Mental Health Toolkit: Tools to Bolster Your Mood & Mental Health

1. 0:00 – 3:10

   Mood & Mental Health Toolkit

   1. AHAndrew Huberman0:00

      (instrumental music) Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we are discussing tools for mood and mental health. I will include tools and resources taken from the guest episode that I did with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, who is a psychologist and neuroscientist whose laboratory focuses on mood and emotions. During that episode, she mentioned several important tools that I do believe everybody should apply and that, indeed, I've been applying to my own life and have found to be extremely beneficial. I will also highlight some of the specific research articles those tools are based on, which were not covered in the podcast with Lisa. I will also discuss tools gleaned from the four-episode series that I did on mental health with Dr. Paul Conti, who is a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry. And that episode, as some of you may already know, focused on mental health and the self, as well as relationships, and it included a deep discussion of, what is the self? We talked about the unconscious mind and the conscious mind, and we also covered a lot of tools for understanding one's self, both within the context of therapy, but also within the context of things that one can do alone and that require zero cost. In addition, we talked about tools for improving relationships. We talked about first principles of self-care, so I will provide highlights and takeaways of those tools during today's episode. And thirdly, I will include tools, what we often refer to as protocols, gleaned from some recent publications, indeed, publications that came out as recently as two weeks ago, which really emphasized specific things that we can all do that, again, are zero cost, that have been shown in quality peer-reviewed research to significantly improve mood and mental health. For instance, if you are a regular listener of this podcast, you are probably familiar with my nearly constant reminder that people should view morning sunlight and afternoon sunlight and if you can't, to embrace some alternatives, like looking at bright artificial light, although sunlight is best. Well, there was a recent paper published in the journal, Nature Mental Health, an excellent journal, focusing on not just the positive effects of viewing light at those times of day and indeed throughout the day, but also the independent and positive effects of being in darkness for six to eight hours every night. That's right. Not only is light during the day correlated with significantly improved mental health outcomes, but darkness at night, that is avoiding lights, not just bright lights, but lights for up to eight hours at certain periods of your 24-hour circadian cycle has been correlated with improved mental health outcomes, and indeed, has been shown to significantly offset certain negative mental health outcomes. This is a spectacular study. Again, it involved a enormous number of research subjects, more than 85,000 research subjects, and it touches on a large number of actionable protocols that I've distilled down to just one or two things that all of us can easily do to improve our mood and mental health on a consistent

2. 3:10 – 5:35

   Sponsors: Plunge, Eight Sleep & Waking Up

   1. AHAndrew Huberman3:10

      basis. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Plunge. Plunge makes what I believe is the most versatile, at-home, self-cooling cold plunge for deliberate cold exposure. I've covered the topic of deliberate cold exposure several times on this podcast. Indeed, we did an entire episode about deliberate cold exposure, and what's very clear from the research literature is that deliberate cold exposure can induce dramatic positive shifts in so-called catecholamines. That is dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine. This is a small collection of molecules that are released in the brain and body when we do deliberate cold exposure, and that subjectively lead to greatly enhanced feelings of mood, alertness, and focus for many hours afterwards. That's perhaps the best substantiated reason, and the most popular reason, why people who get into deliberate cold exposure, no pun intended, continue to do deliberate cold exposure on a consistent basis. Plunge uses a powerful and very easy-to-use cooling filtration and sanitation unit to give you access to deliberate cold exposure in clean water whenever you want. I've used a Plunge for several years now, and I really like it because, first of all, it can use a standard outlet. You don't have to modify the electricity in your home or yard, and it's very easy to clean. In fact, it stays clean for long periods of time, which makes it very easy to maintain as well. Plunge has several different models to select from, including their new All-In Cold Plunge, which offers faster cooling, smartphone connectivity, and more. If you're interested in getting a Plunge, you can go to Plunge, spelled P-L-U-N-G-E, .com/huberman to get $150 off your Cold Plunge. Again, that's plunge.com/huberman to get $150 off. Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep, that is getting enough quality sleep on a consistent basis, is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. Now, one of the key things to getting the best possible night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment, and that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature needs to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to

3. 5:35 – 13:58

   First Principles of Self-Care & 6 Pillars of Mental Health

   1. AHAndrew Huberman5:35

      wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. With Eight Sleep, controlling the temperature of your sleeping environment is made extremely easy. Eight Sleep mattress covers allow you to program the temperature of your sleeping environment at the beginning, middle, and end of your night. It can even divide the temperature on the two sides of the bed for different people. It also has sleep tracking capacity. It will tell you how much slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep you're getting, and really help you dial in the exact parameters so you can get the best possible night's sleep. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for well over two years now, and it has significantly improved my sleep and therefore my daytime mood, focus, and alertness. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, you can go to eightsleep.com/huberman and save up to $150 off their Pod 3 covers. Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman.Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up. Waking Up is a meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and NSDR, or non-sleep deep rest, protocols. I started using the Waking Up app a few years ago, because even though I've been doing regular meditation since my teens, and I started doing yoga nidra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an app, turned out to be the Waking Up app, which could teach you meditations of different durations and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain and body into different states, and that he liked it very much. So, I gave the Waking Up app a try and I too found it to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times I have longer to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the Waking Up app has lots of different types of yoga nidra sessions. For those of you who don't know, yoga nidra is a process of lying very still but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations, and there's excellent scientific data to show that yoga nidra and something similar to it called non-sleep deep rest, or NSDR, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy even with just a short 10-minute session. If you'd like to try the Waking Up app, you can go to wakingup.com/huberman and access a free 30-day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com/huberman to access a free 30-day trial. Okay. Let's talk about tools for improving mood and mental health. I think it goes without saying that these are extremely important topics for everyone, not just to know about, but in my opinion, also for people to implement. And the reason is that we are currently in a worldwide mental health crisis. And while we could debate the reason why we are in a worldwide mental health crisis, it's very, very clear that mood disorders and challenges with mental health abound. And of course, there are many different therapies for the treatment of mood disorders and mental health. Everything from talk therapy with a psychologist or psychiatrist or social worker, uh, prescription drug treatments, there are nutritional approaches, somatic approaches. And I want to be clear that I do believe that there's value in all of these approaches. What tends to matter in terms of what sorts of tools and approaches one adopts includes both access, so whether or not people have access to these type of therapies, whether or not they can afford them on a consistent basis, and also, of course, the severity of the mood or mental health disorder. And I'd be remiss, of course, if I didn't make the statement, and I don't say this just to protect me, I also say this to protect all of you and those that you know, that if you are concerned about yourself or somebody else having a serious mood or mental health disorder, please do seek out help from a licensed clinical psychologist or psychiatrist or other healthcare professional who's qualified to help you in that regard. With that said, we can now have a discussion about tools and protocols for enhancing mood and mental health that truly apply to everybody regardless of age. To start off, I want to talk about a fundamental aspect of mood and mental health enhancement that was discussed both in the guest episode with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, as well as in the guest series with Dr. Paul Conti. And that has to do with what Dr. Paul Conti referred to as the first principles of self-care or mental health. The first principles of self-care include, but are not limited to, taking excellent care of one's biology, which of course includes both the mind and the body. And in order to make this very simple and actionable, I've distilled out what I refer to as the big six. I've sometimes referred to these as the six major pillars of health, both mental health and physical health, as well as performance for that matter. But if we're going to talk about tools for mood and mental health, we absolutely can't discard discussions about our biology. That is, we need to make sure that we're taking care of our normal biological function and indeed enhancing the production of specific neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, that we are optimizing, yes, I use the word optimizing, the function of our so-called autonomic nervous system, that aspect of our nervous system that's humming in the background all the time, it's operating unconsciously to regulate our sleep-wake cycles, it's regulating how well or poorly we react to things, it's regulating how much dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine, acetylcholine we're producing. All of this stuff is humming in the background and sets the stage for all the conscious work that we might put to, for instance, trying to understand what our life narrative is, what our unconscious mind is doing, what sorts of defenses it might be producing. All of this sort of high level and directed work that we're gonna talk about a little bit later exists on a background of autonomic function, of neurotransmitter production, of hormone production, not just testosterone and estrogen, but things like cortisol, prolactin, and on and on. So it's important to understand that if our goal is to be in the best possible mood given our life circumstances and to have the best possible mental health given our life circumstances and to improve our mood and mental health consistently over time, that we have to pay attention to what I'm referring to here as the big six or the six pillars of mental health. And those are, just to list them off, then I'll go into a little bit more detail, sleep, sunlight, although I'd like to modify sunlight because based on some new data that just came out a couple of weeks ago, I'd like to now make that second pillar not sunlight, but light/dark. So we could even just think about it as light, when and how much light you get. But what you'll soon learn is that how much dark you get is also extremely important. So we've got sleep, light...Movement is the third. Nutrition, social connection, and stress control. Now these are topics that I've spoken about extensively on previous Huberman Lab Podcast episodes, so I don't want to go into a deep dive of each of these six pillars right now, but I am going to just give you a few highlights of each. And then, of course, we will provide links in the show note captions for which you can go on the deep dive if you like. And I would also like to mention that if you ever have questions about specific protocols or tools, and you're seeking those out, or previous episodes, or specific timestamps of previous episodes of this podcast, you can go to our newly revamped hubermanlab.com website and put any topic of interest, or even several topics of interest into the search function, and it will take you to the very specific timestamps and other resources that provide information on those topics. So I'm going to go into a few of the key bullet points about each of the six pillars, or what I also refer to as the big six of self-care and mental health. Again, this is a necessary list, but it is not sufficient. Again, necessary to do these things every 24 hours, indeed, every 24 hours, if you want to have the best possible mood and mental health, but it is not sufficient. That means you still need to do some of the other things that we're going to talk about in terms of directed approaches at improving mood and mental health if you are to, quote-unquote, "optimize your mood and mental health," or if you are, let's just say, trying to constantly improve your mood and mental health. But these are the necessary but not sufficient pillars of mental

4. 13:58 – 18:00

   Pillar #1: Sleep & Sleep Routine

   1. AHAndrew Huberman13:58

      health. So under the heading of sleep, it's safe to say that most people need between six to eight hours of sleep per night. Some people can get away with five. Some people need as much as nine or ten. Certainly, growing kids, babies, teenagers, and those that are suffering from some sort of illness are going to need more, as much as nine, ten, maybe even 12 hours of sleep per night. However, most people do well to get somewhere between six and eight hours of sleep per night. You're just going to have to experiment and figure out what's best for you. Now one thing I heard recently, so I can't claim this as an original idea, but that I think is a really good way to think about sleep, is that sleep, much like physical fitness, is something that we have to constantly be working on. It's not the sort of thing where you can get a great night's sleep one night, and then the next night just kind of let all the protocols go and expect to get a great night's sleep. You don't have to be neurotic about getting a great night's sleep. Indeed, I do believe that we should strive to get enough quality sleep as many of the nights of our life as possible, and if you can't do that, hopefully it's for good reasons, but, of course, things happen in life, raising kids, you have emergencies, all-nighters to study so you can make sure you get that best possible grade on an exam, et cetera, et cetera. But we should all strive to get the best quality sleep that we can and as much of it most nights of our lives. So it's important to look at sleep as a process that you're going to be working on for the rest of your life, just like fitness. And I don't say that to overwhelm you. I say that so that if on any given night you get a poor night's sleep, you don't stress that too much. You just get right back on the wagon, and you try and get the best possible night's sleep the next night, and the next night, and the next night, much like fitness. There's no ten-week program that's going to transform your physical fitness forever. Okay? Just like there's no sleep program that's gonna transform your sleep forever. It's a daily, or rather I should say, nightly investment, although some of the things that are going to positively impact your sleep, or perhaps damage your sleep, are things that you do during the daytime, right? So avoid that caffeine too late in the day, get that morning sunlight, and on and on. But view sleep as something you're constantly investing in. And it is a critical investment for your mood and mental health. The other thing that's not often discussed, and I really haven't talked about terribly much on this podcast, is the importance of having a fairly consistent sleep routine. Now, I realize that not everybody can get to sleep at the exact same time each night and wake up at the exact same time each morning, and frankly, that's not practical. I certainly don't do that. However, what we know from the circadian health literature is that everybody should strive, again, that's strive, nobody's perfect, but strive to get to sleep at more or less the same time each night and wake up at more or less the same time each morning. This turns out to be really important for regulating mood and mental health, and indeed, for improving your overall levels of sleep, getting the optimum amounts of slow wave sleep, A.K.A. deep sleep, and rapid eye movement sleep. And what we know is that ideally you're going to get to sleep within plus or minus one hour of your regular sleep time. So if your regular to bed time is 10:00, you're used to getting in bed at 10:00 and falling asleep somewhere around 10:30, well then if the next night you fall asleep at 9:30, great. You're still within the plus or minus one hour. And if the next night you go to sleep and you don't fall asleep 'til 11:30, don't sweat it. In fact, you're still within that plus or minus one hour. However, if you start getting into a habit of going to bed at vastly different times, deviating more than or less than one hour from your normal to bed time, well then you're going to start to run into issues, such as waking up feeling groggy even if you got enough sleep, so even if you slept the full eight hours that you're used to getting. People who go to sleep much later than they normally do or much earlier than they normally do start getting into kind of issues of mood regulation, energy regulation, not just in the morning, but in the afternoon. Likewise, try and wake up at more or less the same time each morning, plus or minus one hour. That's really going to help you anchor your overall sleep schedule, and it's really going to help lead to predictability of your overall levels of energy, mood, and focus throughout the day.

5. 18:00 – 24:38

   Pillar #2: Light, Sunlight

   1. AHAndrew Huberman18:00

      The second pillar in that big six is light, and I used to refer to this as sunlight. All right. I'd say, and I'm going to say it again now, although I've covered this in a lot more detail, so again, just hitting the top contour critical elements, try to view sunlight, that is with your eyes, view sunlight as early as possible after waking. Whenever I say that, the most common question I get is, what do I do if I wake up before the sun comes out? Well, unless you have superpowers that I'm not aware of, you can't make the sun come out any earlier. So just flip on artificial lights as needed.... until the sun comes out, and then get outside, face east in the morning, take off those sunglasses. It's perfectly safe to look at low solar angle sunlight without sunglasses, providing you're not, you know, driving into bright light and you crash, this kind of thing. Get outside, look at the sunlight, definitely blink to protect your eyes as needed. But get that sunlight in your eyes early in the day. This has myriad positive effects on mood, focus, and alertness, and nighttime sleep later that night. And it does so through a number of well-defined biological and endocrine hormonal pathways that I've discussed on many previous podcast episodes. And you want to do this for about 10 minutes on non-overcast days and as long as 20 or 30 minutes on overcast days. And that highlights the second most common question I get, which is, "What do I do if there's no sun where I live? I live in an area where there's no sunlight." Look, if you live on planet Earth, there's always sunlight. There might not be very much of it, there might be very overcast where you live, it might seem very dark, but trust me, there's far more photons, light energy, coming through that cloud cover, even in the darkest mornings of winter, than there are at night in those dark winters. So get that light in your eyes and do it as consistently as possible. And also do that in the late afternoon and evening, that's critical for regulating your circadian clock. For reasons that I've talked about previously but I'll get into in a future podcast really explaining how those clock oscillators and mechanisms work. But just to keep it really simple since this is a toolkit episode for mood and mental health, your mood and your mental health will benefit tremendously from getting morning sunlight in your eyes. Now, if you need to get more light in your eyes because indeed there's just not enough sunlight or you don't have the opportunity to get outside and view sunlight in the morning for whatever reason, you might invest in getting a bright light source that you can plug in. You probably want one that's as bright as 10,000 lux, so that's pretty bright. Those fall under the category of so-called SAD lamps, S-A-D, seasonal affective disorder lamps. And you can purchase those. They can be somewhat expensive. You can also opt to get a 900 lux drawing tablet. By the way, I have no financial relationship to any of these sorts of light sources, but you can find them pretty easily, and in the case of the 900 lux light tablet, um, fairly inexpensively online. And you can put that on your desk or where, uh, you have your morning coffee, and try and enhance the total amount of light that you're getting in the morning. But frankly, nothing is as good as sunlight. So if you can't get sunlight, you might think about investing in one of those SAD lamps. And indeed those SAD lamps aren't as good as sunlight but they are the next best thing if you really can't get sunlight on a consistent basis. A few other fine points that I always get asked about. First of all, it is absolutely okay to wear eyeglasses or contact lenses. Those sorts of corrective lenses are actually gonna focus the light to your retina which is where you want it. However, this whole process of viewing morning sunlight and afternoon light does not, again, does not work through a window or windshield, because windows and windshields filter out the relevant wavelengths of light that you want to get directly onto your retina. Okay? So that's the reality of it. In addition, please don't feel that you have to look directly at the sun, and certainly don't stare at the sun. Never force yourself to look at any light, sunlight or otherwise, that's so bright that it's painful to look at. So if it's comfortable for you to look directly at the sun and just blink every once in a while and you can do that without any pain or discomfort or watering of the eyes, please do that. You're getting a lot of photons into your eyes and they're transmitting that to your brain, and your brain to the rest of your body, and on and on. However, if you find it uncomfortable to look directly at the sun, in that case what you'll want to do is offset your gaze to, you know, 10 or 20 degrees, which is nerd speak for just a little bit to the right or a little bit to the left, and get the sunlight into your eyes indirectly. Okay? And I often also get asked, "Well, can I stand in the shade while I do this? What if I have an overhang in my apartment?" The best thing is of course going to be to face directly to the sun and look either directly at it or slightly offset. But if you can only get morning sunlight by going out onto your balcony, and your balcony doesn't face east, rather it faces west, you'll still get a lot of photons from the sun reaching your eyes there. But ideally, you would find some way to look toward the sun first thing in the morning. I realize that with kids and work and other obligations, this can be challenging, but it is a challenge worth meeting. Meaning, don't lose your job or forget to take care of your kids to do this, but you can bring your kids to do this, and indeed you should. It sets their circadian rhythms also. And people often will ask, "Well, does it work on dogs?" You know, and indeed, dogs and other animals have these exact same circuits and pathways for setting their circadian rhythm, so it's great for them too. Now there are also clear and documented benefits for mood and mental health to getting bright light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight, throughout the day, as much as you safely can. Please don't get sunburned. Don't get cataracts by getting too much sunlight. But getting outdoors and getting sunlight in your eyes during your lunch break or a walk here and there, or if you have to remain indoors during the day, getting the lights in that environment as bright as possible, as is safely possible I should say, is known to improve mood and mental health. Why? Well, because there's a special so-called opsin within the cells of your eyes called melanopsin that doesn't respond to the same differences in color that are present in sunlight in the morning and the evening, but rather responds to the overall brightness of light. So very bright lights, either from artificial sources or ideally from sunlight, activate these cells, and these cells project these little wires we call axons into specific parts of the brain that improve your mood and feelings of well-being. So I can't give you a specific number, you know, of five minutes a day or 10 minutes a day. Just get as much light in your eyes ideally from sunlight throughout the day as is safe for you, meaning where you're not getting sunburned and you're not damaging your retina. And-If you want to know if you're damaging your retina, well, any time you have to blink or turn away from light because it's really bright, that's a signal that the light is too bright. So while you want to place yourself into bright environments, you don't want to place yourself into any environment so bright that it's painful to be in. Okay? So use that as a metric, and you should be just

6. 24:38 – 28:33

   Tool: Nighttime Environment & Darkness

   1. AHAndrew Huberman24:38

      fine. And the last point about light for mood and mental health is a relatively recent theme that's emerging from the scientific literature and that really was driven home by a recent study that I mentioned a little bit earlier in the episode. This is the study published in Nature Mental Health showing that darkness during a particular stage of your 24-hour cycle, your so-called circadian rhythm, is also very beneficial for mood and mental health. And it's beneficial for mood and mental health in a way that is independent from light and from sleep. Now, what do I mean by that? Okay, well, there are a number of different ways that this can be examined, but in this particular study, which I like oh-so-much, entitled "Day and night light exposure are associated with psychiatric disorders: an objective light study in more than 85,000 people," what the researchers did is they analyzed how much light and/or dark people were getting across the 24-hour cycle and correlated that with mental health outcomes, looking at a range of different mental health challenges, including bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, PTSD, and much more. And I'll go into this study in a lot of detail in a future episode 'cause it's such an important study with so many gems within it that we should all know about, but one of the key things from this study is that the positive effects of daytime sunlight exposure and the positive effects of nighttime dark exposure, that means, of course, the absence of light, are independent of one another. Put differently, making sure that you are in very dim to completely dark environments for a continuous six to eight hours within every 24-hour circadian cycle is correlated with much better mental health outcomes. In other words, we shouldn't just think about the presence of light in the morning and throughout the day as positive for mental health. That's all true. It's absolutely true. And this study further verifies that. But that's been known for some time, indeed, decades, from the scientific research, and of course, it's been known for thousands of years intuitively and subjectively without detailed scientific measurement. But in addition to that, this study shows that people who stay in very dim to dark environments for eight hours every 24 hours, or I should say approximately eight hours in every 24-hour cycle, they benefit from improved mood and mental health outcomes in a way that's independent of how much light they're getting and independent of how much sleep they are getting. The point is this. The time when you wake up, consider that time zero, and then about, again, you don't have to be super strict about this, about 16 to 24 hours after that wake-up time, you should be in a very dim to dark environment for that 16-hour to 24-hour period after waking up. Okay? What do I mean by this? I mean if you go to sleep at 10:00 PM and you wake up at 6:00 AM, well, that 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM phase of your circadian cycle, you should be in very dim light or entirely dark environment. This is a great opportunity to reference another study which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which shows that even having a small amount of light in the room, which isn't even that bright, while you're sleeping with eyes closed can disrupt morning glucose levels. So in other words, keep your sleeping environment dark. Keep your nighttime environment dim to the best of your abilities, right? Certainly, go out to dinner every once in a while, go to the movies, go out and have a party, enjoy yourself. If you have to go to the hospital, God forbid, or you have to tend to some emergency, do that. But to the extent that you can control it within the confines of life and its demands, keep your nighttime environment dim or dark, because that, independently of any sunlight and other bright light that you're viewing during the daytime and afternoon, is going to positively improve your mood and mental health.

7. 28:33 – 33:18

   Pillar #3: Movement; Pillar #4: Nutrition

   1. AHAndrew Huberman28:33

      Now, moving on to the other pillars, and these I'm going to move through a bit more quickly than I have the previous two because we've done entire series on these, or I should say serieses. Serieses? Is that how you pronounce it? Someone put the plural of serieses in the sh- in the (laughs) comments on YouTube. The third pillar is movement, and when I say movement, I mean exercise. As you all know, we should all strive to get anywhere from 180 to 220 minutes of Zone 2 cardio per week. That's movement that allows you to hold a conversation, but were you to do it more intensely, or even a bit more intensely, you wouldn't be able to hold that conversation. In addition, we should do some VO2 max work. We should get our heart rate very high at least once a week doing some sort of movement that's safe for you, so that could be running or cycling or swimming or Pilates, whatever it is for you. Getting your heart rate way, way up is also important, and to do that at least once a week. But daily movement, either cardiovascular training or resistance training, and it's very, very clear that we need both, maybe not on the same days. In fact, I split them to separate days. Resistance training done for anywhere from six to ten sets per muscle group, either close to or to failure. This could be with weights, it could be with bands, it could be with machines. All of that was covered in detail in the podcast series that I did with Dr. Andy Galpin, an exercise physiologist, who's expert in all those areas. I also did an episode on foundational fitness protocol that has been distilled into a very simple three-page PDF that you can get for completely zero cost by going to hubermanlab.com and just put foundational fitness protocol PDF, and you'll be taken to that toolkit. So all of the details of a weekly exercise routine that involves daily movement, but also, certainly in my case, includes at least one full day of rest per week, because many people do indeed need one, maybe even two full days of rest per week. So that highlights the third pillar, movement, but we know that cardiovascular training and resistance training aren't just great for our body. They also improve mood and mental health. That's so very clear from the research literature. So we can't overlook those.... in a conversation about mood and mental health. Now, the fourth pillar is nutrition, and nutrition is a big topic. It's a very barbed wire topic. If you get involved in this stuff online, you know, you, you, you've got your people who believe that, you know, carnivore is better than vegan. You have the people who believe vegan is better than carnivore. Most people are omnivores. You have your seed oil debates and on and on and on. We're not going to touch any of that now. Indeed, if you want to learn more about nutrition and what works and what doesn't work for sake of aesthetic changes, weight loss, muscle gain, et cetera, I would refer you to the guest episode that we did with Dr. Layne Norton. You can find that, again, at hubermanlab.com, where we do a deep dive on all the variations and different nutritional protocols. But suffice to say that regardless of whether or not you're vegan, omnivore, or carnivore, or keto, or whatever, everybody needs to consume sufficient amounts, but not excess amounts, of quality calories per day. Now, you may do that by intermittent fasting. You may do that by a more traditional meal scheduling. But everybody's going to need to do that, because your body and brain, and indeed the parts of your body and brain that translate to mood and mental health, require macronutrients, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, as well as micronutrients. So the key takeaway with nutrition is to make it quality nutrition within the bounds of whatever sort of nutritional program that you're following, and that means getting most of your food sources from either non-processed or minimally processed foods. So these would be foods that you're going to need to prepare or foods that would perish, um, over time. These are not the sorts of foods that live in boxes and cans and other, uh, packages that would allow them to live on the shelves forever and ever. Okay? And a- as I say that, I know many people are shouting, "Well, what about rice? You know, rice can live on the shelf for a long time." And yes, okay, I consider rice a minimally processed food, because of course it can live on the shelf for a long period of time. And here, I'm just gonna back out of the whole conversation about nutrition at this point, because as you can probably tell, it's a deep series of rabbit holes that we can fall into and really get distracted. The point is make sure you're getting enough food. Don't overeat. We know energy toxicity is a problem for not just body composition, but for mental health. So you want to get enough calories, but not too few calories, and you want to make sure that you're getting them from quality sources. And I say that because, of course, food is not just a substrate for the cellular repair and indeed production of tissues in your body. But it's also the substrate for all the sorts of neurotransmitters, right, which are derived from amino acid precursors that are derived from food, right? All of that dopamine stuff and serotonin stuff is derived from amino acids that come from food sources. So the link between nutrition and

8. 33:18 – 34:51

   Sponsor: AG1

   1. AHAndrew Huberman33:18

      mental health should now be an obvious one. As we all know, quality nutrition influences of course our physical health, but also our mental health, and our cognitive functioning, our memory, our ability to learn new things, and to focus. And we know that one of the most important features of high-quality nutrition is making sure that we get enough vitamins and minerals from high-quality, unprocessed or minimally processed sources, as well as enough probiotics and prebiotics and fiber to support basically all the cellular functions in our body, including the gut microbiome. Now, I, like most everybody, try to get optimal nutrition from whole foods, ideally mostly from minimally processed or non-processed foods. However, one of the challenges that I and so many other people face is getting enough servings of high-quality fruits and vegetables per day, as well as fiber and probiotics that often accompany those fruits and vegetables. That's why way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast, I started drinking AG1. And so, I'm delighted that AG1 is sponsoring the Huberman Lab Podcast. The reason I started taking AG1 and the reason I still drink AG1 once or twice a day is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs. That is, it provides insurance that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and fiber to ensure optimal mental health, physical health, and performance. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim a special offer. They're giving away five free travel packs plus a year's supply of vitamin D3 K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com/huberman to claim that special offer.

9. 34:51 – 40:00

   Pillar #5: Social Connection

   1. AHAndrew Huberman34:51

      The fifth pillar in the big six is social connection, and we're going to talk a little bit more about this later in the episode. But let's just be very brief and specific about this. We all need to strive to limit the number of social interactions that we feel tax or even vex us, that cause us stress. This is something that was covered in depth in the episode with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett where she talked about the fact that we don't just have a nervous system that regulates itself through experience and through our thoughts and our actions. We are, as a species, interacting with other nervous systems, both of our own species, other humans, as well as non-human species, dogs and cats, and if you have 'em, horses and other animals. So we need to think about our nervous system as being both regulated from the inside and through our own actions and choices and thoughts, but also through interaction with other nervous systems. And while we don't always have as much control over which social interactions or work interactions we have to engage in, we should really strive to understand and indeed pay some serious attention to whether or not certain types of social interactions are what she referred to as net savings, neutral, or taxing, right? Certain types of social interactions with certain people or groups of people just make us feel taxed. It makes us feel stressed. It leads to negative affect, that is not good feelings or emotions, and often elevated levels of autonomic arousal that leave us ruminating and leave us having challenges with sleep. We really should all strive to limit those interactions to the extent that we can. On the reverse side of that, as Lisa Feldman Barrett so beautifully pointed out, we also have the capability to regulate each other's nervous systems in ways that produce savings, that is that allow us to feel and indeed cause physiological changes that make us feel not just happier, not just relaxed, not just happy because we enjoy interacting with somebody, but, or a group, but...... that give us a savings, that give us the kind of resources, literally metabolic and neurochemical resources that make us feel more capable and give us a sense of elevated mood and improved mental health when we are not engaging with those people. And this is highly subjective, of course, but you should be able to distinguish, in fact, I encourage you to spend a little bit of time, maybe even just five or ten minutes thinking about, you know, who are the individuals and groups that I interact with that leave me feeling taxed? You know, that really seem to drain my energy and have me ruminating and in a not good space when I leave whatever interaction I had with them. This could be a real interaction or an online interaction. Indeed, I did this the other day, based on Lisa's suggestion, and I found it to be tremendously useful. What I did is I decided to, and by the way, this was happening on a run, where I was thinking, you know, a lot of my mind is in a conversation with people that aren't even here. I was sort of working through a conversation, I was thinking about what I would say, what I did say, what they said, in an interaction that unfortunately was pretty unpleasant. It wasn't extremely unpleasant, but it was pretty unpleasant. And I realized, okay, that is the sort of interaction that I would like to avoid in the future, because it wasn't happening right then, but it was carried forward into a portion of my day, my morning run, that for me is normally very pleasureful and quite sacred to me actually. So paying some attention to how much of your internal dialogue is with yourself versus with others and how much of that is positive or negative is extremely beneficial, and I'm not talking about always just thinking about oneself and not thinking about others. To the contrary. We also need to think, as Lisa pointed out, about who are the people with whom we interact with or observe that lead us to have ongoing dialogue with them in our mind or think about those interactions in ways that give us energy, that lead to energetic savings, literally metabolic savings that we can apply not just in those interactions, but in our work endeavors and our solo endeavors, whatever that we're doing when we are away from those people. So while this concept of savings or neutral or taxation of our metabolic and our neurochemical systems might seem a little bit squishy, it is not squishy. This is a neurobiological concept, it's also a psychological concept, and it's one that I'm so glad that Lisa brought up because social connection, social interaction is so vital to our mood and mental health, but oftentimes we hear social connection and we think, oh, that means we have to spend a lot of time with friends, we have to organize dinner parties. Well, sure, that's all fine and good if you can do that, and I do of course encourage people to spend time with those that they love, but it's also important to take a step back and just think a bit, maybe even write out a bit, you know, who are the groups and sorts of individuals and interactions that really tax you? Who are the people that you find kind of neutral? And what are the individuals and groups that really provide what Lisa referred to as savings? That is, they tap into the metabolic and neurochemical pathways that lead us to have improved mood and mental health not just during those interactions, but away from those interactions as well, and often pervasively and extremely positively so. So it, this is no small deal. This is a really important aspect of our mental health.

10. 40:00 – 45:40

    Pillar #6: Stress Control; Physiological Sigh

    1. AHAndrew Huberman40:00

       Now the sixth pillar in the big six is stress control, and the reason it's included is that, look, stress is going to happen. Life is filled with so-called stressors, and for a good number of years, in fact the last 15 years, there's been a lot of debate in the field of psychology and neuroscience as well whether or not stress is good for us, whether or not stress is bad for us, whether or not we simply need to reframe stress as good or bad. And to some extent all of that is true. You know, we know that chronic stress is not good for our memory, our immune system, or our health. We also know that if you understand the reality, which is that stress also allows us to harness our mental and physical resources to perform better than we would otherwise in certain circumstances, and that provided we can get to sleep each night, that perhaps stress isn't so bad and perhaps is even performance-enhancing. I talked about this in the guest episode with Dr. Alia Crum from the Psychology Department at Stanford, and I've talked about this in other podcasts as well. And I'm not here to tell you that stress is good for you. I'm not here to tell you that stress is bad for you. What I am going to tell you is that it is extremely important that we all have readily accessible stress management tools that work the first time and every time, and these fall into two categories. The first category are real-time tools, so tools that you can use to reduce your level of stress in real time, and the best way that I'm aware of that's grounded in excellent physiology and neuroscience to reduce your stress in real time is the so-called physiological sigh. I did not invent this pattern of breathing, it's not breathwork per se. This is a pattern of breathing that we all naturally do in our sleep to restore carbon dioxide and oxygen levels to their proper ratios. We also do it periodically throughout the day without noticing. Indeed, we have a defined or specific neural circuit in our brain that extends to our diaphragm and communicates with aspects of our heart, et cetera, that allow physiological sighs to calm us down faster, at least to my knowledge, than any other directed protocol. And the physiological sigh, as many of you know, is very simple and straightforward. Anyone can do this. You simply do a big inhale through your nose, try and maximize the inflation of your lungs, and then before you exhale, sneak in another brief inhalation, even if it's just a tiny micro-inhalation to maximally inflate the lungs, and that has an important effect on the little sacs in the lungs called the alveoli of the lungs. It's going to open up whatever alveoli were collapsed in there, and then you're going to do a long extended exhale through the mouth. And typically just one, although sometimes it requires two or three, but just one physiological sigh is effective in bringing down one's level of stress significantly enough that you don't need to do it again. So this can be done essentially anywhere and by anyone. I suppose-Probably couldn't do it if you were underwater, or certainly don't do it if you're underwater. But otherwise, it's a very safe and very effective way to calm down and reduce your levels of stress in real time, maybe before public speaking or in whatever circumstance you feel you need to calm down in real time. So I'll demonstrate the physiological sigh for you here. I've done this many times before in previous episodes. But for those of you that haven't heard or seen those episodes, I feel, uh, obligated to do it again now. Okay, so it's a deep inhale through the nose, followed by another brief inhale through the nose, and then a long exhale through the mouth. And before you start asking questions about, "Well, what do I do if I have a deviated septum? Can it be just through the mouth?" Do the first two through the nose. Do the third through the mouth. So it's like this. (inhales deeply) (exhales deeply) And indeed, I feel calmer. And indeed, if you do it, you will feel calmer. You'll notice that second inhale through the nose was kind of sharp in the sense that I had to really push, um, put some physical effort into making it happen, and, you know, I, my shoulders jolted upwards. If you were just listening to this and not watching, my shoulders jolted upwards. That second inhale through the nose is important for a variety of reasons I've talked about elsewhere. So the physiological sigh is going to be the go-to protocol for you. Again, not invented by me. This is not Huberman breathing. This is a pattern of breathing discovered in the 1930s by physiologists. It's hardwired into our nervous system, and that's what makes it so great. It works the first time and it works every time. So that's, to my knowledge, the best way to control your stress in real time. Now, why is that important for mood and mental health? Well, as we'll talk about later, if you want to access your so-called generative drive, a theme that we're going to get into in a bit more detail, this is something that came up during the series with Dr. Paul Conti, you will learn that stress, and anger, and negative emotions, while they can be very motivating, very arousing, they are not going to be good for your long-term mood and mental health, period. So having tools to regulate your stress and your levels of anger, your levels of reactivity, and also to elevate your feelings of agency and control over your life, starting with agency and control over your physiology, your internal state, is going to be vital. And what I love about the physiological sigh is that, of course it's completely zero cost, but also, there's a dedicated circuit in your brain and body for this particular pattern of breathing. We do it spontaneously, but you can do it intentionally and it works just as well, if not better, to regulate your levels of stress, that is to bring them down, which has outsized positive effects on your mood and mental health, not just in the moment, but it also should improve your confidence that when stress comes, because the world is filled with stressors, it's not if, it's when, when stress comes, that you will have a physiologically, scientifically supported tool to deal with and reduce

11. 45:40 – 50:00

    Tool: Raise Stress Threshold, Deliberate Cold Exposure

    1. AHAndrew Huberman45:40

       that stress. Now, in addition, I do believe it's important for sake of mood and mental health to also have a tool or a protocol to raise your stress threshold, that is to increase your capacity to deal with life stressors without them feeling so stressful. And there are a number of different ways to do this, but they all center around elevating your levels of adrenaline, epinephrine and norepinephrine, noradrenaline, those are the same thing, just they have multiple names. Forgive me. I didn't give the same two things four names, so don't blame me. Blame the other scientist that did it. The point is, there are several ways that you can self-induce elevations of noradrenaline and adrenaline, and then to learn to anchor your mind and your thinking to stay calm in those elevated adrenaline states as a practice for when stressors hit you in the outside world and your adrenaline and noradrenaline spike. Now, one of the best ways to do this, because it works the first time and every time and is also zero cost, in fact, it will save you money, is to put yourself in a cold shower or other deliberate cold exposure environment, but most everyone has access to a cold shower, not everyone, but most people, and of course, by turning off the heat, you're going to reduce heating costs, right? Your water bill. So getting into a cold shower for a minute or so to elevate your levels of adrenaline and learning to either use your breathing, you could do physiological sighs, or to distract yourself or whatever tools and approaches you need to be able to stay calm while you have elevated levels of adrenaline in your body. And the reason deliberate cold exposure works so well to do this is that it is pretty non-negotiable. Even if you really love cold showers or cold plunges or things of that sort, you're still going to get that elevated adrenaline and noradrenaline. It's pretty much non-negotiable. You know, for the first 10 or 15 seconds that you get into a cold plunge or a cold shower, you should fully expect yourself to feel stressed and for your breathing to accelerate, and then your goal is to try and anchor or control your breathing in that stressful environment. And the reason for doing this is that it's a practice. It's a practice that's going to translate to a better ability to manage your internal state and therefore your thinking, your cognition, and your ability to make good decisions under stress. It's not about becoming untouched by stress, it's about being able to better navigate stress. Indeed, I think of this as analogous to driving in fog, something that I had to learn to do because I grew up in the Bay Area and it can be very foggy there sometimes. And of course, you don't learn to drive in fog the first day you learn how to drive, but the first time you hit heavy fog driving where you can only see one reflector in front of you at a time, it is truly stressful, right? You don't know if you're gonna come up on another vehicle in an instant, which of course can happen, so you have to adjust a number of things. You have to learn how to do that. And while I would never elect to drive in fog, learning to drive in fog teaches you how to be comfortable driving in different weather environments. Same thing with driving in a rainstorm, or for you East Coasters from the Northeast, learning how to drive in a snowstorm. You would never elect to do that, but once you do it a few times, you feel more comfortable in those extreme conditions. So that's really what raising your stress threshold is all about. Of course, do it safely, do it under conditions in which you're not gonna get hurt or anyone else will get hurt.But learning how to do this can be extremely beneficial. And of course, deliberate cold exposure isn't the only way but frankly, it's the most reliable way and it's the most versatile way to do that because you can do it in your shower or in a cold plunge at home, so you can practice these things. Again, safety first. Always make sure you're not exposing yourself to cold to the extent that you're gonna damage yourself mentally or physically. But it's a great practice and you could probably think of other ways to spike your adrenaline that were safe and, of course, life will spike your adrenaline, so you can also use real life as your, uh, you know, your stress inoculation tool and we all have to do that anyway. What I'm suggesting is that you adopt a real-time tool, physiological size, and that you adopt at least one offline tool that you do anywhere from one to three, maybe seven days a week. But at least one day a week that you put yourself into a cold shower, deliberate cold exposure, not for sake of increasing metabolism or anything else, but really just to learn how to calm yourself and maintain clear cognition when stress hits because indeed, stress is gonna hit.

12. 50:00 – 57:58

    6 Pillars & Brain Predictability, Affect & Emotion

    1. AHAndrew Huberman50:00

       So that's the big six for improving mood and mental health. And the big six apply, that is, they are the cornerstone for mood and mental health regardless of who you are, regardless of your age, regardless of whether or not you're dealing with an acute or a severe mood or mental health disorder or you find yourself to be reasonably healthy with respect to mood and mental health and you simply want your mood and mental health to be stable and/or improve over time. Now, the reason why the big six, those six pillars are so important for mood and mental health, and indeed form a critical component of what Dr. Paul Conti referred to as the first principles of self-care, is that those six pillars establish a milieu, that is an environment of neurochemicals, including neuromodulators such as dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, and other neurochemicals as well, as well as hormones, testosterone, estrogen, prolactin, cortisol, and immune molecules and on and on, that lead to a high degree of predictability in your brain and nervous system. Now what do I mean by that? Why would predictability be such a key component of mood and mental health? Is it really just about knowing that you're going to feel energized in the early part of the day and tired at the end of the day? Now that might be part of it, but that's not the major takeaway. The major takeaway is that as Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett so aptly pointed out, your brain and indeed your entire nervous system has a couple of major jobs. You know, it has the job of regulating your breathing and your heart rate, et cetera. It also has the job of regulating your thinking and your planning and your memory. Those are the jobs of the brain and nervous system that we normally hear about, but if we think about the more macro jobs that the brain has, the key function of the brain, certainly the parts of the brain that are more recently evolved, the ones involved in thinking and planning, et cetera, are really involved in generating predictions, predictions about what's going to happen next and whether or not you're going to be prepared for what's gonna happen next. And indeed, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett also beautifully illustrated this model of the brain as regulating a brain-body budget, and moods, and a related topic, which she called affect, okay, I'll explain what affect is in a moment, setting the stage for being able to better predict what's gonna happen next and therefore regulating your mood in the moment. Let's just take a moment and explore that statement in a little bit more detail. Essentially what she was saying, and what I'm now again saying, is that your brain and body go through different states. Your state at a given moment can be labeled as your affect. Your affect includes a lot of different things, including levels of autonomic arousal, levels of hormones, levels of transmitters, all of that stuff. But it falls under the umbrella of affect. Affect essentially sets the stage for particular emotions to be more likely or less likely to emerge. So emotion and affect aren't the same thing. Affect is a bit more general and sort of undergirds the possibility of having certain moods like feeling elated, happy, or sad or depressed. It really sets the general stage for different types of specific emotions, even highly specific emotions. So in that way when you're taking care of the big six, when you're tending to these six pillars on a regular basis, and I should point out that we really want to tend to those six pillars every single day or every single 24 hours. We really need to make those a regular investment to the extent that we can. When we do that, we create a neurochemical and a neural milieu that allows the brain to be in a better predictive state. It allows the brain to give rise to certain affects, spelled A-F-F-E-C-T-S, so affects, that lead to certain emotions being more or less likely to occur. Put very simply, when we're tending to those six pillars on a regular basis, we feel better more generally and therefore the emotions that we tend to have under different conditions, even conditions of a difficult interaction with a coworker or with a family member, tend to be more positive than if we are not tending to those six pillars. Now in some sense, that's sort of a duh statement. For instance if you're sleep-deprived, if you're not fed well, like you haven't eaten in a few hours, of course you're going to be more irritable, you're going to be more reactive, you are going to be more emotionally labile. But sleep and nutrition are just two of those six core pillars. When we talk about those core pillars and the necessity for tending to them on a regular, every 24-hour basis, what we're really talking about is creating a milieu within our brain and nervous system that allows the nervous system to do what it does best and in fact what its main job is to do, which is to predict what's gonna happen next. Because as Lisa Feldman Barrett pointed out, emotions are really context-dependent states that allow us to navigate not just our present circumstances, but they are our nervous system and brain's best guess about the circumstances that we are soon going to encounter. Now I don't offer you all of that as kind of a-... a bunch of, you know, tangled mess of nerd speak to confuse you. What I'm saying is that by tending to those six core pillars, you are shifting the likely affects that you will experience and therefore the likely emotions that you will experience. So you're biasing your whole system towards more positive affect and more positive emotions regardless of what your life circumstances happen to be and the stressors that you encounter. And indeed, you also are including that sixth pillar of stress control, so when those stressors arrive, you will be better able to navigate them. Now this view of emotion regulation, of mood and mental health, is certainly not a novel concept. People have talked about the physiological regulation of mood from the time of William James and even earlier. You know, i- it's been a longstanding question, for instance, or debate in psychology and philosophy. You know, do we feel anxiety in our body and then label it as anxiety or do we feel anxiety in our mind and then our body follows? That's been a longstanding debate, and frankly, there's evidence on both sides which leads me to the conclusion, I think most neurobiologists and psychologists to the conclusion that those things are interrelated in a way that we can't really dissociate them completely at any level, right? When your heart rate goes up and you start brea-thing faster, you know, if I were to induce that state in you, you'd probably interpret that as feeling anxious. In addition to that, something can make you anxious before your heart rate and breathing increases, and then your heart rate and breathing increases. So no need to tease those apart. But if you think about the brain in large part as a prediction machine and your brain as a metabolic regulator, it's trying to decide which organs need resources. How much resource can I dedicate to thinking, to creativity, to enjoying social interaction, to paying attention to what somebody else is saying as opposed to what's going on inside my body? All of those major functions of the brain as they relate to affect and emotions are going to be best supported, that is biased toward positive mood, positive affect, positive emotions, and therefore positive mental health outcomes, when we're tending to those six pillars. Doctor Lisa Feldman Barrett referred to that whole process as the brain regulating a brain-body budget, and she had beautiful analogies for that budget, and that's what led to the description of social interactions as either generating savings or being neutral or generating a taxed feeling, literally taxing that brain-body budget. And I love that concept and it's one that you can keep in mind, and indeed we can inject a lot of specificity into this whole process of improving mood and mental health through specific protocols if you simply remember, if you make a daily investment in the six core pillars, you are building up that brain-body budget. You will have more energetic resources to spend on whatever life circumstances come your

13. 57:58 – 1:06:25

    Pharmacology, Psychedelics, Supplements & Neuroplasticity

    1. AHAndrew Huberman57:58

       way. Now before we move into a discussion about protocols for how to better understand your life narrative, to enhance your sense of self and confidence and things of that theme, I briefly want to mention that of course there are known tools out there in the medical community and psychological community for improving mood and mental health. And while there are a variety of tools, one of the main tools of the psychiatrist is prescription drugs that target specific neuromodulator systems in the brain and body. For instance, SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or atypical antidepressants that target the dopamine and epinephrine system such as Wellbutrin, bupropion, or other types of antidepressants. Or for instance, nowadays there's a lot of growing excitement about clinical trials using relatively high dosages of psilocybin, which by the way closely mimics the chemical serotonin. That's right. Psilocybin, which is converted to psilocin in the brain. If you look at it chemically, it looks very much like serotonin, although it has distinct effects from serotonin. I talked about psilocybin and what's being done in terms of the clinical trials, safety considerations. I talked about the potential hazard considerations and where the legality and all of that is going in that episode if you want to check that out. But the reason I'm taking a moment to mention these drugs, things like SSRIs, Prozac, Zoloft, citalopram, Wellbutrin, psilocybin, and so on, is that all of them target specific neuromodulator systems in the brain and body, and at the same time it's fairly clear that mood disorders such as major depression are not necessarily deficits in things like serotonin or dopamine. They can be, but most often they are not. So why are such drugs prescribed for mood disorders and for mental health disorders? Well, because if specific neuromodulators like serotonin, dopamine, or epinephrine are dramatically increased above baseline, that affords the brain the ability to rewire itself. Really, the way to think about SSRIs or atypical antidepressants or psilocybin for the treatment of major depression is really to think about them as chemical tools to open or access neural plasticity. And that's why it's oh-so-important that those drugs be combined with talk therapy where people are actively working through the sources, the real life sources and the historical sources, maybe even the trauma-based sources, of their depression. And I mention this because, you know, there's a lot of debate nowadays as to whether or not, you know, these drugs are useful, whether or not the side effect profiles justify their use, whether or not, you know, they are applicable to young populations. You know, there's a lot of debate about this and, and certainly in the case of the psychedelics there's a lot, a lot of debate because this is newly emerging area and there's still not a lot of data although it's starting to, you know, increase over time. But the key point here is that all of these drugs have the potential to work in some people, not others. Some people, you know, they simply don't work for and they cause more problems than solutions they solve. But they tend to work by...... increasing the propensity for neuroplasticity by changing the neuromodulator milieu in the brain. And this is an important point when thinking about tools for enhancing mood and mental health, that when we think about tools for enhancing mood and mental health, and next, of course, we're going to talk about the tools that are specifically designed to target a specific aspect of one's life story or concept of self. All of that is always operating on a backdrop of two things, that overall neurochemical milieu and autonomic function that the six pillars relate to and support if we're tending to those. But any improvement in mood and mental health, it's going to be significant, it's going to be noticeable, and it's going to be stable, it's going to be pervasive over time, is going to require that some degree of neuroplasticity, some degree of neural rewiring occur. So I'm not bringing up the topic of these particular drug tools to say that they are the best way to improve mood and mental health. I'm certainly not saying that. They are but one way to potentially improve mood and mental health, and if they are going to work, they always work best when done in concert with talk therapy because they are opening the opportunity for neuroplasticity, but then that neuroplasticity has to be directed toward a particular end point. There has to be specific work that's being done by the individual or ideally, the individual with an expert trained clinically certified therapist or psychologist or psychiatrist in order to make sure that the neuroplastic changes that occur lead to long-standing improvements in mood and mental health over time. Indeed, the drugs that I just described were originally designed as tools to allow people to access changes within their brain that would then allow them to enhance mood and mental health but not have to rely on the drugs themselves for improved mood and mental health. And along those lines, I'm sure some of you out there are thinking about the supplement-based or nutrition-based approaches to enhancing these neuromodulators, and indeed while they don't have the same potency as things like Wellbutrin and SSRIs at increasing things like dopamine and serotonin respectively, there is a growing number of people out there that are relying on, say, daily supplementation with anywhere from one to three grams with, of L-tyrosine, you know, amino acid precursor to dopamine, combined with often, you know, 300 to 600 milligrams of Alpha-GPC as a way to enhance dopamine and acetylcholine and to set the stage for elevated levels of neuroplasticity. But it's very important to point out that the amino acid precursors to the various neuromodulators like L-tyrosine, like L-tryptophan, so L-tyrosine, precursor to dopamine, L-tryptophan, precursor to serotonin and so on, that those don't have the same degree of potency, that is, ability to enhance those neuromodulators, and so the extent to which they enrich the possibility for neuroplasticity still remains somewhat obscure. There haven't been clinical trials on that yet, at least not clinical trials that I am aware of. So I mentioned all of that stuff about drugs, whether or not it's psychedelics or whether or not it's prescription antidepressants or whether or not people are using a supplement-based, amino acid-based protocol for increasing certain neuromodulators. It feels important to mention all of that because, well, first of all, it's quite prominent out there, certainly in the case of prescription antidepressants, and there's growing prominence and use of relatively high dose psilocybin, again always in- done with support talk therapy. This is done in a legal setting. I said legal, not illegal. A legal setting with a board certified therapist. This is being done on university campuses, within research labs, and of course, I acknowledge that there are people who are using these compounds outside the realm of the university clinical study environment. So I mention these chemicals not because I'm pointing to them as the path to improved mood and mental health. They can be, but they aren't always, and as I mentioned before, they can sometimes cause problems that lead people to wish that they hadn't taken them or to decide to not take them any further, a decision that absolutely has to be made with a healthcare professional who's well certified to do that. But I'm mentioning these tools because I want you to understand if they work, why they work. And one key point that was really emphasized by Dr. Paul Conti, who, as I mentioned before, is a psychiatrist, so he uses pharmacology in his practice although he uses other non-pharmacologic tools as well, is that these pharmacologic tools are never to be viewed as the be-all end-all of enhancing mood and mental health. They are but one path to improving mood and mental health, and indeed should be viewed as a path to getting people who are otherwise unable to engage in those six core pillars, those first principles of mental health, to be able to do those things on a regular basis, and then perhaps, based on a discussion with their clinician, these people could come off those pharmacologic agents. Maybe yes, maybe no. It depends on the individual, it depends on the circumstances. But those core six pillars, those first principles of mental health that include but are not limited to those core six pillars are absolutely essential. There's no drug that can replace those core six pillars.

14. 1:06:25 – 1:07:26

    Sponsor: InsideTracker

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:06:25

       I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals. I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done, for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term health can only be analyzed from a quality blood test. A major problem with a lot of blood tests out there, however, is that you get information back about metabolic factors, lipids, and hormones and so forth, but you don't know what to do with that information. With InsideTracker, they make it very easy because they have a personalized platform that allows you to see the levels of all those things, metabolic factors, lipids, hormones, et cetera, but it gives you specific directives that you can follow that relate to nutrition, behavioral modifications, supplements, et cetera that can help you bring those numbers into the ranges that are optimal for you.If you'd like to try InsideTracker, you can go to insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off any of InsideTracker's plans. Again, that's insidetracker.com/huberman.

15. 1:07:26 – 1:14:39

    Tool: Emotional Granularity

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:07:26

       Okay. So setting aside the core six pillars, let's now talk about other tools for mood and mental health that center around really what we more typically think of when we think of mood and mental health, which is emotions. When Dr. Lisa Feldman-Barrett was a guest on the podcast, she said something that was really incredible, and it's something that's strongly grounded in excellent scientific data, which is, the more specificity that we can put to labeling our emotions, the better off we're going to be in terms of our overall mental health. Let me restate that. The more specific language that we can put to our own internal emotions, even if that language is just to ourselves in our own internal narrative, we don't even have to speak out th- what those labels are, the better that we're going to feel over time. And indeed, this effect can be quite rapid. And indeed, Dr. Lisa Feldman-Barrett has done research on this very specific topic. It's something that's referred to as emotional granularity. So while some of us move through life with a sort of what I call emojification of emotions. You know, you got your happy face, happy, and your sad face, sad. You know, you're angry, depressed, anxious. You know, those are labels for emotional states, or you could think of them as affects or emotions. I think of them as emotions. But they're not very specific. They're pretty broad bins. We say sad or depressed or super depressed or super sad, anxious, panic, and we think of that as nuance, but it's not very nuanced. And Lisa's laboratory and other laboratories have explored two things. First, if people are asked to or encouraged to put more granularity, more specificity on what they're feeling, then it seems that their levels of emotional processing are better overall. How does that translate to emotions? Well, it translates to better overall feelings of well-being when one is placing more specificity on positive emotions, and the flip side is also true. So this is important to know. If one places more specificity on negative emotions, it also can enhance one's kind of experience of those negative emotions. Now, that means that this is a two-sided blade. All right? This isn't always a good thing. And if one is thinking about protocols for improving mood and mental health, the data make very clear that adding more specificity to our positive emotions in terms of the language we use, but also just the depth with which we process and think about those positive experiences, can be very beneficial for us. So there are two studies that I'd like to highlight that relate to this. The first is entitled Effective Self-Monitoring Through Experience Sampling on Emotion Differentiation in Depression, and the second study is entitled Emotional Granularity Increases With Intensive Ambulatory Assessment, Methodological and Individual Factors Influence How Much. Now, each of these studies focus on something slightly different. The first study was mainly focused on people who have depression, and they were cued several, if not many, times per day to just think about and report on their emotional state. And that was done in order to get people to place more granularity, more specificity on what they're feeling, but also simply to tap into how they're feeling on a more regular basis throughout the day. The second study, which is one that included Dr. Lisa Feldman-Barrett as an author, was slightly different because it focused on non-depressed individuals, and it cued them to touch into their emotions more times per day, and it also included some physiological measurements, and one in particular that we're gonna talk about in some detail. Now, I don't have time to go into all the details of these studies, I may do that in a future podcast episode, but the key takeaways are very important for all of us to know, which are, first of all, the more often that you can ask yourself, you know, "What am I really feeling right now? How do I feel?" And, and this is so critical, the more that you force yourself to not use broad labels or simply valence labels, valence labels are good or okay or bad, and instead understand that good is not an emotion, okay is not an emotion, bad is not an emotion, but rather saying, you know, "I feel, you know, curious, but a little anxious," if that happens to be the case. Or, "I feel, you know, bored, uh, but, you know, also, you know, a little bit in positive anticipation about what's gonna happen tomorrow." Things of that sort. Putting more nuance and specificity on your emotions, but also touching into or thinking about your own emotional states more times per day clearly has positive outcomes for mood and mental health, and the reasons for that are incredibly interesting, and this is something everybody should understand. Why would it be that putting more specificity on what we're feeling, so perhaps just in our own heads, like thinking, "Okay, how do I feel right now?" Like, if I were to do that right now, I'd say I feel energized and happy. I do. I really enjoy doing what I'm doing. So I wouldn't say I'm, like, off the charts in awe or elation, but I'm very happy, and I feel energized. You know, earlier today, I was feeling a little bit fatigued and a little bit confused, 'cause I was trying to sort out something, and, uh, it wasn't making sense to me. Um, so assessments like that, which can be told to somebody else or that we just hold internally, done repeatedly throughout the day, anywhere from three to six times throughout the day, just periodically pinging ourselves. Maybe you set an alarm, or maybe you just decide to, every once in a while, you know, maybe every time you- you go into an elevator, or every time you go up a flight of stairs, you just ask yourself, "Yeah, how do I feel right now?" And thinking about that for a moment. And you don't have to write it down, although I suppose you could. Well, it turns out that just that practice can really enhance our so-called emotional granularity that can enhance our positive emotions and affect. And in addition, it provides us a better sensitivity to better understand those negative emotions...... which sounds like it might be a bad thing, but those negative emotions have information in them. All right? This is one thing that's often lost in those broad categorizations of anxious, or sad, or depressed. And keep in mind, of course, that some people are genuinely clinically depressed and that needs to be taken extremely seriously, just like some people are genuinely clinically anxious, and that needs to be taken seriously. But most of us when we throw out the words depressed, angry, sad, we're not using enough nuance and it doesn't really apply to our internal states or the circumstances that we're in and, as a consequence, we suffer. It's not just about communicating our emotions. We suffer because th- the data say that the more nuance, the more emotional granularity that we have, the richer is our experience of the positive aspects of life and the more effectively we can navigate the negative aspects of life. Right? Again, negative emotions perhaps isn't the best way to even describe negative emotions because that label negative implies that we should avoid it. And in fact, those negative emotions provide a lot of information about perhaps social interactions that we should seek to avoid in the future and so on and

16. 1:14:39 – 1:23:49

    Tool: Heart Rate Variability & Emotional Graduality; Physiological Sigh

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:14:39

       so forth. Now, one of the most interesting things about this whole process of increasing emotional granularity and touching in several times per day into how we feel, something that's completely zero cost, takes just a moment to do, that we can get much better at over time, that was clearly seen in these studies that people get much better at doing this, it becomes more facile for them very quickly, is that it correlates with improvements in physiological metrics that relate to overall improvements in mood and mental health. And the specific physiological metric that I'm referring to is so-called vagal tone. Some of you have perhaps heard of the vagus nerve. It's the 10th cranial nerve, it's an extensive peripheral nerve that it goes out of the brain, uh, at the level of the, the neck. Uh, it's one of the cranial nerves that extends, um, to essentially all the organs of the body, the heart, the lungs, et cetera, but it's a two-way street. It's a superhighway of nerves out of the brain and into the body and it's a superhighway of nerves back from the bodily organs to the brain. And it's involved in regulating a lot of so-called autonomic functions, so how fast our heart rate is, or how fast our breathing is, rates of digestion. And all of that weaves together to create those things that we call affect, our internal states. So without going into a ton of detail about the vagus nerve, there's something that's called cardiac vagal control. Cardiac vagal control is the extent to which that vagus nerve can impact your heart rate and your overall feelings of calm or alertness. Now, the simple way to think about this is more commonly referred to as heart rate variability. Heart rate variability is simply the distance between your heartbeats, or rather, the time between your heartbeats, which we know if those timings between your heartbeats are somewhat variable, that is correlated with positive physical and mental health outcomes. One of the ways that you can increase heart rate variability is to get regular cardiovascular exercise as well as doing resistance exercise and, no surprise, getting sufficient amounts of quality sleep each night is also going to be very beneficial for heart rate variability. Now, exercise and sleep, of course, are wonderful, but it turns out that there's also a very rapid way to increase heart rate variability by activating the vagal innervation of the heart and the way that the heart and some other circuits within the so-called brain stem interact, and that's through something called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia can be summarized very simply by saying when you inhale, you speed your heart rate up, and when you exhale, you slow your heart rate down. And it's that exhale slowing your heart rate down that's mediated by the vagus nerve. Now, there's a more thorough description of that which I'll just give you now, and it's not that lengthy. So here's how it goes. When you inhale, your diaphragm actually moves down and, as a consequence, your heart actually gets a little bigger, has a little more space. As a consequence, the fluid in your heart moves a little more slowly per unit volume, and there's a neural signal to speed the heart up. Conversely, when you exhale, the diaphragm moves up. That means there's a little less space for the heart in the general area where it's sitting, so the heart gets a little bit smaller, a little more compact. That means that the fluid in your heart is moving more quickly through that smaller space, and there's a neural signal mediated by the vagus to slow the heart down. So that's why inhales speed your heart up and exhales slow your heart down. That is the basis of so-called RSA or respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Now, what does any of that have to do with the granularity of language that we place on our emotions? Well, it turns out there are several studies showing that when people place more descriptive granularity on their emotions, that is correlated with, okay, it's not causal, but it's correlated with improvements in respiratory sinus arrhythmia which we know correlate with improvements in heart rate variability. Indeed, it's one of the major bases for heart rate variability, which we know is correlated with not just positive physical health outcomes, but positive mental health outcomes, including lower levels of anxiety, improved sleep, and overall levels of mood. This is a topic that I'm very familiar with 'cause last year, my laboratory at Stanford University School of Medicine in collaboration with a colleague of mine, Dr. David Spiegel, our associate chair of psychiatry also at Stanford University School of Medicine, published a clinical trial in Cell Reports Medicine showing that there's a particular pattern of breathing that people can do for just five minutes per day that is effective in significantly improving various metrics related to mood and reducing anxiety and also improving sleep, although I should say the protocol I'm about

Episode duration: 2:04:11