Andrew Huberman: The Science of Small Changes

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/ed68139818bb4557

And if you're somebody who's really into self optimization and you're doing
A lot of work on yourself, maybe you've been doing some therapy or journaling or
work on traumas and you're optimizing your
Hormones and sleep, you are in a very small category, unfortunately, of people that's really trying to be healthy for yourself and for others.
After age twenty five, the brain doesn't change unless it's self-directed change. So don't expect anybody to change unless it's self-directed. Forget trying to get people to change. It does not work. It works with children. It does not work with adults unless it's self-directed plasticity.
And there is
Tons of literature to support that statement.
Welcome to the Knowledge Project Podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parrish.
The goal of this show is to master the best of what other people have already figured out, so you can unlock your potential.
To that end, I sit down with people at the top of the game to uncover what they've learned along the way.
Every episode is packed with timeless ideas and insights that you can use in life and business.
If you're listening to this, you're missing out.
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Check out the show notes for a link.
Andrew Huberman is here today.
Andrew is a neuroscientist and tenure professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University of Medicine.
I wanted to talk to Andrew for a long time to get a
better picture of the small behaviors we can put to work for us that make a big impact when it comes to our health.
And with such a big area to cover, where to begin is always hard. We start with light.
How light not only impacts the way we feel and learn, but how it impacts our sleep.
We go on to explore the difference between falling asleep and staying asleep, over the counter pharmological supplements, the relationship between vision and breathing, but we don't stop there.
We also cover
How the source of most of our problems is impulse control, so we explore how to subordinate those impulses. We also explore sleep mattresses like aid sleep and exercise to reverse the aging process.
As regular listeners know, I tend to explore subjects through the lens of my guests, and often, as is the case here, we explore similar ground through new eyes.
Consider sleep.
Something we talked about with Matt Walker, we cover here with Andrew.
And we talk about it in an upcoming episode with David Sinclair.
We cover the same subject.
With three people in detail.
through different lenses to get a better sense of what works and what doesn't.
And before we dive in, the lawyers want me to point out that the science based insights in this podcast are not medical advice.
They also tell me that you should get advice of your doctor before you do practically anything.
It's time.
To listen?
And learn.
Mm-hmm.
Let's start with light.
Light seems to impact the way we feel, how we learn and how we sleep.
How does light exposure or sunlight exposure impact the way we sleep? During the day, we have the opportunity to interact with light in various ways.
And our cells use that information, but maybe you can take us through how we can use light to get a better night of sleep.
Sure. So light is
Perhaps the most powerful stimulus for our mental
physical
health and for our performance in
every endeavor. We often miss this point because the effects of light
are what we call slow and integrative.
You know, if you look at a particular color of light, it's not that suddenly you're gonna be endowed with superpowers.
Um if you
Don't view light it.
uh for half a day or for a day, you're okay.
But what light does is it
sets the foundation
Of our abilities.
And it does that indirectly and directly.
It does it indirectly by controlling when we are asleep and when we are alert.
And it also has direct effects on the way that our nervous system functions. So I'll just
Get right into
Some practices, and then I'll flush out those practices with some science.
um to explain why they work rather than
um dropping a a lot of scientific nomenclature and then telling people what was is useful. The way that we function is by way of our nervous system. Our nervous system links all the organs of the brain and body, brain, spinal cord, but then of course spleen, heart, lungs, et cetera. And the nervous system is the system that coordinates all of those.
The nervous system, therefore, is
Without question the most powerful
organ system of our body and it acts as a conductor.
It is locked inside of our skull and body and it has no knowledge of the outside world and vision.
Um which involves
Photons, light energy.
Um reaching the eyes.
getting converted into electrical signals.
Is the way.
that the nervous system
decides when to be
Alert and functional and when to be asleep.
And
It also is what determines all the various little oscillations in ability to focus and
creativity and all the other things that we consider life.
When you wake up in the morning
Your
Brain and body have effectively been in the dark, regardless of what sleep environment you happen to be sleeping in.
And you have a set of neurons, nerve cells, in the back of your eye, and a little structure called the neural retina, it's a little three layered structure.
And those nerve cells.
Are not
involved in detecting the shapes of things, what they are essentially looking for, what activates them.
is bright light ideally from sunlight.
And when bright light, ideally from sunlight, reaches the eye.
Those particular neurons send a signal
Off into the vaulted dark of the brain.
They do that by way of a little wire called an axon.
And they communicate with an area of the brain that's
vitally important called the hypothalamus. It sits right above the roof of your mouth and it harbors
A bunch of structures that are responsible for
Hormones like testosterone and estrogen for
cortisol release um
in other locations in the body.
Basically controls when you're gonna be alert, when you're gonna be asleep, your hormones, your immune system function.
and your appetite and your mood.
So this morning signal of getting bright light in your eyes is absolutely vital.
No.
How does one do this?
The best and ideal way to do this would be to wake up.
Go outside.
and get some bright light in your eyes without sunglasses.
If you have to wear corrective lenses or contacts, that's absolutely fine.
Now
The ideal situation would be a nice bright
Clear day.
You get five to ten minutes of sunlight. You don't have to look directly at it. In fact, never look directly at any light of any kind that's so bright that it's painful to look at.
But you get some light indirectly through your into your eyes, some bright sunlight.
You would go inside and get ready for your day.
By doing that you
You do a number of things. First of all.
Every cell in your body has a twenty-four hour clock.
meaning there's a timer that goes from zero to twenty four and then repeats.
And that's true from the day you're born until the day you die.
However, every cell in your body has a
its own separate clock and the way that those clocks are coordinated.
into coherent action is from a signal from this brain structure called the hypothalamus.
And the only way that
signal can arrive properly is if you're
getting light to trigger the hypothalamus to say, okay, it's the start of the day, everybody start. Otherwise, your body slowly over time becomes a little bit of a clock shop where every clock is on a different time or then it's alarming at different times. This is actually what happens when you travel and you get stomach issues or you're not feeling right from jet lag.
Your body clocks.
are um the individual clocks of the cells in your body are falling out of of sync.
So you get up in the morning, you go outside, and you get some bright light in your eyes.
However, many people, including me, wake up before the sun is out. In fact, I'm up uh you know early this morning and there's uh very little light in the sky. The sky is just a pale gray right now.
In that case, it's very simple. Flip on as many bright artificial lights as possible.
Ideally overhead lights.
Because the neurons in the eye that perceive this light
And send that signal to the brain reside in the lower half of the eye, and therefore, because the optics of the eye, they actually view the upper visual field. But
sunlight is really the key, and so once the sun is out.
It's
Very important to get outside and get anywhere from, you know, five to 2 minutes of bright light exposure. A lot of people can't afford the time of 20 minutes.
If it's a dim overcast day.
The remarkable thing is there is more photon light energy coming through that cloud cover than there is from these bright lights of the sort that are behind me here.
Now
Some people live in an area of the world where it is very dark in winter.
Or their schedule is arranged such they just can't do this within thirty minutes of waking. In that case
There are daylight simulators that are commercially available. They're very expensive. What I recommend is actually something quite low cost and works just as well, which is that you get a ring light, like the selfie ring lights that the uh YouTubers and the
and the Instagrammers use and just put that on on a table.
uh or facing you as you work in the morning. And actually you could leave that on all day.
Basically what you want to do is get as much bright light as you safely can in your eyes all day long, and then as little
Bright light in your eyes.
as you can between the hours of about ten PM and four AM for reasons we can discuss.
So bright light exposure through windows or or windshields will not suffice.
Those unlike corrective lenses on your eyes.
glasses and contacts don't focus the light to your eyes. In fact they're designed to filter
the very light that triggers activation of these neurons.
The key thing is to understand that
Um, you people probably heard that blue light is bad, wear blue blockers. Blue light is wonderful. Blue light is actually what sets this clock in the eye.
uh excuse me the clock in the brain that signals to the rest of the body
It creates a state of alertness and well being throughout the day and
It sets a timer.
of about sixteen hours for when you're gonna get sleepy later that night.
And I'll explain the mechanisms in a moment.
So throughout the day, you want to get as much bright light in your eyes as you can. If you need to use one of these ring lights, great. Some of them are very low cost. I realize everyone has different budgets, but
The daylightors are kind of ridiculously expensive considering that all you really need is a bunch of bright light in your eyes.
However, sunlight is best. And so if you have breaks during the day, go outside, even if you're gonna be on your phone texting. If you can take calls outside, do it.
If you can get out onto a balcony, do it.
If the sun is on the opposite side of the building and you're on the balcony taking a call, you're still getting more photons, more light energy.
And a fun little free resource that's out there, there's an app called Light Meter.
And now the photographers will know um
About this light meter.
Uh you
basically open up this app, you can press it in the direction, uh you point it, excuse me, in the direction that you're
um looking and you can press the little button and you'll see it'll tell you how many lux, how much light energy is coming from that location. It's approximate, but it's pretty good. And you'll notice that on a dim overcast day you're getting
you know, eight thousand lux.
uh of light coming to you, and then you'll point at one of these very bright artificial lights in your home and you'll look at and it'll say,
eight hundred look. Wow, how is that? Well, it's because there's a lot of light scatter in in the outside, so you you don't perceive it as a focused beam.
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So this this behavior, this this activity should be done every day. If you miss a day,
It's okay.
There's a slow integrative system.
But you don't wanna miss more than one day.
Why? Well
One of the key features of every cell in our body.
І'ско а женal
hormonal signal. Hormones are
Chemicals are released in one location in the body that go and act at other locations in the body. And a key hormone
For health is cortisol. We always hear about cortisol as a stress hormone, but cortisol
Every twenty four hours.
There is going to be a peak in cortisol release. That's non-negotiable. It's a healthy peak. It's the one that wakes you up in the morning.
increases your body temperature, which is part of waking up.
gives you focus and alertness. It activates your immune system in a positive way, provided you don't have too much cortisol throughout the day.
And that peak is going to happen no matter what.
If you get light in your eyes early in the day, that peak will arrive early in the day.
This is vitally important because one of the key findings in the in the field of psychiatry, biological psychiatry, is that
When that
peak doesn't arrive early in the day, it starts drifting later and later and later in the day.
And people start getting mood issues, they start feeling irritable.
And actually it's a hallmark physiological signature of depression to have a late shifted cortisol peak.
In addition to that
many people who have depression or even mild depression.
wake up at two or three in the morning and can't fall back asleep. In fact, that's one of the first things that a psychiatrist will ask about.
If you go into their office.
And it doesn't mean that if you're waking up at two or three in the morning that you're necessarily clinically depressed, but it's one of the hallmark features.
And
Many people report
that just simply getting bright light exposure in their eyes early in the day, ideally from sunlight
Corrects a number of these issues.
Will it cure clinical depression?
Probably not if it's very severe. But many people actually feel
Better all day long, they sleep better.
Obviously this is a zero cost tool.
And when I say we were designed to do this, I I
I don't get into discussions about
design and um uh spirituality, as I always say, one thing is absolutely certain, which was that I was not consulted at the design phase and neither was anyone else uh that I know. So I can't answer questions about that, but these cells and circuits are there for a purpose.
They have no other function except to
Bring
Information about when there's light in the environment to the brain.
And
Essentially to convert that into a bunch of hormonal signals.
So I want to talk about the other hormonal signal, because this is really key. Many people have heard of the hormone melatonin.
This is a hormone that is secreted from a little gland, little P size gland in the brain called the pineal.
The pineal is the only source of melatonin in the brain and body, and melatonin's role is to make us feel sleepy and fall asleep.
It does not actually keep us asleep.
I'm not a fan of melatonin supplementation for reasons we can talk about in a little bit.
But
Light.
Viewed by the eyes inhibits melatonin.
So much so that if melatonin levels are at their peak and you walk into the bathroom at night and you flip on the lights and it's really bright, if you spend more than 10 or 15 seconds in that light, your melatonin levels will drop.
Two zero.
So this is a remarkable relationship between the external world and melatonin.
And this is why in the evening
You don't have to be paranoid about lights.
But what I recommend is that starting a
around you know eight, nine p.m, or ten p.m. start dimming the lights in your environment. Just dim the lights as low as you can safely have them. People have different lifestyles and different needs. If you're on screens, dim the screens.
If you
want to buy blue blockers, fine. I I don't have any relationship to any blue blocker company. The truth is
You need to be worried about the brightness of light more so than the color of light.
I know people that have converted their entire home to red light at night, which
is definitely the wavelength of light.
That has the least
stimulating effect on this system.
And that that's um kind of an interesting
thing. I I think we're going to start seeing more kind of smart homes and smart lighting systems. Most people don't do that. I don't do that. What I do is in the evening I start
Dimming the lights and if I use lights, I use lights that are set low in the physical environment.
And that's because they won't trigger activation of these cells quite as much.
You really want to control your transition into wakefulness by viewing bright light early in the day and throughout the day. And then you really want to control your transition
into sleepiness by dimming the lights in the evening.
And if you if people do those two things
they are going to see an outsized effect on their mental and physical health. It's with without question.
And then there's one other kind of um
Tweak to all this that if you can.
Try and get outside in the evening or late afternoon when the sun is
headed towards the horizon. Doesn't have to be a sunset. If you can watch the sunset, great.
But what we call low solar angle light has particular wavelengths that are optimal for activation of these cells.
And what happens then is very interesting.
You're giving it two signals, you're giving it a morning signal saying ah it's
morning you'd like that morning then you're getting an evening signal and this clock in the brain
for the it gets a little technical, but it has two oscillators.
and it has a morning oscillator and an evening oscillator, and then your system really knows where it is in time.
And then if you avoid bright lights in the evening, most days, you know.
We'll
You know, fall off every once in a while. You go to a show or you go out and it's bright in the restaurant, fine, no big deal. But if you do this most days, your system starts to hum.
Along with
the natural rhythms
of the rise and falling of the sun.
And
It's no coincidence that we have a 24 hour clock in every one of our cells because the earth, of course, spins on its axis once every 24 hours. And in addition to this, if you start doing it regularly, something really beautiful happens, which is
That melatonin signal, remember, light.
Inhibits melatonin.
The longer the day
the shorter the malatonin signal. So in summer months your your body
It releases very little melatonin.

There's less light overall.
you release much more melatonin. So you actually have a calendar system in your body that relates to the
orbit of the earth around the sun once a every three hundred and sixty five days.
And what happens is when you start getting regular about morning light viewing.
And
In some sense, evening light viewing every once in a while, or ideally every day.
What happens is your system starts to fall into a very regular pattern where you feel sleepy when you expect to and want to be sleepy, you feel wide awake.
And
People actually report the subjective experience of going outside in the morning and as the sun comes out or as they get this bright light exposure from an artificial light, they can actually feel their system charging.
That's not a placebo effect.
That's a real effect of the release of cortisol and adrenaline into your body. The release of dopamine is controlled by light, a powerful uh neuromodulator that makes you feel good. So I could go on and on, but
Um it's very simple. Get as much bright light in your eyes ideally from sunlight throughout the day when you want to be alert.
really limit the brightness of light and the amount of light
As you head.
into the uh night time.
If people have
shift work or they're raising newborns and things of that sort.
There it's a whole other discussion, but
What I recommend is
Um, I have an episode on jet lag and shift work that gets really technical, but does offer some tools and it it just would take us off course here, but I do realize and I I want to acknowledge the shift workers and
parents that are raising kids that can't adhere to this, but I think most people can. What's your evening routine including supplements from like take walk me through five PM until your your lights out falling asleep.
Uh in bed.
Uh I generally go to sleep somewhere between
Ten
and eleven PM, although lately I've been going to sleep much earlier.
Um, because I've been
finishing my last meal sometime right around six thirty seven. And that's not because I'm on some extravagant um nutritional routine. I've just started getting up earlier.
Um, for social reasons.
uh my partner um she goes to bed really early and so just for coordinating schedules it just
It just makes sense.
But I think most people go to bed somewhere between ten and eleven PM or you know, nine and eleven PM.
So right around 5 p.m., um, I'm not an evening exerciser. I like exercising in the morning or the day.
The way I like to exercise, I like to exercise pretty intensely for about 45 minutes or fifty minutes.
And that requires caffeine for me. Uh, and I don't want to drink caffeine too late in the day. So I stopped drinking caffeine around two or three PM.
And oftentimes earlier.
But a couple of things happen in the evening.
First of all
Um, my evening meals are more laden with carbohydrates than they are proteins, typically, not every day. There's times I'll have a steak for dinner or something like that, chicken soup or whatever it is. But it's very clear that fasting and low carbohydrate meals, I'm not saying diets overall, but meals.
Дезленерс и фокус.
A lot of people say, Well, how can that be? The brain uses glycogen, you need carbohydrate. Well
When you eat a meal that is slightly devoid or devoid of starches
It creates a sense of alertness because there's actually a a mild adrenaline response. So what I do is I basically
I'm rewinding a little bit into the earlier part of the day, but I fast until about
um eleven o'clock. I usually get my exercise um at some point before eleven o'clock or or noon. I'm not super strict about that. Then my meal is generally something
Сам мі, а салед.
Um something low carbohydrate. If I train really hard, I might have some rice or oatmeal or something like that.
And some fruit.
And then in the afternoon, I have a snack, which is also pretty low carbohydrate because I want to have that alertness and I'm drinking caffeine. So I'm kind of humming around.
doing my work and trying to get into that high focus state for dinner.
I generally will eat
pasta or something that includes more starches because starches are known to actually reduce cortisol levels in the body.
This is why why we eat comfort foods. Most comfort foods involve eating foods that are pretty carbohydrate laden because
There's um a pathway involving
carbohydrates and the the amino acid tryptophan that converts to serotonin.
And it
Essentially blocks the cortisol response. A lot of people that are on very low carbohydrate diets, I have no problem with that. If people do ketogenic diets or low carb diets.
But those people often have a hard time sleeping.
So in the evening I tend to eat pastas and rice and soups and I still eat some protein, but I um
from clean animal sources, because that's what works for me, but but I generally am shifting my whole system towards more quiescence.
I might do a little bit of work in the evening. We are not big.
um screen people in the evening. I do read books.
Um generally we end up
Hanging out.
just talking and um listening to music and things like that.
I might do some writing on the computer.
So right around eight or nine PM, I start bringing the lights down. In fact, I have a real sensitivity to the overhead lights because I'm so used to this pattern. So I start dimming the lights in the evening.
overhead.
And then
For the transition to sleep.
I do keep my phone out of the
the bedroom as much as possible.
Sometimes I'll use it as an alarm, but I'll put it on airplane mode.
If I'm feeling a little too alert, I remember two things. One
Yeah.
Biggest peak in alertness actually occurs about ninety minutes before your natural to sleep time.
lot of people don't know this. This is beautiful work from
uh Chuck Weissler's lab, he's an MD out of Harvard Medical School. And what he discovered in tracking people's
wakefulness and activity patterns is that they're buzzing around all day doing things ideally
But then
Right біфор
their natural pulse in melatonin takes off.
they have this peak in activity.
And this I think um probably
Arkans back to some need to
uh you know, champ down all the
the safety uh leaks that might be in one's environment.
Um and you know, get everything prepped because when you're asleep, you're actually pretty vulnerable to
predators and attack and things of that sort. That's the rationale. Nobody really knows.
But you can
Essentially figure out your net your best to bed time by when you have this big peak in activity and then it kind of subsides. So sometimes if I'm feeling a little too alert.
And wide awake.
What I'll do is
Just remember that that's gonna pass naturally.
And people vary, but some people are just
Really?
tend to be very four brain oriented, as I call it. They're thinking and anticipating all the time. It's good to try and taper that off. One of the
absolute most powerful tools that has come into my life in the last decade.
that my lab works on and there are people in psychiatry at Stanford that are also working on
is a practice that I call non sleep deep rest, which is NSDR.
Non sleep deep rest.
is an umbrella term.
that admittedly I created to include things like Yoga Nidra, which is actually doesn't involve any downward dogs or handstands or anything. Yoga Nidra is a ancient practice
There's some scripts online.
Many of them are very good. You go on YouTube, you can find one of these scripts. They're totally cost free.
put in headphones or put your phone next to you, you lie down.
And it's a ten to thirty minute script that walks you through a progressive relaxation of your nervous system.
There's some breathing. What this
Practice does is it teaches you to deliberately turn off your thinking.
And to relax your body, and it makes it easier for people to access falling asleep.
And it
more easily de-stress. Now the question is when to do NSDR.
You can do NSDR first thing in the morning if you ever wake up and you did not get enough sleep. I often wake up and feel I didn't get enough sleep.
I'll do a thirty minute NSDR.
And I come out of that feeling terrific, as if I got a full night's sleep. And I do this almost every day at some point. I might do it in the afternoon.
Or if you wake up in the middle of the night and you're having trouble falling back asleep, I highly recommend doing this because
Even if it doesn't put you back to sleep.
It's better than being awake and ruminating and you're teaching yourself to fall back asleep.
The other resource that's really wonderful.
something called Reverie R E V E R I
Reverie is an app for Android and Apple. It was developed by my colleague David Spiegel in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford. He's a world expert, or I should say the world expert in clinical hypnosis, not stage hypnosis, but self-hypnosis for
Um, you'll find a number of things in the app improving sleep.
Focus.
Chronic pain, anxiety, and I should say every one of those.
Scripts.
And Reverie on the whole.
has excellent peer review data.
clinical data, scientific data that we know which brain areas turn on and off as a consequence of doing these things. It's a really powerful tool. And these are only 15 minute scripts. Again, the best time to do them is first thing in the morning before you go to sleep at night or any time of day is the kind of joke that I make, which is just
Get in the habit of doing
N S Dr or a Reverie script.
You don't have to do it every day. You could do it maybe
Once or three times a week.
And what you're doing is you're you're learning how when you wake up in the middle of the night, you go to the bathroom, you come back, you're like, Oh, now my mind is racing. What do I do? Instead of getting on your phone.
You can
start to use some of the progressive relaxation that you learned from those scripts where you can actually do those scripts.
And so I tend to do those in the evening.
Or when I wake up in the morning.
And that greatly facilitates my uh transition to sleep and and just being a
a more rested person.
Now in terms of supplements.
Um, I'm a big believer that um supplements are powerful and are a terrific
often a terrific replacement for prescription drugs.
Not that there aren't terrific prescription drugs. I mean, many people benefit from prescription drugs. I take a few, but I think that
Many people rely on things that are excessive and and habit forming, expensive and unnecessary.
But I will say first off, behavioral tools should form the foundation of
All yours.
Sleep tools, your wakefulness tools.
Behaviors first, behaviors first, behaviors first, for one simple but important reason, which is that behaviors rewire your nervous system.
they so they engage what we call neuroplasticity, which is your nervous system's ability to change. You get better at falling asleep when you do NSDR or reverie. You get better
at waking up and feeling alert when you view bright light in the early part of the day.
With supplements and and things of that sort, your system can react in the moment, but it doesn't rewire, doesn't get better such that if you don't take that thing,
You're just where you were before.
Now that said, there are some supplements that have been tremendously helpful for me.
For sleep over the years, and I know now.
That there are are I I
You know, uh
humility aside, just from having blabber about these on various podcasts, including mine.
I think they're probably hundreds of thousands of people taking these things. And I want to be very clear that I have no financial relationship.
to the whether or not people take these things or not. We my podcast is sponsored by a uh by a supplement company, but I'm not even gonna mention it. I just think
Find the lowest cost.
high quality source you can.
Um, there are many.
And so the three things that really
can help with the depth.
and uh transition to sleep are magnesium three and e o magnesium three and eight
An alternative which is just as good.
is magnesium bis glycinate.
B I S
GLY CINATE BIS GLYCINA ETER ON
And what you're looking for is to get somewhere between a hundred and
Two hundred milligrams.
of those. Sometimes you'll see on the bottom it says two thousand milligrams. That's the elemental magnesium. You'll it'll also see a smaller number. Go with the smaller number.
What does this do? Well, it makes people feel a little drowsy and it greatly increases the depth of their deep and and the amount of deep sleep.
you're a sleep tracker type with whoops or auros, you'll see this.
About five percent of people
don't like magnesium three and eight and bisglycinate because it gives them stomach upset.
You'll know the first time.
Um, but most people do just fine.
The other thing that is a really powerful um supplement, which is wonderful, is apigenin, A-P-I-G E-N-I-N. Apigenin is a derivative of chamomile.
And I should say that fifty milligrams is the the target there. And there's only one source that I know of, I have no relationship to them, but that's Swanson.
And these things are available online.
I take bisglycinate and apigenin.
And
You take them about thirty to sixty minutes before sleep.
And most people report having incredibly improved sleep.
Are they habit forming? Not that I am aware of.
Should you check with your doctor?
Matt, if yes, if you have, especially if you have a heart condition taking magnesium because of the way neurons work, you it's an electrolyte and you might want to check for that purpose.
But
Most
physicians I I think would put these well within the margins of safety, but check with yours.
Now there's a third supplement, which is thianine T H.
N
A N I N E
Theanine's an interesting one.
Thianine Magnesium three and eight.
and apogenin all trigger the activation of a of a neuro hormone excuse me a neuro a transmitter in the brain called GABA.
Which um tends to shut off our forebrain.
Theme anywhere from one hundred to four hundred milligrams.
Is a kind of a powerful third component of this.
three andate or bisglycinate, apogenin and stack.
And theanine is interesting though. Your dreams will get very vivid.
People who have night terrors or who have uh sleepwalk should not take theanine.
But theanine
Is a great
Addition to this evening.
supplement stack. And I do that about thirty to sixty minutes before sleep.
One last point about sleep.
If you wake up in the middle of the night.
Turn on as many lights as you need in order to navigate around safely, but again, try and keep the lights low.
And waking up once in the middle of the night.
To use the restroom is perfectly normal.
Lot of people think, oh, I woke up now, my sleep is disrupted, my sleep tracking score, my recovery isn't good.
I'm a big fan of sleep trackers, but I don't use one. I go on subjective feelings of wakefulness during the day.
Just remember insomnia.
Clinically defined is whether or not you're falling asleep during the day.
because you're having trouble sleeping at night. A lot of people think they have insomnia would
What they actually have is
Anxiety.
Waking up.
And they they're just concerned that
They've heard all the terrible things that happen if you don't get enough sleep. Obviously, you don't want to drink so many fluids before sleep that you're waking up all night to use the restroom.
One of the nice things about a carbohydrate rich meal in the evening is carbohydrates actually hold water. Anyone on a low carbohydrate diet will notice that they lose a lot of weight. They
they think they're leaner, they're actually excreting a lot of water.
So that's key and then
The temperature thing is really big. We haven't talked about temperature, but second to light, temperature is the most powerful
Стимулес
for wakefulness. Actually when you wake up in the morning it's because your body temperature is rising.
Um, so what time do you typically wake up in the morning?
Uh I wake up around five.
But so your what we would call temperature minimum is three AM. So a temperature minimum is not a specific temperature, it's a time
in the twenty four hour cycle.
It's about two hours to ninety minutes before your natural waking.
I'm not talking about the waking that happens in the middle of the night and you go back to sleep. I'm talking about the wake the typical wake up time where you would rise.
Okay, so
For you, your temperature minimum is about 3 AM, and then your body temperature is going to start increasing, increasing of that cortisol release. If you can get light exposure.
As that slope is rising, as it's increasing.
Then you're going to
Агмент а фастер інкріз.
Okay. If you were to view light
Or get up at
Two AM
It would actually
jet lag you, and it would actually shift you in the opposite direction as if you were waking up in some other location in the world.
So that temperature minimum is kind of a nice thing to keep in mind. What happens is your body temperature is going to go up, and then somewhere around
three or four in the afternoon, maybe for you'cause you're a really early riser.
maybe about two or three in the afternoon, it's gonna hit a temperature peak.
The temperature peak is interesting. The temperature peak
He would think, Oh, that's my time of gr
greatest wakefulness. It's actually when you're gonna feel a little bit of a drop in energy.
in the afternoon. And then it starts dropping and you actually feel pretty good in the evening.
And then temperature should continue dropping because in order to fall asleep and stay asleep, you need your body temperature.
To be about one to three degrees lower than it was.
And that in the afternoon.
So one thing you can do is you can keep
The temperature in your
home l a little bit lower at night and just stay under blankets.
Um, we actually dump heat mainly through the palms of our hands, the upper half of our face, and the bottoms of our feet.
There's a special portals between the blood and the skin there. Beautiful.
Um thing was discovered by my colleague Craig Heller at Stanford. These are called glabrous skin. For the officianatos, you have
Arteries, capillaries, and veins. And in these particular locations, it basically only goes to art from arteries to veins. You skip all the little estuaries that are the capillaries between them, and you're able to basically dump heat more easily.
During the middle of the night, the best thing to do
is to have warm blankets on top of you and be in a cold room. And then if you get too warm, you will just naturally in your sleep
You'll just extend a foot.
Or a hand out. You've probably heard sleep with socks on. Terrible idea.
Um, I don't know why that caught on. That makes no sense whatsoever. You you want to be able to dump heat in the middle of the night because if you get too hot, you'll wake up.
If you can extend a hand out, that's great because if the room is too hot
What are you gonna do? You're not gonna put your hand into a bucket of ice next to your bed. I mean that most people don't have that device. Some people use these chili pads or eight sleep or these kinds of things.
I I um actually don't have one personally. I tend to run kind of warm, so I try and get the two. That's an interesting question. Like I use an eight sleep and it it can adjust the temperature throughout the night. So
How should I adjust that to optimize the quality of my sleep? Should I start from cold and like gradually go warm or should I just do cold all night?
So I would say moderate temperature at the beginning of the night.
Um for the first two or three hours of sleep then
Yeah.
want to keep it cold until about that three or four a.m.
Wait.
And then starting right around
four forty five, your body is naturally heating, but if you were to
Allow it to heat up, then I think you would wake up more quickly. Yeah, you want to start with like an average temperature and then go colder and then go warmer.
That's right.
You wanna mimic what would happen if you were sleeping outdoors, essentially.
Um and there's a beautiful study
There was uh two studies actually that were published out of the University of Colorado.
Uh, where they took students um camping.
For two days.
And they made them eliminate all their electronic devices so they had to rise with the sun and
Go to sleep.
Or get into their tents at night, more or less when the sun went down.
They found that just two days of getting onto that pattern with the rise and fall of the sun.
And they were sleeping outdoors, so they had the temperature, whatever temperature what happened to be that time of year in Colorado.
They found is that that
Reset the cortisol and melatonin rhythms for a week.
Which is incredible. They went back to their normal
chaotic pattern of bright lights and college life.
And they're and the the rhythm because it's a slow oscillator system stuck for a week.
Now that doesn't mean just do these things two days out of the week, but
It's really incredible. Um, I've looked at those data a lot and
uh it's it's just remarkable how the system will map to this. So I think if you want to have moderate temperature
Um early in the night, then drop it low.
to bring you to your temperature minimum and then heat.
Heat up when you want to wake up.
You're good to go.
Well I should mention that some people like to heat up in the morning to get more energy.
And they'll do that with a cold shower.
or ice bath and you might say, Wait, that's crazy.
You're getting in the cold water. Well
This is uh kind of an interesting and counterintuitive one. Your brain has an area called the preoptic area of the hypothalamus.
That's more or less like a thermostat.
So if let's say you're overheating, you went running, you're overheating, and you put some cold icy towels over you and on your head, and you're squeezing cold water on you.
Guess what?
That's just like putting cold water or an ice pack on the thermostat.
What happens?
Body heats up.
So when you get into cold water, as long as you don't stay in there to the point where you start becoming hypothermic.
You actually are increasing your metabolism and body heat.
So a lot of people take a cold shower or get into an ice bath early in the day because you get that shot of adrenaline and cortisol.
You also get the release of a
Neuromodulator dopamine, which
This is incredible, but there's a paper published in the Un um European Journal of Physiology. It showed that there's a two point five X
Huge increase in dopamine release, very long lasting. 2.5x is the amount of dopamine that's triggered by the use of cocaine.
But the difference is cocaine has a very sharp peak on it and then it falls, which is why people become habitual users.
But this long sustained increase in dopamine from cold water exposure.
of anywhere from one to three minutes.
is really powerful and it increases body temperature. So some people do that early in the morning to wake up as well.
And I

People will probably say, Well, how cold? I would say the

really varies. So what you want to do is you when you want to get into cold
Ideally you would submerge yourself up to the neck, but you can also use cold showers.
They
The code should be
uncomfortable to the point where you want to get out very badly.
But safe.
And that's the only prescription I can give because
It yeah, I can't say thirty degrees or forty degrees or fifty degrees because people have different heat tolerance and cold tolerance.
And so
It should be uncomfortably cold, like you really want to get out of that cold shower.
How long to stay in there. Ideally you would do this for a total of eleven minutes per week. So that could be
eleven one minute sessions, it could be a couple two or three minute sessions or or three or four two or three minute sessions.
But then people say, well, do I end on cold or can I then take a nice hot shower and get ready?
Well, if you're me, you take a nice hot shower and get ready for the day.
But if you want to increase your metabolism a lot, because this will increase your metabolism, your
Looking at
um fat loss or this kind of thing.
Well then you want to
End with cold.
because then you need to use your body's natural mechanisms to heat up.
Right. So there's a real rationale to all this.
I confess I don't do the cold shower thing every day. I much prefer the sauna.
Or a hot shower or bath.
And that, if you think about it, works in the same way. When would be the best time of day to do that? Well, you could do it anytime.
But the best time for things like growth hormone release for
cardiovascular health and for
A number of other effects.
Would be
To do it.
in conjunction with the cold, we can talk about that, or in the evening.
Why in the evening? Because you want your body temperature to cool off in the evening, right? Well, if you get into a warm environment.
Provided you don't stay in there for too long.
you're not in there for an hour or two and becoming hypothermic.
You get into a sauna for ten or fifteen or twenty minutes.
Your brain sends it
Cool off signal.
because it's the effectively like putting a heating pad on the thermostat.
Saunas are hard for m most people to access, but likewise a hot bath.
Um before going to sleep.
For many people is very useful. And I and it has a number of other effects. I mean, if you're gonna do heat cold contrast.
Probably best to do
you know, fifteen to twenty minutes of of heat.
Um and then
Three minutes of cold.
fifteen to twenty minutes of heat, three minutes of cold. But frankly, I often don't have time for all that. So I'll just do
I'll get into the cold.
I hate it.
I hate it for
one to three minutes, I get out. I'm always glad I did it. Then I'll get into the sauna.
And then I'll take a shower and
had to work or something like that.
All right, some quick questions before we get into some longer ones. Do you cycle your supplements at all or do you just do them every night? The three that you mentioned? Yeah, I do them every night unless I pass out reading without them.
And I've never developed a dependents on any of them. I do notice that um
You know, if I don't take them
consistently then I'll start, you know, my sleep isn't quite as good.
Th there are two other things I should mention that I do use just in full disclosure. I do take
about two hundred milligrams of GABA.
I've been doing that lately because it really improves my sleep.
And I'm really big on sleep.
And
I sometimes will take a gram or two of glycine.
as well. So I'm taking a lot. I'm taking bisglycinate, I'm taking apigenin, I'm taking theanine, I'm taking GABA, I'm taking glycine.
But why am I doing all this? Well
I fall asleep and stay asleep.
For about six to seven hours.
Um
I feel
completely charged during the day.
To me, sleep is the foundation of all mental and physical health.
And I'm not somebody who struggles with clinical depression.
I'm forty six years old.
I I
I feel
Great.
most all of the time
Even if life is hard. And that for me is a is sort of a
Oh like
Oh wow, I can't believe it, right? Given my work schedule, given life is challenging, now I have a want a wonderful life, but I also have a number of challenges like anybody else.
And I think
What what's different? Well what's different
is that I've been getting really good sleep consistently for for years now.
I didn't finish up with melatonin earlier. I'm not a fan.
Not a fan of melatonin supplementation.
Doses are much too high. It's a hormone that interacts with the other hormone systems of the brain and body.
Mostly the dosages are much too high. What you take in terms of one milligram melatonin, very small dosage.
something like a hundred times what you naturally secrete.
I get really concerned about this, especially in kids.
Because melatonin is actually the hormone that
suppresses p the onset of puberty.
I don't have any direct data in myself, but
I'm not interested in taking a hormone
uh exogenous hormone that suppresses
The uh
Sextoid hormones which are
testosterone and estrogen powerful hormones in men and women.
um for all sorts of things. And I know that a lot of people just think go test phosphorone men.
estrogen women, but that's not the way it works. They're present in both. And actually
having sufficient levels of estrogen for for men, provided it's not too high.
Is it?
important for brain longevity and health. It's actually really important for libido. A lot of people that
um get on uh hormone replacement men that get on hormone replacement will take things like an astrazole and they'll start crushing their um estrogen and they run into serious sexual side effects. So you want these things working naturally.
Um
hormone therapy or not, and melatonin just it
it causes all sorts of problems. So
I know that the melatonin supplement
uh manufacturers probably don't like that I say this, but
Melatonin is should I don't think should

Taken the way that people take it, like MMs, maybe occasionally for jet lag, but don't rely on this powerful hormone. It disrupts a number of other systems.
Do you read in bed or do you read on the couch and then go to bed?
Uh I'll sometimes read in bed. Typically I'll read on the couch.
um or work on my computer on the couch. I no longer bring the laptop into the room or and and now that you ask it, I don't tend to read in bed so much.
I've kind of converted the bedroom into only bedroom activities, you know, um, and not a place where I work.
Do you take naps at all?
I do, I'm a big napper. I love taking a twenty minute nap or doing an NSDR in the afternoon.
The rule on naps, and Matt Walker and I agree on this, is that
Yeah, map should be shorter than ninety minutes and they should
You should only take them if they
If they don't
Disrupt your nighttime sleep.
There are several very good papers that were published in the last few years.
In the journal Cell Report showing that short
NAPS and NSDR I should say has some good science to support it.
accelerates neuroplasticity and learning.
Especially if you take that nap within four to six hours after a very intense learning bout.
There's something about that.
um sleep state that allows the brain to rewire. And most of the rewiring and plot neuroplasticity occurs during deep sleep, but also during these
Short sleep valves.
that we call NAPs or NSDR.
So I'm a I'm a huge fan.
One thing that's really um I should mention if people are having an afternoon crash.
uh one thing they can do to support themselves is to sh um delay their morning caffeine for ninety to a hundred and twenty minutes after waking.
The longer you're awake.
The more there's a build up of a of a molecule in the brain and body called adenosine.
And that's sort of a sleepiness molecule, if you will.
Caffeine inhibits
Adenosine function.
It basically parks in the receptor and prevents adenosine from working. So if you wake up in the morning and you're blitzing caffeine like I am this morning,
Um, but I've been up for a while.
You're drinking caffeine straight out the gate. What happens is whatever residual adenosine was in your system is still floating around.
you've blocked where it can bind to the adenosine receptor, so it's not making you sleepy.
But then
Sometime right around one or two PM when that caffeine wears off.
All of a sudden there's this glut of
A denosine and you feel tired.
When you wake up in the morning if you delay caffeine.
The cortisol peak
actually is able to clear out the remaining adenosine.
that happens to be around, but it requires uh gets a little technical, but it requires an interaction with the receptor. So if you keep caffeine uh out of your system for the first ninety to 120 minutes of waking and then have your caffeine, you'll notice that you'll push through the afternoon just fine.
Without any um
afternoon drop. It also allows you to drink less caffeine overall because a lot of people are just habitual coffee drinkers.
Um, which I I happen to really enjoy coffee and I drink Yerba Mate is my other preferred source of caffeine.
It seems common, at least among people that I know, that they can fall asleep like right away almost instantly, but then four to five hours later they're wide awake.
You sort of mentioned depression. W what else is going on there? What goes through your mind in terms of
Uh how to handle that and and
You know. Yeah. So a couple of things. One is they might not be getting enough physical activity during the day.
Or they're getting too much, they're overtrained.
If you train too much and too often.
uh you'll find that you can't get enough sleep and you're always tired.
If you train too intensely
you'll often find that you um you'll w you'll have this waking up
um agitated thing. Now that's that's
I wouldn't get too bogged down in that.
But it's something to keep an eye out for. People that are doing tons and tons of miles on the road and then
They're always exhausted. Well, your body's just not recovering.
And
Likewise with work, if you're just work, work, work and you're just burning yourself down.
an appropriate amount of physical exercise each day.
It's going to help you.
get the appropriate amount of sleep. And the rule of thumb from the literature is
About a hundred and fifty to a hundred and eighty minutes per week.
of zone two cardio. So this is um
Cardiovascular exercise of any kind where you could have a conversation, but you're a little bit strained, you'd prefer to be quiet to keep it going.
Zone two cardio, hundred and fifty to one hundred and eighty minutes a week, approximately.
broken up into various sessions.
And then it's very clear.
that the body and brain
and the skeletal system and the muscular system benefit from
Any
From a minimum of six sets per
Body part.
Per week just to maintain muscle. I'm not talking about people building muscle. I'm talking about people like my mom, who's in her, you know, late 70s, should be doing six sets a week of.
quadricep work.
That that will help sleep the 150 to 180 minutes of zone two cardio and getting resistance exercise, you know, three or four times a week.
You're going to be a much more fuel efficient, better sleeping, more focused system.
Without question. There's tons of science to support why that's the case.
In fact, there's this really cool study I'll just mention that's done at Stanford recently by my colleague Tony Weiss Corey.
But they take the blood.
From
exercise individuals and they infuse it into
non-exercise individuals and all sorts of aspects of brain function improve. There's actually stuff secreted from the muscles.
But then go off to the other organs. This makes total sense when you hear about it because
Think well, how could that be? But it
The the rationale is that
The the other organs of the body don't know what the other organs of the body are doing. So they need to receive signals. So when the muscles are working, the brain
says, Oh, I need to keep the the neurons that are responsible for motor function and memory. They I saw improvements in memory analysis of nervous patients in this study.
Really amazing.
So there's that. There's the exercise and effort component. I don't think we were designed to just think.
And um and scroll and text. I think we were designed to move.
And that's vitally important.
The other thing is that many of the people waking up after four or five hours were supposed to go to bed earlier.
Remember melatonin puts you to sleep but doesn't keep you asleep. So many of these people might be going to bed at eleven o'clock.
Waking up at three or four a.m.
Here I am again, when actually they need to go to bed at nine.
Now there's this weird asymmetry in the way that our system is built in that we can push through fatigue, but it's very hard to make ourselves fall asleep.
So
Some people
need to discover that they actually were meant to go to bed earlier.
Alright.
I know people think about night owls and morning larks and this kind of thing. That's a big uh idea in industry. And to some extent it's true, there are genetic polymorphisms that relate to these things.
But
For the most part.
Most people were
you know, evolved in under conditions where they went to sleep shortly after the sun went down.
I do think that there is something powerful about going to bed a little earlier. There I keep asking Matt Walker
If there's any science to support this, and he tells me no, but
I find and many people find that every hour of sleep before midnight
recharges them.
More deeply than the hours after midnight, and I don't know what this is.
But I find if I go to bed at nine o'clock
And
I'll sometimes wake up at midnight. I'm like, ah, it's only midnight. What am I gonna do? But then I fall back asleep. I'll wake up at three or four a.m. and I'm ready to go.
And and that's
That's great. I mean you can get so much done in the hours between, you know, four and seven AM
fewer distractions.
Your focus can be very high.
The problem is most people are going to bed late. They're waking up at four or five hours later.
Then they're scrolling on their phone because it's a very kind of passive sensory input.
They're trying to
get themselves back to sleep. It doesn't work. And then throughout the day, they're working at about 75% capacity.
So I would encourage those people to just start going to bed earlier.
I wanna briefly touch on caffeine and alcohol. Maybe we can start with alcohol. What happens when someone has a glass or two of wine or an after dinner cocktail? How does that impact our sleep? And is there anything we can do to counterbalance the effects of booze?
uh in the moment, just acknowledging that it's probably gonna happen to get a better sleep.
I think that the key is to not but do it too close to sleep.
I think obviously hydration is key because alcohol is dehydrated.
Remember a lot of the negative effects of alcohol on sleep are by way of the temperature system.
Remember we used to hear that, Oh, you know, if you drink and you're outdoors, I guess we've all had the experience of
partying and you're outside and you're not wearing a jacket and it's freezing cold and you feel fine.
Right.
And
That's because of the way that alcohol
Um actually
It's it's a little bit counterintuitive. Alcohol actually lowers your body temperature, but your perception of that lower body temperature is disrupted.
Um so
Part of the reason you can fall asleep.
When you drink alcohol.
is because it lowers your body temperature.
Now
It there's a dosage component and so on.
But one idea would be
If you're going to drink alcohol.
Hydrate.
The supplements I referred to
At least to my knowledge.
But don't um interact with alcohol.
Uh, obviously the deadly combination is alcohol and any kind of barbituates or sedatives. So there, there's actually a strong incentive for staying away from sleep medication if you're drinking, right? I mean, people a lot of deaths have occurred just because people combine sedatives.
um prescription sedatives with alcohol.
But the supplements I'm referring to, um
As far as I know, don't do that.
Um
There's a loss of sodium in your system.
Um when you drink alcohol because you secrete a lot of fluid. Neurons run
Essentially uh the the way they're able to function is from three main electrolytes. It's sodium, potassium, and magnesium.
The actual firing of your nerve cells is because sodium enters the cells.
Tassium goes out.
So a lot of people will feel better if they'll drink water with some electrolytes.
Um, so that will make a big difference in terms of reducing hangovers and improving sleep. You want appropriate amounts of
sodium, potassium, and magnesium in your system. Salt has gotten kind of a bad rap.
Um, but there was an article published in Science magazine, which is one of the premier
three Apex journals and
So it's
uh about the the whole myth around salt. I mean it's true that people with chronic hypertension need to avoid salt, but for most people are consuming enough fluid, salt is great. I mean salt is something that brings volume, bl it keeps your blood volume up.
keeps your brain feeling alert and focused. A lot of times people will feel jittery during the day. They'll think they'll have low blood sugar. Take a little bit of take a pinch of salt, put in some water, maybe a little lemon juice to kill the taste, and drink that. You notice you're just rock solid.
Why?
You might have been low blood pressure or low sodium.
Sometimes people can't focus and they are low sodium.
Sometimes we crave sugar and we're actually low sodium. This isn't wishy washy
New agey California stuff. This is really like
Th this is goes
right down to how our kidneys function and blood volume and how the brain requires a certain amount of blood pressure in order to have enough
blood going to our brain in order to be able to focus.
So when we drink alcohol, we're inhibiting all these things. You're excreting sodium, you're lowering body temperature, and of course it makes you feel kind of drowsy. Now, about 10% of people
Have a genetic
um predisposition to get a big dopamine increase from alcohol.
Alcoholics have to be care afraid of this and and people who have this need to be on the lookout for alcoholism.
I I have a a good friend who um
When they drink.
they experience this dopamine surge. So they can drink and drink and they feel
Alert and they feel great and they want to party. They it's not that their tolerance is high, they actually have a dopamine response to alcohol, whereas most people, it's more of a GABA sedative type response.
And after
one more drink than they
normally can handle, they're just ready to pass out or they're kind of heading into the
The blackout type.
um drunk stuff, which is really bad. So just keep in mind that alcohol can have different effects on different people, but for most people a drink or two, hydrate, hydrate with electrolytes.
And then
When you wake up in the morning, you also want to hydrate with electrolytes.
That's that's really key. And I think that can offset some of it.
And then they can offset some of it.
What about caffeine? Maybe you can walk us through what we know about it and how we can use this knowledge to get better performance while minimizing the impact on sleep.
Caffeine, as I mentioned, is is in it it works. It's actually a competitive
Agonist uh
of a deniseed. So how does it work?
Caffeine parks in the adenosine receptor. Remember, adenosine is this molecule that builds up the longer we've been awake. So it parks in that receptor.
And it can so it's an agonist, meaning it can park there.
But it it
outcompetes the adenosine. So w it creates a an artificial state of alertness.
That way.
But
It also triggers the release of
Of adrenaline.
Also called epinephrine. Epinephrine and adrenaline are the same thing. From the brain and body, two sources. There's a you have your adrenal glands above your kidneys. That's one source. And then you have a collection of little neurons in your brainstem called the locus ciruleus.
Locus release is an amazing structure.
It sends those little wires we call axons.
often to different areas of the brain acts like kind of a sprinkler sprinkler system, releasing epinephrine.
and creating states of alertness in the brain.
And caffeine stimulates
Those neurons to release
A dronal.
So it literally creates wakefulness in the brain and wakefulness in the body through locus ceruleus in the brain and the adrenals in the body.
In addition, it does something really cool, which is that it
increases the sensitivity.
of the dopamine receptors. Now we haven't talked too much about dopamine, but dopamine is perhaps the most powerful neuromodulator. It's involved in movement. That's why people who have Parkinson's are deficient in dopamine neurons.
They have trouble generating um smooth movements, so they shake, they have trouble in severe cases, they can't speak, they they feel depressed because.
Dopamine is not
Um we hear about dopamine hits.
It's in in other areas of the brain and body such that it controls
motivation, craving, and drive.
And dopamine makes us feel good, but it really makes us feel motivated.
People who are deficient in dopamine have trouble with focus, they have trouble with
Motivation.
No disrespect, but they are the people that can sit around
thinking about the things they need to do forever. They are chronic procrastinators and they have very
very high what we call activation energy and they're just not very motivated.
Dopamine.
Can be enhanced by taking various things and doing certain things we could talk about, but caffeine increases the sensitivity of dopamine receptors.
Increasing not just the tendency to move by release of adrenaline, but makes us
More motivated to go out and pursue goals, in fact.
The major effect of dopamine is to place us into
A mode of
what we call like steroception of focusing on things that are outside our immediate experience or the confines of our skin.
Create the company, get the grades.
Find the mate.
uh forage for food. This is an ancient generic mechanism that was designed to carry over to most every pursuit activity.
Of any kind.
So caffeine increases dopamine function by increasing dopamine receptors.
I I am a fan of taking
caffeine or drinking caffeine early in the day.
I as I mentioned, I think your mate is one source that's great. Some people like coffee, some people like espresso. Just make sure you hydrate and make sure you're getting enough salt.
As you hydrate.
Uh you don't need to buy any fancy electrolytes.
You can just take a little pinch of salt and put it in water.
um for every coffee that you drink or um espresso that you drink, you'll find you feel much better. In fact, in some South American countries,
And in Europe they'll give you some water with
Your coffee.
they sort of understand this relationship of the dehydration and
Um, caffeine causes the excretion of sodium by way of the kidney. So I would stop drinking caffeine around two or three in the afternoon. Many people find that they can drink caffeine until eight or nine pm.
And then still fall asleep, but the quality of your sleep will be greatly disrupted.
So try and taper that off.
uh toward the afternoon.
But there's a some other fun things that you can do with caffeine.
Well one of the things is to become a bit of an intermittent caffeine user.
It's a little hard to do, but if you're somebody who really relies on caffeine.
You can try deleting
Caffeine for a morning and then doing it the next day, you'll immediately feel the rewarding properties of it of like how great it tastes and how charged you get.
So
If you get to the point where you're drinking more and more caffeine and you're not getting the the great sensations and motivation from it, you're probably too caffeine adapted.
You're not gonna feel burnt out from drinking too much caffeine. What what's happening is the caffeine isn't working anymore because you've saturated all your receptors.
So
Uh avoid overuse, um, stagger the use. You know, I I actually think it's a good resilience exercise every once in a while to just skip caffeine.
For a day.
Some people get headaches.
And that's because caffeine affects blood flow.
This is kind of interesting. If you have a headache.
Sometimes a little bit of coffee can help that headache.
Depends if you're caffeine adapted or not. For people that are caffeine adapted, the way that caffeine works.
is going to be it's actually gonna help dilate the blood vessels of the brain and body. So it's gonna actually allow more blood flow. If you're not caffeine adapted and you don't drink caffeine very often, it's going to constrict those blood vessels.
And make them essentially make it harder to relax.
So
You know, this gets a little technical, but um
There's some fun things you can do with caffeine, like mix it with theanine if you
feel like it you're overstimulated. You could take a hundred milligrams of theanine and you could
adjust down your level of jitter jitteriness.
Some people really like that caffeine plus the mine combination because it's that alert but calm.
Whereas when they just drink caffeine, they're just too buzzed.
And they can't focus.
Let's chat about subordinating impulses, which I think is a is sort of a good segue here. It seems like the source of almost all of our problems come from a lack of impulse control.
And what I find interesting about this is it's not that we're not capable of making rational choices, but more we're not even aware in the moment we're being irrational. We're reacting without reasoning. And in popular books, it seems like they make it easy and say, Well, if you're driven by feelings, you're reactive. And if you're driven by values, you're proactive.
But I'm curious to hear your take.
Yeah, I'm fascinated by this. Uh you know, most of the
Disorder and dysfunction in the world.
Um is caused by lack of impulse control.
Right, just think about all the people that tweet something stupid.
And then
los jobs.
Or
You know, or we hear these case of like wow, like the person was on a zoom and they did something inappropriate.
Not by access, it's wow, they really have a hard time, people will have a hard time suppressing their behavior, and they lose things that they've invested tremendous amounts of resources in.
Some of this is relates to
biological drives that you know, primitive drives, you know, you hear about people who
have made fortunes or have wonderful families and then
They go and have a a one off affair with somebody and they lose
A lot.
Right. They lose relationships, they lose reputation, you just think, wow.
So do we conclude that the forces of of the hypothalamus that drive us towards
Um certain types of behaviour are more powerful.
Maybe, although maybe it's we should look at it from the other
side and just say well maybe
They were just actually far weaker in terms of impulse control.
Across the board.
And maybe that's what made them effective because they were very action oriented.
I have someone in my life, I won't mention who they are, who likes to say about themselves they're all tactics, no strategy.
And they are an extremely effective person.
They can make more happen in forty five minutes.
And anyone else I know.
But they have no long term strategy. It's really
It's and it's gotten them into some serious
Uh hot water.
But in any case.
Uh so there's an area of our neural circuitry called the basal ganglia.
The basal ganglia are vitally important for controlling
and integrating thought and action.
And
They have two main circuits that are both regulated by dopamine.
But
They use different receptors for dopamine to have different effects, in fact opposite effects.
Some of the circuitry in this basal ganglia.
Um
Pathways are involved in what we call go functions, like pick up this thing or lean into the work. It's go, it's action oriented, and that includes thought.
And then the other one is no go.
And there's a s it actually involves
um certain neurotransmitters, including dopamine, to suppress behavior.
So what we learn as kids is actually a lot of no go.
type behavior. Sit still.
Don't interrupt.
Okay, it's not just clear your plate from the table.
It's not just be kind, say thank you. Those are go type behaviors. It's
Sit there. It's the two marshmallow task.
And
Beautiful work has uh two marshmallow task, of course, being the study done at Stanford many years ago and repeated many times. Seems like I'm citing only Stanford studies. I realize there are other universities, but a lot of great work was done there where they give the kids an option to have uh one marshmallow now or two marshmallows if they wait.
Those videos are very cute and it's fun to watch that
The kids will sit there, they use all sorts of distraction strategies. One of the kids like starts getting close to the marshmallows some
turn away, others sniff them, um
And they've tracked these kids over time, and indeed there are some data to support the fact that
Kids that were able to defer gratification.
do better in life. It's not it the studies are not as
Um
Robust as we once thought, but
Adults have a lot of problem with delayed gratification.
They're just not very good at it.
Um
And so one thing that I've done over the years um to try and
reinforce these circuits in myself based on my understanding of how they work.
is every day I try and have somewhere between
twenty and thirty
No goes.
And the no-go's can be trivial. Like I'm ready to pick up my phone.
No.
And I force myself to not pick it up. And all I'm doing is trying to reinforce that circuit because the thing to understand about neural circuitry.
Is that it's generic. It doesn't
It's not designed
So that you
ha have a strong no-go response just to picking up your phone, it actually carries over to multiple other things.
And this is
Also true of the go circuitry.
Maybe this is the problem we're in. We heard years ago, and I think it's still a wonderful thing from was Admiral Craven, you know, you get up, you make your bed in the morning.
Why? Well, I have a friend from the SEAL teams. He's like, Well, the re you know, the McCraben narrative was you do it so that at the end of the day, even if you have a miserable day, your bet is made.
And I heard that and I was like, well, I like the idea.
But frankly, seeing my bedmate at the end of the day doesn't do that much for me.
I actually think it's a much more powerful
underlying mechanism and no disrespect to him, great admiration for
um McCraven and I love his work and what he's doing, but but I think that at any moment we can be back on our heels, flat footed or forward center of mass. That's the way I try and visualize the waking portions of my life.
Sleep of course allows you to toggle between these states more easily. So get that sleep. But we're
You know, at any moment we're kind of like feeling defeated.
We're flat footed or forward center of mass. And forward center of mass
Takes energy.
But it also has its own momentum. And so I think getting up and doing something reg without
Involving
rumination or consideration or thought, just getting into action sets your whole nervous system into a mode of go.
And I think we then we drink caffeine.
It's a go stimule.
Then we move towards the things that are important to us. We're emailing. We're always doing go, go, go, go, go. Even if you're scrolling on your phone, it's go.
uh scrolling Instagram or something, it's a go type function.
We rarely rehearse.
Are no go functions.
And no go functions are simply about suppressing behavior. So if you have a meditative practice, there's a little bit of that.
where you think, Oh, I don't want to do it, but I'm gonna force myself to sit still.
even though I want to get up. That's an a no-go. But
Think about it, if you get better at meditating.
you actually have less of an opportunity to get into this no go.
Mode.
Right, to trigger the circuitry. So what I try and do is introduce
20 or so no-goes throughout the day that I deliberately impose on myself as I'm about to get into reflexive action.
And it could be delaying
Um a a bite of food for
couple of minutes. I realize it sounds almost like an eating disorder thing, but that's for people with eating disorders probably want to stay away from that one. But there are all sorts of ways that we can do this. We find ways that we are
Short
short circuiting this process. And so I think
We need to keep these no go circuits trained up.
I think nowadays there's so much opportunity and so much reward for go that we don't train the no-go pathways. One that I think works well for me is oftentimes if I'm training in the gym.
I'll have a set routine.
And then I'll start changing it. I'll notice that I'll have this impulse to
I'll give a dumb example, but just because I want to make it concrete.
Yeah, you're doing one exercise and suddenly you'll you'll
go to alternate limb.
It's like why did I do that? I had a plan.
Right. I should stick to that plan. So the the no go there is to not default to something more spontaneous.
It's to force r into really enforce regimen.
And I think what happens is is we become adults.
There are
There isn't anyone supervising us making us do these things quite as much.
And the phone has allowed for so much context switching and so much opportunity for go, go, go, go, go that pretty soon.
You got hours of your day that are gone that were not structured.
So I'm not talking about becoming neurotically attached to these no goes. What I'm talking about is is
Keeping the um the blade sharp
On both sides.
Keeping the goes.
Intact, getting up, making your bed, getting into action, doing things.
But also
forcing myself to not check the phone, to not check email, to stay in a groove of focus.
And that's actually where you there's the greatest opportunity. I'm a big believer in 90 minute focus.
Work about.
And of course in that time attention drifts and there's the temptation to get up.
go use the bathroom, get up and get a cup of coffee, get up and do anything but what I'm doing. But I try and just really create tunnel vision, even if I'll just sit there and go, this is miserable. I can't focus on this, but not allow myself to go do something else.
Unless it's
There's a real urgent need.
And this is actually the way I trained myself to study in college.
was a little bit masochistic, but I used to sit down, set a timer, and I wouldn't let myself get up.
For any reason.
For any reason whatsoever.
And
I think I've lost some of that over the years, so I'm trying to build up the circuitry again.
A good friend of mine, Pat Dossett from the he did nine years in the SEAL teams.
And he's a big believer in keeping these circuits tuned up.
And he said, uh
We always do a certain challenge each year.
The other day he said to me, he's like, How about in 2022 we do the hour of pain? And I was like, Oh no. Turns out the hour of pain is where you sit in a pretty uncomfortable position.
And you have to remain in that position for an hour.
I was like, that sounds great.
That sounds like a really great low cost, miserable way to build up these no-go circuits.
Cold water you could do for a little bit longer, but eventually you're gonna get hypothermic.
Right? Heat you could burn yourself.
Exercise you could damage yourself, but one hour of pain. So I
I gotta try this, so I think we're we're gonna do it.
Breathing and vision seem to not only affect our state of mind, but also our body. When we're stressed, for example,
Our our field of vision like narrows and we we have blind spots not only with what we can literally see, but also with what we can cognitively see.
Can you maybe take us through the relationship that vision and breathing have on our internal state and any behavioral practices that we can use to feel better and see more?
Yeah, so we'll start with vision.
Um
When we are relaxed, we are in panoramic vision, even without moving our eyes or head, we actually have a wider aperture or field of view.
Those from
Special operations communities will understand this as situational awareness.
You have to be relaxed in order to see what's going on.
Why?
Well, the moment that you have adrenaline in your system
Yeah, it goes up.
your field of view actually narrows, the pupils dilate.
So you know, um
police will look at see how high people are by if people are super relaxed, their people are very small. And if they're very, um
agitated their pupils will be large.
agitated or excited in a positive way. When the pupils are large, there's a movement of the
the lens of the eye and actually your visual field narrows, you get a soda straw view of the world.
So when you're very stressed.
You have a narrower aperture.
And you're actually viewing the world.
Um, just imagine trying to identify something in a scene by looking through binoculars much harder, actually, than if you have the entire um panoramic view.
So stress and the visual system, relaxation and the visual system um link together. There's actually a simple practice that you can do if ever you're
in conversation or in an environment where you're stressed.
You're trying to find a
plane gate that you're running to, you're trying to find somebody
God forbid you've lost your kid.
You actually
Um wanna dilate your gaze.
You can consciously do this by you can do this even now, just as we're talking. You can
Start two.
You don't move your head or eyes, it's fine to blink, but what you're trying to do is see the periphery of the room, the ceiling. You actually want to see your body in the visual scene that you're in.
Actually your motion detection goes up fourfold when you're in this
panoramic vision mode because of the you shift to a different category of neurons that are much better
Detecting motion.
Whereas when you go into kind of watch
Watchmakers mode.
you are looking for things that are happening over a very small
space and in the visual system and in the brain, this is really the key thing. Space and time are linked.
So if you have a narrow field of view, you're actually measuring smaller time increments. You're micro slicing.
Your environment.
and you're micro slicing it in space and time. Whereas when you have broad
Swath of vision.
you actually have bigger time bins. And here's a good example of it if you are
Um
need to get home and you're in line at the uh the grocery store nowadays you know some places you're even in a mask which is kind of uncomfortable
And the person in front of you is returning something, it's going to seem like time is going by very, very slowly because you're micro slicing, you're getting higher frame rate.
Okay.
However, when you're relaxed, doesn't bother you at all. You're actually batching time in in bigger swaths.
And so the visual system drives
Your time perception system.
Okay. So
If you're feeling stressed in conversation or public speaking or anything where you want to remain covert about that stress and you want to relax in a way that's covert.
Dilate your gaze, just try and open up the aperture of your field of view.
The other thing you can do is exhale.
Because
In a very straightforward way, inhale, speed up.
Your heart rate and exhales slow it down.
got this muscle called the diaphragm. The diaphragm is is unique to mammals. It's really
Incredible, but it's a
It's incredible.
Because it
It's a skeletal muscle, it's actually can be it can work voluntarily in the background.
Or you can take control of it.
When you breathe in
Your lungs expand.
The diaphragm moves down.
And what ends up happening under those conditions
Is that your heart actually um
Because you're
You create a change in the amount of space in your thoracic cavity.
You
You change the flow of blood through your heart because
Um, as you inhale, diaphragm moves down, there's a little more space, heart gets a little bigger, and the brain sends a signal to the heart to speed the heart up.
When you exhale
The diaphragm moves up.
There's actually a contraction of the heart in the thoracic cavity.
It's a little smaller, there's
Yeah.
Blood flows faster through that smaller volume, and the brain sends a signal to slow the heart down. Simple way to remember it is inhales.
Speed your heart up.
Transiently exhales
Slow it down. So
If you get stressed, exhaling is the key. Now there's another way to de-stress, and this is
Um
fastest way that I'm aware of to de-stress. My lab works extensively on this, but it's something that's actually been known since the thirties, and that's what are called physiological size, S-I-G H.
Physiological size.
Are actually something that you do every five minutes or so in sleep or wakefulness.
You're breathing, you're working, whether or not you're holding your breath or you're stressed, every five minutes or so, you do this.
Yeah.
you reinflate your lungs because the lungs aren't just two big bags of air. They actually have hundreds of millions of little sacs called Avioli.
And
The remember you bring in air.
Your trachea then
creates a lot of volume by by branching into the lungs, then you have all these millions of sacs that if you were to lay them out would be as about as big as a tennis court. Huge volume inside of you.
And air oxygen can actually move from those little sacs directly into the bloodstream and deliver oxygen to your brain and body.
When you exhale
You don't carbon dioxide.
Now the stimulus to breathe in
Is from
Neurons that sense carbon dioxide. When you aren't breathing enough, carbon dioxide levels go up.
And then it forces you to take a breath.
As you get stressed.
Or if you underbreathe or if you over breathe.
These little ivioli sacs collapse.
So now you can't bring as much oxygen in and you can't offload as much carbon dioxide. And also they are moist.
So because of surface tension.
If you just take a big deep breath, let's say you're stressed once take a deep breath and you go
They don't open.
They don't reopen because they're sticky.
A double inhale.
With the second inhale being a really kind of sharp inhale will reinflate those.
Will sack. So it's

So the idea is
You take a big deep inhale and then you sneak in another inhale, even if you feel like you're not getting much in. And ideally the inhales are done through the nose. So again, it's inhale.


And then long exhale through the mouth.
That double inhale through the nose followed by a long exhale through the mouth.
Will rapidly de stress you.
So much so that most people find they just need to do it once, sometimes two or three times.
In order to go from a state of real
I don't know, stress and anxiety to feeling completely calm. Is that why kids do that when they're crying, or we adults do that when they're sobbing too?
Yes, when we sob we are effectively asphyxiating ourselves.
That's the because what are if we think about sobs, sobs are mostly exhales.
Hmm is the crying thing. That's my weak attempt to to um cry on cue. But you're collapsing those little sacks, and then it then there's a
Hm That's the kind of thing.
Okay, people with sleep apnea do this every once in a while. They're falling asleep, they're in sleep.
And they're they're basically asphyxiating themselves. People who are very large, and that includes, by the way, people not just people who are obese, but people who have a lot of muscle, who have big necks.
Oftentimes they they sleep on their back and their mouth breathers. They're they're basically oxygen starving themselves. And then they'll
They'll do this kind of
physiological side, it's the body's attempt
to offload carbon dioxide and bring in more oxygen.
There's a well known neural circuit for this.
involving an area called the parafacial nucleus discovered by Jack Feldman at UCLA. I just mentioned those things so that if people want to dive deeper into this, they can. If you're in a claustrophobic environment
Actually, you're in a crowded elevator or something, there isn't much oxygen nowadays also because people are in the masks.
Every once in a while people will take off that mask finally if they're outside, right? And they get they're allowed to do that. I don't know where people are in the world, but here we're
Got a lot of masqueros, then all of a sudden it's this big.
Oh.
That's the physiological side.
So the double inhale followed by an extended exhale is a great way
to rapidly bring down your level of what we call autonomic arousal, which is just fancy language for de stressing.
It works great when you're running too.
If you have a side stitch, this is kind of a
uh interesting aspect of of the side stitch. A lot of times people get a side cramp.
That side cramp isn't a cramp.
At all.
that side cramp that you feel is actually you have a nerve called the phrenic nerve, pH.
R E N I C that in innervates the diaphragm and controls the diaphragm and it has a c what's called a collateral, a little branch.
It goes to the liver.
And we you a lot of pain that we feel in the body is what's called referred pain, where you feel it in one area because of branches of nerves. Um
split off. Oftentimes they'll feel it in their shoulder too, because the phrenic actually kind of courses up and around near the shoulder.
And so they'll have some shoulder pain and they're side cramping and they'll think, Oh, I have a cramp or something. I need to
run with my hands above my head or I need to
Um drink.
More electrolytes.
Try do a physiological sigh.
two or three times while running and the cramp will will relieve itself.
I uh in ninety-nine percent of the time and because of the way that it relaxes the diaphragm.
And so you're taking out that collateral pain.
So
I think that the physiological side is a great tool. It's not completely covert because if you're in conversation with somebody and you do it, you know, they might spot you.
But you can do it.
Um in conjunction with panoramic vision.
uh dilating your vision, you can do it
In most any situation besides I suppose underwater.
Now a lot of people are benefiting from nasal breathing more generally.
Um and I always say
Unless you're speaking or you're exercising hard, nasal breathing should be your default. Also in sleep, nasal breathing should be your default. There's a wonderful book.
Um call Jazz.
A hidden epidemic by
Sandra Kahn and Paul Ehrlich, both colleagues of mine at Stanford, with a forward from Jared Diamond and also from Robert Sopolsky. So a lot of heavy hitters on this book.
Talks about the cosmetic benefits.
and the health benefits of being a nasal breather.
The nose has mucosal lining and has a microbiome.
that filters bacteria and viruses far better.
than breathing through your mouth. Being a mouth breather is terrible.
It actually disrupts the aesthetics of the mouth in kids. They've done twin studies, one kid's a mouth breather, one's not.
Um and the whole jaw structure, the nasal structure.
improves when you become a nasal breather. And it's very plastic over time, so you can correct things over time.
Lotta people say they can't read through their nose'cause they have a deviated septum.
Guess what?
The way to get better at breathing through your nose is breathing through your nose. The reason you have a deviated septum is because you're a mouth breather.
Um, there are rare exceptions where if people boxed or they had broken nose or something like that.
But your sinuses can learn to dilate.
So learn to be a nasal breather, one fun way to do that.
That isn't too embarrassing like taping your mouth.
is you can take a sip of water.
When you exercise and run with that sip of water.
In your mouth you learn how to nasal breathe.
I like to do laps in a pool every once in a while. I don't have access to a pool too much anymore, but
I used to like to um swim with my nose just above the
Surface of the water but my mouth underneath.
And I'm only going as fast as I can where I can t continue to nasal breathe. People look at me like I'm crazy.
But um
You know, at least I'm not a mouth break.
brains deteriorate with age. What exercises for the brain have demonstrated either slowing or reversing some of this natural process? Is it just cardio like we talked about earlier?
Yeah, so that this is really interesting. So there they're great data from uh the Nobel Prize winning uh neuroscientist Eric Kendell's lab at Columbia.
showing that when we do certain forms of exercise, there's a hormone like molecule that's released into the blood sh bloodstream called osteocalcin.
Osteocalcin
is known to provide support to neurons in a brain area called the hippocampus, which is involved in learning and memory.
The hundred and fifty to one hundred and eighty minutes of zone two cardio per week will support
overall brain health and function by way of improving blood flow.
So a lot of
Cognitive dysfunction is um over time and and age related dementia is just poor perfusion of the brain. This is why people who have general cardiovascular issues also generally have issues with thinking.
quite honestly. Now in terms of brain function
Cou a couple of things I um just want to mention before I forget.
One of the the ways to improve cognitive function is to make sure that there's uh appropriate amounts of lymphatic clearance.
the brain has its own lymphatic system. This lymphatic clearance happens during sleep.
One way to enhance it is to have the feet slightly elevated, 10 to 15 degrees. I put a pillow under my ankles when I sleep at night.
Usually I in the middle of the night I realize I kicked it away or something like that. But feet elevated naps.
of about ten to fifteen degrees.
are very useful. It increases the glymphatic clearance. There's
beautiful data to support um lymphatic clearance as an important process. Now in terms of exercise, exercise during the day increases the rates of lymphatic clearance at night.
So
The reason I mention this is that these are indirect effects on lymphatic clearance and blood flow.
Now what about direct effects? The direct effects bring us to osteocalcin.
And the direct effects of exercise on brain function and health.
Actually come from stimulation of the skeleton.
and load bearing exercise. And this is something that
I think is underappreciated.
When we do cardiovascular work again, you support blood flow, lymphatic clearance, but
Osteocalcin is made by the bones.
Wow, hormone that's made by bones that's released into the bloodstream and then goes to the brain and improves brain function.
And how
Does this work? Well, when the skeleton has load load bearing um
It is load bearing.
then osteocalcin is released and it makes perfect sense. Why would the brain continue to support its own function
If the body isn't being used.
No.
It'd say how does the brain know that the body is being used?
because osteocalcin is that signal. Again, the brain and body have to communicate.
And it's not like the body says, Oh, I weight trained today or I did
Um calisthenics today.
No, it doesn't work that way. There's a hormone signal to communicate that to the brain.
So this can be achieved a number of different ways.
I actually think bodyweight exercises can be quite
Good.
Um there are a couple of online sources that
I mean, I think the incredible work that Ido Portal
Is doing
IDO Portal. He's big on this movement.
He calls it movement culture, but this is
Not just doing push ups and
and burpees and not that sort of thing, which are very linear.
But a lot of non d of dynamic nonlinear movement. He talks about explosiveness, suppleness
In basic form people doing push ups, sit ups, pull ups, dips.
jump squats, you know, basic load bearing.

It's actually well established that cognitive function and aging can be assessed indirectly by grip strength.
Now why would that be? You have lower motor neurons, which are neurons in your spinal cord that control contraction of the muscles.
that by releasing neurotransmitter onto those muscles.
But you have upper motor neurons which control
Deliberate motor action.
And grip strength is something that really involves those upper motor neurons.
And um you actually can do this as a as a test.
The if you're lifting weights, if you
um grip really strong. Let's say you're even doing a unilateral movement. If you
clench the opposite fist really, really hard, you'll find that you can move more weight from more repetitions because you're engaging the entire upper motor neuron to lower motor neuron system.
So there's a chain of neural events there.
So the idea is that people should be doing three to four days a week.
Minimum.
Uh
some sort of load bearing exercise that could be weight training.
Machines are free weights.
But it could also again be
push ups, pull ups, dips.
Um jump squats.
The ability to jump.
and grip strength are highly correlated with cognitive function later in a in age.
think now why would that be? Again, it's these hormonal signals sent from the body to the brain.
And I think that, you know, the overwhelming amount of evidence has been placed on cardiovascular exercise and improvements in the brain.
Even so much so that people have um focused on there's some mouse data.
Studies published on on mice showing that
Exercise, cardiovascular exercise can um
Increase the number of neurons in the hippocampus. Turns out that's true for mice, but not for humans.
I wouldn't focus so much on adding new neurons to the brain. It's more about getting the ones that you have to already be
But to be more functional.
And I think that one of the reasons why so much of the work was done on cardiovascular exercise is very easy to make mice.
uh run on a wheel. They love to run on a wheel.
harder to get them to lift weights.
If you want mice to do low bearing exercise
they actually do these kind of crew experiments where they actually make a limb deficient so that they can I have to hobble around on another limb to overload that limb.
And just one more incentive for doing load bearing exercise. There's a beautiful paper published this last year showing that
When
People do resistance exercise.
A little what's called a micro RA.
Um which are little tiny RNAs, as the name suggests.
actually are released in little vesicles, little bubbles from the muscle and travel to the body fat and
help facilitate burning of body fat.
So resistance exercise has
obviously affects on caloric burn.
that can indirectly support fat loss.
in states of you know subcaloric intake.
But
Resistance exercise itself facilitates lipolysis, the usage of body fat.
for energy.
So so many reasons to both do cardiovascular work.
Hundred fifty to hundred and eighty minutes a week minimum.
and to do three to four days a week of resistance exercise. And it doesn't have to be excruciatingly hard or heavy.
It does have to be
Effort.
But it pays off through this osteocalcin system.
Dude, I could talk to you all day. I got w one last question today, but maybe we can do another episode next year just on mental performance and learning. But one aspect of mental performance that doesn't get a lot of attention.
Is that we often get into these ruts that totally undermine us. Like, for example, somebody cuts us off, or we feel slighted or wronged by someone.
Is there a way that we can use the body to control the mind and let go?
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, I agree we get into these these ruts. I think there are a couple of things to remember.
And I say this with a lot of sensitivity. I really do.
Um one is that most people are not mentally healthy.
Doesn't mean they're mentally ill.
But you know, most people have not done a lot of self reflection work.
in a way that translates to their behaviors.
Most people sadly.
Grew up in families where there was at least some unhealthy dynamics.
Most people are stressed.
And a lot of people shed their stress on the others.
And so
You know, we're constantly being bombarded.
With
Can dysfunction.
I'll take us out of this this swamp in a minute, but a colleague of mine who's a psychiatrist years ago when I started teaching.
Gave me some great advice. He said, Just remember
One percent of people
Have
Clinical schizophrenia.
Four percent are bipolar.
five to ten percent are clinically depressed another 10% have anxiety
listed off O C D all these syndrome I thought this is disorder and he said now
When you get your
feedback from your course, be sure to pay attention to the things that you need to do better.
But please understand that as you move through life, you're dealing with
People are struggling.
I thought wow.
I had no you know it's true. So when you look at comments online and someone says something crazy, I mean there's a very high
probability that they're dealing with a mental disorder of some sort.
So
If you're somebody who is
Um moving through life.
And
feeling bombarded by a lot of quote unquote crazy behavior. Just remember that
There's a lot of struggle out there.
Um, and if you're somebody who's really into self optimization and you're doing
a lot of work on yourself, maybe you've been doing some therapy or journaling or
Work on
Trauma is that we
You know you're
Optimizing your
Hormones and sleep, you are in a very small category, unfortunately, of people that's really trying to be healthy for yourself and for others.
So the first thing I say is that the second thing is
After age twenty five, the brain doesn't change unless it's self directed change. So don't expect anybody to change unless it's self-directed. Forget trying to get people to change. It does not work.
It works with children, it does not work with adults unless it's self directed plasticity.
And there is
Tons of literature to support that statement.
No
As we
You know, move forward in life though, I you know, if we
Uh
healthy and functional. It's our job to step into to leadership roles and then to and to demonstrate healthy behavior. How do we do this?
I think that one thing that we can do is raise our stress threshold.
You know, when you talk about these days there's a lot of quote unquote trigger warnings and about being triggered and people everybody's getting triggered. So one it one way to look at all this is that, okay
The they're
is to eliminate the problems, the people triggering.
The other is to reduce your trigger threshold.
And I think that um trying to reduce
Yeah.
the amount of problems in the world.
by forcing or encouraging other people to change is just generally not that good. You offer tools, that's what I do, that's what you do, and you just hope that people will take them.
But we I we can increase our stress threshold so that our trigger threshold is much higher.
And the way to do that.
Yeah.
A self directed practice.
that my lab has been working on for for a while now. And some people recognize this as tumo type breathing or Wim Hof type breathing. The truth is it doesn't actually have to be done with breathing. You could do this with ice baths, you do this with any resilience increasing B um
behavior what you need to do is get comfortable
And stay in a no go response.
Under conditions where you have high levels of adrenaline in your system, uncomfortable levels of adrenaline.
That can be done by getting into an ice bath.
That can be done.
through what we call cyclic hyperventilation. We're running a study on this now. Actually the data are in
It's just not published yet.
Cyclic hyperventilation means sitting or lying down.
For
Take, you know, f we found that five minutes a day actually is very effective, even though it's very brief.
And it looks a little silly when I do it, but I'll just do it. Cyclic hyperventilation is gonna be a big active inhale through the nose and then a passive exhale through the mouth. So this
Yeah.
you just kinda let it fall out, but you repeat that twenty five to thirty times. So I'm not gonna do it twenty five to thirty times, I'll do it five times just to demonstrate. So it's big active inhal.
This is work. It's gonna feel like work. It's
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you do that twenty five to thirty times and you're gonna feel agitated.
What's happening? You are generating adrenaline release into your system. I can already feel like a little bit of blood flow.
Yeah.
Healing up.
You're generating adrenaline release. This is different than running up a hill.
This is
Active
stimulation of adrenaline into your brain and body. Then after twenty five or thirty breaths.
You exhale all your air.

Through your mouth.
And you hold your breath.
And you try and be as calm as you can for about fifteen to sixty seconds.
Don't try and hold your breath too long, just when you feel the stimulus to breathe.
Go back into it twenty five to thirty.
Big active inhales.
S
Passive exhale, big active inhale, passive exhales, and you'll notice a tendency to want to shorten the inhales, but try and really do a full inhale.
Passive exhale.
Then you exhale all your air again.
Sit there for about
Fifteen to sixty seconds.
Until you feel the impulse to breathe.
Then you do a third round.
twenty five to thirty of these big inhales, passive exhales.
Then you exhale all your air, fifteen to
to sixteen seconds.
And then you take a big gulp of air.
Logs full?
And you're gonna sit as calmly as possible as you can with lungs full.
And at that point
You'll thank me because what's gonna happen is you're going to feel a kind of mild euphoria.
You're going to be very alert.
Extremely alert because your system is
Filled with
Adrenaline.
But you're gonna feel very calm.
There's also dopamine release at that point.
And then when you feel the impulse to breathe, please don't pass out. Just

Just exhale and start breathing normally.
This done
We had people do this daily, but if you
Do it.
on a regular basis, maybe even just three times a week, what you'll notice is really incredible.
You actually when things happen in your world, people will say something or
You won't feel that sharp spike of adrenaline.
You've raised your stress threshold.
So we hear a lot about grit resilience and mental toughness.
But those are just psychological terms. What we're talking about here is the how to build grit resilience and mental toughness.
And so this is very similar to the kind of cold water torture that they do for you know SEAL team screening.
Um it's a it involves some goes'cause you have to do these breathing things as you
We talked about earlier go type behaviors. There's also a lot of no-go. The no-go is sitting calmly while your system is filled with adrenaline.
And there's another perk of all this that's very relevant right now, which is that
There's a beautiful study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that shows
That when people do this kind of breathing
prior to an injection of E. coli, something I don't recommend people do.
They are actually able to remain symptom free.
In the face of that.
Very serious.
Infectious
F
Injection.
Why? Well this breathing and adrenaline in particular is
activates the immune system in a way that allows you to counter infection.
So the other day I got off a plane. I've been traveling a lot now.
Planes are starting to get more crowd. There was a lot of coughing and sneezing on the plane. I was like, oh God, like this is the last thing I want.
I mean I feel
pretty safe in general about all the other stuff going on, but you know, colds and flues, we haven't been exposed much, so we're all
lot more vulnerable. I hate being sick.
So I got off the plane, got outside, took my mask off.
And I immediately did this round of breathing.
In order to get that stimulus.
And unfortunately I'm not sick.
Um
But it's a great tool.
for activating the immune system great tool for building up that stress threshold.
You could do it by getting into ice baths or cold water, but I really like this practice and
Again, it's a little early to report the specifics, but we had people do this just five minutes a day.
Um and we see some really impressive effects on
mood on countering anxiety on improvements in sleep
And it makes you a
Tougher person, basically.
Don't do it near water or in water, because you could pass out and drown. But aside from that, don't do it while driving, the obvious stuff, right? Be rational.
But it's a great practice.
Takes a little bit of effort to get into, but I guarantee that if you do it.
Three or
Or more times a week.
You're going to notice it.
big improvement in your ability.
to not get triggered. Someone's gonna say it won't feel triggering.
Because there's no adrenaline response to it. You've raised your stress threshold.
Let's end with what is success for you.
Uh that's a hard question, uh, but a really good one. Um
Well, I place tremendous value on certain things.
And I think some of those will be obvious. So I'll just list those and I'll try then I'll try and give a a more succinct um answer. I'm not a good philosopher, but
You know, the things that have really made a huge difference in my happiness in life.
Are first of all feeling physically and mentally well.
Um
is our own individual obligation.
uh regardless of upbringing, we no one can do it for us. There's no magic pill or fairy or stork that's gonna deliver the solution. So I place tremendous value on keeping my physiology
where it needs to be. I wanna
I wanna have endurance, I wanna have strength, I wanna have mental strength, I wanna have kindness.
Wanna have openness. I want to be open to learning.
Friendship to mi is is a is the bedrock of my
Well being because
I I depend very heavily on it for
the feeling that that life is moving forward. And that that's just unique to my own experience, but I think
Um, you don't need many friends, but friendship is is a wonderful
an important part of my life.
Um, so I try and take good care mentally and physically. I try and invest in my friendships.
And obviously other
relationships to
Success to me.
really is about embracing
this capacity that we have to to improve our nervous system. It really is. It's not just a job for me.
It really is, um
I feel
My duty as a human being to
always try and be better do better
Um for myself and for others. And
That involves having tools and protocols.
Being reflective.
There's so many ways that
We can improve and there's so many ways that we can
Dolve.
When we don't
Do that work.
I'm a big
believer in the psychologist Erickson's stages of development.
He talked about these different stages of development that at every age we're working through some fundamental conflict. And if we can resolve that conflict,
That then we can advance to the next stage and it
And the ages are somewhat plastic because of changes in in culture and life, but
I started off as a developmental neurobiologist and development doesn't end
twenty five, your whole life is one big developmental arc.
And so
I'm forty six now and I try and think okay, what have I managed to accomplish and then what what's my work? What's my
What do I need to do?
Um for instance, I don't know.
Much about spirituality at all.
I intend to learn it.
Um
I didn't grow up in a particularly religious family. I don't even know that my goal is to set out to do that, but I feel like at this stage of life, according to Erickson,
If you've resolved a career, you've resolved relationships to some extent, you've resolved your relationship to yourself to some extent, and that's an ongoing process.
What's the next thing that we face? We face
to try and understand how we our short life span
relatively speaking, fits into a larger and more coherent whole. And so that's the work I'm doing. So I look at life as a success to me is is looking at life as a series of developmental milestones.
And
Making sure that if I didn't hit any milestones in the past for whatever reason
That I take responsibility for meeting those milestones.
And
looking forward and where I'm at now, I just try and say, well, what are the milestones that I should be working on now so that I find myself at 50 and 60 and 70, hopefully beyond that.
Having
Checked off the boxes that
make for a um a a full life.
It's hard to go back and take care of things of past.
Um we can't be
superperformers at everything, so that's not what it's about. But I really believe
I think that's that Ericsson was quite correct in understanding that
Our nervous system changes over time.
And that we need to meet these milestones. Nothing bothers me more than regressive behavior. I see a lot of that in the world now, adults acting like children.
Just kind of regressive reactivity.
Even just the little exercise that we did a moment ago of trying to raise stress threshold.
I feel like adults need it just as much and maybe even more than children because I think we're we've become like collectively regressed.
Um and that includes me. I'm I'm no better than anyone else. I just try and put the the work in to try and resolve these milestones.
That's where I'm at.
with in terms of what I see as successful
In terms of my professional life, I mean I've a very simple and
Me important mission, which is I just want to share the beauty and utility of human biology. That's my goal. That's why I have a podcast, that's why I go on podcasts, that's why I have social media.
I just want people to understand
What is to know about
And what we understand about the the body and brain.
In ways that can help improve
their lives and the ways that they interact with others. And so
That's my singular mission and um
I'll continue as long as the that feels like the right one.
Andrew, thank you so much for taking the time today. This was an amazing conversation. So informative and so deep. I have so many more questions for you.
Well thanks so much for having me on. I
I'm I'm always happy to sit down and uh
Have a podcast, have a conversation, um, at any point.
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