LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the Sydney Opera House

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. Recently, the Huberman Lab podcast hosted a live event at the Sydney Opera House in Australia. The event was called The Brain Body Contract and featured a lecture followed by a question-and-answer session with the audience. We wanted to make the question-and-answer session available to everyone, regardless if you could attend. So what follows is the question-and-answer session from the Sydney Opera House in Australia. I also would like to thank the sponsors for the event. They are Eight Sleep and AG1. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. Now, one of the key aspects to getting a great 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 actually has to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up in the morning feeling refreshed, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. Eight Sleep makes it extremely easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment at the beginning, middle, and throughout the night, and when you wake up in the morning. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for nearly three years now, and it has dramatically improved my sleep. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, you can go to eightsleep.com/huberman to save $150 off their Pod 3 cover. Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman. The other live event sponsor, AG1, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens and other critical micronutrients. I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they decided to sponsor the live event. The reason I started taking it and the reason I still take it every day, once or twice a day, is that it ensures that I meet all of my quotas for vitamins and minerals, and it ensures that I get enough prebiotic and probiotic to support gut health. Now, of course, I strive to consume healthy whole foods for the majority of my nutritional intake every single day, but there are a number of things in AG1, including specific micronutrients that are hard to get from whole foods, or at least insufficient quantities. So AG1 allows me to get the vitamins and minerals that I need, probiotics, prebiotics, the adaptogens, and critical micronutrients. To try AG1, go to drinkag1.com/huberman, and you'll get a year's supply of vitamin D3K2 and five free travel packs of AG1. Again, that's drinkag1.com/huberman. Thank you to the Sydney Opera House for hosting us and for making this event possible. "What are the latest findings on the physiological mechanisms behind stress' impact on the body and brain, and what are some practical tools or techniques for managing stress effectively?" Well, um, thank you for that question. I'll, I'll, um, deliberately not repeat what I said earlier about physiological size, panoramic vision, et cetera, b- and raising stress threshold, because we covered that, um, already. But I think that one of the m- the most interesting findings, two most interesting findings in the f- in the field of stress in the last five years, or even three years, I think the, the work from my colleague, Alia Crum at Stanford, she's been a guest on the podcast, she works on mindsets, uh, is the following, um, result. Uh, students, Stanford students that is, come into the laboratory. They view a, I think it's a five-minute movie about how awful stress is for the mind and body, all the things it does, like deplete your immune system, make you miserable, uh, deplete certain aspects of the, the reproductive axis and on and on. And then a separate group comes in and watches a video, also five minutes, also true, about all the things that stress can do to enhance performance, both cognitive or physical, like ex- ex- or additional energy, additional cognitive power, access to certain memory sets, albeit narrow memory sets, et cetera. And what you find is that the results point directly to the fact that whatever you believe about stress, provided the information you have is true, is what happens. So if I tell you that stress improves your memory focus attention, one observes that. If I tell you that stress depletes your immune system, et cetera, one observes that. So this is something that we don't quite yet understand as neuroscientists and the psychology of it, uh, makes more sense, frankly, than the mechanisms. But it's becoming very clear that what we believe about a given phenomenon strongly impacts how it shapes our response to that. So I find that very interesting. Now, of course, you can't delete information about stress being bad for you, so what does that mean if you want stress to be, uh, l- enhancing, as it's called? There's literally now called the stresses enhancing mindset that the thing you can do is to learn more about how stress can be enhancing. We're not talking about lying. We're not talking about placebo effect. We're talking about real knowledge based in fact that one can absorb and, uh, I find it amazing and wonderful that the mere learning of something can actually change how we respond to something at a core physiological level. The second, I think, very important set of findings on stress relate to a structure that I've talked about recently on the podcast and I talked about with, um, the one and only David Goggins. Most people presumably have heard, like, he's on his ways running here right now from, from Central America. Um, m- <|agent|><|en|> There's a, yeah. That guy, I'll tell you, that guy is every bit as intense as he comes across.