LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre
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§01Transcript — part 1
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
Recently, the Huberman Lab Podcast hosted a live event at the Great Hall in Brisbane, Australia.
The event was called The Brain-Body Contract and featured a lecture, followed by a question-and-answer session with the audience.
We wanted to make the question and answer session available to everyone, regardless if you could attend.
I also would like to thank the sponsors for the event.
They are 8Sleep and AG1.
8Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity.
I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep is the critical foundation for mental health, physical health, and performance.
Now, one of the key things to getting the best possible night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment.
And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually needs to drop by about one to three degrees.
And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and alert, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees.
Eight Sleep mattress covers make it extremely easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment
and thereby to control your core body temperature so that you fall and stay deeply asleep and wake up feeling your absolute best.
I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for about three years now, and it has completely transformed the quality of my sleep for the better.
Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation
of pod cover, the Pod 4 Ultra.
The Pod 4 cover has improved cooling and heating capacity,
higher fidelity sleep tracking technology,
and the Pod 4 cover has snoring detection
that will automatically lift your head a few degrees
to improve airflow and stop your snoring.
If you'd like to try an Eight Sleep mattress cover,
you can go to eightsleep.com slash Huberman
to save $350 off their Pod 4 Ultra.
Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK,
Select countries in the EU and Australia.
Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Huberman.
The other live event sponsor, AG1,
is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink
that also contains adaptogens
and other critical micronutrients.
I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012,
so I'm delighted that they decided to sponsor the live event.
I started taking AG1 and I still take AG1 once or twice a day
because it gives me vitamins and minerals
that I might not be getting enough of
from whole foods that I eat,
as well as adaptogens and micronutrients.
Those adaptogens and micronutrients are really critical
because even though I strive to eat most of my foods
from unprocessed or minimally processed whole foods,
it's often hard to do so, especially when I'm traveling
and especially when I'm busy.
So by drinking a packet of AG1 in the morning,
and oftentimes also again in the afternoon or evening,
I'm ensuring that I'm getting everything I need.
I'm covering all of my foundational nutritional needs.
And I, like so many other people that take AG1 regularly,
just report feeling better.
And that shouldn't be surprising
because it supports gut health,
and of course gut health supports immune system health
and brain health,
and it's supporting a ton of different cellular
and organ processes that all interact with one another.
So while certain supplements are really directed
towards one specific outcome,
like sleeping better or being more alert,
AG1 really is foundational nutritional support.
It's really designed to support all of the systems
of your brain and body
that relate to mental health and physical health.
If you'd like to try AG1,
you can go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman
to claim a special offer.
They'll give you five free travel packs with your order,
plus a year's supply of vitamin D3K2.
Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman.
And now for the live event
at the Great Hall in Brisbane, Australia.
What are my thoughts on nicotine?
Nicotine causes cancer when it's consumed in the form of smoking, vaping, dipping, or snuffing.
So don't do that.
There's a debate now about vaping.
Is it bad? Is it good? It's bad.
It is.
Is it worse for you than smoking? Probably not.
Is it better? Probably. Slightly.
You know what's better? Just not doing it.
but if you need to do it and you have to pick, you know, I suppose, you know, I'm not going to
tell you what to do, but I think that vaping has allowed a good number of people to smoke less.
I'll acknowledge that, and it's also clear it's not good for you, so if you're going to do something
that's bad for you, do a bunch of things to offset the thing that's bad for you. That's always my
advice, but now in terms of nicotine itself, nicotine doesn't cause cancer. The mode of
consumption causes cancer. That's important. Nicotine binds to so-called nicotinic acetylcholine
receptors. So these exist naturally in your body and on your muscles. They're the way that actually
your nerves control contraction of your muscles. So the consumption of nicotine, let's just say in,
I don't know about down here, but in Europe, it's becoming fairly common. And in the Middle East,
also for people to take little pouches of nicotine can be absorbed, you know, sublingually or through
the gum, gets into the bloodstream. And it is truly a cognitive enhancer. It's a cognitive
enhancer. I'm not going to lie to you. It will raise attention, focus, cognitive performance.
This is well established. The problem is it also raises blood pressure and causes vasoconstriction.
This is well established. So, you know, you have to ask yourself, is it worth it? Do I do it
sometimes? Do I do it often? Do I choose to not do it at all? I don't think the young brain should
be consuming nicotine even in these non-cancer causing forms like pouches for a variety of
reasons, but mostly because the brain is so plastic at a young age anyway. But I actually
am familiar with the use of nicotine for offsetting certain neurologic diseases. When I was visiting
Columbia Medical University in New York City some years ago, I was in the office of a Nobel Prize
winner, won't tell you who it was necessarily, and he proceeded to consume no fewer than six pieces
of Nicorette gum in our half-hour meeting. I was like, whoa. At the time, he was in his late 70s.
He's now in his 80s, and I was like, hey, listen, what's the deal with the nicotine? And he said,
oh, well, it offsets Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. I said, really? He said, yeah, yeah, you can
increase cognitive function. I used to smoke, but I don't want to get cancer, so I just chew a lot
and a lot of Nicorette. Okay, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, lot of Nicorette. You know, it can increase
the amount of acetylcholine activation through the binding of these nicotinic acetylcholine
receptors, might even maintain some dopaminergic neurons, which are the neurons that one tends to
lose with age and is rampant in diseases like Parkinson's. I thought, whoa, okay, so there's
something there. The fact of the matter is that nicotine can enhance focus, alertness, and learning
but it does have those other issues. So you want to be considerate of those other issues
and not become dependent on it. And my experience is that people who taste the nicotine focus
from a Zyn patch are those people who are buying those things pretty regularly. I know somebody
that went from one Zyn patch twice a week to a canister a morning in about a month because the
effect will wear off if you keep consuming it every day. You have to consume more and more.
So take that into consideration. Probably best to avoid unless you really need the boost and you
can afford the increase in blood pressure. That would be my suggestion. I've never taken nicotine
and I don't smoke. What's the best you can do for managing ADHD if not taking medication? Okay,
so we did two episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast on ADHD. The first was on behavioral,
nutritional, and supplement-based tools. 50% of the comments were like, thank you so much. This
is very helpful. Can't wait to try some of the stuff. The other were like, you're evil.
You're trying to persuade people to not take pharmaceuticals, which is not true. I'm interested
in all of it. I just covered that stuff in the first episode. And then the second one we did on
ADHD was about things like Vyvanse, Adderall, Ritalin, etc., most of which, by the way,
are amphetamines. Are we putting our kids on speed? Yes. Yeah, they're amphetamines. But I don't
think that we should walk away from those things in every case. They do have real clinical value
in many cases, and their clinical value comes from the fact that one, not all, but one of the
major effects of amphetamines is that it can increase dopaminergic and noradrenergic,
meaning dopamine and norepinephrine release in the brain, which can increase attention and focus,
which is actually beneficial in some cases for the brain to learn to focus, to get neuroplasticity
of those very circuits. So it's a consideration that 50% of the comments of that second episode
were why don't you talk about the behavioral tools, the supplement-based tools, and the nutrition
tools, and everyone else said thank you for talking about the prescription drugs. So the point being
several-fold. One is that certainly a combination of behavioral, nutritional, supplement-based,
and prescription tools is viable for most every situation, and it's worth thinking about all of
those when considering a treatment for ADHD, and I think we really need to get out of these silos
of thinking, you know, like big pharma is evil. Listen, there are drugs that can help people.
Is it evil? I don't know. Is it going away? No. Okay. Is there value there? Sometimes.
Is it over-prescribed? Sometimes. What about nutritional tools? Well, in some cases it can
really help. In other cases, one still needs prescription drug tools. In some cases doing
behavioral, nutritional, or supplement-based tools can allow one to take lower doses of
pharmaceuticals, if that's your goal. I think it really needs to be tailored to the individual.
What I would like to see is more of a tailoring to the individual than the simple write a script,
send people off, or tell people that it's all bad if it comes out of a prescription
drug label format. Now, it is very clear that the original dosing schedule for things like
Adderall, Vyvanse, et cetera, was during the weekdays, but not the weekends. That somehow has
moved to no weekends off. So there's been a lot of changing in the dosing schedules.
And the way these drugs are taken, are we creating a dependency on these drugs is always a big
question, and the answer seems to be a sort of. Very few people for whom these drugs work decide
to come off them. There's nothing magical about turning 25, after which you don't need
these enhancements, but sometimes people don't need them or need as much of them,
because the neural circuits can be built up. One thing that I would like to see more of
is attention to the behavioral tools for ADHD, not the least of which is what's being carried out
in many schools and clinics in China, where children are being encouraged to teach themselves
how to maintain visual focus on a target some distance away from them, which then allows them
to maintain cognitive focus when they move to their work. The relationship between visual focus,
as we've talked about a bunch of times tonight, in the case of the cuttlefish, etc., and cognitive
focus is an intimate one, such that if you expect yourself to focus, you can't really expect yourself
to drop into focus as an immediate state. You know, so it's not a square wave function.
So you don't just sit down and drop into a state of focus.
We're so attracted to these notions of focus, and we have these concepts like flow.
And by the way, I'm not disparaging of those concepts.
I know Stephen Kotler.
I have respect for him and his books about flow.
But from a neuropsychiatric, neuropsychological standpoint, what we can really say about flow is that backwards spells wolf.
We don't really know that much about it.
And so I think that if you expect yourself to focus, you need to give yourself some warm-up time to focus.
Don't assume that you have attention issues if you sit down and it takes five or ten minutes to drop into a state of focus.
Just like you wouldn't expect yourself to go out for a hard run without some sort of warm-up jog beforehand.
So the behavioral tools, such as focusing on a visual target, are underexplored, at least in most countries,
but in China and elsewhere they are being explored pretty extensively.
So I would encourage a full exploration of all the tools.
In this case, it says not taking medication.
Then obviously heavier reliance on the behavioral tools is going to be helpful.
While I'm getting more sleep now, I neglected sleep for many years.
Me too.
And at least 15 years of getting just five or so.
Am I doomed or can I offset this past damage?
You can offset the past damage.
One of the things that's really wonderful about the brain and body
is that it can compensate.
You know, there's certain things that I get asked a lot.
I don't know why I get this question a lot,
but people say, you know, I smoked meth for years,
and then can I get my neurons back?
And I'm like, well, you know, it's neurotoxic,
but the fact that you're asking the question is reassuring.
You know, so don't start.
But if you did, you know, I mean,
you can always do better than you're doing,
and you certainly can do better than you did in your past,
or at least that's what they tell me.
so really when it comes to sleep deprivation you know I spent many all-nighters I wouldn't talk
about sleep so much if I didn't have challenges with sleep I mean for a long time I slept like
a bulldog I would sleep anywhere anytime by the way folks if you ever walk down the street and
you see a bulldog and you stop you'll notice they always stop they always seem so friendly they
always stop they always stop and they look up at you and you pet them and like the reason they
seem to like you so much is because they love to stop. I own one. They're all about the stopping.
It's not you. It's about the stopping. Anyway, the goal is not necessarily to sleep as much
as a bulldog. Actually, it's the only animal, so you can't help myself, it's the only animal
for which there's a genetically induced apnea. They're brachycephalic, which means they have a
§02Transcript — part 2
Short snout.
You got all those folds.
You know why the folds are there?
The folds are there because they have a genetic mutation.
They bred out the pain receptors in the face
because they used to have them like they would bull bait.
They'd bite on the face of the bull.
They'd kill all the pain.
They bred out the pain receptors,
gave them a floppy face.
Short snout.
English bulldog, thank you for the specificity.
A biologist loves the specificity.
The Frenchies are pretty cool.
The Frenchies are pretty cool.
They have a little more kick in them.
Right? The bulldogs, a little less, and Costello was a bulldog mastiff, so he was more or less like
a sea turtle. You know, just slow movement, stopping, and he's going forward, and you can
move aside. In fact, Costello was so mellow that when he would lie down on the floor, I had
one of those, you know, kind of robot vacuums, things we called a Roomba in our country, it would
come up to his face, and he would just, and it would bounce off his nose. And he wouldn't even
take the opportunity to blink. The bulldog is sort of the essence of economy of effort.
And actually, if you look at people, people resemble different dog breeds. I spent a lot
of time thinking about this. Some dogs and some people have a bit more kind of reverberation in
them. They've got a higher RPM all the time, all the time, all the time. And then there are the
Bulldogs, right? Rick Rubin, right? They're these people that are just more still. And we look at
these people that are more still and think, well, there probably isn't that much going on in there.
But now we know from the Rick thing and the Carl thing that they're thinking a lot. But in the case
of Costello, they don't get much done. You know, maybe Costello wanted to get things done, but
if he woke up on New Year's Day and said, all right, 50 rabbits this year, he never actually
achieved that. But listen, the point is some of us sleep like bulldogs. Some of us tend to go to
sleep and wake up in the middle of the night. I'm one of those people. Go to sleep four hours, wake
up. I hate it. But I figured out that non-sleep deep rest or yoga nidra has taught me how to fall
back asleep really quickly and I can recover some sleep by having gotten through non-sleep deep rest.
Some people are waking up in the middle of the night because they don't have their sleep timing
right. We have a series on sleep coming out soon with the great Matt Walker. We record a six-episode
series with Matt, and he talks about something. I take no credit for this. This is Matt's acronym,
QQRT, quality, quantity, regularity, and timing. You want to pay attention to the amount of sleep.
Some people need six. Some people need eight. If you only got seven for years and you're reading
that you need eight or else you'll get dementia, please don't worry about it. It is simply not the
case. Some people need less. Some people need more. This varies across the lifespan. Then there's the
quality, how much of that sleep is continuous. Did you drink caffeine in the afternoon or alcohol in
the evening, in which case the quality will be diminished. The regularity is very interesting.
Going to sleep more or less, five nights a week at least, going to sleep more or less at the same time
every night, plus or minus an hour. It's fine on the weekends. I'm not just saying that so you don't
all leave at once, or a third of you leave. Some people do best by going to bed at 8 or 9 p.m.
and waking up at 3 or 4 in the morning.
And that's where you would feel best.
In fact, if you're somebody that wakes up at 3 or 4 in the morning,
you might be going to sleep too late
and you have this intrinsic chronotype, as it's called.
And you can shift your clock a bit later.
But most people want to go to bed sometime between 10 p.m. and midnight,
wake up sometime between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m.
And there's great variation there too.
But, you know, QQRT.
So think about the quality, the quantity, the regularity,
and the timing. Once you dial those in, everything is much, much better. So much so that even if
you're not getting enough sleep, as long as you're going to bed at more or less the same time each
night, you'll fare better. So if you didn't do any of this stuff for years, like I didn't
when I was in graduate school, et cetera, don't despair. Don't despair. It's very clear that the
brain can recover, and I wouldn't waste a single moment thinking about what you didn't do. Also,
my time machine's broken, your time machine's broken. I realize that doesn't create a lot of
comfort, but it's unlikely that you did substantial damage. Unlikely you did substantial damage,
unless you did that your whole life, and we're talking about a conversation that's happening
late, late in life. But even then, more sleep would be better. Do you believe in burnout?
If so, what would be a recommendation protocol to relinquish burnout once it's already occurred?
This is a very interesting question.
You know, we don't quite know what burnout is,
and it can come from a combination of things.
And typically, burnout comes not during the stress period,
but several months afterwards.
You know, the adrenals, you know,
these two little nuggets above our kidneys and our lower back,
are capable of driving so much neural energy in us
that we can do all sorts of things for a very long time,
even in the absence of food, as long as we have water and salt.
You know, the adrenals, because they kick out adrenaline and cortisol,
and by the way, are involved in salt appetite.
There's a reason for that, because you need that.
The adrenals can keep us going,
and there is no such thing as true adrenal burnout,
because the adrenals don't burn out.
You've got enough adrenaline in your adrenals for two lifetimes.
but there is an adrenal insufficiency syndrome, so that's a real thing. It's rare, but it exists.
But burnout seems to be, in my mind, more related to psychological burnout. And I'm not a psychologist,
but I'm a fan of the poet David Whyte, and he has this beautiful poem that is either entitled or
somehow includes the word wholeheartedness. I think that where we recover ourselves is by relating to
and engaging with things and people that we wholeheartedly enjoy,
even if that is simply relaxation or gardening or drawing
or maybe just doing nothing for a bit.
I think burnout is very real.
And I think burnout, as pushed through the filter
of what we've been talking about earlier in the evening,
is when we are not getting periodic experiences, if you will,
of delight or excitement or a sense of meaning.
And here we're starting to drift into kind of abstract.
You know, not everyone gets to do a job that they delight in.
Certainly there were years where I didn't delight
in the sorts of things I had to do for certain jobs.
But finding some areas of life
that create those neural energy states that carry forward,
that wick out into other aspects of what we're doing.
And I don't know if I made this point clear enough earlier,
but those moments of really feeling excited about something in a way that really lights you up in particular
are not just about that moment and seeking out more of those moments,
but in the way that it lifts our nervous system, the way it carries us forward
and allows us to do the other things that we have to do,
which frankly sometimes can be not as exciting or even drudgery.
So if you've burnt out, I know the feeling.
I have burnt out before.
and I encourage a combination of rest but also exploration of things that can evoke that kind
of internal excitement or sense of meaning and one has to be a bit of a forager in order to do
that try new things and that can be difficult but burnout is real and I encourage you to take it
seriously because unfortunately typically what follows burnout is depression and then things can
really run ashore. What types of food do you try to eat every day and why? Oh, I love to eat.
I do. I love to eat. I even like the mere act of chewing so much. So it just, yeah.
That's why I buy those Persian cucumbers. You just munch on those things all the time.
I tend to eat according to how alert or asleep I want to be.
It violates a few kind of popular thoughts about nutrition, but that's what I do.
Generally, for me, I like water caffeine early in the day and then eat sometime around 11 or noon.
I'm not really strict about these things.
If I'm hungry, I'll have a plate of eggs in the morning or something or a handful of macadamias.
By the way, the macadamias down in Australia are awesome.
They're so good.
But in the States, they like confuse them with all these palm kernel oils and stuff.
And so when I first tasted the ones, and they always taste good, but I'm not going to get into the seed oil debate.
I think of better ways to hang myself, like with this microphone cord.
It's less like, you know, I guess I do sort of avoid the seed oils.
But, you know, I feel best.
I love them.
Oh, the macadamias.
I told you, I always find my way back.
The macadamias down here taste as if they've been infused with all sorts of stuff.
But then you look at the packaging and it's just like macadamias and salt.
I don't know what is so good.
The coffee down here is amazing.
I don't know why it tastes so good.
So good.
The produce.
I mean, basically I eat like you guys.
Gals.
That's what I do.
That's what I do.
I basically eat meat and eggs and fruit and vegetables.
And I do like rice and oatmeal.
And there are people on social media that tell you, like, oatmeal is going to kill you.
And I'm like, if oatmeal were going to kill me, I'd be dead.
I eat so much oatmeal, but that's not to say that some people feel better if they don't eat oatmeal.
I kind of find the nutrition debates to be kind of like funny.
They're so non-scientific, they're funny.
But I also know that, and here I have a theory,
that when you eat most of your foods from unprocessed or minimally processed sources,
something magical happens.
Not only are you, let's say, eating healthier foods, quote unquote,
but we should define healthier.
Foods for which their macronutrients,
proteins, fats, and carbohydrates,
also, and calories,
tend to be matched pretty well
with high micronutrient content,
something that doesn't exist
in highly processed foods, right?
But probably also better for the planet,
which is great,
not being, the planet's important.
We want to keep that around.
But the other thing is that,
neurally, when you eat foods
as their main ingredients,
which is not to say you can't have a soup
or a stew or a salad every once in a while,
but closer to their original form,
and I do cook my meat,
unlike other people on the internet,
there's the guy eating chicken raw for like 28 days.
I was in the barbershop the other day.
They're like, what about the raw chicken guy?
And I was like, not a good idea.
So when you eat foods in their kind of basic state,
the brain can associate the taste
with the macronutrient and amino acid content and micronutrient content.
And we know that the gut is sensing a lot of that unconsciously, subconsciously.
We know this through neural pathways, beautiful work being done by people here in Australia
and in the States and elsewhere about the signaling for the gut is actually tasting the food
or it's measuring the amount of amino acids, fatty acids, et cetera.
And so when you eat foods in their kind of more original form, non-processed or minimally processed, it's clear that the brain starts to develop a more specific intuition or appetite for what you need.
You start to know, oh, like I need some fat or I need some protein or I'm craving.
You start to crave the things according to what's actually in them.
And highly processed foods and rich combinations of foods don't allow you to do that.
And that hasn't really been explored.
There's a little bit of work that's coming out on this by Dana Small at Yale and Kevin Hall elsewhere.
But we're sort of starting to get there.
So this is why I believe when people go on these elimination diets where they say, like, I'm only eating meat, like the lion diet or whatever, like Costello, meat only.
And many of those people, quote, unquote, feel better, I think, because they're starting to form a relationship with the nutrient content of the food, the caloric content, and the taste in a way that after that they, like, see a cracker.
and they're like, no.
You know, they can kind of reset the neural circuits
around appetite and all of this stuff.
But for me, because I'm an omnivore,
like a normal person,
§03Transcript — part 3
and sorry, no disrespect to the carnivores.
I just kind of like the blood drinking,
like liver chomping, like come on.
Like the, I'm gonna catch a bullet
or like a, you know, someone's gonna bone at me.
So I fear them more than I fear the vegans.
It'll just be like a bunch of, you know.
The vegans will attack you online,
but in person, they'll just like hit you with a parsley.
so it's not as, yeah, the, the, um, I'm going to get myself in trouble. The, um,
I'm an omnivore like most people. And the, and so for me between 11 AM and 8 PM is typically
when I eat, but sometimes I eat at nine. I didn't eat before this cause I don't like to eat right
before I do this sort of thing. So I'll eat a meal before I go to sleep tonight. I'm not super
strict about this stuff. I'm not super, super strict, but in general, it's some sort of
intermittent-ish fasting thing. And it tends to be meat and fish and eggs and little Parmesan cheese
and coffee and oranges and cucumbers and lettuce and food, like food and pasta. And I suppose that
having done that for so many years, I do, you know, adjust it. Like if I do a hard resistance
training workout, I'll eat a few more starchy carbohydrates to replenish glycogen. But I tend
to avoid extremes with all that stuff. And I love a great slice of pizza. And I've sort of lost my
taste for sweets, but occasionally I'll do that. And I love vegetables like croissants and things
of that sort. So, but you know, all kidding aside, you know, I do try and eat pretty healthy every
day. With a ton of info out there about health and wellness, Andrew, I love the way, Nikhil,
what are your top health and fitness style recommendations for someone who has a busy
lifestyle? This is a great question. And you know, I get accused a lot. I get accused a lot of a lot
of things. But, you know, one of them is, well, no one can do all this stuff. But we talked about
that earlier. We do the best with what we have and the time we have. Try and get some bright sunlight,
even through cloud cover, especially through cloud cover every day. I try and dim the lights or,
you know, get under a red light, not red light panel necessarily, but just put in like red party
light. I've done that this whole trip when we traveled in the evening, just, it's just a red
light bulb. It's not fancy. So the red light bulb screws in this little pedestal, turn that on,
all the other lights go off, and then it makes for a nice, easy taper into sleep because, you know,
the blue in bright fluorescent lights, the short wavelength light, really is activating for the
nervous system, especially late in the day. So light is a big one for me. Try and get a few walks
in. I think if you were going to exercise just two days a week, it's very clear that those two
days per week should include some resistance training exercise and then maybe follow up with
some easy cardiovascular training or something like that. Hopefully one could get out in about
maybe three days or exercise, sometimes not outside. One can only exercise indoors, maybe
three days per week. So I don't think it takes a ton of time necessarily, but that might even be
excessive. So with busy lifestyle, I think it's those little carve outs of five or 10 minute walk.
when we had Andy Galpin on the podcast and did a series.
And by the way, Andy's launching his own podcast
through our podcast channel, which is SciComm,
which Rob and I started.
He's got the Perform podcast with Andy Galpin.
He talked a little bit about these exercise snacks.
These are actually pretty cool
in the sense that if you just take 60 seconds
and do, you know, like a near all out,
you know, run up the stairs, but be careful,
or jumping jacks for a minute,
as fast as you can. That raises heart rate in a way and adjusts your physiology in a way that
really does carry over to better performance, including even things like VO2 max in other
endeavors. So it's probably not the case that that's all you should do, but even small bouts
of exercise can be very, very valuable. So that's reassuring. And then I am a huge fan of non-sleep
deep rest, aka yoga nidra, which means yoga sleep, which is just lying there as we talked about
before, but it's slightly different than what we were talking about for creativity. Lying there
and deliberately inducing, using your mind to deeply relax the different muscles of your body,
stay calm, long exhale, breathing, this kind of thing. There's a 10-minute NSDR with my voice on
YouTube that you can simply find at zero cost. There are many with other voices, female voices,
et cetera, that you can find on YouTube as well. And if you don't like those, we're soon to release
on our Huberman Lab Clips channel, a number of different meditations and NSDRs, again,
all zero cost of 10 minute, 20 minute, 30 minute. I would say that for limiting stress,
improving sleep and restoring mental and physical vigor, NSDR is perhaps the best tool out there.
And again, I didn't create it. I simply took Yoga Nidra. I started calling it NSDR. And by the way,
I was aware that I was going to upset some people when I did that.
I was not trying to appropriate anything, I promise.
The problem was I would talk about yoga nidra and studies of yoga nidra
showing that it replenishes dopamine and the basal ganglia
can restore mental and physical vigor.
And then people would back away from me slowly like,
yoga, I don't want to do yoga.
And I'm like, no, no, this is yoga sleep.
You don't actually move.
And they're like, well, that sounds pretty different.
And I'm like, I know it sounds different.
I would go on and on.
And then I decided to call it non-sleep deep rest.
and when you call something what it is or what it can accomplish, you move away from nomenclature
and I have very mixed feelings about renaming things, but I figure as long as I don't call it
like the Huberman protocol, at least I'm distancing myself from it and it's a zero-cost protocol. So
non-sleep deep rest is valuable for restoring mental and physical vigor. It can potentially
help offset sleep that you didn't get. It can help you fall back asleep at night,
do in the middle of the night. It can help you get better at falling asleep if you do it during
the day. I did it for 20 minutes just prior to coming out here. I always do that prior to any
event or thing that requires a lot of focus, this kind of thing. Otherwise, the jokes I tell are
really just not okay. And so I do think it's quite valuable and it's something to explore.
At what age would you consider testosterone replacement therapy? Whoa. One of the risk
versus benefits of starting it sooner rather than later. We got shouts. Well, so one of the
major effects of testosterone replacement therapy is spontaneous shouting out in crowds.
Just kidding.
You know, there have been a number of studies of testosterone in males and females. By the way,
females have more testosterone than they do estrogen. You know that, right? Per deciliter
of blood, higher testosterone than estrogen. Just on average, on average, they tend to have
lower testosterone than men per deciliter of blood. So it's important in both males and females.
I think you're referring, James, to the use of so-called TRT in males, but I'll touch on it in
females as well because low-dose TRT therapy... Oops, sorry, I just did that. I get in trouble
if you say like PCR reaction, ATM machine. Is there a name for that? Okay. The T at the end of
TRT is therapy. Testosterone replacement therapy. Testosterone replacement therapy technically means
that someone's levels prior to that therapy fall outside the reference range, so lower than 300
nanograms per deciliter, typically, or some other array of symptoms, and they replace it,
replacement therapy. Many, many people nowadays, in my opinion, far too many and too young,
take what I call testosterone augmentation therapy, where their levels are within normal
range, and then they take it to get out of range. And look, there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not
going to tell you what to do. I'm not a cop. You do what you want to do. There are a couple things,
TRT or TAT, augmentation, and here we're just setting aside high-dose steroid use,
because that's just a whole other biz. And frankly, the bodybuilders will get upset, but
but I'll get away from you because you'll be waddling and I'll be running.
That's just like a whole other business. So testosterone replacement therapy is
widely used nowadays. I think far too young. Basically, it will lower your sperm count
dramatically if you're a male. So you'd have, if you want children, you want to conceive children,
you will need to offset that by taking something like human chorionic gonadotropin HCG,
which is available synthetically. They used to sell it in the form of pregnant women's urine.
There was a black market for it. We could really go off into the sticks with this question.
In my opinion, if you want to explore this, I would say first, get your behaviors right.
sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress control, training. Get that right. Don't train too hard
or too long. Get that right. Then there are certain supplements, and we've talked about this on the
podcast. Some are debated a little bit more than others. Things like zinc, tongkat ali, et cetera,
that can probably provide a boost beyond normal without shutting down the gonads. And then,
and only then, if you feel you really want to do this and it's in line with your ethics or,
you know, I don't know if you're playing a drug-tested sport, etc., then just minimal
effective dose. And then if you want to have kids someday, or if you don't know if you want to have
kids someday, make sure you're taking the appropriate things to offset that. That's basically what I
would say. And the major effect of testosterone in men and women is not libido per se, and it's not
aggression per se. It tends to make people more like them. If you're a jerk, you can become more
of a jerk. If you're calm, you become more calm. If you're kind, you can, I don't know if you become
kinder, but there actually have been studies of altruistic behavior and administration of
testosterone by nasal spray or other means. And frankly, people will become more out, they'll
become competitively altruistic. I think the major effect also could be described as it makes effort
feel good. So we could go on and on about this. I'll just toss in that nowadays there's a lot of
excitement about peptides. I'm going to do an episode about peptides. A lot of the young people
I run into here and in the States are like, what are your thoughts on BPC-157? What do you think
about this peptide or that peptide? Peptides are simply small protein amino acid chains.
So there are lots of things called peptides, but typically these are things that increase growth
hormone. Keep in mind that anything that increases growth hormone will increase the growth of any and
all tissues. So if you have a small tumor that you're not aware of, that will grow also.
So just keep in mind if you're going to tickle these pathways,
you're playing with some serious biology,
but there are safe ways to do it.
Sorry, you said what are the benefits of starting sooner rather than later.
Start it later.
What are the physiological and practical differences
between breathing techniques akin to Wim Hof
and the physiological sigh in relation to stress focus, et cetera?
Okay, we can make this pretty straightforward.
First of all, I know Wim.
We go way back to 2015.
I went over to the Pyrenees and visited him and hung out.
and then brought them to the States.
And Wim Hof breathing is tummo breathing,
but in science speak, we call it cyclic hyperventilation.
It's just cyclic hyperventilation.
So if you inhale vigorously and long,
your heart rate goes up.
If you exhale vigorously and long,
heart rate goes down through a process
called respiratory sinus arrhythmia.
Volume of the heart changes when you breathe in
versus breathe out.
Speed at which blood moves through the heart
changes as the blood gets bigger or smaller, according to inhales and exhales. And basically,
the net effect is inhale, heart speeds up a little bit, exhale, heart slows down a little bit.
So if you do Wim Hof, aka tummo breathing, and you inhale vigorously and let it fall out of your
mouth, and then you're going to increase heart rate, increase autonomic activation, etc. If you
do a pattern of breathing like inhale, inhale, long exhale, inhale, inhale, long exhale, cyclic
sighing, over time you're going to slow the heart rate down and you're going to calm down. That's
just how it works. So when I hear about box breathing, or now you hear about box breathing,
okay, it's relatively equal ratios of inhale, exhale. There's a little bit of pause in there.
That's the box. Inhale, hold, exhale, hold, inhale, hold, exhale, hold of varying durations depending on your so-called carbon dioxide tolerance.
But at the end of the day, you're maintaining kind of even heart rate.
When you do big cyclic hyperventilation, a.k.a. Wim Hof Tummo breathing, you're increasing heart rate and autonomic arousal, release of adrenaline, do cyclic sighing, a lot of exhales.
The opposite is true.
Okay, so that should give you a framework for thinking about breathing
and how to apply different breathing techniques
and get us away from some of the naming of things.
But I'm not trying to take anything away from so-called Wim Hof breathing.
By the way, if you're going to do Wim Hof breathing,
be very, very careful to not do cyclic hyperventilation or Wim Hof breathing
and then do breath holds and don't do that anywhere near water.
There have been cases of people drowning, dying
from combining cyclic hyperventilation and breath holds with water
because it changes the threshold for shallow water blackout.
When you exhale a lot or when you hyperventilate,
you remove a lot of carbon dioxide,
and carbon dioxide is the stimulus to gasp.
So what will happen is, indeed, if you do...
You're blowing off a lot of carbon dioxide,
and then you go...
That's a Wim exhale.
and then you hold and you go underwater yeah you'll hold your breath longer than you normally
would but instead of feeling that impulse to breathe like the gas reflex and you shoot for
the surface you'll just—done so it's a serious thing and you want to be really careful
to not combine cyclic hyperventilation and breath holds and especially both with
cold water, frankly, any water exposure. I always say don't do Wim Hof, Tummo,
or cyclic hyperventilation breathing, even standing or seated in a puddle.
Okay. So in response to stress, it's really if you want to be more alert,
increase the vigor and duration of your inhales. If you want to be more calm,
increase the duration of your exhales. Would you recommend that children also get morning sunlight?
Yes, and your pets too.
Unless they're nocturnal pets, right?
For anyone that had the not-so-smart idea of getting a hamster,
§04Transcript — part 4
you realize they're nocturnal, right?
They're going to run all night long on the wheel.
In fact, rodents like to run on wheels so much
that Hopi Hoekstra at Harvard has shown
that if you put a little running wheel,
like the little wheels that the mice like to run in,
in a field, animals will run to the wheel
and run in the field.
It tells you everything you need to know about rodents.
But really, children need that,
but obviously babies have sensitive eyes.
We all can potentially hurt ourselves with sunlight,
and down here the UV index is very high.
When the sun is low in the sky,
so-called low solar angle sunlight,
in the morning and in the evening,
the UV index,
mostly because of atmospheric interference,
but some other things as well,
it's not as damaging to the eyes. That's why it's easier to watch a sunrise or a sun closer to the
horizon than it is to, you know, please don't stare at the sun in any case, but an overhead sun.
So I think it's really important for circadian rhythms, but of course kids need their sleep,
so if they're going to sleep in a little bit, that's fine. Just get them outside afterwards.
It's the staying inside and staying on a phone that's problematic, and then leaving that room at
noon really shift your circadian rhythm in unhealthy ways, and that's true for children,
and perhaps especially true for children.
As a father, what can I be doing to give my children the best start in life?
What a great question.
I hope my parents asked that.
They abandoned me at the pet store.
No, I'm kidding.
They didn't abandon me.
They didn't abandon me at the pet store.
If they did, I didn't notice.
I was among my friends, the fishes and the birds.
I think this question probably should be, I'm going to edit.
Let's just say, what can we all be doing to give our children the best start in life?
And what does that mean for those of us that have already started in life?
So first of all, we have an episode of the Huberman Lab podcast with an absolutely magnificent guest, Dr. Becky Kennedy, coming out on, I guess it would be Tuesday down here.
So this coming week, all about this.
And, you know, we could talk about things for learning, encourage them to play an instrument.
I would think that we perhaps should teach kids some tools to modulate their stress in real time,
like physiological sighs.
I don't see why not.
I certainly wish I had tools to regulate my stress when I was younger.
They didn't teach us that stuff.
They didn't know it or the knowledge was there, but as I mentioned earlier, they didn't teach us that stuff.
They taught us all sorts of stuff in high school, health and stuff.
I mean, they taught us that, you know, drunk driving's bad.
They taught us it just takes one sperm one time.
They taught us all sorts of stuff, but they didn't teach us this business of physiological sighs or stress thresholds or about the anterior mid-cingulate cortex,
because a lot of that stuff wasn't known or just wasn't discussed.
So I think some tools to control one's inner landscape, play music.
I certainly am going to encourage the exploration of these energy states that, you know, letting kids explore.
I mean, they need rules and regulation and boundaries, of course,
but there's this concept of impingement that I find very interesting that the classic psychologists used to talk about.
You know, when a kid says they like something or don't like things,
like, yes, they need to be doing certain things for their normal life progression,
but kids are very good sensors of what works for them and what doesn't work for them.
and we don't want to impinge on certainly their healthy loves and desires,
things that don't endanger them, right?
Things that really reflect their unique loves and desires.
Don't force them to play Suzuki violin if they want to play the drums, right?
Let them bang on stuff and let the kids that want to play Suzuki violin do that.
Don't make them play the drums.
So these impingements actually I think are problematic.
They lead to a lot of confusion and if anything else,
they take us away from that unique wiring to be our own unique expression. Becky Kennedy does
describe a few key principles of parenting that I think are really interesting that extend to
all kinds of relationships. She talks about the main role of parenting, and to some extent,
all relationships, is to create boundaries and to make kids feel safe.
Seems pretty good to me.
The other short list of two things, and she describes how to do this in ways that are highly actionable,
is that every child, I found this really interesting, every child wants to feel real,
like they want to feel like they're real like they're seen they exist and they want to feel
safe and so that one of the things that really rung in my ears and still does from that episode
recording again out this week is that when a kid or an adult says something about how they feel
that perhaps one of the best responses we can give them is you know i believe you like that
You're not saying that you don't want to go to school, don't go to school.
We're not saying you don't enjoy doing something, don't do it.
Or you want a fifth serving of candy.
You can say, I believe you.
No.
And so I think that a lot of it is we get confused with terms like validation and listening.
What I like so much about what Becky offers, and I do hope to do a child development series in the not too distant future,
what I like so much about what Becky offers is that
it boils down to simple concepts
like
we want to be
real
which I guess is kind of an analog for seen
and we want to feel safe
not unlike when we did the podcast
series on mental health with Dr. Paul Conti
he said you know it's really about
mental health is really about agency
and gratitude but there are a lot of things
that siphon up into
those feelings or those moments or that state of agency and gratitude. So I would say that's
perhaps the most important thing is, you know, boundaries make kids feel safe and then make
them feel real, like their feelings and what they're reporting matters. And then, of course,
the impingement thing becomes a little bit complicated because they do need boundaries.
So we have to constrain their wishes sometimes and their behavior, but we don't want to do it
in a way that takes them away from that unique wiring that makes them who they are so they
can become the characters and people and professionals and creatives and scientists
and poets and just good people, everyday good people.
That's the best answer I can provide at this time.
They're not going to give me another question, but I can keep going just briefly, if I may.
by just first of all saying that, again, I'm very, very grateful for the opportunity to convene with all of you here tonight.
I realize it was me speaking and you listening, except for the guy on testosterone.
And I certainly, you know, I can't really express enough in words what the podcast means to me.
You know, it's a bizarre thing.
It's completely transformed my life.
It's made it, you know, incredible.
I never dreamed of anything like this.
But for me, it's really not about hearing my own voice.
It's this compulsion that came in at an early age.
And it's really my wish, frankly, that the tools, the protocols, the knowledge,
whatever it inspires you to do or to think, you know, we don't have to agree on everything.
I would hope we don't agree on everything.
the ways we disagree with me and with each other and with others,
that we start maybe thinking about ourselves through a lens of science
and think about health and really try and meet those discussions
with the kind of benevolence and curiosity and vigor,
a good argument every once in a while is healthy too,
that it really deserves.
I think we're in a very interesting and kind of sometimes scary time.
I often feel scared, frankly
because of what I see
and even my own position in this whole landscape
I sometimes think like
I feel like a lot of times things are just kind of hanging on by a thread
but I actually have a lot of optimism
I think our species is very smart
I think that we've managed to navigate tricky places before
and I think that through the learning and teaching of things that work for us
that we learn from these kinds of things
and from each other
that pretty soon we're going to start to fill in the gaps between the silos that are the yogic
traditions, the chiropractic massage, health and fitness, traditional medicine, non-traditional
medicine, functional medicine. I mean, I really encourage all of you to try and, you know, stand
back from it all and try and identify the common themes that may exist across these things and
really try and identify some of the links and points of convergence more than the differences.
and at the very least to explore things.
And if you don't like them, that's great.
And if you do, to pass them on to other people,
especially the behavioral tools that we all harbor within us
that I think can really enhance our mental health and vigor,
our physical health, and hopefully our longevity too.
So I could go on and on, but I really just want to say
thank you so much for coming out tonight.
This is our last night in Australia,
and I'm certainly going to miss being here.
and we intend to come back again soon.
Thank you so much for paying,
tuning into the podcast,
paying attention to and tuning into the podcast,
and for being willing to learn.
You're all amazing students
and you're also amazing teachers.
I learned from you all in comments and feedback.
So if you have that, please keep that coming.
And last, but certainly not least,
thank you for your interest in science.
Thank you.
Actually, I've never done this before,
but because it's my last night here,
I've always seen people do this,
and I've never done it,
but I'm going to do it.
Can we get the house lights up?
I want to get one of these.
I'm going to do this as a video,
and you don't have to do it.
Your faces will show up,
but don't worry.
We won't.
It will go on the internet,
but this is not for me.
I just want to.
I'm going to send my mother this.
Okay, there we go.
Thank you.
That's on you.
Thank you.
You made my mother very happy.