The Biology Of Focus, Success & Long-Term Energy - Dr Andrew Huberman (4K)

There's been a lot of controversy over the last few months, and the internet's been ablaze with speculation. I think it's important to get it up top, what is happening with the state of the adenosine system research within the first 90 minutes of the day?

Adenosine is an incredibly interesting molecule. It exists in the brain and body. It accumulates with the number of hours that you're awake. So the longer you're awake, the more adenosine accumulates. It does many things in the brain and body. One of the most important things that it does is to give us the sur- subjective experience of feeling sleepy, and the objective feeling of our body being fatigued, of feeling literally heavier, requiring more energy to move ourselves. When we sleep and when we allow ourselves to go into states of deep rest that are similar to sleep, we can talk about this, the adenosine system is adjusted so that there's less effective adenosine circulating or bound to adenosine receptors. Okay? So this is sort of adenosine 101. There's a lot more to it, but that's sufficient for what we need to talk about for now. The drug, the most commonly used drug, the drug we're using now and that we're on right now, caffeine, which is consumed by it's estimated more than 90% of the world's adult population, effectively works by blocking the adenosine receptor. There's some nuance there, but we can think of it that way for simplicity's sake. And in doing so, it prevents the sleepiness inducing actions of adenosine. However, when caffeine wears off, the adenosine that was around trying to bind to those receptors is still around. In fact, it's accumulated even more, which at least partially explains the so-called caffeine crash or the dip in energy, the fatigue that is that we experience maybe three or four hours after consuming caffeine. Okay. As I mentioned before, when we go to sleep at night, adenosine is cleared from our system. There was a lot of debate over the years about why we sleep. In fact, the great Matt Walker wrote the book, Why We Sleep. And a lot of it has to do with the cell biology of regulating potassium and other ions that are in neurons, and for those that are interested in the cell biology, it's about readjusting the amount of potassium inside and outside the cells, which is happening on an ongoing basis. But you could think of the time that we sleep as doing many things, but one of the most important things is to bring those adenosine levels down. Whatever adenosine has accumulated, to bring it back down such that when we wake up in the morning, we feel alert. Okay? There are a lot of reasons why we feel alert. Some of them we can call pro-alertness mechanisms, like the release of cortisol. Some of them are about removing the brake on wakefulness, like reducing adenosine. Here we're talking about removing the brake on wakefulness by reducing adenosine. So let's say, like what time do you go to sleep at night typically? If you had your way.