Andrew Huberman: My Exact Routine To Optimize Brain & Body, I Do All Of These Every Day!

1. 0:00 – 2:41

   Intro

   1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman0:00

      Here's the diabolical thing. The risk of dying early if you have bright nights goes up immensely. There have been a lot of studies done on people after six PM on devices getting artificial LED exposure. They live shorter lives, cancer rates go up, they're metabolically unhealthy. But here's the really scary thing. We have a generation of kids that are metabolically sick. They cling to their iPads, they're on devices, but the problem is that most things are designed to make people do less of what's good for them. And we don't talk about this enough.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett0:28

      And Andrew, you're one of the most trusted voices in health today, and we've waited many, many years for this. Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body.

   3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman0:36

      Yeah. These ten protocols are well-established. They're the ones that are going to move the needle the most in terms of one's mental health, physical health, and performance.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett0:44

      Okay, so let's get into it.

   5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman0:45

      So protocol number one, you want to get sunlight because exposure each day to the skin increases testosterone and estrogen in both women and men, and is important for libido. And then the second, and this is really key, is to reduce stress fast. And I'll explain how to do that in a moment. And then number three, working out with weights for forty-five minutes, taking your sets near to failure. It will triple or quadruple your cortisol levels. But a lot of people have been told, "Don't spike your cortisol."

   6. SBSteven Bartlett1:06

      It's the stress hormone.

   7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:07

      But it's a preparation hormone. You're preparing for adversity, but also great things. The next thing, and this is one of the most valuable skills. If you do it for five minutes per day, you will experience a significant improvement in mental and physical health. And then sleeping on your side, very important for offsetting dementia, getting rid of bags under your eyes. But Steven, the number one thing that you need to know about is the moment I started [beep] my life got so much better and I really started to see what I could only describe as miracles.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett1:33

      Andrew, I have this outstanding question that I have to ask you. You don't really talk in depth about supplements.

   9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:37

      Oh, I do. I go ham.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett1:39

       So you can only do five for the rest of your life.

   11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:40

       Oh, gosh. I highly recommend getting a-

   12. SBSteven Bartlett1:47

       This is super interesting to me. My team give me this report to show me how many of you that watch this show subscribe, and some of you have told us, according to this, that you are unsubscribed from the channel randomly. So favor to ask all of you, please could you check right now if you've hit the subscribe button if you are a regular viewer of this show and you like what we do here. We're approaching quite a significant landmark on this show in terms of a subscriber number. So if there was one simple free thing that you could do to help us, my team, everyone here, to keep this show free, to keep it improving year over year and week over week, it is just to hit that subscribe button and to double check if you've hit it. Only thing I'll ever ask of you. Do we have a deal? If you do it, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll make sure every single week, every single month, we fight harder and harder and harder and harder to bring you the guests and conversations that you want to hear. I've stayed true to that promise since the very beginning of The Diary of a CEO, and I will not let you down. Please help us. Really appreciate it. Let's get on with the show. [upbeat music]

2. 2:41 – 4:04

   Introducing Protocols

   1. SBSteven Bartlett2:42

      Andrew Huberman, um, we've waited many, many years for this, and now it has arrived. This is your long-awaited book called Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body, and inside this book, I counted roughly fifty different protocols split across seven different areas. Um, sleep, exercise, stress control, nutrition, light, focus, motivation and learning, and personal growth. You've written ten of the protocols you want to focus on sharing today. Can I ask why did you choose those ten?

   2. AHDr. Andrew Huberman3:12

      They're the ones that are going to move the needle the most in terms of one's mental health, physical health and, quote unquote, "performance." Your life will be so much better if you do them.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett3:22

      And do they cost a lot of money to do the ten that you've picked?

   4. AHDr. Andrew Huberman3:25

      No, they could be done either at completely zero cost or on a existing budget.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett3:29

      And do you do these ten things?

   6. AHDr. Andrew Huberman3:31

      Every day.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett3:32

      Every day?

   8. AHDr. Andrew Huberman3:33

      There's one on, on there that I don't do every single day. I take off one day per week, but every single day without fail.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett3:38

      And when you wrote them, did you write them in order of sequencing?

   10. AHDr. Andrew Huberman3:42

       Yeah, throughout the day.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett3:43

       'Cause I... I see.

   12. AHDr. Andrew Huberman3:43

       From, from start to finish throughout the day. Because this is the other thing. Protocols synergize. They ratchet together. How well you slept last night is dictating how well you feel now.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett3:51

       Mm-hmm.

   14. AHDr. Andrew Huberman3:52

       These are gears in a larger system. One moves, the other ones move. And while there is a place for pharmacology and supplements and things that you take, ultimately these gears fit together based on what you

3. 4:04 – 7:02

   When High Cortisol Is A Good Thing

   1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman4:04

      do.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett4:04

      Okay, so let's get into it. What was the first, uh, thing that you drew? 'Cause I saw there was a picture there.

   3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman4:08

      Okay. So in my, my unelegant drawing, but I, I am a, you know, biologist, so we're allowed to do this. I mean, this is essentially a plot of where you wake up in the morning and then where you go to sleep at night, you know. And these are not hours of the day. These are the different protocols. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Okay? So, um, this line represents the healthy cortisol curve. Most people don't realize that, but you wake up be- because of a rise in cortisol. It's literally called the cortisol awakening response. If you've ever woken up one minute before your alarm clock, it's because the cortisol awakening response is heavily entrainable, meaning it can be matched to external stimuli. You want this peak in cortisol as high as possible in the first sixty minutes of your day. Everyone thinks you want low cortisol, but here's the deal. High cortisol in the early part of your day is what provides for elevated mood, focus, attention, your ability to learn. It's also what establishes low cortisol in the afternoon and at night, which is a requirement for falling and staying asleep.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett5:09

      Mm.

   5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman5:09

      So this peak sets up this trough. So you want high morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol. These represent melatonin, the hormone of sleepiness. As we know, if you've slept the night before, then melatonin essentially is low at morning, and the dash line is adenosine, which is a downstream product of, of the use of ATP in your cells. The more you're awake, the more activities you do, the more you think, adenosine builds up. That's why you get sleepy.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett5:35

      Mm.

   7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman5:36

      So what's very interesting is that when you spike your morning cortisol, and I'll explain how to do that in a moment, and you do that within the first hours of your day, you also establish a case where these little blips are stress. Stressful text, stressful event, but they're brief. We always hear that cortisol is bad, but our ability to have big inflections in cortisol stress out and then they come back down to normal is very, very good if this peak was high. If this peak is not as high and this is kind of a, like a medium or, or flat, what they call a flattening of the cortisol curve, you see Shorter lifespan, less recovery from every kind of illness and, and these stress spouts last a very long time because they're riding on a higher baseline

   8. SBSteven Bartlett6:18

      So if your morning cortisol level is lower or flat-

   9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman6:21

      Mm-hmm. Right

   10. SBSteven Bartlett6:22

       ... then if I get that stressful text during the day, it will be a longer cortisol spike, more stress.

   11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman6:28

       Bigger and longer.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett6:29

       Oh, wow.

   13. AHDr. Andrew Huberman6:30

       And not only that, but there's an indirect but very important interaction between cortisol and melatonin. Your sleepiness hormone doesn't come on and function as well.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett6:38

       Mm-hmm

   15. AHDr. Andrew Huberman6:39

       And so sleep gets very disrupted. So a lot of people think, "Oh, I don't want my morning cortisol high." And a lot of women in particular have been told, "Don't spike your cortisol. It's gonna lead to excess visceral fat, moon face, et cetera." There's this, a condition called Cushing syndrome, which is a massive overproduction of cortisol. Very rare condition. I mean, it happens, but most people are not dealing with that, right? Most people's morning cortisol is too low and their afternoon and nighttime cortisol is

4. 7:02 – 8:15

   Why Hydration Matters

   1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman7:02

      too high.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett7:02

      How do they know this stuff? Like, how do they test this?

   3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman7:05

      This healthy curve as it's called, um, was measured through just consistent blood draws around the 24-hour cycle, and then it's been looked at in response to everything from caffeine to cold plunges to exercise to sunlight, and there's this very... So protocol number one is hydrate.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett7:21

      Okay.

   5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman7:21

      Your mind is exceedingly more sharp when you're well-hydrated, and it actually helps boost your morning cortisol. There's a very interesting interaction between when the bladder being emptied as, uh, usually after people wake up, they use the, the restroom, they urinate, and then hydrating, and there's an, I'll talk about this a few times, but there's an ascending pathway along the vagus nerve that serves to wake up the brain, and part of that has to do with hydration first thing in the morning. You awake from bed to urinate in the middle of the night because of an arousal phenomenon of hydration and the bladder being full.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett7:52

      When you say hydrate, uh, do you mean electrolytes or just water?

   7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman7:55

      16 to 32 ounces of good clean water is fine. If you wanna add electrolytes, great.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett7:59

      How much is that? Is that a cup or is that a-

   9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman8:01

      Um, this is 16 ounces, maybe 18 ounces. Yeah.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett8:04

       Okay, so like a big, a big mug.

   11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman8:05

       Yeah. You wanna consume about 80 ounces of water throughout your day. It's a lot, but you don't wanna cons- basically everything you wanna do in the early part of the day, you want to do less in the evening part of your day.

5. 8:15 – 13:38

   Why Morning Sunlight Matters

   1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman8:15

      The next thing, and this is really key, it could have gone first, but you want to view sunlight or a 10,000 lux artificial light. I could spend three hours talking about this, but I'll keep it really brief. When you view sunlight, there's this beautiful phenomenon. It activates these melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive ganglion cells, you know, the major focus of my work for many, many years, so I'll resist saying more. They literally extend physical wires that we call axons into your hypothalamus. Your master circadian clock resides there. We call that your suprachiasmatic nucleus, and when you view low solar angle sunlight, sun low in the sky, there's an abundance of, yes, UV, but it's lower when it's low in the sky. You actually can look at the morning sun more easily than you can the overhead sun. Why? The morning sun looks more yellow, orange or even some red tones-

   2. SBSteven Bartlett9:00

      Mm-hmm

   3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman9:00

      ... compared to the overhead sky. Well, the light coming from the sky is the same, right? But the specific wavelengths of light, as we call them, that are coming from the sun when it's low in the sky are the optimal stimulus for these melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive cells that tell your central clock it's time to wake up. The day is beginning. Okay. There's also something incredible that happens if you get bright light in your eyes in that first ideally 30 minutes, but s- even 60 minutes of your day, which it, there are two pathways by which your brain's circadian clock wakes you up. One is it sends signals through peptides it releases and neural signals, but it's able to activate what we call the HPA axis, hypothalamus pituitary gland, which is sort of hangs outside the brain, and then adrenals. You release adrenaline. There's a unique window that passes after about an hour following waking, where your suprachiasmatic clock can trigger an alternate pathway that literally goes down your spinal column and triggers your adrenals to release additional cortisol. In fact, viewing sunlight in the first hour of your day takes this peak. Here's what it would look like if you didn't view bright light in the first hour of your day. It would be here, which is bad, and your stress responses then would be bigger and longer. This increase in cortisol is driven by viewing sunlight. Now, when I say sunlight, people say, especially in the UK, they'll say, "There's no sun where I live."

   4. SBSteven Bartlett10:25

      Mm-hmm.

   5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman10:25

      Okay, this could easily se- say daylight. Why? Because there's always daylight out. If you look at how bright it is on an overcast day in the middle of December, even in the UK at 8:00 AM versus midnight the night before, it's different.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett10:42

      Mm-hmm.

   7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman10:42

      You know, it's obvious. When there's overcast skies, less of the long wavelength light, the oranges and reds are coming through. But you want daylight in your eyes in the first hours of your day. Go out on your balcony if that's all you can do. If you're in a car, roll down the window. It's not good to try and do this through a window or windshield. There's so much data showing that spiking your morning cortisol this way establishes low cortisol and high sleepiness hormones, let's call them, at night, which is great, buffers stress, and moreover, kickstarts your immune system to protect you against bacteria and viruses you can encounter during the day. It is great for your metabolism, mood, ability to learn, and on and on. And in the book I explain a number of different ways how this peak relates to this trough if people are interested. But if you don't have access to sunlight or daylight, having a, using a 10,000 lux artificial light can be very beneficial. These 10,000 lux lights have been shown to significantly offset the symptoms of seasonal affective disorder, et cetera. But what we're finding from this huge study from the UK Biobank is that you want bright days and you want dark nights, and they're additive. So having bright days is great for your mental health and physical health along a huge number of parameters, significantly improves them. But having dark, even if you were in dim light all day, making it dark at night, people are healthier. The risk of dying early if you have bright nights goes up immensely, and we don't talk about this enough If you don't have access to enough daylight, like you wake up before the sun comes out and you're up for two hours, let's say, before the sun comes out, I highly recommend getting a 10,000 lux artificial light

   8. SBSteven Bartlett12:17

      And last time we spoke, you took me outside after the conversation and you had an app on your phone that-

   9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman12:21

      Right. Light meter. So I have no relation to the app, but I use it

   10. SBSteven Bartlett12:24

       And that is able to tell you how much lux of light you're getting at the moment

   11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman12:27

       Yes, but it's additive. So one thing that's important to note is, let's say you miss a day, right? The next day, get outside for twice as long. How long should you do it? On a very clear morning with the sun rising, and by the way, you don't need to see the sun cross the horizon. You can just wait till it's elevated, but it's low in the sky. People who are concerned about UV damage should know that when the sun is low in the sky, the UV index is much lower, and there's a reason for that. It's a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering. Sunrises and sunsets are very beautiful and colorful. When the sun's overhead, it's hard to look at. It's this big ball of light. It's so bright because you're getting all the wavelengths, the UV all the way out to the infrared coming at you in more or less equal intensities. When the sun is low in the sky, the UV is, it's not completely scattered, but not as much of that is, is reaching your eyes. Much lower risk of sunburn, much lower risk of eye damage, and so on. So here's the diabolical thing. Your screens are not nearly bright enough to kickstart this increase in cortisol in the morning, but they are very capable of increasing your cortisol levels at night because the, this low level of cortisol makes you vulnerable to big increases in cortisol. It's a little bit of a detail that I explain

6. 13:38 – 19:09

   How Light Can Boost Metabolism

   1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman13:38

      in the book, but yeah

   2. SBSteven Bartlett13:39

      I was gonna say, on this point, is it just exposing my eyes to the light or d- does my body need to, to be exposed to it?

   3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman13:44

      Great. Great point. And one of the protocols in there, it's not one of the ten I listed, is about the importance of getting sunlight on as much of your skin as possible, as is socially appropriate. Uh, beautiful work from Glenn Jeffrey's lab at University College London. You're not gonna believe this. They do a glucose tolerance test. So they fast people, they have them drink a glucose drink. They measure how fast, uh, blood sugar rises. And if they shine red light, so long wavelength is, red is long wavelength light. So-

   4. SBSteven Bartlett14:09

      Like that, like that?

   5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman14:10

      Yeah, like this would be medium wavelength 'cause it's yellow. A red would be, um... So this is probably, I'm guessing, somewhere between 500 and 600 nanometers of light, and red would be probably somewhere between 580 and 700, and then infrared goes out further, you know, into the 800s and thousand. The sun emits all of those. Okay, so this is long wavelength light. Okay. So they shine long wavelength light on people's backs, and they do the glucose tolerance test and, and they observe a more than 25% reduction in the peak, and they also look at the rate of rise of blood glucose. It's buffering blood glucose rise, which we know is a good thing.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett14:46

      Just to summarize, they shine red light on someone's back while they have a glucose shot, and their glucose spike is lower?

   7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman14:51

      That's right, and you can do this onto bare skin or you can do it through a T-shirt. Turns out that these people's metabolism rose significantly. Why? How? Well, long wavelength light can actually go into and through your body. It c- it gets absorbed and it can go about eight centimeters into the body, red light. Long wavelength light of infrared can pass all the way through the body. They show that beautifully in this study. You say, "That's not good." No, it's fantastic because along the way, it makes conformational changes in the way that your mitochondria handle the electrons basically. This long wavelength infrared light that comes from the sun, it's the heat that you feel from the sun or from a long wavelength light device, allows... It's so amazing. It actually allows your mitochondria to, to function more effectively, more efficiently. Now, it's not to say that short wavelength light, blues and greens and ultraviolet light are bad. We need ultraviolet light.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett15:47

      Uh-huh.

   9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman15:47

      We need it on our skin to make vitamin D. What you want is full spectrum balanced light, but not so much UV that you get a sunburn, and you don't want a lot of short wavelength light in the absence of long wavelength light. Best way to do that, sunlight in the early and later part of the day 'cause the UV index is low. You're getting the full spectrum. Indoor LED lights like this, which we all spend a lot of time under, there's now evidence from, from Glenn Jeffrey's lab and others that it actually may damage the mitochondria. We talked about melatonin coming, coming from the pineal gland that makes you sleepy at night. You also have melatonin in most all of the cells of your body, and there it doesn't make you sleepy. It serves as an antioxidant. But it's sort of captured, and the way to liberate it is through long wavelength light. So you have a protective mechanism that's kicked on with long wavelength light that protects you, protects you against the oxidative stress and damage to cells.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett16:38

       Mm-hmm.

   11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman16:38

       And this has many, many positive effects. So Glenn's lab has done experiments where they literally take out a light like this and they have people look at it like this for one to three minutes a couple times a week. They look at people different ages, different eye conditions. He's a serious vision scientist, right? He's not, he's not a biohacker. He's not s- he's has no interest in commercial products actually, although sometimes I wish he did.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett17:00

       [laughs]

   13. AHDr. Andrew Huberman17:01

       People over 40 who experience age related vision loss, we all do a little bit, experience improvements in vision when they do this simple thing. And why would that be? Well, it turns out that your photoreceptors, which absorb light and convert it into electrical signals that allow you to see, are the most mitochondrial rich and metabolically active cells in your entire body. Now, biologists love to play this game where they go, "Your tongue is the most metabolically active." Then they go, "No, your..." You know, everyone makes a claim on this. The photoreceptors, my friends, are the most metabolically active cells in your entire body, so they have a ton of mitochondria and they need to protect themselves against the oxidative damage that comes with generating a bunch of, of downstream products from ATP. So long wavelength light is what protects us in this. So you can see significant improvements in vision for people that view long wavelength light couple times a week, but only in people older than 40, and get this, only in people that do that in the first three hours of their day.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett17:58

       What?

   15. AHDr. Andrew Huberman17:59

       Yes. Your eyes and your body and brain are not the same at this first third of your day versus this middle third of your day versus the last third of your day and at night. They're not. Your sensitivity to bright light causing bad effects on you after sundown Increases, not immediately, but it increases gradually. Your need for bright light in your eyes in the early part of the d- of the day is immense. You need this. You, you want this. And if you miss a day, get out the next day and view some more light. You asked will light to other parts of the body work? Not for setting this system in motion, but it's a great idea to get out two to three times per week when the UV index is low. You can just look on your phone, what's the UV index? And it j- in general, be the earlier the, or the later half of your day when the UV index is lower, and to get out and get some light onto your skin. You don't have to be naked or in a swimsuit. Great if you are, and that's appropriate, but you can also just wear a T-shirt because the long wavelength light will go all the way through. So Glenn Jeffrey and Robert, uh, Roger Seheult, he's a physician who talks about the immense benefits of getting sunlight onto the skin for getting over disease, for sta- for enhancing immune system function

7. 19:09 – 21:14

   Why Sunlight Is A Powerful Health Tool

   1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman19:09

      and on and on.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett19:10

      Can you... 'Cause there's gonna be a lot of people right now that are-

   3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman19:12

      Yeah

   4. SBSteven Bartlett19:12

      ... gonna go buy a red light lamp and-

   5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman19:13

      Not necessary.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett19:14

      Not necessary?

   7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman19:15

      No. Sunlight. Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd album.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett19:18

      Yeah.

   9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman19:18

      Pass sunlight through a prism, it bends the light, and you see the rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. But also in that sunlight is ultraviolet light. Some UVB exposure each day to the skin increases testosterone and estrogen in both women and men, and is important for libido. It actually reinforces romantic relationships for reasons other than, uh, sexual interactions, um, attractiveness, et cetera. Strong effects. So sunlight has it all. What you don't want is to go outside when there's so much UV that you get a sunburn, and you don't want to think that, you know, red light's the only light you need. You want that warmth from, from the sun. And it gets better because... And notice I'm, I'm sort of like, "It gets better," like a salesman. I'm selling nature, okay? I'm telling you, when you go outside and there's a lot of greenery, greenery reflects long wavelength red and infrared light. Throw on some infrared goggles, and you're not gonna do this, but you look and they, all that stuff would be glowing white in those goggles. Greenery reflects down infrared light. How do you know it reflects light? I'm stealing Ro- Roger's words as I say this, but where's the coolest place to be on a hot day? Under a tree. Why is that? Because it's reflecting the heat, the infrared light.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett20:30

       Mm-hmm.

   11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman20:30

       But when you're out in greenery, you're getting all that long wavelength light, and it bounces around and it goes through you. So get out into nature. Walk outside. If you work at this, uh, work and live in a city, get outside. Take off a brimmed hat because you do want the, the sun getting down onto your, onto your face. People are so terrified about accelerating aging based on UV, but we're not talking about baking yourself in UV light all day. The, the health benefits of this are immense. There's a Swedish study that actually showed that the more sunlight people got, the longer they lived. In fact, smokers who got a lot of sunlight, this isn't my favorite study, but-

   12. SBSteven Bartlett21:04

       [laughs]

   13. AHDr. Andrew Huberman21:04

       ... um, but we have to admit it's there, lived longers than non-smokers who didn't get enough sunlight. There... And there are other things, too, like exercise, et cetera. But-

   14. SBSteven Bartlett21:12

       There'll-

   15. AHDr. Andrew Huberman21:12

       Don't smoke, but get sunlight.

8. 21:14 – 24:18

   How To Offset Night Shifts And Screen Time

   1. SBSteven Bartlett21:14

      There'll be a lot of night shift workers listening.

   2. AHDr. Andrew Huberman21:16

      I have a section specifically for night shift workers because here are the two scariest things. Night shift workers live shorter lives, cancer rates go up, they're metabolically unhealthy, and it's very hard to mitigate. But I provide some tools specifically for night shift workers and for jet lag, by the way, because people travel. Here's the really scary thing. You and I qualify as night shift workers because the studies on night shift work, barring some of the more extreme ones, was most of them were on how many people after 6:00 PM, right, are on devices getting artificial LED exposure or doing activities besides eating and socializing with their family or in bed. If you work at night at home, you're still a night shift worker. You don't have to work all night to be a night shift worker. So we have a generation of kids that are metabolically sick. And I don't like to be one of these, like, fearmonger people, but here's the cool thing. I'm gonna skip 'cause we're onto this. I'm gonna skip to number six.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett22:18

      Okay.

   4. AHDr. Andrew Huberman22:18

      Okay? As the sun is going down, you don't have to watch the sunset. That would be cool to watch the sun-

   5. SBSteven Bartlett22:24

      Yeah

   6. AHDr. Andrew Huberman22:24

      ... everyone loves sunsets, but try and get some daylight in your eyes in the late afternoon or evening. If you're going to be working indoors from, like, after lunch until nightfall, try and get near a window. Do your best. Go out on a balcony. Take a quick walk around the building. Do what you can to get some sunlight in your eyes without sunglasses. When you get some sunlight in your eyes in the late part of your day, let's just say in the last third of your day, and the clock times don't matter here 'cause we all get up and go to sleep at different times, you buffer y- those cells in your eye against the negative effects of artificial light at night. This is your Netflix occ- inoculation-

   7. SBSteven Bartlett22:59

      [laughs]

   8. AHDr. Andrew Huberman22:59

      ... as I, as I call it. Like, you can be on your computer at 9:00 or 10:00 at night without it damaging your melatonin levels quite as much, without it disrupting your blood glucose levels and your sleep if you get some bright light in your eyes in the later part of your day. But there's one population of people for whom this doesn't work, and it seems to be adolescents. You can't buffer them against the negative effects of screen light at night. What happens if you view screen light at night? You get big bumps in cortisol, and people say, "Well, I can fall asleep just fine after being on my iPad or screen." True, some people don't have as much of a negative effect from blue light at night, but the blood glucose effects and the next morning cortisol effects are the problem. Remember I said high cortisol sets you up for low cortisol?

   9. SBSteven Bartlett23:42

      Yeah.

   10. AHDr. Andrew Huberman23:43

       Low cortisol sets you up for high cortisol. So you've got a population of people, kids, who have, their cortisol is slightly but significantly higher in the evening and at night because they're on devices, and the next morning their cortisol levels are struggling to get up.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett23:57

       Mm.

   12. AHDr. Andrew Huberman23:58

       You know, this is a tough one because teens socialize that way and y- you don't want to take their phones away and they cling to their iPads like, you know, like my new bulldog, Strummer, clings to a chew toy. You know? It's like you can take it away from him, but, like, they hate you for it. So I said view daylight 'cause you can't always see the sun, but even if it's overcast, just get out for a few minutes and take a walk. Your sleep will be

9. 24:18 – 26:17

   The Best Exercise Routine For All-Round Fitness

   1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman24:18

      better.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett24:18

      Mm-hmm.

   3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman24:19

      I feel like I'm giving a lecture in class.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett24:20

      That's amazing. That's what I want. Yeah.

   5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman24:21

      Okay. So we said hydrate, sunlight, and then number three, I know everyone's heard it But if you can exercise in the first three to four hours of your day, you could do it in the afternoon without problem. But there's a huge advantage to doing cardiovascular resistance training in the first three hours of your day

   6. SBSteven Bartlett24:37

      Cardiovascular or resistance training?

   7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman24:39

      Yeah. And, and in the book I devote an entire chapter, chapter two, to exercise, and I explain what I think personally is the best way to structure an exercise program for somebody who doesn't want to be the most jacked but wants muscle and definition and strength, somebody that doesn't need to run a marathon for a record time but wants endurance, somebody who wants to be able to sprint reasonably fast and has middle distance ability too. And it's basically structured, you either lift or do cardio on alternating days. Three days total of lifting, warm up, reasonably low volume of work sets, two to three work sets per exercise, emphasizing compound movements. So not a, like a preacher curl or a tricep kickback. Those are fine, but you're gonna get a lot more bang for your buck if you're doing pull-ups, rows, dips-

   8. SBSteven Bartlett25:24

      Multiple muscles at once

   9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman25:25

      ... presses, multiple joints moving at once as-

   10. SBSteven Bartlett25:27

       Okay

   11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman25:27

       ... compound exer- um, some hip hinge movement, so could be squat, hack squat, some deadlifts. And I talk about how to get specific aesthetic effects in there too. I mean, I'm by no means an exercise physiologist, but I've been resistance training since I was 16. I'm, I'm now 50. I'll be 51 in a month, so I feel great.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett25:43

       Cardio at the start if you're doing resistance training or not at all or?

   13. AHDr. Andrew Huberman25:46

       I warm up for five minutes of cardio and then resistance train.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett25:48

       Okay.

   15. AHDr. Andrew Huberman25:48

       But I do the cardio on alternate days.

   16. SBSteven Bartlett25:50

       Right.

   17. AHDr. Andrew Huberman25:50

       Three days total of cardio. One day of cardio is long and slow for about an hour. One is about 30 minutes at moderate intensity. One is a short one like I did this morning, jumped on the Airdyne bike, pedal easy for a minute, then go all out for 30 seconds, easy for 10, 30, 10, 30, 10, 30, 10, and then you're off the bike. Basically max heart rate training.

   18. SBSteven Bartlett26:09

       Wow.

   19. AHDr. Andrew Huberman26:09

       And the day after leg day, if you do your legs right, take a rest day.

   20. SBSteven Bartlett26:13

       Mm-hmm.

   21. AHDr. Andrew Huberman26:13

       Yeah. But the, here's what the interesting thing about exercise.

10. 26:17 – 29:09

    Do Ice Baths Raise Cortisol?

    1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman26:17

       You notice I didn't say deliberate cold exposure.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett26:20

       Mm-hmm.

    3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman26:20

       You wanna blow some minds? I will go toe-to-toe with anybody on the internet or off the internet. Deliberate cold exposure does not raise cortisol this much. It's amazing to me that the same people that are suggesting moderate to high intensity exercise are saying that deliberate cold exposure raises cortisol. It's simply not true. Not true for women, 'cause a lot of people said, "Is your book gonna be for women and men?" I distinguish between data when there are data showing that it's different for women and men. I acknowledge when there's no data in women. And the data are very clear in women and men, trivial increases in cortisol. Magnificent, huge increases in adrenaline, norepinephrine, and dopamine from deliberate cold exposure, and that those so, so-called catecholamines are great to have rolling into your day. They're the things of alertness and focus. The appropriate stressor for cortisol, appropriate meaning the one that you want, is a psychological stressor. We know that.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett27:12

       Mm-hmm.

    5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman27:12

       Working out with weights for 45 minutes, taking your sets near to failure, going for a run for 30 minutes. So the point being, if you do this exercise in the first three hours of your day, you're getting a big inflection in cortisol. Again, this is what you want. Now, some people can't exercise first thing in the day. They either don't want to or they can't by way of schedule. And if you g- going to exercise in the later part of your day, that's fine. Your cortisol will come back down. You can do some long exhale breathing to slow your heart rate. Andy Galpin talks about that. Take a hot shower, which paradoxically lowers your core body temperature and then helps you sleep. When you heat up the surface of your body-

    6. SBSteven Bartlett27:50

       Mm-hmm

    7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman27:50

       ... you have a thermostat in your brain called the medial preoptic area, and it goes, "Oh, the surface of my body is warm. I should probably cool my core body temperature down," and you fall asleep better. You know, this is like the, the putting socks on effect or the hot bath effect, right?

    8. SBSteven Bartlett28:03

       I assume a massage or something like that also-

    9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman28:05

       Great.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett28:06

        Really?

    11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman28:06

        If you have access to that in the last hour of your day-

    12. SBSteven Bartlett28:08

        Yeah

    13. AHDr. Andrew Huberman28:08

        ... like, uh, we need to learn more about your life. [laughs]

    14. SBSteven Bartlett28:10

        [laughs] My fiancée used to be a masseuse-

    15. AHDr. Andrew Huberman28:13

        Oh, true

    16. SBSteven Bartlett28:13

        ... for many years, so she-

    17. AHDr. Andrew Huberman28:14

        Awesome.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett28:15

        Yeah.

    19. AHDr. Andrew Huberman28:15

        So when you exercise for a few days early, in the first three hours of your day, let's say you do that two times. The next morning you wake up feeling a little bit more willing to exercise. Did your willpower change? Well, in some sense, yes, but what happened was your cortisol entrainment mechanisms changed. Your suprachi- chiasmatic nucleus all day is clocking what you're doing. Let's say you eat like 9:00, 12:00, snack at 3:00, and 6:30. You have a food anticipatory signal. You have ghrelin is secreted, makes you hungry. We are clocks, and the synchronization of those clocks is very, very important. When you exercise at roughly the same time of day, early in the day, you will have more energy to exercise in the first 15 minutes before that. You'll notice you kind of start stirring around. Yes, part of it is cognitive, but a lot of it actually is your brain is anticipating exercise is coming. Oh, cool. That's why.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett29:06

        I-

    21. AHDr. Andrew Huberman29:06

        I u- I teach neuroanatomy, so this is fun.

11. 29:09 – 31:38

    How To Build Willpower And Tenacity

    1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman29:09

       Um-

    2. SBSteven Bartlett29:09

       I, I have a, a brain here in front of me. It does open up in case you want to open it up, but you just reminded me of something.

    3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman29:14

       Yeah.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett29:15

       You reminded me of something that I saw you talk about, which was the anterior midcingulate cortex.

    5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman29:19

       Oh, yeah, yeah.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett29:20

       And I think you described this as being one of the most interesting d-

    7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman29:23

       Yeah, yeah

    8. SBSteven Bartlett29:24

       ... discoveries of neuroscience.

    9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman29:26

       So cingulate cortex, I mean, it's not directly exposed here, but the anterior midcingulate cortex would sit somewhere like there. This is an amazing structure, right? I mean, just to remind people, like when we feel some sort of pressure, social pressure, physical pressure, traffic that we hate, and we decide, "I'm gonna lean into this," like, "I'm gonna compete or I'm gonna push through this internal or external resistance," neurons in the anterior midcingulate cortex are just firing away. And if that area is stimulated, my colleague Joe Parvizi at Stanford showed this, he's a neurosurgeon, people say, "I feel like a challenge is coming on and I'm gonna lean into it." This is the brain area of tenacity. And the amazing thing is it has connections all over the brain with reward systems, et cetera. So it's collecting information about when it gets activated, what's going on in the world that makes you feel pressure, when you feel like pushing back, when you don't. But the best part is it is highly subject to plasticity. People who diet successfully Their anterior midcingulate cortex gets bigger and more active. People who embark on a new exercise program, adding some component of exercise, for me it's mobility work, 'cause I've gotten a little stiff over the years. I know. So when you do something that you don't want to do, that you don't reflexively do, your anterior midcingulate cortex gets bigger and more willing to engage in challenging things going forward.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett30:54

        Yeah, so that's the key point, which is that sets you up to be able to do more challenging things in the future.

    11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman31:00

        That's right. Why would you do deliberate cold exposure? I'll tell you why. Because your ability to sit calmly, or even not so calmly, when your system is flooded with adrenaline and norepinephrine, and to be able to trigger that with cold water safely, like cold shower, getting into a cold ice bath, it's safe as long as it's not so cold, as long as you're not hyperventilating beforehand on purpose, that carries over to your ability to keep your head straight when other things trigger adrenaline. You don't get 10 stress systems. You get one, and stress looks like your adrenaline goes and it comes down slowly. This is a hallmark of stress. Cortisol goes up, go- goes down. Right. So the...

12. 31:38 – 36:08

    What Does Calming Your Nervous System Mean?

    1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman31:38

       Oh, you are prepared, my friend. My goodness.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett31:40

       [laughs]

    3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman31:40

       You should be a university professor, you know? You wanna teach with me at Stanford? So I came up with a model for arousal, right? When people hear arousal and they think, "Oh, it's gotta be romantic arousal," and it can be, but arousal is really just how alert or sleepy you are. So you can be really sleepy, like in a coma, or you can be in full-blown panic. Nobody wants that. But a seesaw is the right analogy here because we have this thing called the autonomic nervous system, and the autonomic nervous system is made up of two parts, parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system. They're in different parts of the body. They both connect to most every organ, but in general, when you are relaxed, that's what we call the reflection of parasympathetic tone going up. When you're stressed, it's the reflection of sympathetic tone going up. But as you get sleepy, your parasympathetic nervous system starts to dominate a bit. And as you get really sleepy, it dominates more. When you wake up in the morning, and then f- if you do the right things like hydrate, get sunlight, and some exercise, well, then your cortisol goes up and you're gonna be more alert. The ability to navigate stress of all kinds depends on your ability to do what I call is control the tightness of this hinge. When you train your ability to think, breathe, stay calm when your system is flooded with adrenaline, and that happens later in a way that was non-voluntary, something happened that you didn't want to happen, your brain immediately flits to the understanding of that place, and you are able to maintain thoughtfulness. You can know to not speak. That's often the best thing you can do. You know to react or not react. In fact, when you get into a cold plunge, one of the beautiful things about cold is that your prefrontal cortex that's involved in strategy setting and making meaning out of what's going on, its activity is greatly suppressed for the first 20 to 30 seconds. Know this about every stressful circumstance. In the first 20 to 30 seconds, you are brain damaged. You are brain damaged. You are, you are in that mode of like you could react physically. Sometimes that can save your life, but most times you just don't wanna do anything. Step out of the way of the car, get away from the aggressor, whatever, but most times you're best off not saying a darn thing. And then your prefrontal cortex slowly starts coming back online, and then you're back again 'cause you ruminate, you know? And-

    4. SBSteven Bartlett34:00

       This is good relationship advice.

    5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman34:01

       Very good relationship advice.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett34:03

       [laughs]

    7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman34:03

       I wish I had learned it long ago, right? Actually, last night I looked on Twitter and I saw something that was both perplexing and a little bit upsetting to me, and I went to sleep like I know how to deal with this, some long exhale breathing, which will slow your heart rate, and we'll talk about that. But I woke up this morning, turns out it was a complete misunderstanding and everything was reversed. But last night I thought about sending a text, but I thought later at night the prefrontal cortex is already diminished. This is why stress feels so much harder to deal with at night.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett34:30

       And prefrontal cortex, we should describe that thing-

    9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman34:32

       Yes. Oh, I'm sorry

    10. SBSteven Bartlett34:33

        ... logic and stuff and-

    11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman34:34

        So, um, frontal cortex, so here it's logical. You have the frontal and motor areas here, and your prefrontal cortex is basically a big patch of real estate behind your forehead-

    12. SBSteven Bartlett34:44

        Right

    13. AHDr. Andrew Huberman34:44

        ... that in humans is greatly expanded compared to in other mammals. I don't like calling them lower, but they have less prefrontal cortex, so they're more driven by their impulses. One of the most incredible things that every child and adult needs to develop is what's called top-down inhibition. You feel an impulse, but you resist the impulse.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett35:04

        Mm.

    15. AHDr. Andrew Huberman35:05

        In fact, the way I've mostly trained my dog, Strummer, 'cause it works, is I taught him at nine weeks of age, put down a piece of food, of course he goes for it, he loves food, and you teach him wait, and he sits there, and you teach him to look at you, and then now he-- I can have him moving toward a piece of food, and I say, "Wait," and his nose can be this far and he'll just stop. He has great top-down inhibition. Is it about food? No. Am I trying to torture him? Of course not. It's so that if I say wait, he can suppress his arousal.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett35:34

        Mm.

    17. AHDr. Andrew Huberman35:35

        This is one of the most valuable skills, and people with frontal damage show an inability to do that, which is why sometimes they're violent or they say inappropriate things. People who are tired, stressed, drunk, prefrontal cortex activity is suppressed. Get in a cold shower, first 20, 30 seconds, it's kinda fun. You're, you're like, "Here I am with less of a brain than I had getting in." And then 30 seconds later you're like, "I can do this."

    18. SBSteven Bartlett36:01

        This explains why you shouldn't-

    19. AHDr. Andrew Huberman36:01

        "I can do this."

    20. SBSteven Bartlett36:02

        ... do things tired.

    21. AHDr. Andrew Huberman36:03

        Don't do things tired. Don't say things tired.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett36:05

        When you haven't slept.

    23. AHDr. Andrew Huberman36:05

        Absolutely.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett36:05

        Oh my God.

    25. AHDr. Andrew Huberman36:06

        Impulse control is way worse.

13. 36:08 – 38:52

    The Comfort Crisis: Do Hard Things

    1. SBSteven Bartlett36:08

       So when I heard you talk about the anterior midcingulate cortex and that there was this part of the brain that was kinda like the willpower, or you described it then as the tenacity muscle-

    2. AHDr. Andrew Huberman36:16

       Yep

    3. SBSteven Bartlett36:17

       ... it completely changed my relationship with hard things because it made me realize at some sort of like, I guess some conceptual level, that every hard thing I overcome is better equipping me, like when I, you know, curl weights in the gym, to do harder things tomorrow.

    4. AHDr. Andrew Huberman36:32

       Yes.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett36:33

       When I heard other, oh, there's like a neurological, I- I'm making a neurological investment in my future. And then you talked there about doing voluntary difficult things like the cold plunge, whatever, to-

    6. AHDr. Andrew Huberman36:43

       Or learning a new language It can be cognitive in nature. It can be learning to dance, if that's stressful for you, and it can be anything that creates some resistance for you, internal resistance, anything of that sort. This is a, a, a beautiful structure because it's wired into cognitive capacities and our ability to build them, and challenges with that too, emotional challenges

    7. SBSteven Bartlett37:04

       We're kind of optimizing our lives towards comfort though, aren't we? That's like a, a winning formula is more comfortable things on nice padding.

    8. AHDr. Andrew Huberman37:11

       I think Jack Dorsey said it best. There's this great video of him online. It was, it was a small lecture that he was giving where he said, "Any time we exchange ourselves, our money, our time for convenience, we are almost always giving up something that's like fundamentally useful for us neurologically." And it's okay to do. I order food on DoorDash 'cause there's great food and I don't have a lot of time to cook. I'd like to devote my time to other things. I'm trading for convenience. But if you're aware of the trade-off, you're much better off, and the real question is what you're gonna do with that additional time. While I'm against, you know, over-optimization to the point that it pulls you out of life, like it diminishes life, I am all for striving and optimization, quote-unquote, in ways that allow you to lean into the rest of your life with more vigor. I think Arthur Brooks says it best, you know, I mean, we are wired and meaning comes from striving and within striving is some struggle, and within struggle is also the release from struggle, and that's also very, uh, satisfying. Here's the over-optimization thing to me in a nutshell, which is there are people for whom doing two of the things I described for five minutes each per day will experience a significant improvement in their mental and physical health. There are people for whom they're sort of like junkyard dogs. They can live on anything. They have a ton of vigor.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett38:29

       Mm.

    10. AHDr. Andrew Huberman38:29

        And they can be like, "Yeah, I didn't feel that much from like drinking some water and getting sunlight."

    11. SBSteven Bartlett38:32

        [laughs]

    12. AHDr. Andrew Huberman38:32

        Cool. I got you. You're one of those people who can fall asleep in front of the screen, get up, and just keep going on a, you know, a sugary muffin and something like, great. But everyone can afford to take a look at what they're doing now and try and move the needle toward more vigor, wellbeing, happiness, peace by doing certain things.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett38:51

        Do

14. 38:52 – 41:48

    What Should You Actually Eat?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett38:52

       you become more sensitive to the thing when you stop doing the thing?

    2. AHDr. Andrew Huberman38:55

       Depends on the thing.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett38:56

       Okay.

    4. AHDr. Andrew Huberman38:56

       So for instance, if people... Like I talk about nutrition in there and all. We- it's one of the cards. I actually cover everything from the all meat diet to vegan diets, to... I really go into the literature so people can choose. But really if you look at what most people could benefit from doing, and you could do this with vegan or vegetarian, it's a little harder, but the best diet is gonna be the following, right? Not too many calories, not too few. That's individual. You can calculate that. It's an easy thing to do, but I provide a way to do that. You need to get what's, what are high complete protein to calorie ratio proteins. This is a concept I came up with because if you look at the literature, yes, we need the essential amino acids, so that's a complete protein, but you can get that from beans and rice. But to get 30 grams of complete protein from beans and rice, you're gonna consume about four to five times as many calories as is required if you get it from a chicken breast.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett39:49

       Mm.

    6. AHDr. Andrew Huberman39:49

       So this is the, the factor that's kind of obvious, but no one ever talks about. So you want to eat some high complete protein to calorie ratio protein, so, you know, eggs, lean meat, fish, and then everyone knows you need fiber-

    7. SBSteven Bartlett40:01

       Mm-hmm

    8. AHDr. Andrew Huberman40:01

       ... right? So vegetables and fruits. But what I will say is that many people who remove s- starches entirely-

    9. SBSteven Bartlett40:08

       Mm-hmm

    10. AHDr. Andrew Huberman40:08

        ... or remove vegetables entirely will find that they, their autoimmune issues resolve and there are reasons for that, and we have to acknowledge that. But most people should be eating some vegetables and fruit for micronutrients and fiber. Low sugar fermented food, very clear. Justin Sonnenburg's work from Stanford, very clear. Lowers the inflammato... In fact, when they had people eat more fiber, for many people, inflammatory markers went up. No one likes to talk about that, especially not the vegans, but too much fiber can be noxious for some people and pro-inflammatory. So low sugar fermented foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, beet kvass is delicious.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett40:46

        Hmm.

    12. AHDr. Andrew Huberman40:46

        Problem is they tend to be expensive, but you can make your own-

    13. SBSteven Bartlett40:49

        Mm-hmm

    14. AHDr. Andrew Huberman40:49

        ... and there's recipes online to do these things. I don't wanna get into the seed oil debate. Just eat, just use olive oil. It's delicious. It's relatively inexpensive nowadays to get real olive oil. S- small amounts of butter. Okay. Like, like why are we even debating seed oils? It's so dumb. It's like the, the seed oil debate is like the fastest way to kill neurons that I'm aware of.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett41:08

        [laughs]

    16. AHDr. Andrew Huberman41:09

        You know? It's like so dumb. It's like, because the studies are not well done. You're comparing a processed food diet that includes seed oils versus... Or you're talking clean seed oils versus a high meat diet with processed meat. It's a, it's a mess.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett41:21

        Mm-hmm.

    18. AHDr. Andrew Huberman41:21

        It's like as a scientist, you just look at this and you go like, "This field sucks." Like it... Someone wants to have a magnificent career in science, go into the field of nutrition and do some really good studies because the studies are lousy. 90% of them, like you can look at it, you don't even have to be trained in nutrition. You go, there are five different variables here and four over here. This is like what you would call a bad experiment.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett41:43

        Mm-hmm.

    20. AHDr. Andrew Huberman41:44

        So olive oil, the data are great. It's impressive.

15. 41:48 – 43:50

    How Starchy Foods Can Calm Stress

    1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman41:48

       And then starches are great for fueling muscles and glycogen and brain, but you don't want to overdo them. And the way that people tend to overdo starches is by eating starches combined with a lot of fats. So sourdough bread is great. Sourdough bread with butter is even better if you ask me. Sourdough bread with equal amounts of butter and bread, you're starting to get into problems. It's very hard for people to go from like to overeat starches unless they have a lot of fats with them or sugar with them.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett42:17

       On starches, is there an impa- I think I've heard you talk about an impact on your sleep with what you eat late at night.

    3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman42:23

       Many people who don't eat enough starches find that they have sleep issues, and there are reasons for this because we talk about comfort foods.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett42:30

       Mm-hmm.

    5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman42:31

       Typically, people think junk foods when they think comfort foods, but foods that increase glucose, lower cortisol. Hmm, that's weird. Starches lower cortisol, and you want your cortisol low at night. Helps you fall and stay asleep. Now, you don't want to eat too close to bedtime. You also don't want to have gnawing hunger at bedtime. We talked about that. But here's the interesting thing. What is cortisol We, I should have mentioned this earlier. What is cortisol? Is it a stress hormone? No. It's a hormone that's released during stress. But cor- [laughs] cortisol's job is not st- to deal with stress. Cortisol's job is to mobilize energy in the body. When cortisol goes up, glucose is mobilized-

    6. SBSteven Bartlett43:11

       Hmm

    7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman43:11

       ... and other fuels too. So when you eat starches, you buffer cortisol. There's a very clear relationship here. So people who are not eating enough starches who then allow themselves that bowl of rice or a bowl of pasta in their final meal of the day, or a little bit at lunch and at dinner, maybe even a bowl of oatmeal at breakfast, they feel more even psychologically. They have more physical energy. Sometimes people with chronic stress issues notice they stop shaking. People with autoimmune issues sometimes resolve those because your cortisol is buffered.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett43:42

       Hmm.

    9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman43:43

       Because your blood glucose is elevated, and so your body isn't tapping into the survival system to try and mobilize glucose. So-

16. 43:50 – 46:40

    Cortisol Is Not The Stress Hormone

    1. SBSteven Bartlett43:50

       I have this outstanding question that I have to ask you.

    2. AHDr. Andrew Huberman43:51

       Yes.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett43:52

       It goes back to the picture that you drew of the graph. Where is that one?

    4. AHDr. Andrew Huberman43:54

       Yeah.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett43:55

       You said c- high cortisol in the morning is a good thing.

    6. AHDr. Andrew Huberman43:57

       Mm-hmm. Yep.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett43:58

       So what if I pi- pick up my phone first thing in the morning and I look at my worst emails?

    8. AHDr. Andrew Huberman44:05

       In some sense, from the perspective of spiking your cortisol, like, it's a good thing, but can you do it outside while getting sunlight?

    9. SBSteven Bartlett44:10

       [laughs]

    10. AHDr. Andrew Huberman44:11

        At least. Yeah?

    11. SBSteven Bartlett44:11

        I was wondering if it matters, like, how the cortisol comes, because what if I stress myself out in the morning?

    12. AHDr. Andrew Huberman44:15

        Doesn't matter.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett44:15

        I, I really-

    14. AHDr. Andrew Huberman44:16

        Doesn't matter.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett44:16

        Interesting.

    16. AHDr. Andrew Huberman44:16

        The problem is the rumination that comes with stress.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett44:18

        Okay.

    18. AHDr. Andrew Huberman44:19

        Right? So, you know, the nice thing about physical stressors that we control, like a workout or a cold plunge, is that they have an onset and an offset, and yes, they start faster than they end, right? You have a stress, and it kinda carries over, you ruminate. But psychological stressors tend to bang around in our brain a lot and late at night, and they tend to come back. I will say this, I think 2027 is gonna be the year that we close the coffin on this cortisol is bad thing-

    19. SBSteven Bartlett44:48

        So how should I think about cortiv- cortisol? Because right now I think of it as the stress hormone.

    20. AHDr. Andrew Huberman44:52

        It's to mobilize energy.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett44:53

        Okay.

    22. AHDr. Andrew Huberman44:53

        So you can use it.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett44:55

        Okay.

    24. AHDr. Andrew Huberman44:55

        And if you're going to sleep at night, you don't need to mobilize energy so you can use it. You need to rest and reset your body.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett45:00

        Okay.

    26. AHDr. Andrew Huberman45:01

        Cortisol is an energy promoting hormone.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett45:04

        So if I walk up on stage, my cortisol level, like before I go up on stage and there's a big audience, whatever, my cortisol level's gonna go up then?

    28. AHDr. Andrew Huberman45:10

        Yeah, if you're stressed about it, maybe a little bit more, but it's, it's, it's a preparation hormone. You're preparing for adversity, but also great things. There are these beautiful studies from a guy named James McGaugh and Larry Cahill, which showed, do you know that if you want somebody to learn something, you know what you do? You spike their cortisol before, during, or after that thing. Should work. Why not? Trauma does that, and you never forget. All you do is work on trying to remove the emotional load of that traumatic thing.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett45:36

        Wait, so if, does that mean that someone who's listening to this podcast right now in the gym-

    30. AHDr. Andrew Huberman45:40

        Mm-hmm
17. 46:40 – 52:29

    How To Reduce Stress Fast

    1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman46:40

       can focus better.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett46:41

       What about if I'm a podcaster and I wanna be able to ask good questions and use my mouth and my brain, uh, in that context? But not, not necessarily just learning, but performance-

    3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman46:49

       Yeah

    4. SBSteven Bartlett46:49

       ... of my sort of cognition.

    5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman46:50

       So the performance curve basically is inverted U. If you're not alert enough, you can't do what you need to do. If you're too alert, you can't do what you need to do or learn. So you wanna be at the top of that inverted U. And a lot of what learning is about, and a lot of what the anterior midcingulate cortex is about, is getting from I don't wanna do it up to the top of that U, then it's usually about not getting too stressed. Now, I learned the best trick for this, like the two best tricks, and in fact, that will take us to number five. You can use any time of, of day, which is use physiological size to reduce stress fast, okay? So I have a ch- a chapter on stress mitigation, and it's got essentially two components. One is how to limit stress in the moment.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett47:30

       Okay.

    7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman47:30

       Very, very important to know how to limit stress in the moment. And here-

    8. SBSteven Bartlett47:34

       Why is it so important?

    9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman47:35

       Oh, gosh. Because meditation, great night's sleep, massage, social relations, being well-fed, hydrated, all of that helps you buffer stress. But when something happens and your heart rate is too high or you're shaking and you can't organize your thoughts in the way you want, none of that helps. You've gone over the line. You're too far on the arousal spectrum towards alert. And it was about 2016 that I realized I'm gonna take a significant portion of my lab and work on this problem. I wanna find real time tools for mitigating stress. So I started hanging around with people from special operations who sit in ice baths and cold water and they don't actually do ice baths, by the way, in the SEAL teams. They spend a lot of time in cold water during their training. And I started talking to people in performance fields, in particular neurosurgeons, people who deal with life or death circumstances for many, many years and maintain immense calm. One of my closest childhood friends, he's, you should have him on this podcast. It's, his name is Dr. Eddie Chang, and he's a neurosurgeon at UCSF. He's the chair of neurosurgery, and he's brought people out of locked-in syndrome to speak through AI. He's also a bioengineer. He's also been my friend since we were seven years old, and we talk three times a week these days about science, and I've actually visited his laboratory and got to see him take a golf ball sized tumor out of a guy's forebrain while the guy was awake.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett48:51

        Wow!

    11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman48:52

        Eddie is the calmest guy you'll ever meet. Why? Because a movement of less than a millimeter in the wrong direction for him could cost a patient's life. People have ways to calm down in real time. So I teamed up with a colleague, his name is David Spiegel. He's ours, uh, at that time he was our associate chair of psychiatry, and he studies, uh, hypnosis, but clinical hypnosis for smoking cessation, pain management, and anxiety. And I should say mainly Melis Yilmaz Balbon in my lab did the study, where she built this stress lab with VR and stress and that's a whole other thing. And then we did this study where about 100 or so subjects were fixed with, um, trackers that measured heart rate and heart rate variability and sleep, and people were in one of four groups. They either meditated for five minutes a day or they did box breathing, inhale hold, exhale hold for five minutes. Okay?

    12. SBSteven Bartlett49:44

        Like four seconds each or something?

    13. AHDr. Andrew Huberman49:45

        There's a way you can measure it, which is the carbon dioxide tolerance test, like how well you can control an exhale will tell you a little bit about how stressed you are. When you're stressed, you tend to blow off carbon dioxide very quickly, and when you're less stressed, it tends to shift towards long exhales become easier. So one of the groups, uh, and then I'll say what the mechanism is, did cyclic hyperventilation. Some people call this Wim Hof breathing, Tummo breathing, Pranayama breathing. It's big inhales, passive exhales. Repeat it for five minutes. [inhales and exhales] Massively spikes adrenaline, which isn't a bad thing. You're controlling it anyway. Does not spike cortisol very much incidentally. And when you do those exhales, you're blowing off a lot of carbon dioxide, so y- it shifts your internal state and tends to make people very alert. Or they did, there was a fourth condition where they did a double inhale, long exhale, repeat, the so-called physiological sigh. So Jack Feldman at UCLA and some other folks in the 30, 1930s had sh- observed that animals and people, when they're very relaxed, would do this kind of strange pattern of breathing where they would go [inhales and exhales] It's a double inhale, long exhale. Jack's lab discovers there's a brain area called the parafacial nucleus, which is specifically there to generate this double inhale, exhale pattern in animals and in humans. Wild. Well, nature doesn't make mistakes like that. Okay? Turns out there are two breathing centers. One is in, called the Prebotzinger complex, named after a bottle of wine. Pattern of breathing where you inhale, exhale, o- that you alternate. This other structure, the parafacial nucleus, which we all have, is involved in any time you double up the inhales or exhales, and it's involved in breathing while you speak or sing or eat, and it generates these physiological sighs, which it turns out get triggered in environments where there's not enough oxygen or when you get claustrophobic or when you get very stressed, carbon dioxide goes up, your brain senses that, and it triggers the gasp reflex. That double in- inhale maximally inflates the millions, hundreds of millions of little sacs in the lungs, and then when you exhale, you offload the greatest amount of carbon dioxide. So if you just go [inhales and exhales] you're not offloading as much carbon dioxide, but if you [inhales and exhales] that second short inhale takes these little sacs in your lungs, which are like balloons at a kid's party, and they're empty, but they're fluid lined on the sen- so there's some surface tension inside them. They're sticking together. So you go [inhales twice] it's the double inhale that opens those up, and then you offload the carbon dioxide. Now, that's great,

18. 52:29 – 56:04

    How To Increase Your HRV

    1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman52:29

       but the real magic of deliberate long exhales is that they slow your heart rate down through a process called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. This is like the most important thing for anyone ex- interested in stress, exercise, sleep, and wellness because [chuckles] the wild thing is we have this vagus nerve. Everyone likes to talk about the vagus nerve. It's a massive nerve bundle that collects sensory information and chemical information from the organs of the body and sends it up to the brain. Cool, and it's classified as parasympathetic, calming. But you know what's funny? Neuroscientists, when they want to wake up a, a person during an experiment, like a neurosurgery experiment, they stimulate the vagus. A treatment for, for depression is to stimulate the vagus. Guess what that does? Makes people more alert. So it's a mixed nerve. But the really cool part about the vagus is that it's not all ascending. Oh, the m- eighty-five percent of the information is going up from the body through the vagus, but there's another pathway too, and it goes down, and it goes down to your heart, and it controls the slowing of the heart rate when you exhale. Heart rate variability is the slowing of your heart rate when you exhale. You wanna increase your HRV, do a few deliberate exhales during the day. People go, "How do I get my HRV up?" Well, yeah, you do some VO2 max training, right? Like, [chuckles] you know, obviously, you do some max heart rate training, some HIIT workouts, et cetera. You really wanna increase your HRV in sleep and while waking, just do some deliberate exhales during the day because that's the parasympathetic, the calming arm of the vagus pushing down on your heart rate. And all of the groups I described saw benefits, but it was the people who did these physiological sighs that benefited the most. So then I started exploring, well, how fast does heart rate slow down with physiological sighs? And turns out you don't need to do it for five minutes. Do it once. You just go, okay, you're feeling stressed, you're going on stage, you're waiting for a diagnosis, you're, you don't feel... You feel too a- alert relative to how you wanna feel for whatever reason, good or bad. You're about to get married, right? You know, whatever. You just [inhales and exhales] until your lungs are empty, and it's immediate. And I, for me, that was immensely gratifying. Yes, 'cause it's fun to publish papers. We publish it in cell reports, and Melis gets, lets, the lion's share of the credit for that. There were other people on the paper, but she did so much hard work from that and analysis. I was so gratified because I'm like, "Oh, finally." Like if I didn't sleep well or if I'm-- something stressful, even though I slept well, I can calm myself down like, like that.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett55:13

       Mm.

    3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman55:13

       I thought real time tools for stress are what We all need. The interesting thing is that you can also raise your stress threshold, and a lot of the stress mitigation chapter is also about how to do that. We need to train for discomfort so that the little things don't feel so big.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett55:30

       Yeah.

    5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman55:31

       This is also important in survival situations, right? You need to be able to think very clearly about what order of operations to take, what direction to escape through. This is not about, like, setting yourself to tolerate more pain and abuse. This is about the exact opposite. So this is about safety. This is about self-protection. This is about noticing when you're-- when we're alert but calm, we can notice the subtle ripples in people around us.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett55:57

       Mm-hmm.

    7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman55:57

       Who needs our attention, who we really don't like-

    8. SBSteven Bartlett56:01

       Mm.

    9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman56:01

       But we never really realized it. You can notice that

19. 56:04 – 1:00:44

    The Eye Movement Trick To Fall Back To Sleep

    1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman56:04

       stuff.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett56:04

       A lot of people, they wake up at, like, two, three AM in the morning-

    3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman56:06

       Yeah

    4. SBSteven Bartlett56:07

       ... in the middle of the night, and they don't really know why. They don't know how to get back to bed. They start worrying and remune-ruminating-

    5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman56:12

       Yeah, very, very common

    6. SBSteven Bartlett56:13

       Yeah. So what-- They can use this as a tool in that moment?

    7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman56:15

       Definitely. Ten long, long deliberate exhales. There's also this really crazy trick that I put in the book. It has indirect scientific support. You want it? Like, best way to fall back asleep. You wanna hear this crazy... This is so nuts. To fall asleep or to fall back asleep, you need to stop thinking about your body position.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett56:32

       Hmm.

    9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman56:33

       Turns out there's a direct relationship through, through s- a few steps, but there's a dedicated circuit, I should say, between your eyes, their movements, and your cerebellum, which is involved in proprioception and balance and a number of other things. We call, we call the cerebellum the mini-brain, but it's this, this guy back here. We really get nerdy at these hyperfoliated lobes back here. Foliated are just folds. It's just nerd speak for foldy, bumpy.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett56:57

        [chuckles]

    11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman56:58

        It's involved in balance. It's involved in learning. It's actually very important for generating and responding to the error signals between what you're trying to do and, and what you can do. That error signal turns out to be one of the most important things for generating learning, to make errors through genuine attempts, and your cerebellum is critical for that. It's also involved in timing. So you need to kinda turn off your recognition of your own limbs to fall asleep. How do you do that? You know what works with babies? Walk back and forth at a particular pace, and this was defined in this Japanese study, and have people swing the baby back and forth just gently as they do it, and the baby falls asleep. Guess what? Parents figure out the exact cadence [chuckles] with a very small margin of error through trial and error to figure out how to get their kid to sleep. It's like a natural experiment. It's been looked at in the lab. Turns out when you rock back and forth, your eyes move. This is a very, very ancient system that exists in all jawed animals, including us, that as we move through space, walking, running, swimming, whatever, the world is gliding by what we call optic flow. You would see the world blurry, but you have a compensatory eye movement that unbeknownst to you because of a connection between your eyes and these brainstem areas, whose names aren't important right now, and your cerebellum creates a visual slip error, and your eyes automatically offset that error. So when I go like this, the world seems stable, and it turns out there's a pattern of eye movement that can shut down the proprioceptive circuits in the cerebellum-

    12. SBSteven Bartlett58:34

        Which means?

    13. AHDr. Andrew Huberman58:35

        Make you forget your limb position, and it greatly facilitates the speed at which you fall back asleep. Okay, you're gonna close your eyes. Great. You're gonna move your eyes slowly to one side underneath your eyelids-

    14. SBSteven Bartlett58:50

        Mm-hmm

    15. AHDr. Andrew Huberman58:50

        ... then to the other side.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett58:51

        Mm-hmm.

    17. AHDr. Andrew Huberman58:52

        Then up, then down. Now you're gonna move them counterclockwise in a circle-ish and then clockwise in a circle-ish. And now still with your eyes closed, you're gonna kind of point them towards your nostrils. You're not gonna cross your eyes, and you're gonna do a long exhale. Great. That done two or three times generally has people waking up the next morning and like wild. What happens-- what happened is your proprioceptive circuits are shut down. Now, that's kind of fun to do, and you'll see, and it costs nothing, and it generally works. Some people, if they're really, really stressed, it might not work, but this is what I do if I wake up in the middle of the night. I usually go to the bathroom, get back in bed, do long exhale breathing, and I do that, and I wake up the next morning. It really works well. So well, in fact, that there's a company based on work done from two MIT scientists. They have a sleep mask that generates this pattern of eye movements through a little electrode behind the ear. It just like t-t-t-t, and it stimulates the extraocular muscles in just the right patterns. And I tried it, and you fall right asleep.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett59:58

        You're joking.

    19. AHDr. Andrew Huberman59:59

        No.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett59:59

        [laughs]

    21. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:00:00

        And it monitors REM.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:01

        Mm.

    23. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:00:02

        N- You know, we monitor REM through like an Eight Sleep or a Whoop or some other device through changes in heart rate and breathing. This is direct monitoring of REM. It's wild, and it can control your eye movements to induce more REM if you want more REM. There will be a time very soon, like within the next twelve to fourteen months, when because of devices like the one they and others are making, when you're going to be able to say, "You know what? I want two hours of deep sleep. I want two hours of REM across a six-hour night because I can't afford to sleep my ration of eight," and you will be generating those eye movements during sleep in order to facilitate, not force, but facilitate those patterns of sleep.

20. 1:00:44 – 1:02:46

    Ads

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:44

       [page flipping] I've spent the last decade building and investing in companies, and so often the conversation around marketing budgets follows the exact same pattern. The budget gets approved, but then the results don't come back. And most of the time, the creative pitch and the offer is fine. The problem lies with the audience. Ads reach people who will never buy or refer, nor do they have the power to sign off anything at all. And this is why so much budget gets wasted. LinkedIn Ads, who are a sponsor of this podcast, lets you reach them specifically by job title, seniority, company size, industry, the skills that they have, and much more. You're no longer hoping your ad reaches the right person. Instead, you're defining exactly who sees it. And LinkedIn Ads drives the highest B2B return on ad spend across all major ad networks. Give them a try at linkedin.com/diary. And if you spend two hundred and fifty dollars on your first campaign, you'll get a two hundred and fifty dollar credit for your next one just by going to linkedin.com/diary. Keep this to yourself. Terms and conditions apply. I want to speak to the business owners listening and watching right now. I know what it's like to be personally responsible for every decision. I founded my first company at twenty-one years old, and honestly, the pressure can be immense. It's the kind of mental load that takes its toll below the surface. I recently did some tests through our sponsor, Function, which got me thinking about that invisible impact. I found that I had low levels of omega-3s. I had deficient levels of vitamin D, probably because I sit inside this dark room all day, and that has totally changed how I construct my day going forward. I get up in the morning, and the first thing I now do is I go for a walk outside in the sunshine, in part to help my vitamin D levels increase, but also because it helps to reset my circadian rhythm. With Function, you can check your brain health, your aging, your stress, and so much more. They provide over a hundred and sixty lab tests for what is equal to a dollar a day and member pricing on advanced imaging. Head to functionhealth.com/doac to join and use code DOAC25 for a twenty-five dollar credit. [paper flips]

21. 1:02:46 – 1:04:07

    Could A Peptide Improve REM Sleep?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:46

       Did I hear you say that there's a peptide that can help your REM sleep?

    2. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:02:49

       Yes. I have no affiliation to, to it 'cause, um, it's called Pinelon. I, I will tell you, in the book, I do not talk about hormone therapies, peptides, or psychedelics. The book is about what I know for sure. Hormones, peptide therapies, and psychedelics are at the front edge right now. I'm very much involved in looking at the research, talking to the people that are doing these things, and yes, I, I dabble in these things, right? I'm very interested. I experiment on myself, and I'm an adult, I can do that. So Pinelon is very interesting because I found that if I took an itty-bitty bit every third night, I tried this experiment for about a month, I got massive amounts of REM sleep that night, but also on subsequent nights. I hosted a, a Dr. Abud Bakri on my podcast, who's, in my view, is the most knowledgeable physician on the topic of peptides.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:41

       Oh, I saw that episode. It's amazing.

    4. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:03:43

       He's amazing.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:43

       Yeah.

    6. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:03:44

       And I think you guys would have an even better conversation, frankly. But in any event, he tells me that Pinelon is potentially involved. There are some data supporting its use for encouraging pinealocyte health, so the actual health of the pineal.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:58

       Pineal gland.

    8. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:03:59

       Yeah, the pineal gland, which makes melatonin and does other things too. So I think Pinelon is a great tool to use sporadically. I don't use

22. 1:04:07 – 1:13:15

    The Truth About Peptides

    1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:04:07

       it regularly. You know, as long as we're talking about peptides, I do think that there's... I mean, I'm peptide curious, is, you know, I'm from the Bay Area, called peptide curious.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:14

       [laughs]

    3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:04:14

       I have not tried any GLPs yet, but I'm getting curious about very, very low dose tirzepatide or retatrutide.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:20

       I'm peptide curious, but I'm scared.

    5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:04:23

       Yeah.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:23

       I'm scared 'cause I don't, uh, uh, you s- got to inject most of them, right?

    7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:04:27

       It's a tiny little thing-

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:28

       Mm.

    9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:04:28

       You know? Um-

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:29

        What's your take on peptides as like a ca- it's a big category, isn't it? Bloody everything seems to be a peptide these days.

    11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:04:34

        Here's my opinion. It will be popular with some people, unpopular with others. But obviously, as with hormone therapies or anything else or supplements like sleep, hydration, sunlight, exercises, nutrition, like you need all that stuff.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:49

        Mm-hmm.

    13. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:04:49

        The behavioral tools are the foundation. Great things can happen when you build on a foundation. Okay things can happen when you build on non-foundation, but it doesn't last long. But the combination of the two can be pretty awesome, especially if somebody has the means and the interest. So the GLPs-

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:06

        Mm-hmm, which are the weight loss drugs.

    15. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:05:08

        The weight loss drugs. I think retatrutide is amazing. It's not just a GLP. It also hits the glucagon and GIP pathway. This is the one that Lilly invested, Eli Lilly invested hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, into researching, and it's went through phase three. People lost one-third, approximately, of their body weight in about a year or so.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:27

        Is that a, is that a good thing for everybody?

    17. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:05:29

        No. So pe- what's happening is people are... Okay, so the psychedelic community talked about microdosing.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:37

        Mm-hmm.

    19. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:05:37

        That microdosing phrase has been now incorporated into GLPs, and people realized they could bypass a lot of the side effects and the cost by microdosing GLPs. These are anecdotes, so I wanna be clear, and I'm not s- pushing peptides or selling peptides, I say quite comfortably. I have a friend who's very, very skeptical about anything that's not fully FDA-approved. "I don't wanna hear about your biohacking nonsense," this kind of thing. But she has chronic fatigue syndrome, and she talked to me about like, "What can I do?" She's seen all these physicians. Mind you, these are physicians at Stanford. These are physicians at UCSF. Like she's, and she's a very smart, nuanced person. But she has a wall there. She's started taking a very low, very low dose of tirzepatide once every ten days.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:22

        And tirzepatide is?

    21. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:06:23

        It's one of the GLP drugs.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:25

        Okay.

    23. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:06:25

        Like, so we could talk about Mounjaro, Ozempic, but it's, it's not, it's not touching GIP or glucagon. It's mainly just increasing levels of, of glucagon-like peptide, which is this thing that suppresses hunger and appetite-

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:37

        Okay

    25. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:06:37

        ... but also seems to lower inflammation. Yes, there are concerns about vision loss in people who have certain structural abnormalities of the eye. Yes, there are concerns about apathy if people take too much of them. You know, it seems to reduce alcohol craving for people that like alcohol-

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:49

        Mm-hmm

    27. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:06:50

        ... and sugar craving more generally, and it can reduce craving for everything if you take enough of it.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:55

        Yeah.

    29. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:06:56

        Keep in mind, these drugs are ramping up levels of GLP thousandfold or more. Thousandfold or more. The body has never seen this level of, of glucagon-like peptide in the history of humans. And remember, this whole thing was discovered because a smart biologist was studying why Gila monsters, these reptiles that I think are ugly, he probably thinks they're beautiful, only have to eat a couple times a year. It's because they make a peptide called extendin, which turned out to be homologous to glucagon-like peptide-1 in humans. The reason these reptiles don't have to eat very often is 'cause they always feel satiated. Why? Because they have very high levels of glucagon-like peptide circulating. We don't. And it works through two mechanisms. Tells the brain mechanisms for satiety to ramp up their activity, and so your brain is telling you, "I don't really want food." And it also makes people feel full, which is the basis of some of the side effects of nausea and other things. So she will tell you, "Oh my God, my energy's back. My inflammation markers are way lower. I..." I'm not cured, but I feel so much better. Very, very hard to dispute that kind of experience if you're the patient. We could talk about safety and sourcing and, you know, et cetera. But anyway, so people are starting to realize they can microdose stuff. But you won't see randomized controlled trials that are gonna push this kind of notion. You can tell it's terrible for business.

    30. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:14

        Mm-hmm.
23. 1:13:15 – 1:18:45

    What Psychedelics Can Teach Us About Reality

    1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:13:15

       for.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:16

       That was number five.

    3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:13:17

       Ha.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:17

       Number five.

    5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:13:18

       Oh, we got into peptides. Yeah.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:19

       We-- Yeah, we've done a quick few-

    7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:13:20

       Good thing we're not talking about psychedelics. We'll do that another time.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:22

       Oh, gosh.

    9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:13:22

       We won't do them another time. Um, I don't do psychedelics publicly.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:25

        I'm open. I-- Listen, I'm open-minded. I did DM... Look, I don't care. I don't-

    11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:13:28

        Not as open-minded as you'd be if we do psychedelics. No, I'm kidding. [laughs]

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:31

        No. True, yeah.

    13. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:13:32

        Uh, you took, you took DMT?

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:33

        In a faraway land where it was very legal. 'Cause, you know, I sit here and talk about these things and psychedelics, and I actually did work in a psychedelics company for about a year. But it was deeply, deeply fascinating, and I-- the reason I was compelled by it is the efficacy as it relates to mental health-

    15. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:13:46

        Yeah

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:46

        ... and the studies being done out of London around things like, you know, psilocybin and ibogaine and DMT treatments, and I just thought, wow, you know, it's unbelievable some of the clinical data. I'd love to learn more. So I did a psilocybin, and then I did, uh, DMT, and it was really just-

    17. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:14:02

        Wow. I've not done DMT

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:03

        You've never done DMT?

    19. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:14:04

        No, no. I've, I've done, um, clinical, um, MDMA and psilocybin. I think I'm done with that, not because I had a negative experience, but I got what I wanted out of it.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:13

        Yeah.

    21. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:14:13

        And, um, I found it to be immensely beneficial.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:16

        S- the psilocybin or the-

    23. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:14:17

        The, the combination of therapy going in, therapy during, and therapy coming out of, of combination MDMA/psilocybin.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:23

        Mm. Do you know what? It, it's one of the things that made me think a lot about religion-

    25. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:14:28

        Mm-hmm

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:28

        ... was having a DMT experience where what I experienced felt indistinguishable from this reality in terms of the vividness and the, the realness of it, and me just pondering this, this concept that a tiny little inhale of smoke could completely change my material reality. So therefore, I concluded that my material reality is j- is literally, but I mean, tell me if my logic's wrong, is a small amount of chemicals being uninterrupted. Does that, does that make logical sense, Dan? [laughs]

    27. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:14:56

        Yeah. So I, I think about this way too much. I guess we are gonna talk about psychedelics, reality, and religion. Um, couple short statements about this. Uh, you're w- I'm fascinated by this, so I'd love to hear you talk more about it, but here are a couple, uh, ways that I think about it. In a non, um, dismissive way, most all of biology is just compartmentalized chemistry. So whether or not it's the flow of electricity along neural circuits to generate tenacity, for instance, or learning, you're just guiding chemistry in particular ways, okay? That's not a way to trivialize it. It's kind of a way to think about it. There are two ways that you can change brain function, behavior, and chemistry. One is mechanical. I can breathe differently. I can get a massage, right? I could poke myself with a knife, okay? So there are mechanical forces that change our physiology, and then there are chemical forces: pharmacology, things we eat, and chemicals within us, serotonin, et cetera. That's really it. There's no other thing. In many ways, you're absolutely right. It's compartmentalized chemistry and mechanics, and other chemicals are what control that chemistry. And I think organizing one's thoughts sometimes in that way can be helpful 'cause you realize the stress response is really just a bunch of chemicals happening in certain places and so on. I personally am intrigued about the idea of things outside of our conscious understanding in biology that maybe things like DMT give us access to, or maybe just prayer gives us access to, or faith gives us access to. And it comes from my recognition, both as a neuroscientist and just a human who's been alive for 50 years and some change, that our biology and psychology, let's mold those together, are extraordinarily good at accomplishing certain things. But there are certain things that are outside the abilities of our psychology and biology. And if we are asking our psychology and biology to satisfy something that our psychology and biology simply cannot satisfy, we're going to miss out on a lot of potential meaning in life. And what I w- to be very direct about it, like at the point where I decide to really embrace the idea of faith of a God, right? That there are powers outside of human understanding that can be very useful. Everything got better. It, it relieved me of the pressure to control everything internally and externally. And I find it not just intriguing, but absolutely captivating that a force outside of us, some people call it God, the universe, right? Some people might think it's Jesus, some people might think it's something else, might actually hold some power in how we could potentially behave, be better. Be... Wouldn't it be wonderful if there's this thing planted in us or some of us, which is a question about things outside of us that if we were to embrace, could allow us to get to a better place as a species? Why would we think that a, a technology like AI would do that? AI is wonderful, but why would we think that it would come from computers? That's of us, right? Why would we think it would come from anything that humans and only humans could do? To me, the embracing the notion of a God and having faith, which by the way, is about having doubt, but still doing the, the things, the practices, prayer, is like to me, one of the most liberating and educating thing, not just about stuff of God and the universe, but about the human brain.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:40

        Okay. I've got some questions.

    29. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:18:41

        Yeah. I mean, it's like we're not meant to solve this on our own.

24. 1:18:45 – 1:28:34

    Do You Believe In God As A Neuroscientist?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:45

       Do you believe in God?

    2. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:18:46

       Absolutely.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:47

       When did God come into your life?

    4. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:18:50

       Very early, but I was very good at suppressing the notion that it was real. Like, I would pray in private. I would hide it and, um, and not just in bad times. And then I think I lived enough and observed enough hardship. We've talked about some of this on a previous podcast. I talk a little bit about that in the book, but, but I observed it out there too, not just in my own life, that I, I started to realize, especially if you stick your hands in enough brains and you see my good friend Eddie Chang record from the brain of a h- awake human and remove a tumor and save that person's life, and you also realize that brain areas are controlling things 'cause when they're stimulated, that person feels and responds in a certain way. You realize that we're not all meat and potatoes in there. There's something else. But I'm not sure that it all comes from us. It's, it's sort of hard to explain. The, the best way I kind of wriggle out of this is that I, I brought my dad on my podcast. My dad and I for many years had a choppy relationship. We have a great relationship now. He's 83 years old. He's super vigorous. He loves ideas. He's into quantum bi- you know, quantum computing, and he, he's a theoretical physicist, right? And I asked him to explain quantum mechanics. I go, "Yeah, like tell my audience how relativity works." He worked on chaos theory, okay? "Tell us how chaos works." And he said, "I- I'll do that, but you have to understand that one of the most important things about understanding quantum mechanics is that early on you are told and you learn that the human brain can't wrap its head around quantum mechanics with logic, with the, with human understanding. You have to rely on the math." And he says, "Anyone who talks about the quantum field who can't show you the math, can't show you the proofs, is lying." He loves it when people are like, "Oh, the quantum this and the quantum that." It's often is in like the k- uh, meditative communities-

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:20:44

       Mm-hmm

    6. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:20:44

       ... but others too. And he goes, "People throw this word around because very few people ac- under- actually understand quantum biology. There's gaps in... There's some logic, but there's gaps in their logic that the math doesn't line up with, and the math doesn't lie." So what he was saying, and we were having a discussion about God, and he said, "Yeah, at some point if you're gonna have faith in a higher power or God, you have to depart this notion that your logical brain can go from A to B to C, and boom, you're there."

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:11

       [chuckles]

    8. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:21:11

       But in quantum mechanics it's the same thing. But on the basis of quantum mechanics, you can build stuff, you can engineer stuff in the real world like that red light or a rocket.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:21

       Are you saying that you don't know all of this-

    10. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:21:23

        There's no math to prove this thing that I call my, the existence of God. There's no math, and it's not worth torturing yourself over. What I believe is worth torturing yourself over, and there's also great beauty in there, is embracing the practice of prayer, embracing the questions and the, like opening the aperture of your beliefs just for a moment, going, "Maybe I'm gonna just believe in God for 10 seconds."

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:49

        Mm-hmm.

    12. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:21:49

        See what that's like. And I started to experience beauty and experience, um, peace around not trying to control things that obviously were not under my control, not just within me, but in other people, and I really started to see what I could only describe as miracles. And by miracles, I mean I would pray for some indication of what the right path might be on something where it wasn't clear to me, and then two or three days later, something would happen which would like seem almost completely unrelated, and the answer would come in that thing. And then I just locked in. I'm like, "Listen, I'm a disciplined guy when I really wanna be. I'm gonna pray every night before I go to sleep. If I fall asleep, I'll get out of bed and pray when I, if I wake up in the middle of the night." I've not missed a night in nearly three years. I was recently invited up to Stanford to give a talk with Arthur Brooks, who's a lifetime Catholic. He's in mass every morning. You know, he and I have very different experiences of God and religion. My family was mixed religion. I got to sit up there and just say, "Listen, I am gonna tell you that I for sure am the person who's least knowledgeable, least versed in this room. But what I can tell you is my experience with prayer. What I can tell you is what I've observed in myself when I open the aperture for faith." The reason I did that talk is because our former director of neurosciences at Stanford, um, had written to me and said, "I think you should consider talking to this group." And he did some of the most important experiments in the history of neuroscience linking neuronal activity to perception. He really showed that if you stimulate certain brain areas, people perceive things a certain way regardless of what's happening out in the world.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:23:26

        Mm-hmm.

    14. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:23:26

        Like there's a brain area I could trigger right now, and I could show you a movie of a bunch of dots moving up, and everyone here would be like, "They're moving up." And if I tickled the right neuron in your brain, you'd say, "They're going down."

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:23:38

        Hmm.

    16. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:23:38

        And I'm like, "That's wild." Then I turn it off, and you'd say, "Oh yeah, of course, they're going up." Your understanding of the world is an abstraction that occurs inside your skull on the basis of photons that come in through your eyes, sound waves that hit your ears, mechanical forces that hit your skin, and chemicals that go in your nostrils and in your mouth, and then you create, you abstract reality in here. Now, the laws of physics dictate how those things, like photons have properties, sound waves have properties, and those are converted, they're transformed into signals, but then you abstract the world with enough accuracy so that I can pick up this pen-

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:15

        Okay

    18. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:24:15

        ... okay, and not miss it, at least for now. So if you understand neuroscience that way and then you go, we don't see infrared in this room because we don't have the sensors.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:28

        Mm-hmm.

    20. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:24:29

        But a pit viper does. Does that mean that there's a God? No, not necessarily. That alone doesn't prove that. But what it does prove is that we only have access to the physical events in the world that we have the filters within us to extract, which is a kind of mealy-mouthed way of saying you can't see it 'cause you can't see it.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:53

        Yeah.

    22. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:24:53

        You don't have the sensors. You can throw on infrared goggles and then you can see it, but that's a technology. There w- I don't think there will ever be the God goggles. The emotional goggles, so to speak, come from this thing that we call faith. Faith is the infrared goggles of, of human understanding about why we're here. And the, the challenge for people is I feel like people come in three categories. They, they either, at least three. They either were forced religion in a bad way, so they hate it. They never had access to it in a way that made them gently pulled toward it or, you know, they were like, it was like people knocking on their door, it felt like a disturbance, and I, you know, I'm not against proselytizing if it's done kindly and with, you know, delicately. Or they are absolutely convinced that it can't be, which I look at as sort of a spiritual anorexia. You know, there are regions of the brain that when stimulated, people get a godlike exper- the experience of God, not as themselves, but they feel it. You had this idea.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:25:50

        Yeah. [chuckles]

    24. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:25:51

        And so people have said, "Oh, well then there's a God region of the brain, and it's just a brain region. It's just a brain region. That can't be." But we have brain regions, Arthur says this much more eloquently than I could. There are brain regions for thirst, which in the philosophical way, again, this is coming from him, not me, would say, "Well, that proves the existence of water The thirst proves the existence of water, right? So I have a thirst circuit for gaining understanding of this thing that we call life and whatever comes after it. And in that thirst, I decided to open the aperture to the idea that it's n- that the thing, the stimulus, the water, the photons, I'm not able to extract that through thought, through my eyes, through my ears. Just like my dad couldn't come to understand quantum mechanics by thinking really hard about it. You have to do the math. And there are gaps in the, in my reasoning here. Like, it, it's not a perfect one-to-one, but also life's just so much better, man. I don't think anxiety sticks in us very long. If we-we're feeling anxious, you, you pray, God, please, like, help me remove, help me remove this. It's not do this for me. It's help me put energy in me to do the right things today. Put energy in me to serve people. I prayed before I came in here.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:12

        Really?

    26. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:27:13

        On, get on my knees before every podcast, guest or host, I pray. I prayed for... I just said, "Please help me move my ego out of the room." We all have an ego. Help me move my ego out of the room. I, I would hope that people could learn useful information that might help them and that they would propagate that information. Please make sure that I maintain humility, maintain, like, help me, help me strive for clarity. And I also said, "And help Steven and I do something that we're not predicting that would happen, but you want us to happen that we don't understand."

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:47

        [laughs]

    28. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:27:47

        And maybe that's this part of the conversation.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett1:27:49

        [laughs]

    30. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:27:49

        Right? Like, you know, I don't know. A-and the point is not to know. It's also fun as a scientist who loves mechanisms and cells and circuits and neuromodulators, and it's enriching to have a part of life that, like, I can just explore in. Like, it, it's-- I like mysteries. Like, science is about mysteries, and it's about solving mysteries, but it's also about being in awe of the, the mystery. And, um, I'm all in, man. I mean, I'm different all in than other people talk about being all in, and I don't tell people what to do morally. I'm, I'm really just trying to navigate my own, my own path. But it is, uh, it, it's like one of the best things that ever happened to me. It's so liberating, and life is still plenty hard, but

25. 1:28:34 – 1:37:03

    Could Religion Be An Antidote To Modern Suffering?

    1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:28:34

       I love it.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:35

       It seems to be an antidote that a lot of people are reaching for now based on the way that we've kind of designed our lives over the last couple of decades. The sort of individualism, the loneliness, the, I don't know, nihilism, the me, me, me, the material success, the, you could say like low-level narcissism of being on social media and trying to c- get as mu- many followers as you can, and we've become islands. And I, I've been thinking a lot about this idea of like God and meaning because it does appear to me that we are meant to be like anchored to, you know, ourselves and then our family and then like, I don't know, our community, and then maybe our city, and then maybe our country, and then maybe the planet, and then something above.

    3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:29:16

       I mean, you're an ambitious guy. Go bigger, man.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:18

       Was it-

    5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:29:18

       I'm not trying to push you.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:19

       Yeah, yeah. No, no, please.

    7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:29:20

       Bigger, the biggest thing is that the, that is a non-human force in the universe that wants goodness and can exemplify perfection. And you and I, if I may, by virtue of being human, by virtue of having circuits-

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:37

       Mm-hmm

    9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:29:38

       ... that... I mean, the famous studies, like people get to stimulate different areas of their brain. You know the area that people like to stimulate a lot? The area that generates frustration and anger, that arousal. I saw that result and I was like, "Oh man, that's disappointing." Why not beauty, gi-giddiness, or even feelings of being drunk? Though they found that too, but they were not as interested in that. You know, are we bad? No, we're not bad. We, we are wired with an animal part of our brain, and we are wired with a conscious, thoughtful part of our brain. And it's a lot of work to ascend, I know that word is like, in the looks maxing thing now. But like it's a, like to ascend as a human to a place where you're living in a controlled and thoughtful and peaceful way with yourself and with your pursuits, and you're putting, trying, striving to put goodness in the world and take care of people and, and to do that, uh, with a little less friction. I know from experience that comes from trying not to control every aspect of every process, and somehow everything just goes much better. So, you know, people will be like, "Oh, he really drank the Kool-Aid." Like, I don't know. I, I actually think that this was pumping in my veins from go. Yes, I worked on a lot of topics, um, stress, vision, et cetera, but I studied neural development for a long time and, you know, sperm meets egg and cells start dividing, and you get a human. And, um, yes, we understand induction factors. I teach developmental neurobiology, cell migration, axon guidance, you know, mesoderm, ectoderm, et cetera. Great. Like, compartmentalized chemistry can give you a human, but there are gaps in our understanding, and there's magic in that orchestration that goes beyond what the science can even begin to understand, and it's nothing short of spectacular. You just, like... Also, who doesn't want more awe in their life? It's like Dr. Keltner, who's like the, the awe guy at Berkeley, like you said, yeah, awe is when you go from small aperture to big aperture and from big aperture to small aperture.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:31:48

        Hmm.

    11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:31:48

        That transition induces awe, and you can hear it in sound too. Like when you walk in off the street and you go into, like, Stanford has this incredible church. Memorial Church is unbelievably beautiful with this giant organ, and you walk in there and people change, not just because it's a ch- you s- like there's this high ceiling and you're like, "Wow."

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:07

        Yeah.

    13. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:32:08

        Like, this is incredible. And of course, I know humans made it. Like, I'm not an idiot. But s- day aperture to Holy aperture. The, like these, and you can get this other ways, right? I'm not saying you can't get this other ways, but I like the idea that if we dial out really far-

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:25

        Hmm

    15. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:32:26

        ... that there's something much greater than us. And, and I don't know what it, exactly what form it takes or exactly what shape it takes or exactly what ways that it, it, um, God would exert, uh, influence over our minds, but-

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:42

        You don't need to

    17. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:32:42

        ... you don't need to.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:43

        This is the thing that I have to, I think I have to come to terms with is I, I go, "Okay, this is really interesting. There's lots of meaning and benefits to my life." You know, if we're just thinking about benefits, right? And then I go, "Okay, so which, which, which Bible have I got to believe?" And then I start looking at the Bibles and I'm like, "Okay, Noah's Ark." I'm like-

    19. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:32:59

        Look at a bunch of them. I think one will call to you more than the others. Listen, it may end up being atheism for some people, but when I said, um, when I said spiritual anorexia earlier, anorexia is the most deadly of the psychiatric illnesses. It's, uh, like, it's incredibly deadly and it's a, a, something happens to the neural circuits where people with true anorexia feel reward, uh, some sort of sense of quote unquote re- reinforcement is better than reward. Reinforcement from avoiding food as opposed to eating it. So that's very, like, runs against our evolution as a species, right? And our health. But the desire for food, as Arthur would say, proves the existence of food, right? Desire of thirst pr- proves the existence of water. And there are atheists who are like, "Yeah, I don't need it. Not for me." And then there are atheists who are, who have a kind of spiritual anorexia. It's almost like they get their spirituality is not believing in a god.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:33:55

        Hmm.

    21. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:33:55

        And I look at them and I go, "Well, you're kind of on the, uh, like the same, like, extreme." It's almost like it wraps around so far that you, you, the, the truly religious people and the atheists kind of meet right here. They both have the same sort of thing, but there's kind of an inversion of the circuit right there. And so I don't know. Someone will work out the neuroscience or not. I'm gonna keep praying because my life is that much better.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:15

        When you, when I heard you talk about it, I started praying a little bit.

    23. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:34:18

        Oh, right on.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:19

        Not all the time, but there, there's several moments where I thought, "Do you know what now would be a good time to just pray?" C- and I'm, uh, someone like you saying that you do it gives a lot of other people permission to try and to investigate for themselves because, you know, y- like if I'm in the Huberman camp, maybe I'm someone that really cares about scientific rigor and precision and, and then if you, if, that if you change that camp to also be open-minded to spirituality and religion and these sort of other pursuits, I can still [laughs] be sort of ideologically who I believe I am while also investigating these other things. So what I, it, it was really i- impactful for me to hear you talk about prayer because it impacted my, it gave me permission, I should say-

    25. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:34:58

        Hmm

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:34:58

        ... at some weird level to also investigate and, yeah, like I report the same findings as you that [laughs] it helps. [laughs]

    27. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:35:05

        Yeah. It helped. My former chair and director of neurosciences at Stanford, who encouraged me to do that talk at Veritas, where I mostly talked about how ig- ignorant and naive I am on these topics, he's a brilliant neuroscientist. He has faith.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:19

        Hmm.

    29. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:35:20

        And I respect him and I respect his mind. I also think there's maybe a, a kind of fun analogy here that just came to mind. You know, it happens in every dimension, like audience and podcasters or whatever, but this happened during the pandemic with the, with the health community, and we're seeing the, the long tail of that now. But, you know, when you're a kid, you think your parents are everything. You think they can do no wrong. And then there's this thing called being an adolescent teenager, and you catch them doing, like lying or saying things occasionally or doing things, and you go, "Wait, you said that," and, and it's like this, and all of a sudden you're like, "You don't know anything."

    30. SBSteven Bartlett1:35:55

        Hmm.
26. 1:37:03 – 1:38:30

    Ads

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:37:04

       This is something that I've made for you. I've realized that The Diary of a CEO audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learnt is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny small steps, and we call this in our team the 1%. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries, and we released these last year, and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours at thediary.com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. There should be a button just down below here, and if it says subscribed, you're already subscribed. If it says subscriber, that means you're not yet. And if you're not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button? It helps the show more than you know, and according to the algorithm, you're someone that watches our show, but you haven't yet hit that button. Thank you so much.

27. 1:38:30 – 1:40:07

    How To Create The Ideal Sleep Environment

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:38:30

       Okay, so we haven't done number seven and we-- And what's number eight then? We haven't done number eight.

    2. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:38:34

       Yeah.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:38:35

       And we haven't done-

    4. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:38:36

       Well, we sort of did this

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:38:37

       ... haven't done.

    6. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:38:37

       So at night, once you're asleep, try and keep your sleeping environment as dark as possible.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:38:41

       Okay, good tip.

    8. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:38:41

       A good eye mask is useful. Some people like earplugs too. If you wake up in the middle of the night, do some long exhale breathing or do the, you know, the, the swacky eyes to the side, eyes up and then w- you know, counterclockwise and clockwise. So at night, dim the lights. Why? Bright lights stimulate cortisol release. You want your cortisol low at night. Everyone says you gotta dim the lights t- because it suppresses melatonin.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:03

       Uh-huh.

    10. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:39:03

        That's true, but that's just half of the story. The other reason is it increases cortisol and you want your cortisol low at night.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:08

        What about this whole conversation around phones at night?

    12. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:39:11

        Yeah.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:12

        And blue light?

    14. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:39:12

        Well, dim, dim your phone.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:14

        Okay.

    16. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:39:14

        Or, or triple-click program it to the go to the red screen.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:17

        Oh, yeah.

    18. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:39:18

        Yeah. Just do that. I, I think in the last, let's be reasonable, the last thirty minutes before sleep, no screens. First thirty minutes after waking, you should be looking at the sun and exercising, hydrating and doing that kind of thing.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:31

        And chuck the partner out the bed. I've heard, I've heard some [laughs] -

    20. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:39:34

        Really?

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:34

        ... babe been joking.

    22. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:39:34

        Oh, the sleeping sep-

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:35

        Babe been joking.

    24. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:39:36

        I'm the opposite. I'm, I'm a spooner.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:38

        So am I.

    26. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:39:39

        You know?

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:39

        And I read some studies that said, yeah.

    28. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:39:40

        I sleep best as big spoon.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett1:39:41

        Yeah.

    30. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:39:42

        With a human.
28. 1:40:07 – 1:48:30

    You Need To Do Effortful Work Daily

    1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:40:07

       you really want to do these two things. These actually go very well together. You need to do a bout of work of 90 minutes to two hours. You, like you gotta strive and try and learn something. Do something hard every day mentally. This is critical for your ability to focus and by the way, you, you asked about phones. Awesome study came out. They had people with their phone off upside down on the table or in their bag underneath their chair or in the opposite room, a separate room and what they found is people can focus just fine in all three conditions. But if the phone is anywhere in the room, the amount of cognitive flexibility they have with the material they're focusing on is diminished. In other words, requires more energy to focus even if they're not getting calls and notifications. There's a subscript running in the brain apparently that's anticipating that this thing is gonna reach for me, it's gonna call me. So it's calling you even if it's not calling you, which is pretty cool.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:41:01

       Hmm.

    3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:41:01

       And so the way to increase focus and cognitive capacity is actually to just get the phone out of the room. That's a big part of it and actually visual field mattel- matters a lot too. You know, like the, the kid in school with the hoodie who's not asleep, like that actually is helpful. I talk about some of the, the history of tools for focus, pharmacology but also physical devices. You know, they used to design helmets for kids to like try and focus the kids that had troubles fo- cho- Problem is now with the, with the phone you've moved the whole world right in front of you. So focusing just here doesn't work, but get the phone out of the room and do some effortful learning bout and it should feel like a fight. Keep in mind the friction you feel trying to learn something, that's adrenaline. The st- Remember, how do we block learning? We block adrenaline and its downstream effects with propranolol. Being alert but calm or a little stressed and making errors through deliberate attempts to do something, not just throwaway errors, that's how you learn. Why? If I can reach out and grab this pen, my brain doesn't change. One of the biggest lies in public education about neuroscience is that every experience changes your brain. By the time I'm done saying this your brain will be different. No, that's absolutely not true. That's a bunch of hooey. I studied neuroplasticity. I teach neuroplasticity. I'll tell you, you know what induces neuroplasticity? Being a baby who's trying to learn or being an adult who's forcing yourself to try and learn and you can't do the thing. The error is what stimulates the plasticity. So if you-

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:42:29

       Ah

    5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:42:29

       ... and the, the appropriate level of difficulty, say the computational modeling is somewhere around 15% on average. Now what does that mean? There's two kinds of practice. One is practicing doing things that I already know how to do. There you're aiming for 100% performance, right? You're reinforcing what you already know how to do. Talk to a great dancer and they'll tell you they drill, drill, drill, drill the things they already know how to do. But when you're trying to learn the new language, the new emotional skill, the new physical skill, the new f- cognitive emotional skill, you need to make genuine attempts and you need to fail some of the time and those failure signals are relayed to your cerebellum and your cerebellum propagates through networks that say change.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:43:09

       Hmm.

    7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:43:11

       So there's a set of conditions in the chapter on plasticity that say you need to be alert. So I talk about all the ways you can get alert including pharmacology supplements and behavioral tools. Then you need to be focused. I talk about all the tools for focus which you can devote to anything not just learning and then I talk about the conditions for plasticity and you need to get this friction and these errors and then you need to stop, you need to come back a day or two later, do it again and then you need to make sure that you reinforce what you learned. The be- here's where AI is gonna be a wonderful tool, already is a wonderful tool. The best way to learn is to not forget meaning if you test yourself mentally or you could use any one of the LLMs but I'll go into ChatGPT and I'll just say, um, "Generate a short test of a graduate student at Stanford level questions about neuroplasticity." And I, and I'll just-- And I go, "Oh," and I remember this, this, and there's this one thing I don't remember. That's how you maintain and build knowledge over time, self-testing. Self-testing. People hear the word test they think of external tester. You're the test taker. Self-testing. I've done-

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:18

       That's a really interesting idea for this podcast episode which we should d- definitely run team.

    9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:44:22

       Should we generate a quiz?

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:24

        Yeah, so we can take the transcript and we can turn it into a, a test-

    11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:44:28

        Cool

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:28

        ... of the 10 protocols that you've talked through and we'll link it below if you want to take the test.

    13. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:44:34

        Awesome. Yeah.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:35

        Interesting. Yeah.

    15. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:44:35

        ChatGPT is great at doing this. You can change the difficulty and you can actually say, "I'm a professor Of neuroscience and I want a 15% error rate on average.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:45

        [laughs]

    17. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:44:45

        Hit me. You know, it, uh, d- so it's pretty cool. You know, the, the study I love that really backs this up is that there've been a lot of studies of learning where they have students read the same passage one, two, three, or four times, and then they also have them highlight or take notes, or they just have them read it once and self-test, and they look six months and two years later. Reading it once, no notes, no highlighting, and self-testing, uh, you know, about a week later and looking up what you got, couldn't remember or got wrong, led to much more stable learning over time. Awesome. Now, this doesn't work so well for physical endeavors 'cause there you have to, like, actually do the physical thing. You have to test yourself physically. But I love that, uh, set of experiments, um, 'cause tells us everything we should be doing. So I think in doing this, for me, it could be a book, it could be... Lately, I've been podcasting and recording my audiobook. Have you done a, a, a book?

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:39

        Yes, and I did the audiobook, which was horrific.

    19. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:45:41

        Are you due for another one?

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:42

        I am. I've, I've actually written it already. I wrote it, I finished writing it last year, but I... [sighs]

    21. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:45:46

        Oh, man. What's it about?

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:48

        It's time. It's called Just Fucking Do It.

    23. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:45:49

        [laughs]

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:49

        I, I asked the audience multiple times what, uh... I showed them multiple covers of books, hundreds of them, and asked them what they wanted, and that was the one that most of them tried to buy.

    25. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:45:57

        Okay.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:57

        And so it's really just a, it's really a breakdown of how to do the thing, and actually, I reference you in there-

    27. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:46:01

        Oh

    28. SBSteven Bartlett1:46:01

        ... in the chapter about-

    29. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:46:02

        Oh, thank you

    30. SBSteven Bartlett1:46:02

        ... the anterior midcingulate cortex-
29. 1:48:30 – 1:55:05

    How To Tap Into Your Unconscious

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:48:30

       So that's number four. We've got one left, number ten, is it?

    2. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:48:32

       Yeah.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:48:33

       You said they were linked.

    4. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:48:34

       So number ten, to frame this a little bit, the last chapter of my book is on personal development. I thought a lot, like, am I gonna write a book, a last chapter on, like, relationships? That seemed like a no. Not because I haven't had them or not because I haven't had some great ones, um, but because I think people who, like, work on that as their academics, you know, fundamentally should do that. Then again, I had a chapter on nutrition and exercise. But, um, in any event, I decided to write about relationship to self, and then I thought, "No, personal development is something we're all trying to do." And here's the key question set up at the beginning. I talk about grief and what the science of grief is and, and how to navigate grief. But early on in that, the ch- chapter on personal development, I sort of set it up the following way. I look out on the landscape of all the personal, psychological, and relationship development stuff out there online, in books, in papers, et cetera, and it looks like there's sort of a two bins. One is how to find what's important to you, do what's best for you, and be the person you're supposed to be for the world and maybe for you also. And then there's this other bin, which is that we need to be very careful about pursuing things and fulfilling roles because we can get very far off track from our core, like what Martha Beck would call our essential self.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:49:54

       Mm-hmm.

    6. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:49:55

       And I'm a huge fan of her work, if in no small part because she talked about that in her books, which were very, very impactful for me. But she also has three degrees from Harvard, so this isn't somebody who, like, can't get stuff done, and she's a mom, and she's navigated complicated life landscapes. So I was like, "Okay, this is, this kind of it." And then I, I hosted, um, James Hollis, this 84-year-old Jungian analyst on, on my podcast, and, um, he just wowed the heck out of all of us. And he basically said this: "Here's a really good life." Mind you, this guy's written books like "The Eden Project" on, on relationships. He's written books like "Under Saturn's Shadow" on the healing and trauma of men. He's a, he's a brilliant thinker. And he said, "Look, there's three things you gotta do every day." And he encourages his patients to write this on their refrigerator or carry it around with them. He says, "First, shut up I'm like, "What? I, I thought it was gonna be like this like nice Jungian analyst like..." He goes, "Shut up." He goes, "There's always somebody suffering more than you. You have to have gratitude. You have to have a gratitude practice." So I spent some time talking about what that really looks like, 'cause there's a science of gratitude, and then there's the common understanding about what that is. It's really about receiving gratitude or, yes, having a gratitude practice of all the things that are good in your life, but really it's about giving gratitude and receiving gratitude, and that's a... I talk about that and how to accomplish that. The second thing he g- he said, so I go, "Okay, now he'll kind of soften up," and he is. He says, um, "Suit up. You're not gonna be able to do well in anything in life unless you prepare. Get up in the morning, take care of your health, do what you need to do to shower, brush your teeth, get organized." This sounds a little bit l- like Jordan Peterson's clean your room, but it was even, like, edgier than that. It was like, how in the world could you perform well on an exam or in a relationship or in a sport or at work if you don't actually do your homework? I was like, "Oh man, this guy's like, sending some, like, boomer knowledge right here." [laughs] And then he says, "And show up." He said, "Happy people fulfill outward roles for the world. They fulfill roles, father, mother, sister, brother. They look at themselves, and this is not the totality of it, but they look at themselves as somebody who needs to fulfill roles, teacher, mechanic, whatever, engineer, podcaster. But you have to shut up, suit up, and show up. You need to fulfill roles. There is no human being that doesn't get, doesn't have to do stuff for the world. You can't freeload." But then he said there's this other bin, which is if you carry on like that for 10, 20, 30 years, you can end up quite happy. But most of the time, if people just do those things, they end up pretty miserable.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:52:36

       Mm-hmm.

    8. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:52:36

       And I was like, "Oh man," like... [laughs] And he said the other piece is once a day you need to get out of role fulfillment. You need to get out of preparation, suit up, and you need to get out of trying to be more grateful. You still need to do that, but you need to get out of that, and you need to go into what he called exiting the stimulus response mode of being, which could be sitting quietly in meditation. It could be drawing, listening to music. You're not trying to inc- accomplish anything, and you're just letting your unconscious mind feed you information about what he called your deepest heart's desires. And I was like, "Yes, this is why we go camping." He said, "Yes, you can take longer extended breaks. You can go backpacking. You can run. You can do the... You can allow this to happen in any number of ways. But once a day, take some space for yourself and just touch in with self." Now, if you're sitting there going, "Okay, what do I wanna be when I grow up?" It should happen. It's not the way it works. Your unconscious mind speaks to you in emotions, in analogies, and it sets you up to go back into life to be able to see connections and start navigating in new and interesting ways, ways that are unique to your heart's desires about what you like and what you don't like, and to know that those choices are in goodness and in keeping with who you are. I can't tell you what your deepest heart's desires are. Only you can come to that clarity, but you need to do it through a practice where you're not trying to be the football coach, the mom, the best this. You need to listen to yourself, but you also need to keep fulfilling those roles because he and I both agree, and I mentioned this several times 'cause I get asked all the time, "How do I find my calling?" You find it while working your butt off doing something else. That's how. You don't sit around going, "Well, what's my calling?" You work your butt off doing the something else, and you hate it, so you just do something that you hate a little less, and you do something you hate a little less maybe.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:54:25

       Mm-hmm.

    10. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:54:25

        And eventually, you get pulled forward to this thing that is your key self.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:54:29

        And there's not necessarily a s- 'cause people often when they talk about finding a, find your passion, passion is a word that happens to be singular, which can be somewhat distorting.

    12. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:54:38

        Yeah.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:54:38

        'Cause then you think almost like an Easter egg.

    14. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:54:40

        Yeah.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:54:40

        I have to go f- I have to go search for it, and there's gonna be one of them somewhere.

    16. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:54:43

        I can handle five-year chunks. Maybe this just reflects my years and years of, like, getting degrees where it's, like, three to five years for this, then three to five years for that, postdoc, graduate school, et cetera. I'm navigating from 50 to 55 now. That's what I know. I know what I'm gonna carry forward: exercise, faith, hydration. So I know what I'm gonna carry forward, but I don't know what's coming next. I've never been 60 before.

30. 1:55:05 – 1:59:16

    Glymphatic Drainage: Can It Reduce Eye Bags?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:05

       So the end of the day, and there were two questions that I had for you here-

    2. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:55:08

       Yeah

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:08

       ... based on some of the research.

    4. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:55:09

       Yeah.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:09

       Um, the first is, I'll say it's a technical one, but sleeping on your side? I heard there's, um, there's different outcomes for your brain based on how you sleep at night.

    6. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:55:20

       Yeah. When you sleep, you have a washout of waste products from the brain.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:23

       Yeah.

    8. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:55:24

       Very important for offsetting dementia, very important for feeling rested, and if that's not enough incentive, very important for, for getting rid of bags under your eyes. You know, in the morning when you're... Have you ever seen yourself after one night's shitty sleep?

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:35

       Oh my gosh.

    10. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:55:36

        Right. Sleep two nights well, you see yourself.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:38

        Yeah, yeah. What the hell?

    12. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:55:38

        Yeah, you're your-

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:39

        Yeah

    14. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:55:39

        ... handsome self again, Steven. You know? So what is that? That's accumulation of, of lymph and other fluids and waste products here. The skin-

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:47

        That weren't flushed out.

    16. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:55:48

        Yeah.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:48

        Really?

    18. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:55:49

        So during sleep, there's this glymphatic clearance. Um, and it does seem it can be s- slightly but significantly improved by sleeping on your side with your head slightly elevated.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:56:00

        Okay.

    20. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:56:00

        We used to think it was slightly inverted. Now we think it's slightly elevated. When you get up in the morning, I'm actually a big fan. I've got one of these inversion tables, but most people won't. You know, where you lie back-

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:56:09

        On the back

    22. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:56:09

        ... and you go upside down.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:56:10

        Oh, okay. Okay.

    24. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:56:10

        No, you just hang upside down. It feels good on my back. But some people get the shaker. Some people do some jump rope. You can just kind of shake out and move because the lymphatic system is really incredible. It's one-way valves stacked up from your feet all the way up to your brain. The, people think about the, the role of lymph and lymph nodes in immune checkpoints and immune system. That's all true, of course. But the lymph system is taking liquid, and it's dumping it back into your blood circulation, and it can accumulate when you're lying or when you're... You know, this is lymphedema is, you know, swelling of the lower limbs, et cetera, you know. So you need to move. When you move, the, you're essentially squeezing the lymph- in these one-way valves up to dump back into the general circulation. Your brain doesn't have that mechanism, so miraculously, in sleep, you get s- the astrocytes, the glial cells actually create a bit of extra space in the brain between neural tissue that allows the waste products, the glymph as we call it, glia lymph, glymph, to flow up and out towards the surface of the brain and then it dumps out of the brain, still in the body of course, and down and out. Actually, the puffiness of the eyes, the interior chamber of the eyes, some of the cloudiness of the eye, these systems are shared, and actually, some of it actually comes out through the nose, which is wild. But get upright, move around. There's a, a bunch of ways of, like, you know, these like tapping, shaking. It looks silly, it looks kind of crazy. Looks like you've been in California too long if you do these things, but it can help move lymph out. But sleeping does, uh, clears glymph. The other thing that's, there's a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that I do detail in the book, which is a short meditation, believe it or not, increases glymphatic clearance in the daytime. Now, this is super interesting because folks like you and me always want to figure out how we can get by with less sleep and still feel awesome and not short-circuit our health. Turns out that the regular meditators are probably able to shave an hour off their sleep, twenty minutes a day meditation, because they're getting the glymph clearance during their meditation. And so in sleep, the timing of sleep and how long you sleep has a lot to do with body temperature, but also there seems to be a drive for glymph clearance that says you need to sleep longer, which is why, one of the reasons why when you're sick, you sleep a lot more.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:58:30

        Mm.

    26. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:58:30

        One of them. There are others as well. So short... I'm now back to meditating, and my meditation practice is pretty feeble compared to many, but here's what I do. I wake up in the morning, and the first thing I do is ten breaths of meditation. I tell myself, if I can't concentrate for ten breaths without my mind going elsewhere, what kind of day am I gonna have? And also, what kind of human am I if I can't organize myself for ten breaths? Then I get out of bed. I usually go straight to the bathroom, pee. Then I go hydrate. Then I get sunlight. Then I try and get some movement, although these days I, because of the dog, I get a walk in. Then I come back, drink some caffeine, exercise.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:59:07

        And the ten step starts over again.

    28. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:59:09

        And it starts all over again. We are this rhythm. No human being has ever escaped these circadian influences in cortisol and melatonin.

31. 1:59:16 – 2:04:22

    Do You Really Need Supplements?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:59:16

       Do you take, uh, uh, you don't really talk in depth about supplements or recommend supplements.

    2. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:59:20

       Uh, oh, I do. I always get asked, what should I take? I talk about alpha-GPC, L-tyrosine. I talk about theanine. I talk about theanine's use at, with low-dose caffeine for enhanced task switching, which is a very interesting literature. I talk about, um, ways to improve sleep, everything from tart cherry to apigenin to quviviq, um, which is one of the DORAs, one of these, uh, orexin drugs. I talk, I, oh, I-

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:59:46

       But what do you take every day?

    4. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:59:48

       You got another three hours?

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:59:49

       Oh, really?

    6. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:59:49

       No, no, no.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:59:50

       Is it a lot?

    8. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:59:50

       Nah, not really.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:59:51

       What are your, like, if you had to pick five... If they said to you-

    10. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:59:54

        Yeah

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:59:54

        ... "Andrew, you can only do five for the rest of your life," what five supplements would it be?

    12. AHDr. Andrew Huberman1:59:57

        Well, if somebody's sleeping terrifically well, I'd say nothing for sleep.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett2:00:01

        Sure.

    14. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:00:01

        If they're not sleeping terrifically well, I would suggest they, they try magnesium threonate or magnesium bisglycinate. They're interchangeable for sleep. Okay, that's one. I'm a big believer in getting at least one gram per day of EPA omega-3.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett2:00:16

        Okay.

    16. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:00:17

        I suggest getting it because it's now available generic and cheap, but prescription form, Lovaza.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett2:00:23

        EPA, which stands for?

    18. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:00:23

        The form of, of omega-3 that's, th- that you want for brain health, probably also for cardiovascular health and reduced inflammation.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett2:00:31

        How do I know if that's the omega-3 that I have?

    20. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:00:33

        You need a prescription.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett2:00:34

        Oh, you need a prescription?

    22. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:00:35

        But here's what's awesome about it. It's very high concentration EPA, and it's cleared of all heavy metals.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett2:00:40

        Okay.

    24. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:00:41

        And it's very, very inexpensive, so the challenge is getting a doctor to prescribe it for you. Just tell them you want Lovaza, or else you're gonna take a bunch of stuff over the counter, you might get mercury poisoning.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett2:00:51

        Okay.

    26. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:00:51

        There you go.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett2:00:52

        Right.

    28. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:00:52

        Uh, don't threaten your doctor, but you get the idea. So that's for mental health, physical health, big believer in boo- boosting omega-3s. Also, I don't eat fatty fish. I don't like salmon unless it's sushi, and, like, I'm just not good at eating seafood. Um, so that's two. Vitamin D.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett2:01:08

        Vitamin D, yeah.

    30. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:01:08

        Five thousand to ten thousand IUs per day. People will be like, "Ugh, you don't know that. You need to blood test. You don't want over..." Okay, don't take twenty-five thousand, but most people are underdosing vitamin D. And also, I'm not, uh, and I know it pisses people off, but I'm not trying to, like, hit the RDA, okay? Just like I-
32. 2:04:22 – 2:07:59

    The Benefits Of A Post-Meal Walk

    1. SBSteven Bartlett2:04:22

       Okay, the last thing I wanted to ask you about is, um, I saw a clip, I think it was one of your most viral clips, um, of all time, where you just talked about how going for a walk after you eat can have a really big impact-

    2. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:04:32

       Yes

    3. SBSteven Bartlett2:04:32

       ... on your body.

    4. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:04:34

       Yes.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett2:04:34

       That most people don't realize.

    6. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:04:36

       Most people don't realize. Uh, there's a section-- I think walking is necessary, but not sufficient for health. You know, I don't think you need to count ten thousand steps per day, but I, I think seven thousand to eight thousand steps per day should be the goal. You can do it. I'll pace while I'm on calls. I take every, every... When I finish a podcast with my team, we take a walk. I, I'm always trying to take stairs. When I travel, I take stairs, not the escalator. You arrive a little sweatier to your plane, but s- you're also rucking your bags and this kind of thing. So walking is, is incredible because those low-level repeated muscle contractions really help buffer blood glucose, especially after a meal. But there's this wild study where the soleus muscle, the one that gives the calf width, width, you know, when you do seated calf raises, right? Your... It's this muscle-

    7. SBSteven Bartlett2:05:23

       Oh, yeah

    8. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:05:23

       ... underneath the gastrocnemius, right? That muscle is about one percent of your total musculature, but it has an outsized and significant glucose utilization. Interesting. So in this study, which is not practical, they had people do what they called soleus push-ups, which are basically non-weighted seated calf raises while sitting, and they had them do it repeatedly. And they looked at blood glucose regulation, and that powerfully regulated blood glucose increases. It buffered the peaks, and it turns out that this is related to walking. So I'm not suggesting unless perhaps you're stuck on a plane or while, while in an office that you... You know, if you're a knee bouncer, rejoice, you know. You're doing yourself good. Um, but this movement really seems to help blood glucose management. Now, some people say, "Oh, yeah, this is so silly. They're talking about all day you're gonna do this?" Yeah, some people probably accuse us of this. No, what I'm saying is walk, because when you walk, you're getting that low-level repeated muscle contraction. It's a slow-twitch muscle, and it seems to be, I don't want to call it a sink, but it seems to be an unsuspected, um, furnace for glucose utilization.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett2:06:29

       And why does that matter?

    10. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:06:31

        You don't want big peaks in glucose. You can manage them. I mean, you get d- more insulin will be secreted if you have a big peak in, in glucose. That's why insulin's there, to make sure that, um, glucose is managed. You don't want it too high. You don't want to be hyperglycemic. In fact, that can be deadly. You don't want to be hypoglycemic. But when people eat, they experience an increase in blood glucose, and while the peaks are manageable, if you're buffering them, so you're, you're, you're sort of flattening out those peaks with, you know, five to ten minutes of walking after a meal, you will have fewer energy crashes. In theory, over time, your metabolic health can be better, or at least cannot get worse. And you know, there's... Dr. Rhonda Patrick has, has pointed out there's a sort of a comparison study where people either walked after meals or for thirty minutes or, or so on per day, or they did, you know, ten air squats every forty-five minutes or so. Just stand up and do air s- And it looks like they were comparable. Maybe the air squats were better. I don't know about you, but I'm not gonna stand up and do air squats in a restaurant or when I go out into the street of New York, if I have the great, you know, experience of having dinner with you and James Sexton again. That was the last time we had a shared a meal. I'm not gonna do air squats. Oh, we're gonna walk. So I think I'm not being disparaging of, of, of Rhonda. I think she was pointing out a, a mechanistic feature, not, not a, not a, a, a protocol, but necessarily. But if you're stuck on a plane, you could do some air squats. You could, you could, uh, you know, bounce your knee. And, you know, non-exercise, um, induced thermogenesis is a massive

33. 2:07:59 – 2:16:47

    Why Metabolism Doesn't Have To Decline With Age

    1. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:07:59

       calorie burn. You know, people who move a lot tend to be rather thin. They tend to be lean. It-- The studies on those, uh, I go back to my undergraduate days when we worked on metabolism and physiology, like Rothwell and Stock and some other folks, these scientists who figured out that there were people who could eat a lot more than you would think they needed, but they always stayed lean. Turns out they're moving a lot during the day, burning up to eighteen hundred calories a day. Now, that's extreme, but some people who just move a bit more, about a thousand calories t- per day. And there's this paper published in the journal Science, which is a great journal, not as great as Nature, but the Brits get the cake there. And people will argue, but it's true that the decline in metabolism that we all associate with aging, like, oh, metabolism slows as you age, turns out that's not true. Turns out that if people maintain muscle mass, that doesn't happen. And you say, okay, well then aging is muscle mass loss is reduction in metabolism. Actually, no. People are moving less. And I've been, as everyone else has been absorbed with this longevity thing, I look at older people and, and in particular people in their 80s, and you know what I see a lot of? A lot less spontaneous movement and a lot of mouth breathing, [breathing] which at rest is not good. We know this. It deprives the brain of oxygen. It's not good. You can mouth breathe during exercise, physiological sighs, et cetera, but you don't wanna be a mouth breather in sleep or in wakefulness. And then you host people like James Hollis or Twyla Tharp, who's... I don't know her exact age, I think she's in her early 80s, but choreographer, world-class dancer, who deadlifts a lot and works out for two hours a day at 5:00 in the morning, who boxes, who choreographs. They're so mentally sharp. They're physically lean. There are other examples I could rattle off, and you go, "What is happening?" Mike Snyder, my colleague at Stanford, who's not that old, but he's in his 70s. You look at him, you go, "What's going on?" And they're moving all the time. They're moving, they're mentally active. They have posture like you. They're exercising, sure, but they are moving, moving, moving. The spontaneous movement is burning calories. That's one piece, but it's also the glucose regulation. It's the fact that they're not sitting stagnant in their own... It, it, you know, there's-- Layne Norton has pointed out quite beautifully actually that what's the problem with caloric excess? Okay, there's the fat aesthetic piece, right? Body fat aesthetic piece. But that aside, it's that you have a toxicity of over- of, of energy. The world's expert in mitochondria came on my podcast recently, Jared Rutter. I mean, he's a phenom in the, the biochemistry and the, the genetics of mitochondria, and he will tell you. He's like, "When you overload a system, and therefore a cell with calories, the mitochondria, the, the whole system gets sick." The energy management system of a cell gets sick, and your metabolism, this thing that you call your metabolism, is the collective makeup of all these trillions of cells. So you jam too much fuel in there, like, they don't work as well.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett2:10:58

       Mm-hmm.

    3. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:10:59

       And caloric restriction at times might be beneficial. Caloric maintenance, maybe a little bit more at times, a little bit less. This is good. So movement, movement, movement because it's obviously calories in, calories out.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett2:11:10

       You know what this is, right?

    5. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:11:11

       You're telling me I need to stop.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett2:11:13

       No, no, no, no, no. This is not a clock. This is a [laughs] this is a, this is a CO2 monitor.

    7. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:11:19

       Oh, I thought it was a lux meter. Okay.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett2:11:20

       Yeah.

    9. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:11:20

       Okay, how high-- Oh, we have a lot of CO2 in here.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett2:11:22

        Yeah.

    11. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:11:23

        Okay.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett2:11:23

        It's, it's something that we always have in the studio because I, I think I learned over time that the higher this got, the more sort of tired I felt.

    13. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:11:28

        Mm-hmm.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett2:11:29

        And obviously because there's not great ventilation in this studio here. We started at 600 and we're now at 1,700.

    15. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:11:34

        Yeah. And we're under short wavelength light, but before we came in here, what did we do? We went outside-

    16. SBSteven Bartlett2:11:38

        We went outside

    17. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:11:38

        ... and we had a blast of full spectrum sunlight.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett2:11:42

        Sunlight. Yeah, I always, I, I, you know, I think about this a lot now when I'm trying to do good cognitive work.

    19. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:11:46

        Yeah.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett2:11:46

        Because I've read some studies that if this gets above 1,000 parts per million-

    21. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:11:49

        Mm.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett2:11:49

        .. cognitive performance starts to go down, so-

    23. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:11:51

        Well, if your cognitive performance gets any better, we're all hosed 'cause you're [laughs]

    24. SBSteven Bartlett2:11:54

        Oh, geez. You're very kind. Andrew, thank you so much for so many reasons.

    25. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:11:58

        No.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett2:11:58

        It's such an honor to, to get to learn from you, but I... You know, there's-- I'll be honest, there's no book that I'm waiting for. There's no books that I've been waiting for. Is there any book in my life that I've been waiting for? No, there's not. This is the only book in my life that I've been waiting for for years now, and, um, I say that to say 'cause I, I, I believe in your approach. I believe in your approach, your scientific rigor, the nuance you apply, the stories that you tell, the experiences you're, you've had, the unbelievable, almost like mesmerizing ability you have to remember things. Remember na- You didn't reference one study without ref-referencing, like, the author of the study, and I've, like, never seen... I was thinking, "How the fuck has he done that?" Like, how do you know all the names of all these people?

    27. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:12:36

        Years of, years of training and advisors who drilled into me that attribution is important. Yeah.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett2:12:42

        It's remarkable. There's so much information out there around health and all the things that we've graced today, but, um, I was waiting for your book because I'm not very good at reading books, right?

    29. AHDr. Andrew Huberman2:12:52

        Well, there's an audio version too if you prefer.

    30. SBSteven Bartlett2:12:54

        [laughs] No, no, no, no.

Episode duration: 2:16:47