who always gets anxious in crowds. Those narratives feel like identity, but they're often outdated or incomplete. Conti encourages people to hold their life narrative up to reality and ask whether it still fits. If the story you tell yourself is negative or limiting, you can revise it — not by pretending, but by looking for exceptions and complexities you've been ignoring.

Both exercises rest on a single trait: curiosity. "All we need to bring is curiosity," Conti said. "Curiosity doesn't have to be overly serious or worried. It can be very light-hearted." People are curious about everything except themselves. Rectifying that gap is the engine of change.

The observing self: why you feel like a different person in different situations

Huberman brought up a psychological phenomenon that many people experience: feeling like a completely different person when alone versus when with others. Some people's internal state shifts so dramatically that it seems like they're living two separate lives.

Conti explained that humans are naturally state-dependent — we act and feel differently depending on context. The problem arises when life moves fast and stress is high. "What ends up happening is we're kind of rushing just to keep up with ourselves," Conti said. "When that happens, we become very state dependent as opposed to being able to observe ourselves."

The solution is to develop what psychiatrists sometimes call an "observing ego" — a part of yourself that watches from above, noticing how you change across situations without getting lost in any single one. "To be able to observe ourselves is how we knit together oneself across situations," Conti said. "So we can be aware, I'm different in one situation than another. But there's a whole self that's riding above all of it."

Building that observing self is a skill. It requires slowing down, even for a few seconds, to step back and ask: How am I feeling right now? How am I behaving? Is this the same me I am with my partner or at work? Over time, the muscle strengthens, and you gain a more coherent sense of identity.

True self versus false self in the age of social media

The conversation took a sharp turn into modern life when Huberman observed that social media encourages people to broadcast selective versions of themselves — curated highlights, staged photos, filtered confessions. That behavior blurs the line between who people actually are and who they present to the world.

Conti sees this as a rich area for curiosity rather than judgment. "It's possible a person can be engaged in something that even they themselves know isn't real," he said. "Wanting everyone to see what's best in my life, and to think that I'm doing really well — maybe I'm doing that to hide something. Why am I doing that?"

If you find yourself curating a false image, Conti suggests getting curious about the protectiveness behind it. What are you afraid people will see if you drop the filter? The goal is not to shame yourself into authenticity. It's to understand the fear, so you can choose whether to keep the mask or to reveal more of your actual life.

Why this approach is different

Most mental health content on the internet focuses on symptom reduction: here's how to fix your anxiety, here's how to stop procrastinating, here's how to raise your self-esteem. Conti's method is more structural. Instead of putting out fires, he asks people to examine the architecture of their inner world — the self-talk, the stories, the state-dependent shifts — and to do it from a place of genuine interest rather than desperation.

That's why the book includes worksheet-style prompts. It's designed for people to return to regularly, not as a one-time read. Huberman described it as "a wonderful resource that includes both information and simple worksheet-like prompts that can help anyone through sticking points."

The practical payoff is agency. When you know what's going right, you have a stable base from which to tackle what isn't. You stop seeing yourself as a collection of problems to be solved and start seeing yourself as a complex, capable person who can learn and grow. As Conti put it: "If we're willing to look at ourselves and bring compassionate curiosity, we can bring a lot of change."

What to do today

If you want to try Conti's method, start small. Find five quiet minutes — no phone, no distractions. Ask yourself two questions: What was I saying to myself in the last hour? And what's the story I'm telling myself right now about who I am? Write down whatever comes up, without editing. You're not trying to fix anything yet. You're just collecting data.

Then look for what's going right. Not a self-improvement pep talk, but an honest inventory of the things you do well, the relationships that work, the habits that keep you afloat. Write those down too. Conti says that starting from strength is not just a nicer way to think; it's more accurate. And accuracy matters. You can't build confidence on a foundation of lies, even lies about your own brokenness.

From there, the path opens. Curiosity takes over, and the questions you ask yourself become more interesting. Why do I feel so different at work than at home? Why do I edit myself online? What would happen if I stopped?

The answers will be different for everyone. But the process is the same, and it works because it starts with reality — not the part you want to fix, but the part that's already functioning. That's the part that will carry you forward.