Andrew Huberman
Appearances
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
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. As some of you may know, our Huberman Lab team recently launched a new podcast called Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Andy is a professor of kinesiology at Cal State Fullerton and is a world expert in exercise physiology and human performance.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
this new podcast perform with dr andy galpin explores all aspects of human performance it shares the latest science and gives practical tools on things such as how to improve cardiovascular health how to build strength and muscle mass how to maximize recovery with nutrition and supplementation and much more what follows is the final episode of season one of perform with dr andy galpin
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
If you enjoy it, I encourage you to go and subscribe to it wherever you're listening now and to listen to the other nine episodes of season one. I'm certain you'll really enjoy this first season from Dr. Andy Galpin. And now, episode 10 of Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin. I encourage you to listen to the other episodes of season one wherever you're listening now. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
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. My guest today is Dr. Peter Attia. Dr. Peter Attia is a medical doctor who did his training at Stanford University School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Aside from food, what exogenous molecules do you take?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
What dosage of rapamycin do you take?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
By virtue of the side effect.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And the idea there is that you're limiting mTOR. You're causing your cells to grow less, mature slower, and in that sense, slowing down aging. Is that the idea? Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
So by the end of today's episode, you'll learn a lot about NAD. You'll learn a lot about the biological pathway. You'll learn a lot about the delivery routes, the various supplements, and why people think they may be useful, why others, perhaps even Dr. Atiyah and myself, think they may not be useful for longevity. You'll have to listen to find out what the answer is there.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
How do you feel when you're on rapamycin, aside from the canker sores?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Does it synergize with caloric restriction or collide with caloric excess? Meaning if you're taking rapamycin, but you're slightly over your caloric needs, maybe you're trying to add a little bit of body weight or you happen to overeat a little bit just because, is it going to collide with rapamycin's potential positive impact on slowing aging?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
I should also mention that we give somewhat of an overview or a framework for thinking about approaches to longevity. So if you're interested in things like rapamycin, metformin, and whether or not fasting can improve longevity, we get into that as well. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
But again, we'll have to wait and see what that shows. Without going off track too much, my understanding is that the dog study was halted because of a lack of federal funding. Is it continuing?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Yeah. I was on NIH study sections for many years reviewing grants. I rotated off as a regular member a little over a year ago. And I can tell you that the whole process is designed to be as targeted to the best and most exciting work possible. But there's a number of features now that make it such that It's largely the work that's already mostly completed that gets funded.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
You know, like, how does that work? But anyway, we could have a whole other journal club discussion about funding, but I had to ask. I was curious. So hopefully that study will get completed, and thanks for raising those funds. Let's talk about NAD. Yes. It's in essentially every cell of the body except red blood cells, correct? Yes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
It's generally thought to be associated with energy production and mitochondrial pathways in every single cell.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
It's also, as I recall, where the story began. That's exactly right. It was some experiments where the sirtuins were mutated in one direction or the other, meaning gain of function or loss of function. These days people hear gain of function and they immediately think to pandemic-related themes. But gain of function is a way of –
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
changing genes typically to augment a function, increase its robustness, or in some cases to rescue a phenotype where you have a knockout mouse that lacks a gene, so that's loss of function, or a strain of yeast that lacks a gene, and then you do the gain of function rescue experiment. You reintroduce the gene of interest. It's an important – I wouldn't even call it a control.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
It's an important experiment in any case because loss of function will tell you a lot. But gain of function and loss of function, assuming that the results jibe, tells you much, much more. This is one of the major areas – I think this is very important to highlight – where human genetics really struggles.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
because you can get humans with a mutation in a particular pathway, like, I don't know, the Sonic Hedgehog pathway. Somebody is hypomorphic for Sonic Hedgehog, and they might actually lack a major tooth up in the middle because of the role of Sonic Hedgehog at the midline. And you could say, okay, well, loss of function here. Here's the role of Sonic Hedgehog.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
But the ideal experiment is to put the gene back in and then rescue that phenotype because, as any logical mind can tell, There could be many things downstream of Sonic Hedgehog that could create the phenotype that you observe. But if you put Sonic Hedgehog back in, yes, that's still true, but you get more reassurance that that's the gene of interest.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Now, proper hydration is critical for the optimal functioning of all the cells in your body. And that's especially true for the neurons, the nerve cells. In fact, we know that even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish both cognitive and physical performance.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
So with respect to sirtuins, as I recall, they deleted the sirtuins. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
So it's both necessary and sufficient for extended life.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for more than 10 years now, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast. To be clear, I don't take AG1 because they're a sponsor. Rather, they are a sponsor because I take AG1. In fact, I take AG1 once and often twice every single day, and I've done that since starting way back in 2012.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
There is so much conflicting information out there nowadays about what proper nutrition is, but here's what there seems to be a general consensus on.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Whether you're an omnivore, a carnivore, a vegetarian or a vegan, I think it's generally agreed that you should get most of your food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources, which allows you to eat enough but not overeat, get plenty of vitamins and minerals, probiotics and micronutrients that we all need for physical and mental health.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Now, I personally am an omnivore and I strive to get most of my food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources. But the reason I still take AG1 once and often twice every day is that it ensures I get all of those vitamins, minerals, probiotics, etc. But it also has adaptogens to help me cope with stress.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
It's basically a nutritional insurance policy meant to augment, not replace quality food. So by drinking a serving of AG1 in the morning and again in the afternoon or evening, I cover all of my foundational nutritional needs. And I, like so many other people that take AG1, report feeling much better in a number of important ways, such as energy levels, digestion, sleep and more.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
So to make sure that I'm getting proper hydration and electrolytes, I personally dissolve one packet of Element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I first wake up in the morning and I drink that or sip that across the first half hour of the day or so. And then I also make it a point to drink another packet of Element dissolved in an equal amount of water, so 16 to 32 ounces,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
So while many supplements out there are really directed towards obtaining one specific outcome, AG1 is foundational nutrition designed to support all aspects of well-being related 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.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
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.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
at some other point during the day, and maybe even a third if I'm exercising and or sweating a lot. I should mention that Element tastes absolutely delicious. My favorite flavor is watermelon, although I also confess I like the raspberry flavor, the citrus flavor. Basically, I like all the flavors.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Well, that experiment's never been done and never will be done. The joke I was trying to set up for is the one I'll make now, which is no one wants to be in the control experiment. That said, nobody wants to be in the treatment experiment either. You got me. You beat me to the punch. No one wants to be in the treatment group either because of it requires eating so little.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. Today's episode is also brought to us by Levels.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
It's incredibly interesting because I think when you look at cell biology and you see these parallel pathways, when you see these effects of experiments where changing sirtuins or changing caloric restriction independently increase lifespan, combine the two, you get this, what appears to be a synergistic effect, but it's, as you pointed out, an additive effect.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
it was like a pretty straightforward experiment to do. You could just do an occlusion, right? You could then put back in the sirtuin or adjust calories and see whether or not you get the, effectively, whether the math is corrected.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Yeah. Making a fly mutant, Drosophila mutant that overexpresses sirtuins, a worm C. elegans mutant that overexpresses sirtuins, that's a pretty quick experiment to do because of this short generation time of those species. Right. Now a mouse, It's a longer experiment, but I'm guessing all of those experiments have been done.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods impact your health by giving you real time feedback on your diet using a continuous glucose monitor. One of the most important factors in both short and long term health is your body's ability to manage blood glucose.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
We should probably clarify what a transgenic mouse is. I talked about knockout mice. That's when a gene or genes in some cases. is deleted from the genome. So it's null. It does not express that gene. The gain of function would be to put back that gene in. That would be a knock-in mouse.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
So in that case, you still get some normal expression of the gene from the endogenous genome, but now you have a transgene that's inserted there. And there are all sorts of important intricacies that relate to this. For instance, where the transgene is inserted. If it's downstream of an enhancer that's muscle-specific, then you can get a... mouse that it overexpresses sirtuins just in muscle.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
You can get it ubiquitously expressed. There are a number of different ways that this can happen. I'm assuming this was ubiquitous expression of, you said SIRT6? SIRT6, yeah. So every cell in the body that normally would express SIRT6 would express more SIRT6.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Dr. Atiyah is one of the world's most trusted voices on the topics of healthspan and lifespan, and with good reason. He is known to systematically review the research literature, the clinical trials, and he maintains an avid clinical practice.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
I'm guessing unless they made it clear that it was tissue-specific, that it's whole body. So we're talking about it when Peter says transgenic mouse, he's talking about a mouse that has this transgene that causes it to express more sirtuin-6 than it ordinarily would. And let's assume, although we don't know this for sure, that the other genes in this mouse are functioning as they would normally.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
To maintain optimal energy and focus throughout the day, you want to keep your blood glucose levels steady without big spikes or crashes. I first started using levels about three years ago as a way to try and understand how different foods impact in my blood glucose levels.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
What sorts of things are downstream of sirtuins? And that question translated to normal English is what is changing as a consequence of increasing the sirtuin? Could it be, for instance, well, unlikely based on what we already know about caloric restriction and the fact that they are independent parallel pathways, but is it something related to glucose metabolism?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Is it something related to clearance of senescent cells? I'm just throwing out possibilities here.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And it's proven incredibly useful for determining what food choices I should make, when best to eat certain foods, especially around things like workouts, and when and what to eat relative to when I go to sleep in order to allow for the best possible night's sleep and stable blood sugar throughout the night and when I wake up in the morning.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
this business of DNA repair and reducing, you know, fragmentation or mutations to DNA that are naturally occurring has been a hot idea in the field of aging for a long time. Is that because when x-rays became popular or post-nuclear fallout that people showed accelerated signs of aging? I mean, how did we get from DNA mutation to accelerated aging? Like-
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
So if you're interested in learning more about Levels and trying a CGM yourself, go to levels.link slash Huberman. Levels recently launched a new CGM sensor that's even smaller and has even better tracking than their previous version. Right now, they're also offering an additional two free months of membership.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Again, that's levels.link spelled L-I-N-K slash Huberman to try the new sensor and two free months of membership. Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. Now, I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each night.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
I'd like to take a quick break to let you know that the Huberman Lab team has launched a new podcast with host Dr. Andy Galpin. Andy is an expert in exercise science and human performance, and has long been a fan favorite on the Huberman Lab podcast.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
This new podcast is called Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin, and it dives into topics such as how to build muscle and strength, how to improve your cardiovascular health, and how to optimize recovery and sleep for performance and much more. Andy is an absolutely fantastic educator and true expert on all things human performance.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
One of the best ways to ensure a great night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
I know you'll thoroughly enjoy his new podcast and learn a ton of useful knowledge from it. So please check it out and give it a subscribe wherever you're watching or listening to podcasts now. Again, the podcast is called Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
How do you activate sirtuins?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
It's also interesting because keratinocytes in skin turn over every 28 days or so. So you could imagine because it's a novel population of cells that they would have steady expression of sirtuins and NAD. Then they simply die for whatever reason, or that it starts off very high on day one of generation, then tapers off quickly. But That's not the case, it sounds like.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
What about neurons? I mean, you've got the same set of central nervous system neurons your entire life. And of course, some peripheral neurons as well, but there's some regeneration in the periphery. So we need to, let's just talk about brain.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
So unless you're talking about the olfactory bulb where you have constant turnover throughout the lifespan, you have the same hippocampal neurons, except a small population, same hippocampal neurons, cortical neurons, retinal neurons that you were born Are we observing NAD levels tapering off as we age?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Eight Sleep makes it incredibly easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment by allowing you to program the temperature of your mattress cover at the beginning, middle, and end of the night. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for well over three years now, and it has completely transformed my sleep for the better.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation pod cover, the Pod 4 Ultra. The Pod 4 Ultra has improved cooling and heating capacity, higher fidelity sleep tracking technology, and it also has snoring detection that remarkably will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve your airflow and stop your snoring.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And I would say a fair number of so-called anti-aging approaches are targeting the the so-called reactive oxygen species, ROSs, which impede mitochondrial function, essentially. This is an opportunity for me to call out the work that I think is at least intriguing, which is the work of a colleague by the name of Glen Jeffery at the University College London,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
He's been in the field of visual neuroscience for a very long time. And a few years back, he started doing some experiments on animals and now also two studies published on humans showing that exposing the aged eye, so 40 and older, to red light and near infrared light for a couple minutes a few times a week can... spare certain processes involved in vision, photoreceptors. How does this work?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Well, the idea, this isn't proven yet, the idea is that it's reducing reactive oxygen species and thereby improving mitochondrial function in what is perhaps the most metabolically active cell type in the entire body, not just the eye, which are the photoreceptors. So it's an intriguing set of studies.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Again, we don't have all the mechanisms worked out, but it brings us around again to this idea that mitochondria are vitally important for the functioning of cells. Things that impede the function of mitochondria can either reduce the output of and or kill cells. And so anything that can improve redux... can potentially keep a cell around longer, functioning better.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
So when I hear about the role of NAD in this pathway, I think like most people, I think, okay, well then I should just take more NAD and maybe I will age more slowly, or I will replace some NAD that's missing as I age in whatever cell type. Turns out that might not be so straightforward, right?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
I mean, I don't want to jump to supplementation just yet, but if we are to back up from NAD a little bit and look at the pathway leading to NAD, it's NR, NMN, and NAD. We'll spell these out in a moment. And this sort of competition that's out there in the market is around either infusing or in some cases ingesting NAD directly.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
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. And now for my discussion about NAD and longevity with Dr. Peter Attia. Peter Attia, welcome. How are you?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Taking NMN, which is the precursor to NAD orally, I haven't heard of anybody infusing it, or taking oral form NR, which is the precursor to NMN. My understanding is that NMN is simply NR minus a phosphate group.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
So when it comes to the topic of whether or not a particular molecule or supplement or prescription drug is indeed something that we should be thinking about and perhaps even taking in order to improve our healthspan and lifespan, Dr. Atiyah is the person that I choose to sit down with and discuss it. So today we are going to discuss the so-called NAD pathway.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Because everything we're on right now is upstream of sirtuins.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And I'm only leaping further to this discussion about how to increase NAD because I know that's in the back of people's minds. We're not going to double click here just yet. I just want to frame that up because ultimately that's where we are headed in terms of people making decisions as to whether or not they should take NR or take NMN or infuse NAD or none of the above.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
I would say scientific justification for longevity. I'll go on record now saying that I take NMN and in some cases I will take NR and NMN and I observe, this is just end of one self-observational data, I observe a very clear positive effect, but I don't think it has anything to do with extending lifespan.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Great to see you again. Great to be here again. Should we parse this?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
an ad thing i think we should do you mind if i set up a little bit of a framework great so for people that want to live as long as possible i figure there are at least four categories of approaches broadly speaking the first i'll just call the do's and don'ts you've talked a lot about these your book outlive beautifully covered these and i tend to regurgitate some of what you say on this podcast.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
So a couple of kind of practical notes. I've taken NR in capsule form. I've taken NMN typically in powdered form where I put it sublingually under the tongue.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
No, I took NAD as an infusion. I've probably done it five or six times. And for the first 10 minutes of the infusion, you feel like somebody's stepping on your chest with a boot. Your legs cramp up. You feel nauseous. I did not take the anti-nausea med that was offered. I don't like taking things if I can avoid it. I just figured I'll just experience this. It was very uncomfortable.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
To the point where you couldn't read a paper or a book. You just want to be left alone. You actually get a little bit irritable. You're like, this is awful. Every noise in the room is a bit too loud during that first 10 minutes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Right. I don't know what it was doing physiologically except making me feel miserable during the infusion. There are ways to adjust this even without the anti-nausea meds. For instance, you can slow the infusion. That's the typical way.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
People will put it in over the course of several hours, anywhere from three hours to as brief as 30 minutes is kind of the record that I've heard about for 500 milligrams of NAD. If you put 1,000 milligrams in there, obviously it's more painful and you have to – anyway, there are a bunch of practical considerations. You feel – now, maybe it's placebo, but one feels quite good afterward.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
So as soon as the drip is done, you feel better than – you did prior to the drip. How do you feel if you just receive an IV infusion of the same volume? I've done that because I've received saline drips. You also feel pretty good. It's hard to disentangle these things. And typically they'll put other things in the bag, glutathione, some vitamin C. You know, they tend to sell these as kits.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
I decided to try it. It seemed fine. I did it when traveling. I don't know, maybe I'm due for another one soon. But for me, the more typical way to try and increase NAD or whatever, because I don't know what it's doing exactly, but I like the effects of taking sublingual NMN. The single most Let's say salient to me anecdotal data on taking sublingual NMN is that it makes my hair grow really fast.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
It makes my nails grow really fast. And I do feel an increase in energy. And I take it first thing in the morning. And what dose? One and a half grams, 1,500 milligrams.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
I'm not even approaching that at all. Well, it's clear to me, based on my read of the data, that NR can cross the cell membrane directly. Directly. Very easily. There's no obstacle to NR getting into cells. Okay. And NMN cannot because of the extra phosphate group. So that if you take it sublingually or you ingest it orally, it goes into the gut. The phosphate group is cleaved.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And because of that, the argument is that if one were to compare the benefits of taking NR versus NMN, there are more data to support NR. as a precursor to NAD, a more effective precursor to NAD than orally ingested NMN. But some people will say, well, I'll just take more NMN than I would NR. And then this gets into the realm of cost effectiveness. It's just a commercial issue.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
It starts becoming a battle between commercial sources. And I don't dispute that NR... makes more sense as a precursor, especially at dosages of, you know, 300 to 600 milligrams versus 1500 milligrams. But I've opted to take sublingual NMN mostly based on cost and are at the dosages people recommend is quite expensive.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Namely, you want to move appropriately and often enough, so get enough zone two cardio, do your resistance training, keep nerve to muscle connection strong, avoid the sorts of things that would lead to falling and being immobile, eat right. There's a whole category of things there we're not going to talk about today, although we might touch on a bit.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
You'd be spending about 300 bucks a day, right? It's just it's not feasible. It's just not feasible. So I don't have a deep desire for my hair to grow faster or my nails to grow faster. It's more the increase in energy effect. Now, I will say that sublingual NMN is also a bit of a laxative. So there are all these, and I say that somewhat chuckling, but some people say it makes them feel better.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Well, is that because you're evacuating your bowels a few minutes or hours later and then you've feel less bloated and you have more energy, it's very unclear. I think what has not been done, as far as I know, is to compare orally ingested NR at say 600 milligrams, relatively high dose versus a gram of sublingual NMN and then actually measure blood levels of NAD.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
If that experiment has been done and I'm not aware of it, I'm not aware of it, then forgive me. Maybe someone will put it in the show note captions. But I guess this gets down to the question of how many people are taking oral NR or NMN or are taking NAD infusions, which by the way are quite expensive, anywhere from $300 to $1,000 a drip. That's pretty expensive. What benefits are they getting?
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
What are they getting out of this? What are they getting? Is it an acute increase in NAD that what? That causes them to live, what, a week longer? I mean, we have no idea.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Know your genetics and make some good decisions on the basis of your genetics. So the do's and don'ts. The second category I would put under the umbrella of calories, glucose, insulin, et cetera, that all kind of funnel in, at least in my mind, to mTOR, mammalian target of rapamycin, a molecule that's robustly expressed during development in essentially all cells of the body.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Because my understanding is that there are some studies that have explored the role of supplemented NR, maybe NMN as well, but certainly supplemented NR for sake of lowering inflammation to offset some of the negative effects of time zone shift, alcohol. Yeah. I have a few others listed here, overnutrition.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
and then across the lifespan tapers off. During puberty, especially, well, let's say infancy through puberty, cells are expressing so much mTOR and they're growing like crazy. And we often associate that early stage of life as youth, not aging, because we think of it as a kind of a timestamp as opposed to the verb. But I would argue as a developmental neurobiologist by training that
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Right. I totally agree. And I think... You know, at this point, I'm questioning whether or not I'm wasting my money taking NMN or NR. The reason I take NR is really for these anti-inflammation reported purported effects. I just want to pay a little bit of attention to the whole commercial battle around this because I think it's relevant. I mean, I think right now, as far as I know,
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
The FDA has essentially said that NMN should not be sold as a supplement, but it is still being sold as a supplement. So there's a little bit of ignoring of the FDA's request. NR, as far as I know, is authorized for sale as a supplement. Yeah.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
It's one of the most rapid phases of aging of our entire lifespan. Look at a picture of you when you were five, look at a picture of you when you were eight versus 15. You look very different and your size is robustly different.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Well, you just answered the question I was going to ask, but I suppose the question therefore becomes, is there any benefit to taking either of them for sake of lifespan?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
One's just got a phosphate group on there. You might need to take a little bit more of the NMN versus NR or maybe a lot more, who knows. in order to get the same increase in NAD, is my understanding.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And I should say that basal and squamous cell carcinomas are very, very common.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Assuming somebody is averse to feeling like they have an elephant stepping on their chest. They're going to pay $750 for it, aka an NAD infusion once a week. Look, people may opt to do that. People with a disposable income could do that, drip it in slower, not feel nauseous. Increase NAD with the hope, hope, hope that maybe it's going to extend your life.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Most people considering supplementation to augment the NAD pathway are going to default to either taking NR or taking NMN.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
You could also weight train for the first hour and then enjoy some food afterwards. Lane Norton taught me that there are data showing that exercise, in particular resistance training, improves the rewarding properties of food, makes food taste better, which we've all kind of intuitively experienced. So you spend the first hour, Working out, second hour eating.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Okay. Well, I'm going to pull a little bit from marketing – text here, but I trust these showing- Really? Yeah. Yeah, I do. Because they have citations to support them and we can include the citations. I can say these are not linchpin arguments for doing one thing or the other, but we already established that NR
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
and NMN are quite similar except for the presence of a phosphate group on NR that gets cleaved off.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Or NR. Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah, okay. Great. Well, then you took the words right out of the data I was going to refer to. That's right. Because I asked a few folks that helped develop some of the NR supplements. Like, what are the data that support the use of NR for increasing NAD? And they say NR can cross the cell membrane directly. NMN cannot.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Okay, but you can just cleave the phosphate group. Right, right. Exactly. NR, they claim, I'm not, this is not my claim, but they claim that NR is, quote unquote, 25% more effective than NMN in raising whole blood NAD levels. But I'm guessing that's milligram for milligram, right? Okay, so then you just adjust the milligram dosage a little bit and so on.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
What's entirely unclear is what raising blood NAD translates to in terms of getting more NAD into cells.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
This is a pathway that's received a lot of attention in recent years as a potential target for improving lifespan, that is for living longer. Today we discuss the various molecules in this pathway and the various approaches to increasing NAD, which is the end target goal of anyone that's trying to augment the NAD pathway, so to speak. So for instance, we talk about taking and R.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Yeah. I mean, the brain, the same brain has to learn an entirely new body every year in terms of how to move it, limb length, et cetera. So a lot of the so-called anti-aging or longevity approaches that fall under this umbrella relate to things like caloric restriction or taking drugs such as rapamycin. And of course, mammalian target of rapamycin is the target of rapamycin. Duh.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
There's something so sticky about the longevity field, just so sticky about this idea that one could take something and extend lifespan and people don't want to be in the control group. So they're willing to invest significant amounts of money to do it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
They're probably about – 30 to 50 prior to this FDA ruling, which is kind of an interesting situation in its own right. You know, what happened there was the supplement NMN, suddenly the FDA decided that it should not be sold over the counter anymore because there was a clinical trial initiated on NMN, which essentially makes NMN a drug.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
clinical testing and thereby can't be classified as a supplement any longer. That was the rationale as I understood it. But as with things like N-acetylcysteine- That was more of a lobbying effort though, I think.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And this had happened prior for N-acetylcysteine, NAC. which some people take. It's a mucolytic. It's actually a great decongestant. If you're congested and it increases glutathione, that's my understanding. I believe somebody checked me on this. Does it decrease or increase glutathione? Increases glutathione is my understanding. If I have that wrong, someone will tell me quickly in the comments.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
My understanding is that in Europe, NAC might even be available by prescription. In the US, you can still buy it over the counter, but a few years back, The FDA said, nope, can't sell NAC any longer. And there was a pushback lobby to keep it on the market. And you can still buy it on Amazon. The same thing has more or less happened with NMN.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
certainly with nr although nr was never in question in terms of whether or not it should be sold as a supplement or not because as far as i know there's no clinical trial on nr at least not currently so there's a clinical trial on nmn which classifies it as an experimental drug and therefore the fda said nope you can't sell it as a supplement a few companies major companies pulled nmn from the market in the u.s
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Many smaller companies just kind of watched and waited and continued to sell it. And I checked prior to the beginning of this episode and you can still buy it online. But of course, a lot of what we're saying today is kind of a, why would you? We're not really coming up with strong arguments for taking NMN, at least not in today's discussion.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Right. And the experts in this area like Charles Brenner have pushed back hard on that, arguing that the studies were not done well. Is that – I recall.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
In an effort to essentially remove excess insulin, blood glucose, and thereby reduce reduce mTOR activity, so essentially slow cellular growth. And all that fits nicely into the logic that mTOR is associated not just with development, but with aging because development is aging.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
No. In fact, I don't want to quote him at all. But I think he would argue that sirtuins, NR, NMN – should not logically or practically be linked to efforts to extend lifespan, but that there are some interesting positive effects of augmenting NR as a means to increase NAD for sake of anti-inflammation and some of these other effects that we've been discussing.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And then I would say there's a third category, and it's the one we are going to talk about today, which is targeting specific cellular pathways that some people have deemed potentially interesting for longevity. And the pathway that we're going to spend some time on is the so-called NAD pathway.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
You seem to be vigorous. You take great care of yourself. How much do you think taking rapamycin, for how many years have you been taking it? Six. Has contributed to your current state or vigor? Zero idea. This is my opportunity to ask about your belief or lack of belief in biological aging tests. Because if somebody is going to experiment with any or all of these things,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
um they may want to evaluate whether or not their biological age is changing and there are a number of these tests available and people love this stuff love them they love them i mean who wouldn't want to see that they are 51 years old but their biological age is 37. i just did a movement test the other day so it's a it's a
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
NR, NMN, NAD being the major players, and we'll talk about some of the biochemical and enzymatic steps in between. And then I suppose there's a fourth category, which we could say is the do everything, even the most esoteric of things category. This is a rare category. There are folks like Brian Johnson who spend a lot of time in this category specifically.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Okay. Well, I bought that chart, my life in weeks. Yes. In fact, I bought two of them for reasons that are uninteresting. I've watched that chart, Phil. Not quite what you predicted, but I put my estimated lifespan to be 95. Great.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And then I have little lines on the side of how much vigor I felt from, and just overall wellness, completely subjective of zero being like Completely cratered near death to 10, like it's best I've ever felt. But you make that note every how often? Okay. So what I did is, you know, from 10 to 15, I felt, you know, blank. And then in my 20s, I actually didn't feel so great because I was working –
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
80-hour weeks, commonly. You can ask my former lab technicians. I was just talking to Fung Nguyen recently. I mean, I used to work to collapse, not healthy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
80-hour a week, maybe 100 hours occasionally, maybe 70, maybe back to 40, but just too much work, not enough sleep, nutrition not great, just not doing the right things, but just gave my 20s to being in lab, basically, and a lot of my 30s as well. So I would say from 40 to 45, my vigor was higher than in my 30s.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And then now I track, I would say about every two months, I'll start filling in that line. And it's adjusted for by stressors and adjusted for by positive things in life. And the goal for me is to figure out what are the behavioral tools and other things I can do or take that are going to keep the vigor as high as possible. Vigor, well-being.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And internal peace, et cetera, all of that combined, kind of what I'm calling wellness in this very subjective measure, as high as possible as I transition to my 50s, my 60s, 70s, and 80s. And I'm guessing that I'm going to have to do many more things in my 80s and 90s in order to maintain balance. a similar, hopefully, level of vigor and well-being than I do now.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
taking very high doses of polyphenols, limiting their caloric intake to just early part of the day. I think he eats dinner at 11 a.m. I don't know if it still qualifies as dinner at 11 a.m., but his final bite of calories is, I believe, at 11 a.m. Doing everything from red light to PRP, platelet-rich plasma, excuse me, and essentially the kitchen sink approach to longevity and aging.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And the question is, will I be able to?
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Yeah. Because I think the chart is great. I think the chart, more than any supplement for longevity, gives one a visual perspective of where they sit in this long arc. And I don't think the brain is very good at anchoring us to the notion that we are mortal. Because if we think about that for even a few moments too long, it makes us anxious. And I think we are very good at avoiding that. Yeah.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
I better get cracking on some stuff.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Do you avoid going through the non, let's just say the non-traditional scanner at the airport? the one that might use higher levels of radiation? No. Do you think about how many flights you take as a source of radiation? No.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
I think you just relieved a lot of people of some unnecessary concern.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Yeah, grip strength, jumping, cognitive function. I mean, I've got very good genes in terms of longevity on one side of my family, pretty good on the other, although not as robust. I mean, if I just look historically. Yeah, who knows, right? I mean, but my sense is that I'll live to be 95 if, you know, barring, you know, bullet bus or cancer.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Yeah, a short nap would reset me near completely. Yeah. I got more colds and flus in that time because I wasn't taking such good care. But then again, I was indoors more, so it's an imperfect experiment. But you're right. I think that as I've approached 50... I need to do more.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Mine was never very good, so...
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Sorry to interrupt, but since we've been talking about molecules and energetic pathways- What about energy? Just that get up and go. Let's just say after a decent night's sleep, seven and a half hours, waking up same time more or less, 6.30, 7 a.m. probably for you or me. And – Why is it that as we get older, we have less energy? Our mutual good friend, the late Ben Barris used to ask about this.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
He used to say, he called me Andy. He was like, Andy, why do I have so much less energy? I was like, I don't know. I don't know. It's a great question. Now, unfortunately he died of pancreatic cancer. So there may have been other things going on, but that was prior to the cancer, at least as far as I know. You know, it's a very interesting question. Why do we have less energy?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And I don't think anyone's ever been able to answer that question.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Maybe, although... Up until now, we've been talking about all these ways to try and increase NAD in the bloodstream and hopefully in cells. And I don't know, I take my NMN and my NR and I feel a little bit of a boost in energy, but I can't say that it's so significant that I feel like I can sprint back and forth just spontaneously.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Like I love Froot Loops, right? Interesting. By way of contrast, the food part is easy for me. I like healthy food and- Oh, I like healthy food.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Okay. Yeah, I don't like unhealthy food. I've weaned myself off. I never really liked it that much. I mean, I like a great tasting slice of pizza or ice cream every once in a while, but I much prefer- Meat, fish, chicken, eggs, fruits, vegetables, rice, oatmeal. I just like that stuff. I'm a weirdo that way, I suppose.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
But on the topic of exercise as it relates to vigor and longevity, I'm intrigued by how some forms of exercise give us more energy. especially the same day, and how some forms of exercise or even timing of exercise tends to deplete us. Because I think one of your major calls to the public has been to move more for sake of their healthspan and lifespan.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
But because of the time investment that it takes to work out in a gym or to go for a run or a ruck, I think some people think, well, that's a lot of time, but if it gives you more energy and more focus to do other things, well, then it's great. So it's not just about living longer. It's about being able to do more.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And I've noticed, I don't have any science to back this up, but I'd love someone to run a test on this, that if I complete my workout before 9 a.m., even if I have to start it while I'm a little bit fatigued, I have more energy all day long. But that if I initiate that workout, say mid to late morning, I'm pretty tired in the afternoon. It's like I give everything I have to that workout.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And so it becomes a little bit defeating since I'm not a professional athlete or even an amateur athlete. I'm working out for healthspan, lifespan, but I want to do exercise that gives me more life during my waking hours. I think somebody should study this.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And I'm convinced that it has something to do with the change in body temperature that occurs across the day and the additional change in body temperature that occurs as a consequence of exercise.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
I haven't thought about it that much, but not so much. Not so much. And I wonder whether folks like our friend Jocko Willink are able to do so much. He has so much vigor, that guy, in part because he basically exercises just after the lowest temperature phase of the circadian rhythm. And he uses exercise presumably to drive himself out of that and get that
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
temperature increase, that's the consequence of waking. But in his case, he's waking up so early, 4.30 is when he starts those workouts. So it's something for people to play with.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
It's something that I don't think gets discussed enough, which is, yes, you should exercise, do resistance training, do cardiovascular training, but play with the timing of those and see how at a given intensity, it impacts your energy levels for the remainder of the day. I think it's an important metric that
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Again, I just don't see a lot of attention to because I think if people could experience the increase in energy that is the consequence of working out at the right intensity in the right way at the right times for them, they'd be much more apt to do it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
It wouldn't feel like this – like spending money on something that sure will make you live longer but then you're depleted and you can't do cognitive work. There's something pretty impressive about the fact that as far as I know –
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
The last three, let's just call them, I don't want to call anyone out specifically, major pillars of the high-level administration at Stanford School of Medicine, to my knowledge, were all 5 a.m. runners. There's something about early morning exercise. And my good friend, Eddie Chang, who's the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF, he's been on this podcast, known him since we were seven years old.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
He's an early morning exerciser, and then he's got tons of energy all day.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Yeah, I don't doubt it. I just have noticed that in the few times in my life where I've kick my own butt to get out and start working out really early, I have more energy all day long. Sometimes I still require a brief nap, but it's a pretty striking effect as compared to the 10 a.m. workout effect. So I've started setting a standard of trying to get my workout done before 9 a.m.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
So anyway, it's something for people to play with because the more energy to live in your waking hours, perhaps not longer, but certainly have more energy in terms of output, I think is a significant and undervalued parameter. So let's quickly return to supplements. We, I think, are converging on an answer about NR, NMN, and NAD, which is you don't take them. Correct. I take NR and NMN
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
with not a lot of religious adherence, I should say. If I ran out, I might not buy it for a while. And the only observed effect for me is this accelerated hair growth, which is a pain in the butt, frankly, because it just means I have to get my hair cut more often. I'm not trying to grow my hair faster, but okay.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
What are some other supplements, if any, that you take that are peripheral to this pathway or separate from this pathway? Rapamycin is a prescription drug only, right? So are there any over-the-counter things that you take that you would place into the lifespan category? Maybe they touch into healthspan as well. I'm happy to list off what I do, but what are your, let's just say top five at least?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
versus NMN versus direct infusions, or even orally taking NAD. And we compare them in terms of both what's known and what is not known about their ability to get into cells and any efficacy they may have for either longevity or healthspan.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Okay. I'll try and move through my list pretty quickly. I may miss one or two things and I don't know, maybe we'll put the list someplace online and fill in any gaps. I definitely take AG, AG1, you know, my typical ad read. I've been doing it since 2012. That's true. I take one or two servings a day, three if I'm traveling. And I'll generally do that first thing in the morning or in the evening.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
For me, it's really about capping off the vitamin minerals that I might be lacking in my diet, and also the whole adaptogen business, I think, and polyphenols. I'm very interested in Pendulum because part of the reason I take AG1 is for the gut health aspect. Bowel movements are more where I'd want them.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
I mean, it sounds kind of weird to talk about, but you just feel better when your gut motility is right. I feel like it adjusts my gut motility so it's neither too fast nor too slow. So that's first and foremost. I take a quality fish oil. either the one that AG makes or Carlson's in liquid form that has that lemon flavoring. And I make sure I get above one gram per day of EPA.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
So that's usually a tablespoon, sometimes two tablespoons. I make sure that I get enough D3, typically from the dropper, 5,000 IU per day, approximately. Sometimes 3,000, sometimes 7,000. I kind of play around that. And I test my blood levels. I also take methyl B12. And I also take Tonga Ali. So I take one capsule of that in the early part of the day.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
That has lowered my sex hormone binding globulin, freeing up a bit more testosterone. That's why I like it. And I take a couple of green tea capsules in the morning. I drink yerba mate. That's more of a stimulatory effect. And I take the NMN in powder form, sometimes NR as well. And again, if I run out of that, I tend to go long periods of time without. I use Element as an electrolyte. So-
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
People are probably noticing this is all pretty basic. I take, in my case, 10 grams of creatine monohydrate per day. I sometimes forget to take it. That's why I take 10 grams. I'll sometimes miss a day. And I certainly feel the effects of that in the gym because of the greater water volume in the muscles.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
But there are a lot of data on creatine monohydrate for sake of either maintaining or offsetting some of the cognitive dysfunction associated with sleep deprivation, maybe aging altitude and some other things as well. And then for a few months I was playing around with, let's say, nicotine gums. I stopped doing that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
First of all, I was dipping it and I ended up lifting for an entire episode of the Lex Friedman podcast that I only realized later. So I stopped taking it also because it gave me a kind of a tick and cough when I wasn't chewing it. And then I felt like I needed to chew it and it's a little too stimulatory for me. Before sleep, I take magnesium threonate, really bullish on magnesium as well.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Apigenin, 50 milligrams, which is essentially chamomile extract and theanine. And occasionally I'll take 900 milligrams inositol also, or instead, I kind of mix those up and around. And then I use a quality whey protein as a protein replacement, that kind of thing.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And I've played around with various things like Shilajit and sometimes get the sense that it's having an effect, but then I'll stop taking it for long periods of time. There are very few things that I've stayed with for long periods of time, and I basically just described what those are. If ever someone were to design a supplement that would provide more energy all day long that wasn't caffeine.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
I'd probably look to that, but I ingest caffeine in the form of yerba mate and coffee. I've played around with caffeine tablets, taking 50 milligrams of caffeine in tablet form. I mention that only because it has a distinctly different feel than ingesting caffeine through liquid form. It feels stronger, and I don't know why that is.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
In fact, there's a very well-known podcaster who drinks peppermint tea and takes caffeine tablets as a way to, I don't know, drink peppermint tea, which sounds very nice and mellow, but also get the stimulant effect. So anyway, that's pretty much it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And then I do a lot of things, as I know you do, mainly based on suggestions you've made about getting zone two cardio, rucking, weight vest walks and hikes. three times a week resistance training, three times a week cardiovascular training, one long, one medium, one short. And I try and hit the sauna and the cold once a week. And yeah, that's pretty much it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
I think there are a bunch of other supplements that are really interesting and kind of fun to play with if one wants to, like 600 milligrams of alpha-GPC or 900 milligrams of alpha-GPC in a double espresso prior to a workout. You feel different. It's a stimulant. But I don't like to do that too often because of the increase in TMAO that occurs.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
And then you have to take 600 milligrams of garlic to offset that increase. And you start getting- If we believe TMAO matters. Right. If you believe TMAO matters. I don't. Okay, great. Even better. I'll maybe skip the garlic. So things like that. I prefer to just eat garlic anyway. So there are a bunch of things like that that are kind of fun to play with as pre-workouts.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
But yeah, that's the core supplement regimen. And it's the one I've stuck with for, gosh- at least 10 years, or in the case of AG, more than that. So I should say, because any discussion around supplements, I think it's going to have people pricking up their ears to, okay, this is like a sales pitch or something. I absolutely want to go on record.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
The things you choose to do and not do are going to have much greater effect on your health span and lifespan, that is the behavioral things, in particular sleep, exercise, nutrition, sunlight, et cetera, than any one supplement that you're going to take. So I do view supplements, I think, through the appropriate lens, which is that they are indeed a supplement. They are not necessary.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Many of them are simply sufficient to serve as an insurance policy or to augment mental and physical health, maybe longevity, in ways that make it worthwhile given my disposable income that I want to devote to supplements. But I don't think – you need them.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Okay, so I completely agree with you. Exercise, sleep, nutrition, and emotional health, not listed in any particular order. Peter and I both completely agree. Those are the critical four. Before we close, NR, NMN, NAD, and NAD in particular, how do we view this? Is it a pathway that we should be focusing on in terms of supplementation or infusions for sake of extending our life?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Great. Thank you for that clear stance and the willingness to change it in light of new data. Peter, so good to sit down with you again and talk science, talk health, and in this case, talk about the supplements that we're not going to take in addition to the ones that we do take. We will do this again sometime very soon, hopefully. In Austin. Would love that. Thanks, Peter. Thanks, man.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Thank you for joining me today for my discussion with Dr. Peter Attia. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. In addition, please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, you can leave us up to a five-star review on either Spotify or Apple.
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or topics or guests that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, formerly known as Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, and Facebook. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, other of which is distinct from the content on the Huberman Lab podcast.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
So again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, our neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes what we call protocols in the form of brief one to three page PDFs on everything from neuroplasticity and learning to optimizing your sleep, to improving dopamine regulation,
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Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
to foundational fitness protocol that includes both resistance training and cardiovascular training. It details sets and reps. All of that and more is completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab, scroll down to newsletter and provide your email. And I should point out that we do not share your email with anybody.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion, all about NAD and longevity with Dr. Peter Attia. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Peter Attia: Supplements for Longevity & Their Efficacy
Dr. Atiyah and I compare and contrast the literature on this, again, both research and clinical literature, and we discuss whether or not he or I take NAD, NMN, or NR. And if so, or if not, the reasons for that. We also each go through our own supplement regimen, which of course reflects what we do believe can potentially have an effect on healthspan and or lifespan.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are discussing how to study and learn.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And it is very important anytime you're trying to learn new information. So focus goes with alertness. You can't be focused if you're not alert. This is prerequisite. So you need to be alert and you need to be focused in order to pay attention to the information that you're trying to learn.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
In fact, it is the process of being focused and attending that cues your nervous system that something is important, that something's different about whatever sensory experience you happen to be having when you're focused and attending, whether or not it's the information you're hearing or that you're looking at or both.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
That cue at the level of neurochemicals in your brain and body signals to the neurons, hey, you're going to have to change. You're going to have to alter your connections, either make them stronger or weaker, or a combination of those things in order to make sure that your nervous system can retain and use the information at a future time. So that's step one. And of course, as a part of step one,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Most people, when they hear about optimal studying strategies, they want to know, you know, what should they do? What should they take in order to learn better? Well, here's what everyone should take in order to learn better, which is a great night's sleep the night before limiting your external stress, although some stress is good because it queues up your alertness.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Fortunately, today you will learn the best ways to study. Turns out there's a rich literature on this dating back well over 100 years, and the data are absolutely fascinating and incredibly actionable. It's incredibly interesting how the fields of education, the fields of psychology and the fields of neuroscience have now come together to define the optimal strategies to study and learn.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
It actually allows you to remember certain things better. We'll talk about this a little bit later. No one can remove all stress from their life, but we know one thing for sure, your ability to be alert and focused is going to be greater if you slept well the night before, okay? So sleep is without question the best nootropic, right? The word nootropic means smart drug.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I don't really like that term because learning involves all sorts of things. It's not just about being smart. It's about being able to attend. It's about sometimes being creative, flexible with ideas and information. Here's the point. You're going to need to get your sleep right in order to be able to study and learn at your absolute best.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And I've done many episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast about sleep. We have a newsletter about sleep, the details in a short PDF format, the various things you can do to get your sleep optimized, so to speak. You can find all that hubermanlab.com by putting sleep into the search function.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
We don't have time to discuss that material now, but get your sleep right so that you can be alert and focused when it comes time to learn.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Now, the process of being alert and focused on particular material that you want to learn can be enhanced by just having a silent script within your head, silent meaning you're not saying it out loud, where when you sit down to learn, you're looking at a book or you're listening to a lecture, perhaps a podcast like this, you're thinking, okay, I need to learn this, I need to learn this.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
You can voluntarily ramp up your level of focus and alertness by telling yourself that information is important. Don't be a passive participant in learning, this is the basis of active learning, by expecting the information to be so interesting that it pulls your level of attention and focus out of you. Rather, learn to engage your attention and focus voluntarily, volitionally.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
When we hear about ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, we know that people with ADHD can attend very rapidly. They can really pay close attention for long periods of time if they like a given topic or a given experience or activity. They have serious challenges, however, engaging their attention and alertness if they are not excited about an activity or information.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And so it is the hallmark of all good learners to be able to voluntarily force yourself to attend and to focus. And when I say force yourself, that means a constant bringing back of your mind's attention to whatever it is you're trying to learn. It is meant to feel difficult.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I say meant to feel difficult because that strain that you feel, that encouraging, or in some cases, forcing yourself to attend, sometimes even putting on a hoodie and hat, literally putting blinders so that you can only attend to the material right in front of you, that straining that you feel reflects in part
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
the release of neuromodulators like epinephrine, adrenaline in the brain and body, which serve to cue the neural circuits that they need to change at a later time, okay? So the strain that you feel in trying to learn, the strain that you feel in forcing yourself to learn how to focus, that is good.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
That's a cue to your nervous system that it's going to need to change, that neuroplasticity needs to take place. Think about it.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
If you didn't feel that strain and you were able to perform whatever it is that you were doing, or remember whatever information it is that you're being exposed to seamlessly, well, then your nervous system wouldn't have to change because it already has the capabilities within the neural circuits. So that strain that you feel, that agitation is great.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
That's a cue that you are learning or that you've set the learning process in motion. Now, it's also the case that some people don't have great levels of focus and attention. And there are, of course, pharmacologic tools. I would encourage anyone that has clinically diagnosed ADHD to talk to their doctor about whether or not they should use prescription meds and or other methods.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Eight Sleep.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Great sleep is always going to be an important substrate for attention and focus for anybody, but especially for people with ADHD. I highly encourage anyone that's interested in enhancing their levels of focus and attention to also consider the non-pharmacologic approaches. So this is irrespective of whether or not you need pharmacologic approaches. Yes, being well hydrated.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Yes, the appropriate amount of caffeine for you that allows you to be alert, but not shaking and agitated can be very useful.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
However, the scientific data also support the fact that doing a brief, say five to 10 minute mindfulness meditation each day, these are the data from Wendy Suzuki's laboratory at New York University, showing that people who do a 10 minute meditation per day, where they simply sit or lie down, close their eyes, focus on their breathing, their attention invariably drifts, they bring their attention back to their breathing.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
People who do that on a regular basis improve their level of focus. They improve their memory and recall ability. And of course there are a bunch of other positive effects of that simple zero cost tool of mindfulness meditation. So if you're interested in improving your levels of focus and attention for sake of learning,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I highly encourage you to explore the oh so valuable tool of mindfulness meditation, just five or 10 minutes per day done on a regular basis. You miss a day, no big deal, just get right back to it the next day. Does it matter if you do it morning, afternoon, or night? No. Some people find that doing it too late at night might disrupt their sleep.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
But if you think about meditation of the sort that I just described as a perceptual exercise, maybe you don't even call it meditation. You're just teaching yourself to focus. You could even do it with eyes open by focusing on a visual target, allowing yourself to blink. There are good data on this sort of approach as well.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And then just making sure that your visual attention and cognitive attention comes back to that visual target. over and over again. It's a deliberate process of bringing your attention back to a particular location that is very valuable for improving your levels of focus.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
In fact, it is known to create significant improvements in your ability to focus, which is critical for your ability to study and learn. So I know that many people are interested in what to take, what to do at the level of kind of esoteric practices or things to buy. There is stuff out there.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Again, I mentioned hydration, caffeine, great sleep, and so on, but the simple practice of mindfulness meditation or just what I describe as a focusing perceptual exercise of bringing your attention back to the same location over and over again deliberately will train you to train your nervous system to bring your attention back to whatever it is you're trying to learn.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Now I've done other podcasts about how to focus about attention specifically and ADHD. Again, you can find all of those at hubermanlab.com. Simply put ADHD or focus or tools for focus into the search function and it will take you to the exact timestamps in those episodes that are relevant.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Right now, however, I want to talk about the second part of neuroplasticity, which is that the actual changes in the nervous system, the strengthening and weakening predominantly of connections between neurons that underlie learning do not occur during the focusing and learning or rather the exposure to the material. but instead during deep sleep and sleep-like states.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the critical need to get sleep, both enough sleep and enough quality sleep.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And again, I've done a lot of podcasts and talked a lot about tools for getting better sleep, but I just want to remind everybody that the actual reordering of the connections, the strengthening of connections between neurons that underlie learning, the weakening of those connections occurs during sleep in particular, during rapid eye movement sleep, which tends to predominate
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
in the latter half of the night. So make sure that you're getting enough sleep for you. For some people it's six hours, for some people it's eight hours. And yes, there is something called the first night effect. The first night effect is the experimentally observed phenomenon whereby information that you learn on a given day
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
is mostly consolidated during the night's sleep that you have on that first night after the learning occurs. Does this mean that if you get a poor night's sleep on the first night after learning something that you are forever going to forget that information, that it cannot be consolidated into your neural circuits? No, however, it's very clear that the first night after learning
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
you want to get the best sleep possible. So if you're learning about, so you're studying is going late into the night and you're drinking a lot of caffeine, be mindful that the sleep that you get after drinking that caffeine late into the day, the all-nighters that you're pulling, those are not serving your learning well. So you need to structure your life as a student of any kind
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
so that you can get focus and attention to what it is you want to learn. And you can get sleep to the best of your ability. And of course, people who are raising young kids or who have stress in their lives for whatever reason, perhaps won't be able to optimize their sleep on that first night or even subsequent nights. But do your best to get your sleep right.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
It's the single best thing you can do for your mental health, for your physical health and for learning and performance of any kind. And it's really worth the effort now. With an understanding of the mechanisms, the focus and alertness and the sleep phase of neuroplasticity, what are some other things that you can do to enhance whatever studying and learning you've obtained?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Now, one of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is that your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees in order for you to fall and stay deeply asleep. And to wake up feeling refreshed, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I already talked about a tool, a behavioral tool for enhancing focus. What about a behavioral tool for enhancing plasticity? If your sleep is great, or especially if your sleep isn't great. And there, I highly recommend you explore non-sleep deep rest or NSDR. There's a script for this in the show note captions.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
NSDR, sometimes referred to as yoga nidra, although those things are similar but different, is a 10 or 20 minute practice that you can do to restore your mental and physical vigor if you haven't slept enough. So you could do it first thing in the morning when you wake up, if you feel you haven't slept enough. You can do it in the afternoon.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
You can do it in the middle of the night if you're not able to sleep and offset some of the sleep loss that you otherwise would have experienced. NSDR is a very powerful tool in order to enhance neuroplasticity. And I'll talk more about this in a future episode. There's a lot of exciting data coming out about NSDR and yoga nidra.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
But if you're sleeping well, and even if you aren't, I highly encourage you to incorporate a 10 or 20 minute NSDR into your schedule someplace. Again, where you place it in your schedule isn't as important as the fact that you do it in order to enhance neuroplasticity. That is the reordering of connections between neurons to serve the studying and learning that you're doing.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Now let's talk about how the best students structure their days. Turns out there are great studies on this. There's a really nice paper In fact, that surveyed close to 700 students. These were medical students, approximately equal number of male and female students, and analyzed the most useful learning habits. That is the learning habits associated with the most successful students.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Now, any time you do a study like this where people take surveys, there's always the issue of In fact, we can pretty much set aside any possible causality. For instance, I'm about to tell you that the very best performing students tend to study for about three or four hours per day, but you could easily say, well, they're the best students because they study three or four hours per day.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
They don't study three or four hours per day because they're the best students. And you'd be exactly right, okay? We can get into all sorts of discussions about correlation versus causation, about reverse causality and on and on. However, none of that is the point here.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
One of the best ways to ensure all of that happens is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And with Eight Sleep, it's very easy to do that. You program the temperature that you want at the beginning, middle, and the end of the night, and that's the temperature that you're going to sleep at. And it will track your sleep.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
The point here is to establish what are the habits that the most successful students seem to incorporate over and over again, regardless of what classes they're taking, regardless of where they are in their arc of their learning trajectory.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And so what we know based on this study, and I'll provide a link to it in the show note captions, is that there are at least 10 study habits that the highly effective students use. I'm going to focus on the top five or six just for sake of time, because it turns out that most of the effect it appears of being a better student can be attributed to these top five or six habits.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
That is, what the scientific data say is the best way to study in order to remember information and to be able to use that information effectively in different areas of your life. So for those of you that are still in school, this could be any stage of school, today's discussion will be very useful for you.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
They set aside time to study. They literally schedule time to study. Now this probably serves several roles. The first one is that they are able to clear out other distractions. And in fact, that's the second thing that they do. They are very effective where they make it a point of putting their phone away and off, of isolating themselves. That's right. They're not studying with other people.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
They study alone, which is not to say that people who study with others cannot be effective in their studying, but the best performing students seem to study alone. They put their phone away. They tell their friends and families that they are not going to be able to be reached during that time.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And yes, they study for three or four hours per day, but they break that up into a couple of different sessions, typically two or three sessions. So they're not doing a three or four hour studying about all in one shot. So they're managing their time, they're eliminating distractions, and they're studying for a consistent amount of time, at least five days per week, okay?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Presumably they're taking some weekends off, although that wasn't made clear from this paper. The other thing that they do, and this is very important, is that they make an effort to then teach their peers, to teach other students in the class. Now, some of you may be thinking,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
and I'm thinking back to college here, mostly, that if you spend all this time learning the information and you are in a competitive scenario with the other students, that teaching them the information is kind of a freebie for them and it's harder for you, meaning you're putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage or you're giving them an unfair advantage for not having done the work.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Now, while this paper didn't do an analysis of whether or not these students that served as the learners from the other students got an unfair advantage, it's very clear that students who make it a point to learn material in isolation, then bring that material to other students in the same course and teach them perform exceedingly well in comparison to the other students.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
It tells you how much slow wave sleep you're getting, how much rapid eye movement sleep you're getting, which is critical. And all of that also helps you dial in the exact parameters you need I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for well over three years now, and it has completely transformed my sleep for the better.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So don't be afraid to be a teacher of your peers in order to test. This is key to test and develop mastery of the material. Now in my laboratory for years, we used to have a saying, which I simply picked up from the laboratories I was trained in. I didn't come up with the saying, which was watch one, do one, teach one.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And that was referring to doing surgeries or suturing or doing an antibody reaction or a Western blot or things that you do in laboratories. Watch one, do one, teach one. Watch one, do one, teach one, of course, should be reserved to anything where no one's going to be put in danger by the watch one, do one, teach one procedure, right?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Some procedures, especially in laboratories, can be dangerous given the materials you use, et cetera. And of course, today we're talking about learning and studying generally. So provided it's safe, watch one, do one, teach one, is an excellent means to learn, that is to study new material, to develop proficiency and even mastery. and over time, perhaps even virtuosity.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
We'll return to that later, those distinctions. So going back to this idea that the best students set aside time, they designate time to study alone without distractions, that is sure to help them anchor their focus and attention. They know that they're going to need to use their focus and attention during that time. And we know,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
with absolute certainty that focus and attention are a limited but renewable resource in the human brain. The longer you're awake, the more is the buildup of a molecule called adenosine in your brain and body. It makes you sleepy. It makes it harder to focus. When you sleep, adenosine levels are pushed down again. You're able to focus again. You feel more alert.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
You can think of adenosine as limiting your attentional budget, which is not to say that some people don't study best in the afternoon. or in the evening, or even late at night, right? I recall times during university when I'd study between the hours of 10 PM and 2 AM. I don't do that any longer,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Scheduling time where you know you're going to need to be focused and attending is perhaps one of the most important things toward being able to focus and attend to the material. Now, if you're taking courses, you probably are going to be a slave to the timing of the courses. You aren't going to be able to tell the instructor, okay, listen, I want you to do this course at 3 p.m.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
because that's when you learn best. or at 8 a.m. because that's when you happen to be able to attend best. However, to the extent that you have any control over the time in which you're going to study, keeping that at a regular time or times, perhaps one block early in the day, one block later in the day, perhaps two blocks early in the day and so on is going to be beneficial.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
It turns out that's also supported by the research literature that The brain, just like with its sleep-wake cycles that entrain to a regular schedule, that is your brain and body get used to being active and inactive at particular times based on your exposure to sunlight, your exposure to activities, your social rhythms, et cetera. If you regularly, meaning for the course of about three days,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation pod cover, the Pod 4 Ultra. The Pod 4 Ultra 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.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
make it a point to focus and study at particular times. Again, pulling your attention back, it's not an automatic process, but pulling your attention back to a specific location, perhaps on a page or that you're listening to in a lecture.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
your body and brain will start to entrain to that rhythm such that you will be able to focus and attend better simply by virtue of the regularity of the timing of the exposure to the material, okay? So you probably need about two or three days to break into a regular schedule of focusing and attending and studying at a given time or times.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
allow yourself that transition period, but then make it a point to schedule those times to study, set aside your phone, tell people you're going offline, turn off the wifi if you need to or have to, you may need it for your studying, I don't know, depends on what you're studying, but limit distractions at all costs. and learn to just focus on the material. And this is a skill.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
This is the most important thing to understand. It's a skill to be able to focus and study. And it's a skill that you can learn very quickly, especially if you schedule it for regular times and you give yourself two or three days in which to adapt to those schedules and times, and then try and stick to them as regularly as possible.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Perhaps even on the weekends, if you're approaching the end of the quarter or semester, perhaps even on the weekend, even if you're not in the quarter of semester. Keeping those regular times will entrain your nervous system to study and learn at its best at those particular times. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
By now, many of you have heard me say that if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1. The reason for that is AG1 is the highest quality and most complete of the foundational nutritional supplements available.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
What that means is that it contains not just vitamins and minerals, but also probiotics, prebiotics, and adaptogens to cover any gaps you may have in your diet and provide support for a demanding life.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
For me, even if I eat mostly whole foods and minimally processed foods, which I do for most of my food intake, it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits and vegetables, vitamins and minerals, micronutrients, and adaptogens from food alone. For that reason, I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, and often twice a day, once in the morning or mid-morning, and again in the afternoon or evening.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
When I do that, it clearly bolsters my energy, my immune system, and my gut microbiome. These are all critical to brain function, mood, physical performance, and much more. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim their special offer. Right now, they're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim that special offer. Before I move into specific ways to study in order to maximally offset forgetting, notice I didn't say in order to learn, but rather to maximally offset forgetting, AKA learning, stably learning material.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
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. Today's episode is also brought to us by BetterHelp.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
There's one other point that I wanted to pass along from this really nice study on the study habits of highly effective medical students that I've been referring to. And that is when one examined, or these people were asked about their motivation for studying, the best performing students, had an interesting answer.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
They had a very long term understanding of how or belief rather about how their success in medical school would impact their family, how it would impact their life arc, how it would change them. And they weren't particular about the ways in which it would change them or their family. In fact, it was a rather broad, abstract, aspirational way of thinking about their study efforts.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So what I like so much about this paper is that in addition to having a fairly large sample size, close to 700 students that were evaluated, and yes, it's purely self-report and this kind of thing, nonetheless, it bridges the two extremes of studying and learning.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
It gets right down into the nitty gritty of how long they study, when they study, the things they do to limit distraction that we just discussed, but it also gets to their underlying psychological motivations and the thing that they use in order to pull them forward through their study efforts. perhaps especially when their desire is waning or their level of fatigue is increasing.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I don't know that I'm speculating here, but this is this aspirational component of going to medical school, which it turns out in the country in which the study was done, only very, very select few of the very best students are able to achieve that. And they have to learn the information in a different language altogether, which is incredible. I always marvel at that.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I have friends that did their PhD thesis in Italy. They're Italian by birth. They now happen to run a laboratory in Italy. And they had to do their PhD training and write papers and give their thesis dissertation and defense in English, even though English was their second language. So talk about a challenge. And that's just one example that I can think of. There are many examples of that.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
These students that I'm referring to in this study are not necessarily constantly thinking about how their efforts will transform themselves and their families, but they certainly were able to report what it was specifically that they are seeking, what they're aspiring to, besides just trying to do as well as they can getting into and through medical school.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So the high level aspirational stuff within you, whatever that is for you, it's going to be highly individual, is certainly important and it offers a bookend to the nuts and bolts-y kind of stuff that you're going to do, I would hope, in order to best study and learn the specific material.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So the specific actions that you're going to take each day to learn specific bits of information that will pull you toward those important aspirations. And now again, if you love the material you're learning, this aspirational component is probably not as important.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I can recall during university and graduate school and so on thinking, oh my goodness, this is like the coolest thing I've ever heard. I've probably say that about a million different topics. Oh my goodness, circadian rhythms, seasonal rhythms, melatonin, neural circuits, dopamine. I was just awash with excitement about what I was learning.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years. Initially, I didn't have a choice. It was a condition of being allowed to stay in school, but pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to overall health.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
But of course, sometimes I would take a course where the material was, I don't know if it was more challenging or not, but I had a harder time getting engaged by the material, either by virtue of how it was being taught to me or the material itself. So the ability to attach to some aspirational goal to pull you through can be very valuable. You're not going to love every topic you have to learn.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
However, I will say that at least in my experience, some of the courses that I look back on most fondly are the courses that I struggled with the most. And in fact, that's the basis of the next and easily one of the most important studying tools.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So a key theme in all of the excellent literature that is the peer reviewed research on how best to study is that studying that feels challenging is the most effective. I know nobody wants to hear this. Everyone wants to hear about flow. Everybody wants to hear about information just sinking into their brain by osmosis. I think it was a Garfield cartoon where he talked about learning by osmosis.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
There's this very cute real world video of a kid in a classroom, I believe, It's in China where he's taking the book and he puts it on his head. Maybe I can find this clip. And he's just kind of like trying to wash it into his brain. It's super cute clip, but guess what? That doesn't work. I mean, it works to put the book on your head. It doesn't work.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
It's not going to get the information into your brain. Perhaps someday there will be ways to rapidly download information into neural circuits. Right now we know, we've known for hundreds, if not thousands of years that Effort is the cornerstone of learning. So I know there are probably some groans about that.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I know some of you perhaps were hoping that today I was going to tell you how to study so that studying wasn't painful. I think I can accomplish that by the end of today's episode. But in order to do that, let's take another quiz. Okay, so here's the quiz. Again, you can answer these questions in your head.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
You don't have to tell anyone, but you could write them down or say them out loud if you want. The first question is, When during either your states of alertness or sleep does the remodeling of neural connections occur? I like to think this is a pretty easy one. Okay, the answer is during sleep. The second question is what is one behavioral tool that you can use to improve focus
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
The answer is simple mindfulness meditation, which I'd prefer you think of simply as a perceptual exercise. So again, just sit or lie down, close your eyes, focus on your breath when your attention drifts, bring your attention back to your breath and so on.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
In fact, I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise. Now, there are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all, It provides good rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about the issues that are most critical to you. Second of all, it can provide support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Or if you prefer, you can do this eyes open by focusing on a visual target, either a foot or two feet or three feet away, whatever distance is comfortable for you, allowing yourself to blink as needed, forcing yourself to focus on that visual target for say one to three minutes, maybe even three to five minutes, maybe even 10 minutes. Again, please blink, you don't want your eyes to dry.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Both those tools will improve your ability to attend, to focus to other material when the time comes, okay? The circuits for focus and attention themselves are subject to neuroplasticity. And then the third question is, can you name or list off in your mind three tools that the most effective students have been shown to use?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I can think of limiting distraction by virtue of putting away phones and telling others you won't be in contact with them too. And I'm getting these out of order, I realize. is to isolate, to study alone. And the third that I can recall is to teach others in the same course. You can probably think of a few others. Now, why are we taking these silly little quizzes?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Well, it turns out they're not so silly when one considers that hopefully you'll remember the information from today so that you don't have to listen to it over and over again. but that if ever there was a strongly research supported tool in the literature, in the peer reviewed literature about how students can learn information better, it's testing.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And I know, I know, I know we think of tests as a way to evaluate our knowledge, but it turns out that testing is one of the best ways to build our knowledge, to retain our knowledge, and again, to offset forgetting. Now, the study of testing as a learning tool, not just as a way to evaluate how much information we've learned, goes back over a hundred years.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
There's a classic study that was done in 1917 where grade school age children read biographies. So they read biographies and then the kids were divided into different groups. One group read and reread and reread those biographies over and over. Another group read the biographies once and then were tested on those biographies.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
But get this, they tested themselves on those biographies simply by having to think about the information that they had read and trying to remember the information. Like what was the biography? Who was the person? Who were they married to? What did they do? When did they go to school? What did they do in school? What did they do in the world? What role did they play in life?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So they essentially tested their own knowledge simply by going into their own head and asking themselves what they could remember about those biographies. Now, keep in mind here that even though it's fairly apparent that reading a biography two, three, four times might seem more passive than testing oneself on a biography that they had read just once. Right.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
You could imagine that thinking about the biography involves more effort. And indeed it does. But keep in mind also that the kids in the second group were only exposed to the biography once. And yet when you look at the percent of accurate recall of information from those biographies, the children that read the biography once and then
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And third, expert therapy should provide insights. With BetterHelp, they make it very easy for you to find an expert therapist with whom you have these critical components of therapy. Also, because BetterHelp allows for therapy to be done entirely online,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
made a deliberate point to think about that biography in their own mind to effectively test themselves on that material just within their heads over and over. but an equal number of times as the kids that read the biographies directly on a page over and over, vastly outperformed the kids that read the biographies over and over.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Put differently, reading and rereading material and rereading material is far less effective than reading material and then thinking about that material, testing yourself on that material, forcing yourself to bring that material to mind in your own mind. And this is not just for sake of remembering more volume of material, but also accuracy. of recall of that material.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And that at least to me was pretty surprising at first until one starts to explore subsequent studies of the role of testing as a learning tool. And then you start to realize that testing yourself is far and away the best tool for studying and learning, not just for evaluating your knowledge, but for actually studying and incorporating that knowledge into your neural circuits.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Okay, so I realize that anytime I or somebody else talks about a study that was done in 1917, we think of people in these, you know, like wooden shoes and in these schoolhouses that look so different and kids dress so different. Let's get a little more modern here. Keep in mind, however, that the nervous system hasn't really changed much in tens of thousands of years.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Nonetheless, I think it's nice to think about a more recent study of how best to study. And this study, which by the way, we'll provide a link to in the show note captions, as well as a couple of reviews that include results from similar studies. Again, I'm pointing to a body of research, not just one study here. Looked at whether or not studying material four times, so study, study, study, study,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
It's very time efficient and easy to fit into your busy schedule with no commuting to a therapist's office or looking for parking or sitting in a waiting room. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com slash Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
was better in terms of locking that information into people's minds, allowing them to use that information flexibly, which is an element of creativity, essentially giving them mastery of the material, than a different group, which studied once, studied the material twice, studied the material three times, then was tested on the material,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Or a third group that studied material once, then took one, two, yes, three tests on the material. Now, so what I just described was three groups, all of whom read a passage. This was a passage about animals, about biology, some other topics too in different experiments. Again, three groups, one group studies four times. They study the material one, two, three, four times.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
then later they take a test. The second group studies one, two, three times, takes a test on that material, and then later takes a test. The third group studies the material once, then takes three tests on the material, and then later takes a test. So what's analyzed and compared between these different groups is their performance on that final test, okay? What I put in as the fifth
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
because it was, think about it as SSSS, so study, study, study, study, and then later test, or SSST, study, study, study, test, and then later test, or STTT, study, test, test, test, and then later test. So what's compared and contrasted is performance on the test some period of time later. Now, some experiments made that final test of the material
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
a couple of days later, other experiments made it a couple of weeks later, other experiments made it much later, months or even a year later, okay? The point here is twofold. First of all, based on everything I've told you thus far, you can probably guess who performed best on the test that occurred some period of time later, okay? Right, the performance on that final test
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
was essentially proportional to the number of tests one had already taken on the material. That should be pretty much obvious given the way we've been going today in this description of tests as a way to offset forgetting. So the more tests that you take as a way to expose yourself to the material, the better you're going to perform on that material at some later point.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Now, of course, at some point you have to be exposed to the material for the first time, right? That's why it's studying and learning.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
But after one exposure to new material, taking more tests on that material, even if you don't perform that well on those tests, as long as you're able to see the accurate answers to those tests and compare your answers to those answers will lead to better performance on the ultimate test and retention of that material at some later time.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
put differently, it's not about how many times you study the material or how many times you're exposed to the material. It's about being exposed to the material, doing your best to focus and attend to that material, and then self-testing yourself on that material. Or as the case may be, if an instructor
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Waking Up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and more. I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old, and it made a profound impact on my life.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
is the one giving you the test, but nonetheless, taking tests on that material, not just once, but ideally two or three times, that's what really locks the material into your neural circuits.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
That's what's going to lead to the most pervasive change, the most durable change, we should say, in your neural circuits that carry that material, that hold that material in your mind, what we call neural encoding, okay? So, The more times you test yourself or that you are tested on material, the better your retention of that material.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Now, some people will immediately say, well, goodness, what if I learned it and then I'm tested and I'm somehow consolidating the wrong or inaccurate material, but it doesn't appear to be the case. As long as you learn what the correct answers to the tests are, even if you're getting, you know, 40 or 50% or less accurate on those tests that you take immediately after the studying period,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
that's still going to be a better strategy than rereading the material, which ought to be somewhat surprising. It certainly was surprising to me. But you know what's even more surprising and a little scary and that we all should know, and I wish I had learned when I was like in the second grade, is that if you ask students, How confident are you in the material that you just learned?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
How well do you think you would perform on a test? What you see consistently in these studies, I'm chuckling because it's kind of mind blowing, is that the students who studied the material, that is who were exposed to the material four times, think that they are going to perform best on the ultimate exam.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
However, the students that study the material once and then are tested three times on that material, They think that ultimately they're going to perform least well. For instance, they ask them their confidence. How well do you think you would perform on a test of this material in two weeks or in a year or in six months or even tomorrow?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
They report, that is the students in the study, test, test, test group report, much lower confidence in the material, much lower sense of mastery of the material compared to the students that were exposed to the material four times who were saying, yeah, I think I would do pretty well or very well. And guess what? The exact opposite is true.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And by now, there are thousands of quality peer-reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our focus, managing stress and anxiety, improving our mood, and much more. In recent years, I started using the Waking Up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Put differently, when you're exposed to material over and over and over again, you think you've learned the material. In fact, your confidence that you've learned the material increases with each subsequent exposure to the material,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
but actually you haven't learned it at all compared to the people that are exposed to the material and then take tests on the material, oftentimes straining to get the answers right on those tests. In fact, sometimes getting those answers dead wrong and then realizing they get those answers dead wrong, or sometimes they just sense it. But guess what?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Testing yourself once, twice, maybe three times prior to the ultimate test of your knowledge of that material is far and away the best way to lock that material into those neural circuits. Now I say, I wish I had learned this when I was a student because to some extent I used a self-testing approach. The one most salient example of that is I took a course when I was in college.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I still remember it was Biosciences 169L, Neuroanatomy Laboratory taught by Ben Reese. He's still there, I believe. And he was known then and I'm sure still now, if he's still teaching as extremely challenging professor, extremely challenging, not as a person, not his personality, but a ton of detail and rigor and high, high, high expectation
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
for this laboratory course in neuroanatomy, which involved lectures. It involved in a neuroanatomy textbook where you'd look at essentially panels of different brain sections from different species, different types of stains of different brain tissue. Mind you, this is an undergraduate course.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And then there was a laboratory component, hence the L in 169L, where you'd have to go from microscope station to microscope station, identifying structures based simply on what you could see down the microscope.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And therefore, you had to know what the stain was, you know, what was essentially visible to you on the slide, because certain stains reveal certain things like the what we call the cell body of neurons versus the the sort of wires, what we call the axons between neurons, et cetera, et cetera. I remember thinking, this is a really hard course. It was a very difficult course.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And my mode of studying for the course involved, of course, going to class, doing the dissection. We dissected a sheep brain at that time. So we're literally dissecting an actual brain. We're doing microscope work. We're learning about it from the textbook and from lecture. And there was a ton of new nomenclature about rostral, caudal, dorsal, ventral, all the stuff of neuroanatomy.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And then at some point I made the decision, perhaps on the basis of sheer overwhelm, to study for neuroanatomy by laying down on my bed in my, studio apartment i lived alone and closing my eyes and flying through the nervous system from different entry points through the ear review my cochlear anatomy through the eye review my retinal anatomy through the dorsal surface of the brain.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Think about the sulci and gyri, and then the corpus callosum. And I can still see it in my mind's eye. So my process of studying for neuroanatomy, yes, involved exposure to the material, but it involved hours upon hours of thinking about the material within my own mind. So it's a little bit meta unto itself there.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits, but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice. What I and so many other people love about the Waking Up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from, and those meditations are of different durations.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
As a consequence, I like to think, in fact, I believe with some confidence that I have a very high mastery of neuroanatomy in different species as well. Now that's my particular area of expertise. I don't think I'm any kind of savant with respect to neuroanatomy. I just spent hours upon hours learning the material and then reviewing the material within my mind.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So in other words, testing myself, here's what I would do if I were moving down a trajectory of a neural track, for instance, between say the hippocampus and a neighboring structure and I didn't know what was next, I would then go look it up in the textbook and then I'd go back to this mental exercise visualization type studying. It really wasn't studying is the point.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
The point is that I was testing myself. I was trying to find the points in which I no longer had the knowledge to move further through, in this case, my mental image of the brain, but through the material. And this is the key aspect of testing. It's not about just knowing how many things you get right, how many things you get wrong. It's about recognizing exactly what you know and don't know.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And an important component of testing is running up against those things where you say, I can't remember. I don't know what comes next. Or I'm certain that that structure is the fimbria. And then you go and you look and you go, it's not the fimbria, but guess what? I'll never forget, for instance, the location of the habenula or what it looks like.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
A structure of which, by the way, since these names are kind of esoteric, at that time, we didn't know what it does. It turns out it's involved in disappointment. It's key to the depression circuits or the circuits that underlie depression in some individuals. It is suppressed by viewing of morning sunlight. We know that too.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And by getting too much artificial light exposure in the middle of the night, you enhance activity of the habenula. Beautiful work not done by my laboratory, but other laboratories demonstrates that.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So what I just did for you there was hopefully teach you a little something about neuroanatomy and depression, but more importantly, to just illustrate that how you test yourself can be highly individual to the ways in which you learn best.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
However, even if you are not formally enrolled in any kind of school at the moment, today's discussion will also be extremely effective for you to be able to study and learn better information from say the internet or podcasts or any area of your life where you are seeking to learn and use new knowledge.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Now that contradicts what I said earlier, which is that this notion that people have different learning styles and some people are verbal learners and some people are auditory learners and et cetera, doesn't really hold up so well anymore. which by the way is not to say there isn't any research to support it, it's just that it's heavily contradicted by other research that contradicts that idea.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice, both from the perspective of novelty You never get tired of those meditations. There's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation. And you can always fit meditation into your schedule, even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
But your approach, your mode of best testing yourself on material for sake of offsetting the forgetting process and for identifying where you have gaps in your knowledge or where you thought you knew something, but you don't, or you knew something, but it's wrong,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
That can be accomplished through the approach that's best for you, which in my case turned out to be lying down and thinking about the material in my head.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And still to this day, when I read a paper, I try, I don't always do this, but what I try to do is then take a walk in my yard or outside, and I try and think about the key components of that paper and think about some of the graphs that are especially important, which is what I'm going to do now. I'd like to take a brief break to thank one of our sponsors, Element.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium and potassium in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Now, I and others on the podcast have talked a lot about the critical importance of hydration for proper brain and bodily function.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Research shows that even a slight degree of dehydration can really diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes in order for your body and brain to function at their best. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are critical for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or nerve cells.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of Element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise I'm doing, especially on hot days if I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman, spelled drinkelement.com slash Huberman, to claim a free Element sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. Okay, so I like to think that we're establishing that testing yourself or testing your students
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
or being tested by your teacher is the best way to offset forgetting. Let's look at the literature that actually supports that statement directly, because in the previous experiment I described, it was either study, study, study, study, or study, study, study, test, or study, test, test, test, and then later everybody takes a test at the same time.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
A variance on that was done where they had one group of students study material, so this is new material. And when I say study, I mean, they were exposed to the material for the first time. And I realize this is a little bit of a problem because we're using the word study when, in fact, I'm trying to make the point that testing yourself is studying, okay?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So forgive me, but this is the way it's mapped out in these experiments and these papers, should you look them up in our show note captions. One group is exposed to the material, what we're called studying, and then takes a test immediately after. they are told what they got right, what they got wrong on that test, and what the correct answers are.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And then sometime later, after a delay, they take a test of the same material. Another group studies, that is they're exposed to the material, then there's a delay, okay? That delay could be days, it could be weeks. This experiment has been done every which way, it seems by now.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I also really like doing yoga nidra or what is sometimes called non-sleep deep rest for about 10 or 20 minutes, because it is a great way to restore mental and physical vigor without the tiredness that some people experience when they wake up from a conventional nap. If you'd like to try the Waking Up app, please go to wakingup.com slash Huberman, where you can access a free 30-day trial.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
then they're tested, and then there's another delay, and then they take a test at the same time that group one did, okay? So again, it's study, test, long delay, test for group one, or study, delay, test, delay, test for group two. Remember, the final test is taken at the same time by everybody.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Or group three, study, that is they're exposed to the material, then a long, long, long, long delay, then a test, and then the ultimate test, okay? The test that everybody takes at the same time. Can you guess which group performed best?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And the essence of this experiment, if you're listening to this and it's not clear in your mind is you're either exposed to the material and tested very soon after, and then take a test after a delay, say a week or two weeks later, or you're exposed to the material, There's a delay of a few days, then you take a test and then another few days, and then you take a test. So it's more evenly spaced.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Or if you were assigned to the third group, you'd study. You're not going to see the material or be tested on it until a day or two before the big test. Then you're tested on it. You get your answers back and then you're tested on it again. You could imagine that the last group might perform best because they're re-exposed to the material. They're told what the correct answers are.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So they know what they got wrong. They know what they got right. And then the next day they're taking the test again. I would have thought that group would perform best, but it turns out the opposite is true. It's pretty wild. The best performance comes from being exposed to material, what in this experiment they're called studying.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Okay, so they read a passage or they learn some math material or language material or music material or motor learning. Then they take a test very soon after, even same day or next day. And then there's a long delay. And then they take the test. That group performs best. Put differently, test yourself very soon
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
if not the same day, certainly the next day or so, very soon after being exposed to material for the first time, as opposed to the last group, which performs worst. They perform worse.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Being exposed to material, then there's a long period of time, then you're tested on that material, you are told what you got right, what you got wrong, and then the next day you take a test again, even with overlapping questions to the test you took just the day before, and that group performs worst. group that studied, had a gap test, they had a gap test, they performed somewhere in the middle.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
What does this tell us? What it tells us is so important vis-a-vis neuroplasticity, vis-a-vis best learning strategies. This is something that, goodness, I wish I had learned when I was in graduate school, when I was an undergraduate, when I was in high school and elementary school. Goodness, even when I was in kindergarten, I wish I had learned this.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Test yourself on the material that you were just exposed to very soon after your first exposure to it, because that offsets the natural forgetting of new material that the brain is exposed to. This is absolutely the hallmark of all the impressive data about testing as a tool for learning. Testing oneself or your students or being tested if you're the student by your teacher
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Again, that's wakingup.com slash Huberman to access a free 30-day trial. Okay, let's talk about how best to study and learn. And of course, people have different learning styles. Some people prefer to learn by reading. Some people prefer to study in a group. Some people prefer to highlight. Some people call themselves auditory learners. Other people consider themselves visual learners.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
as a tool not just for evaluating performance, for knowing what you know and don't know, but for consolidating that information in your neural circuits. And when I say consolidating that information in your neural circuits, I realize it's a mouthful, What we know is that this business of putting the testing soon after exposure to new material is about offsetting the forgetting of that material.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So you might say, wait, if that's true, how come studying the material and then waiting and then taking two tests right back to back where you're learning the material again during the test, that should be the best performing group. Ah, well, there seems to be something fundamentally different about first exposure to material versus testing yourself on that material.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And we don't know exactly what that is. There's some interesting neural imaging data in humans that this has to do something with this notion of familiarity with material. This is very simple. So this is easy to understand, even though it involves a little bit of memory neuroscience nomenclature.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Familiarity with something, recognizing it is not the same thing as having agility with that thing, of having mastery of that thing, is not the same thing as having mastery of the material, of having committed it to memory, okay? So when you read something over and over and over, You see it over and over. You hear it over and over. You think about it over and over.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Of course, you're reading it or you're hearing about it. And you think that you're learning the material, that your neural circuits are changing, but it's a pretty passive process. Or even if it's a difficult chapter to read or a difficult passage of music,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
The difference is when you're tested on material, something happens in your performance of or recalling of, if it's just cognitive or you're writing it down or you're told to play the music or do the motor movement, something happens in the error, the getting wrong of certain things that cues your nervous system to lock in the information that you have right and to remember what you have wrong so that you then correct it, which is far and away different than
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
exposure and re-exposure and re-exposure, okay? So it's a prerequisite to learning that you need to see the material for the first time. You can't just start testing yourself on material that you've never been exposed to. I suppose you could, but you're going to get it, I would imagine, mostly wrong or all wrong.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
But this business of using testing very soon after first exposure to material as a tool to study, in order to offset forgetting is clearly tapping into this difference between familiarity with something for which we know certain brain areas are activated versus recollection, being able to take that material and bring it to memory, bring it to your focused attention and use that material.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I realize this is a bit abstract and some of this is still being parsed. If you're interested in the neuroscience of familiarity with something versus your ability to actually recall something and have mastery of that material, There's a really nice review that I provide a link to in the show note caption. It's published in the journal Hippocampus.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I always chuckle at the fact that there's a journal named after a brain structure. After all, as far as I know, there isn't a journal called Retina or Amygdala. And I have a brief anecdote from graduate school whereby I learned that there was this journal Hippocampus, and it was my first graduate student gathering in graduate school. And the guy who hosted it,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Turns out it's a luminary in the field of learning and memory. And I was saying, you know, this is ridiculous. Like there's a journal called Hippocampus. Here I am, first year graduate student. He goes, yeah, there is. And I said, yeah, that's so silly. Like who are the idiots that name a journal after a brain structure?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
But guess what? When one looks at the research on preferred learning styles, pretty much all of that melts away. It turns out that the best way to study and learn is defined not by the medium in which that material arrives, whether or not it's auditory or visual or combined, whether or not you review slides or a textbook, or you watch small videos.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
It turns out there's also a journal called Cerebral Cortex and there's probably one about spinal cord. So it turns out I was the idiot saying this. And the guy I was talking to who of course was the host of the party said, yeah, actually that's my journal. I founded the journal Hippocampus. So you can look them up. So at this point, you're going to take a test and it's a super easy test, okay?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I realize we're a bit into the material and we're all probably fatiguing a little bit, marveling, I hope, at what an incredible tool testing and in particular self-testing soon after being exposed to new material is. And the question is this, and by the way, this is an open-ended question.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
You're not supposed to know the answer because I haven't told you the answer yet, but I want you to think about this. If one looks at the majority of data in this whole field of testing as a studying tool, how much improvement do you think you get from testing yourself once on new material? Do you think it's a 10% improvement, a 20% improvement?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So here I'm just comparing to testing yourself once on material that you were just exposed to for the first time versus not testing yourself at all, okay? How much do you think you improve? The answer is about 50%, five, zero.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And I can say that on the basis of the fact that in studies of musical learning, of mathematical learning, of language learning, of motor learning, when subjects are exposed to new material and then tested at some period of time later,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
The percentage of information they get right or that they are able to perform something correctly diminishes over time, especially because they're not doing any practice and no testing in the intervening time. This was built into these experiments. And then you simply ask how much of the material was forgotten if they just were exposed to the material.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So in the case of say music learning, this would be, you know, your teacher sits down next to you and shows you the scales on the piano.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
but then you're not practicing them in between versus, or perhaps another example would be somebody gives you a lecture about a particular phase in history, and then you're not being exposed to the material again, and you're not self-testing versus if you just take one test, even a self-directed test of the material immediately after, irrespective of how well you perform,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
you have the amount of forgetting, okay? I want you to think about self-testing in this way, because we're thinking about optimal studying strategies. You have the amount of forgetting that would normally occur. This is oh so important. In fact, I don't even know that most neuroscientists think about learning and neuroplasticity this way. Most everybody, including neuroscientists,
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
are taught, were taught, continue to be taught, that you're exposed to new material, you focus, okay, then during sleep, there's remodeling of the connections, all that's true. but we really need to think about how most information that comes into our nervous system each day is forgotten. Most of it is completely discarded.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
There are some rare clinical deficits where people remember everything, and I'll tell you, these people really struggle in life. They do not do well in work, in relationships. They remember every little detail of everything, and it is incredibly disruptive to their quality of life. It's nothing you want. You want to have a great memory for the right things.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So when you self-test material, you have the amount of forgetting that occurs compared to if you're just exposed to the material. I want you to keep that fact in mind because that fact is the one that really hit me upside the head and made me realize, goodness gracious, how I wish that I'd self-tested myself on material that I wanted to remember over time. rather than reading it over and over.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
It turns out that the best way to study and learn is to access components of your memory systems that offset forgetting. This is a theme I'm going to return to over and over again throughout today's episode.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I had this elaborate process for studying that I use all through college and graduate school, and it worked pretty well for me, where I'd read and highlight, then I'd write out my notes, then I would write little paragraphs about that stuff. Now, some of that probably mimicked self-testing. Indeed, it had to have. And then, of course, I would take the quizzes and I would go to office hours.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Once I got serious about school, I got really serious about school. And of course, I still forget things. I've made errors on this podcast before, in part from going too fast or making a joke that People didn't perceive as a joke. So the whole story there. But in any case, of course, I make errors. Of course, I've forgotten certain things and sometimes I misspeak.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I always strive to get things accurately. We correct things in the show note captions. If they're called out to us, we're now using AI to review the podcast and adjust anywhere using insertions or actually replacing those words if we need to and so on and so forth. But yes, we all forget things. We all make errors.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
But if I had just known that testing myself on material while walking out of class or soon after getting home or later that evening or the next day would allow me to perform so much better on an exam, a midterm or a final exam. And of course I still would have studied because I was committed and you should still study as much as you feel is necessary to get mastery of the material for you.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
However, if I had known that testing oneself or being tested soon after exposure to material would have the amount of forgetting even out to a year later, I definitely would have saved myself a lot of time.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Let's talk about some specifics of ways that you can self-test or if you're a teacher, or if you have good dialogue with your teacher and they are open-minded, perhaps they are open to hearing about what are the best forms of testing oneself as a tool for learning.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
The best tests are open-ended, short answer, very minimal prompt tests, not unlike the type that we've taken today during this podcast, as compared to multiple choice tests. Multiple choice questions allow for familiarity of names, of facts. It's going to be A, B, C, D, and sometimes E is A and C, and so on and so forth. And within each of those A, B, C, D, E,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Rather than think about studying to learn and retain information, I want you to think about studying to offset the natural process of forgetting that everybody experiences when they are exposed to new material of any kind, cognitive or or motor learning, musical learning, math, et cetera. Okay, so keep this in mind throughout today's episode.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
and you're looking for the right answer, you're looking for the familiarity, the recognition of something. Yes, this, not that. Okay, that's the best answer, you circle C. Okay, this kind of thing, as opposed to an open-ended question where you have to write out your answer, you have to recall the information, right?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
It requires a much greater degree of mastery of the information than does familiarity or recognition of the material. So the best tests as study tools are going to be open-ended, short answer questions, or even long answer questions. Now there's one exception to this, which are multiple choice tests that include tricks. Okay.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
If you've ever taken the GRE, the graduate school entrance exam or the LSAT,
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
or the MCAT, there are some questions in there that are very straightforward, but in those standardized tests, they tend to include some quote unquote trick questions in which those questions don't allow you to just recognize the correct answer and distinguish it from the other incorrect answers, but rather they have answers in there that on first blush look like the right answer and people have a tendency to circle those and move on.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
or to select those and move on. But if you think about the material a little more deeply, it turns out those quote unquote obvious answers are actually the incorrect answers. So there are versions of multiple choice tests where it requires a, greater degree of mastery of the material where simple familiarity won't serve you.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And you actually have to be able to recall the different components of information leading into that. But those are a bit more rare, certainly in the context of other kinds of learning, like musical learning. Although I suppose for music theory, that could be relevant. But when I say music learning, I'm just kind of defaulting to the idea of the mechanics of musical learning.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
But of course there's music theory, et cetera. So what I'm effectively saying is the ultimate exam, the final exam, the midterm exam, the exam that's administered to you, rarely do you have control over the format of that exam. Sometimes it's mixed format, but the different ways in which you self-test as a form of studying are really key. And ideally you would make these open-ended.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
In other words, you would not simply rely on multiple choice. You would rely on a form of self-testing or that you give your students or that your teacher gives you that requires you to think about the material with some degree of depth, with some degree of effort. And of course, you're going to get certain things wrong.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Now, I would hope that if testing is being used as a learning tool, as opposed to just for evaluation, but here we're talking about using testing as a learning tool, that it wouldn't impact at least not at that moment, your final performance in the course or whatever it is. Rather, it is testing for sake of learning. Now, we know from the literature that students don't like pop quizzes.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I gave you a few today and forgive me. They don't like pop quizzes. And we know this in the form of, the reduction in teaching evaluation scores, okay? Having received teaching evaluation scores of different, let's say values over the years. And I always take the feedback seriously.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
One salient comment that just leapt into my mind was the fact that I ended up mentioning my bulldog Costello too often in class. So here I'm mentioning him again, just to get back at that one student that said I mentioned him too much. I mentioned him as much as I want. The point here is that When students evaluate their teachers, they tend to punish their teachers for pop quizzes.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Does that mean pop quizzes aren't effective? No, but you know what's more effective? Telling students at the outset of class or telling yourself at the outset of any kind of learning expedition, because this isn't just about the classroom, that you're going to take a bunch of exams, that you're going to use testing or quizzes, whatever you want to call them as a form of teaching and learning.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
The best way to learn is to think about offsetting the natural forgetting of new information. You're trying to inoculate against forgetting. That is the way to remember things. That is the way to gain mastery over them. And I'm going to teach you how to best do that using the data gleaned from the peer-reviewed literature. Now, before I do that, I want to talk about what learning is.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And that you can expect five tests or five quizzes during the course of being presented the material, or that you are going to test yourself every day after the material. Now, sometimes you have to go from one class to the next class. There isn't an opportunity to test yourself, but guess what's not going to be helpful? Walking out of class and getting immediately onto your phone.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
We know that that probably inhibits your ability to remember the material because it's going to enhance forgetting because you do have this key opportunity right after being exposed to new material to help offset the forgetting by testing yourself on that material as soon as possible after being exposed to it.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So again, even though I did not attend school in an era where we had smartphones and texting, I recall walking out of class and just walking out of class and going to my bicycle, but Of course, there were people to talk to, there were other things to attend to.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
If you're really serious about learning material, take a few seconds, maybe even a few minutes after being exposed to that material and think about that material, test yourself on it. And if you find that you don't know the material, you're confused by it or overwhelmed by it, great. You just accomplished the first step in cueing your nervous system to the fact that it needs to learn that material
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
and you've created an opportunity for enhanced neuroplasticity, which is really what all of this stuff about testing as a form of studying is about. You're going to test yourself so that you figure out what you don't know, so that you then look up that material, test yourself on it again, so that ultimately you forget Very little of it, if any.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Now there are other components to learning a neuroplasticity that I've talked about on previous podcasts that are just too interesting not to mention, but I'm just going to mention them in brief, things like gap effects. Gap effects are oh so cool and they've been demonstrated for lots of different forms of learning. Gap effects are what I just did, which is to take periodic pauses,
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
in the learning of material as short as five to 10 seconds, but even as long as 30 seconds during which, guess what? Your hippocampus, the neurons in your hippocampus repeat information that you've been exposed to for the first time at a rate 20 to 30 times faster than typical, just as it does during rapid eye movement sleep. So if you are a teacher and or if you are a learner,
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
periodically throughout an episode, a class or whatever of trying to learn new motor skills or music skills or whatever kind of learning pause and let your hippocampus generate more repetitions of that material than it would otherwise if you just tried to barrel through.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So I realize as we've gone through today's discussion that words like test and quiz, evaluation, offsetting forgetting, all of that stuff can spike people's cortisol. It can give us flashbacks to uncomfortable classroom experiences related to being called on, cold called for the answer. a vicious trick that instructors play.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Keep in mind that testing as a form of studying, whether or not self-directed or given to you by a teacher is not for sake of evaluation at the level of, okay, you know, you get an exam at the end of a lecture and then you do your best to answer those questions and then you turn it in and it impacts your grade. No, this is about being told or revealing to yourself how much you know and don't know.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And then of course being told the correct answers so that you can compare your answers to the correct answers and doing this frequently and ideally very soon after being exposed to the material. That's one of the key things that I keep coming back to again and again here, because it's something that frankly was not done while I was in school. for whatever reason.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I promise to make this fairly brief because I've covered learning and so-called neuroplasticity before on this podcast. For those of you that have heard those discussions, this will serve as a refresher. For those of you that have not heard those discussions, this will be thorough enough for you to be able to digest all the rest of today's information.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And I think that's largely because when people hear the word testing, they think of evaluation. And if anything, at least in the United States, over the last 30 years, but in particular over the last 15 years, there's been this tendency to shift away from formal evaluation. I personally believe that one can learn in many different styles and many different contexts.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I, of course, as a university professor, believe that for certain topics, in particular science and medicine and health, but other topics as well, of course, that formal rigorous coursework is by far the best way to learn information for me.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
But that regardless of whether or not you're learning just from YouTube or you're learning from podcasts or you're learning from books or you're learning from the school of life, as it were, from experience that testing as a form of studying is absolutely key. And gosh, there's such a beautiful body of research.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
In fact, I'll link to several studies, including a review entitled, Testing Enhances Learning, a review of the literature, as well as a beautiful article, Test Enhanced Learning, which gets into this. And there's a wonderful book about this that I'll also provide a link to in the show note captions.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
all of course, authored by researchers who have worked squarely in this field and compare the data on testing as a studying tool to other forms of studying and learning. So it's a really impressive literature that I do believe we all should have known about. And that's why I'm passing it on to you now.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Now, before we wrap up, I want to make sure that I emphasize some of the other key components to studying and learning that have nothing to do with testing as a studying tool. And those are the role of emotion, the role of story, and the role of what's called interleaving. Now, in terms of emotion, I think we all inherently understand that more emotionally-laden experiences
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
are remembered more durably. We tend not to forget them. In fact, this is the basis of things like PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. It is the reality that one trial learning that is exposure to something and never forgetting it occurs very readily when the thing that we're exposed to is negative or has a very heavy negative emotional salience.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So it could be something we read or something we see, Sometimes it's something that happens to us. I don't like the idea of that, but this is true. Your nervous system is wired such, neuroplasticity is such that stressful experiences, because they deploy such massive amounts of adrenaline, epinephrine, as well as other neuromodulators,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
allow very quickly for the milieu, the environment of the neural circuits that led up to that experience to strengthen their connections with one trial, so-called one trial learning. This is why, sadly, although at the same time from an adaptive perspective, we say, fortunately, if you were to step outside today and God forbid, see somebody get hit by a car, you would remember that.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Neuroplasticity is this incredible feature of your nervous system, which of course includes your brain and your spinal cord, which is the ability for your nervous system to change in response to experience. So any form of learning involves neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity, we sometimes hear as neuroplasticity, two words, or neuroplasticity. Those are the same thing, essentially.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Chances are you would remember that forever. Now, that does not mean that the emotional components of that memory necessarily going to stay within you.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
There are tools for the treatment of PTSD, such as the different ones that come to mind are, you know, systematic exposure therapy, where you're re-exposed to that idea or memory, sometimes even circumstance with of course the support of a trained professional, typically a psychiatrist or psychologist. And the emotional load of that experience is gradually
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
uncoupled from your memory of the experience. There's things like EMDR, there are pharmacologic approaches. Some of these are combined with the sorts of things I've described. I've done entire episodes about stress and PTSD. Again, you can find those at hubermanlab.com by putting stress PTSD into the search function.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
However, we know that it is the same neuromodulators, mainly epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed at massive amounts in those moments where something very stressful happens that allows the neural circuits that led up to the circumstance, as well as the neural circuits that encode that visual scene and scenes like it, or sounds like it to be locked in and linked to the stress response.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Now, what this is really all saying is that negative stuff is remembered typically the first time and every time and very durably over time. as compared to positive experiences, which as far as peak experiences go, right, birth of your first child, a wedding, a wonderful professional or personal experience, those two can be one trial, learning and memory.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
But most things that we are exposed to are not at those extremes, either negative or positive. However, we know that any kind of story, any kind of emotional emphasis on material, either in the delivery of that material, but certainly in the way that that material is perceived by you, like getting really excited about something you want to learn, or thinking something's really awful,
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
is likely to be more readily and stably committed to your memory. And that's because of these neuromodulators like epinephrine and norepinephrine, but other neuromodulators as well, that wire those experiences into your neural circuits. Again, these neuromodulators, epinephrine, norepinephrine, we also hear about acetylcholine, dopamine, et cetera,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
They can operate at low levels and sort of background levels. They can create subtle fluctuations in mood, focus, and attention, or they can create massive shifts in mood, focus, and attention, depending on their levels, their timing, and much, much more.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
The point here is that if you're a teacher and or if you are a learner, paying attention to your internal state as you're trying to learn is very key. We've all had that teacher, that lecturer that just kind of drones things out and monotone.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
If you need to learn the material coming out of a source like that, person or otherwise, you're going to have to ramp up your level of internal attention consciously in order to bring about some emotional salience, some intensity to the way it's perceived. And you can do that just through your own thinking.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
as opposed to the situation where you have a super dynamic teacher who's telling you things with wide eyes and perhaps even cracking jokes. By the way, the teachers that crack jokes get lower teacher evaluations than those that don't crack jokes or swear. Did you know that? Teachers that crack jokes and swear, they're perceived as more likable, but they get lower overall evaluations typically.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
They're seen as less professional and therefore less good teachers by their students. That's why I try not to make too many jokes or swear in my lectures. The point being that We all have those really wonderful dynamic teachers. Yes, it's much easier to learn and remember that material.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
You still need to test yourself on it, but it's much easier to learn that material for the very reasons I stated before. It's a lesser example of more deployment of the neuromodulators in you, the learner, that is exposed to that material, okay?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
The change that underlies neuroplasticity at the level of cells, which we call neurons or nerve cells, generally involves three different mechanisms. One is the strengthening of certain connections, what we call synaptic connections. Synapses are the location between neurons where they communicate with one another. It's actually a gap between the neurons. is technically called the synaptic cleft.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So emotion matters, so much so that in a beautiful review about learning and memory from the great James McGaugh, one of the luminaries in modern neuroscience and psychology of memory, He talked about a medieval practice, this is pretty wild, whereby people and kids, kids are people of course, but adults and kids were taught information and then thrown, literally thrown into cold water. Why?
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
To deploy adrenaline and consolidate memory of the material they were exposed to. Now, I know we've covered deliberate cold exposure on this podcast before. No, I'm not saying you need to do a cold plunge after being exposed to new material, but guess what?
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
They were doing that many hundreds of years ago and it makes sense logically based on all our understanding of the neurobiology underlying things like PTSD, underlying emotion-laden memory formation and consolidation and our ability to remember things that were emotionally laden much better than things that were less emotionally laden.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So if you want to take a cold shower after learning some material or even better testing yourself mentally on that material, while in a cold shower or cold plunge, you certainly can. Just don't stay in there too long. Use best practices. If you want to know what those best practices are for deliberate cold exposure, you can check out our deliberate cold exposure newsletter at hubermanlab.com.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
It's completely zero cost. You don't even need to sign up. You simply go to newsletter in the menu tab and you can find that PDF. And now, because you are becoming proficient in an understanding of neuroplasticity and learning and testing and neuromodulators like epinephrine, yes, drinking caffeine will increase your levels of epinephrine.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Not strikingly so, but enough that it probably helps you learn things a little bit better. Should you drink the coffee after? Listen, that's getting a little bit too down in the details. The most important components to learning are that you be alert so that you can attend, so you can pay attention to the material you're trying to learn and then testing yourself later.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And of course the other component, which is getting sufficient amounts of great sleep each night. And I highly recommend doing NSDR. I mentioned gap effects before. Those are very, very cool. I just used another one now. And the final tool for studying that I believe is not discussed enough and is a bit counterintuitive.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Now, one of the most important things that you're going to learn today is that learning, that is the best learning practices are not intuitive. So before we dive in, keep in mind that whatever you believe about how best to learn for you is probably incorrect.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So it's a fun one to just mention and that perhaps you can explore in your own studying and learning adventures is interleaving of information. This one's kind of wild, actually. It turns out that if your instructor or you takes information about something that they're trying to teach you or you're trying to learn, maybe it's piano, maybe it's neuroscience, maybe it's how to learn better.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And every once in a while throws in a little anecdote about something, let's just say, or mention something about the Olympics or incorporate something that seems pseudo random because it's not actually related to the material you're trying to learn.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Turns out that that acts not as a gap in the same sense that gap effects, which are times in which you do nothing in order to get more repetitions of the material that you just heard in your hippocampus, but rather those breaks of interleaving information, not just getting a steady barrage, like drinking from a fire hose of new information from start to finish,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
turn out to enhance overall learning ability. Probably, we think, at a mechanistic level, because the neural circuits are able to generate more repetition, similar to gap effects. But actually, in a very interesting way, also because,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
It's a gap. And within that gap, chemicals are passed across that gap that allow one neuron to activate other neurons or many neurons to activate many other neurons or to inhibit the activity of other neurons. Okay. One form of neuroplasticity is the strengthening of connections between neurons. Another form of neuroplasticity is the weakening of connections between neurons.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
by injecting other information that seems totally unrelated, random or pseudo random, it allows the brain areas that are responsible for encoding information to take whatever new information you're learning and to incorporate it with existing knowledge or even distantly related knowledge. So does this mean that you should learn math and history in the same lecture?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Well, I think that might be a bit overwhelming, kind of like drinking from two fire hoses. Here we're talking about interleaving challenging information that's new to you
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
with little anecdotes, little bits of information that perhaps are new to you but don't require a lot of challenge, which is, of course, why every once in a while I throw in a little anecdote about my bulldog or learning neuroanatomy or something of that sort.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
It's not just to provide a break, it's to provide examples that are related, but not central to the material that we've been talking about today, which is all about how to study and learn optimally. Okay, so I realize that many of you are not students any longer, although some of you are, but in many ways, we are all students.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
We are all constantly being exposed to all sorts of information out in the world. Goodness knows. Thank goodness we don't remember it all. But there is, of course, information that we would like to remember, that we would really like to consolidate in our memory and be able to have some mastery over.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Earlier, I said I would distinguish between unskilled, skilled mastery and virtuosity, and I'll do that now. Unskilled, of course, means that we have limited understanding, let alone ability to use information. Skilled typically means we know and can recognize and use information. in basic ways or even advanced ways.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Mastery typically means that we have close to the full depth of knowledge in a given area and that we can use it pretty flexibly. And virtuosity, at least my definition of virtuosity is where we actually have such mastery of material
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
that we can use it in ways that we still don't even know how we can use, meaning that we can inject elements or we even invite elements of uncertainty and kind of spontaneity into the use of that material. Here, I'm thinking of great musicians, I'm thinking of great athletes where,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
They know all the plays, they know all the moves, it's all scripted into their nervous system and they can deploy those at any time.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So they have real mastery, but in order to display their incredible abilities, their virtuosity, they actively invite in the X factor, the uncertainty such that sometimes they find themselves playing their instrument or singing or performing athletically or mathematically or what have you in ways that even surprise them. And that of course is a lot to expect of ourselves.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I think most of us would be content to have skill and mastery of the things that we care about. And you know, should we achieve virtuosity, then wonderful.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
But one of the main points of today's discussion was to arm you with an understanding of neuroplasticity in the context of studying and learning, to really understand that so much of learning stably and consolidating information over time is to offset the forgetting process.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And that testing is not just a tool for evaluating our knowledge, but rather a tool for evaluating and reinforcing and building our knowledge. Put differently, that testing is an excellent tool, if not the best tool for studying. And I think that's an important reframe that others have brought about and that I really want to highlight, underline and boldface during today's discussion.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
It's one that I certainly wish I had applied more in my educational trajectory. And it's one that I plan to deploy further in my seeking out of new knowledge in terms of the podcast and neuroscience, but in other areas of my life as well, because from the existing literature and hopefully from the way it was presented to you today, you probably realize that it is near infinite, if not infinite,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
that we can apply testing as a tool for studying, self-testing, testing of others, using testing as a way to really probe what we know and don't know and to really offset that forgetting process. And in that sense, it is really nicely aligned with what we know about neuroplasticity. And it's also something that we can use freely and that you can use covertly
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And yet a third form of plasticity, which is often discussed in the media, but is very rare actually, in the nervous system, especially the adult nervous system of humans, is neurogenesis, or the addition of new neurons.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
that you can apply in your own seeking out of knowledge and new skills of all kinds, classroom or otherwise. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. Another terrific zero cost way to support us is to follow the podcast on both Spotify and Apple.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five star review. Please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
to exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
If you're not already following me on social media, I'm Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, formerly known as Twitter, Threads, Facebook and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I cover science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the Huberman Lab podcast.
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Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media channels. If you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, our Neural Network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter. that has protocols, which are one to three page PDFs that describe things like optimizing your sleep, how to optimize your dopamine, deliberate cold exposure.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
We have a foundational fitness protocol that describes resistance training, sets and reps, and all of that, as well as cardiovascular training that's supported by the scientific research. And we have protocols related to neuroplasticity and learning.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Again, you can find all that at completely zero cost by going to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the right corner, scroll down to newsletter, you put in your email, and we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion, all about how to study and learn. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Let's just get this out of the way upfront because the addition of new neurons, again, grabs so much attention in media articles, but it's responsible for a near trivial amount of the sort of neuroplasticity that is important for today's discussion, or frankly, for most all discussions.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
It is true you have a specialized set of neurons in your olfactory bulb that are responsible for smell, as well as a specialized set of neurons in the so-called dentate gyrus of your hippocampus, an area of the brain that's important for memory, in which new neurons appear to be added throughout the lifespan. But this is not the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Rather, the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans is the strengthening of existing connections and the weakening of existing connections or the formation of new connections between already existing neurons, not new neurons, okay?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Now, the removal or weakening of connections between neurons being an important component of neuroplasticity is very important for sake of today's discussion. I want to emphasize that when we hear about weakening of connections, we often think, well, that means forgetting, or that means the brain is getting less good.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
However, so much of the neuroplasticity that underlies, for instance, the acquisition of a new motor skill is actually the reflection of removal of connections. So we don't want to project any kind of value onto a discussion about adding new connections, removing new connections. Let's just leave it at this level mechanistically.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
When you hear about neuroplasticity, just know that it could be the consequence of strengthening of connections as well as weakening of connections. and that neither strengthening of connections in the nervous system nor weakening of connections can map directly to the formation or removal of say memories or information. Just know that these are the important mechanisms.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
In fact, if you look at a baby, that is let's say, I don't know, nine months old, their motor skills are not terrific typically compared to the motor skills that that child will have when they are six or seven years old. Just look at a kid trying to eat spaghetti or something of that sort or eat anything when they're a small baby versus a toddler versus a young child versus
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And I confess this was humbling for me as well when I started to dive into this literature, because as somebody who was a student for many years and in some sense still considers himself a student of science, and health information because of this podcast.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
an adolescent or teen, despite the poor table manners of some adolescents and teens and some adults for that matter, they are still exhibiting far more precise motor movements than they did as an infant, of course. And believe it or not,
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
The improvement in motor coordination that one observes in humans and other species for that matter, from birth until the adolescence and teen years and adult years is largely the reflection of the removal, that's right, the removal of as opposed to the formation of neural connections. However, the neural connections that remain become much more robust. They become much more reliable, okay?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So that's the mechanistic backdrop for everything that we're going to talk about today, which is how to study and learn. And as I mentioned earlier in my introduction, most of learning and remembering new material is about offsetting the forgetting process that naturally occurs anytime we hear new information.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So in keeping with what will ultimately reveal itself to be the dominant theme of today's discussion right now, and for reasons that will become clear later, I want you to take a brief quiz. Now, the moment people hear quiz or test, typically it spikes their adrenaline, they start feeling stressed, but don't worry, you're going to keep your answers to yourself.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And you're doing this for a very specific purpose. Here's my question. This is a two question quiz. How many different ways mechanistically speaking does neuroplasticity occur? Is it one mechanism, two mechanisms or three mechanisms? Or is it four or five? Okay, can you name in your head two of the three major changes that the nervous system can undergo which are reflective of neuroplasticity?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Okay, so the answer to question was, is that there are three different modes of neuroplasticity, as you recall, or as you may not have been able to recall. And by the way, if you were not able to recall the three different modes of neuroplasticity or mechanisms underlying neuroplasticity, that is fine.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And certainly as somebody who still teaches university courses, both to medical students and graduate students and to undergraduate students at Stanford, I thought I understood the whole teaching and learning process, but I too learned that it is anything but intuitive. In fact, most of what we believe about the best ways to study, are absolutely false.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
As you'll soon realize, recognizing the errors in your information retention is another critical and very useful way to retain more information, even if you got the answer wrong or you didn't know. In fact, especially if you got the answer wrong or you didn't know.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So the three ways are the strengthening of neural connections, second, the weakening of neural connections, and third, through neurogenesis, the addition of new neurons. Why did I provide this quiz? Why did I test you?
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Well, as you'll soon learn, if you look across the total body of research on how best to study and learn, it involves doing exactly what we just did, which is to periodically stop and test yourself on the material that you learned. Testing is not just a way of evaluating what knowledge you've acquired and which knowledge you have not managed to acquire.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
It also turns out to be the best tool for offsetting forgetting of any kind. And I'll go into the data that supports that statement in a moment. So yes, today we're going to get a little bit meta in the sense that we're going to be learning about optimal studying strategies and applying those as we go through this podcast.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
And no, there will not be a test at the end, although you're welcome to give yourself a test at the end. I'm going to provide you with an excellent zero cost, very fast tool that you can use to evaluate your knowledge and your ability to study and learn better as a consequence of having listened to this podcast versus had you not listened to this podcast.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
So if ever there was an incentive to listen to the end, There it is. Okay, let's talk about some of the other practical aspects of studying and learning. I know a lot of you out there who want to learn and want to come up with the best studying strategies are trying to think about how to structure your day or how much to study or when to study.
Huberman Lab
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning
Let's get the most important things out of the way first. Neuroplasticity and learning, that is converting your studying efforts into retention of knowledge is a two-step process. You've probably heard about active engagement. That's just a fancy set of words for focus, for really attending to the information that you're trying to learn.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
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. My guest today is Dr. Stacey Sims. Dr. Stacey Sims is an exercise physiologist and a nutrition scientist and a world expert in all things training and nutrition, specifically for women.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Let's get people – sorry to interrupt. Let's get people up to speed on RPE because this is a term that's starting to circulate more outside the physical training community and to the broader kind of recreational exerciser community, which I consider myself part of. Me too now. I mean, I train regularly and have for years, but I'm not an athlete. I don't get paid to train and so forth.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So reps in reserve, perceived effort. Let me just explain this. I think probably 95% of our listenership has never heard these terms.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So eight repetitions in good form and the person doing the exercise could, in theory... They really dug in there, grit their teeth, could complete two more repetitions in good form before hitting failure, the inability to move the weight anymore in good form.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Okay. But they're stopping at eight, so they have two reps in reserve.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
between men and women and their needs in terms of nutrition and training. But she is also exquisitely skilled at highlighting the data showing that there are specific areas of nutrition and fitness for which women and men differ and women have specific needs. So today you will learn what those are.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
As opposed to looking at, say, percentage of one repetition maximum. Yeah. Saying you're going to move 70% of your one repetition maximum for six repetitions. Seems like that's a great thing as well, but it's a little bit more complicated because you need to know your one repetition maximum.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Doing one repetition maximums can be dangerous if you're not skilled in that, especially with compound movements like squats and deadlifts. Okay. So is there an across-the-board recommendation for most people that they should – generally train their sets in good form to failure, to leave a couple reps in reserve? What do you suggest for, let's say women, but this could also pertain to men?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Interesting. Lots to talk about in terms of exercise, but before we move on, if the bad situation is a woman fasting, drinking caffeine, and training intensely, but as you told us, not as intensely as she would be able to otherwise, what's the solution? I imagine that solution involves ingesting some fuel.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
and you will learn how to apply those specific protocols such that by the end of today's episode, you'll be armed with a tremendous amount of new knowledge about the biological mechanisms and the specific do's and do nots that can guide you towards your female-specific health and fitness goals.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
What is a good example of a, you know, a pre-training meal, if you will? And we could put some variation on that for people with different, you know, tendencies towards omnivore or vegan or whatever. But what is the timing of that meal relative to training that works best? And I'm assuming there's some flexibility there.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I've heard of people like you. Yeah. Meaning I tend to move slowly in the morning.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Okay, so we're similar in that way. Yeah. So how do you square that?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
As a neuroscientist, I find it so interesting that at least some of what you're talking about with this pre-workout meal and perhaps most of it relates to how ingesting those calories impacts the brain, protects those cispeptin neurons. And we'll talk more about cispeptin, very interesting peptide.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Maui Nui Venison.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
As opposed to saying, okay, you need X number of calories because you're going to burn X number of calories.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Which is a very different conversation. Here what we're talking about is the neural aspects of being able to generate intensity, also blunt cortisol, and get the most out of training without putting the body into kind of an emergency state.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Right. And it has its own kind of elements of being laced with neuroticism about calorie counting and then that can drift easily into the realm of eating disorders. I did an episode about eating disorders some years ago and as I was researching that episode, I learned that people with eating disorders, women and men, especially anorexia, become like calorie calculators.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Their eyes and their brain just are constantly evaluating the caloric load of food. And it can be obviously very intrusive. It's also the most deadly of all the psychiatric conditions. So that's a long way from hopefully what we're talking about here. But there's the opportunity for drift whenever talking about calorie counting in and out. Of course- believe in the laws of thermodynamics.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
calories in, calories out. But I love what you're describing here as getting the brain in a mode that the brain and body are protected so that one can invest in that high intensity exercise and get the adaptations that one wants, but not send everything down this pathway of just becoming a computer of how much am I exercising? What did I burn? What did I earn? Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
As long as we're talking about food and food intake relative to training, What is the suggested post-training window in which one should either avoid or make sure they get nutrition? Meaning how long does one have after, let's say, a resistance training session of about an hour?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It seems to me that's what most people are doing if they're investing in resistance training, maybe plus or minus a what? 20 minutes. And they're hitting those high intensity sets where they have maybe just one or two repetitions in reserve, maybe going to failure on a few of those sets. What do you recommend women eat after they train?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Maui Nui Venison is the most nutrient-dense and delicious red meat available. I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts and with several expert guests on this podcast about the fact that most of us should be seeking to get about one gram of high quality protein per pound of body weight every day.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So women should try and get 30 or as much as 40, maybe 50 grams of protein, depending on their age, post-training, within an hour of training.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
men seem to have a longer window. They could wait an hour, two hours, maybe even three hours before ingesting protein. What about carbohydrate?
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for more than 10 years now, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast. To be clear, I don't take AG1 because they're a sponsor. Rather, they are a sponsor because I take AG1. In fact, I take AG1 once and often twice every single day, and I've done that since starting way back in 2012.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Not only does that protein provide critical building blocks for things like muscle repair and synthesis, but also for overall metabolism and health. Maui Nui venison has an extremely high quality protein per calorie ratio. so that you can get that one gram of protein per pound of body weight easily and without ingesting an excess of calories. Also, Maui Nui venison is absolutely delicious.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
There is so much conflicting information out there nowadays about what proper nutrition is, but here's what there seems to be a general consensus on.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Whether you're an omnivore, a carnivore, a vegetarian or a vegan, I think it's generally agreed that you should get most of your food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources, which allows you to eat enough but not overeat, get plenty of vitamins and minerals, probiotics and micronutrients that we all need for physical and mental health.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Now, I personally am an omnivore and I strive to get most of my food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources. But the reason I still take AG1 once and often twice every day is that it ensures I get all of those vitamins, minerals, probiotics, etc. But it also has adaptogens to help me cope with stress.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's basically a nutritional insurance policy meant to augment, not replace quality food. So by drinking a serving of AG1 in the morning and again in the afternoon or evening, I cover all of my foundational nutritional needs. And I, like so many other people that take AG1, report feeling much better in a number of important ways, such as energy levels, digestion, sleep and more.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So while many supplements out there are really directed towards obtaining one specific outcome, AG1 is foundational nutrition designed to support all aspects of well-being related 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.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
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. At some point, there was a lot of discussion about training fasted burns more body fat. I think now most people accept that that's not the case, that perhaps the percentage of...
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
fat as fuel is increased when one trains fasted, but that overall in terms of loss of body fat. it doesn't matter if you train fasted or you train fed.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Okay. I think that can't be stated enough by experts like you. That doesn't mean that if one prefers to train fasted or with a minimum of food in their gut that they can't do that. I like to train fasted, but what I'm hearing is that women should probably ingest at least some protein, high quality protein, and maybe drink the protein in a protein shake form if they don't want to ingest solid food.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I love their venison steaks, their ground venison, I love their bone broths, and I love their jerky, which is extremely convenient when you're traveling. Those Maui Nui venison jerky sticks have 10 grams of high quality protein per stick at just 55 calories. While Maui Nui offers the highest quality meat available, their supplies are limited.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I know some men that basically don't eat all day and then eat one meal in the evening and they'll train in the morning. That's inconceivable to me because within an hour or so of training, I'm hungry, which brings to mind what we mean when we say training. I'm a big believer in people, everybody getting ideally to
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
or three resistance training sessions in per week and two, maybe three cardiovascular training sessions per week. That would be ideal. One could potentially do more, probably not a whole lot less before you run into long-term health issues that you could offset. But I think most people can fit those in.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And I'm very frankly delighted that nowadays there's such a push for women and men to resistance train. That wasn't the case when I was growing up. I recall taking my sister to the gym for the first time and I think she was the only woman in the gym when we were in high school, except for a few female bodybuilders. And she said, well, I don't want to look like that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And I said, well, don't worry, you're not going to look like that. But now you go to a gym and women are lifting weights, men are lifting weights.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's terrific.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah, it's awesome. As I mentioned before, I've had female training partners and they kill it. Yeah. It's a lot of fun to have a female training partner also because – not only is it cool to see the progress they can make really quickly, which surprises them often, you know, I think a lot of women think that, okay, it's going to require external androgens or it's going to, you know, and, and what,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
you pointed out that there are some barriers to women putting on mass quickly. I think I've noticed that strength increases can come really quickly. Why is that?
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Responsible management of the access deer population on the island of Maui means that they will not go beyond harvest capacity. So signing up for a membership is the best way to ensure access to their high quality meat. If you'd like to try Maui Nui Venison, you can go to mauinuivenison.com slash Huberman to get 20% off your membership or first order.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
You're still doing that?
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
whenever somebody, male or female, is concerned about growing too big too fast, I always remind them that resistance training is unique among different types of exercise in that because of the blood flow to the muscle during the exercise session, the so-called pump, you get a window, a transient window, but a window nonetheless
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
of what the hypertrophy could look like if you do everything else correctly in terms of recovery. So provided that the size of the muscle during the training session is not aversive to you, you're okay. You're good. Which is unique among training. It's not like when you go running, you get a sense of being much faster. You actually get the opposite effect.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
You feel the burn in your lungs and the pain of hitting the wall of your limits. And then hopefully if the adaptation takes place, then you can push past that next time. But with resistance training, you get literally a physical picture and a somatic feeling for what that hypertrophy could look like.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So we've been talking about training, but we haven't really spelled out what you would suggest a novice... perhaps an intermediate resistance training, cardiovascular training program would look like in broad terms. I realize we don't have time here to get into all the nitty-gritty details.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
You've written about this elsewhere and we'll refer people to those terrific resources in the show note captions. But what would you like to see women doing? And maybe we can break up the age brackets because it sounds like this is something that is resurfacing again and again here. Women, let's say...
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Again, that's mauinuivenison.com slash Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. Now, I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each night.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
30 and younger women 31 to let's say 40 and then let's say 41 to 60 and then maybe 61 and on in terms of how many sessions of resistance training per week is it whole body training how many sessions of cardiovascular training and what sorts of examples could could you give
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And just to remind people, compound movements, multi-joint movements, squats, deadlifts, chin-ups, rows, overhead presses, bench presses, et cetera, as opposed to isolation movements where only one joint is moving. Yeah. And for everybody in all those age ranges that you describe,
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
One of the best ways to ensure a great night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
are you suggesting they train the same muscle groups three or four times per week, or they do some sort of split where it's upper body, lower body, take a day off, or upper body, take a day off, lower body, take a day off, whatever might work for them?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Even some interesting literature about emphasizing some unilateral movements as people get older, not just dual limb movements or dual limb simultaneous movements. You always want to train both sides of your body, folks. So if I understand correctly, younger women should train to failure, try and generate strength and hypertrophy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
As women get older, they should emphasize more strength training, leave some repetitions in reserve, but train heavier. It makes so much sense what you're saying. Because what we know about the nervous system as we age is that there's some atrophy or at least some weakening of neuromuscular connections and the upper motor neurons in the brain that control the
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
neuromuscular connections in the spinal cord out to the muscle. There's something really sticky about this idea in terms of longevity that I don't think anyone else has ever said.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
In addition to working at Stanford and with numerous professional athletic teams, Dr. Sims has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed studies on exercise physiology.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Eight Sleep makes it incredibly easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment by allowing you to program the temperature of your mattress cover at the beginning, middle, and end of the night. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for well over three years now, and it has completely transformed my sleep for the better.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
For women who are not on hormone replacement therapy, and we did a previous episode about perimenopause, menopause, and hormone replacement therapy, but if it comes up again and again today, that would be wonderful because these are important under-discussed topics.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
For women that are not on hormone replacement therapy who decide to train heavier, maybe do a bit more training volume, not train to failure, they're making sure to not let their cortisol spike too much by making sure they have some pre-workout nutrition, some post-workout nutrition. Would they be wise to be very careful in how much cardiovascular exercise they add to that?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Meaning there seems to always be this risk of overtraining. And as you pointed out, for various reasons, cultural reasons, historical reasons, around exercise. My observation is that most women, unless they know better, default to cardiovascular exercise as opposed to resistance training.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So if a woman in her 40s, late 30s to let's say 50, is doing two to four sessions of resistance training workouts per week, and they also really like cardio or they feel they want to or should do cardio, should they be careful about how much cardio they're doing? And is there a best form of cardio? Should they really emphasize the high-intensity interval training? Should they avoid zone two?
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation pod cover, the Pod 4 Ultra. The Pod 4 Ultra has improved cooling and heating capacity, higher fidelity sleep tracking technology, and it also has snoring detection that remarkably will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve your airflow and stop your snoring.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
We should probably also define for people what zone two is if they don't already know.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Is this things like soul cycle as well? Yeah. Okay. I've never done any of these. Yeah. But I imagine there's a lot of spinning, a lot of moving, a lot of sweating, and a lot of quote-unquote calories burned emphasis.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
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. Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I have family members who are women who are thin because they love to walk and they just walk a ton and they eat well and enough. but they are resistant to resistance training. And if they do pick up a weight, it's usually some very light dumbbells, do a few curls, a couple of tricep extensions, and aren't really leaning into the higher intensity work. I think this is pretty common.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And my observation is that it's common, not because... They couldn't be incentivized to do the higher intensity work. But that learning the complex compound movements, like how to squat properly or even leg press properly, deadlift properly can be a bit overwhelming, especially when one walks into a gym. This is true for men too.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Like all this stuff, all this equipment, all these bodies and these people look like they know what they're doing. It's like if I were to go into an advanced like kitchen or – symphony and all these instruments I don't know how to play. So what's the best line of attack for somebody who really wants to overcome this longevity barrier? Because clearly resistance training, proper nutrition work.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And the cardiovascular exercise piece is a little bit more intuitive. Walking, you do it faster, you're jogging, you do it faster, you're running. The bike, the SoulCycle class, et cetera, it's easier in terms of the mechanics. One can still get hurt, but it's just more straightforward.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Is there a way that in the absence of a budget for a personal trainer that somebody can learn how to do these movements and, as you said, ease into them over the course of even up to four months in a way that they can be confident that they're unlikely to get hurt and really build up their capacity to do real work that can benefit them?
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Waking Up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and more. I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old, and it made a profound impact on my life.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I'm a big fan of machines, especially plate-loaded machines, but machines just create the close to correct or correct arc of movement. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah, exactly. And to really spend the time adjusting the seat height, adjusting the various pins on the machine, not just the weight, in order to make sure that one gets the best range of motion. I think this is something small, but that is significant in terms of its impact.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
People just plop down in a machine, especially if you're working in with somebody and feel, especially beginners will feel pressured to move quickly and they won't adjust the seat height. And so it's just all wrong for them. And all it takes is a little bit of time to, you know, and ask people, you know, how to adjust the machines.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So you've mentioned polarized training. If I understand correctly, this would be a woman doing three or four days of high intensity resistance training for 45 to 60 or 45 to 75 minutes per session. And then at the opposite extreme, maybe just walking a lot or jogging a lot.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So is that what you're talking about, polarized training, as opposed to these other forms of training where it's designed to get people sweating like crazy, breathing hard for long periods of time, but neither putting them in the landscape of inducing muscle strength adaptations and hypertrophy adaptations, nor really taxing the cardiovascular system enough to create an increase in longevity, for instance.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And by now, there are thousands of quality peer-reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our focus, managing stress and anxiety, improving our mood, and much more. In recent years, I started using the Waking Up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I'd like to take a quick break to let you know that the Huberman Lab team has launched a new podcast with host Dr. Andy Galpin. Andy is an expert in exercise science and human performance, and has long been a fan favorite on the Huberman Lab podcast.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
This new podcast is called Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin, and it dives into topics such as how to build muscle and strength, how to improve your cardiovascular health, and how to optimize recovery and sleep for performance and much more. Andy is an absolutely fantastic educator and true expert on all things human performance.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I know you'll thoroughly enjoy his new podcast and learn a ton of useful knowledge from it. So please check it out and give it a subscribe wherever you're watching or listening to podcasts now. Again, the podcast is called Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin. Let's talk about the menstrual cycle and how that impacts training at the level of psychology and physiology. And of course, the two are linked.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
They're inextricably linked. For instance, is there a particular phase of the menstrual cycle where a woman should expect that motivation and or recovery would be more challenging?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So this is women who have, quote unquote, normal menstrual cycles, human ureic.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
She has not only evaluated existing protocols for nutrition and fitness that are specific to women versus men, but she has also developed many new protocols that are now in practice with professional sports teams, but that can also serve people who are generally interested in fitness and longevity, and in doing so, the general public. The tools that Dr. Sims shares with us today
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And this is probably because these studies are being done on university campuses with college undergraduate women.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Which typically is in a given age range.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits, but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice. What I and so many other people love about the waking up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from, and those meditations are of different durations.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So for most women in the weeks before their period, they're going to feel more robust except right up until the point of menstruation or the inverse. Yes.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Got it, okay.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So broadly speaking, the luteal phase is associated with more cortisol.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
more kind of baseline levels of stress. Would it make sense for a woman to try and offset some of that with a bit more nutrition during that phase, a bit more perhaps complex carbohydrate? We know that some complex carbohydrate can blunt some of the cortisol response, maybe just even a little bit more attention to eating.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice, both from the perspective of novelty. You never get tired. tired of those meditations. There's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation. And you can always fit meditation into your schedule, even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
How hard should a woman push through the mental and maybe even physical resistance to train less or not train during a given phase of the cycle?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I also really like doing yoga nidra or what is sometimes called non-sleep deep rest for about 10 or 20 minutes because it is a great way to restore mental and physical vigor without the tiredness that some people experience when they wake up from a conventional nap. If you'd like to try the Waking Up app, please go to wakingup.com slash Huberman, where you can access a free 30-day trial.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
On the flip side, if a woman is feeling spectacularly good, should she just really push it as hard as she can? Yeah. Is there anything about the relationship between the hormone fluctuations of the menstrual cycle and feeling really, really great that training hard can somehow disrupt the cycle? And this is actually kind of the old lore, probably myth, I would imagine, that –
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
high intensity resistance training is somehow detrimental to female hormone cycles. I don't think there's any evidence for that, but I hear that from time to time. Why do you think that myth came to be? Why do you think it propagates and what can we do to extinguish it if in fact it's not true?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Wow. Very interesting history there. Is it true then that if a woman maintains either caloric balance with her basically eating enough to support her energy output or even a slight caloric surplus, that it's unlikely that her periods will cease even if she's training very hard and very often?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So it basically boils down to calories in, calories out.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Again, that's wakingup.com slash Huberman to access a free 30-day trial. And now for my discussion with Dr. Stacey Sims. Dr. Stacey Sims, welcome.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
appetite, body temperature, and hormones are very tightly linked.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Far too tightly for us to disentangle all of those in a single conversation here. But as you're describing the urgent need for women to fuel enough with the proper fuels, to train hard enough to stimulate the correct adaptations that they need, I imagine that the shift in appetite
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
and body temperature that occurs across the menstrual cycle is also going to play into this, meaning there will be phases of the menstrual cycle where women will be just naturally less motivated to eat enough carbohydrate, enough protein in order to get the most out of their training.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
What phases of the menstrual cycle are those so that women can pay particular attention to make sure that they're fueling enough?
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Our podcast, and I put out a lot of content about nutrition, fitness. cold exposure, heat exposure, hydration, topics that are very near and dear to your heart and for which you have a ton of expertise, but for which you have an extra degree of expertise as it relates to females specifically.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Let's talk about one of the many third rails of discussions online, which is birth control.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And we need to define exactly what type of birth control we're talking about because there are so many different forms.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
There are IUDs, there are the copper IUDs, there's the ring, there's the, you know. Let's talk about oral contraceptives that... are designed to prevent ovulation. So this is quote unquote the pill. So we're being, let's for now limit the conversation to that so that there isn't confusion.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Share with us, if you will, your thoughts on these, how they impact any of the things that we're talking about or anything else from that, for that matter.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Please.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So I'm excited to talk to you today because very often I will get questions in the comment section on social media or on YouTube Was this study done in both men and women? How does it differ for men versus women? And on and on. And I rarely, if ever, have answers, but you have answers.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
OCs.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Or a contraceptive. And do you recall what the direction of the effect was on the amygdala? For those that don't recall, the amygdala bilateral brain structure, meaning one on each side of your brain – literally means almond in Latin, it's almond shaped, and it's part of a larger network associated with threat detection.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Sometimes it's described the locus of fear in the brain, but it's involved in a lot of other things too, both positive valence and negative valence, but nonetheless is part of the threat detection system, elevated levels of arousal, which is why it's often discussed in the context of fear, anxiety, et cetera.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Great. So just to kick things off, because this is a question I get really often, fasting.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Intermittent fasting.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
We need to distinguish between the two, of course. Yeah. Perhaps the most common question I get as it relates to males versus females is intermittent fasting or time-restricted feeding, as it's sometimes called, an eight-hour feeding window, a six-hour feeding window, a 10-hour feeding window. Is that something that perhaps differs in terms of its impact and how well it works for men versus women?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Is there any evidence that other forms of female contraception can be, let's just say, problematic for the types of things we're discussing today?
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Or IUD, copper IUD?
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Before we got started today, you mentioned some very interesting pioneering studies on evaluating menstrual blood itself as a window into some larger themes about what's going on physiologically, maybe even psychologically. Now might be a good time to just touch into that. We can always return to it again later. But let me just ask it more directly.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
What are some things that can be measured directly from menstrual blood that are informative for women? And it sounds like there's a new generation of at-home tests that might be interesting and informative for them to think about.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Can we talk about PCOS for a moment? Most people have heard of it by now, but polycystic ovarian syndrome, it's associated with typically elevated androgens. It's becoming more and more common or perhaps detected more based on better detection methods. I don't know which. The prevalence of PCOS seems to be very, very high.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
In the 80s and 90s, there was a lot of excitement in the neurobehavioral endocrinology fields, largely based on animal literature, but then expanding into human literature that certain forms of activities could change hormone patterns. Maybe even psychology. And that makes sense on the surface of it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
But is there evidence that if somebody engages in, say, high intensity training or competitive scenarios, this has been explored a lot in men, but I'm wondering if it's also been explored now in women. that androgens go up. I mean, there's been these studies, I don't know how good they are, of people on the stock exchange watching their stress fluctuations, measuring testosterone.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I think most of those studies were done in men, but other competitive scenarios, even showing, for instance, that exogenous testosterone can increase altruism in men, if men are competing for who's like donating the most money at a philanthropic event.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
But you put them in a different scenario where it's far less benevolent in goal, and then they'll, exogenous testosterone drives competitiveness towards things that are more traditionally thought of as male-male competition. In other words, it's all context dependent.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Is there anything that kind of springs to mind of interesting studies as it relates to androgens or estrogens in women athletes and as it relates to exercise?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
As we talk about menstruation, we should probably talk about iron stores and iron. Yeah. Do women need to supplement iron given that they lose iron during menstruation?
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If a woman is going to get a blood test to evaluate testosterone, estrogen, lipids, metabolic factors, et cetera, and she can only afford to do that at one point during her cycle and compare at various times, maybe every six months or once a year even at that specific time of her cycle, is there a best time in cycle to do that blood test?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And if she can add a second blood test at a different phase of the menstrual cycle, where would you place that second test?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And if she measures her hormones at those two times within the cycle, do you think that's sufficient to get... 75% plus of the relevant data.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Terrific. Caffeine. Yes. In the old days, meaning when I was a kid and not long ago. Ten years ago. Three weeks ago. Yeah. We would hear that he's... crazy statements about caffeine. It pulls calcium out of the bones. You'd hear this stuff. I did a whole episode on caffeine.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I'm a big fan of caffeine, but I do warn people that if they suffer from anxiety or they're going through a particularly stressful life event, it can raise the activity of the sympathetic arm or the autonomic nervous system. You'll feel more nervous. You're more prone to panic when you're drinking caffeine. Many people love caffeine.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I think 90% of the adult population of the world ingests some form of caffeine every single day.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Likewise, making it the most consumed drug worldwide. Is caffeine safe for women? I suspect based on what you just said that the answer will be yes. But are there case conditions where women should be cautious about their intake of caffeine independent of this anxiety thing? I mean, people probably shouldn't drink more caffeine than they can tolerate psychologically.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
No one, male, female, young or old.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Okay. I hear a lot that people who drink caffeine before a workout, you know, midway through, they're like, I don't feel good.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
For me, that just stimulates the desire for more caffeine. Or even, dare I say, a half piece of nicotine gum, which I experimented with. But I was told, and this is why I'm not going to continue to do it. Not only is it very habit-forming.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It actually is such a vasoconstrictor that I was told by a dermatologist that it's terrible for skin, even if you're not getting your nicotine by smoking, vaping, dipping, or snuffing. So this big trend now toward ingesting nicotine as a stimulant and cognitive enhancer and performance enhancer, I think people should at least be aware of the negative effects on skin.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I'll tell you that half piece of nicotine gum is... The first time you do it, it's an unbelievable experience. It's like your first real cup of coffee.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah, and dials you in. I recommend nobody do it because it feels that pleasant if you like caffeine.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Shishandra.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Oh, I should know what this is.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I should know. Well, I'm here to learn.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Shishandra.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Do you use it? Yep. Are you on it now?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Okay. You just sent people down the rabbit hole of the internet. All right. Yeah, yeah. You heard it here first, Dr. Stacey Sims. I'm going to give it a try. Because the nicotine thing is an interesting one. And there are some cognitive enhancing effects of nicotine that perhaps in people 65 and older might actually be beneficial for offsetting some forms of neurodegeneration. But
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
That needs to still be explored and researched. Don't cut that and clip it and put it out there like so. That's happened already. Very interesting. All right. Caffeine, we both agree, is great. Shashandra?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Check it out.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
All right. Will do. Cold.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
For reasons I still don't understand. People have associated me or this podcast with deliberate cold exposure. I like deliberate cold exposure in the form of a cold shower or a cold plunge or an ice bath, mostly for the effects that occur afterward, meaning more alertness, a kind of semi-euphoric buzz that goes on a long, long time.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
No, I don't think it increases metabolism significantly enough to have a meaningful difference. But the long-lasting increases in the so-called catecholamines, dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine to me are pretty impressive. And I just like the way it makes me feel. So that's the main reason I believe why people do deliberate cold exposure.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And every time I do a post about deliberate cold exposure, I get asked, understandably so, How does it affect women differently than men? And then I usually get questions about Raynaud's syndrome.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. So is there a difference in terms of how deliberate cold exposure impacts women? I have to imagine the answer is yes, given what you said earlier about vasoconstriction versus vasodilation. But deliberate cold exposure, like it, hate it. What do you think? Do you recommend it for women?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So sauna?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Hot tub.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Thank you for saying that. I'm not a big fan of infrared sauna because it doesn't get hot enough.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. You can bring an infrared light into a traditional sauna if it can tolerate the heat, but finished sauna would be what, something between 185 degrees Fahrenheit and maybe 210 if you're really heat adapted.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Oh, sorry. Yeah, you're living down in New Zealand now.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Every time I've tried to do math on the fly on this podcast in my head. I know.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
My brain's in a different processing mode.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
People can look it up.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
are applicable to fitness, to changing your body composition and to overall health. Today we discuss how hormones and hormone cycles impact nutrition and fitness needs specifically in women of different ages. We of course discuss the menstrual cycle, perimenopause and menopause, but also female specific nutrition and training as it relates to things independent of hormones.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Interesting. I didn't know that. Could you elaborate on more oxidative fibers, what that is and how it relates to metabolic flexibility?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Which is chilly.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's not warm.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I think some people might be confused by the idea of using sauna in order to reduce the hot flashes. So I'll just remind people that your brain has a set of neurons in the medial preoptic area that's sort of a thermostat, if you will, controlling core body temperature. And if you heat the surface of your body, your medial preoptic neurons say, oh, let's cool down the core of the body.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Now, if you stay in that heat too long, your body temperature will go up. But conversely, if the surface of your body is made cold, the internal milieu of your body will heat up because those medial preoptic neurons will say, oh,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
This is like putting an ice pack on the thermostat, which is what graduate students and postdocs used to do in the lab side working because it was a battle over the heater, right? Some people were in hot, some people were in cold, so it was always this business. In any event, so it's not that you disapprove of using deliberate cold exposure.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
You just recommend that women do deliberate cold exposure with temperatures that are maybe in the low 50 degree Fahrenheit range as opposed to The really, frankly, just painfully cold for anybody, you know, 38 to, you know, 50 degree temperatures.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Wow, fascinating. As a cautionary note, if anyone is going to explore Wim Hof type methods, please, please, please do not combine cyclic hyperventilation or hyperventilation of any kind with breath holds and water exposure, not even in the depth of a puddle.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
There have been drownings associated with people doing cyclic hyperventilation in various contexts, not just related to Hough breathing, but basically people who are not skilled and even some who are skilled combining cyclic hyperventilation, breath holds, and water in any form, cold or warm water. Bad idea. Just don't.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If you're going to do any kind of cyclic hyperventilation breathing, and my lab's actually published on this in a clinical trial, do it on dry land or don't do it at all. And if you're going to do deliberate cold exposure, limit your breathing to slow, deep breaths. Make sure that you're well supervised and just stay alive, please.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Cold and temperature generally is such a potent stimulus. And it's exciting that people are starting to explore this, especially the, in my opinion, the sauna work. One thing I suppose that we should discuss very briefly before we move on, since we've been talking about resistance training. we've been talking about deliberate cold exposure.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
There is evidence that doing deliberate cold exposure, not so much in the form of a cold shower, but in the form of a submersion up to the neck, post strength or resistance training, say in the four, but probably the eight hours after resistance training, because of the attenuation of the inflammatory response, which sounds like a great thing, it actually can inhibit some of the strength and hypertrophy gains that one would otherwise experience.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So if you're going to do deliberate cold exposure, Best to not do it in the eight hours or even on the same day after resistance training geared towards developing strength and hypertrophy increases. No problem to do it first. In fact, maybe even some performance enhancing effects of doing it first. There's some athletes at Stanford doing that, but just want to throw that out there.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Is there anything else you want to add to that?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Get the vasodilation.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Oh, interesting. So after a good weight training session, if one has the luxury of doing it, get into the sauna for... Up to 30 minutes. Make sure you're hydrating.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Ooh, so now we're getting into real performance enhancement. Is this true for men and for women? Yeah. Let's walk through this protocol. I like this. This has not been discussed on this podcast. Somebody does their resistance training, finishes up, drinks eight or 16 ounces of water with a little salt in it maybe, and then hops in the sauna.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
For how long?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Okay.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
No longer.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Okay. Okay.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
um the ranges that i've seen published in the finnish studies are as i recall and i'll double check these numbers 186 degrees fahrenheit up to about 210 fahrenheit um and the higher end only being for those that are heat adapted yeah one can cover their head with a towel and actually feel more comfortable because the brain is insulated the surprises people they think putting a you know something on their head would make it
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
excessively warm, but you actually are protecting your brain from some of the heat.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And this stimulates the production of more red blood cells. Okay. Which then translates to what in terms of athletic performance?
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Okay. This is why when I go to Colorado, I'm gasping for air while I do a walk, but then I come back to sea level and I feel better. My endurance is better, but some people might not experience that effect.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So this explains why when I've gone to meetings in Colorado at altitude, some people can have a drink that first night and they're perfectly fine, even though they normally live at sea level. And I'm trying to see the stairs correctly, even though I don't drink.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Very interesting. So you can use post-resistance training sauna exposure to improve performance.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Love it. Logically watertight and I'm going to give it a try.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
What other training tricks, tips do you have up your sleeve, Dr. Sims?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Do you have any favorites besides that? I delight in these and I know other people will as well. Do any come to mind? I mean, you've taught us about Shashandra, about post-training sauna exposure to improve performance by increasing red blood cell count. Is there anything else that kind of springs to mind? No pressure.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Used to be ephedrine.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So I'm old enough to remember when they would sell it as the triple stack with ephedrine. Yeah. But some people dropped dead and they took it off the market. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Did it really?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It gets... You going?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's speedy. Yeah. It's dangerous.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Should anything be done in terms of recovery to make sure that you offset that additional stress? that's achieved with this track stack.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
What about sleep? We hear so much these days about the importance of sleep for mental health, physical health, performance. I think this is a great thing, a great trend. Are there female specific requirements for sleep? that vary across the menstrual cycle and or by age or just generally, do men and women need to think about the need for sleep differently?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
That makes very good sense. We'll put a link in the show note captions to some zero-cost non-sleep deep rest yoga nidras. We've put out a couple with my voice, if you prefer another voice. I'm a big fan of the ones by Kelly Boyes, who's contributed to the Waking Up app. It also has terrific non-sleep deep rest yoga nidras out there, and there are others as well.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
You mentioned a few supplements, theanine. apigenin, which is chamomile extract. Maybe let's just have a general conversation about supplements. What's your thought on supplements? How do you place them into the landscape of nutrition? They are, after all, supplements, not replacements.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
But the word supplements, I believe, is a little bit misleading because there are food-based supplements, like a protein powder. There are supplements designed to achieve a specific outcome. And then there are supplements that are kind of a designed to be a more support for a bunch of things, kind of insurance policy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
What are some of your favorite supplements in any of those categories, specifically for women and perhaps even specifically during certain phases of the menstrual cycle and or perimenopause, menopause? I just threw about nine questions at you. All of them.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So five grams of creatine monohydrate per day, sort of typical? Three to five. Three to five?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Interesting.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Like gastric distress? Yeah.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Noted.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Sorry, I just want to stop you for a moment. As it relates to creatine, I hear two general lines of concern. One, I hear more often from women.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
My understanding is that because creatine brings water into the muscle, as well as supporting the phosphocreatine system of the brain, the water into the muscle component means, yes, people who take creatine, three to five grams per day, will gain a few pounds of body weight. That's solid body weight in the form of water within the muscle, so solid in air quotes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's water, but it's within the muscle. So they should know that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Interesting.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Okay. And this is not bloat, like water, subcutaneous water. This is water within the muscles. Correct. So it will be stored within lean tissue. Correct. And then I do hear concerns about creatine causing hair loss. My understanding is there is zero evidence for that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
There is a smidgen of evidence that it might increase dihydrotestosterone levels, but it's like one study, marginal increase, and then people linked dihydrotestosterone to hair loss. And so then the conclusion people drew was that somehow creatine increases hair loss, but you're saying zero evidence.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Okay, so we've got creatine D3, 1,000 IUs per day, 5,000 IUs. I guess it depends a little bit.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Great. Okay. So we've got creatine, vitamin D3. What are some of the other supplements that you take or that you I don't know if we say suggest, but that you perhaps suggest women consider.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If these adaptogens blunt cortisol, because certain ones do like ashwagandha, which by the way, I do think people should cycle if they're going to take it high doses, right? Because there are some issues with liver- And thyroid. And thyroid problems if people take ashwagandha at high doses for too long. So that's important to note. But
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Assuming that the adaptogens are reducing cortisol levels in addition to doing other things, is there a particular time of day or night that people should consider taking them? Should they avoid taking it early in the day? My understanding was that you want a bit of that cortisol bump early in the day, but you certainly want cortisol lower later in the day.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
What's the story with pregnancy and training? Yeah. Is there an official word on this? Assuming a woman knows that she's pregnant from the very beginning of missing a period where she's in a position to make decisions about training or not training, training at a given intensity or not, what are your recommendations?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I've been asked whether or not pregnant women can do deliberate cold exposure probably no fewer than 2,500 times on social media. And I never have an answer, but I always default to the cautious answer, which is please don't until you talk to somebody who actually has an answer. Just because it sounds like a very precarious situation, but in all honesty, I don't know.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I'm just biding time there and just saying, please go ask somebody who can give you a definitive answer.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
But probably not extreme heat.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's almost the inverse of what we know for males, which is if men want to conceive, they should avoid the sauna because we know that heat is detrimental to sperm viability in a real way. So much so that I tell... guys, if they are trying to get their partner pregnant, that they should bring an ice pack into the sauna. They should insulate that ice pack.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Don't put it directly on the scrotum for other reasons, but that the negative effects of heat on sperm are real. But there's also an interesting... It's not just a trend. There's actually some research showing that cooling the testicles leads to increases in testosterone, which is...
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
On the face of it, kind of counterintuitive because it turns out that it's about the vasoconstriction causing the subsequent increase in blood flow, increased vasodilation. So the inverse of what you just said, which is that during the heating process, the hypoxia induces more vascularization of the placenta. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So when talking about temperature, one always has to think about the surface of the body versus the brain response, as we talked about earlier. And then what's happening during the deliberate heat or deliberate cold versus what's happening after the deliberate heat or deliberate cold, right? Everything in biology is a process, not an event.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Thank you for the disclosure. I see it more as an indication of real knowledge. So thank you. This is an aspect of your training I knew a little bit about based on your publications, but I didn't realize the depth of knowledge. So we're all benefiting here, including this earlier protocol of sauna post-training. You can bet a lot of people are going to start incorporating that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I think we might need to name that. I've done this from time to time, named protocols, because people are reluctant to name them after themselves. Maybe we call that the... the SIMS protocol or something like that. Anyway, your discomfort will be other people's benefit. Now seems like a good time to address some specific questions related to the age brackets that you mentioned earlier.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
In anticipation of sitting down with you today, I asked some different women that I know, you know, if you could ask the world expert in exercise physiology, hormones, and nutrition, et cetera, as it relates to women, one question, what would it be? And one of the most common questions I got in the 50...
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
category was, what is the most efficient way for a woman older than 50 to train for the maximum healthspan and lifespan benefits?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
One-third?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Goodness gracious.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Super interesting. Two questions. Is there a protective effect of starting the eating window, and here I'm asking for both men and women, starting the eating window at, say, 11 a.m. or noon and ending it a little bit later? So not a six-hour eating window or seven-hour eating window, but extending that to 8 or 9 p.m. Under those conditions, do you still see the obesogenic effect?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
It's a few scrambled eggs. It's a chicken breast at lunch. It's a small steak at dinner. Plus other things.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I'm thinking about this and I'm thinking about my mother who's 79 years old. She'll be 80 at the end of June and is in good health. walks a lot, gardens, does some yoga, but does none of the things that you're describing. So mom, please, I'm going to send her to listen to this. In the same vein, what about the women out there age 20 to, maybe we make it the 20 to 40 bracket.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And if we need to divide that more finely, we can. What is the most efficient way for them to train for health, vigor, and longevity?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Now, forgive me because you've said it several times throughout today's discussion, but I really want to drive home a key point that I think for most people, men and women, is not obvious but is really important. When you say high intensity, you don't mean a class or a run where you're drenched in sweat and gasping for air at the end necessarily.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Let's disambiguate high intensity from what most people think of high intensity, which is a really hard workout, a tough class where they had me moving the whole time, doing a circuit, et cetera. What is the appropriate high intensity workout look like?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Okay. So 400 a lap. Yep. 800, two laps.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
For instance, we evaluate the evidence that women may not want to train fasted and the reasons for that. We talk about how training might vary according to different phases of the menstrual cycle.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Pretty tough. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Right.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And this is high-intensity interval training. This is not what you would consider resistance training for sake of building muscle or strength.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
You're using these loads, these machines, the pike hanging from the bar and bringing your knees up or L-sit or something as a tool to get the heart rate up continually. Very different than resistance training the way most people think about it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
On the rower, on the Airdyne bike, running if you like. Yeah, any of those things. The skier.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So 30 seconds all out, then rest, what, 10, 15 seconds, repeat?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Oh, nice.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And if I heard you correctly earlier, you are suggesting most women do one or two days of high-intensity interval training plus three to four days of resistance training for sake of building strength and muscle, which looks very different. It's more warm-up, do a couple –
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Work sets, you know, two to four work sets of, you know, an overhead press, two or four work sets of maybe a barbell curl, two or four sets of some dips or whatever one's, you know, personal choices. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Got it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Very different, far and away different than what most people, men or women, are doing out there, which is a lot of Stairmaster treadmill jogging, maybe some lifting for hypertrophy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And in terms of nutrition, you mentioned women should shoot for 1.1, 1.2 grams of quality protein per pound of body weight. What other types of foods do you like to see women ingesting? So are you a fan of fruit?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Great. Well, these days you sort of have to ask in these circles. Vegetables. Yep. Fiber is important.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And then in terms of starches to replace glycogen, especially if people are doing these high-intensity interval training sessions and the resistance training, what are your preferred sources?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Ooh, I cringe at that stuff. But, you know, I prefer rice and oatmeal. And I like a really good sourdough bread with butter or olive oil.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Because GLUT4 levels are so high, you're basically pulling everything into glycogen at that point anyway.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And there's some data that chocolate is good for us, especially the low sugar, dark chocolates.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Right.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Yeah. One has to live. Yeah. And fats. Where do you like to see women get their fats from?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
That all sounds very rational and delicious, in my opinion.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I think if people hear it from you, they'll do it. I think people just need to hear it in the context of a non-diet context. And you've done an amazing job today of explaining how nutrition fuels training, training fuels changes at the level of the muscle, the liver, et cetera, that allow one to ingest more fuel.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
In fact, a lot of what I'm hearing is that women should probably ingest more quality fuels in order to offset these cortisol spikes and feel better while training and to train more, which everyone agrees, provided it's done properly, is great for us. Kind of a fun, hopefully fun question for you.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If you had a magic wand and you could get all the women on earth now and going forward to make a change or changes, you don't have to pick just one, in terms of nutrition, how they think about their hormone cycle, exercise, healthspan, lifespan, what would it be?
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Well, Dr. Stacey Sims, this has been tremendously educational for me and I know for everybody listening and or watching. You've taken us on an amazing tour of the best ways to train with cardiovascular training and resistance training. those tailored specifically for women, as well as touching into some protocols for both men and women that are immensely powerful.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Talked a lot about the menstrual cycle. I get asked about the menstrual cycle and how it relates to training and vice versa so many times. And thank you for providing clear, actionable answers. And you've also educated us on caffeine supplements and including revealing some supplements that I didn't know existed, which is not a common occurrence for me.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And many wins, many, many wins, thanks to you, and on and on. So just such a rich data set here presented with such clarity and in an actionable way. On behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching, I just want to say thank you.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I know you've come a very long way from the other side of the equator, not just to see us, but given that your time is so precious that you've come to visit us and share with us your knowledge. I just want to say a really deep, heartfelt thank you.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And we'll have to have you back again. Maybe we'll come to New Zealand.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Stacey Sims. To learn more about her work, please see the links in our show note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Please also subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five star review. Please also check out the sponsors that I mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or topics or guests you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols, An Operating Manual for the Human Body.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body. If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media channels.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Regular listeners of this podcast will know this, but just to remind everybody, a sympathetic state has nothing to do with emotional sympathy. It's the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system, which drives more arousal and alertness and at higher levels, stress, sometimes called the fight or flight response.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
So that's Instagram, X, formerly known as Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, and Facebook. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlap with the contents of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the contents of the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media channels.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
If you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter,
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Our neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as protocols in the form of brief PDFs of one to three pages, where I spell out the specific do's and in some cases do nots, but mostly do's related to things like how to optimize your sleep, how to regulate your dopamine levels. There's a protocol for neuroplasticity and learning.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
as well as protocols for fitness, which we call the foundational fitness protocol, includes everything, sets, reps, cardiovascular training. Again, all available, completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab, scroll down to newsletter and provide us your email. But I should point out, we do not share your email with anybody.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Stacey Sims. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
Parasympathetic being the other arm of the autonomic nervous system, sometimes called the rest and digest response. arm of the autonomic nervous system. They work sort of like a seesaw or a push-pull, pick your analogy. In any case, it sounds like intermittent fasting or time-restricted feeding, unless it's very well aligned to the circadian rhythm, is not going to be advantageous for women.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And we discuss how women can design nutrition and training programs that are optimized for their specific needs, not just because they are women, but because they are women of a particular stage of life and women with particular goals. As you'll soon see, Dr. Simms is exquisitely skilled at explaining the human universals of nutrition and training. That is the things that do not differ
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
That's what I'm hearing. I'm also hearing that if a woman trains while fasted, so in the non-feeding window, so wakes up, maybe has some hydration and trains, that's going to further exacerbate the stress response in a way that's not going to be good.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
And I have to imagine that if she also is drinking caffeine in order to do that training, because caffeine is a stimulant of the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system, that it will further exacerbate all these issues. So this is a eye-opener for me because I've had female training partners for years. I don't eat until 11 a.m.
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Dr. Stacy Sims: Female-Specific Exercise & Nutrition for Health, Performance & Longevity
I like to hydrate and caffeinate before I train in the morning, and then I like to eat starting around noon. Several of them have hopped on that schedule with me. Some of them eat breakfast first, some of them don't. They do as they choose, of course. But now I'm thinking that's probably the worst way to go.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
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. My guest today is Dr. Teo Soleimani. Dr. Teo Soleimani is a double board certified dermatologist and dermatologic surgeon.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Roca. Roca makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are the absolute highest quality.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
What about vaping nicotine or oral use of nicotine? So nicotine gum, mints, pouches. And let's touch on vaping first because that's becoming more common.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I did an episode of this podcast on alcohol, which somewhat to my surprise was very widely shared, only to my surprise because I've never been a big consumer of alcohol, but apparently many out there are. And the data came back, at least to my understanding, that zero alcohol is healthier than any and that up to two drinks per week
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
is probably okay as long as you're an adult of drinking age and not an alcoholic. You don't have issues with alcohol use disorder as it's now called, probably okay. But beyond that, you start running into some health issues that can be offset by better behaviors of other types. But what about the direct effects of alcohol on skin in the short term?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Does it increase blood flow and therefore improve skin? Are there long-term indirect effects? I could imagine that alcohol disrupts the gut microbiome, which then disrupts skin, et cetera. So maybe we could break this down into direct acute effects, meaning immediate effects that are really direct from consuming alcohol that day, that week, let's say.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I've spent a lifetime working on the biology of the visual system, and I can tell you that your visual system has to contend with an enormous number of different challenges in order for you to be able to see clearly from moment to moment. Roka understands all of that and has designed all of their eyeglasses and sunglasses with the biology of the visual system in mind.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
versus chronic effects through other systems like disruption of sleep and microbiome?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Roka eyeglasses and sunglasses were first designed for use in sport, in particular for things like running and cycling. And as a consequence, Roka frames are extremely lightweight, so much so that most of the time you don't even remember that you're wearing them. And they're also designed so that they don't slip off, even if you get sweaty.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
But I'm not hearing any positive effects of alcohol on skin health or appearance.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
And what I'm pulling from all of the discussion we've had up until now is that Improved blood flow and strong hydration status are both important. Do you recommend patients drink a certain amount of fluid each day or maintain adequate hydration as a means to build or maintain skin health and appearance?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Now, even though Roka eyeglasses and sunglasses were initially designed for sport, they now have many different frames and styles, all of which can be used not just for sport, but also for wearing out to dinner, to work, essentially any time and any setting. I wear Roka readers at night or Roka eyeglasses if I'm driving at night.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
What are some of the parameters for selecting a moisturizer? People are immediately going to say, well, what constitutes a good moisturizer? What should it have in it? What are some things to avoid?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
You were telling me before this recording started, there are people who, and forgive me for those that cringe when I say this, that put placental extract
Huberman Lab
Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
And I wear Roka sunglasses in the middle of the day, anytime it's too bright for me to see clearly. My eyes are somewhat sensitive, so I need that. I particularly like the Hunter 2.0 frames, which I have as eyeglasses and now as sunglasses too. If you'd like to try Roka, you can go to roka.com slash Huberman to get 20% off your purchase. Again, that's roka.com slash Huberman to get 20% off.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I see. So when I think about something in a jar, you have something like Aquaphor or something, which is pretty thick stuff. So that would be fine for someone with eczema, not okay for somebody with acne.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. By now, many of you have heard me say that if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1. The reason for that is AG1 is the highest quality and most complete of the foundational nutritional supplements available.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
What that means is that it contains not just vitamins and minerals, but also probiotics, prebiotics, and adaptogens to cover any gaps you may have in your diet and provide support for a demanding life.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
For me, even if I eat mostly whole foods and minimally processed foods, which I do for most of my food intake, it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits and vegetables, vitamins and minerals, micronutrients, and adaptogens from food alone. noon, or evening. When I do that, it clearly bolsters my energy, my immune system, and my gut microbiome.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
These are all critical to brain function, mood, physical performance, and much more. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim their special offer. Right now, they're giving away five free travel packs plus a year's supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim that special offer.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Why do people wake up with bags under their eyes if they just slept for six or eight hours? Yeah.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Today's episode is also brought to us by Juve. Juve makes medical grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there's one thing I've consistently emphasized on this podcast, it's the incredible impact that light can have on our biology.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Skin cleansing is a topic that gets a lot of coverage. And I sometimes get chuckles or even attacks for saying I've always just used unscented Dove soap, the bar, not the liquid soap, or like acetophil soap. And this is because when I was younger, like much younger, I had very sensitive skin. And when I was like... kid, seven, eight, nine years old.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I think I just started using unscented Dove soap at some point and things like it, gentle soaps without fragrances. What are your thoughts on those? And I ask not for my own purposes, I'm going to stick with it because it works for me, unless you tell me I shouldn't. I see this enormous market for skin cleansers that includes a range of costs from relatively low to near astronomical.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
If you tell me that this unscented Dove soap or Cetaphil soap is the way to go, and by the way, I'm not sponsored by either of those. I don't even know who they're manufactured by, so there's no commercial angle here. But I'll be relieved because they tend to fall on the lower end of the cost bracket relative to some of these astronomically priced cleansers.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Now, in addition to sunlight, red light and near infrared light have been shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health, including faster muscle recovery, improved skin health and wound healing, even improvements in acne, reducing pain and inflammation, improving mitochondrial function, and even improving vision itself.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
The unscented, non-fragranced versions of them.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
What sets Juve lights apart, and why they're my preferred red light therapy devices, is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning it uses specific wavelengths of red light and near infrared light in combination to trigger the optimal cellular adaptations. Personally, I use the Juve handheld light both at home and when I travel.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
He did his training at Stanford University, and he was a clinical professor of dermatology and dermatologic surgery at UCLA, that is, the University of California, Los Angeles. Today, we discuss all things related to skin appearance, skin health, and skin longevity. For instance, we discuss sun exposure and the impact it can have on both the appearance and health of one's skin.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
So does that mean that people should bathe probably once or twice a day, but the people that are Bathing three times a day, it's probably excessive. I mean, are we saying that you can't get into water? I mean, when you say cleansing, you're talking about face cleansing. I realize this is going to be highly individual, but some people are just out of habit, shower and use cleanser
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
you know, twice a day or once a day. I think for me, it's in the morning or in the evening, sometimes both. If I do a workout, I try and shower as close as possible after the workout, as soon as possible after the workout rather, because otherwise I will break out, you know? So it sounds like one has to kind of learn what their cadence is and that's going to vary by age.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
It's only about the size of a sandwich, so it's super portable and convenient to use. I also have a Juve whole body panel, and I use that about three or four times per week. If you'd like to try Juve, you can go to juve, spelled J-O-O-V-V dot com slash Huberman. Juve is offering an exclusive discount to all Huberman Lab listeners with up to $400 off select Juve products.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
including things like acne, psoriasis. Most people think about shampooing for sake of hair, but there's the scalp component. And since you're an expert in skin, we should probably spend a bit of time on this. For people that tend to have a dry or flaky scalp, what should they do about that? My understanding is that some of the more typical commercial
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Anti-dandruff shampoos can contain things that might cause issues for hair itself. So they might help with the flaking and drying of the scalp, but damage other aspects of you know, either appearance or health of hair. What are some really good options for people that have dry scalp? What are some great options for people that have oily scalp?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
And let's leave aside the frequency of use and just perhaps just put it on the shelf as much as you need it, but not more. So that could be once a week. It could be daily. It could be twice a day in extreme cases, it sounds like.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Again, that's Juve, J-O-O-V-V dot com slash Huberman to get $400 off select Juve products. Today's episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. Now, the mattress we sleep on makes an enormous difference in terms of the quality of sleep that we get each night.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Got it. So it sounds like the best options for cleansing skin, for shampooing, really stem from knowing whether or not your skin tends to air oily or dry, figuring out how often to cleanse.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
And then as you pointed out before, even though there's an enormous range of costs for these things, none of the solutions that you're describing sound like they fall on the high end of cost or even in the middle end of cost, which is a bit surprising to me. If I had a magic wand, I would make for all organic, non-processed and minimally processed foods to be very inexpensive.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
But it turns out those things tend to be more expensive. You can go to farmer's markets and cut back on the cost, et cetera. But there seems to be an unfortunate tradeoff between – availability and cost and benefit, or at least risk.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
But it doesn't sound like that's the case with skincare or scalp care that one can exercise really excellent skin and scalp care without having to go into a range of spending an outrageous amount of money.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
We need a mattress that is matched to our unique sleep needs, one that is neither too soft nor too hard for you, one that breathes well and that won't be too warm or too cold for you. If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz, and it asks you questions such as, do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
It's going to be very reassuring to many people. It's also going to be somewhat destabilizing to people who are really attached to the idea that the more expensive products are really doing something that much more beneficial for them.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
So this seems like an appropriate time to ask about sun exposure. And then we'll also talk about sunscreen, sunblocks, skin cancer. Sure. But what is the relationship between sun exposure and skin health specifically? Meaning how much sun exposure is healthy for our skin? I'm a big believer in getting sun exposure to the eyes early in the day, blinking as needed to protect the eyes, of course.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Things of that sort. Maybe you know the answers to those questions, maybe you don't. Either way, Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the Dusk mattress, D-U-S-K. I've been sleeping on a Dusk mattress for, gosh, no, more than four years, and the sleep that I've been getting is absolutely phenomenal.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
But in order to set one's circadian rhythm for elevated daytime mood, focus and alertness, and improved nighttime sleep, there's just so much data to support setting one's circadian rhythm properly for sake of health. And there's so much data to support the fact that sunlight viewing in particular is the best way to do that.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
And sunlight viewing in the early part of the day in particular is the best way to do that. Beyond that, how much sun exposure to the skin is good for us? Is it zero? Is it five minutes? Does it depend?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
If you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com slash Huberman, take that brief two-minute sleep quiz, and Helix will match you to a mattress that is customized to your unique sleep needs. Right now, Helix is giving up to 25% off mattresses and two free pillows. Again, that's helixsleep.com slash Huberman to get 25% off and two free pillows.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
So even midday sun, maybe if there's some cloud cover or we have some sunscreen on or a physical barrier like sun and long, excuse me, like hat and long sleeves, then getting some sun exposure in your mind is good for our overall well-being, mood, et cetera.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I'd like to take a brief break to thank one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Now, I and others on the podcast have talked a lot about the critical importance of hydration for proper brain and bodily function.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Research shows that even a slight degree of dehydration can really diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes in order for your body and brain to function at their best. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are critical for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or nerve cells.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
And now for my discussion with Dr. Teo Soleimani. Dr. Teo Soleimani, welcome.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of Element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise I'm doing, especially on hot days if I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman, spelled drinkelement.com slash Huberman, to claim a free Element sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
what about sunscreens and sunblocks and i think we should distinguish between those two labels you know in the old days as i understand sunscreen was the word used to describe stuff that you put on your skin that absorbs uv and then sunblock is the stuff that you put on your skin to reflect uv um
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Typically nowadays people say sunscreen more than they say sunblock or they use them interchangeably without any knowledge of the underlying mechanism. So first of all, let's clarify sunscreen versus sunblock.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Oh, well, it's an honor to have you. Let's talk about this amazing organ we call skin. So skin, of course, covers our other organs. It's its own living biological entity. And just for sake of educational purposes and to frame the rest of what we're going to talk about, how much turnover is there in our skin? Meaning the skin that I'm wearing right now
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
mineral-based sunscreens are sometimes called inorganic, correct?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Is the mechanism for these two the same? Because I was under the impression that the mineral-based inorganic sunscreens reflected back UV rays, whereas the chemical-based sunscreens absorbed UV rays, but there's a bit of an online debate about this, claiming that they all absorb UV rays.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
So what is your recommendation about protecting oneself from the sun? And maybe for the moment, let's just set aside sunscreens and acknowledge that a physical barrier like hat, long sleeves, long pants provides a pretty good barrier to the sun, correct?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Is that going to be 100%, 50% of the skin that I'm going to be wearing a year from now? I'm 49 years old.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
If I understand correctly, you're saying that the use of sunscreen can protect against premature aging. Let's say sunblock, because I think we're going to arrive at mineral-based sunscreens probably being the better option, but we can make sure that we double-click on that, so to speak. that sun exposure itself perhaps is not linked to the most deadly of skin cancers. That tells me two things.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
It doesn't tell me that I can just spend as much time as I want in the sun, but it does tell me that I should probably look into the things that cause the most deadly skin cancers. Okay. But I'm also hearing that regular application of sunblock
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
and or physical barrier will protect my skin against some forms of premature aging caused by sun exposure, but will not necessarily protect me against the most common forms of skin cancer. That is peculiar in the sense that, or even baffling to the non-dermatologist, me, because we already know that sun exposure causes UV mutations, mutations in the DNA of cells,
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
is one of the kind of core components of cancer. So how do we square all of this?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I think most people would prefer not to have the premature aging caused by sun exposure. So what should those people do? I've taken on a practice of... Putting a mineral-based inorganic sunscreen on my face, my arms if they're going to be exposed, back of my neck, tops of my ears. If I'm going to be out in midday or late-day sun that feels intense, I'll do that.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Every single time I go out now on overcast days, not so much for viewing morning sunlight. I don't do that. In fact, when the sun is low in the sky, I don't tend to wear sunblock. That's me. That's been my choice. There were a few years there where I didn't put on sunscreen, or if I did, it was like on a camping trip or skiing or something where the sun felt very intense.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
And in that case, I would just reach for whatever sunscreen or sunblock was available because I wasn't aware. that some of the ingredients in certain chemical-based sunscreens may be problematic. So I think I fall into the typical category of a lot of people.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
But of course, there's the category of people that are like, nope, sunscreen sunblock is terrible all the time, or they're just too lazy or uninterested in applying it. But then there's this whole category of people that are putting it on Every single time they go outside in hopes that that's going to keep their skin appearing much younger and just generally are kind of afraid of the sun.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
No skin cancers.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
If you tell me that he got skin cancer on the opposite side, I'm really going to gasp.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
In reference to that, we discuss sunscreens, which ones are safe, which ones perhaps elicit a bit more concern, or perhaps should be avoided, and we discuss the surprising relationship between sun exposure and skin cancer. We discuss laser treatments for the skin, both for the appearance of skin, in order to make it appear more youthful, as well as to prevent certain forms of skin cancer.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I mean, I guess I'm biased, but... Well, I find a 28-day turnover, just to be incredible... The skin as I understand it is innervated, that is it receives connections from the nervous system. So I think for many people, Their interest in skin is skin appearance, although we will also talk about skin health.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
But in terms of skin appearance, how much does stress, short-term and longer-term stress, impact the appearance of our skin? And how does that work? I could imagine that the neurons release certain things into the skin. Does stress make our skin age faster? Does that mean it turns over more quickly or turns over more slowly? Maybe you could link these two aspects of our biology for us.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
So the takeaway for me is, Physical barrier, no issues. Mineral-based sunscreen, safest. So that's zinc oxide, titanium dioxide.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Okay. And then chemical-based sunscreens, probably best avoided. Okay. And then you mentioned polypodium. So this is a pill. It's a supplement basically that one can take. I only call it a supplement because it's not a prescription drug, correct? Yeah. That protects your skin from UV damage from the inside.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
What are the dosages of polypodium that are useful and are there any side effects?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Interesting. And you mentioned sun powder as a potential, that's a brand name?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I think we both agree that the mineral-based sunscreens are going to be the best option of the ones out there, if one is at all concerned about some of these chemical components and chemical sunscreens. Yeah, fair enough. Absolutely agree. Yeah, so within that category, are there particular things to look for?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I'm not necessarily trying to aim for particular brands here, but given that I have no relationship to any skincare products, I would just like to know which ones...
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
to look for or will any zinc oxide and or titanium dioxide containing sunscreen provided there are no chemical components in there besides the inactive ingredients of course um will any suffice because in that case people can just shop for cost or availability
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
What are some, if any, of the concerns that some of the components in chemical-based sunscreens can cross the blood-brain barrier?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Another call for the mineral-based sunscreens just as a, why take the risk?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
This seems like a good time to shift a little bit of our attention to nutrition and the gut microbiome. Now, this isn't an infinitely large topic. We could spend several episodes discussing this, but if you were to provide us some of the major takeaways as it relates to nutrition and skin health, nutrition and skin appearance, gut and skin health and appearance, what would those be?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
So my understanding, and we'll get into this more as it relates to acne, is that patterns of eating, either content, food volume, that is caloric load, et cetera, that increase insulin and things like mTOR are sort of pro-acne. They're going to aggravate or increase acne. Whereas the things that tend to lower circulating blood glucose, insulin, and reduce inflammation tend to be kind of
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
anti-acne, or sorry, we pull in the other direction towards reducing acne load. But if we were to just step back and say, okay, the typical person who wants to have the healthiest, best appearing skin, who's not dealing with any specific issue, because we will get into those specific issues, can we say they should eat a vegan diet, a vegetarian diet? Is it okay to be an omnivore?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Some people are on the extreme of this carnivore type diet. Some of those people actually report elimination of certain skin conditions. I don't know. I've never tried one of those extreme diets, but you hear this, but again, you hear a lot of things. So it seems to me that the relationship between keeping the gut microbiome healthy and ingesting sufficient amounts of fiber is pretty clear.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
The relationship between keeping the gut microbiome healthy and overall, that is systemic inflammation low is pretty clear. And that eating foods that are mostly unprocessed or minimally processed keeps inflammation on the lower side as opposed to eating more processed foods. But assuming you, would you agree or disagree with that? Feel free to disagree, please.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
So assuming that that's all true, is there any evidence that the ingestion of specific foods can make skin healthier? Like you'll see this stuff, like, oh, if you have two cups of blueberries a day, your skin is going to be healthier. Or is all of that indirect by virtue of specific micronutrients that are in those foods? Yeah.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I guess the most direct question is, do you yourself consume collagen proteins in a supplement form or make it a point to eat things like bone broth, which contain high percentages of collagen?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Is there a role for omega-3 fatty acids like fish oils and things of that sort for skin health specifically?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
What about some treatments that are known to be beneficial for the appearance and health of skin that people are not as aware of? Because I think people who are concerned with their skin health and appearance, they think about sunscreen, and we've learned a lot about that from you.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
But what are some things that really work to improve skin health and appearance that perhaps require a visit to the dermatologist, but that you don't hear enough about? Yeah.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Why do you think, given the immense interest in skin appearance and health, we don't hear more about this?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
This would be things like Retin-A.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
We discuss retinoids. We discuss supplements and nutrition, all in reference, again, to skin health and appearance. Thanks to Dr. Soleimani's incredible depth of expertise, as well as clarity of communication about the do's and do nots that relate to skin care and appearance and to avoiding and treating skin cancers.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
So this would be go to your dermatologist, ask for some, is it laser resurfacing?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
So people have this done once a year or so?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I guess people rarely are sympathetic to presidents for aging quickly because I guess if there were a president who did not age quickly, we would worry they did not work hard enough or something of that sort. But the relationship between stress and skin fascinates me because – not just of the direct relationship.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
It's amazing. How is this different than exfoliating skin? Like if one were to just try and scrape away some of the dead skin through some semi-vigorous buffing of the skin with like a sponge. I've never done either of these procedures. Like I said, my skincare routine is very basic. It's the unscented dove soap, the shower once or twice a day.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I mean, I feel pretty good. I mean, I think... You know, sleep seems to play a significant role for me. I do get probably a bit more sun exposure than most people. I'm conscious of checking for skin cancers and we'll talk about that because those do run in my family. But, and I try and eat right and exercise right. consumed much alcohol in my lifetime.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Like when we see people and they're stressed, like it seems like their whole, the power of their skin changes, the kind of level of gleam in their eyes change. And of course the eyes are a direct piece of the nervous system, really. They're as close to the brain as one can get. outside the skull.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Is that the IPL laser?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I've had that actually because I had an angioma. Yeah. I've had it three times. And the third time they hit this thing, it went away, but not without a very significant bruise lasting almost a month. I mean, it was pretty dramatic. Overdone it. Right. But it did eliminate the vessel.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
So as long as we're on the topic of photobiomodulation, what about red light near infrared light? Is there any evidence that it can benefit skin health and appearance? Nowadays, you can find masks that will emit red light. Some people will purchase red lights they stand in front of.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
But it also suggests, because of the dynamic turnover of skin every 28 days, that if people were to become less stressed, that their skin health and appearance might improve. Is that also the case?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
So probably looking for something that's at least endorsed by dermatologists makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. And I should say here, I have no No angle into this. These masks that emit red light, I don't have any business relationship to them. So that's not why I bring it up. I was just very curious. I see them in my Instagram feed, probably by virtue of...
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
doing public facing health and science information and my interest in light. What about, oh, yes, excuse me.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Thank you for that. And full disclosure, I was accurate in saying that I don't have any relationship to any red light masks. companies or products, but this podcast is sponsored by Juve, which makes medical grade panels for red light and near infrared light. And I do own one of those and I use, I have a small portable one I use, and then I have a panel I stand in front of.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
So that includes my face and then I'll turn around and so do a whole body a couple times a week.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
It's interesting when people see and hear about red light and near-infrared light therapies, I think a lot of people think, oh, this is kind of like next-age biohacking. But there was a Nobel Prize given for photobiomodulation for the treatment of lupus in the early 1900s.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
So this is a longstanding thing, the use of light of particular wavelengths or combinations of wavelengths, of which red light and blue light are, of course. in order to target different layers within the skin to get some desired effect.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Well, I think it's a very relevant tangent because the relationship between immune system function and skin is very clear. And these conditions that you're referring to, vitiligo, acne, psoriasis, eczema, et cetera, have interesting relationships to the immune system. So that's actually a perfect segue for what I'd like to talk about next. So let's start with psoriasis.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
What is the story with psoriasis? What is it? What can make it worse? What can make it better?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
So these drugs that target these specific interleukins seem like the most direct way to treat psoriasis. Some people, for whatever reason, have an aversion to prescription drugs. I'm not necessarily one of those people, but I, like everybody else, would like to know what we can do to reduce symptoms of things like psoriasis without having to, quote unquote, take anything.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
That was my question since the sun emits UV. why not just get some additional sunlight exposure for psoriasis?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
What about vitiligo? This is something I did not cover in the solo episode about skin health, but I got a lot of questions about vitiligo, of course, being this typically patchy, non-pigmented regions of skin that you said is at least some... cases are related to the immune system. These people get skin cancers less often, is that right?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
It's fascinating. Again, speaking to the fact that skin is far more than just this protective outer sheath. It's a reflection of so much that's going on internally. And we know that intuitively also by observing others.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
It is fascinating. It also speaks to the value of having some immediate and long-term stress reduction techniques just as a sort of first principle of taking care of one's skin. There are some other things that cause vasoconstriction, basically the tightening of the vessels and capillaries to the skin, as I understand. Maybe we could just tick through a few of these and get your sense.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I think this is one of several ways that parents can communicate well with their children or their children with their parents rather in terms of how they're feeling prior to language. You know, they'll look at their skin, their stool, obviously fussiness and mood and those things too.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
But we seem to have developed an intuitive understanding that a shift in the kind of like tone of the skin or some other features of the skin signal to us wellness or lack of wellness.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
It is so cool. What about acne? Acne seems very common, you know, as a We progress through puberty. There seems to be more acne. Sometimes it's transient. Sometimes it's not. What are some things that people can do to prevent or reduce acne?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Is it true that eating a diet that is – of slight excess in calories because it will tend to push the insulin glucose regulation system more into the positive as opposed to, let's just say, higher levels of insulin in circulating blood glucose than one would observe at, say, maintenance calories or sub-maintenance calories that overeating a little bit could cause acne.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I consume caffeine every morning, usually yerba mate tea, some coffee a little bit later. Those will increase vasoconstriction to some extent, although chronic caffeine intake may cause vasodilation. So I'd like to know the relationship between caffeine and blood flow to the skin and skin health and appearance. That's the first question.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
any foods that promote increases in glucose and insulin? So sugary foods, high glycemic foods, these sorts of things. Can that actually increase acne? Fried foods?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
What about rosacea? I hear so much about this, and I'm going to assume that we can mark off at least one thing as clear, which is that alcohol can exacerbate rosacea, maybe directly. but certainly indirectly by impeding some aspects of the microbiome, disrupting sleep, rosacea gets worse.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
But what are things that people can do, do's and don'ts, that is for rosacea, if it's mild rosacea, like excessively ruddy cheeks or superficial riding capillaries that seem to bother a lot of people? I know that it bothers a lot of people because they asked about this quite a lot. in the questions when I solicited for questions.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
And then dovetailed with that question is nicotine, which is also thought to be a vasoconstrictor. It raises blood pressure because it's a vasoconstrictor. What are the effects of caffeine, both acutely and chronically, and nicotine? Let's assume that nicotine is consumed either by smoking or oral ingestion on skin appearance and health.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
By the end of today's episode, you will be armed with an immense amount of knowledge that is the very latest in our understanding of how to improve and protect your skin. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
A couple of things that you taught me that I just want to pass along in short form, and please correct me if I have this wrong. One, if you can avoid popping pimples, definitely avoid it because it can cause damage, recruitment of these matrix metalloproteases, which essentially digest some of the deeper layers of the skin, leave scars.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
I think it's to eradicate the infection type of thing.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
And if they pop on their own, I can't believe we're having this conversation, but that's a skin health and appearance episode. After all, if they pop on their own, then... cleaning it with a gentle cleanser is probably the best way to go. No topical antibiotics. Is that right? No.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
And what about the use of corticosterone cream? Like if somebody has a red bump and they're headed to an event or something and they want to – eliminate some of the redness and bumpiness.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Assuming sterile technique and other safety measures in place, are tattoos inherently bad for skin?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
That's a good segue into surveying for skin cancers. Earlier, you talked about some of the more common forms of skin cancer, squamous cell carcinoma, basal cell carcinoma, but then there's the one, no one truly wants, which is melanoma.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
So I was taught to keep an eye on my moles.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
If they change, change in border, change in size, et cetera, to notify a dermatologist. Yeah. I get my moles checked about, I don't know, I just had it done less than a year ago. But what about getting all skin checked? I mean, what do you, this is your area of expertise. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you had a magic wand.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
to help prevent skin cancers, what would you have people do?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
For the HPV that eventually becomes squamous cell carcinoma. Yeah. Is the HPV vaccine effective even at older ages?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
As I recall, planter's warts, which are these warts that burrow a kind of root into the bottom of the foot, they're very painful. That actually... can be caused by HPV. It's a form of HPV. And it's not sexually transmitted. It's locker room transmitted.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
So warts on their fingers, plantars warts on their feet.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Do you think soon we will be in the landscape of vaccines for all forms of skin cancer?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Fascinating. And a good place for us to probably pause until the next time we have you back to talk about where that technology evolves. Because today you've taught us so much about skin, what it is, its anatomy, its physiology, what it reflects in terms of our internal workings, health, or in some cases, challenges with health.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Talked about various conditions such as psoriasis, acne, eczema, dandruff, as it's sometimes called, and what we can do. The role of nutrition, avoiding certain things like excess alcohol, nicotine, et cetera, but also some of the newer and more exciting treatments that exist for all these conditions. merely cosmetic and uncomfortable, some truly life-threatening and dangerous like melanoma.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
So for all those reasons, and also for taking time out of your very busy clinical schedule to come talk to us, I really appreciate it and I want to voice my
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
uh appreciation both for myself and for those listening and viewing I know people will have many many questions so we will refer them to your uh social media accounts and links to your clinic and so forth so that they can have those questions addressed and who knows maybe
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
and get the chance to work with you in the meantime i just want to say thank you for this public education gift that you've given us um i'm thinking about skin very differently now and i plan to do and not do certain things uh in light of today's conversation no pun intended so
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Well, we will certainly bring you back to further the discussion. Meanwhile, thank you ever so much, Dr. Soleimani. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion about how to improve and protect your skin with Dr. Teo Soleimani. To learn more about his work and find links to his clinic, please see the show note captions.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
If you're learning from and are enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and on Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or topics or guests you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
It's entitled Protocols, An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, Twitter, now known as X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I cover science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the Huberman Lab podcast.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Interesting. And what about nicotine?
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media channels.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
And if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, our neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes protocols, which are brief one to three page PDFs, which summarize various things that you can do in order to, for instance, optimize neuroplasticity and learning, or optimize your sleep, or improve dopamine regulation.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
Again, all available at completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and provide us your email to obtain the newsletter. And I'd like to point out that we do not share your email with anybody. Once again, thank you for joining me for today's discussion about skin health and appearance with Dr. Teo Soleimani.
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Dr. Teo Soleymani: How to Improve & Protect Your Skin Health & Appearance
And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
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. My guest today is Esther Perel. Esther Perel is a psychotherapist and one of the world's foremost experts on romantic relationships.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Do you think that's perhaps one reason why people who are in these cornerstone relationships, of whom I've known many, even family members of mine, met in university, met their significant other, and then had their first jobs, moved in together, all the things you described, that there's this-
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Yeah, and I think it probably happens at a stage of life when there's still a lot more neuroplasticity, frankly. I mean, everything I know about neuroplasticity is that it exists across the lifespan, but that it tapers off significantly in one's late 20s. And, you know, fortunately, it's still available, but... The notion of being set in our ways is a neuroplasticity phenomenon, right?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
The fontanelle is still... Exactly. It takes a lot more to open that plasticity later than it does earlier, certainly. And yet it's inversely related to the self-awareness, right? I mean, the younger we are, the less self-aware we are about our patterns because we... just have less data over time.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So I could see how it would be more difficult for somebody in their 20s to say, hey, listen, I think I have a good many virtues, but I have this severe issue with something, or this particularly frustrates me, or here's my laundry list of issues, right? Whereas somebody in their 40s or 50s or older, if pressed, could probably make that list if they were really being honest with themselves.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So it seems like- I think it's a good point. You know, so it seems that maybe there's a sweet spot, but that these earlier relationships, I've always been impressed by them and kind of romanticized them in my mind because that wasn't the trajectory that I took.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You can find a link to that course in the show note captions, as well as links to her books, her podcast, and other resources about romantic relationships. Before you begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
That just feels like such a true statement to me because in my professional life as a developmental neurobiologist, there's a saying, people always think of development and then adulthood, but all of life is one big developmental arc.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And the great psychologist Erickson spoke about the different sort of challenges that people face from birth all the way until death, which nowadays hopefully will extend into people's 80s, 90s, or even beyond.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I agree. If people haven't seen those stages, we'll put a link to them in the show note captions. But the idea is that you're basically grappling with some basic struggle that you either reconcile or you don't at every stage. So you could imagine that these, let's say these three marriages, let's imagine a couple that meets in their 20s and does three marriages together.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
which implies a couple of divorces in between, maybe not legal divorces, across their lifespan. They really are, according to the Erickson theory of development or any neurobiological examination of brain development, different people in their 20s versus 40s versus 60s, 70s, 80s.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is David. David makes a protein bar unlike any other. It has 28 grams of protein, only 150 calories and zero grams of sugar.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So this notion of three different marriages to me seems both logical and very grounded in what we know about the biology of the the brain and the self.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And yet it's also kind of a radical idea when one hears it for the first time. It framed in the context of with the same person, it sounds kind of lovely and romantic. Okay, they meet, it's lovely, they have their first marriage. Then there's some challenge, they overcome... They do a second marriage, then some challenge and a third marriage.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And maybe there's even grandchildren you imagine, maybe even great-grandchildren. There's all this kind of romantic notions built up around it. But then there's also the reality that for many people, more than half, there's a fracture of the first marriage and that they either remain single or marry again. And so what do you think dictates whether or not a person can go through these
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
series of evolutions and actually find and create love again and again and again, either with the same person or with someone new or in some cases, I guess, three different partners. I mean, what is the sort of requirement? Is it a willingness to accept this model and understand that who they are at 50 is going to be very different than who they were in their 20s?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
That's right, 28 grams of protein and 75% of its calories come from protein. This is 50% higher than the next closest protein bar. These bars from David also taste incredible. My favorite bar is the cake flavored one. But then again, I also like the chocolate flavored one and I like the berry flavored one. Basically, I like all the flavors. They're all incredibly delicious.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Okay, so when I hear your answer, what comes to mind is that, again, as a neurobiologist, I think the brain, the human brain has this amazing capacity to focus on past, present, or future. And sometimes two of those three things, it's kind of hard to think about all three at once.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
But it sounds to me as if one of the more functional attributes that somebody can have if they want to navigate relationship in a healthy way is is to be able to at least temporarily discard with one's story about one's past and even their past identity. And the word that was coming up over and over again in my mind as you answered was this word you used earlier, which was curiosity.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And I'm wondering if what you're referring to is a curiosity on the part of hopefully both people in the relationship as to what the relationship could become and who oneself could become And my definition of curiosity is an interest in finding out, but without an emotional attachment to what the outcome is. This is what we train scientists to do.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You want to get the answers, but you can't get emotionally attached to the answer being A or B. That's anti-curiosity. Real genuine curiosity is about the process, the verb action of wanting to figure out something, but... not being attached to a particular outcome.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And as you were describing sort of functional trajectory of relationship, I was thinking, okay, so if one could approach relationship with a willingness to discard kind of stories about one's past, and maybe even a sense of one's identity of past, be willing to let go of that a little bit, and just be curious about like, where could this go if I let the relationship guide my evolution of identity a bit?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And that takes some, as you said, some boldness because it's kind of scary, right? Not knowing who one is going to become if they let the other person, you know, maybe lead for a while or if they were to lead for a while. Are these the sorts of dynamics that you're referring to?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Now for me personally, I try to get most of my calories from whole foods. However, when I'm in a rush or I'm away from home, or I'm just looking for a quick afternoon snack, I often find that I'm looking for a high quality protein source.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And with David, I'm able to get 28 grams of high quality protein with the calories of a snack, which makes it very easy to hit my protein goals of one gram of protein per pound of body weight. And it allows me to do so without taking on an excess of calories. Again, I focus on getting most of my food from whole food sources throughout the day.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. AG1 is designed to cover all of your foundational nutritional needs, and it tastes great. Now, I've been drinking AG1 since 2012, and I started doing that at a time when my budget for supplements was really limited.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
In fact, I only had enough money back then to purchase one supplement, and I'm so glad that I made that supplement AG1. The reason for that is even though I strive to eat most of my foods from whole foods and minimally processed foods, it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits, vegetables, vitamins, and minerals, micronutrients, and adaptogens from food alone.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And I need to do that in order to ensure that I have enough energy throughout the day, I sleep well at night, and keep my immune system strong. But when I take AG1 daily, I find that all aspects of my health, my physical health, my mental health, and my performance, both cognitive and physical, are better.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I know that because I've had lapses when I didn't take AG1 and I certainly felt the difference. I also notice, and this makes perfect sense given the relationship between the gut microbiome and the brain, that when I regularly take AG1, which for me means a serving in the morning or mid-morning and again later in the afternoon or evening, that I have more mental clarity and more mental energy.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim a special offer. Right now, they're giving away five free travel packs and a year's supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim that special offer. I am a firm believer that when we are in a stress response,
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
that we become locked in a time domain and not to spin off into a tangent about this, but you know, put differently when we are relaxed, we can think about time and our life and other things happening around us and others in a far more dynamic way. The stress response is about solving for the feeling now.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It has no sense about or it doesn't allow us a window into the cognition or emotions that are related to what could be, even though we desperately want out of there. And there's all sorts of evolutionary reasons why this would be the case. Of course.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
But I feel like a statement that you made, which is that a curiosity and a willing to discard with one's own narratives, and in particular what you said about the – that people perceive their own experience as fact when in actuality, it's just two different stories.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Neither person is correct or one person, you know, but people have these stories which are almost confabulation at some point, but they feel so true to all of us. when we experience them. I also feel like that's a lot of what's happening in culture at large. Diametrically opposed camps really believe that the same thing is a reflection of two completely different series of facts.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
But I typically eat a David Barr in the late afternoon when I get hungry between lunch and dinner, sometimes also mid morning if I get hungry then. And sometimes I'll use it as a meal replacement, although not a complete meal replacement, it can get me to the next meal. So if I need to eat in a couple of hours, but I'm really hungry, I'll eat a David Barr.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And it seems almost unsolvable at the level of culture, there's just too many people, but at the level of two individuals, I feel like it ought to be tractable.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
As I mentioned before, they are incredibly delicious. In fact, they're surprisingly delicious. Even the consistency is great. It's more like a cookie consistency, kind of a chewy cookie consistency. which is unlike other bars, which I tend to kind of saturate on. I was never a big fan of bars until I discovered David Bars. If you give them a try, you'll know what I mean.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Yeah, people are incredibly prone to confabulation based on these unconscious things going on. And it's kind of a scary thought.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
She's also the author of bestselling books such as Mating in Captivity and The State of Affairs. Today's discussion focuses on what it means to be in a truly functional romantic relationship.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I mean, and in reality, most people... are terrible at understanding how they themselves feel, let alone someone else's intentions. I mean, if somebody apologizes and says, listen, I'm truly sorry, I screwed up. And the other person says, I don't believe you. I think what they're really saying You can tell me if I'm wrong, is I don't feel better as a consequence of your apology.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So if you'd like to try David, you can go to davidprotein.com slash Huberman. Again, the link is davidprotein.com slash Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, but no sugar.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So let's say that the apology also includes that I really messed up. it makes total sense that you would be upset. You know, we had an agreement that we would meet at 7 and I didn't get home until 9 and I didn't notify you until 8. I would be upset too. That's totally justified. That sucks. That's got to really suck. At that point, if the other person still feels like it's still frustrating,
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Presumably it's because either this is a pattern So this one apology doesn't encapsulate all the other, the sort of litany of other things that relate to this, of feeling unseen or unappreciated. There's often a lot more behind the event.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Right. Or, yeah, it could be a pattern of apologies that don't equate to change, or it could be a pattern of an apology that doesn't encapsulate all the other things that weren't voiced. Because sometimes people won't voice their grievances. because they, for whatever reason, but there's a lot of resent that's built up, right?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So in that moment when somebody tells another that they are not convinced, emotionally convinced, what are the tools that you give each in order to be able to navigate that sticking point?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and bodily function. In fact, even a slight degree of dehydration is known to diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes in order to stay hydrated. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are vital for the functioning of all cells in your body, especially your neurons or nerve cells.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Interesting.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I'm just going to hover there for a second because I agree that apology is such an interesting and important concept. And you mentioned that accepting somebody's apology at an emotional level, not just saying, thank you, I accept your apology, but really internalizing that and allowing space for it to shift your experience of the thing that hurt.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I appreciate that distinction now that you've given it. I mean, I appreciate you giving that distinction. I did not make that distinction before.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Is that right?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Because to do so would what for them?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I find that so much of being an adult, again, in quotes.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Involves the disambiguating two things. One is we're taught to really trust our own experience to some extent, to stand our ground when we know A is true and B is false. But then also part of being an adult is admitting when we're wrong. And there's no rule book, no real time rule book for that, especially given that people have different versions of the same thing often. But it seems to me that,
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Drinking element dissolved in water makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate amounts of hydration and electrolytes. So to make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of both, I dissolve one packet of Element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I first wake up in the morning. I drink that basically over the first half hour or so that I'm awake.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
One of the great challenges, not just in romantic relationship, but in relationships of all kinds, is to really be able to slow down and enter the state of mind and body that allows us to do the kind of processing you're talking about. So at a very practical level, I'm curious.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Let's say a couple comes into your office and they're dealing with either a single hurt or a litany of hurts or something like that. Do you believe it's important for them to shift out of their emotional state to be able to process differently? Do you have them at the beginning of a session, do you have them do a couple deep breaths together?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Do you have them recall a time when they felt particularly bonded? Is there an effort to shift their somatic state in order to bring their mind to a place of more curiosity? Or is going straight to the issue often the best way in?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And I'll tend to also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and I'm losing water and electrolytes. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Again, that's drinkelement spelled L-M-N-T.com slash Huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, drinkelement.com slash Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
What a great question.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. Now, the mattress we sleep on makes an enormous difference in terms of the quality of sleep that we get each night.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function. I recently became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
While I've long been a fan of blood testing, I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood, urine, and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health, my hormone status, my immune system regulation, my metabolic function, my vitamin and mineral status, and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors on your results. For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had two high levels of mercury in my blood. This was totally surprising to me. I had no idea prior to taking the test.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Function not only helped me detect this, but offered medical doctor-informed insights on how to best reduce those mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption, because I had been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC and acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification, and worked to reduce my mercury levels.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health, and while I've been doing it for years, I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I've been so impressed by Function, both at the level of ease of use, that is getting the test done, as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are, that I recently joined their advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try Function, go to functionhealth.com slash Huberman.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
We need a mattress that is matched to our unique sleep needs, one that is neither too soft nor too hard for you, one that breathes well and that won't be too warm or too cold for you. If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz, and it asks you questions such as, do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman Lab listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com slash Huberman to get early access to Function. There's something that I really want to revisit that you said. You said it incredibly clearly. but I have never heard this described.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And I think it's so, so very important for people to hear and internalize, including me, that I'm going to ask us to visit it again, but not because you weren't clear, but just because I think it- No, I'm curious, what is it?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
As a biologist, when we teach biology, the good biologists, good teachers, we emphasize names only because people need to know them. This is called that, this is called that, but it's all about verbs. It's all about processes and dynamics. And what you just described as the three verb states of conflict, I think I've never heard articulated that way.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So you described, if I understand correctly- Pursuer, pursuer. Right. Either one person pursuing another.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Loggerheads.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Okay. Two arrows pointing at one another.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And not in a good way.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
We discuss this from the standpoint of identity, that is how people both try to hold onto and evolve their identities within a relationship and how a truly functional romantic relationship indeed evolves over time from a standpoint of curiosity and adventure, but also one in which people need to hold on to certain components of themselves.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And in each of those cases, it seems that the first step to getting to a more functional dynamic to try and sort this out, whatever the conflict is, is to somehow change one's mindset from talking about the story of what led there or stories of what led there to really starting to parse the feeling states of ourselves and hopefully empathy for the feeling state of the other.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Things of that sort. Maybe you know the answers to those questions, maybe you don't. Either way, Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the Dusk mattress, D-U-S-K. I've been sleeping on a Dusk mattress for, gosh, no, more than four years, and the sleep that I've been getting is absolutely phenomenal.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It's almost like a psychosis of sorts.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It's almost like we lose our theory of mind, our ability to place ourselves in the mind of another in a healthy way when we're in these stress states.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
If you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com slash Huberman, take that brief two-minute sleep quiz, and Helix will match you to a mattress that is customized to your unique sleep needs. Right now, Helix is giving up to 25% off mattresses and two free pillows. Again, that's helixsleep.com slash Huberman to get 25% off and two free pillows. And now for my discussion with Esther Perel.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Right. And my mind immediately goes to what you just described as a shift from focusing mainly on the past and how it's making us feel in the present to how we're feeling in the present, acknowledging and understanding something did happen that was real, as you said, and yet with this curious eye toward the future of what could unfold.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I don't know if it's a bug or a feature as the engineers say, but it is remarkable to me that the very same neural machinery that forms the underpinning of infant primary caretaker relationship is repurposed for romantic relationship. I mean, I marvel at that, right? I mean, the brain doesn't have like, oh, here's your developmental wiring circuits. And then guess what?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You get to hit adolescence and you go through puberty and then you get this new circuit for forming a romantic attachment. The brain imaging shows us that it's repurposed. So it's like if you got a two plus two equals four algorithm in that circuit, let's call that securely attached, although I realize that language is not sufficient, but for just purposes of discussion. Okay, well then great.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Then you get healthy romantic attachments as adults or you as an adult, and perhaps you can navigate in and out of things that are unhealthy more quickly. However, if you got a two plus two equals five algorithm wired into that circuit, well, then you're forever looking for something that is essentially dysfunctional. That's the simplest version of this.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Yeah, so beautiful work by Alan Shore and others, his work I know you're familiar with, has shown that you image the brain of infant and typically it's mother, but they've done other caretakers as well. And you see this incredible mirroring of Sure, right brain, left brain activity, more dopaminergic or serotonergic activity. Basically, the takeaway is that you see a lot of coherence.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
What's going on in the mother is going on in the child and vice versa. And there's a lot of reciprocity. But sometimes in unhealthy caretaker-infant relationships, the so-called anxious, attached, dissociative, or avoidant type scenarios, the ABCD baby type thing, People can look that up. If they like, we can provide a link.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You see a mismatch in the neurochemistry and the activation of these brain areas. In other words, the brain circuitry for attachment is set up so that anxious states are evoked when calm states should have been.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
But then you take those... You essentially run the same sorts of studies on romantically attached young adults or older adults. And what you see is it's the same sets of neurons, the same circuits. I mean, this is remarkable. Nowhere else, to my awareness, nowhere else in the nervous system do we repurpose neural circuitry.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Esther Perel, welcome.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
from early in life, you know, it's as if there's a neural circuit for sensing thirst and drinking early in life, and then later it's used for sensing how to navigate a city. Okay, now those are two very disparate things. But this is like outrageous, right? And so I say it's either a feature or a bug, we don't know, but it is the way it is, right? I would say I wasn't consulted at the design phase.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
There are so many questions and curiosities and puzzles and challenges around the topic of romantic relationships. But what I really want to know is to what extent is the decision to even think about being in a relationship of the romantic type? a extension of our identity or is it really a willingness to potentially embrace a new identity?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I like to think in a kind of romantic way that... some of our most important work in our lifetime is to try and resolve these developmental miswirings that are the consequence of faulty caretaker-infant relationship. And you can't blame the infant. Now, does that mean we blame our parents to the point of ostracizing them? Well, one would hope not. Maybe in some cases that's necessary.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
But I think... I like to think that what we've observed over the last 10, 20, 30 years, in no small part, seriously, thanks to your work, reflects an evolution of how we are thinking about attachment, that we are actually getting better at understanding the self. And there's something about the human brain that wants to understand itself. So I like to think that in a hundred years,
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
not only will there be more models of relationship as functional, healthy relationships, but there will also be a deeper understanding of what this whole thing of love and attachment really is. And the parallel I use is one of biology. We understand so much more about brain function now than we did just 10 years ago.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Addiction, for instance, not just a condition of failure of willpower, but this understanding about dopamine and other molecules. I think we now look at a fentanyl addict or a heroin addict very differently. They're caught in a neurochemical algorithm that is not serving them well.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It doesn't remove their responsibility, but there comes a point where they can't recover themselves and they need certain supports and those supports are starting to emerge now. So my hope is that this is built into our evolution as some sort of vector toward
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Right. The repetition compulsion. You get the same thing over and over again. Lord knows I've had that and some wonderful partners. And by the way, as I say that, I'm also taking 50% of the responsibility, or 100% of the responsibility for the choice. As they say, you didn't have six hard relationships, you had one hard relationship six times, right? And I think Paul Conti says it that way.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
But that, yes, that the repetition compulsion is a unconscious attempt to resolve the core conflict that arose during early attachment.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Do you subscribe to that view?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I love that answer.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
we hear a lot these days about the different attachment styles or languages of love. You know, the love languages, you know, people will say, I, you know, emphasize, you know, gifts feel very rewarding or acts of, what is it? Words of affirmation, you know, unstructured time or et cetera, et cetera.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And I asked this somewhat abstract question for a very specific reason. And the reason is the following. I think everyone who's been in a romantic relationship or even who just wants one is familiar with the kind of yearning or interest or curiosity. And then also with the fact that
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Or people will, I think nowadays, if they look into it a little bit, they'll realize that they are either, you know, more avoidant or more anxious. These things can shift. I mean, I think it's wonderful that people are thinking about these things in the same way that I think it's wonderful that people understand that there's a molecule called dopamine
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
They can do certain things, serotonin, certain things. But I'm curious as to whether or not you feel that the naming of things and the assignment of oneself to a category can sometimes be limiting in terms of one's ability to really embrace this curiosity.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And you also use the word invitation and you are describing couples therapy and healthy relationship as a bit more of an art form than a reductionist protocol oriented science, which I love because to me, you know, despite being a scientist, some of the great mystery of life and certainly of romantic relationship is when you find yourself in
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
happy places that you didn't anticipate finding yourself or in a place of forgiveness and close friendship. When at one point you can recall being, as you said, like you just, this person is like embodies the worst things in your mind. So I think I wonder if, the processes that you found useful in your clinical work, is it possible to formalize those in a way that people can start to adopt them?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
In other words, Do you think that we can learn to navigate relationship in more healthy ways? Not just by saying I'm anxiously attached or avoidant or securely attached. I'm looking for someone that has that or my love language is this and they love to do that. And so therefore we're a perfect lock and key.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I think people are starting to think about relationship in a more nuanced and sophisticated way. And yet also what I'm hearing is, It's a lot more dynamic than that. And that some of those categorizations that we assign ourselves can really perhaps be limiting to what could be.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
just like the development of our physical body, it has an arc across the lifespan that a relationship has a sort of developmental arc. There's the first meeting, the first week, the first month, et cetera. And so much of what I've seen in your work and in the discussion about relationships in the public sphere seems to be trying to understand how we change
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
in terms of what we want and what we ask for, what we feel willing to ask for, et cetera, across this arc of the relationship. But what I want to know is, is the decision to enter a romantic relationship a willingness conscious or unconscious, to actually change who we are? In other words, are we entering a relationship to just be ourselves and find someone with whom we go lock and key?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
that expands one's understanding and maybe even lends itself to a hint of curiosity stands a chance of having some rehabilitative quality to it. I feel that nowadays there's such an overuse of psychological terms like narcissist, gaslighting therapy terms. It's almost the way that if people were to talk about neurobiology as neurosurgeons, right?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I'm not a neurosurgeon, but I have friends who are. And neurosurgery is like... It's something people train for many, many, many years for just as being a clinical psychologist, people train for many years for and have a ton of in-office experience, real world experience. Nowadays, the naming and the attachment of names to particular top contour features of people out there.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
seems to be largely for the purpose of closing off possibility as opposed to increasing possibility. However... It's both.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Well, amen to bringing people together more. Yeah, such an important mission right now.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I'd like to explore the possibility of something that I've heard, but I don't know if it's true, that sex, which of course doesn't just include intercourse, but the things that lead into and out of sexual intercourse, but that sex is a microcosm for the relationship at large, meaning that the dynamics that show up in intimate interactions are somehow reflective of a larger
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
working out or dynamic in the relationship. To what extent do you think that's true? It's a concept that I've heard. It sounds interesting. And any discussion about sex tends to, you know, get people's ears bricked up because it's, depending on where you live in the world, it's either something that people talk about casually, openly, or with a lot of you know, electricity around it.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
But I always like to say, you know, as a biologist, we can all agree on one thing, which is that we're all here because sperm met egg, if not in human, in dish, and then eventually in human. So we're still at that point in human evolution. So what are your views about intimacy and sex as a reflection of the relationship.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And here, what I'm thinking of again are these, when you described conflict, you described these three different positioning of arrows, towards one another, away from one another, one chasing the other. Is there a parallel for healthy relationship that we can offer up?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Yeah. Before talking about this question of whether or not sex is a microcosm of the larger relationship, the health of the relationship.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Or are we really saying, hey, even whether or not we realize or not, if we're pursuing a relationship, are we really basically saying, I'm willing to become a different person by virtue of being in a relationship?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And am I correct in interpreting what you just said as that... love and desire are fundamentally separate, that they can exist in parallel, but that any goal of society, much less a couple to try and unify those as one thing is not going to succeed?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I'm relieved to hear you say that. Maybe I grew up on too many, I don't know how many romantic comedies I saw, but I grew up in a home where love sex and romance were discussed in very, almost ethereal terms.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Do you recommend that couples exchange these documents?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Because somehow in them, there's a split between these two things.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
What percentage of infidelity do you think reflects somebody's inability to integrate this love component from desire component such that they find that they only experience infidelity desire or strong desire outside their committed relationship.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
We explore what conflict in relationships looks like and the dynamics that underlie those conflicts. So focusing less on specific scenarios, but rather the dynamics that exist in conflicts in romantic relationship across all different situations and different combinations of people.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
What you just said brings me back to this idea that we were exploring at the very beginning of this conversation, that it seems that so much of navigating relationship in healthy versus unhealthy ways depends on this internal dynamic within ourselves of an ability to be in close, intimate relationship with another.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
and yet hold on to enough of our own identity and evolve that identity within the relationship to the other.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
This is a recurring dynamic that you see. And does it swap back and forth across couples, male, female?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I'm assuming in that example, heterosexual relationship, but even homosexual relationships, you'll see it switch back and forth, or it tends to be a pretty stable feature, meaning one person in the couple tends to be afraid of abandonment by the other, the other person more deeply afraid of abandonment of themselves.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Indeed I have. So interesting. Again, not because you weren't clear, you were incredibly clear and concise about this, but I think this is such an important concept. Maybe you'd repeat it for us again, just so that people can really drive it into their consciousness and maybe ask themselves the question, are they more afraid of abandonment by the other or abandonment of themselves?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And my mind keeps flitting back to this parallel construction of these circuits were built in infancy and childhood and adolescence. And what kind of flashed to mind is when we are adolescents and teenagers, there's this fundamental question that we ask that rarely do we ask again later on. I mean, maybe people do, but the question is kind of, who am I?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Teenagers try on a lot of different identities often, and how they dress is one of the ways in which they self-identify. Their music, I mean, the music we listen to when we're teenagers and young adults is forever stamped into us as like some core part of our identity.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It has an emotional weight that music that we arrive to later doesn't, unless it resonates with that early music or recapitulates that rather. So in my mind, I'm thinking, I wonder if these circuits that are struggling with holding on to self versus a kind of playful, curious exploration of new things, novelty, which is so fundamental to relationship.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And they're not, they're, as we say as neurobiologists, are really antagonistic, that they're really in a push-pull. I mean, there's so many things that we're discussing today that really feel as if these are like circuits that can't be co-active easily, that they're like, we're in this internal grappling match. And what keeps coming to mind- But they also need each other. Right.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
They're like the front axle and the back axle of a vehicle. You can't exist without both.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So if I understand correctly, we seek out others in order to try and initiate the process of change that we want. Right. But then when we hit the friction point, meaning the point where it challenges where we are.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Fascinating.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I get it. I get it. And it makes me think that this earlier discussion we were having, you know, is sex a microcosm for the larger relationship? It sounds to me like the answer is yes, but especially the relationship to self. And especially like there's a lot of information in one's desire template or blueprint about how one was cared for or not cared for.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
right? I couldn't agree more. And I think that there also seems to be this attempt to directly translate from, well, if somebody had issues with their mother, then they're going to have issues with women as an adult. Or if they had issues with their father, they're going to have issues with men as an adult.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
But in reality, it's the algorithm. It's the algorithm. It's that these algorithms that are laid down in our neural circuitry earlier, they don't care about male-female-ness. I mean, it doesn't change whether or not people are heterosexual or homosexual. It ain't to them, I believe. I think these are frankly, biologically driven.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
But the idea is that our ways of being don't translate directly that way, that these are deeper processes. So if one had issues, for instance, male and heterosexual, but they had issues with their father, they could have the same issues with women as an adult, right? That it could translate, that it's not always mapping male to male, female to female.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
then there's a form of resent or frustration. Defensiveness. Defensiveness.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
It cuts across our preconceived notions that if somebody had a good relationship with their mother, they will have a good relationship with women. If they had a good relationship with father, with men.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I hadn't heard that, but that one's going up on X. Repair work is something that is so fundamental to healthy relationships.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
What is your recommendation for how couples think about repair work? Let's assume that they're still together and there's some at least hint of a hope to recover the relationship. Should repair work be framed as repair? in a particular way to facilitate it. You know, how does one begin?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
I mean, I can sort of been, we've been doing a lot of threes today, so I can imagine mistakes, misunderstandings, and betrayals, right? There are mistakes like I accidentally step on somebody's toes, there's misunderstandings, two people thought the same thing, and then there are outright betrayals. And my understanding from your work is that
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You've seen many couples, indeed helped many couples, recover from all three of those categories to the point where they are quite satisfied with their relationship.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So a very practical question then. What are the... necessary but not sufficient elements that somebody should have in themselves before they go seeking a romantic relationship. Meaning, what is necessary in order to be able to embark on the process with any chance of success? Barring extreme pathology, right?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And of course, we also talk about what healthy conflict resolution looks like, what a truly effective apology looks and sounds like, and we explore the erotic aspects of relationships, comparing and contrasting, for instance, love and desire, how sometimes those things run in parallel in the same direction, how sometimes those run in opposite directions, and how people can explore their own notions, their own models of love and desire in order to have more effective romantic relationships.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Beautiful, aspirational, and realistic too. This notion of, not notion, forgive me, this act of, Truly getting outside of oneself to be present to the way the other person feels, irrespective of who was right or who was wrong, if it was a misunderstanding, betrayal, but especially in cases of betrayal.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
The exiting of, as you said, either a stance of not wanting to look at it for oneself or of self-flagellation. Both are self-centered. So really getting into... genuine care for, if not caretaking, were the offer of care for the other person.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Assuming that both people entering the relationship have the best of intentions to make the relationship work, in quotes, is it both a sense of one's own identity as well as what specifically they would like to change? Or is it some other constellation of factors?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Yeah, absolutely. And what you're describing also perhaps at least partially explains why sometimes, not always, apologies are insufficient. Necessary but not sufficient because there are certain modes of apology that don't show us that the person who's apologizing is really outside themselves.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
They're in their own guilt, they're in their own shame, and therefore they're not really present to how we feel.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Who is ready for relationship? And for people who are not in relationship or who are, what sorts of questions should they be asking themselves? What sorts of things should we all be doing?
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Great question. My answer is far too long to give here. Everyone will be relieved.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Well, I want to make clear that before what I say next, that if I had my way, we would continue this conversation for many hours, if not days. Perhaps there's an opportunity for that in the future. But I was told, and not surprisingly, that you're in tremendous demand. You're on a live tour now.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
i can't wait to see this it's all sold out so i'll have to wait like everyone else but um sounds like an incredible experience indeed i know some people have spoken directly to them uh who attended one of your lives recently and they sound like a completely immersive and um experience like no other. So I'm very excited about that.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
My only regret about your tour is that we have to halt this conversation in the next couple of minutes. And there are a couple of things I just want to reflect back to you that are all from a place of real deep appreciation. First of all, for bringing forward what you've brought today. You're one of these exceedingly rare people with whom when they speak, like gems just fall out of them.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And I know I'm not alone in this sentiment. I mean, just in today's conversation, you've transformed the way that I think about relationship, self, identity, neurobiology, love, sex, so many key topics. And in a much larger way, As you pointed out, and I completely agree, the themes that you're talking about are not just fundamental for us to resolve as individuals.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
They are not just fundamental for us to resolve in couples or whatever relationship configuration people happen to be in.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
They're societal. That we can look at anything, an election, two countries battling one another, political groups, whatever. At every level, this is what it means to be human, built up from the same fundamental circuit, same fundamental dynamics. And I really see you as...
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
You hear that a lot.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
not just a pioneer, but the pioneer of this parting of the veil from what has, I think, until this point in human history, been a lot of descriptions of things, of what's right, what's wrong, this and that. And some of that might be true. I don't know. I'm not qualified to know.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
but that you represent a real parting of the veil into the next evolution of what it means for humans to interact in more healthy ways and with curiosity and sense of invitation toward more love, connection, and peace. So, you know, there really aren't words to express how enthusiastic and appreciative I am of what you brought here today and what you're doing.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And so I just want to say, you know, deep heartfelt thanks. And I know I speak for many, many people.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion about romantic relationships with Esther Perel. To find links to Esther's new course on intimacy, as well as links to her books, her podcast and other resources, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
In addition, please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. Please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols, An Operating Manual for the Human Body.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body. If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So that's Instagram X, formerly known as Twitter, Threads, Facebook and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media channels.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
If you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, our neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as protocols in the form of brief one to three page PDFs. Those protocol PDFs are on things like neuroplasticity and learning, optimizing dopamine, improving your sleep, deliberate cold exposure, deliberate heat exposure.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
We have a foundational fitness protocol that describes a template routine that includes cardiovascular training and resistance training with sets and reps, all backed by science. And all of which again is completely zero cost. To subscribe, simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab up in the upper right corner, scroll down a newsletter and provide your email.
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Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Esther Perel. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
If you don't mind defining those for the audience.
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
What happens when people are mismatched in terms of age?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
So that's shifting now towards more often people are observing older women with younger men?
Huberman Lab
Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
By the end of today's episode, you will learn from the world's foremost expert on romantic relationships, how to find, build, and revive romantic relationships that feel most satisfying to all partners involved. I'm also pleased to announce that Esther Perel has just released a new course on intimacy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
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. My guest today is Dr. Stuart McGill. Dr. Stuart McGill is a distinguished professor of spine biomechanics at the University of Waterloo.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
That's the plan. Well, I've certainly had a blast today, Dr. McGill. This has been amazing. I mean, you've given us such a wealth of knowledge about the back, its anatomy, neurology, the sources of pain for those that have back pain, avenues to relieve back pain, avenues for people to stave off back pain, including the big three, but not limited to the big three.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
You also gave us a wonderful window into the precision with which you approach assessment. And during the introduction and also in the show note captions, I mentioned and linked to the many clinicians that you've trained all over the world so that if people want to try and access direct coaching and rehabilitation, they can do that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I also really appreciate the books you've written, and we linked to that as well, Back Mechanic. And I really just appreciate your devotion to public education through your own channels, through your students, the many, many, many peer-reviewed papers that you've published. I mean, I can't overemphasize this enough. You have a vast number of high quality peer reviewed publications in these areas.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
And it's just wonderful to sit across from somebody who's devoted their professional life to this really important area that so many people confront, whether or not they be athletes or conventional exercisers, or just people who are experiencing some pain or want to get in shape or all of the above.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching, I just want to extend a really deep, heartfelt and genuine thank you. Thank you so much.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Well, thank you for those words. It's a labor of love for me, and that's extremely gratifying to hear. And God willing, I'll be in your kind of shape at your age. Let's do this again.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Thanks. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Stuart McGill. To learn more about his work, as well as to find a link to his excellent book, Back Mechanic, The Step-by-Step McGill Method to Fix Back Pain, please see the show note caption.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Also in the caption, you'll find a link to backfitpro.com, which is Dr. McGill's website, where he has links to specific practitioners you can work with if you're experiencing back pain. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Please also subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five star review. Please also check out the sponsors that I mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or topics or guests you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab Podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols, An Operating Manual for the Human Body.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body. If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media channels.
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So that's Instagram, X, formerly known as Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, and Facebook. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlap with the contents of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the contents of the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media channels.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
If you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter,
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Our neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as protocols in the form of brief PDFs of one to three pages, where I spell out the specific do's and in some cases do nots, but mostly do's related to things like how to optimize your sleep, how to regulate your dopamine levels. There's a protocol for neuroplasticity and learning.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
as well as protocols for fitness, which we call the foundational fitness protocol, includes everything, sets, reps, cardiovascular training. Again, all available, completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab, scroll down to newsletter and provide us your email. But I should point out, we do not share your email with anybody.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Stuart McGill. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Dr. McGill is a true encyclopedia on the topics of back physiology and anatomy, sources of back pain and treatments for back pain. So it's truly a special opportunity to be able to learn from him in such immense detail and in such a clear and actionable way.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So facet angles that are too close together, basically, a small angle.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I mean, is it fair to say that if we are naturally flexible, For instance, like my sister can, you know, like her fingers can bend back really easily. Her shoulder extension, which I guess for people that aren't familiar with shoulder extension, you know, she can like let's say you're leaning up against a railing with your back to the railing.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
The railings just let's just say is just above lower back height and you can put both hands on it. parallel. So your arms are close together, like very close to the torso. And people don't do this quickly because you can tear something or injure something. But then with feet about, I don't know, a foot or two away from that bar, you can do a knee bend and basically the arms go back behind you.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Like I happen to have a fair degree of just natural shoulder extension ability. I'm not particularly flexible, quote unquote, but that's just how I'm structured. Yeah. I have some friends that can't do that to save their life. But I wouldn't consider myself hyperflexible. My sister is a bit more flexible. We're related, obviously.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
By the end of today's episode, you will have a quite thorough understanding about the anatomy and physiology of the back as it relates to a healthy back, to back pain, and of course, you'll have various remedies for dealing with back pain, preventing back pain, and for strengthening your back for all sorts of different kinds of movement, not just for exercise and sport, but also to move through your daily activities pain-free and with ease and mobility at any age.
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So would people like her or people that tend to be pretty flexible naturally, would they be wise to avoid certain activities if their goal is to remain pain-free? I mean, you talk about the St. Bernard running program. on the Greyhound track, you know, we all can enjoy things recreationally, but of course we don't want to injure ourselves.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So is somebody who's naturally flexible, should they avoid certain sports and activities? And conversely, if somebody is naturally stiffer, thicker spine, thicker joints, should they avoid certain activities?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Helix Sleep.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for more than 10 years now, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast. To be clear, I don't take AG1 because they're a sponsor. Rather, they are a sponsor because I take AG1. In fact, I take AG1 once and often twice every single day, and I've done that since starting way back in 2012.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
There is so much conflicting information out there nowadays about what proper nutrition is, but here's what there seems to be a general consensus on.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Whether you're an omnivore, a carnivore, a vegetarian or a vegan, I think it's generally agreed that you should get most of your food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources, which allows you to eat enough but not overeat, get plenty of vitamins and minerals, probiotics and micronutrients that we all need for physical and mental health.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Now, I personally am an omnivore and I strive to get most of my food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources. But the reason I still take AG1 once and often twice every day is that it ensures I get all of those vitamins, minerals, probiotics, etc. But it also has adaptogens to help me cope with stress.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
It's basically a nutritional insurance policy meant to augment, not replace quality food. So by drinking a serving of AG1 in the morning and again in the afternoon or evening, I cover all of my foundational nutritional needs. And I, like so many other people that take AG1, report feeling much better in a number of important ways, such as energy levels, digestion, sleep and more.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So while many supplements out there are really directed towards obtaining one specific outcome, AG1 is foundational nutrition designed to support all aspects of well-being related 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.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
They'll give you five free travel packs with your order, plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman. Unless somebody is seeking to be a world-class athlete in something, in which case they should probably pay attention to their genetics and see whether or not it lines up well with a given sport. Although there have been...
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
exceptions where people who are incredibly genetically, let's just say, biased toward not being able to perform well in a sport have nonetheless succeeded in performing at a world-class level. Those are exceedingly rare exceptions.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
for most people who want to do things recreationally, like the heavier set person with a thicker spine who wants to golf or do ballet, perhaps, or the thinner willowy person who wants to get into powerlifting, for instance.
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Are there certain things that they should each consider and embrace as activities in order to make themselves more resilient, more pain resilient and more apt to have higher performance? For instance, would the willowy person, so to speak, do well to build up some of the musculature around the spine to compensate for the thinness of that spine?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now, I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. Now, one of the keys to getting a great night's sleep is to make sure that your mattress is suited to your unique sleep needs.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
And would the person with the heavier or thicker spine do well to try and encourage more pliability of their discs somehow?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
The people on the podium look very similar in structure.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
What does that mean? Well, if you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz and it asks you questions such as, do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night? Things of that sort. Maybe you know the answers to those questions, maybe you don't. Either way, Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
For me, that turned out to be the Dusk mattress made by Helix. I started sleeping on a Dusk mattress about three and a half years ago, and it's been far and away the best sleep that I've ever had.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So if you'd like to sleep better by sleeping on a mattress that's customized to your unique sleep needs, go to helixsleep.com slash huberman, take that brief two-minute sleep quiz, and Helix will match you to a mattress that's ideal for you. Right now, Helix is giving up to 30% off mattresses and two free pillows. Again, that's helixsleep.com slash Huberman to get 30% off and two free pillows.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So I know that you loathe and avoid generalizations with good reason. But given that most people listening to or watching this are probably not aiming to become elite athletes. I know I'm certainly not. Can we safely make at least one or two generalizations about what we each and all can do to try and avoid let's say back pain and injury by either diversifying
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
our training or avoiding certain types of training. For instance, let's take the three major phenotypes, and this is obviously not how the world works, but the classic ectomorphic phenotype, very thin, very willowy, small joints, long and lithe, or lithe.
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
the mesomorph, thicker, more muscular, and then the so-called endomorph, the more heavier set, maybe even carrying some extra body fat, et cetera. You don't really know what's under there. They could fall into either of the other two phenotypes. I could imagine, based on everything that you're saying, that a good rule of thumb would be avoid the types of activities that
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
are outside of your natural genetic propensity based on body type, at least in the extremes. Like if you're not very bendy, don't do seven days a week of yoga, okay? But I could also imagine the opposite, which is if you're not very bendy, do seven days of yoga because that's going to allow you to become more bendy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Or the person that is naturally shaped more like a shot putter, let's say the mesomorph or endomorph, and you could say, well, Um, there'd be great power lifter. I mean, I knew kids like this in high school, you know, PE class, they're like, okay, weight training today. None of us had done weight training.
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
And then the kid, you know, lies down and, you know, and pushes, you know, three 15 and you're like, Oh goodness, you know, like that's, that's wild. Um,
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
But maybe they shouldn't be weight training if their goal is to be all around fit, which I think is the goal of most people, to be able to carry some luggage at the airport without having to stop every once in a while and suck for air, to be able to lean down and grab something out of a cabinet, pick up a kid, do some hard work.
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
labor in the yard, move some logs and things like that, to be able to do stuff without getting injured and without being so sore in the following days that you feel like you need extensive rehabilitation. So again, I know you like to avoid generalizations, but should we make it a point to train against our predisposition in order to offset the imbalances that would otherwise occur?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Or would we be wise to lean into our strengths and just not touch stuff that taps into our weaknesses? I understand the question.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Today's episode is also brought to us by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years. Initially, I didn't have a choice. It was a condition of being allowed to stay in school. But pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to overall health.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
As a professor for more than three decades, Dr. McGill has analyzed the spines of injured people as well as healthy people and developed methods to treat spine injuries and pain as well as to improve spine biomechanics in anybody. He has authored more than 250 peer reviewed research articles on these topics, making him a true world expert.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I just meant oops, because clearly that's not the way you went. Not that going to plumbing school would be a bad decision for some, but in your case, you went a very different direction.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
There are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all, great therapy consists of having good rapport with somebody that you can really trust and talk to about the issues that you're dealing with. Second of all, that therapist should provide support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
And third, expert therapy should provide useful insights, insights that allow you to better understand not just your emotional life and your relationship life, but of course also your relationship to yourself and to career goals and school goals, meaning excellent therapy should also inspire positive action.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So if somebody has pain in a given movement, say standing up, um, after they sit for too long, um, um, a particular style of hip hinge, deadlift or squat, or when they run, for instance, would it be wise for them to think about the exact movement that makes the pain the worst?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
in the moment that they're doing the movement or afterwards, because oftentimes pain will arrive after we engage in a certain activity, but during the activity, that pain is shut down, which by the way, is an interesting phenomenon in its own right. And, you know, might be worth some mention as to, a couple of the reasons why that occurs.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
We always think, oh, blood flow, it's warm, but clearly it's more. It's much more than that. It's much more than that. Yeah, for sure. So let's say I've pain in a knee when I run. Should I avoid running in that gate that causes pain and work around it? Seems to me that would be the logical choice. Right.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
BetterHelp makes it very easy for you to find an expert therapist with whom you really resonate with and that can provide the benefits that I just described. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, you can go to betterhelp.com slash Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up.
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
It must be humbling for adults to get down and do a baby crawl.
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Does he wear one of those elastic lifting suits when he does that?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
The neural aspects are fascinating. When he does that incredible squat poundage, does he... take the bar off a standard squat rack and then walk it back? Or is it one of those ones where the bar is suspended from two hooks and then he takes it from there?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So that particular lift was lifted off a monolith where he didn't have to walk it out. So he takes it off. So it's hanging from hooks, then the hooks are brought away. The reason I ask is it sounds like he's optimized for one very specific movement in a couple of you know, a couple of planes and nothing else.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Waking Up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and more. I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old, and it made a profound impact on my life.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Because walking with a thousand plus pounds on one's shoulders is also a feat in of itself.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So best to not be carrying a willow spine for that one. You want to be like a Muir Woods, a redwood trunk.
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I love the analogy to dog breeds. I love going to dog shows. I've only done it a few times, not to actually see the prancing around of the dogs. That doesn't interest me at all. The best part about a really excellent dog show is you go back behind the the arena where all the different breeds reside. So you can see the lineup of the finest Irish Wolfhounds, the finest English Bulldogs, et cetera.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
In recent years, I started using the Waking Up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice. What I and so many other people love about the Waking Up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from, and those meditations are of different durations.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Hundreds of different breeds. And you really get to see these genetic extremes, not just of structure, but of temperament. And you get to see the similarity in temperament of the Bulldogs. And of course, there's variation. Some of them are a bit more jolly, others more stoic. You know, the terriers are magnificent in their own right.
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
And as you pointed out earlier with respect to the podium, more similar to each other within breed than across breeds in terms of temperament. But there's variation within breed. The reason I bring this up and the reason I bring this up now is that
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
If you look at the movement to those animals, even just the way they walk, whether or not they enjoy a flexion of the paw as they stride or whether or not they tend to stride differently. I don't have language for this. I'm not an expert in this, but I have a visual system that works and I can see that they may move differently. They actually walk differently, even at the same pace.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
And then you look at human beings, shorter, taller, medium, more lithe, more heavyset. And it's amazing that we don't take this into consideration, that we all move very differently, even within species, but that we've been into these groups.
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So when someone walks into your laboratory, as it were, your clinic slash laboratory, are you paying attention to how they move into the room, irrespective of pain? 100%.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice, both from the perspective of novelty, you never get tired, tired of those meditations. There's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself. And you can always fit meditation into your schedule, even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I recall seeing Michael Johnson sprinting very upright. Yes. So when I think upright, I think either flat lower back or a little bit of a... of an arch in the lower back, this kind of movement.
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Well, I think he was 200 and 400. He was. Which is unusual, someone that could win gold in both.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I also really like doing yoga nidra or what is sometimes called non-sleep deep rest for about 10 or 20 minutes because it is a great way to restore mental and physical vigor without the tiredness that some people experience when they wake up from a conventional nap. If you'd like to try the Waking Up app, please go to wakingup.com slash Huberman, where you can access a free 30-day trial.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I'd like to take a brief break to thank one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Now, I and others on the podcast have talked a lot about the critical importance of hydration for proper brain and bodily function.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Research shows that even a slight degree of dehydration can really diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes in order for your body and brain to function at their best. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are critical for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or nerve cells.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of Element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise I'm doing, especially on hot days if I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman, spelled drinkelement.com slash Huberman, to claim a free Element sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. I love where this conversation is going because there's tremendous variation in body shape and form out there.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
And I'm certain that by now everybody listening is starting to think about, oh, am I more likely to have a willowy spine, a thinner spine or a thicker spine, the kind of pliability or what you called vertical stacking resilience that one spine or the other would have. And it brings me back to this question of,
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
What can we each and all do to try and create the strongest back as well as limit the propensity for pain assuming we don't have it yet? Okay. So I would say I'm kind of in the middle. I'm neither extremely lithe nor am I shaped like a – you know, like a kettlebell, kind of somewhere in between.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So for me, I make it a point across my training week to include three resistance training sessions, three quote-unquote cardiovascular training sessions, one long, one medium, one short cardiovascular session. The lifting sessions are geared toward building or maintaining strength in a balanced way for me. Everyone is going to have different requirements.
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
In other words, nothing is skewed toward one particular outcome like endurance or strength or power. And I think most people probably want something similar because they'd like to be able to meet the various demands of life. So I frame the question I'm about to ask that way because as people start to assess themselves, the question arises again,
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Should we try and compensate for our weaknesses by emphasizing a certain style of training a little bit more? And if so, what does that look like for the spine? You said earlier, and I love this quote, and I want to make sure I attribute it to you now and going forward, that all systems in the body require stress for better health. Optimal health. Thank you. For optimal health.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Again, that's wakingup.com slash Huberman to access a free 30-day trial. And now for my discussion with Dr. Stuart McGill. Dr. Stuart McGill, welcome. Thank you, sir. Great to have you here. I'm a big fan of your work. I've watched a lot of your other content.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So assuming that somebody has a thinner stature, they're more bendy, would they be wise to build up the muscles of the core, not just the abdominals, but the obliques and the lower back muscles, all around the spine in order to give it more stability? And would the person who has a thicker torso, thicker spine, thicker joints...
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
do well to emphasize some additional yoga training, some additional anything that allows them to be more bendy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So backtracking a little bit, but making sure that I'm doing that with purpose. You need to know what generates the pain in order to try and localize the pain.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
But then the goal is not to repeat whatever creates the pain. Correct. Perhaps, what I'm hearing, the goal is to get... near the proximity of the pain, but not go there. Not generate the movement that recreates the pain, but take the movement as far as one can without creating the pain. And then think about where the instability or weakness or biomechanical failure is contributing to the pain.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
read your books, and I'm excited to discuss today what makes for a really strong, resilient back, what causes back pain and how to relieve it. And perhaps the bigger issue is what all of that allows for in terms of mobility and functionality, not just in sport, but in everyday life. So to kick things off, I'd like to ask a question that I think is on a lot of people's minds.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Well, and there's some wisdom to not pushing into pain and extremes all the time. If the goal is to have a long arc of fitness or athletic career, a good friend of mine who's very accomplished in the fitness community, he says one of the best ways to get and stay in excellent shape your entire life is to train consistently, train reasonably hard. And we can talk about what his recommendation is.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I'd love your thoughts. But as best as one can to not get hurt. You know, we forget about this. We hear so much about training consistently and pushing hard, but the not getting hurt part is key as well. Here's his recommendation on intensity. Can I share it with you and just get your thoughts?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Yeah, there's some neuroscience, certainly some psychology, but certainly some neuroscience to support that in terms of how we reset our... kind of a reinforcement threshold.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Most people aren't thinking about their back unless they have pain. So what causes back pain? You start with the easy questions.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
No, it's excellent recommendations for everyone. His suggestion, and by the way, this is not for competitive athletes. This is just for exercisers, if you will, is to make 85% of one's workouts across the year at about 85% of muscle. Maximal intensity and output.
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So still constraining the total length of a session to whatever the goal of that session is, whether it's resistance training or cardiovascular training, but to not go all out, to go at 85% of one's subjective understanding of what all out on that day would be on that day. to make 10% of one's workouts across the year at somewhere between 90 to 95% intensity of what one could generate that day.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Again, 100% all out being subjective for that day. And then 5%, or even less, of their workouts all out, everything you could possibly give, quote unquote, leaving it all on the mat, whatever phrase one prefers. And I like that recommendation because it keeps things in check and it also creates an awareness of how intense one is training and it allows us to not
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
let the great night's sleep or the extra cup of coffee that we had or the great song that happens to be playing or the competitive spirit that's arising because someone joined you that day or asked you to join a workout to take you into the domain of harming yourself.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
In fact, I can look to the times when I've been injured training and almost always it's because somebody invited me to join their workout and we got into a little bit of a competitive spirit. And I'm not an ultra competitive person, but you push yourself to 100% on that day.
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
And two weeks later, you've got something you're dealing with, or two days later, you've got something and you go, God, was that really worth it? And I think unless one is a competitive athlete and that's competition day, it's probably not worth it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
During today's episode, we discuss spine anatomy, as well as the common sources of back pain. And we discuss some of the controversies as to the origins and different treatments for back pain. As you'll quickly learn, there is no one specific source of back pain, nor is there one specific solution to back pain.
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Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
That's pretty heavy. Here I'm thinking about intensity, meaning, well, for resistance training, let's say that one could complete six repetitions at a given weight. But if they had a gun to their head, they could complete nine.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Okay. Well, then you're doing six. Again, this is crude calculations, right? But six, maybe seven, maybe cheating a little bit on that seventh repetition. If it's a run and like for me on Sundays, typically there's a long, slow jog, but maybe the slow in that component is a little bit subjective. So am I pushing a little bit harder than I'm comfortable or am I hitting kind of a cruising pace?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Right. Okay. So 85% of max intensity for me would be staying at cruising pace and occasionally bumping up the, the speed a little bit. But on all out day, if it happens to be one, then it's, long, quote unquote, slow distance, but I'm trying to increase the speed of what I'm referring to as slow.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So again, this is all very subjective, but we know on a given day, whether or not we're pushing past our comfort zone or not. And I'm not somebody who relies heavily on heart rate monitors and things like that. What I rely on is my consistency. This is the way that I've decided to stay in all around shape for, you know, more than three decades. I feel like I'm in decent shape.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I'm not a great athlete. I'll never be the strongest person in the room or have the best endurance or the most speed or explosiveness, but I'm pretty sure I can keep up with most things pretty well. And I don't have pain. And I feel very grateful to not have pain. And I think it's because I've adopted a stance of, I don't wanna call it moderation, but of modulation.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Yeah, Dr. Sean Mackey is our head of the, essentially the pain division at Stanford School of Medicine. He's an MD and PhD, and he's a big... proponent of the biopsychosocial model of pain, which probably makes sense for us to discuss now. As the name suggests, it incorporates psychological elements. It incorporates, of course, physiological elements.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
And it points to, as I recall, seven or more sort of paths to dealing with pain, some of which include thoughts about one's emotional state. stress level, sleep. I mean, all of these things clearly play a role in pain and rehabilitation from pain.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Yeah, surely the nervous system is involved in generating movement and feedback from the muscles and proprioception. And as you're describing, the nervous system creates our sense of pain. There's an emotional component to it, as Dr. Mackey pointed out and as you're reinforcing.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
The neural circuits that control quote-unquote pain or give rise to pain involve the confluence of all of these things at some level. And I appreciate that you're willing to go into this biopsychosocial model of pain and acknowledge it because I think all too often in this space of biomechanics and pain and back pain in particular, people –
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
you in some cases get labeled as only subscribing to one particular pattern of remedy or one particular framework, and that's simply not true. It's just not true. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that that's actually a reflection of other people placing a singular lens on you and your work, as opposed to your work having a singular lens.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I know that you look at things through the rather complex prism that is back pain and back rehabilitation. So thank you for touching into the biopsychosocial model. And we'll put a link in the show note captions to that episode with Dr. Mackey because he went into this in some depth. And so it is the case that we've covered that model in pretty extensive detail.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
There's something that you said to me. ones that I really want to make sure we highlight, which is that people who embark on a particular style of training, not just sports selection, but style of training, like resistance training with heavier weights versus endurance training, running longer distances or swimming longer distances, will sometimes cultivate a certain, what should we call it,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
personality style or reactivity style that is probably independent of who they started off as. I mean, you can never separate these things completely. I mean, we could argue people who have a lot of mental endurance pick endurance sports or people that are rather ballistic in their personality, here I'm playing psychologist, pick sports with a lot of speed and ballistic motion involved.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
But perhaps the reverse is also true, that the more we engage in activities for which the nervous system is required to generate a particular pattern of movement, ballistic movement or endurance or strength, that we exacerbate certain aspects of our mental self, our emotional self as well.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I realize this is not the stuff of detailed peer reviewed studies necessarily, or at least I'm not aware of them, but in your experience, working with a variety of different people from the general population who engage in different activities, as well as athletes who engage in very different activities, And let's keep in mind the discussion we had earlier about dog breeds.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
They are selected for not just based on physical phenotype and movement, but also personality type, temperament. What sort of broad correlations have you observed in, say, endurance runners Do they have more mental endurance for other activities versus, say, strength athletes or sprinters? Do they tend to have less but tend to excel in other domains of their mental life?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Sure. So when you say genetics loads the gun, what comes to mind, because it's my experience, is that I have a right shoulder that sits a little bit lower than my left shoulder, unless I'm mindful of that. My dad has the same thing. And I can put an ankle on my other knee a bit more easily on one side versus the other. I tend to pronate one foot a little bit more than the other when I run.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I find that really interesting. And I can think of a number of self-experiments that I'd like to embark on, including more endurance training at particular times of year and seeing how that correlates with mental focus and endurance for athletes. say, writing or preparing podcasts, things of that sort.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
But of course, now that I have some sense of what the answer could be, I'd be biasing the outcomes. But if it's a self-experiment and the goal is simply to shift one's mental life or behavior, then I don't know that it matters that much.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Do you think that if somebody has pain, that they should have the capacity both to like lean into and push into the pain, not exacerbate it, but to sit with it and feel it as opposed to just avoiding it. How should people think about their own pain and how to work with it? That's the reason I'm asking.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
These are subtle things. They don't necessarily result in back pain. But I'm guessing that a lot of that is... either developmental overuse, particular sport, I'm regular footed, I skateboarded a bunch, so I push with my right foot, I kick a soccer ball with my right foot, those sorts of things. But let's assume that genetics played some role, created some bias.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Yeah, that answers the question. It's follow the advice of the clinician. It gets back to this issue of predisposition to move a certain way, to therefore avoid other forms of movement, to engage in certain activities but not other activities.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I realize that I'll get in trouble if I say, you know, 70% of the training that we do should be in line with our predisposition and 30% should be countercurrent to that. But I'm kind of veering towards numbers more or less like that, right?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I mean, we know, for instance, in the machine learning algorithms that relate to learning in the nervous system that a rough – this is a rough estimate of difficulty should be about – 15% of questions or challenges, so these could be cognitive challenges or physical challenges, should lead to failures, non-injurious failures.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Getting the answer wrong about 15% of the time tends to optimize learning across a number of different domains. Okay. Is that true for everything? Is it true for language, math, dance? No, but it's true for a lot of things.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
If I were to tell you that, which I just did, would then you immediately think to a particular intervention if I told you, okay, you know, I have a little bit of lower right side pain, which I occasionally do. I know I've got this imbalance that was loaded by genetics and presumably experience as well. And would your mind immediately go to a particular intervention origin of that pain?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Yeah, you're in great shape at 67. Yeah. Just remarkable shape. For those listening and not watching, I encourage you to take a look at the top card of the YouTube video. I mean, Stu moves around great. I mean, well, your posture is great and you're in awesome shape for any age, much less 67. So that's a testament to your methods. Well, the point was, it's okay to push when you're younger.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I'd like to ask you about... McGill's big three. I know that again, you loathe to impart generalizations on people, but at some point you realize that people need something to do to work with in order to try and quote unquote, pain proof their back or reinforce their back. So we did a video that included the big three.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
We'll provide a link to those in the show note captions where I perform the big three, probably not perfectly, admittedly. I should have invited you to critique my form and we can always shoot another one of those, but I think it captures the big three well enough. The bird, dog, the roll up and the side plank.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
designed to build strength and stability around the spine and to stave off back pain, or in some cases, rehabilitate back pain. An enormous number of people wrote to us and commented how much the big three have helped them. So I just want to make sure that it's clear that despite
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Or perhaps even more importantly, a particular remedy to that pain? Or do we need to drill a little bit deeper and really understand more about what I do, what I don't do, if I'm more thin set or heavily set at the level of bone structure? You know, what are some of the other questions one would ask in the investigate category?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
The fact that you are appropriately reluctant to say that the big three is the solution to everything in terms of back pain for everyone, they have helped a large, large number of people avoid and in some cases rehabilitate back pain. If you were to add a fourth exercise to the big three, what would it be?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Let's say somebody has a willowy spine and they want more spine stability. They want to be able to generate more spine rigidity for whatever purpose.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
They have a lower back pain that's unilateral. And when they sit too long and then stand up, it feels like that side is locked up and there's some pain shooting down the leg.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
But as Dr. McGill spells out very clearly, there are things that anyone and everyone can do in order to strengthen their back and to reduce the amount of pain they may be experiencing. He explained some specific ways to self-diagnose your back pain, which of course is critical for understanding what specific things to do as well as to avoid in dealing with any pain and,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
And when they walk a bit, 10, 15 minutes, they tend to feel better.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
What are your thoughts on inversion tables and anti-gravity boots and things to deload the spine?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Well, I started doing the big three on the basis of your book. And it certainly has helped my lower right side back pain that occasionally flares up. I also noticed I've gotten stronger in various lifts, but the most salient consequence has been when I run, I feel like my torso can stay more upright as I can kind of cycle my legs underneath me like I'm pedaling on a bike.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
And I feel like I have endurance for days.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I do. Yeah. I had a whole body scan for just, you know, for fun, I guess is the sort of thing I do for fun. And indeed there's a, I think it's like an L3, L4 bulge on one side, which is fully consistent with the pattern of pain that I've had. Right. And I've managed to avoid for a number of years now doing Cobra type pose, these kinds of things.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
The Cobra doesn't work for everybody, but it is a powerful thing.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I noticed if I travel and it forces me to sit for long periods of time and then the next day I train with any kind of hip hinge movement, it flares up again.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Don't forget to use your lumbare on the airplane. Right, yes. Dr. McGill gave me this little pillow called lumbare that inflates you putting in lower back and it's a wonderful tool. Right. That gives you resilience for travel. If one didn't have access to that, they could just roll up a towel and put in their lower back. Absolutely. Yeah, or sitting in a lecture.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
You might get some funny looks, but you'll be the person still mobile and not complaining about your pain when everyone else is grunting.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
That's an advanced neuroplasticity trick that comes with age. I'm right there with you. I have a question about walking. These days, we're hearing more and more about benefits of walking after meals, walking several times per day, blood sugar regulation. I think it's all wonderful. Anything that gets people moving in healthy ways, I think is terrific.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
When it comes to walking, none of us want to be the person paying careful attention to our gait, especially when we're not in pain and things of that sort. But if you were going to recommend a daily walk, is there a duration and speed that you think could be beneficial in terms of staving off back pain, just general posture, things of that sort?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Are we talking about a brisk five-minute walk or a brisk 20-minute walk, this kind of thing?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
If ever there were two exercises that bring to mind notions of back strengthening and potentially back pain... It's the deadlift and the squat. What are your thoughts on deadlifts and squats as a function of one's age, one's perhaps phenotype, ecto, endo, or mesomorph, or any other factors that would lead you to say, yes, deadlift and or squat.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
No, don't deadlift and or squat, or maybe you should deadlift and or squat.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Yeah, that's something that I both encourage and discourage people from searching for because it can scare you appropriately, but it also can be traumatizing to see.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
He's a willowy bendy guy who can just keep bending up and down off the ground. Bingo.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
What are your thoughts on glute ham raises? I'm a big fan of Nordic curls and glute ham raises for the posterior chain. To me, a glute ham raise, folks can look it up, is basically a deadlift into a leg curl, into a hamstring leg curl, except that your feet are, instead of being on the floor for the deadlift part, you've rotated yourself 90 degrees.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
so that the feet are effectively at the wall, right? And from the bottom position up to the parallel to floor position, that's more or less a deadlift, right? Stiff-legged or partially stiff-legged deadlift. And then the rest of the way is the Nordic curl or the leg curl.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
To me, that seems like almost the perfect exercise for the posterior chain, hamstrings, and glutes, which is why I do them regularly. What are your thoughts about them for back strengthening and for people that are trying to avoid back pain, both in the present and in the future?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Because they can't generate that kind of twist and snap with the throwing a football, for instance, like the stiffening up of the body at precisely the right moment and the relaxing of the arm. It's a pulsing strength. The flicking and spiral.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
There's a very mundane example for you. Could I ask you a question about the willow versus thicker trunk example? Can we look to torso thickness or wrist thickness or ankle circumference as a way to assess ourselves as to whether or not we are likely to be more willowy or redwood-like. I mean, it should be obvious just by looking at ourselves, knowing ourselves.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I mean, some of those guys back when were known for having a few alcohol drinks plus smoking cigarettes on the course.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Well, that's okay. I mean, I've gone on record saying that I'll do and... genuinely do heavy hack squats, hack machine squats, leg extensions, those kinds of things, alternatives that for me have just led to progressively more of what I'm looking for in training legs. And back, of course, lower back. And I do the glute ham raises. And I can do all of those without pain.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I don't know the last time I ever did a deadlift. I was never particularly strong in the deadlift. But if you're telling me that avoiding deadlifts as I get older, heavy deadlifts, that is, is going to help me avoid pain. back and hip pain, then I'm all for avoiding heavy deadlifts.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Do you see how- Do I need to flare my elbows back? You can do, yeah. Okay.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
But for instance, I have a short torso. I'm kind of thick through the torso front to back. I always have been since I was a kid. And my wrist circumference isn't small, but isn't huge. I had a bulldog mastiff and he would often look at me and I knew in his mind he was thinking My wrists are really thick compared to yours, Andrew. I knew that's what he was thinking.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
as it relates to applying in sport and in everyday life. Dr. McGill and I also discuss several of the avid controversies within the field of back pain and the treatments for back pain.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
You've talked about the so-called biblical training week. I love this. It's something that I plan to adopt for myself. It's not too far off from what I do now, but it's distinctly different enough that I'm excited because it's going to require some psychological adaptation, physical adaptation. Tell me, what is the biblical training week and why is it so useful?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
He had forearms like a longshoreman. And of course, he had never done any work whatsoever. Actually, primary goal of the bulldog is to do as little work as possible in life. But I have friends who have thick knees, some have smaller joints, smaller ankles. Can we make some general assessment about our spine without imaging it by looking at some of these peripheral markers?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Is there anything that can be done to offset the shrinking? Not that I know of. People will ask whether or not hanging or anti-gravity boots. Oh, well, I've measured that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I feel like every tissue in the body has been the target of an attempt to either restore its more youthful state or somehow augment its, I don't know, resilience over time.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So these days we hear a lot about FDA-approved treatments using so-called platelet-rich plasma, PRP injected into the knee or PRP injected into an ovary or PRP injected into whatever tissue it is that people are attempting to restore youthful state to. Is there any evidence for any compounds or injectable drugs that can restore the tensile strength and thickness to the discs?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Yeah. Could you walk us through... your biblical week training with some examples of what one could select from the buffet of training options.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
And of course, the discs are in repeating fashion throughout the spine, top to bottom. Correct. And the discs are the soft tissue that allow for mobility of the
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
vertebrae the uh the bony segments exactly they are the joints but they're not a ball and socket joint they're actually a fabric of layer upon layer of collagen fibers and we can talk about that as well what a beautiful adaptation right take a bunch of bony if you want to be able to bend a bone right you need to um break it up into segments kind of like beads on a necklace and um and then in between those beads you put some pliable yet um uh it could like
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
We talk about the so-called biopsychosocial model of pain, which points to the various sources that pain can arise from, everything from emotional to lack of sleep, to specific locations in the spine and brain and elsewhere in the body, and the ways those mesh together to give us what we call pain, as well as to direct us towards specific treatments for pain that tend to be especially effective.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I appreciate the neck work that you do, though. I have a four-way neck machine, but I don't require one. I've actually found that taking a plate and wrapping it in a towel, lying on one side, making sure to hook my foot under the wrench and stabilize with my other hand on the ground. and then just gently doing repetitions.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Jeff Cavaliere from AthleanX has a great set of videos on this, where he really spells out the dangers of things like neck bridges. They can be done, but there's a risk there that probably outweighs the potential benefits for most people. But every once in a while, I can't help myself and I do some bridges.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Yeah, I get teased for saying this too often, but the value of having a strong neck is just hard to overstate. You don't have to have a big neck, but a strong neck for sake of stabilizing the whole shoulder girdle during pressing and pulling lifts, for posture, for, you know, Feeling like your head is stably placed on your body.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
My bulldog was alive. He had the larger neck in the house. But again, it's not about building size into the neck. It's really that strength and stability that I just think translates to so many things that are valuable.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Yeah, this is interesting. I love older exercise books. And recently I came across one called Heavy Hands. This must be from the 70s. And the entire book was centered around people I'm being encouraged to carry some dumbbells during exercise, not all the time, and doing some lunges or walking uphill and getting the weights out from their body. And I was kind of chuckling about it on the one hand.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
pun intended. But at the same time, you know, we know based on a number of really good studies using neuroimaging and functional scoring of neural system function as one ages, that the innervation of some of the distal muscles and the fine control of the
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
the digits, the fingers and toes and toe spreading and things like that, even calf size and atrophy are fairly reliable markers of the extent to which there's been degeneration of the upper motor neuron pathways, other brain areas or not. So the idea of keeping the nervous system and neuromuscular
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
connectivity youthful by, quote unquote, heavy hands or maybe ankle weights, provided they're not going to induce injury, makes a lot of sense. Weighting the most distal portion of our body in order to generate adaptations, I think is going to be something that returns to the kind of modern sphere of fitness and longevity.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I guess, a tissue that you can still compress. So it's both pliable and it can squeeze down and become more narrow in the vertical direction. And it can also squeeze down on one side or the other to some degree.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
And none of these things require fancy equipment. One could imagine just... grabbing a hold of some other... Well, an iron bar. An iron bar. Yeah. I really think there's something to this loading of the distal limbs cautiously, right? Properly. But there's something there in terms of keeping the neural pathways healthy and alive. Because we know they atrophy with age.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
And that explains in part the calf muscle atrophy, which, as you point out, is a well-known clinical marker for for neurodegeneration.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Well, certainly when I resistance train, if I'm doing anything standing, I make it a point to stagger my stance. Yes. And at the same time to make sure that my belly button is pointing forward so that I generate some anti-rotation energy. effort so that most of my abdominal work can be placed within the workout for other things.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I do some pikes and some direct abdominal work as well and the roll up and things of that sort that you've recommended. But I find that from a coordination standpoint and especially from a balancing the musculature and the strength on both sides of the body, this is extremely important.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
And I know this because after years of skateboarding where you push with one leg, that was when I was younger, boxing where I'm traditional stance as opposed to southpaw, You know, you start getting into all these imbalances that goes way beyond anything aesthetic.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I mean, the aesthetic stuff is my concern in certain people, but it was more the feeling that I could turn to my right very easily without pain turning my left. I felt stiff and it was just an imbalance in some of the muscles controlling me.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
So I think that weaving a symmetric stance, weaving the requirement for symmetric balancing of the musculature on both sides of the midline just makes all the sense in the world to me, especially if one is going to be a regular exerciser, which hopefully people are.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
Yeah, let's talk about those because you talked about the strength days. What about the two days of mobility?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
If you could just repeat the cardiovascular days.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
I have a feeling I'm naturally inclined to do endurance work because once I start running distance, I can just run and run. And then eventually it just feels like the stopping comes from
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
you know, I don't know, some nagging little injury or something like that, or pain, as opposed to anything stopping me from continuing to run, which is unfortunate because I tend to like the shorter workout type stuff. But it brings us back to what we were talking about earlier, trying to do a balance of those. everything in between. I love the biblical training week.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Stuart McGill: Build a Strong, Pain-Proof Back
And given that currently I've been doing three days of resistance training total per week and three days of cardiovascular training, all it requires is shifting one each of those days toward mobility training, still taking the full day off each week.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
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. My guest today is Dr. Lane Norton. Dr. Lane Norton did his training in biochemistry and nutritional sciences, and is one of the world's foremost experts in exercise and nutrition.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Yeah, I'd be extremely hungry. I mean, I consume artificial sweeteners, for the record. But there are enough data, and I have enough experience with them to know that
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Sometimes they will curb my appetite, like they'll get me over the bump, but I've come to associate, it's probably just pure paired placebo association, if there is such a thing, where if I drink a Diet Coke, pretty soon after that, I want to eat something. Now I've challenged that by not eating something because I have pretty good discipline and it passes. But I think I've come to associate that
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
the sweet taste with wanting to eat something. And nothing to me is more delicious. Well, there are many things there, like a diet coconut slice of pizza if I'm in New York, or a diet coconut burger, or, you know, there are these food associations. But I don't think, for instance, that sweet taste necessarily stimulates appetite.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
But I can imagine if I only had, as you said, 1200 calories a day to eat, and I'm getting You know, 400 of those calories from sugar. Like you said, there's not going to be much. I better be eating a lot of broccoli as well or else I'm going to be pretty hungry. Just based on my learned relationships between sweet taste and food consumption.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
No, but I know about the Twinkie defense.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
There does seem to be a kind of a requirement in books, sometimes even in podcasts, or to take a stance, like to be anti-something. Because saying, you know, what I personally believe based on my read of the data is that most people should strive to get anywhere from 70 to 90% of their food from non-processed, minimally processed quality foods, and then allow some space for the
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
you know, some processed food, highly processed foods and sweets and things like that, but mostly to get the macros right, as we've described them earlier. And what the range will depend on age will depend on activity level will depend on prior health history.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I mean, there are some people who have enough issues that relate to diet and lack of exercise that when I've seen them get it right and undergo such incredible transformations that like I also know these people's capacity to fall off the train. Right. And you want to say, you know, maybe make that number a hundred percent. So you never go back.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Cause I've seen them slip before and then, and then the guilt and then they come back, excuse me. So there are two ways to look at it. One is you tell people, listen, you don't have to be perfect. Right. Cause if, if perfection is the goal, you're going to fall off. But then there are those individuals like severe alcoholics who quit drinking.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
You don't say like, Hey, like you can have a beer on Christmas. You don't say that.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
It's all or none. But anyway, here we're getting into the psychology of it.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Yeah. Oh, and, and everyone struggles with different things and everyone finds certain things easier. Like I, I'm not an alcoholic, I'm an adult, so I can have a drink or two. I just don't like it. So everyone assumes because I did this episode on alcohol that I'm like anti-alcohol.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Like I'm like, if you're an adult, you're non-alcoholic, you don't have issues with, you know, alcohol use disorder or something like, you might guess, like just know the data. Right. But there are certain things like steak, I'm never giving up. Like you could tell me it takes 10 years off my life and I'm not going to give it up.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I'll do other things to offset whatever that, you know, decrease in longevity might be. I don't think that that's a real thing, but I'm just not going to give it up. It's central to my enjoyment of life. Period. Speaking of which, when, if one really wants to wade into the waters of strong opinions and conflicting data, we covered this a bit last time you were on the podcast, but
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
the questions were replete with requests to discuss seed oils. Seed oils. And I must say this whole thing about seed oils has really gotten in my head. Even though I'm a scientist, like the other day I went to my sister's for dinner and she made a really nice dinner. It was from our mom's birthday. And then she made a really nice salad and I love fruits and vegetables. So it was like salad.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And then I looked and I was like, she's made this out with like grapeseed oil. And I was like, why do you use grapeseed oil instead of olive oil? And she's like, well, I ran out of olive oil. And I found myself like looking at the salad like, is this safe to eat? I was like, I heard your voice in my ear. I also heard Paul's voice in my ear. Saladinos, all these people.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And I thought, well, I ate the salad, by the way. I really enjoyed it. It was good. Grape seed oil doesn't taste as good to me as olive oil. I generally try and use olive oil, butter, things like that when I cook. But what's the deal with seed oils? I understand that they are calorically dense. You told us that last time.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I understand people tend to over consume them and then blame them for a bunch of things that are not related to their seed oil-ness rather than their calorie containing-ness. These aren't real words, of course, but you get the idea. But are there any data out there that have your ears kind of pricked up to the possibility that assuming equal calories, that there might be something
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
bad about seed oils or is there zero? And there's no pressure here to answer one way or the other. Not that you would respond to pressure from me anyway.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
What about swapping with monounsaturated fats? Why are we talking about seed oils versus lard and butter? Why aren't we talking about seed oils versus olive oil?
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Terrible way for me to pose the question. Is there any reason to think, like for the person who isn't sure about seed oils because they've just heard enough negative things, even if there's no basis for it, like me, who's like, I like butter. And I also assume that eating too much butter might not be good for me just because I'm a rational human being based on my read of the data.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Anyway, so I have some butter, yes, but I like olive oil. Olive oil is tasty. I'm told it's good for me. Is there any knowledge about anything in olive oil that says, listen, even if you consume it in concert with your caloric thresholds, meaning you're not eating too many calories, is there anything bad in olive oil?
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
People on X. When I put out questions for your coming on this episode, literally there were multiple people that claim that you are paid off by this, by them, by big seed oil. And I was just like, I have to laugh out loud. I was like, there might be a lot of companies that are large that make seed oils, but I I guarantee they're not paying Lane Norton to say what he's saying.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
But yeah, I would agree. I think that people make errors. I do think that a lot of quote unquote bad papers, or let's just say false conclusions arise from elimination of data that did not fit the person's desired outcome. And the reason I say that is I think it's impossible to control for.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Okay. So that would be trading out butter and lard and meat fats for more olive oil.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
So you've got the student or postdoc doing the experiment, the results don't come out the way they would have preferred. And then they're, you know, let's just say I've observed before, never in my laboratory, fortunately, but
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
You just described the way that I eat and that anytime a friend of mine, and this happens a lot, It comes to me and has, you know, 20 to 50 pounds to lose. Well, make it as easy on yourself as possible. You can eat meat, eggs, vegetables, and fruit, and that's all you're going to do for two months. And most of those guys in this case, they were guys, lost weight.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
a substantial amount of weight and kept it off. They all exercised as well. And of course it's caloric restriction related, right? But they're not touching pasta. They're not touching bread. They asked me all the things that, can I do this? And I just said, listen, if it wasn't in the list I just gave you, you're not eating it. It sounds restrictive.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
cases where people come up with reasons why that particular experiment wasn't valid because, you know, the mice were initially sick or the drug, the lot of drug that they used wasn't, it was heading towards expiration. They come up with reasons to exclude rather than outright data fabrication where people literally create results that aren't there.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
The good news about something like that is that fruit generally tastes good and steak is very satiating. It's delicious. If you don't like meat, I suppose this wouldn't work, but... But I don't think there's anything magic about that diet. It just gets people below their maintenance calories with relative ease.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Eating more fruits and vegetables can only be good for you.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Matina. Matina makes loose leaf and ready-to-drink yerba mate.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And, you know, there are a number of different examples throughout history that where people have done that, but I like to think that those are more recent.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Usually end up reading about that in the form of retractions in journals that come out nowadays more close to the publications because of AI's ability to scan images and things of that sort.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Thank you for that very thorough and very clear answer, and I just will highlight that You ate a steak last night. So you were by no means anti-meat or saturated fat.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Not to aggravate them just because they stuck to their principles. You stuck to yours.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Fair enough. Fair enough. Let's talk about artificial sweeteners. Sweet. Those are the other people that pay me. Um, that's right. Uh, he's kidding folks. Good. Um, you and I got into it. It wasn't a scrap.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
We got into a little disagreement about this, um, years ago, so long ago that it's probably not even worth mentioning that, you know, I was, um, somewhat enticed by the data from Dana smalls laboratory. Then at Yale, I think now she's up at McGill, um, looking at some kind of Pavlovian conditioning of artificial sweeteners. So basically, um,
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Children, children in that case, consuming a high amount of I think it was either sucralose or saccharin in combination with a meal, kind of standard meal and look at the insulin response and then removing the food component sometime later. And what they essentially observed was a conditioned insulin response. So then you then have these kids just have the the
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
sweet tasting, non caloric drink minus the food. And they still and they then saw an elevated insulin response. In other words, the same way that Pavlov got dogs to salivate in response to a bell. that was paired with food, then you remove the food and then they just simply salivate in response to the bell.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
The idea was, well, maybe you can create a conditioned Pavlovian-like response to artificial sweeteners. Okay, I thought it was kind of a cool study. Looking back, I probably wouldn't have covered it the way I did because it's not a typical scenario. I think the more important questions are,
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Is there any evidence that artificial and low calorie or zero calorie sweeteners like Stevia, we have to be very careful here, that they are somehow dangerous in any of the following ways? One, do they alone increase insulin to levels that are problematic? Two, do they stimulate appetite in a way that's problematic, independent of insulin or maybe as a consequence of insulin?
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And then three, what's the story with their potential effect on the gut microbiome? I think those are the three categories that come to mind. There are probably other categories. And I just want to say, for the record, then and now, I'll consume some aspartame every once in a while in the form of a Diet Coke.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Stevia seems to be in a lot of the things that I consume, and I don't have a problem with that. So I'm not anti-artificial or low-calorie sweetener. for reasons that are entirely personal and have no scientific basis whatsoever. I avoid things with sucralose in them. I don't really like the taste of it. And I have kind of an aversion to it for an interesting reason.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Yeah. If I see something, I'm like, eh, no. Aspartame, fine. Stevia gets the thumbs up by me. And I will choose low calorie or zero calorie sodas or drinks or energy drinks. when I have the option to have something with sugar. It's just kind of, but I'm not anti-sugar either. I just developed this as a habit. I prefer to get my calories from food.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Well, and what nobody talks about where it's not discussed enough is that a lot of times the way the paper is written poses a question after the results are in. I mean, and this is a really a not correct way to do science. I mean, in clinical trials... one has to wager a hypothesis from the outset. And you go test that hypothesis. You're not asking a question.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Steak, strawberries, blueberries, oatmeal, rice, butter, olive oil, and all the other delicious, wonderful things, as opposed to a Coke. I'd rather just have a diet Coke and eat a bit more steak.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
So we have insulin, we have, does it stimulate appetite in ways that may or may not be related to insulin? You ruled out insulin increase. So like, could there be a pairing of like, okay, every time I eat, I have a diet soda. Then if I have a diet soda on its own, does it stimulate the desire to eat? a la the Dana Small study. And by the way, that study was halted.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
This is the problem with that study is it was being done in kids. The increases in insulin that they saw in a subset of the kids were so dramatic. This is the way she described it in a talk, so I feel comfortable saying this.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Maybe she's changed her tune, but in this online talk, an academic talk, the increases in insulin were so dramatic that they were concerned about the kids becoming pre-diabetic. So they halted the study, which means the totality of the data never came in, means it's hard to draw a conclusion.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Yeah, and usually, as I recall, a pretty significant amount of diet drink, like two liters a day even. Like the person will carry around a liter or a two liter of diet drink and sip on it whenever they get thirsty or hungry.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Right, exactly. Whereas in more typical laboratory science, people will design an experiment. They have hypotheses. But then depending on how the experiments work out or don't work out, oftentimes they'll change the question, they'll modify the hypotheses. And one would, as a reader, as a journal, as a reviewer, one will never know.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Well, I'm not quitting, but that's ridiculous.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And so that's a slight of hand that is, I would say, unfortunately, is very common in better science.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Are you saying that the potential that those subjects – had to believe that zero-calorie sweeteners or low-calorie sweeteners could be bad for the microbiome, might have actually made their gut microbiome more dysbiotic?
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And only for sucralose. So stevia, no change.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Saccharin and sucralose are the ones that seem to always show the biggest effects, quote unquote. And I don't know how often those are used in diet drinks these days. I mean, less and less. I mean, it's usually aspartame, stevia, more in the kind of wellness, health, fitness crowd drinks.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Yeah, the names of bacteria are really difficult to pronounce. Yeah.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
It's also safer to when the media warns people off things as opposed to towards things, because if they push people towards things, there's more liability. Right. Push people away from things where rarely are they responsible for the opportunity cost there or the trade off as you as you refer to it.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Love it. You've dealt with some injuries. You've dealt with pain. You talked a little bit about how reducing your stress and interpretation of the pain could help. I want to talk about pain and pain management. But before we do that, a more general question that relates is about recovery tools. Many, many people want to know, okay, if we were to create the pyramid of recovery,
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Yerba mate has long been my preferred source of caffeine, not just because it tastes great and provides that stimulant effect that caffeine provides for focus and alertness, but its other many benefits that are unique to yerba mate, such as regulating blood sugar, high antioxidant content, and it can improve digestion. And of course, I drink yerba mate because I simply love the taste.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
the hierarchy of tools for recovery after training. And here, let's change out or let's use resistance training and cardiovascular training interchangeably. Some people run hard, other people lift hard or do both. From the moment that session ends, what do you have in your kit of things to maximize recovery over the shortest possible amount of time?
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And I can immediately think of sleep as critical, but what are the things that you can do starting from that final repetition?
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
You could do it immediately after you can.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Absolutely. Quick. I'm going to layer in an additional question. Is there any evidence that fruit is not good at replenishing glycogen as compared to starch? Because the reason I ask this is that, you know, like if I finish a workout and I have some like a whey protein shake with a
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Assuming equal calories, is that going to replenish glycogen the same way as if I have a couple scoops of whey protein and a bowl of oatmeal or rice?
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Okay. And then typically I'll do a meal that includes some starch a little bit later in the day.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Great. So nutrition post-workout or in the hour or two post-workout, making sure you eat enough in the following hours. Do you include any kind of stress down regulation? Are you... Do you do anything else besides nutrition and sleep to accelerate recovery? Sure.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Viewing horizons, we know. Put you into panoramic vision. We know this from stuff my lab has done.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Oh, yeah. Panoramic vision is a – will come off the accelerator of the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system, which is just nerd speak to say enjoy those sunrises and sunsets. They are very calm.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Awesome. Earlier, we were talking about protein. Actually, several times we talked about protein, and I neglected to ask a question that is very timely because I just did an episode, a solo episode of this podcast recently about skin health and appearance. And I looked at the data on... ingesting collagen. It could be from bone broth or other sources of collagen.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Typically, it's powdered collagens, anywhere from 5 to 30 grams of collagen. And I was kind of surprised at the results. I also talked to some dermatologists. Basically, the results say in these papers, the meta-analysis I looked at, and in speaking with these dermatologists that
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
The conclusion was that regular consumption of collagen on the order of anywhere from five to 30 grams per day with a little bit of vitamin C, a couple hundred milligrams of vitamin C for whatever pathway-related reason, seemed to improve skin appearance. Fewer wrinkles, reduction in wrinkles, more skin tautness, appearance of moisture, et cetera. These are subjective measures, right?
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I don't think they were calipering the skin and looking at tensile strength and things like that. But people felt they looked younger, et cetera. And-
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I was surprised, really surprised because without making this too long a question or story, a few years back, there were some claims by not to be named individuals on Instagram saying, well, if you want to improve the function of your liver, eat liver. If you want to improve the function of your heart, eat heart. And you and I were just like, no. Okay, you're the nutrition biochemistry guy.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I'm the neuroscience guy. I have a little bit of a background in cold physiology that I rarely talk about, but in any case... 05.20 But you know physiology. 05.21 Yeah. I mean, there is... We both agree.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
There's like zero evidence that ingesting a protein, which of course is broken down into its amino acid constituents in the gut, would somehow lead to selective shuttling of those amino acids from liver that you ingest to your liver. That just is like a... There's only one word for that. It's like a crazy unsubstantiated... 05.25 Right. claim.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And then some papers were sent my way, which were in a different language. And like I was trying to anyway, zero minus one evidence, as I would say. And yet the whole notion that consuming collagen protein, which Dr. Gabrielle Lyon told me is actually a pretty low quality protein on the kind of protein quality scale. It's like tendon and toenails and all this stuff. Gross.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
But yeah, that's what it is. Somehow leads to improvements in actual collagen, which is, of course, is a native protein of the body.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
So I went digging, I just wanna, before I get your answer, I went digging and I found, again, a not to be named individual has this kind of wild story on the internet that, ah, well, this is because it's broken down into the dipeptides and tripeptides in the gut that,
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
somehow inform the body that there's an injury in the collagen and we have quote unquote breakdown of collagen aka injury i don't know breakdown of collagen and elastin in the skin all the time and then the body recognizes the presence of those dipeptides and tripeptides so little groups of twos or three peptides not just one and sends those selectively to the skin and so it's like once again it's like it makes sense as a mechanism if it were true but at
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I just had to like roll my eyes. I was like, oh no. Okay, I'm going to pitch this over to Lane as I am right now. So Lane, take it away. What's the story? Does ingesting collagen improve skin appearance? And do we have any idea what the mechanism might be? Sorry for the long question, folks, but I had to set the stage.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
So why aren't we just suggesting that people take glycine instead of collagen?
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Thank you for that very thorough answer and very clear answer. If nothing else, it tells us that Collagen protein is going to be least ideal for post-workout protein because of the fact that it lacks significant amounts of leucine, et cetera. So it might be good for skin. Definitely not a great protein for dietary protein reasons.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And a quality whey protein would be the highest leucine available?
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Great. Well, Dr. Lane Norton, thank you for coming back here for the second time on the podcast. I must say it's a true pleasure to sit down with you and discuss training, nutrition, supplementation, recovery, pain management, stress, life advice.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
for so many reasons a you're you know a serious scientist you know in our business of science um that that that really means something you're serious about the science and you're a light-hearted guy in the right context and you're but you're you're a serious scientist you you believe in the process and you provide the nuance even though that might not be convenient
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
to what somebody wants or convenient to the discussion.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I'd rather this stuff be so simple, you know? Right. Sure. Sure. You're like the rest of us. And at the same time, I really appreciate it because we are now also colleagues in the public health, public facing landscape, social media, it's sometimes called, but a lot of landscapes, podcasts, YouTube, et cetera. And- It's required. It's needed that people like you exist.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And I will go so far to say that, you know, and I'm not alone in this, right, because I've talked about this with with Rogan and with Gabrielle Lyon, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, excuse me, and others, you know, in an ocean of noise. some of which has validity, right?
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
But in an ocean of noise about nutrition and training and all these different things and how to evidence-based blank and science-based that, you really clearly are pure signal. Like you're gonna take as much time and as much effort to communicate the real signal. And you today have really defined for us, for you, what is real versus not real versus a maybe.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And I just want people to hear that loud and clear because I think sometimes people pay attention to how spirited you are and they miss the fact that in that spirited nature and in the nuance and in the, look, we're both long-winded at times. Like I know...
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
because I know this for myself, but I certainly know it for you, that that comes from a place of respect for the science and respect for your audience. That is not being dismissive. That's actually respect for them. It would be disrespectful to just give them the answer they want or give them a quick answer without the explanation.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
So I just really want to extend like a real voice of gratitude for you, for what you did for us today, just far too much to list off. It's all so valuable, just so, so valuable. And also what you do on social media and the way you do it. And look, I also really love and respect your fighting spirit because you're fighting for truth, you're fighting for good.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And I also love the posts and the pictures of your kids. They're delightful. And it's great to see that the balance in your life you've created. So I could go on and on, but I'm going to cut this short by just saying A giant thank you for being the signal among all the noise.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
It's been a true pleasure and you're absolutely more than net positive on the world. And we'll just have to have you come back and talk to us again before long. Thank you so much.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Lane Norton. To learn more about his work, please see the links in our show note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please be sure to follow the podcast on both Spotify and Apple.
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And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast.
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If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body. If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, Twitter, now known as X, Threads, Facebook and LinkedIn.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlap with the contents of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the contents of the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
If you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, our neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes what we call protocols, which are brief one to three page PDFs that cover things such as neuroplasticity and learning dopamine optimization, how to get better sleep. things like deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
We have a protocol all about habit forming and much more. To sign up, again, at completely zero cost, you simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu function in the corner, scroll down to newsletter, and you provide your email. I should point out that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Lane Norton.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
While there are a lot of different choices out there in terms of yerba mate drinks, my personal favorite is Matina yerba mate because it's made with the highest quality organic ingredients and it has a very rich but clean taste. And given Matina's great taste and commitment to quality, I recently became a part owner in the company and I've helped design some of their drink products.
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Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
It sounded like a worse and worse idea by the moment.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
In particular, I love the taste of Matina's canned zero-sugar cold brew yerba mate, which has a slight taste of lemon, and I personally helped develop that drink. I drink two cans of Matina yerba mate cold brew in the morning, and I often drink a third can in the early afternoon. If you'd like to try Matina, you can go to drinkmatina.com slash huberman.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Maybe explain what cohort data are. Comparing two groups.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
These people decided to be vegan. These people decided to be, let's just say omnivores.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And they weren't assigned to this experiment. They agreed to join the experiment. They've been eating this way for a while. Right. You ask them a bunch of questions.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Right now, Matina is offering a free one-pound bag of loose-leaf yerba mate tea and free shipping with the purchase of two cases of their cold brew yerba mate. Again, that's drinkmatina.com slash huberman to get a free bag of yerba mate loose leaf tea and free shipping. You can also find Matina at all Sun Life locations and Erewhon locations.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Right, consuming five to 10 grams of creatine monohydrate per day is going to benefit strength and muscle mass and likely cognition to some extent. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. By now, many of you have heard me say that if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
The reason for that is AG1 is the highest quality and most complete of the foundational nutritional supplements available. What that means is that it contains not just vitamins and minerals, but also probiotics, prebiotics, and adaptogens to cover any gaps you may have in your diet and provide support for a demanding life.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
For me, even if I eat mostly whole foods and minimally processed foods, which I do for most of my food intake, it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits and vegetables, vitamins and minerals, micronutrients, and adaptogens from food alone. For that reason, I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, and often twice a day, once in the morning or mid-morning, and again in the afternoon or evening.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
When I do that, it clearly bolsters my energy, my immune system, and my gut microbiome. These are all critical to brain function, mood, physical performance, and much more. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim their special offer. Right now, they're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
So please be sure to look for it both at Sun Life and at Erewhon. Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. Now, I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each night.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim that special offer.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I wouldn't even call it a diatribe. I think for those listening, this is pure gold because... Never before, certainly on this podcast or other podcasts, has anyone ever really spelled out how to discern differences in quality of evidence. And it's mostly a free world, most places, and people can do what they want, but I think they need to decide what their thresholds are for quality.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
One of the best ways to ensure a great night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Eight Sleep makes it incredibly easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment by allowing you to program the temperature of your mattress cover at the beginning, middle, and end of the night. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for well over three years now, and it has completely transformed my sleep for the better.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I love that description, but now my curiosity is peaked and you got to tell me. So if 90 minutes after ingesting protein, protein synthesis peaks and then it drops to baseline at three hours, but leucine, one of the key amino acids in mTOR, which is in the pathway of cellular growth and protein synthesis are still elevated at three hours. What is the conclusion that explains the discrepancy?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
He is also an expert in the topic of supplementation and other tools to augment health. Today, we discuss a large number of very important topics in these categories, and we start the conversation by establishing what Dr. Norton's thresholds are for what he accepts as evidence, in particular, actionable evidence.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation pod cover, the Pod 4 Ultra. The Pod 4 Ultra has improved cooling and heating capacity, higher fidelity sleep tracking technology, and it also has snoring detection that remarkably will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve your airflow and stop your snoring.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Yeah, and if people didn't follow that, don't worry about it. What Lane's describing is that the presence of a bunch of molecules involved in protein synthesis is necessary but not sufficient for the protein synthesis. Right. A few other things have to happen. Correct. And apparently those other things are not happening after... 120 minutes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Right, because for many decades, it has been – purported believed and propagated that the maximum amount of protein that you can utilize after a meal is 30 grams became the holy number. And this study essentially showed that more than 30 grams can be used not just as energy, but for the sake of protein synthesis in muscle. Correct.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
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. Today's episode is also brought to us by Maui Nui venison.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And it, and how did that study land with you, given that it's one study without going into all the details that did that inspire you to change anything about your protein intake after training?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
now. And in the continuous feeding groups that, uh, do you recall what duration they were eating their meals over? Was it probably 12 hours or so?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I'd have to go back more than eight hours for sure. You know, I'm so glad we're landing here because my first, um, let's just call it sort of operational or actionable question, which came from, um,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
you know, asking on social media for questions for you was many, many people, if not in the thousands, asked how to make sure that they're getting enough protein if they're doing something like intermittent fasting. And I myself fall into this category. I don't do it for any specific purpose.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
This was long before Sachin Panda started doing his work on time-restricted feeding, aka intermittent fasting. But I don't tend to want to eat any food until about 11 a.m., Occasionally I wake up hungry like this morning and I had some eggs, I was particularly hungry, but I think that's representative of a lot of people. I want hydration and caffeine in the morning.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I want to train in the morning and then I want to eat pretty soon after I train. But what that means is that I'm eating during an eight to nine hour feeding window. And if I only manage two meals in there and a snack and I can only assimilate or excuse me, I can only put 30 grams of protein per meal toward protein synthesis.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
We have to be careful not about using it for energy, but toward protein synthesis. Does that mean that I'm not going to hit my target of one gram of protein per pound of desired lean body mass? Because I'm 100 kilograms. I weigh about 220 pounds. I can easily eat 220 grams of protein in a nine hour period. Like give me three ribeyes. I'll eat all three. I love ribeye steak. Right.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Maui Nui venison is the most nutrient-dense and delicious red meat available. I've spoken before on this podcast about the fact that most of us should be seeking to get about one gram of quality protein per pound of body weight every day.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
That protein provides critical building blocks for things like muscle repair and synthesis, but also promotes overall health given the importance of muscle as an organ. Eating enough quality protein each day is also a terrific way to stave off hunger. One of the key things, however, is to make sure that you're getting enough quality protein without ingesting excess calories.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Brutal. They did. Or at least for somebody like me. I can't think of anything worse. I'd rather fast for three days in a row and then eat for four days in a row simply because I know that by day two, it's probably going to get easier, not harder, but on, off, on. Fasting, eating has got to be just torturous.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Also, can you imagine training on a day of complete fasting? Three hours after that, you're going to be dying. And then you can say, well, you could just train on the days when you eat. But then if you ever train legs hard, which I know you do, or if anyone does, and then the next day you're not going to eat anything. The day after training legs properly, my appetite's increased.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And so for you just personally, what time of day do you wake up and when is your first meal?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Maui Nui venison has an extremely high quality protein to calorie ratio, such that getting that one gram of protein per pound of body weight is both easy and doesn't cause you to ingest an excess amount of calories. Also, Maui Nui venison is absolutely delicious. They have venison steaks, ground venison, and venison bone broth. I personally like and eat all of those.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And does each one of your meals include approximately 30 plus grams of quality protein?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Some starchy carbohydrate, fibrous carbohydrate, and some fat?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
So you're- Not everyone's watching. I just drew an asymptote. Right, yeah. An asymptote plot. But for those not watching, just think about a plot quickly rising very, very high and then essentially stays stable at the high level. Yeah. Maybe with a slight bit of taper.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Okay, so you're running in the opposite direction.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Still asymptote going from high to low.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
So asymptote can go from low to high, it can go from high to low.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
In fact, I probably eat a Maui Nui venison burger pretty much every day, and occasionally I'll swap that for a Maui Nui steak. And if you're traveling a lot or simply on the go, they have a very convenient Maui Nui venison jerky, which has 10 grams of quality protein per stick at just 55 calories. While Maui Nui offers the highest quality meat available, their supplies are limited.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
One gram per pound of body weight, which is what Dr. Gabrielle Lyon also essentially recommended.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And we should probably point out, not just for muscle building, um, unless you disagree, uh,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
and feel free to, of course, not that I need to tell you that, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, when she was here, made a really key point, which is that ingesting sufficient quality protein each day isn't just about building muscle, even for folks that don't want to build muscle, and perhaps even particularly for women who assume that, you know,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
building muscle can be a runaway process that maybe they're going to build too much muscle. That's a false assumption, of course, that ingesting one gram of protein per pound of body weight or ideal body weight is going to be beneficial because it's going to improve muscle quality, one's own muscle quality, the health of the muscular tissue.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And then she did an excellent job of relating the health of muscular tissue, skeletal muscle that is, to overall health and longevity. So I just raised that because I know that many people listening to this probably want to add a little bit of muscle here or there. Some perhaps want to keep the muscle they've got and lose fat. And some, of course, want to add a lot of muscle.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
But it sounds like the recommendation is always the same. Since we need to eat sooner or later, one gram of quality protein per pound of lean body mass or current body weight or desired body weight, that's going to be a good starting place.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Responsible population management of the access deer on the island of Maui means that they will not go beyond harvest capacity. Signing up for a membership is therefore the best way to ensure access to their high quality meat. If you'd like to try Maui Nui Venison, you can go to mauinuivenison.com slash Huberman to get 20% off your membership or first order.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
With weights and lift them in between stretches. No, I'm just kidding.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Again, that's mauinuivenison.com slash Huberman. And now for my discussion with Dr. Lane Norton. Dr. Lane Norton, welcome back. Thanks for having me back. Before we jump in,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I'd like to take a brief break to thank one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Now, I and others on the podcast have talked a lot about the critical importance of hydration for proper brain and bodily function.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Research shows that even a slight degree of dehydration can really diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes in order for your body and brain to function at their best. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are critical for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or nerve cells.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of Element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise I'm doing, especially on hot days if I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman, spelled drinkelement.com slash Huberman, to claim a free Element sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
since we're sort of in this realm of protein, maybe we build out from there, because a lot of questions related to something akin to the following. So, okay, so somebody strives to get one gram of quality protein per pound of body weight per day. And I realized that whether somebody follows a pseudo intermittent fasting thing where their first meal does a
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
you know, around 11 and they end, you know, and they finish up eating around 8 PM or a more traditional eating schedule really is just the addition of one more meal, like in the morning. It's like whether or not you eat breakfast. And of course, some people shift it the other way. They start with breakfast and they don't eat dinner, but
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Um, I would argue that in order to, if you have kids or a social life of any kind, the, the most people can deal with, um, sitting across the table with someone just having a cup of coffee for breakfast, but it's sort of awkward. You limit yourself a lot in life. If you, if you can't eat dinner with other people, I don't know, at least.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I want to get your stance on what constitutes evidence, because I think a big reason why you are considered one of the, if not the most trusted person in the realm of nutrition and training is that you set a very high bar for what you consider science-based fact that motivates action. So to just kind of break this down based on my read of the landscape online,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Great. You answered a future question right there. You're telepathic. That's what you didn't know about them. The So the scenario here is whether or not meals are distributed evenly through the awake day or stacked a little bit more toward the morning or stacked a little bit more toward the evening. If somebody gets that one gram of quality protein per pound of body weight,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
then they need to make up the rest of their calories with other stuff. And we have, broadly speaking, starches, fibrous fruits and vegetables, starches, and of course fats. And weight gain and weight loss, I think we both would agree, or weight maintenance, is going to largely be dictated at this point by whether or not you consume more calories than you burn or not.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
So assuming somebody is getting that one gram of quality protein per pound of body weight, Is there any data that support, or do you believe just by your own experience that there's some value in stacking the starchy carbohydrates toward the earlier part of the day versus the later part of the day? And this has been an ongoing debate.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Like I, for instance, like a nearly pure protein and fat meal for the first meal, plus maybe a salad, some fibrous carbohydrates. And then as they get towards evening, I like more starches. And I actually taper off the protein. I find personally that matches what I need to do with my brain. I'm more alert when I'm drinking caffeine and hydrating on a backdrop of slightly lowered carbohydrates.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
But then as I get towards evening, taper off the caffeine, of course, for me, because I want to sleep well, start ingesting some more starches. It's not starch heavy, but I sleep like a baby. But everyone would tell me and does tell me eating starches late in the day is going to make me fat. Eating starches late in the day is going to do all sorts of terrible things.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I find the exact opposite for me. So is there any real evidence that where one places their starches throughout the day matters? And let's just forget resistance training for the moment because there is this post-training window where if I train first thing in the morning, I will eat starches at that time. But let's just remove resistance training for the moment.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
It seems that there's a group of people, I don't know what to call them, purists or something, who, unless there's a randomized controlled trial, so that means in humans, or several, that points in a particular direction, they are very unlikely to adopt a new practice, say removing a given food or nutrient, adding a given food or nutrient, training a certain way, not training a certain way.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Thank you, thank you. I knew I brought you here today for reasons. No, I brought you here for many reasons.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
So what follows is a description of what Dr. Norton really believes is worth paying attention to versus what he believes is worth ignoring in the realms of nutrition, training, and supplementation.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And could I add, in terms of not focusing on a blade of grass, but something that I consider a major lever, if eating fewer carbohydrates in the afternoon and evening doesn't impede your sleep, then you're okay. But I would argue if anything is interfering with your sleep on a consistent basis, you've got a serious problem.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Okay, that's one group. Then there are the people who, if they are told something could be of value, they hear it's worked very well for somebody, maybe they see some before and afters, and it gets mapped to a mechanism
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Yeah, I would say eating, eating the way I eat now, I'm leaner at forty nine even than I was ten years ago or ten years before that. I was pretty lean then. And I don't put a ton of attention to tracking calories, although and I want to be very, very clear this I was not paid to say this like I I've purchased and use Lane's carbon app.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
He happens to be wearing a shirt that says carbon today, but I've talked about this before on other on other podcasts and social media. And it's absolutely true that there's no endorsement relationship. But I love the app because that was really the first time probably since college. So I started lifting when I was 16. Running and lifting has always been my thing since I was 16.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
But since college that I – used a tool, in this case, Carbon, to basically track what I'm eating, exactly what I'm eating. And what I like about it is that I can just click on different boxes of things within the app. And really, it makes it very easy to say, oh, I ate this thing, white rice from this package. It generally knows products. It knows brands.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And it did a really good job of letting me check in and just see how many calories I was consuming, how much protein, how much fat, and from what sources. But one of the major takeaways that at least I got from carbon was that you can arrange your diet any number of different ways.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
In fact, it has like a really nice little slider where you can put in, you know, you want to eat more carbohydrates and less protein even, or you want to have a vegetarian diet, which I don't. I'm an omnivore. I'm an omnivore. My dad's Argentine. I like... I like meat. I like meat. I don't even really like fish that much or chicken.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I just like, I like eating meat and eggs, like my preferred sources and whey protein. Okay, fine. But you can arrange things within the context of different types of diets. And I think there's real value to tracking precisely what one eats for even short periods of time. And then I confess, I stopped using the app for a bit, then I went back to it, you know, and not because things went adrift.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I think some people really need that consistent checking. Other people... need to perhaps just kind of eyeball it for themselves. But for me, I've found that knowing exactly what I'm doing for some period of time allows me to explore things in a way that's really effective. And so I just want to give a nod to Carbon. And I don't do product endorsements on this podcast.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I do ad reads and that kind of thing for things I love. But I say that because I think it lands squarely in the context of what we're talking about, which is that I know what works for me. I also know that some people really love like a giant carb meal in the morning. Some people don't like meat.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
that exists in humans and animals, like, oh, there's this molecule, and if this molecule increases, X, Y, and Z happens, and training in this way or eating this way increases that molecule, for instance, but no randomized control trial, then they're willing to try it or adopt it. And then there's a third, probably a fourth category as well, where people say, They don't trust science anyway.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And I think what's so beautiful about the way that you've been talking about science and nutrition in particular over the last few years and still here now is that you don't really seem to care whether or not people are vegan, vegetarian, omnivore, or even carnivore, dare I say. It's just a matter of how people are couching the advice.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And the reason I keep coming back to this is that I really think that you, this discussion, but you in particular, are best poised in this whole field of public-facing health nutrition advice to really change the way that the messaging occurs and the way that people hear that messaging. And I say that with the utmost respect.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Because most people are not going to go read the meta-analyses.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And most people don't know how to parse data. But I think that paying attention to the words that are spoken right before the advice should be – we need to come up with something like that. It's like the Norton method. Pay attention to the words provided right before the advice.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
We need to distinguish this because people nowadays like kind of put TRT – well, as long as it's keeping someone's testosterone in the normal reference range, which is somewhere between 300 and 1,200 nanograms per deciliter, then they're like – They're not – you've never injected a synthetic version of a hormone.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Yeah, you don't need it. You're well – you're on the upper – you're high normal.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Science is flawed or the controls required to design a really good experiment are so constrained that they don't mimic the real world well enough. And so they're really just interested in what works. So they look to people that seem to have achieved the results they want. feel free to add another group, but which group would you consider yourself in personally?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I love it. Do you do cardiovascular defined as because people get I'm starting to catch flack these days when I say cardio, believe it or not. repetitive motion movement designed to elevate your heart rate for 12 minutes or more?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And then where does your evidence that you put out online and today come from? And I already know the answer to the last question, but I think it was important to kind of spell out the landscape.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I would argue it might be related to you're not getting sick very often. You know, it's very clear that activation of the sympathetic nervous system is one main driver of the immune system. This is why often people... observe that they go through a very stressful period of life and then they go on vacation and they get sick or they're taking care of a loved one.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And, you know, that person either gets better or passes away or, you know, there's some ending to that caretaking and then they get sick.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
When you think about human evolution, I mean, these are just so stories. Anytime people talk about human evolution, by the way, like no one really knows. But the idea that, you know, if there was a famine or you need to take care of children in famine, the idea that you would be more vulnerable to disease at those moments, sure.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
But it's also true that the catecholamines, dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, activate certain components of the immune system that protect you against things. I mean, it's not going to protect you against everything, but it's when you relax and rest finally, that you are more vulnerable to incoming infections.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
It makes sense. I mean, those catecholamines, I mean, there are other molecules involved too, but that, you know... Dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine cocktail is driving us forward in motion and thinking all the time. And if you're putting thoughts into one set of things, they're not going elsewhere. Like you said, it's all trade-offs.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Just like nutrition, just like training.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
So you can be certain that as we start to go through the topics of sugar, GLP-1 agonists, things like Ozempic, artificial sweeteners, whether you should train to failure or not during your resistance training sessions, how much volume of training you need to do, cardiovascular training and its different forms in terms of how they benefit health span and lifespan and body composition, protein and its different sources, and on and on.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
That's a very… But these individuals had not trained previously.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
They seem to enjoy life. I have a grandfather on one side that died earlier, but a grandfather on the other side who lived into his 90s and he ate a steak every day. He smoked till pretty late in life before he eventually quit. He had... Ice cream dessert after every dinner. He's Argentine, so they stack their meals toward the end of the day, definitely. He liked walking.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I guess the point is that he was always interested in what was in the newspapers, but he wouldn't get riled up about it. He liked walking. He really enjoyed life. Like if there's one key characteristic to describe him is he really enjoyed life. Now, he didn't take the best care of himself in the sense that had he perhaps never smoked or quit earlier. or dropped the excess calories.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
He might have lived an additional two or three years, but he was really happy until the end.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I love it. And I love this example of the creatine experiment, because just to repeat the conclusion, because I want to make sure that people don't take away the wrong conclusion. Creatine works. Absolutely. But your belief about creatine works more in this case. So two things can work, one more than the other. And the placebo AKA belief effects are very, very powerful.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I completely agree with you there. Wonderful way to set the stage for some of the specific questions that were asked when I said on social media, I'm going to sit down with Lane Norton again. And I'm very curious about some of these as well. So I'll inject some of my own experience and questions. Training to failure and reps in reserve. We should define these a little bit.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And before we get into it, it's fun to have these kinds of conversations nowadays about resistance training, knowing that both men and women should resistance train people who want bigger muscles and who don't should resistance train. Because in the past, it was always about like bodybuilding and preseason football and people going to the military.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I think thanks to the great work that you've done, but I'll just give a particular shout out to some of the women in the nutrition and fitness space, namely Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, in terms of menopause, perimenopause, Dr. Mary Claire Haver, and women in that sector really emphasizing the key need for resistance training, their other names as well.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
really championing the importance of resistance training. Training to failure in my book means when you can't move the weight, by whatever means, anymore in good form, in proper form. that's failure. So we're not talking about forced reps.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
We're not talking about, um, swaying the upper body or using momentum when, so trained to failure, you can't move the resistance anymore in good form and reps in reserve. My understanding is one's own subjective understanding about how close they are to that point of failure. Do I have that right?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Okay. So with those definitions in mind, is training to failure more effective at generating strength and hypertrophy increases than if one keeps a few reps in reserve? And of course, we have to balance this against all the factors related to recovery, et cetera. But Assuming that one follows a program of doing, and I'm really just trying to cut us right through the middle here.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Let's say two or three exercises per muscle group and does after a sufficient warmup, let's say two to five sets that we're going to call work sets. You could imagine an extreme scenario where every single work set is taken to failure. You could imagine, taking only the last set of each exercise to failure. You can imagine taking none of them to failure.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Assuming adequate volume is achieved across the week. My understanding is this is 10 to 20 sets per muscle group across the week. It could be distributed across different workouts or all done in one workout. Is training to failure going to generate more strength and hypertrophy than leaving some repetitions and reserves? So let's start with the extreme scenario.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I go to failure on every single set and I do what I need to to recover. It doesn't matter if it's only doing that muscle group once per week or spread out multiple times per week. I'm doing what I need to to recover in between. My genetics, my hormone status, my sleep, my nutrition, on and on. Is going to failure more effective than not going to failure?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And did they control for total volume of work? Because I can imagine not going to failure, you can do more sets because you've got more, quote unquote, gas in the tank, right?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
So this is gun to the head type failure.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I think you make a very important point, which is that occasionally training to failure gives you a sense of what failure really is for you. And no one can really tell you that. Only you can tell you that and experience that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
But if I understand correctly, earlier you said once you know what failure is for you, then if strength gains are your goal, and I think more and more people, by the way, are training for strength who don't want hypertrophy, at least not across every muscle group. I think when I talk to the general public, which I do a lot, I get the sense that men and women are like, yeah, I'll lift weights.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I can see the value of that. Would love a little bit more muscle here, a little bit more muscle there, but they don't want to be generally larger. Yet they can understand and appreciate the value of getting stronger everywhere. Because being strong across your whole body is one of the core definitions of health.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
No, but I think a lot of the audience would like to be stronger and not necessarily grow their muscles bigger, except in a few specific places on the body.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Interesting. That's the concentric phase, the lowering phase, the eccentric phase. Yeah, we're not sure about that yet.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And the research shows anywhere from. Five to 30 repetitions can generate hypertrophy as long as the final few repetitions are really hard and volume is adjusted.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Also, if you work out in a... That's a little boring for me. Yes. And if you work out in a gym where there are other people, be kind. Other people are going to need the space and the equipment. So it could take forever. 10 sets of 30, that's impolite. So we're only half kidding there. One of the more common questions... is about training for people 50 years old and older.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And I love the fact that we're talking so much about strength. This seems to be one of the key evolutions in this field. Again, in my opinion, the people who've come through this podcast as guests, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
yourself, Andy Galpin, who now has his own podcast, the Perform podcast, like more and more discussions about strength and training for strength for the general public, not just people who want to be power lifters. So I think there's a lot of carry over there.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And I think the more that people hear us say that resistance training can be really powerful for health and longevity and getting strong is one of the best things you can do for your health and longevity, injury protection, et cetera. Peter Atiyah has talked about this and it's not just about building muscle. want to know how they should adjust their training, if at all, if they are 50 and older.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
So obviously one of the key things to getting and staying in great shape over time, I always say is avoid getting hurt. Could we say, okay, don't try anything too novel and crazy without easing into it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Okay. Could we also say perhaps find the movements that you can do without injury and just keep doing those over and over? Is there any evidence that mixing up the exercises is important, meaning doing new movements? Or if you find two or three movements that work well for you, can you just stick with those and just work on progressive overload?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Right. And it feeds back to that consistency principle that you talked about before.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
We used to just think that there was brown, beige, and white fat cells, and subcutaneous, and intravisceral. Now they've done sequencing of different white fat cells, and like 25, probably now 50, different genetics among those cells that respond differently to insulin. I mean, fat is a very interesting and heterogeneous tissue. It's really interesting.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Yeah. Using, thinking about muscle as an organ, thinking about feeding muscle. We talked about that earlier. Thinking about moving muscle and in particular training for strength, resistance training of different kinds. Hypertrophy, yes. But I, you know, I'm kind of given a little bit of a, biased vote for more strength training out there across the population for really for the longevity reasons.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I mean, Peter Atiyah has pointed out that the percentage of people who die after a fall, not because of the fall itself, but because of a hip injury or a wrist injury, and then they go immobile. Or they're just not exercising as much anymore. Then they get an infection and then it cascades. In fact, I had a conversation with one of my parents recently on their 79th birthday.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I said, you know, in the next five, 10 years, your biggest risk is probably going to be going downstairs or stepping off a curb, not going up. But as Peter's pointed out, going down so that that eccentric movement break, you know, being able to sustain a fall, being able to not fall to catch yourself, so to speak.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Exactly. And this and that pattern of falling while going down precedes a lot of infections and that end up deadly. Right. So, you know. Hats off to Peter for really pointing out the relationship between those things and to you for encouraging people to strength train.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Also, I love the idea that I don't have to go to failure if I'm in strength training, because I like training heavy, but the training to the point where the muscles are quaking, even though that's how I initially started training, because I came up in the Mike Menser camp, I actually find that it eats into my recovery in a way that maybe is a little more subtle, but meaningful.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And nonetheless, which is that I feel fatigued later in the day. Whereas if I complete a training session where I can complete every rep, I notice I don't get into that quaking thing. I actually have a lot of mental and physical energy later in the day.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Maybe this one could be out of a brief answer or maybe not, I don't know. Are there true age-related changes in metabolism that are independent of decline in muscle mass? You know, I saw a paper, I think it was published in Science a few years ago that said that metabolism actually doesn't slow that much as we age. Of course, total muscle mass.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
BMR, basal metabolic rate. In general, well, I should just say up until that paper came out, I thought, okay, as we get older, our quote-unquote metabolism slows. Then, of course, we have to remember that puberty and childhood is sort of like being on performance-enhancing drugs in the sense that protein synthesis is just massive and ongoing.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
But let's just say from age 30 onward, let's say between 30 and 80, assuming that somebody is doing things to maintain muscle mass, Is there any reason to believe that their basal metabolic rate actually goes down just as a function of age?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Indeed, we cover many topics in this episode. you can be sure that all of the information you hear from Dr. Norton is being filtered through that extremely stringent filter that Dr. Norton is so well-known for.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
But my guess is that it would also drive more activity, feeling better, more activity, sleeping better, more activity.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
All right. So speaking of Ozempic, Munjaro and similar drugs. Let's talk about these drugs that are reducing appetite and in fairness have allowed millions of people to lose substantial amounts of weight and keep it off. This topic tends to get people a little bit riled up on social media because I think for some reason people believe that
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
If one gives these drugs the nod, you're essentially saying you don't need to exercise. But I didn't see anywhere or hear anywhere that the use of any compound, drug or otherwise, is mutually exclusive with taking good care of oneself in other ways too. So what are your thoughts on these compounds and what you're seeing out there?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
It's about a pound per week of increase in body weight.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Do you want to just explain for the general listener what a meta-analysis is? Just in kind of top contour.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Like as if it's going to take their jobs away. It's like the same way that people fear AI. Like it's somehow – like this stuff is here to stay. It benefits many, many people. I feel this way about these GLP-1 mimetics and I feel the same way about AI. It's like these things could be, yes, potentially used for evil but also for good.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Right. One study with 10 subjects would have a very small doc compared to a subject with 500 subjects.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Yeah, I think also when people hear about these drugs, they think about the person who's slightly overweight or who is already fit, who wants to be even thinner. And that's not what we're talking about here. And I have a good friend who is an air traffic controller. He works very, very hard. very stressful job, obviously, high consequence job. And he's very overweight.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
And thus, by the end of today's episode, you will be armed not only with the latest information on nutrition, training, and supplementation, but you'll also be armed with your own filter to determine what sorts of health protocols are actionable for you. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
He's gotta be more than 300 pounds by a significant margin. And he's really struggled over the years. And for years, he talked about getting his, you know, quote unquote, stomach stapled, you know, sometimes referred to that way. Couldn't afford the surgery, this sort of thing. And I asked him about it. I was like, you know, what's that about?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
He's like, I just need something that's going to allow me to move without pain or a little bit less pain. Every time he tries exercising, he injures himself. And he's probably going about that incorrectly because he doesn't have a lot of time. And he literally has lives in his hands. He's married now. You know, he may have kids soon. So I haven't spoken to him recently about these drugs.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
But to me, it seems like that's like the perfect candidate for these drugs. If he could eat less. with more ease and lose some weight and then also start exercising, I think that'd be a significant win for him. So scenarios like that are what I think of. And then also, you know, it's a mostly free world in many places, not all.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
So if people can afford these things and they want to take them, like who am I to say they shouldn't take them? You know, I just like, I feel like the amount of judgment involved to say that somebody should or should not use a drug is that's, safe and potentially helpful for them is like kind of, I mean, that's, that's almost offensive in, in a way.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
I love that. On the other side of the coin, you've been pretty vocal elsewhere about the fact that sugar is not a drug. You know, because sometimes people will say, you know, sugar is a drug. I would sort of put in the soft argument for my side, soft argument that highly processed foods, or let's just call them high density of taste foods, right?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
That combine, you know, processed carbohydrates and fats that, you know, at high heats that can be consumed in, you know, where you can easily consume several thousand calories that, you know, almost unconsciously, right? I mean, unless you're asleep or in a coma, you can just pop these things in your mouth and keep going. I don't even know if they taste that good, but people just keep going.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
That there's a bit of kind of lack of awareness and compulsivity to them. Very different than addiction, of course, because people aren't necessarily going out and robbing Robbing people. But maybe just touch on your view of sugar as a substance. We're not talking about the sugar in fruit. We're talking about candy, ice creams, desserts, quote-unquote hidden sugars.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
What are the real risks of these things if people are consuming them still within the confines of their daily caloric needs? So they're not eating excess calories. What's the deal with sugar?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Layne Norton: Tools for Nutrition & Fitness
Right. Self-report. People sneak. People forget.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
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. My guest today is Dr. Mark Brackett. Dr. Mark Brackett is a professor of psychology at Yale University and the director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And we talk about emotional intelligence, which it turns out can be increased at any stage of life. So by the end of today's discussion, you will be armed with a tremendous amount of new knowledge and many new tools, many new protocols that you can immediately apply in your life in order to improve your relationship to yourself and to others.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So connecting the feeling and the reason for the feeling. Correct. As opposed to just labeling the field. Yeah, you need to know why. It's the why that you really have to deal with. How do you feel about emojis? From everything you're saying, they seem like more than benign to me. Yeah, same. I mean, I could imagine that the emojification of culture, as I refer to it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I don't think that's a real word. It's all right. It is now. Set up a Wikipedia page tomorrow. Emojification. is a serious problem because it's what we call in science too much lumping. In science we have lumpers and splitters, right? And both can have fabulous careers, but if you lump too much or split too much, you create more confusion and you often create problems.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I just see emojis as lumping this incredible set of different continuums within us that we call emotions into literally a small icon. And I can imagine this would lead to all sorts of problems, not just in communication, but in understanding our own emotions. Put differently, do you think that the use of emojis has degraded our level of emotional intelligence and processing?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, I mean, right off the cuff, I'll just say, you know, I'm familiar with both of those feelings. I know they're different. I can sense their difference. I mean, but the disappointment piece... Yeah, it could be directed outward or inward. I'd have to work systematically through until I found a violation of one or the other.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is BetterHelp.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So where an example applied to one and not the other, and it would take me a few minutes, longer than I want this audience to have to wait. There you go.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years. I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise. Now, there are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. AG1 is designed to cover all of your foundational nutritional needs, and it tastes great. Now, I've been drinking AG1 since 2012, and I started doing that at a time when my budget for supplements was really limited.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
In fact, I only had enough money back then to purchase one supplement, and I'm so glad that I made that supplement AG1. The reason for that is even though I strive to eat most of my foods from whole foods and minimally processed foods, it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits, vegetables, vitamins, and minerals, micronutrients, and adaptogens from food alone.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I need to do that in order to ensure that I have enough energy throughout the day, I sleep well at night, and keep my immune system strong. But when I take AG1 daily, I find that all aspects of my health, my physical health, my mental health, and my performance, both cognitive and physical, are better.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I know that because I've had lapses when I didn't take AG1 and I certainly felt the difference. I also notice, and this makes perfect sense given the relationship between the gut microbiome and the brain, that when I regularly take AG1, which for me means a serving in the morning or mid-morning and again later in the afternoon or evening, that I have more mental clarity and more mental energy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim a special offer. Right now, they're giving away five free travel packs and a year's supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim that special offer. You said that disappointment is when one does everything essentially correctly, meaning gave the approval.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It provides good rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about the issues that are most critical to you. Second of all, it can provide support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
as much effort as they could, et cetera, and it didn't work out. Versus anger, which is perceived injustice. Would you say that your response to not getting your yellow belt then, because as a fifth degree black belt now, clearly you got that yellow belt eventually. I want to hear that part of the story too. That you were experiencing anger, in this case, could we even call it inappropriate anger?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Simply inappropriate because what you experienced really needed to understand was this notion of disappointment, but no one had taught it to you.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And third, expert therapy should provide insights, insights that are useful in allowing you not just to feel better in your emotional life, in your relationship life, but of course, to be better, to be better in terms of the relationship to yourself, your professional life, and to others, and of course, to things like your career goals.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, online emojis and, you know, downward facing thumbs versus upward facing thumbs and this kind of thing and, you know, vomit emojis and things like that. Mind blown. I'm starting to realize that these may be doing far more harm than we realize.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I'm thinking of instances where people are just using these with the intention of expressing their – But that the people on the receiving end experience a lot of self-criticism as a consequence, mostly kids, but adults too. And I know some adults that really can't handle somebody commenting on their Instagram posts like, big L or something like that. It's devastating for people.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Or nope, or this kind of thing. It's also interesting because I see it even in the academic community, especially on Twitter, X, where I know that, sure, people reject each other's papers, critique each other's papers, but they do that with a degree of, um, intellectual nuance that, um, transmits a sense of care, right? If scientists really care, then they're going to do a careful review.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Um, as much as we would all love the, this is a perfect paper. That's it. Um, no critique. When somebody critiques something that we do with, um, with an attention to detail, provided it's fair, we, we feel cared for. Totally. They care for the work and we care for the work.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And so there's a, there's a relationship there, even if it's an anonymous review, but I'm shocked to see how, um, scientific colleagues I've known for decades, um, really how they comport themselves online. Like they'll swear, they'll come out, you know, they won't bother to punctuate things. They'll just sort of behave in a very, what seems to be a very activated way.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Not all of them, of course, but it's been very interesting. The words that come to mind are, I feel like online, especially on social media, The kids are acting like adults and the adults are acting like children. And so there seems to be a kind of regression toward what I'm calling the emojification or the kind of high amplitude expression with blunt tools.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
With BetterHelp, they make it very easy for you to find an expert therapist with whom you have these critical components of therapy. Also, because BetterHelp allows for therapy to be done entirely online, it's very time efficient and easy to fit into your busy schedule with no commuting to a therapist's office or looking for parking or sitting in a waiting room.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I don't know what that is because I know these people, the reason I'm using the academic community as an example, by the way, it's cost some of these people their jobs, chairs of departments, not at Stanford or Yale, fortunately. But it's kind of striking to me the way that when we remove the face-to-face connection, when people will behave that way. And I use the
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
a parallel example of anonymous review because there it's anonymous. So in theory, they could behave however they want, but there's an etiquette. So it seems like online etiquette is very deprived of many of the important features that you're starting to lay out for us here.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Politicians sort of open themselves up to it. Yeah, they do. Public-facing people in general, I've heard, open themselves up to it. But politicians in particular, I think we sort of give the general public a pass to say almost anything about them. But it's not pretty.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
If you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com slash Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I perceive it as evacutive. I look at that and I think, gosh, what they must feel inside to be able to say those things can't be good. But maybe it feels good to them. I don't know. I don't think I've ever made a negative comment. If I have, someone can call me out on it. Hopefully it was in sarcasm with a friend as the target and they were okay with it or happy with it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
But I don't know what internal, emotional, or psychological state it would take to go say something cruel to somebody online.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Can we provide a counterexample? for the anger versus disappointment that's on the positive valence side. What's a positive set of feelings that people often conflate?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I'm getting Fs all around. Good thing I became a biologist. Ecstatic and elated.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And so I'm good at this.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Now, I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each night. One of the best ways to ensure a great night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Sorry to interrupt, but as soon as you describe contentment that way, and thank you for parsing those two, very useful to me. As soon as you describe contentment that way, I imagine, waking up and rather than thinking about what needs to be done and the things I want to achieve, which I want to achieve, they bring me joy. Throw in a third word there just to confuse myself.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
This notion of contentment, the way that you described, I could see might lead me to pay attention to how good it feels to have gotten some sleep. I sleep well most nights, but what a privilege that is. And to maybe feel the comfort of the comforter and the mattress for a moment before barging into the day. to chase happiness, as it were.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Because you somehow feel like you're not living up to some standard.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Here's where I get to appropriately make a joke about, because before we started, we were talking about East Coast schools versus West Coast schools. I was like, maybe you come West and that'll change, or maybe you're right where you belong there at the also phenomenal university that is Yale. But anyway, that's kind of inside ball stuff. East Coast University is amazing.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Midwest University is amazing. West Coast University is amazing. Different perceived temperaments, but for sure. And styles, just look at the walking speeds, for instance, not just the weather, but yeah, you raise a very important point. We have a member of our podcast team that is like always in a great mood. He's always in a great mood. And it is for me, a reminder to be in a better mood. I'm,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Not somebody that I would say gets, I'm not moody. I don't change moods quickly, but I wouldn't say that my disposition is to be like Tigger-like and just happy all the time. But his energy around that doesn't drain me, but it makes me wish I was him.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. Eight Sleep makes it incredibly easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment by allowing you to program the temperature of your mattress cover at the beginning, middle, and end of the night.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
He is one of the world's foremost experts on emotions, meaning what emotions are and how they regulate our relationship to ourself and others. Today's discussion gets heavily into how we should think about our emotions and the emotional expressions of others and when and how we should regulate those emotions.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
those things are readily available within less than a mile of here. We can point you in the right direction. It sounds lovely. The introversion, extroversion bit is going to prick up people's ears. It certainly did mine. I like time alone. I also like time alone in the presence of many people. In fact, I get my best work done always either alone in nature,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
or in Manhattan, where there are people around me, but I'm completely isolated. I love that too. So how should we think about introversion and extroversion? These things get thrown around so much in popular culture. Are there some solid scientific studies that support that introversion can best be defined as blank and extroversion as blank? And I'm guessing there's a range there.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for well over three years now, and it has completely transformed my sleep for the better. Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation pod cover, the Pod 4 Ultra.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It's got to be on a continuum. It can't be two bins.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
The Pod 4 Ultra has improved cooling and heating capacity, higher fidelity sleep tracking technology, and it also has snoring detection that remarkably will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve your 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.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
When you say you don't necessarily like people that much, I realize you're joking. And I was just going to make sure to ask because I can't presume. That doesn't mean that you dislike people. It's just that being in the presence of a lot of people doesn't draw you out to want to be closer to or get to know all these people simply because they're there.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Whereas an extrovert seems to really like forming and engaging in new relationships, old relationships, all relationships, relating.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Interesting. When I think of throwing a great party and I've thrown a few, what I like to think were great parties, it involves inviting a bunch of people over and then being able to stand back from a lot of it and not have to participate in all of it. I just like seeing friends that didn't know each other start to interact. That's cool. That's fun for me.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And then if I have to communicate directly with too many people at the party, I would definitely feel drained. I'm known to retreat to a room and take a nap or disappear. Yeah, so maybe you are more introverted. Yeah, I think so. Rick Rubin, who's world-renowned for his creative insights and – creativity and for being Rick.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I think once said on a podcast perhaps, or maybe he said this to me, that Tom Petty was the sort of person that basically didn't do anything besides write music and read books and interact with the small number of people in his inner circle. And the idea of leaving the house was just completely overwhelming to him.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Now, of course, people were always approaching him, but like really, really extreme introvert. Whereas Rick has described, and I won't name names here, um, other famous people, musicians and otherwise that. go out specifically to try and get the attention of fame. And if they don't, they feel absolutely isolated. Makes sense.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Even though they have people in their private life, it becomes a kind of extroversion requirement. I would imagine life is much harder for the extrovert in the long run because there's just so much need there.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Huberman. I'm excited to share that I'll be speaking at a health summit called Eudaimonia, taking place in West Palm Beach, Florida, this November 1st, 2024, through the 3rd of November, 2024.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
In that case, do you cold call on people? Whenever I'm teaching, I'm somewhat reluctant to cold call on people because I recall it can be terrifying. when suddenly you're sitting there taking notes, trying to, you know, organize your thoughts around the material, and then suddenly, you know, the whole room's looking at you.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And on the wrong side of the road.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Eudaimonia is an in-person event that offers science-backed tools, live fitness classes, and a range of treatments and protocols to optimize your physical and your mental health. I'll be giving a keynote talk with none other than Dr. Gabrielle Lyon on Saturday. As some of you may know, she's a former guest on the Huberman Lab podcast and has a terrific podcast of her own.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Super important. And by the way, my joke about driving on the wrong side of the road, I do realize that we drive on the wrong side of the road for Australians and those in the UK. So I'll do the touche for you. I'd like to take a brief break to thank one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Now I and others on the podcast have talked a lot about the critical importance of hydration for proper brain and bodily function. Research shows that even a slight degree of dehydration can really diminish cognitive and physical performance.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes in order for your body and brain to function at their best. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are critical for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or nerve cells.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of Element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise I'm doing, especially on hot days if I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman, spelled drinkelement.com slash Huberman, to claim a free Element sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Text messaging is an interesting example of communication that nowadays, depending on how many people have access to your phone number, can either feel like a wonderful source of filling the gaps on trains and while in transit and while walking to the car, perhaps, hopefully not while driving, although people seem to do that. And yet for the introvert, I can imagine that it might feel inundating.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It might feel kind of overwhelming. How do you feel about text messages? Because it's just yet another form of communication. I asked this for a very particular reason. I could imagine that extroverts love to text message. They love to receive and send text messages, that they can't stand a moment of downtime before boarding a plane. They're
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
They're excited that there's yet another form of communication at all hours of the day and night, whereas introverts would be less excited to text message. I also asked this in part because I want to protect the variable latency to respond to text option that I've tried to exercise in my life. But that seems to, well, doesn't really seem to work.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
That's going to be on November 2nd, and we will discuss all things neuroscience and neuroplasticity. We'll talk about some of the benefits and protocols related to cognition and mood and much more.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I think most people assume, you know, if I walk up to you and I say hello and you wait 10 minutes to say hello back, I'll first think you're a little bit rude and then think you're a little strange. Whereas if I text you hello and I don't hear back right away, I might think you're busy. There's some wiggle room for interpretation, but I think...
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
What I'm really getting at here is do we tend to project the same latency expectation on text that we ourselves embrace? This seems like an important source of potential miscommunication, misunderstanding, and maybe worse.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yes, I'm happy to say it 100 times. No, because I mean, I feel this wash of like, relief and now I'm looking for the appropriate word because I'm talking to you. So I feel like I have to use the exact appropriate word. I feel, I feel emancipated because I also feel that as texting has become more routine and has crossed a number of different lines of formality and informality, right?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Not just with family members, but with coworkers and people we do and don't know and just met and have known for ages and You know, the jargon that we use with one group is different than the jargon we use with another. But I feel that texting in general has really degraded our ability to communicate verbally and in writing elsewhere.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Also presenting at Eudaimonia are other excellent scientists and clinicians who've appeared on the Huberman Lab podcast, including Dr. Sarah Gottfried, Dr. Zachary Knight, and Dr. Robin Carthart-Harris, along with nearly 70 other experts. To see the full lineup of speakers and topics and to register, visit eudaimonia.net, spelled E-U-D-E-M-O-N-I-A dot net.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Forgive me. I'm going to interrupt you too. I have no idea what it's like to be a teenager in 2024. So I caught myself. I have no place saying weird because there were things that I was doing as a teenager that I'm sure adults were like, that's weird. So I take that back. But if you think about how...
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
That's an awesome friend.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, I think this is such an important topic. I think because texting is so common and has been used to, you know, communicate so many different forms of human emotion in this broad bin format, I mean, how much can you really put into a text? I have some... friends and coworkers. And you can voice text. Which is like, then it's like. Right. Right. It's long.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And sometimes, well, there are issues with that too. I feel like it's enriched compared to texting, unless the text is carefully written out, punctuated. I mean, we can see the care that people put into certain texts or emails that they tip, and most people, including myself, don't, right? Texting is a short form of communication. Audio notes, voice memos seem like a step up.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I think what this has probably done is that it's made the phone call or the goodness, the handwritten card or letter, it's kind of raised that to the The pinnacle of care of expression. Completely.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, I didn't outright set this rule in my relationships, but I would say with my coworkers, family members, and in other kinds of relationships, there's a rule, which is that we don't argue over text.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It's sure to be a terrific gathering, and I hope to see you there. And now for my discussion with Dr. Mark Brackett. Dr. Mark Brackett, welcome. Thank you. Great to be here. I'm excited to talk to you today about many things related to emotions. We hear the word emotions and we have all sorts of ideas about what they are, what they aren't.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
You and I are both aware that there is neural real estate specifically dedicated to the processing of faces and specifically to the processing of human faces and specifically to the processing of the emotions. carried in human facial expressions. So, you know, this is a hardwired aspect to our species.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Wild. Can we talk about the energy pleasantness axes? Sure. And create a mental picture for people of what this is. I found this to be incredibly useful. If listeners or viewers have a pen or pencil and paper, you could map this out, but it's very easy to imagine in your mind. So maybe you could just tell us on the vertical axis.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Okay, so vertical axis is energy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
We also hear about emotional intelligence quite a lot these days. And I have a feeling that the way it's discussed is often not the way it really is. So to just kick things off, Could you clarify for me, for everyone, what is emotional intelligence? What does it pertain to? And then maybe we can use that as a way to drill into the deeper question of what are emotions?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Wow. Maybe the next generations coming up are far more emotionally intelligent than ours, if I may.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I was going to ask, how do we resolve the contradiction between the message to feel our feelings versus to just recognize that the feelings are moving through us as this five-year-old gosh was and is able to do. Because I feel like it gets to the heart of a lot of what we hear in the psychological and wellness space, which is feelings are just feelings. They're transient.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
They represent all sorts of things. And we can get to the biological underpinnings or the childhood trauma root cause underpinnings, all sorts of things, genetics for that matter. Should we feel our feelings in order to best recognize them? I would imagine yes. Is there any value to suppressing our feelings or does that tend to just grow the feeling?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
What is known about this from the research literature? Because you see a lot of different opinions about this, but I'd like to know, have there been any experiments where people are placed into a negative or positive situation? emotion or are experiencing a negative or positive emotion and then intentionally try to suppress it?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Has there been any brain imaging and measurement of galvanic skin response? Like, does the emotion grow or does the emotion shrink?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
This is a very important aspect of our life because, as we all know, emotions are present with us from the moment we are born until the moment we die. So much like having a body, we need to learn how to work with our emotions in order to have the best quality of life. We all know that we are supposed to pay attention to our emotions, but at the same time, we are often told that we shouldn't
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Um, I'm guessing empathically attuned.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Um, although that's a, for those that know empathy is a, is a, involves a bunch of subcategories. So I want to acknowledge that pathically attuned. Um, I'm guessing that they have themselves some high, high emotional intelligence. Um, and the third is, um, gosh, I, my hope is that there be a, a, uh, high situational awareness.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Right. Because your uncle needed to see something subtle in your facial expression, or maybe not so subtle, but everyone else was missing it. But yeah, But to be able to detect that there was something that really needed – it was like a silent cry for help.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It's kind of going right by her.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So if I were to take an emotional intelligence test, would it have me looking at pictures of facial expressions, Would it have me reading paragraphs about emotional exchanges and gauging who felt what and why and how, that sort of thing?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
This is actually where my next question was going. So I'll just ask the question in the form of an answer. Is this like Jeopardy? I guess that's what you do. No, it's the other way around at Jeopardy. Sorry, you can see how many episodes of Jeopardy I've watched. That if people don't have adequate emotional boundaries and they are maybe even too empathically attuned
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
that someone they care about experiencing anger or sadness or frustration, maybe even with them, would shift their own emotions and not make them able to be available with the three qualities that you listed off before, in particular non-judgment, because now it's personal. And so it would undermine the process.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
It's actually the case that we don't have the time to be judgmental. It's far too energetically costly.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Those cappuccino machines can be scary.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to laugh. I laughed before you said it was a mess. I just, your impression of the question, it's a. Maybe it drew to mind some experiences of mine.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
In thinking about people that can really help us by asking us the right questions or in thinking about how we can ask people the right questions to really help them and us gain an understanding of what they're experiencing. I'm recalling numerous instances in my life where there seemed to be the requirement for an excuse, like an activity excuse.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I currently have a very good relationship with my father, but I remember when there was a time where we had to talk about science or watches as an entry point to any conversation, let alone about emotions, right? And he's done a lot of work. I've done a lot of work. And I like to think we're much, we are much further down the road.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
We enjoy a very close relationship as a consequence of that work in part. But I think what you're describing really makes me realize that no matter who anybody is or what their age or what their background is, that as human beings, we don't just need permission, but we really should think about just having a conversation about how
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
others feel as opposed to making an activity a prerequisite for that conversation. And as I say this, I realize some people are probably thinking, oh boy, okay, so we're just going to sit around and talk about our feelings.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
But my short response to that is yes, because when you don't do that, then I can say from experience, then pretty soon you're not participating in those activities with that person and potentially with anybody. I mean, I'm not saying that people become so unpleasant to themselves and others that they don't have any friends. I mean, okay, that's an extreme case.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
But what I hear in the backdrop of everything you're saying is that it's not just about an education. It's really about a practice of giving ourselves and others permission to simply have a conversation about what one is feeling. as an exercise for both people to be able to explore that in the correct way. And there is a correct way. And you've described the ruler approach as one correct way.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
When I think about most uses of the words emotional intelligence, it seems to correlate, again, in a very non-scientific way, seems to correlate with one's ability to tolerate others' emotions and make sense of the emotions of others. For instance, I've heard it said before, not about me, that so-and-so has high emotional intelligence.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I'm letting that really sink in because, you know, I think these days we hear a lot about therapy. Fortunately, in my opinion, I think and I'm going to get the numbers only crudely right, but they're certainly in the right direction and amplitude.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
There was a survey done, I believe, at Stanford asking students how willing they would be to seek therapy if they were dealing with an emotionally trying time. And this was in the, I think, early and mid-90s. And the numbers that came back were very low, somewhere in the teens or 20% of students polled. Whereas nowadays, it's in excess of 80% or 90%. Very high. Yeah.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I think that's representative of a lot of- Actually, can I give you another example of this?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Is this a pre-med course?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Okay. This is general undergrad. That was a joke against pre-meds. Love the pre-meds, but they are very grade conscious.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Of journaling about stress? Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Because in the presence of their child or someone else's kid reacting in a You're describing emotional intelligence as a self-perception as well. Yes.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Your joke about envy reduction is something I take very seriously. We did a four episode series with Dr. Paul Conti, who's a world expert in psychiatry. He's a psychiatrist and among the very, very best psychiatrists in the world by many accounts. And he discussed during that series, but also on other podcasts he's appeared in, such as my friend Lex Friedman's podcast that
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Envy is actually at the root of much of the evil in the world, small scale evil, large scale evil, and a lot of the despair that people feel. And I think it's a word that isn't discussed enough because like the sound of it is, it's kind of gross, right? Envious, envy, nobody wants to be associated with it. But fortunately,
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Dr. Conti described it as a natural human emotion in some cases, but I had no idea, and I don't know if he knows, but maybe he does through his clinical work, but I'll certainly pass along what you just said to him, that so much of the stress that I have to imagine good people, and these students are, after all, I imagine good people, they're not evil.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Not characterologically evil, let's hope, are experiencing envy. The wish to have more of what somebody else has, maybe something specific, which of course gets to these more common phrases of people feeling that they are not enough. Yeah. Which is going back to contentment. Right. Actually, oh, I didn't draw the arrow. Now I thought I drew the arrow. Between contentment and envy. Right.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So if one wants to combat envy, you can imagine that a program to combat envy might be perceived, if one didn't understand it, as a calling for people to just be content with less, which is not what we want, right? I mean, we want ambitious people in the world. We want people aspiring. We want people to have growth mindset.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And yet we don't want people to be stressed and have a pervasive feeling of envy inside either. So how would you make inroads into envy?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
How does that differ? Sorry to turn your own work back on you from admiration or inspiration. Like, wow, they, you know, like the... Yeah, that's what I'm getting at.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And so is our task, therefore, to do the equivalent of what, in my little anecdote, this other person was doing, to be able to parse one's own emotions in a fine enough way to understand the experience in kind of a third-person way that one can regulate their behavior, what they say, how they act?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
That's all regulation. Conflict resolution is something that I think a lot about in any situation where emotions are discussed. And it brings me back to this earlier situation you were talking about where This woman said that she was going to find her child somebody to help him to intervene. And you were thinking, well, why not you?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Right, exactly. And now there's a whole field of feelings mentors cropping up. That actually wouldn't be such a bad thing.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
That wouldn't be such a bad thing. Say it louder. I like that goal. Yeah. So when we were talking about that, one of the things that surfaced was this notion that some people have a natural empathic attunement or the emotion that the other person is feeling is a negative one and it's about us or about them.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And as a consequence, you know, we're not able to really be present to help the person the way that you helped your dad. Like he was frustrated with his wife. Yes. Had he been frustrated with you, it might be a little bit – little bit more challenging to say, hey, well, dad, maybe what you're experiencing in terms of your frustration with me is actually blank.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, because you're now in a tether with them. So to what extent is empathic attunement a positive trait? Are there people who are better at turning it off or directing it in appropriate ways than others? In a previous podcast that I did recently, somebody sitting right there in that chair told me, and I believe them, that I am codependent. It's the first time anyone's ever called me that.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Codependent. She defined it, she spelled it out, and it, in a very parsimoniously Wei explained a huge array of challenges that I've experienced to the point where I've been learning more about codependency. All right. Okay. Not easy for me to say even now. We're all interdependent. Interdependent, yeah.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Certainly depending on others is important, but certain patterns fall well under the umbrella of codependency. So I was like, okay. And even now I'm uncomfortable talking about it, which is part of the reason I'm trying to desensitize myself to the word itself, let alone drill into the process of getting through it. So-
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
How much is recognition of others' emotions and understanding of those as opposed to what is recognition and understanding of their own emotions factoring into this thing that we call emotional intelligence?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
The point being that if our emotions are so strongly tethered to others, we see that as empathy. We label that typically as positive, but it really diminishes our ability to be there for people if their emotions are negative and about us. I disagree. Okay, great.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Do we know where in the brain empathy resides? We hear so much about mirror neurons, but I think for those of us that have been in neuroscience and psychology long enough, we acknowledge, yes, there are appropriate conversations that include the words mirror neurons, but that they've been made out to be much more than perhaps they are in terms of empathy.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And they've become sort of the default description for all forms of empathy and understanding. And it's not just that. So what do we know about the brain science of empathy? Yeah.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, I keep hearing that the way to do this properly is to ask questions. As opposed to telling people what they need to do. Your friend or this person who was an effective source of support in that moment said, you know, can you get in the hot air balloon and look down on your life? Yeah. get in the hot air balloon for a second and then do this.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
As a former partner of mine said, who I'm still on great terms with, no one likes to be shifted. Yeah, no one wants to be told what to do. Right, no one wants to be shifted. No one, no matter what state they're in, high or low, wants somebody to come along and try and shift them. Or just tell them like, you know, go for a walk. Okay, well, why am I, you know, like, to do what? Or meditate.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
That one's become equally grating when it's probably a great thing to do, but perhaps there's a different way posed in the form of a question that would be more effective. I think the hot air balloon example also brings to mind something. I'll try and keep this as succinct as possible for your sake and for the audience sake.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
take all of our emotions seriously, nor should we react to all of our emotions with behaviors. And indeed, that is true.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
But, you know, having studied stress a bit in my laboratory and experienced a lot of stress, as most people have in their lifetime, it's very clear that when we stress our mental aperture, our visual aperture, our auditory aperture, everything shrinks, right? It contracts. And we know that getting a different spatial perspective gives us a different temporal perspective.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
We can start thinking about our life binned in larger pieces and get that perspective of the things that in life or that are going well. There's a meditation that I guess it's a meditation, I don't know what to call it, that I started doing years ago when I was a junior professor because life was so stressful for tenure.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And little did I know that it just continues to be stressful, but a pleasure to do the work. That involves basically doing a standard type meditation for a few breaths of closing my eyes and focusing on my body and what's going on internally, but then opening my eyes and focusing on something external like my hand or the room, and then going to the pale blue dot It's a very wide aperture.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So effectively the hot air balloon looking down.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Distancing, right. And making this a practice, not in a moment of stress, but each morning as I start the day, as a kind of reminder that our brains, our cognition and our emotions go through tremendous state differentiation, like these complete, we're kind of different people under these different space-time references.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And that when we're in stress, we tend to get locked into one space-time reference. And I'm not trying to be cosmic about this, but the nature of stress is to have us anchor to the stressor.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And to put up mental walls to break out of that and physical walls. So it sounds like great supporters and we can help ourselves through the more unpleasant portions of the emotion scale if we want to by taking ourselves into this different perspective using spatial tools, hot air balloon, pale blue dot.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
While a lot of the stereotypes dating back to the, you know, let's just say in 1930s through to the end of the 1970s seemed to couch people as more stoic, less emotionally expressive, especially in public or with people that they weren't very close with. There was also a tendency, at least in movies about that time, for people who were passionate to be rewarded for expressions of their passion.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So it's kind of two ends of the spectrum, right? We always think of the kind of the real stoic thing, both for male and female phenotypes, right? You look at movies from the 30s and 40s, you see that. But you also saw intense expression, passionate expression. And now I suppose we're in a bit of a new place where – I think there's an invitation.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I like to think there's an invitation for a broader range of emotional expressions and phenotypes, let's call them. I'm a biologist after all. It's also a safe word to use still, I think. You can use the word phenotypes. Stereotypes is a bit loaded, a lot loaded. But emotionality and the notion of people being overly emotional has a unfortunately a bit of a negative tinge to it.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Whereas somebody being passionate, that sounds like a pretty good thing.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Maybe that's why my graduate advisor said, instead of telling you to be careful, I'll tell you to be mindful because the opposite of mindful is mindless, and then you'll remember.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And yet we reward people still for being passionate, even if it's tinged with some anger. Like if somebody has a cause that they're really passionate about, we don't necessarily say they're being emotional. We say they're really passionate about this. There seems to be a subtle difference. There is.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
That maybe it's rooted in a kind of a trajectory of like trying to achieve a specific outcome, whereas just anger or sadness kind of just, you know, um, geysering out of us is it doesn't seem like it's directed towards an end point. Right.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So given that we're both scientists interested in emotions, you're the expert. I'm also just the student today. I think it's worth pointing out to people that there isn't one location in the brain that governs this complex process that you just described. It's a network-wide phenomenon. But you did mention the body. You mentioned feeling. How is one feeling both in brain and body?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
People gaslighting each other.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
What's been lacking, however, and what Dr. Mark Brackett finally delivers to us is a roadmap to think about our emotions in a very structured way and thereby to engage with our emotions, sometimes shift our emotions, and certainly to understand the emotional expressions of others in ways that best serve our quality of life.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
In your book, you include a number of really wonderful quotes, but one of them that I anchored to very quickly is the following. All learning has an emotional base. And it was none other than Plato that said that. What is the relationship between emotions and learning and decision-making?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
To what extent does somebody who has high emotional intelligence – have more or less body awareness or somatic awareness as opposed to somebody who's quote unquote in their head. Put differently, can somebody who's very much in their head who has very poor body awareness have high emotional intelligence?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, your examples bring me back to your earlier mention of this brilliant five-year-old kid who realized that his current emotional state was like the weather. It's going to change. In order to have that perspective, my guess is that he had to have already at some point moved from the blue quadrant.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So low energy, low pleasantness to the green quadrant, high pleasantness, low energy to the yellow quadrant, perhaps not in this order. And yes, I'm using this to remind people about the quadrants, higher energy, higher pleasantness, and then red, high energy, low pleasantness. Yes.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And you've developed an app that's freely available, um, that allows people to essentially, um, press the screen. Um, is that right? Yes. And to denote where they are on this, um, energy versus pleasantness, um, scale at numerous times throughout the day and night, if they choose, we'll provide a link to this app.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah. I've used it before and a previous version. I need to update and get the new version. And I will, um, I found it to be immensely useful just to start thinking about emotions along this energy versus pleasantness axis.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
After one does this for a few days or weeks, maybe checking in and touching the app, I don't know, a couple of times a day, maybe again in the evening upon waking, what sort of data or information does one get back that can be informative toward Being a healthier, happier person, excuse me, a healthier person, more contented, more content.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah. Amen to that. When I did an episode about gratitude, um, now some years ago, um, I was positively shocked to see the data that the data on gratitude practices are so striking in terms of whether or not one looks at neurotransmitter expression or, uh, whether one looks at, um, Happiness rating scales, as it were. Learning, ability to learn.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So many things are improved by even short gratitude practices. And it was interesting for me to realize that not only do effective gratitude practices include thinking about what one has, but also in observing others expressing their own gratitude either towards us or towards others. So, you know, there's something about the human brain that really thrives on gratitude.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And the other thing that I think is worth mentioning, you said these students could, through a gratitude practice, realize the opportunity that they have. I think a lot of people default to the assumption that a gratitude practice will make them complacent and stop seeking to reach their goals. But actually the opposite is true.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
There's a smaller research as far as I understand, maybe it's expanded in recent years, where if people do a regular gratitude practice, even five minutes a day, their achievement actually increases as well. So gratitude and complacency are not on, they're not in the same bin.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So clearly you're on a mission and it's a wonderful, in fact, admirable one at that to bring more emotional awareness. Can we call it that? Emotional awareness to kids and to adults to better the world. I don't think I'm overreaching there. I think that's the goal. I'd like to get back to your origin story a bit. to understand a little bit more about the motivation behind the goal.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
You've written about in your book and you've spoken a little bit today about the fact that you were bullied pretty viciously. And also were the target of abuse. And when one thinks about bullying in particular, we, I think all hopefully naturally default to, okay, how can we stop bullies? But I'm guessing this is a two-sided issue. And I'm not trying to create empathy for bullies here.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
But I'm guessing that in order to really disintegrate the bullying problem down to zero, which would be the ultimate goal.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
That we need to get into the minds of both the bullied and the bullies. Correct. And as uncomfortable as that might be, maybe this is an opportunity to embrace some of the very practices that you've been talking about. So if you would, could you tell us a little bit about how, as a kid, how you perceived your bullies? I'm very curious about that.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I can say I've never been bullied, but I've also not been a bully. I can easily say, I was thinking about this during our brief break there, I hate bullies. Like I like hate them. I'm like right there in the red, no pleasantness, like top, top corner there. Like it activates me physically. Like it makes me angry, makes me want to do something about it.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
But as somebody who was bullied, how did you perceive your bullies? Did you think they were like... correct or the authority? And how have you embraced whatever understanding that was and morphed it over time to be able to think about how to solve the bullying problem, both from the perspective of the bullied and the bully?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Some years ago, I went to this course. It was, you know, broadly could be described as personal development. It was interesting. It was grounded in science and psychology. And each day would start with going around the circle as typically is done at these things. and you'd have to say how you feel, but you couldn't use a valuation. You couldn't say good or bad or so-so.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Yeah, that's part of the reason I asked the question. I mean, I was debating to myself whether or not I ask it in that way because I didn't want to come across as insensitive. No, I don't really care. Precisely because I have sat on neither side of the bullying equation that it's kind of a foreign thing to me. It also makes me realize, and especially now after what you just said,
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I found it very difficult. I found it difficult for a number of reasons. First of all, I don't think I was ever trained to use specific language for my feelings. In fact, I don't think I was ever trained to understand what feelings were. In fact, I don't neuroscientists and psychologists are still trying to figure out what feelings and emotions really are. So a couple of questions.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
that while I was in high school, I'm guessing there was a lot of bullying.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
You know, I had some friends that could definitely be classified as misfits. Yeah. And I, I think looking back, they hung out with my group of friends because we were definitely – we were into different things. We weren't – me, meaning my peers, grew up in the John Hughes film era where you had like the jocks versus the hippies versus the skateboarders versus the – The burnouts. Yeah, exactly.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I had my crowd and was friends with a number of people outside that crowd. But there were these kids that would hang around us that weren't into the same things that we were. And I am looking back and realizing now that they did it because they were definitely safe with us. And we could be a little scary if we wanted to be, but we weren't the type to go out and be scary.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So I think they must have sent some safety with us. And I actually have very fond memories of those kids and know some of them still now. So yeah, I asked that way in part because I realized I missed a lot. Well, Lord knows I missed a lot of what was going on in high school for other reasons, but I just missed a lot of this. And I think even in academic culture as an adult,
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Not now, but I certainly witnessed bullying at meetings that was more demonstrative, where people would make fun of people in general in a way that I felt suppressed the likelihood that people would ask questions, which is a kind of different form of posturing and bullying, right? It makes students afraid to raise their hand and ask questions at meetings, for instance.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Even just working on humans is hard. For those of us that have worked on both animal models, which I no longer do, and humans, which I've done and do, working on humans is that much harder for all sorts of reasons. They're not on the same genetic background. You can't just put them in their cage, take them out, the same different like dark cycles. Some slept well, some didn't sleep well.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I mean, there are issues with animal work as well. But yeah, just even embracing human work research at all is an immense challenge. So the idea that it would be viewed as soft is, I mean, that's just like laughable to me, but.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
When it comes to using language to describe our emotions, how important do you feel it is to have a broad buffet of options? A previous guest on this podcast, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and I talked about this a bit, and she mentioned that in some cultures, there's very specific language for specific emotions. In fact, there's even a word to describe the
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
feeling of sadness one has in a particular culture after getting a really bad haircut, which is incredible when one thinks about it. We all know what that feels like. Right. We know what it feels like. Right. But there isn't, to my knowledge- We don't have the word. A word for that in the English language.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
So today's discussion centers very heavily on scientific data that plays out in the real world that we can all use. We talk about conflict resolution. We talk about how to think about and work with emotions. We talk about bullying, both in children and in adults, how to deal with that sort of thing effectively.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
your description of confronting this bully. I don't even want to call them your colleague because there's nothing collegial. I agree.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
But more importantly, the fact that you were able to confront them is to me. And I think to anybody that hears that story, the definition of courage, you know, because it's in the moments where we feel like this big and we're collapsed on ourselves and we don't
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
know where the resources are and we don't have somebody sitting there like holding our shoulder saying, listen, I'm going to go talk to them or let's go talk to them that you, you, you did that for yourself. You, um, internalize the, um, the lessons you'd learned initially from your uncle.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Um, and brought that forward. And, um, I think anyone hearing that story, um, it's, it's obvious to them that, um, that is the, a great act of courage. And it's an inspirational one too.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And a reminder that for people that are being bullied as adults as well, that it's important to calmly, but directly and firmly express, like you basically gave him a no, like a really strong, like, no, like you would to a puppy that was like putting itself in danger or something, except in this case, it's a human being who had agency. And so he needed a sharp, he needed to be punished slightly.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I mean, I'm sure there's a curse word for it in the English language, but not necessarily for that specific feeling. Or unique to that specific feeling. So what is the relationship between language labels and emotion? And I ask that as a way to kind of wedge into the ruler approach, right?
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Well, certainly not rewarded. You're right. Punished isn't the right word. He certainly, whatever dopamine hit he got from that, that I think part of the intake was just needed that needed to be retracted. That needed to be taken away from him.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And it occurred to me just now that you're effectively doing what your uncle did for you, but for millions and millions of people.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Because as you pointed out, one recognizes, understands labels, but the label is central, literally, to the ruler approach. It is. It is.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Well, it's absolutely clear to me that you're extremely passionate about this mission of teaching people what emotions are and how to work with them, giving them really clear systems to do that, tools that they can do that.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
I think it's fair to say that you answered your own question, in my opinion, if I may, that, you know, you through your Uncle Marvin to you and through the work that you do and through your public education effort, which includes your graciousness and coming here and sharing with us. what you know, um, what you believe people can benefit from.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And I, it's absolutely clear to me that people can so benefit from these tools and what you put into your book, which does include some very personal things that, um, I must say are entirely couched toward the reader understanding and learning how they can make themselves and others and the world a better place. It's, um, it's really extraordinary.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
The, um, the rippling out effect, um, is not a sufficient way to describe it. It's really an enormous amplification of the hard work you've done. And I'm just really, really in awe of the fact that you've taken hard experiences and transmuted those into so much good. And so on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching, I just want to extend an enormous debt of gratitude.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
This is truly important work. And I don't say that lightly. I really appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Mark Brackett. To learn more about his work and to find links to his book, Permission to Feel, which by the way I highly recommend, as well as other links to his laboratory and other resources, please see the links in the show note captions.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. Another terrific zero-cost way to support us is to follow the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or topics or guests you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
to exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
If you're not already following me on social media, I'm Huberman Lab on all social media channels. So that's Instagram X, formerly known as Twitter, Threads, Facebook and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content of the Huberman Lab podcast.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
And if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, the neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as protocols in the form of brief one to three page PDFs, protocols that cover things like learning and neuroplasticity, how to optimize and regulate your dopamine, how to improve your sleep.
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Dr. Marc Brackett: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Again, all available, completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab, scroll down to newsletter and provide your email. And I should point out that we do not share your email with anybody thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion all about emotions with dr mark brackett and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
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. My guest today is Dr. Matthew Hill. Dr. Matthew Hill is a professor of cell biology and anatomy at the University of Calgary.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
One, do you think that there are different subjective effects of different strains of cannabis that can be attributed to the different strains, right? Not just to individual differences in experience. And then the second is, do you think that...
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
there will ever be a time in which we can understand this plant, flower, right, to the extent that we can engineer it to provide specific subjective experiences, perhaps more positive than negative, et cetera. And then there's a third question, but I'll hold off.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Is it possible that there's a chemical profile that relates to the most common indicas or most common sativas?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Well, then that immediately to me negates the sort of premise of this paper that I was referring to that divides according to indica sativa. And yet the paper is also trying to distinguish among all the different types or products of cannabis. Meaning, is there some other feature of the cannabis plant that does relate to these different subjective effects? Because people do seem to
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
get different subjective effects from different products that relate in some way to things other than the concentration of THC.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
You mentioned effects of cannabis on appetite. And I know one of the medical uses of cannabis is in people that are undergoing treatment for cancer in order to stimulate appetite, because oftentimes they have
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I mean- I see. So they purchase something that they think is going to make them calm and it makes them feel calm.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
It speaks to, you know, I did an episode on the placebo effect. And a lot of people hear placebo effect and they go, okay, well, then everything's a placebo. The placebo effect is amazing. There's dose response to the placebo effect of nicotine on cognition. Dose response.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
If you're told you got a high dose when you actually got a low dose, you will exhibit the high dose neurocognitive enhancement effect. And by brain imaging, it shows a high dose-like enhancement of the relevant brain areas. In other words, the expectancy drives changes in brain activity.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
very low or even no appetite due to the cancer treatment um is the mechanism by which cannabis can stimulate appetite known and if so um what is the general trend of effect makes people hungrier obviously but we hear again in um kind of uh recreational terms of people getting the munchies you know becoming exceedingly hungry is that related to some cannabis induced effect on say blood sugar like insulin or glucose regulation or is it happening at a different level
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Do you think this also explains the – lore or perhaps it's real that different alcohols produce different drunks. Um, you know, I mean, I've heard of, you know, I've, I've got friends who will swear that whiskey makes them feel aggressive and vodka, you know, is mellow and white tequilas feel different than, uh, than the other tequilas.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And, you know, for people listening to this, they go, okay, well, that's not science. I agree. That's not science. That's just anecdote. And yet, um, You know, the chemical composition of these different drinks is different, but ultimately we're talking about alcohol, right? Different sugar contents, you know, different hangover propensity.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
It's something for which we should all be very curious to try and understand what we know, what we don't know, and try and get to the real answers. So right off the bat on X, I invited Dr. Hill onto the podcast. and he accepted the invitation.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So I think it's important that you explain that because I do think that, like— Well, that's what the data pointed to. But now what I'm realizing is that anytime we're talking about cannabis, because of the 70-plus cannabinoids present that could modify— or join, so work in parallel with the effects of THC, we're really talking about polypharmacology. It's not a pure substance.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
It's not like giving anandamide, or it's not like adjusting levels of endogenous anandamide. This raises, I think, an equally important issue for us to resolve, which is CBD, which we didn't talk about earlier. When Nolan Williams, who's a psychiatrist, He's one of these phenoms.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Triple board certified psychiatry, neurology, colleague of mine from Stanford School of Medicine, who mainly works in Ibogaine and transcranial magnetic stimulation. But we talked about cannabis a bit when he was on the podcast. And he mentioned a strain of cannabis that is available in Colorado, which is pure CBD. I think it's called Charlotte's Web. And the parents of children who have epilepsy-
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
will move there or go there just to get this strain because it seems to help their epileptic seizures.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Yeah. So the questions are, could you tell us a little bit about the biology of the CBD receptor, mainly as it relates to CB1 or not? Does it bind CB1 as well? If not, how is it working? And you mentioned that people will not report any subjective effect of taking a pure CBD compound, so lacking THC, but it sounds like it may have some usefulness for treatment of epilepsy.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And what are some other established, meaning clinical trials and or lab data, to support the use of CBD for any type of either psychiatric condition, pain, et cetera?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
You mean there's no CBD in there?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Oh, CBD. I mean, given the availability of CBD everywhere, in gummies and drinks, and I mean, you can get it in a... convenience store.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I was under the impression that CBD also bound to the CB1 receptor. No, I mean, certainly not. Or that under some conditions, it can modulate the shape of the receptor to adjust THC binding. But now you're telling me that these two things rarely coexist together. So I guess the question- You can dose them.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I thought the explanation for that was that CBD can modify the CB1 receptor in some way that makes THC less able to engage with the THC receptor.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
It doesn't sound like you're particularly convinced by that evidence. I'm looking at the look on your face for those listening. I'm looking at Matt, and I think he's being generous here. Let me ask it a little differently.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Does anyone know what CBD binds to?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So that should make people feel more alert.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Caffeine. Of caffeine.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
The way you're describing this, it sounds like the anti-caffeine.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Given the effects on adenosine that you described before, that it's sort of what we're calling, just for sake of discussion, the anti-caffeine adenosine. how do we explain the preponderance of CBD added to energy drinks that also contain caffeine? There's like no logic there.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
There you go. Everything can't be expectancy bias. I have a feeling it's going to be interesting to see in the comment section on YouTube. I mean, presumably there's some regular pot smokers listening to this. And the expectancy bias is so strong, as I allude to in the placebo episode and we've been talking about here. And yet it's so strong that I think
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Although cannabis users everywhere use that argument.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
people will also be convinced that there are real differences between different strains because they've maybe done the, you know, non-formal blind, you know, someone gave them their weed and someone else, and then they got a completely different effect, right? They're not expecting something different necessarily in a particular direction, but they get a very different effect.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
But that to me just speaks to the idea that Again, cannabis sounds like polypharmacology, 70 different cannabinoids, THC being among the more powerful components. But it's yoked in the sense that, as you said, people self-regulate their intake, provided they're smoking, not ingesting it by edible. And so it's almost like THC is being held constant.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And then there's this constellation of other things around it that are modified. And people eventually veer towards what they like, what they can afford, what works with their lifestyle. And then they come up with a bunch of theories based on packaging, what they're told, but presumably also some real effects of these terpenes, the CBD component, et cetera. It can't all be just psychological.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
knew they got placebo. People who got the drug knew they got the drug. It's very hard. You could do a dose response, but it's very difficult.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
This is a similar phenomenon with GLP-1. I and other people have pointed to the fact that certain food products or certain drinks or certain activities can increase GLP-1, glucagon-like peptide, which is now becoming more commonplace knowledge because of ozempic, monjaro, et cetera, as very powerful weight loss tools, although there's questions about muscle loss, et cetera. And then we had
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Dr. Zachary Knight on who explained that even a fourfold increase in GLP-1 brought about through a prescription drug or ingestion of a particular food or drink does not lead to any appreciable weight loss. However, when one achieves a thousand fold increases in GLP-1 through the use of things like Ozempic Manjaro, you see profound weight loss, meaning that you need enormous effects
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
in order to see the clinically relevant changes in that case of weight loss. So it sounds like a similar thing with CBD. So if somebody takes a CBD gummy and they feel that they sleep better, you would argue that that's entirely expectation bias.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I've never taken a CBD product. I know a few years ago they were all the rage. I just, I was never tempted to do it.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And I'm aware, and we'll talk about this a little bit more, that there is evidence, according to Matt Walker, who did a six episode series with us on sleep, that THC does help certain people fall asleep, but it can dramatically alter the architecture of sleep in ways that are probably not great.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So if, for instance, you were to take a high dose of CBD and then maybe have a couple alcohol-containing drinks, that could be problematic, right? Because now you're talking about the two-hit model.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
This is more like... Separate enzyme pathway, but you're challenging the liver.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
It's the steak and CBD or the CBD with omelet protocol. I'm just kidding, folks. I'm not suggesting that protocol.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So today's episode is really a unique one in that, first of all, we cover an enormous amount of biology and clinical data as it relates to cannabis, meaning today's discussion is not a debate. It is really an up-to-date discussion about how cannabis works. So we talk about THC versus CBD.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Yeah, I've never tried any of these CBD-containing products. I think a lot of what you're describing speaks to the fact that people are – eager for things that can help them adjust their anxiety and sleep better. You know, which is a large reason why a lot of this podcast is focused on respiration based tools and other base tools that can help people with anxiety.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I think that many people suffer from just too much activation in their autonomic nervous system. And I would argue there are much better things that are not of a ingestible type, you know, things that one can do that are science supported, right? There are clinical studies.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
meditation, breathwork, not so much breathwork, I would argue, but certain patterns of breathing, meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy. There are a whole bunch of different things, as you know. So I don't know what explains the CBD craze, but you certainly have shed light on what is and mainly what is not known about CBD. And I think it's really important for people to hear.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Except supporting the placebo effect, perhaps.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I want to make sure before we close that we touch on some of the potential harms or asserted harms of THC, because I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about this. We talked about psychosis and the lack of evidence for a direct causal effect. You give a beautiful description as to how we should think about all of that based on the current literature. But cannabis and driving...
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
is a potential hazard, right? And some people will laugh. They'll be like, oh, driving too slow as opposed to driving drunk or driving too fast. Okay, we can talk about that. We talked about the potential for addiction and the evidence potentially for and against that, right? There's also this, the big...
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
black or gray box of, you know, all the things we don't know about what regular cannabis use could do. And yet I know a lot of people who've used cannabis for years, mainly as a replacement for alcohol. At least that's how they describe it. Well, it's not as bad as alcohol that you hear that a lot. Okay.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
But what are some actual, if any, what are some actual harms of cannabis use that people need to take into account and just weigh against the fact that every compound, caffeine, even water can kill you if you drink too much of it. And then let's make sure that we touch on this issue of cannabis and driving or operating machinery.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
But I think the machine most people are thinking about these days is driving.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Because people are smoking less of it or there's just fewer carcinogens in there?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Can this potential, I want to highlight potential, relationship between cannabis use and cardiovascular issues be bypassed, no pun intended, by... using edibles, not inhalants, or is it related to THC itself?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And yeah, it took a while for the medical community to adopt the idea that cigarette smoking was bad.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Physicians would smoke in clinic. There are ashtrays in the doctor's office.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I mean, there's also- I'm chuckling at the example because you are so very clearly rooted in science, but that just came out of nowhere. Like, okay, cool. A hot shower, deliberate heat exposure, folks. There it is.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I have been trying to understand how this was- I'm not enjoying it because it's deliberate heat exposure, but it just speaks to the fact that we're talking about smoking being a regular part of the medical community's behaviors up until a few decades ago. And then a hot shower being the treatment for this chronic vomiting. And it speaks to the fact that with science and medicine, we do know a ton.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
It's amazing how much we've progressed this, especially in the last hundred years. last 25 years even. But it's also astounding how these seemingly surprising antidotes to uncomfortable conditions can hold up over time in the absence of any randomized controlled trials or mechanistic data.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Is there something about activation of the heat?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And yet we started off today's conversation with you explaining beautifully how activation of these CB1 receptors are homeostatic in some sense, the thermostat analogy. And, you know, maybe after... chronic use. The seesaw gets flipped to one side and gets stuck there.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. It's always nice to end on a positive side. And we don't want to demonize cannabis, nor do we want to glorify it. But the examples that I've heard of medical uses for cannabis include appetite stimulation. We talked about that. For glaucoma, lowering eye pressure and glaucoma that
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Age and age-related increase in eye pressure are two of the major risk factors for glaucoma, which is the most common blinding disease second to cataract. More than 70 million people suffer from it. Everybody, regardless of age, get your eye pressures checked. There are drops for this, but okay, cannabis can reduce eye pressure and glaucoma. Nausea, you mentioned. And then anxiety.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
It sounds like if people get the... the dose right and it's right for them, that in some cases it can help them with their anxiety. And the reason I raise that one is because it seems that most people who decide to use cannabis regularly are using it as perhaps for its euphoric effects, but as kind of a mild sedative, a way to relax in the same way that they would use a glass or two of wine.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
What are your thoughts on that? Because I think this is the most common use case.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And we know from the biopsychosocial model of pain that emotions and interpretation of the sensation of pain is a huge component of what people refer to as chronic and acute pain. Yeah.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So sort of a homeostatic scale and trying to maintain a middle range.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And that's probably why the CB1 receptor is so widely distributed is that neurons can excite or inhibit each other. That is, raise or reduce the amount of electrical activity in the let's say, nearby neuron, because we're talking about retrograde signaling. But ultimately, you don't want runaway excitation, because that looks like epilepsy.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And I think this is- Presumably because it's reducing the amount of rapid eye movement sleep you're getting, which most people will probably hear and interpret as bad. But REM deprivation is actually one treatment for depression. So there are certain case conditions where dreaming and REM is not advantageous. And you're describing one.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And you don't want runaway inhibition, because that looks like suppression of ability to think, move, et cetera. Exactly.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
That's extremely interesting because it squares with my, again, non-laboratory observation that a lot of people use cannabis to deal with their anxiety.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Right. So what you're saying is that, you know, there's a range of kind of, let's just say, baseline circuit activation within the amygdala and related structures in mice and humans, presumably in other animals also.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
If people take a compound that adjusts the sort of homeostatic level of what's considered low, moderate, and high activation of those circuits that include the amygdala, then perhaps they're bringing their anxiety into range in a way that perhaps is different than with alcohol, which is more acute. People have a couple of drinks, they'll feel relaxed, but then...
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
There's this phenomenon of anxiety the next day, feeling a little anxious when they're not drinking. Whereas it's interesting that many people who use cannabis for this purpose are not using it all day long. They are perfectly able to wait until the nighttime or evening. And of course, people can wait for their happy hour for a drink as well.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
But it's far and away different than the way we envision something like alcohol use disorder, where somebody discovers that alcohol really helps with their anxiety, and then they're drinking you know, maybe one at lunch, maybe a couple at dinner, and then in the evening to fall asleep at night.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I'm describing extremes here, but I find your hypothesis to square really well with the real world observations. And it's an interesting one.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So perhaps genetic differences in sort of baseline levels of anxiety perhaps map to endogenous levels of anandamide and might predict propensity for THC use.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Fantastic. And I really appreciate that you're able to share some of what your laboratory is working directly on now and looking into the future. And I want to thank you for what has been an incredibly clear, precise, and in many cases actionable, whether or not it leads to a yes or a no. actionable information here because cannabis and CBD, as you pointed out, are kind of everywhere around us.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And people are making decisions about cannabis and CBD And I also want to thank you because what initially started off as a bit of a confrontation online, which I alluded to in the introduction that I gave, has now evolved into a collaboration that I'm certain based on the exquisitely clear and generous information that you've provided has led to success.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
better education, more clarity, and therefore better informed choices for all the people listening and watching. So I really, truly appreciate you coming out here, sitting down with me, discussing these issues, clarifying points that were unclear before, and also pointing to the fact that this is a complex system, a complex biology.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
You know, there are a lot of things about psychosis, about negative effects, about potential positive uses of cannabis that just are not yet clear. And thanks to excellent researchers like you are likely going to be clarified in the years to come. So thank you ever so much for your time, for your research, and for your attention to the public health education effort around cannabis.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
We address the question of whether or not indicas versus sativas have different biological and subjective effects or not. We of course talk about the potential correlation, maybe even causation, between cannabis use and psychosis. I think you'll find that discussion very interesting. And we talk about how cannabis relates to hunger, to memory, to anxiety, and to the treatment of anxiety.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Yeah, if somebody who is expert in a particular area takes issue with something specific and can substantiate it with something that can foster better understanding, without fail, I'll reach out to them. Now, how quickly we're able to get them here, et cetera, is always an issue. Sometimes we can put an addendum to a podcast. Nowadays, that's easier using –
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
what's called dynamic insertion, where we can go back and actually make a correction. But listen, the best situation is always when this podcast can mimic the real world of research science as you and I both know it to exist, where if we had been in a meeting and you presented data, I presented data and we disagreed,
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
what we would probably do would be to head, well, traditionally it would be to the bar, but we'd grab a cup of coffee or go for a walk and we would talk about it, hash it out, and then potentially bring it up again at the next meeting. So in some sense, what we've done here over the last month or so, and certainly during today's podcast is to do something to that effect. So-
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Yeah, likewise. And it's certainly within the spirit of the podcast. In no way, shape or form do I purport to get everything right and where I've made mistakes, I really strive to correct them. And listen, it's been a real honor and privilege to have you out here. Thanks for coming all the way from Canada.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And I do hope to have you back again as the research evolves and we can learn more about these topics and more. So thank you so much, Matt. Appreciate you. Great. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion about cannabis with Dr. Matthew Hill. I hope you found the discussion to be as informative as I did.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Please also subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. Please also check out the sponsors that I mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or topics or guests you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
It's entitled Protocols, An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep, to exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media channels. So that's Instagram, X, formerly known as Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlap with the contents of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the contents of the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media channels. If you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter,
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Our neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as protocols in the form of brief PDFs of one to three pages, where I spell out the specific do's and in some cases do nots, but mostly do's related to things like how to optimize your sleep, how to regulate your dopamine levels. There's a protocol for neuroplasticity and learning.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
as well as protocols for fitness, which we call the foundational fitness protocol, includes everything, sets, reps, cardiovascular training. Again, all available, completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab, scroll down to newsletter and provide us your email. But I should point out, we do not share your email with anybody.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Matthew Hill. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Interesting. If I may, earlier you mentioned one of the potential psychoactive effects of cannabis is euphoria. Does that mean that the euphoria associated with cannabis use is independent of dopamine and is more reliant on something like? perhaps the opioid receptor system or the serotonergic receptor system?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I'm certain that given the widespread use of cannabis nowadays, that you'll find the discussion to be both an informative and potentially useful one that could help guide decisions as to whether or not you or others should or should not use or avoid cannabis, as well as one that can simply inform about this very interesting compound.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And so- He discovered anandamide and decided to call it bliss because he had familiarity with cannabis or because he took anandamide as a direct experience. No, no, I mean- Because it takes a lot for a scientist to discover a molecule, but then for a scientist to discover a molecule and then name it bliss for a particular reason, you have to-
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Speculate that they had some familiarity with the compound.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Well, now that potential myth is definitely going to propagate.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And of course, you'll learn a lot of neuroscience and biology along the way. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Your thermostat analogy is perfect here.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the critical need to get sleep, both enough sleep and enough quality sleep.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Very interesting. A lot of kind of aficionado questions about the receptor biology. I'll just spare everyone the details by just highlighting something that you already said far more eloquently than I will, which is I think it is fascinating that this whole system has both a tonic, like a steady release capability, and a phasic, you know, so the ability to spike
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
forgive the pun, the neuroscientists will know what I'm talking about, to spike more activity of the system superimposed on that tonic activity, because this is something that you see in the dopamine system. This is something that you see in essentially every neuromodulator neurotransmitter system. But it seems that the endocannabinoid system has accomplished this quite a bit differently.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So very interesting, unique system in a number of ways that raise a number of key questions.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And yeah, we just had an episode with Zach Knight from HHMI and UCSF. Uh, we talked about like the AGRP neurons and different neurons of the hypothalamus. We nowadays a rich understanding of the neurons that stimulate food-seeking, craving, and then eating.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Now, one of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is that your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees in order for you to fall and stay deeply asleep. And to wake up feeling refreshed, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
His laboratory studies cannabis and its effects on stress, its effects on feeding, and its effects on the behavioral impacts of cannabis exposure at different stages of development. The origin of today's podcast episode is a bit unique. So I'd like to share a little bit of that background with you.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
One of the best ways to ensure all of that happens is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And with eight sleep, it's very easy to do that. You program the temperature that you want at the beginning, middle and the end of the night. And that's the temperature that you're going to sleep at. And it will track your sleep.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Proof that even under the influence of cannabis, animals will work harder.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
It tells you how much slow wave sleep you're getting, how much rapid eye movement sleep you're getting, which is critical. And all of that also helps you dial in the exact parameters you need in order to get the best possible possible night's sleep for you. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for well over three years now, and it has completely transformed my sleep for the better.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for more than 10 years now, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast. To be clear, I don't take AG1 because they're a sponsor. Rather, they are a sponsor because I take AG1. In fact, I take AG1 once and often twice every single day, and I've done that since starting way back in 2012.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
There is so much conflicting information out there nowadays about what proper nutrition is, but here's what there seems to be a general consensus on.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Whether you're an omnivore, a carnivore, a vegetarian or a vegan, I think it's generally agreed that you should get most of your food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources, which allows you to eat enough but not overeat, get plenty of vitamins and minerals, probiotics and micronutrients that we all need for physical and mental health.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation pod cover, the Pod4 Ultra. The Pod4 Ultra cover has improved cooling and heating capacity, higher fidelity sleep tracking technology, and the Pod4 cover has snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve airflow and stop your snoring.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Now, I personally am an omnivore and I strive to get most of my food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources. But the reason I still take AG1 once and often twice every day is that it ensures I get all of those vitamins, minerals, probiotics, etc. But it also has adaptogens to help me cope with stress.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
It's basically a nutritional insurance policy meant to augment, not replace quality food. So by drinking a serving of AG-1 in the morning and again in the afternoon or evening, I cover all of my foundational nutritional needs. And I, like so many other people that take AG-1, report feeling much better in a number of important ways, such as energy levels, digestion, sleep, and more.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So while many supplements out there are really directed towards obtaining one specific outcome, AG-1 is foundational nutrition designed to support all aspects of wellbeing related 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.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
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. You're talking about increasing endocannabinoid activity, and we've said all this in the context of cannabis. So maybe we could talk a little bit about how the components in cannabis, THC mainly, but also CBD, impact cannabis.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
these receptors, the CB1 and let's just leave CB2 out for the moment because it sounds like it's more of an immune system thing. But just to make it very clear, is there a way to increase the activity of endocannabinoids without ingesting THC?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
But you're talking about experimentally or recreationally adjusting their levels. But how does one do that without using THC?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
acting directly on the cannabinoid receptor, not... So it sort of mimics the anandamide and 2-AG.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
By the way, Matt's referring to the fact that I said that in a previous solo episode about this. And there I was nesting it in the concentrations of THC that can be found in high THC cannabis. Yeah. So essentially what I was saying is that at very high THC concentrations, the amount of
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
maybe not the binding affinity, but the amount of THC that is available to the CB1 receptors is going to exceed what's normally found in terms of the amount of anandamide that can bind to CB1 receptors, because what you're talking about is a super physiological condition.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
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. Today's episode is also brought to us by Element.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So you said anandamide is high affinity, low efficacy.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
But it is high affinity.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Blocking the effects of 2-AG, but does it block the effects of anandamide?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
That's a very interesting point that we should highlight. So there are drugs that now exist that can block the breakdown of anandamide, make more available, presumably by disrupting some enzymatic breakdown, and therefore lead to more binding of anandamide. The now elevated levels of anandamide that are available to CB1 and you see no psychoactive effects.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
People are not aware that they... Yeah, you can do... No one can guess.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
What is it used for?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Elements is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Now, I and others on the podcast have talked a lot about the critical importance of hydration for proper brain and bodily function.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Seems like a lot of gymnastics to basically confirm what they already knew. Yeah. which is that even greatly elevating the anandamide by blocking this enzymatic breakdown of anandamide leads to, at least from what I'm understanding, vastly different subjective experience than ingesting or smoking THC, which brings us back to THC.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Research shows that even a slight degree of dehydration can really diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes in order for your body and brain to function at their best. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are critical for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or nerve cells.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And cannabis. It seems that this thing that we call cannabis and THC are – overlapping with the endogenous effects of anandamide. But here you're not talking about endogenous normal levels. You're talking about pharmacologically greatly increasing anandamide, no psychoactive effect, no euphoria, no munchies, et cetera. Then people smoke or take an edible of THC or cannabis.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
and you get a vastly different set of effects. So maybe we could talk about THC and the CB1 receptor. And since we're here, we might as well talk about CBD and the, I think you're gonna tell us the lack of interaction with CB1 receptor, right? And what is cannabis doing at the level of these receptors?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Because it makes me wonder whether or not these receptors are the whole story or whether or not cannabis is, as you mentioned, 70 plus active molecules in there, terpenes and a bunch of other things that may modify their action. But this thing we call cannabis has many more actions than just mimicking the endogenous cannabinoid system.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
You're introducing the ligand, the thing that binds the receptor. This is far and away different than, say, like the actions of amphetamines, which are disrupting the normal biology in a way that's giving you an amplification of an endogenous mechanism.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
If that was all just nerd speak for those listening. It's one, in the context of amphetamines, what you're doing is you're taking an endogenous system, a naturally occurring system, and you're greatly amplifying the amount of dopamine, the amount of norepinephrine that's available. Yeah.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
With what we're discussing today, the endocannabinoid system seems to be producing a set of effects that might overlap with the THC effects. But THC is doing a bunch of other things. And that's because THC, and we'll talk about CBD, but at least THC is acting as the ligand. It's in some sense, we don't want to say replacing, but it's masking the effects of anandamide.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of Element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise I'm doing, especially on hot days if I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
That's very helpful. So the analogy that I was considering using coming in here, like the difference between endogenous testosterone or estrogen versus pharmacologic testosterone or estrogen given as a therapy is very different because that's a levels issue. This is a levels and an extent issue.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman, spelled drinkelement.com slash Huberman, to claim a free Element sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. Today's episode is also brought to us by BetterHelp.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Super interesting. Well, I have to imagine that there are many people who use cannabis not to stimulate appetite but for other reasons. They either like the euphoria or to adjust their anxiety. Yeah. what are some other known mechanisms by which cannabis can change people's psychology? Let me focus in on one particular aspect of subjective experience, which is focus.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Do you think that some people use cannabis because it allows them to focus better? And I raise this specifically because I think that in the past, cannabis has had a bit of a reputation for making people spacey. You use the word stoned, kind of out of it. And yet I've heard of some potential uses for enhancing focus.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
My understanding is that people who use cannabis have poorer certain forms of memory, but not necessarily poorer memory across the board. Is that correct?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. There are essentially three things that make up great therapy. First of all, great therapy consists of having good rapport with somebody that you can really trust and talk to about the issues that you're dealing with.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And so... I should just say this point has often been confused by undergraduates and others to assume that... Just because one can gain proficiency at a task while under the influence of a substance does not mean that you have higher proficiency at that particular task while under the influence. In fact, the way it was presented to me when I was an undergraduate was incorrect.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I remember the lecturer said and later corrected himself. I won't call him out here because that's unfair. He's not here to defend himself, but it happens in lectures that – people who studied drunk would be better off coming to the exam drunk. That is not true from what I understand.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Second of all, that therapist should provide support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Thanks for clarifying that. And also, thank you for clarifying the – discrepancy between endogenous cannabinoid binding and affinity for CB1 versus THC. I really appreciate that because that's something that you and I discussed in light of the solo episode I did about cannabis. And now you've made it clear that THC does not bind with much higher affinity. It's just, as I think your words were, it
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
assuming high THC levels in the cannabis carpet bombs all the networks as opposed to binding more with higher affinity at particular receptors.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And third, expert therapy should provide useful insights, insights that allow you to better understand not just your emotional life and your relationship life, but of course also your relationship to yourself and to career goals and school goals, meaning excellent therapy should also inspire positive action.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Previously, I did a solo episode of the Huberman Lab podcast about cannabis, the biology of cannabis, some of its medical applications and uses, as well as some of its potential harms. That episode came out several years ago now and remains a very popular episode. It's had millions of views and millions of listens.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Yeah, let's talk about this because I know that you and I arrived at different understanding of the fastest, typical, and slowest routes of entry for cannabis. THC into the system to arrive at the brain, right? The numbers that I gave in the previous discussion about this were related to how quickly inhaled smoke moves from the lungs to the bloodstream and crosses the blood-brain barrier.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Right, which is very fast.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Okay, so there may be... It may be that it is the same as nicotine. It may be that it's faster. But importantly, it can be fast. But typically, how fast is the onset of the subjective experience of, okay, somebody takes a hit off a joint or a bong hit, and they start to experience the subjective effects of euphoria, et cetera. How quickly after?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I've seen some people not titrate it very well.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Yeah. I mean, that's not just a fair amount. I mean, if we were talking about alcohol concentration- It's beer to vodka.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And there are aquavit varieties, so to speak. By the way, I think when people hear me talk about any kind of drug that can be used recreationally or alcohol, I think some people assume that I'm ultra anti all these things. I'm actually not, right? I'm not an alcoholic, so I can- um, drink a little bit. And I have, I just don't tend to, and, um, we could discuss cannabis in a different venue.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Um, but the, uh, the point here is we're not trying to frame this as what people should or shouldn't do. We're just trying to inform people. I want to be very, very clear about that. So, um, but when I hear about, you know, um, 20 to 30% concentration, as opposed to 5% concentration, it's significant.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
BetterHelp makes it very easy for you to find an expert therapist with whom you really resonate with and that can provide the benefits that I just described. Also, because BetterHelp therapy is done entirely online, It's very time efficient and it's easy to fit into a busy schedule because it involves no commuting to a therapist's office, finding a parking spot, or sitting in a waiting room.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
If you'd like to try BetterHelp, you can go to betterhelp.com slash Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman. And now for my discussion with Dr. Matthew Hill. Dr. Matt Hill, welcome.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I love this. I mean, as somebody whose lab has done an in-laboratory VR-based experiment on human anxiety and fear and then compared that to a clinical study that we did Sort of en masse, where people were at home doing specific respiration practices. You have many more subjects, but of course, they're reporting back their effects.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
You can monitor them by device, look at HRV, look at heart rate, et cetera. I think having the ability to compare and contrast in laboratory and ex-laboratory data is extremely valuable.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Yeah, for people that have never been to a laboratory or tried to find a parking spot at a university, that's an anxiety-inducing experience in and of itself.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Delighted to have you here because you're an expert in the biology of cannabis, a topic that many, many people are curious about for a variety of reasons. So just to kick things off, maybe we can get people up to speed on what cannabis is. a little bit about how it works in the brain and body to produce the various effects that it produces and how some of that comes to be.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So does that mean that cannabis use rarely leads to tolerance of cannabis use?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Yeah, it sounds like those are precarious. Yeah. That somebody who thinks they have a lot of experience or, God forbid, no experience takes a concentrate and is, what, no longer getting the euphoric experience that they anticipated but instead are getting, what, a paranoid anxiety attack?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
This is a very important point, and I'm going to highlight it because I think it's very... Very, very important, although you're making it very clearly already, which is these days we hear a lot about the quote-unquote problems with high THC-containing cannabis as relative to what was present in the 70s and 80s and presumably 90s as well.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I was a teen in the 90s, so maybe I'm alluding to something there. But what you're saying is that unless one is talking about concentrates, that people and animals in the laboratory will self-regulate the amount of intake in a way that leads to approximately the same blood levels of THC.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So it may not be as much of a concern, at least in light of the concerns about, oh, these levels are so high that people are overwhelming their system with THC. Basically, this could be stated in real world terms as people are taking fewer tokes. of the higher concentration stuff that allowed them to match blood levels that were present in the person taking many more tokes in the 70s.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And then we can dig into some of the nuance. I have a lot of questions about different types, if you will, of cannabis, the relationship to mental health, potentially to mental illness. We're going to drill into all of that. So just to kick things off, what is cannabis?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Usually it's the life destruction that thwarts their progressive increase. Yeah.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Another form of life deterioration.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Sorry, I have to interrupt pet positron emission tomography, not pets. Don't although people get their pets high and we don't know what those pets think about that.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
If also high, one can assume a lot of things about what your pet is thinking while also high. Sort of half joke there. But yes, positron emission tomography is one way to assess the binding of drugs within the brain as well as activity of endogenous neurotransmitters, neuromodulators, such as anandamide, dopamine, et cetera.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
It makes sense. Yeah, these concentrates sound like something to at least pay attention to as a potential problem. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Now, I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term health can only be analyzed from a quality blood test.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Now, a major problem with a lot of blood tests out there is that you get information back about metabolic factors and hormones and lipids and so forth, but you don't know what to do with that information.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
With InsideTracker, they make it very easy to know what to do with those numbers because they have a personalized platform that allows you to see the levels of those metabolic factors, lipids, hormones, et cetera.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And they give you specific directives that you can follow related to nutrition, behavioral modification, supplementation and more that can help you bring those numbers into the ranges that are optimal for you. If you'd like to try InsideTracker, you can go to InsideTracker.com slash Huberman to get 10% off their new membership program.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
InsideTracker membership offers significantly reduced prices on InsideTracker's comprehensive blood panels. Again, that's InsideTracker.com slash Huberman to get 10% off. Along the lines of use, tolerance, et cetera, Is cannabis addictive and or habit-forming? And I think it's probably important that we distinguish between the two.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I may have made this joke in the previous episode I did on cannabis. I've known a lot of chronic cannabis users, and none of them – admit to being addicted. It's not my place to challenge them on that. But they do seem, in my experience, this is not an experiment, but in my experience, more irritable when they don't have access to what they call their quote unquote medicine.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So that speaks to a dependence or something, but then we need to be careful because in the classic sense, addiction, I've defined and others in the field of addiction have defined it as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure such that it causes disruption to other areas of life and your life becomes Yeah.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
But that's the nomenclature now that people are using, alcohol use disorder, cannabis use disorder. This is what you start to see now instead of saying being addicted to pot or being addicted to alcohol.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So I just want to make sure I'm understanding clearly. For people that use cannabis weekly, the... propensity for developing cannabis use disorder is on the order of about 30%.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
That's interesting. I was under the impression this has really changed over the last, you know, five, 10 years. You know, growing up, it was, I mean, I think there are still people in jail now because of possession and sale of cannabis. And then, of course, there are stores not far from here where people are selling cannabis.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Is... The legalization of cannabis leading to more cannabis users or fewer and or incidents of people going into the emergency room suffering from cannabis-induced psychosis, something that I hope we can also talk about.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Does it split male-female?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Several months ago, we posted a clip of that episode to X, formerly known as Twitter. And Dr. Matthew Hill responded to that clip on X with criticism about the specific points made within that clip. Most notably, my discussion of the data that cannabis use can in some individuals cause psychosis.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
accidentally ate THC-containing gummies. Fortunately, the child was fine. But there are actually pretty serious ramifications for this. the parents actually are quite susceptible to legal action if this happens, right? So this is something to like really keep in mind.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I mean, there are a million other health-related reasons why this is probably- Yeah, I don't know if that's true in Canada the same way, but in the States, yeah. Yeah, like if your kid gets into a stash of THC-containing gummies and ends up in the emergency room, there will also be, most likely, there'll be a police visit to that emergency room also, and it doesn't bode well for the parents.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
It's a very serious issue. And again, this was highlighted to me by someone that I know who didn't anticipate any of this, but kids are good at finding candy. And if that candy contains THC and they end up in the emergency room, serious issues. Nonetheless, if your kid is acting strange because you think they ingested THC containing anything, take them to the emergency room anyway.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So as long as we're talking about edibles, Is there any fundamental difference between the dose regulation that you talked about earlier of inhalants versus, excuse me, versus edibles? Meaning earlier you said that even if it's high THC containing cannabis, people will self-regulate to achieve the same, approximately the same blood concentrations.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
But with edibles, I imagine you eat half a cookie, a quarter of a cookie, and you can end up in a vastly different place than you expected.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I've heard of this happening.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Got it. As long as we're on the topic of time course, based on what I was able to find, I believed, and tell me if I was wrong, that cannabis can stay in one system for as long as 80 days. The reason I brought this up previously was there are a number of people who have used cannabis, are going to take a drug test, and want to know how fast it can clear from their system.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
But based on conversations we had offline, sounds like that 80 days might be a bit too long.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So abstinence for 30 days.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
But you're talking about this metabolite that can come from the edibles that doesn't come from inhalants that can have a much more potent effect.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So it's sort of a different situation altogether. Yeah.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Well, I guess it sounds like the drug tests either have to be revised or discarded. And it also sounds like if somebody is going to take a drug test for cannabis and they have used cannabis in any form in the previous 90 days, let's say, going for a run right before your test is going to liberate whatever THC resides in the fat stores.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
A lot of people are writing this down. Along the lines of what's known and not known, I'm curious what is known and not known about the effects of cannabis, THC, in particular on hormones. I've seen studies that cite increases in testosterone from cannabis use
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I've seen studies that cite increases in estrogen from cannabis use, and they argue for increased aromatization of testosterone into estrogen as the mechanism. I've also seen studies that say the exact opposite. So is there any global takeaway message yet, or is it just highly variable or depends too much on dose and individual age, et cetera, that we just really can't say?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Right. Well, there's, and this is where I think it's important that people understand that, you know, on this podcast, we cover science and studies, but we also pull from common experience that people want explained if we can.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And one of the experiences that is talked about a lot in certain, let's just say online communities, is the experience of people who had no preexisting gynecomastia, male breast development.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
We'll smoke marijuana. Do we call it marijuana these days?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I actually got a, I got someone, I got a lot of comments that said marijuana is an inappropriate term.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Smoke, we'll go back to that. That was new to me. I didn't know. So forgive me if I didn't know.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Okay, so we'll smoke cannabis and experience gynecomastia, or in females, so males and females both have breast tissue, but in males it's typically, it's not hypertrophied, but they'll smoke cannabis and get gynecomastia, growth of the male breast tissue.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
That's sometimes reversible, sometimes not, presumably through the aromatization of testosterone into estrogen, which then acts on the tissue, makes it grow, as well as reports of breast tissue tenderness after cannabis use in females. So that was sort of the origin of that discussion around does cannabis impact aromatization of testosterone into estrogen?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And you can find a little bit of evidence for that, but you can also find evidence to the contrary in the scientific literature. So I'm just curious your thoughts on this.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Interesting, because dopamine is one of the main ways that prolactin is suppressed. They're kind of in a seesaw. They work in somewhat seesaw fashion.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Now, whether that's a preexisting thing— Is there any reason to think that would be the case?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Yeah, it seems a bit, I mean, there are phytoestrogens in tons of different plants.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
The sort of attacks on soy and the attacks on – this I think grew out of the kind of the soy versus meat communities and plant-based versus carnivore. This podcast has always been agnostic with respect to nutrition and is really – if we encourage anything, it's that people consume – unprocessed and minimally processed foods as the bulk of their food intake.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
There seems to be enough data on that, but whether or not people choose to be vegan and eat a lot of plants or carnivore and eat just meat, we've essentially stepped out of that debate because let's just say it's as futile as about any other debate. It's completely circular. You end up right back in Twitter.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So this seems to be something that purportedly occurs on a backdrop of elevated androgens, meaning in puberty, Or a backdrop of some other form of androgen increase.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Yeah, but that's not the community I'm referring to. It seems that because transient gynecomastia during puberty is actually fairly common because of there's just so much androgen being produced in puberty that some gets aromatized. And that the idea, I'm not stating this as fact, is that it may exacerbate that. In any case, it sounds like the takeaway from this is that there –
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
aren't a lot of conclusive studies about the effects of cannabis on testosterone or estrogen or aromatization in any direction.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Are those positive or negative changes? I'm assuming that the studies you're referring to saw disrupted what they call sperm quality, which has to do with motility, et cetera.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So I have like- As we say this, I'm just chuckling to myself because anytime this conversation comes up about a substance and sperm quality or egg quality, I always get a barrage of comments of people telling me how many children they conceived while under the influence. No one is saying that you're going to be infertile.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
But if people are having challenges conceiving, it might be something to think about.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Along those lines, I saw kind of a jaw-dropping statistic, and I'm not sure I still believe it, but you tell me what you know about this, which is that up to 15% of pregnant women in the U.S. have used cannabis during pregnancy. That just seems, that number just seems too high and yet, you know, it exists out there.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Okay, two sounds like, okay, that I could imagine. but as high as 20. And do we know what the effects on the developing fetus are? There's a lot to unpack there.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Thalidomide effects are malformation of the limbs and other bodily structures in fetuses. It was an absolute tragedy of medicine that this occurred in even one birth. But Yeah, it's the reason why thalidomide is now, I believe, banned as a drug for use during pregnancy.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And this is... You're talking about the irresponsible that the dispensaries would say that?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Or irresponsible that the study was carried out that way? Because it's a little bit of... Entrapment?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Bartenders in the US put in the comments on YouTube, do you have to undergo training about alcohol to be a bartender?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
You're certainly doing your part to provide the public education about cannabis now. So we all appreciate that. you're highly informed and broad distribution of this information. Because this is also an issue with psychedelics, which currently don't have legal status in the US. This is an ongoing process of whether or not it will.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Right now, things are really on the teeter-totter with MDMA, where we await the decision from the FDA, but the early recommendation to the FDA was to not approve MDMA as a treatment for PTSD. So today, in mid to late June 2024, we'll see what happens.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
But this is also the case for ketamine, which has legal status, but many people are accessing ketamine not through a physician, but through online sources. So what you're speaking to here is a much larger issue. And I absolutely agree with you.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Fascinating plant. You mentioned the psychoactive effects. Some people listening to this and watching this presumably have experienced those psychoactive effects, others perhaps have not. How could we describe for both groups, what the quote unquote psychoactive effects are. You mentioned the higher the concentration of THC, the quote unquote higher someone will get, right?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I mean, I think most people are probably not aware, except by experience, positive or negative in some cases, about the differences in blood concentration as it relates to number of tokes versus concentration versus edible. I mean, these are critical themes, especially for where we're going to go next, which is, you know, all the discussion about high THC and psychosis.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
It sounds like the take-home message is proceed with caution, you know, low and slow.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Like don't ingest too much too quickly. Like really, you know, if one is going to explore this legally, of course, you know, take a little bit, wait, take a little bit, wait, because otherwise you're going to get the, who was the reporter? Oh. I think it was Maureen Dowd, but I don't know.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Reporting from the floor in Colorado.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Can people self-regulate their THC concentration in the blood by vaping as well as they can by joint or bong or other form of smoking?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
The greater the intensity of the high. What is the high? And I know people are probably chuckling saying, you know, does Huberman not know because he's never done it? I mean, that's my own business. I just want people to understand what you mean by psychoactive effects.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
What? And if you go overseas, it's even more wild. I mean.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
He also took issue with some of the specific points I made in that clip related to potential differences in the biology of the effects of different strains of cannabis, most notably indica versus sativa strains, and a few other points as well.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
You know, we're going to be doing episodes on stem cells. And, you know, you've got people flying out of country to do stem cell injections. People are getting them down in Florida who went blind from the injections of stem cells into the eye in an attempt to save what little vision they already had. Probably don't want to get me started on that one. I'm in total agreement with you, by the way.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I want to make sure that I ask about psychosis and paranoia. Yeah. I've previously said, and I was sort of, I wasn't joking, but I have observed in my history that when people started to experience some degree of anxiety or paranoia when smoking alcohol, cannabis, that sometimes the message they would receive back is to take more, to just adjust the subjective experience.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I think that's a terrible idea. Terrible idea.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Well, usually the advice of people in terms of that was recreational drug taking is, um, is rarely excellent advice.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Yeah. Um, I also am aware that there are some very high profile papers that have been published in the last really five years or so pointing to potential increased risk for psychosis of lasting duration, even after the effects of cannabis have worn off in high THC cannabis users, in particular alcoholics.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
high THC cannabis users that initiate that cannabis use young, and this might be preferentially impacting males. I want to make clear that what I just said is not a statement of absolute fact. It's my understanding of the conclusions of these papers.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
There are other conclusions in these papers also, but that particular conclusion seems to be important enough that they place it in the abstract and it's reached major press headlines. So I guess the simple question, which probably doesn't have a simple answer, is does THC cause psychosis?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
What about anxiety attack?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Or does it carry the same set and setting considerations that, you know, psychedelics like psilocybin-
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Okay, so to just clarify for people, these are laboratory mice that are genetically modified so that they contain or lack specific receptors on particular neuron types so that researchers can parse the effects of THC on what we're referring to as inhibitory neurons, which quiet other neurons, versus excitatory neurons, which excite. other neurons and so forth.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And in doing so to understand some of the network biology, which is basically impossible to do in a typical mouse, what's called a wild type mouse or a human, because when one ingests the drug or when the mouse is given the drug, it affects any site in the brain, potentially any site in the brain where the CB1 receptor is expressed.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
You want to see that result.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Like- is in the scanner and then starts having a psychotic episode. But chances are they're going to try and get out. For those that don't know, I don't want to scare people out of doing MRI or fMRI, but you're typically... told to stay extremely still. There's sometimes even a bite bar.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
This is a very controlled environment, not an environment that you would want to be in during a psychotic episode.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And there's also the issue of polypharmacology, which is simply when people take one drug, then there's often the tendency to take another drug either because it's available in those or because their threshold to saying yes is a little bit lower. Do most people who take cannabis and achieve the high have a tendency to do other drugs?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Possibility everywhere.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
It doesn't seem like a drug that people combine with a lot of other drugs.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Is there a bias towards males developing psychosis? I know there may be a bias initially toward males in schizophrenia that could confound this, so we want to be careful.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
What about a first relative who has schizophrenia? Because there's a strong genetic component to schizophrenia.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Yeah, I was, um, looking toward, um, some of the recent studies and, uh, Lancet, JAMA Psychiatry, I believe we can provide links to these again. And now more recently, there's been a lot of, let's just call it mainstream media coverage of this potential, I think is the right way to refer to it, potential linkage between
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
adolescent, teen, and young adult use of high THC cannabis and lasting psychosis. But the more I hear you talk about this, the more I'm wondering if that idea is being amplified more than perhaps we ought to let it be amplified.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
As I recall, and I may have this incorrectly, but as I recall from my undergraduate years... What you just said is also true for military service, for people that have a predisposition to develop schizophrenia, that active military duty can exacerbate it as well.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Yeah, I hear your point loud and clear. I seem to recall that there is a higher incidence of schizophrenia independent of cannabis use closer to the poles and less so at the equator. I don't know if those statistics still hold up.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
It would be interesting for us to look into that because then it would argue that since we're comparing very northern locations to less northern locations that perhaps cannabis was You know, sort of exacerbating that.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
What is it about North Americans and cannabis use?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I like The Grateful Dead. Rick Rubin convinced me to start listening to them again. And because my sister used to listen to them and there's some great songs and they're from Menlo Park, Palo Alto. So I've done my duty to listen. There's some great songs. So I'm not picking on them.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
That's interesting. Is that true even if they've never used cannabis before?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Now, as somebody who's been in the field of science for several decades now, I'm very familiar with the fact that every field, every single field within science has debates within it, controversies, and sometimes outright battles. And to me, that's part of what makes science interesting. It's an evolving process.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Do you see differences between United States and Canada with respect to either cannabis or opioid use?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And so I mean- It's a stressor argument.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And they pay you, so now pot smokers everywhere are running to look at stuff.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I've spoken to many psychiatrists in an effort to find someone expert in ADHD. We've done two episodes on ADHD, focusing on everything from behavioral to nutritional, but also prescription drug treatments for ADHD. And what's interesting is that all of them have relayed the fact that many people, not just
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
young people, but adults with ADHD will often use, not necessarily abuse, but will use stimulants like coffee and other forms of stimulants to a high degree. And then of course you can say, well, perhaps the stimulants are causing ADHD, but they actually argue for the opposite, which is that people are attempting to self-medicate.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And then it's perhaps no surprise that most, not all, but most of the medications that are approved for the treatment of ADHD are variants of amphetamine or similar.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
So it's another case where, you know, depending on whether or not you look through the lens of the drug leading to the condition or the condition leading or through the lens of the condition leading to the use of the drug, you can end up in two very different places. But it looks exactly the same through each lens, so to speak.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
No, the way you're explaining it now makes perfect sense. I do want to make sure that we distinguish between schizophrenia, like psychosis, or schizophrenia itself induced by cannabis, and manic bipolar episodes. So people who have a predisposition or full-blown manic bipolar, sometimes called manic depression, but there's still a lot of nuance there. We did an episode about this that people can
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
also find linked in the show note captions but in any case is there any evidence for the fact that people who suffer from or have a predisposition to manic bipolar conditions like bipolar depression for instance should avoid high THC cannabis um so well first of all I mean
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
What about the effects of cannabis on time perception? There's this reputation that cannabis has for disrupting time perception that people will think a long period of time has passed when in fact very little time has passed. Maybe it's sometimes even the reverse. Is the mechanism by which cannabis can adjust time perception known?
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Or maybe they seek out lots of different forms of recreational drugs and cannabis just happens to be one that they land on, which raises the other question, which is, It's hard to imagine that these people who develop psychosis who happen to be using cannabis are only using cannabis.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Which is known to stimulate dopaminergic and other pathways.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I think it enhances cognition in everybody. It just carries certain health concerns. And by the way, it doesn't enhance all forms of cognition, but there is a nice body of work to support the idea that nicotine
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
delivered in any number of different forms can improve cognitive function to some extent but i don't suggest people run out and do it and in fact it's um one of the more um quickly uh uh abused drugs nowadays because of the non-smoking delivery routes that are becoming really popular pouches and yeah and things in fact i was chewing a little bit of nicorette gum to kind of do an experiment i liked it a lot and then um i decided to stop completely recently because it just um
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
it wasn't having the same effect and I found myself reaching for more and that's the time when I usually back out.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
I think it's because of these very high profile papers and the way those were picked up by traditional media. And this seems to be something that every couple of years there's a resurgence of this idea. Clearly people are curious about it. And so I just want to say thank you for clarifying what is now to me obvious that It could be that there's a relationship there. It's clearly not the case yet.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And it may never be the case that there's a causal relationship there. And it could just as well be that people who have a predisposition to schizophrenia are seeking out cannabis use and engaging in cannabis use. And I think that's a very important principle for our listeners and viewers to just hear and understand anytime we're talking about a substance and a condition.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
Yeah, absolutely. Let's talk about strains of cannabis. I've spoken before about the sativa versus the indica strains, and certainly there is a lot, a lot, a lot of – subjective anecdotal descriptions about differences in the quote unquote effects of those as reported by users.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
When I talked about this before in the cannabis episode, I leaned on a paper that took those subjective reports of arguably many, many people push those subjective reports through what was known about the strains they claim to have used. So this is, you know, people are reporting their use.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
We assume honestly, but you always have to assume that there, I guess people could be lying about which strains or misinformed, but, and then using machine learning to couple their, their, subjective experiences as they report them to indica versus sativa strains.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And then by looking at the chemical composition of those different products, because these were products that they had consumed, trying to tap chemical composition to strain, in this case, mainly the indica sativa discrepancy to subjective experience. And I know that you and presumably others in the field of cannabis research, take real issue to that sort of approach.
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Dr. Matthew Hill: How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks
And perhaps I have the feeling this is what you're going to say, rest on the idea that we, at least at this point in time, really can't say anything about the different biological effects of sativas versus indicas. And yet at the beginning of the episode, you said that there are many, many different cannabinoid compounds in cannabis. So... Three questions, and I'll keep these very short.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
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. My guest today is Dr. Martha Beck. Dr. Martha Beck did her undergraduate master's and PhD training at Harvard University.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
For me, that means being clear-eyed. People who listen to this podcast know that I came up through neuroscience studying a number of things, but the visual system. And these two little bits in the front of our skull are pieces of our brain. They're the only pieces of our brain outside of our skull. And yes, they may be the windows to the soul if people want to refer to them that way.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But to me, just feeling like my eyes are clear. And there's a certain... tone or something that I'm like, okay, like, I'm all there.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, and I think it's the Buddhist that talked about, you know, it's someone who's at the level of their – their eyes are at the level of their skin. So like right there as opposed to sunken back into their eyes. Yes. You know, and then of course some people are like really forward leaning. That's so interesting.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I also happen to work on the intersection between the visual system and the autonomic. You know, so, you know, stress or calm. And I think what that's referring to, and I'm speculating here, is where we are alert but calm. So we're present, alert, but calm.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And of course that controls pupil size and all of this stuff I do believe has been understood in other traditions and ancient traditions through a kind of unconscious genius where they're recognizing all the symbols integrated of clarity of the eyes and level of the skin. And of course we can measure the stuff in the lab, but that's just isolating variables.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years. Initially, I didn't have a choice. It was a condition of being allowed to stay in high school, but pretty soon I realized that doing regular therapy is extremely important to our overall health.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So for me, it's looking in the mirror and like, okay, my eyes are clear.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's like a retraction of our humanness. That's fascinating. I mean, I don't ever recall as a kid, you know, my dad or my mom or anyone telling me like where to place my vision.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I'm probably guilty of being more expressive, emotional, effusive than certainly the – a traditional male stereotype. Like if I love something, people are gonna hear about it. And I'm not shy about the fact that thinking about Costello or my graduate advisor or people I love, like I'll well up and I'm okay with that.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I think – well, to flip that one around, do you think that that's a real thing that – I have no idea. Through cultural conditioning that men and women tend to kind of be either more – I don't know. There's no language for this.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
There are essentially three things that go into great therapy. First of all, you need to have great rapport with a therapist. So you need to be comfortable with that person. You need to be able to trust them and talk to them about all the issues that are relevant to you. Second, and this is what people normally think of when they think of a great therapist,
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Very tactical.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's like taking what's out there and holding it in. I actually can do it. I know how to do this.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah. I probably just learned how to do it, right? Because I'm comfortable in a lot of different environments. There are certainly environments I don't want to find myself in again or in the future for the first time. But yeah, I'm very... very aware what that distinct change in internal state that accompanies that.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But I have paper and pen here, and it's okay because the art of podcasting in my opinion, is that we can spin a couple different plates and return to them because it's like conversation. Otherwise we might as well be on a highly produced traditional media show and that's not what this is. So we're back. So I look in the mirror and I see, I'm like clear, like I'm clear and present.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And of course, for those listening, you should all be doing this exercise for you, right? Yes. Okay. Okay.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's just pretty funny because I definitely have my ideal wardrobe, which is very sparse. I've always owned 20 or so of these button-down black shirts for work purposes. I like T-shirts that are super soft. And because I have a short torso and long arms, they have to fit right. So I find the ones that fit right. It's a nightmare trying to get them. But once I get them, I adore them because –
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I always own two belts or so, one watch, black jeans. The shorts I like, I get teased for wearing mailman shorts, but they're actually the Costco purchased mail or like Kmart purchased like mail person shorts. They fit best for me. And I've always worn Adidas. So I'm happy there.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
that therapist needs to provide you support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance. And third, excellent therapy has to provide very useful insights, insights that you can apply to be better, not just in your emotional life, in your relationship life, but also your relationship to yourself.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Oh, yeah. I own a pair of proper leather shoes. I have a suit. I actually own a tuxedo. Oh, my. I own those things. And I like my closet. I've always liked it. It feels very safe in there. I like it. And then I've always kept a couple photographs of people that I love in my closet.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's my sister.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's my grandfather. And then I think that's it. Apologies to my parents. Apologies to my parents and anyone else. Just forgive me. Okay. Yeah.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Well, the work part of my life, quote unquote work, is like reading and teaching and talking about stuff on the internet, which is podcasting. Mm-hmm. But what I got a flash of is I'd want to work on my fish tanks with my kids.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
BetterHelp makes it extremely easy to find an excellent therapist for you, one with whom you resonate with, have excellent rapport with, and that can give you those three essential benefits of therapy. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com slash Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I do. Yeah, I've always wanted kids. I've been trying to time that correctly.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And with the right person. So, yeah, I like tending to my fish tanks. I have – kept fish tanks since I was a kid. I haven't had one for a few years now, but I like, I'm always setting them up for other people. It's kind of interesting. I always go play in real life. I go see people. I'm like, I'm going to put a fish tank there.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I'll show up and I'll be like, I got it. Will you let me? And then I'll set it up. And I love setting up fish tanks. It's like the, who knows?
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Realistically?
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Two. For some reason, I got obsessed with numbers for a while. But I was thinking like five or something. No, two.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, two feels good.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Fair enough. Two feels good. And... Yeah, there's so much life in a fish tank. There's the plants. There's the food. There's how the fish are interacting with one another, who's chasing who, who's nibbling, who's hiding, who's dominant, who's, like, being kind of unruly and, like, you know. I mean, I must have seen the Finding Nemo movie, especially the second one.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Like. Like 12 times. Fabulous. Like 12 times. It's crazy. As an adult.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So good. Like I just love the personalities. I mean, any movie where Willem Dafoe is the voice of a fish, you're like, okay. I am in. All right. So we tend to the fish tanks, which is great pleasure. And then for me, it's we come here and sit down with you and – Hang out with these guys and my team and share what I know to be really cool, useful, like truly useful practices. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Today's episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
My dad's a theoretical physicist, but he will delight in that. As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for more than 10 years now, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast. To be clear, I don't take AG1 because they're a sponsor. Rather, they are a sponsor because I take AG1.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
In fact, I take AG1 once and often twice every single day, and I've done that since starting way back in 2012. There is so much conflicting information out there nowadays about what proper nutrition is, but here's what there seems to be a general consensus on.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Whether you're an omnivore, a carnivore, a vegetarian or a vegan, I think it's generally agreed that you should get most of your food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources, which allows you to eat enough but not overeat, get plenty of vitamins and minerals, probiotics and micronutrients that we all need for physical and mental health.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Now, I personally am an omnivore and I strive to get most of my food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources. But the reason I still take AG1 once and often twice every day is that it ensures I get all of those vitamins, minerals, probiotics, etc. But it also has adaptogens to help me cope with stress.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's basically a nutritional insurance policy meant to augment, not replace quality food. So by drinking a serving of AG1 in the morning and again in the afternoon or evening, I cover all of my foundational nutritional needs. And I, like so many other people that take AG1, report feeling much better in a number of important ways, such as energy levels, digestion, sleep and more.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So while many supplements out there are really directed towards obtaining one specific outcome, AG1 is foundational nutrition designed to support all aspects of well-being related 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.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
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. There was something that popped to mind. I mean, there are all these little... things that also go into my perfect day that we don't have to go into every detail about like working out and the whole thing.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But I just want to maybe mention a point of contrast that served as one of the reasons why I did this practice in the first place was that in real life, I was waking up and sometimes still do wake up with this like underlying like tension, like something's not right. I don't feel good. I wasn't anxious. I wasn't like, but like something's not right.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I went through years of kind of like gnawing and scratching at different things that, you know, I quickly discovered, you know, like going out for a couple of drinks with people made me feel worse. I don't judge people who drink whatsoever, I'm like, I don't like this.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Now, the mattress we sleep on makes an enormous difference in terms of the quality of sleep that we get each night. We need a mattress that is matched to our unique sleep needs, one that is neither too soft nor too hard for you, one that breathes well and that won't be too warm or too cold for you.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Like it doesn't, like I was just, but this unease, it's like a restlessness that lived inside of me for so long and still can surface as a signal that like, this is not the right life. And at that point, I had a laboratory, grants, we're publishing papers, like all these things that I loved doing, And that I loved the trajectory that I took to arrive there and the people that were in my life.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But like, I just knew I could just say like, something's not right. And I felt terribly guilty. The reason I'm telling this is I felt terribly guilty. Like I owned a home, right? I was in my mid thirties and it wasn't an expensive home, certainly not by today's standards, but I was able to buy a home on my own. I was... dog.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I had, you know, people in my life, but it was like this, it was almost like a gear that was grinding. And that was the stimulus for exploring this perfect day. My life looks completely different now. And it's far from quote unquote perfect, meaning there's still work to do in a lot of domains, a lot. But I feel like the trajectory is right.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz, and it asks you questions such as, do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night? Things of that sort. Maybe you know the answers to those questions, maybe you don't. Either way, Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And he was – Probably true for a lot of higher education institutions. Yeah.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Adam, right?
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I only know his name through your books, of course, but I feel like I know him a little bit because I love the story about him peeing on the doctor.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I want to just... or lack of a better way to put it, double click on two things. First of all, I wonder if we're going to speculate, no need to, but if the perfect day exercise is really about accessing the subconscious.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
For me, that turned out to be the Dusk mattress, D-U-S-K. I've been sleeping on a Dusk mattress for, gosh, no, more than four years, and the sleep that I've been getting is absolutely phenomenal. If you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com slash Huberman, take that brief two-minute sleep quiz, and Helix will match you to a mattress that is customized to your unique sleep needs.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
She is also considered one of the foremost experts in the personal development field, having authored many bestselling books, including her upcoming book, Beyond Anxiety. curiosity, creativity and finding your life's purpose. I must say that today's discussion is a truly special one.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Right. In my case, again, I loved, and I still love doing science. I mean, my lab is certainly shrunk. I made sure people got placed in jobs and faculty positions, et cetera. I'm still involved in some clinical trials. But one thing that pained me about the work, I'll just come clean about this, this makes my throat lock up a bit is I've been an animal lover since I was a kid. I do eat meat.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I eat it from sustainable sources, but you know, not all, but a lot of the work that I did in my laboratory was on animals. And at some point it was approximately halfway through my first position. I realized I was like, I, I, I don't like this.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And we could talk all day about animal research, non-animal research. I decided to work on humans instead because they can consent and they house themselves. But, you know, so there were some pain points, but I think my unconscious was pulling at me. Yeah. Like, this isn't good. This isn't good. And for me. Yeah. And I do think that
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
the conscious mind and the logical mind, as you're referring to it, it's very tactical. And part of the problem is it works so well, works in quotes, to move us forward on metrics related to that. But I mean, there are very few people that I know who are truly aligned with their, I guess what you've called essential self.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
One who I'm fortunate to be good friends with, he just so happens to be famous for lack of a better word, who resonates with a lot of what we're discussing is the, great Rick Rubin, the music producer who's produced all these different types of music. And one thing that's really interesting about Rick, I've spent a lot of time with Rick and we communicate all the time.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And one thing that is very interesting about him is he has incredible powers of observation. He can really feel the energy of a musical artist or, and he's produced other things too. He does great documentary. He's got his own great podcast. But he doesn't get absorbed by it.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Right now, Helix is giving up to 25% off mattresses and two free pillows. Again, that's helixsleep.com slash Huberman to get 25% off and two free pillows. Today's episode is also brought to us by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the correct ratios, but no sugar.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I wanted to talk to you about this because I, you know, I think for people that are very feeling, very sentient or really in touch with that, the ability to like feel music, to feel other people's emotions, to really – that's a beautiful life, to taste food. But there's a – threshold beyond which we kind of lose ourselves in the experience of others and what's going on.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Rick can go right up to that line and really see it and enjoy it, but it doesn't absorb him in a way that he has a place that he returns to that's in him. And the reason I discovered this is I said, wait, you don't drink alcohol. He said, no. I said, no drugs. He said, no. Doesn't judge it, but he doesn't do it. I said, did you ever? He said, no.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I said, who comes up through music and never takes a sip of alcohol?
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Goes to college and never took a sip of alcohol, tried any drug. And again, I don't judge. I've talked about psychedelics on this podcast. I've talked about my own relationship to those, what I think are very interesting clinical trials and things of that sort. I think there's tremendous potential there.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But what is it to be able to experience life in the richest way, but make sure that we don't get lost in feeling or in thought. It's like this ability to move back and forth seems to be the most, the best definition of like a great life, in my opinion, because we need to do things each day.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's like the ultimate parent.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Have not, but I'm learning more about internal family systems models. I learned about this first in the context of visiting a trauma healing center. Yeah, that's great for trauma. And then people are now applying this to addiction as well.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I'll get his name from you later.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Now, proper hydration is critical for the optimal functioning of all the cells in your body. And that's especially true for the neurons, the nerve cells. In fact, we know that even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish both cognitive and physical performance.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
How do you go about doing that? And one of the reasons I'm asking this is because I think everyone, including myself, would do well to be able to access this compassionate witness self. But also because...
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So many people are on social media nowadays where you can almost feel yourself getting pulled down these trajectories, like the gravitational pull of a battle or a video or even something that's delightful. But then you find like two hours went by and you were overconsumed and undercreated in some sense.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It goes nowhere.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You know, this sort of goes nowhere. So do you have a practice that you use to make sure that you're in that place?
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So to make sure that I'm getting proper hydration and electrolytes, I personally dissolve one packet of element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I first wake up in the morning and I drink that or sip that across the first half hour of the day or so.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So the state is what's key.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And it is so – it has so much fun in this world. And so you can walk around in that state.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Sure. You can – so – To be sure I understand. So say I wake up in the morning and I'm just like not feeling right or something triggers me or, I don't know, just like I'm off center.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And then I also make it a point to drink another packet of element dissolved in an equal amount of water, so 16 to 32 ounces, at some other point during the day, and maybe even a third if I'm exercising and or sweating a lot. I should mention that Element tastes absolutely delicious. My favorite flavor is watermelon, although I also confess I like the raspberry flavor, the citrus flavor.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You take that sensation of suffering. Yeah.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And you don't fear it. You don't amplify it. You just kind of pay attention to it.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You. Okay.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, people in pain are usually agitated and grumpy. So it's the inverse of that.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, I love this. I mean, in some sense, the words like self-parenting keep coming up in my mind because a lot of this is about learning to parent ourselves from the inside. Yeah. And I do think that most... We hear about inner child stuff and I think inner child work is very interesting.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I also think that as a biologist who spent the early part of my career on developmental neurobiology, like the same neural stuff is repurposed in adulthood. Like that's something that it's kind of obvious, but we overlook.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Right, right, right. You know, but the notion that like our attachments when we're young, somehow that like those neural circuits are set aside. So then we can form more mature adult attachments. You know, it's like, no, it's crazy. We repurpose them. So we're working in an adult landscape with child-based algorithms.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And depending on how childhood went, you know, that either can be spectacular or so-so or a complete disaster. Usually it's a combination.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Basically, I like all the flavors. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. And now for my discussion with Dr. Martha Beck. Dr. Martha Beck, welcome.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, no, it's looking a little sketchy right now. I mean, things are tense. It sounds like it starts with... self-love, compassion, like only from that place of compassionate witness, self with a capital S, excuse me, can we be at our best for others?
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Let's, if you would, let's drill into this a little bit more because this is a high level, but at the same time, basic and yet abstract concept. And it's not often on this podcast that we talk about abstract concepts. We probably don't do it enough. We get like, I like to talk about protocols. You get your sunlight on clear days, you know, and I love that stuff too.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But as probably people realize by now, I... I think a great life is bridging as many things, at least for me, as possible, and seeing the overlap in the Venn diagrams. It's the only part of us that's real, meaning the other parts are just conditioned.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I'm so excited. I mean, I don't know how to convey to the people listening and watching just how excited I am. I have very few heroes in life, but you are one of them. It's true. That does not compute. It's true. I won't name all of them, but you, the great Oliver Sacks, are among the people that have really influenced me so much in terms of the things I do.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Well, it's interesting because a few years ago, so many concepts that I was intrigued by, breath work, for instance, psychedelics, meditation. I mean, now people get federal grants to study this stuff.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And we do reductionist work to try and understand. In fact, I had to disguise breath work as respiration physiology, which we did. And we did a clinical trial. And, you know, lo and behold, certain patterns of breathing shift your internal state and your sleep and your anxiety. It's like a giant, but it was, it was scary territory for a while. And, um,
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And now, you know, psychedelics have kind of broken through as I mean, I mean, I just have to say this with like while touching my forehead and like that. They adjust neuromodulators just like, but differently than certain drugs that adjust neuromodulators and everyone accepted.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So the idea of changing neuromodulators to change conscious experience and in that altered experience to be able to achieve neuroplasticity is like, it's also a big duh. Of course it works that way. But six years ago, you'd get fired from the university if you said, well, maybe psilocybin could be an interesting compound for... you know, depressed people.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And by the way, I'm not suggesting everyone run out and take a bunch of psilocybin, especially if you're depressed.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Right. And if you're, you know, more gun-shy on these things, contact a local university. They're likely doing a clinical trial on this. We can provide some links to clinical trials. I think the data are incredibly interesting. In any case,
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I guess the point is that I feel like academia is kind of coming around, probably due to the suffering of people in it, where then they know somebody who achieved some relief through meditation or some benefits of meditation. So now everyone, I think, accepts like meditation can be very useful for lowering stress and altering conscious experience. This is not new stuff, as everyone knows.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's gone back thousands of years. So it sounds like Getting into the capital S self, the compassionate witness, is step number one. And so I just want to make sure that we make clear how one does that.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Okay.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
the ways I try and think, the ways I try to not think at times. And your life story is an amazing one. So we have a lot to cover today. So I'm not going to spend any more time talking about why I feel that way, because it's going to just become apparent in our discussion. But I do want to say that you have really been ahead of your time.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And every day.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, this is very relevant to me. I have always wondered about like, do you push back against the feeling? Do you live with the feeling? Do you let it amplify? There's so much contradiction inside of the typical discussion of these kinds of things. That's one of the reasons I love your work so much is that you don't tell people what to do, but you provide paths. I hope so. Absolutely, you do.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Absolutely. I'd like to talk about two things. You know, before I came in here, I did a little meditation. I do this before every episode, but today I just, it like took only like a minute because it came to me so fast, which is the two words that popped to mind were, you know, what's real, what is true.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I mean, I think so much of what we're talking about in so much of life is like, what's real, what's true. Certainly out in the world, but like in us.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
What I'm hearing is that at some level, we need to not trust our thinking. But of course, there are times when we need to trust our thinking. And then, of course, we're receiving messages about what's real, what's not real, what's true, what's not true, sometimes about us. I mean, there's all this childhood programming. How do we start to sort through this?
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I'm guessing that it has something to do with being in that compassionate witness place. But let's say what you've experienced in your life, I know because you've written and talked about this, and I certainly have now that by some interesting twist of fate. I'm a public facing person. People saying things about you or about me that are not true. Or that are judgments that don't feel good. Yeah.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And we are not alone in this. You don't have to be public facing in order to experience this. People all the time are being told they are stupid. Sometimes they're being told they are brilliant and they know they're not brilliant. This can go in every direction. How are we supposed to hold –
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
the narratives, the voices that we hear in our head and outside us in a way that really allows us to be our best essential selves.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I've long benefited from Martha's teachings, and I assure you that during today's episode, you will benefit from Martha's teachings. She describes and we explore practices in real time that will allow you to truly understand what is most important to you and what you ought to spend your time pursuing.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I mean, you're triple degreed from Harvard, you have these academic credentials, and yet you were one of the first people to be public facing about the mind-body connection in a way that is operationalized, what we sometimes call in and around this podcast protocols. And you've offered some practices that have absolutely transformed my life and other people's lives.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It wasn't for you. No.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
All right, so it sounds like challenging or sitting with doctrine and labels and stories that we've heard and that maybe we've internalized. Oh, we've internalized them, yeah. Yeah, and systematically exploring how those make us feel in our body.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Waking Up. Waking Up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and more. I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old, and it made a profound impact on my life.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And by now there are thousands of quality peer-reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our focus, managing stress and anxiety, improving our mood, and much more. In recent years, I started using the Waking Up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I gained them through reading your books and That's not a standard book advertisement, but all of your books have been transformative for me. One of the exercises that has had a profound effect on my life is the perfect day exercise.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits, but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice. What I and so many other people love about the Waking Up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from, and those meditations are of different durations.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice, both from the perspective of novelty, You never get tired of those meditations. There's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation. And you can always fit meditation into your schedule, even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I also really like doing yoga nidra or what is sometimes called non-sleep deep rest for about 10 or 20 minutes because it is a great way to restore mental and physical vigor without the tiredness that some people experience when they wake up from a conventional nap. If you'd like to try the Waking Up app, please go to wakingup.com slash Huberman, where you can access a free 30-day trial.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Again, that's wakingup.com slash Huberman to access a free 30-day trial. I recall the inverse of the perfect day exercise was another one that I did, which was like, just call it what it was. It was like the sucky day, like the shitty day, right? Or just where you'd imagine something really terrible. and then how it would cause the body to contract.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And to recognize, you know, the other side of the coin, right? And just learning that relationship between the body and thought.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I mean, I can say from my own experience that one of the biggest mistakes I ever made was teaching myself to be more resilient to certain forms of stress.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
One of the worst mistakes I ever made. Say more. I mean, I, and my lab studies stress and I talk about stress relief and physiological size are a great way to, you know, reduce real-time stress. And I stand by that. So I'm not talking about that. I stand by meditation and saunas and all the things that make us feel, vacation, the things that relax us.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So I'm not saying the ability to modulate stress is bad. incredibly powerful and useful. I believe that for sure. But when I was a kid, I wasn't the kid that was going to hold the firecracker to the last second. I wasn't the kid that would do the really daring thing. I had friends like that. And I felt kind of sheepish about that.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
in the then very parentless community of skateboarders that a lot of us were really wild we were very free which I love the freedom part but there was a lot of mayhem and craziness especially back then yeah and it's a beautiful culture I'm still friends with a lot of those folks but
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Those cultures split off basically into thirds over time, about a third debtor in jail, about a third doing incredibly well personally and professionally, incredibly well, and then a third doing well, but they're not still as ambitious about that. They're more focused on their personal lives, and I hope that's what they want to be doing. Yeah. Um, that's kind of how it broke down.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And when I first read about it, I thought, what could this possibly be? And as I recall, it involved taking a little bit of time, maybe 10 minutes, maybe 30 minutes, and just sitting or lying down, closing one's eyes, and just imagining with no limitations one's perfect day.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But I remember as a young kid and then in that culture, like learning to push myself past the feeling of like, this is dangerous to the point where as I got older and my body eventually got stronger because back then I was always getting hurt, which is why I left that sport. It wasn't very good. I, for the record, wasn't very good. Um, good enough, but not, not. not where I wanted to be.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
That over time, I remember when I started doing science, I realized this is crazy. Skateboarding, you fall, you hurt yourself so badly, you can't do it anymore. That doesn't happen with studying. So I'll just study until I collapse. I'll just work until I'm sick. I'll just, you know, like... That person down the hall puts in 80 hours.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Well, then I'll do 100, and I'm not a competitive person by nature. Or even worse, you know, in my mid-40s, getting into, like, stupid stuff, like cage egg sick great white shark diving to the point where I had an air failure.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And this is all – You know, this whole thing. And then coming back from that, I'm like, what am I doing? And what had happened is I learned to override the signals of the body.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And it was like, when is enough enough? It's like when the reaper comes, you know? And so I think that if we don't listen to the signals that our body sends and we learn to override them, repeatedly and systematically, we can place ourselves into real psychological, emotional, and physical danger. And I just like, I don't know why, I just felt like this was a need to do this in order to grow up.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And now I try and do the exact opposite. It's like, and then I feel bad. I feel kind of lazy. I'm like, I'm not like running at 5 a.m. I'm like sleeping at
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I'm doing yoga nidra. I'm doing yoga nidra at 7 a.m. because I didn't feel I slept enough. And then I have friends in the public facing health space that are like, they push so hard. I'm like, I'm lazy. And then, so it can go too far.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And what's so wild about this exercise is that several, not all, but several of the things that I imagined in that exercise have amazingly come to be reality.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It was like the stupidest thing. I remember thinking like, what am I doing? And of course, we used it to get virtual reality for our lab. We did a bunch of things that I thought were useful that we transmuted into studies on stress. And so there was always a purpose and a story that could justify being there.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah. And one that was really rooted in goodness and adventure. I love adventure and I'm super curious. Well,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Enough.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah. That's a perfect segue, but before I move on, I want to make sure that I linked back what you said because I think it's exceptionally valuable about what's real, what's true. To really evaluate what's true, you need to sit. Or maybe one can learn to do this while in motion and sense within one's body what feels liberating, opening versus what feels contracting. Is that right?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Okay, well, I'm giving you a notification right now because at the end of that exercise, and I ended up doing it several times. I do too. I do it all the time. Okay, that's good to know. I want to know about the frequency there. Was, you know, I'd love to sit down and talk to Martha Beck, what I wouldn't do. So I'm in a pinch me moment right now.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Love it. I'm going to mention Rick Rubin again. A few years back, I called him up and I said, like, Rick, you're not going to believe this.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I relayed to him a story about someone that I knew really well and this, like, very, like, just kind of wild set of discoveries that someone else had unearthed about their life being completely different than it had been presented and their business was a big fail. Like, the whole thing just collapsed. And And Rick just wrote back. He said, back to nature, the only truth.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Like that's very Rick. Like he's, you know, that's how he talks. Exactly. He said, he said, well, I actually, sorry. It was preceded by, he said, I said, did you read this? Do you see this? I can't believe this. And I'm like, you know, this person really well. And like, I can't like for a very long time. And he just said, it's all lies. Back to nature, the only truth.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And that just got tattooed in my brain because so much of what we see and the shock and I can't believe it. And I think he was referring to something similar. He also has said, and you're going to get a kick out of this, I think, so Rick loves professional wrestling. He watches 10 hours a week of professional wrestling. Why?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Well, first of all, he believes that it's the only thing that humans have created that's real. Why? Because everyone agrees that it's not real.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's fake. And that he likes that no one gets hurt. I mean, people actually can get hurt, but that no one's trying to actually hurt the other person. They're collaborating in this. kind of Shakespearean dance that they do. And you have the different characters. And so I went to see professional wrestling with Rick thinking like, what am I doing here?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Like it was like loud and the flames and all this is like not a scene I would normally take myself to on a Friday. And it was so much fun, mostly because of how delighted Rick was in seeing it and his son as well. So- We can distinguish or like really identify what's true through this practice.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's wild. It's like reality weaving back on itself.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It'll protect you from cancer.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Well, it turns out that people that run kind of more towards autoimmune conditions, like people who have skin conditions that are autoimmune based, have fewer skin cancers. Yay! Because the immune system is combating all these invaders.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So there's a, yeah, if there's an upside, and this is the basis of a lot of the logic related to immunotherapies for cancers is trying to have the immune system fight off these mutations that are always occurring in the background. So I'm not trying to take away from the suffering it's created, but that's an upside.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Thank you. I'm moved by that. Let's just talk about this exercise for a second. Clearly, we could come up with scientific explanations for why it would work. The brain is a predictive machine. Once it understands that something might be possible, maybe it looks for avenues for that unconsciously. We could come up with a whole narrative around that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
No, not if you're talking about dogs and feeling.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You might make me cry because I'm thinking about, no, because I think I can sense it. Yeah. I think I can sense it. And forgive me if I'm like, you know, like now sounding like totally crazy. If anyone's listening, like this, I will say, and I have a... I'm just going to be blunt. I got a lot of training in neuroscience. I got decades of training in it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I'll tell you, the notion of energy is not mysterious at all. I mean, neurons are electricity and chemical exchange. And that happens locally and it happens at a distance.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And the really forward-thinking neuroscientists are starting to put multiple people into scanners and putting people in scanners in different locations. And I know it sounds like people are going, oh, no, like, what are you talking about? This is like spoon-bending stuff. No.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
The idea that thought and emotion at one location can impact thought and location at another one is that magnetoreception has been published in the journal Science. Yeah. So we're not outside the bounds of reality. We are like actually finally as a field starting to acknowledge that this stuff exists and starting to poke and prod around in there. But people have known about this.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So for you, the sensing of your dog passing or you can feel them present.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But just for sake of those listening, what is this exercise? How would you suggest somebody try it?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And the instruments we have to measure things are just not there yet. But the same was said about most everything that has been clearly discovered and is rock solid over the last 50 plus years, at least in neuroscience. I can't help it. just briefly share when I put Costello down. Cause I did that myself, which sucked.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But I didn't want to, I didn't, I mean, so I, the vets, they came to the house, but it was at home and I was right there. I didn't do, I didn't do the injection. No, no, no. I originally, I, I thought I would because unfortunately, because of my previous job, I had to do that a number of times. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
No, so, but what was interesting is, you know, like he let out a big like sigh right there at the end, but the wildest part of it was, and I swear it sounds like I'm making this up, but at the moment he went, I felt my heart heat up. I thought I was gonna be crushed like a broken heart. And I swear it felt as if he was giving me all this energy back.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And it's because I had been spending so much time. He was up in the middle of the night a lot. He must've had some dementia or that kind of thing. And I mean, I had that dog on everything. I was injecting him with testosterone for the last part. Made him a lot healthier, folks. Don't let your dog breed, you know, indiscriminately. But like, I've got my theories about, you know,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
All the stuff that hormones and animals that a lot of the vets are aligned with me on this one. Um, talk to your vet, talk to a progressive vet. Um, you know, I had him on a bunch of different drugs. I had him, you know, he was, he was really unhappy. So letting it, it was the right thing to do. And, uh, I'll stop talking about it cause I'll get, I'll get too worked up. But, um, yeah. Forgive me.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But that feeling, it was like, whoa. And I can still feel it. It's like he gave something back that now I think enough time has passed. I go get another dog. It was almost like, oh, here's all this resource and like gratitude. And so these things sound kind of woo, right? Could you do an experiment where you put me in the lab while I go through that? Sure. Would you see huge physiological changes?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You will hear a rich discussion about how to frame the thoughts and the emotions around any topic, including pain points in life, as well as your goals and the things that you are in pursuit of. You will also learn how to figure out exactly what is most essential to you and indeed how to explore what Dr. Martha Beck calls your essential self.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Sure. I don't see the point of that kind of experiment. Because I think enough people have experienced these kinds of things that it's not necessary. In any case, I want to talk about integrity and your book, Way of Integrity. You ran a very interesting experiment that, frankly, is going to sound a little scary to some people. They don't have to do it. And maybe reflexive to other people.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
which is, I think it was one year of no lying.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But like no lying of any kind, not even to yourself. No, especially not to myself.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And previously on the podcast, we had my colleague, Dr. Anna Lemke, who runs our dual diagnosis addiction clinic. She's done a tremendous service to the world talking about all the various kinds of addiction, addiction as a disease, yes, but also something that people can overcome. And one of the things that I love so much about Ana's message, she wrote the book, Dopamine Nation. Oh, I love that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, wonderful book. She talks about how recovered addicts are actually her heroes because they've learned to navigate this internal process that most people perhaps who aren't addicts or don't think they are, are constantly being yanked around by these dopamine systems, but they've learned to conquer their own dopamine systems So they represent the heroes of her world.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I love that model because we tend to look at addicts and think about it as like, There's all this judgment on it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Until it becomes the source of pain.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, I've spent a lot of my life there, I'll confess, and it's super unpleasant and it's always led to pain. like shitty things.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And we tell ourselves stories like, well, if we achieve certain things, then we'll be in a better position to do more for other people. Like there's the martyrdom version of it too.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
The reason I brought up Ana was she was the first to alert me to these studies that have been done about how myelination and growth of the prefrontal cortex is actually accelerated when people tell the truth, especially around truths that are somewhat uncomfortable. And it's a beautiful literature that's small but starting to really emerge. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And a big part of the recovery from addiction is people first – like acknowledging the truth to themselves and then to other people. And, you know, again, it's all of that's kind of shrouded by how we think about addicts. Like, you know, sadly in any major city and even small towns now, you can see the bent over, you know, like fentanyl addicts.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And like, we judge, we're like, oh, you know, or we say it's so sad or, but that's just, you know, you know, an example of how far gone people can get in that particular addiction. Ana offers an interesting idea, which is that the more we tell these little micro truths, the more connected to reality we are. And in the way of integrity, you talk about this experiment that you did.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
My first integrity cleanse. So an integrity cleanse. So maybe you could explain what it is. And, um, It sounds incredibly scary. It's not just the telling the truth part. It's the realizing the truth part.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Of any kind, even a little micro. Like when are you going to be home and you know it's 12 minutes and you say 10?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I would sort of try to soften the truth. Did it mean also telling every truth that was in your head? No. Or you would keep certain things to yourself?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
For me, the first thing I hear is like, Just feeling how comfortable my body is on the bed. Something that I don't do enough.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
What Ana has said, and I think in the backdrop of what you're saying, is that everybody – does these little micro adjustments or, and you've said, constantly, and you've said that this is largely to smooth social interactions, that most of lying is to smooth social interactions.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
That came to you as a realization in that year.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Okay. It must have been in your unconscious someplace prior.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
There had never been a kind of like, knock, knock, hey.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I expected you to be like, it was horrible. You're like, no, better and better.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And the part that intrigues me is, the moment is like the losing of friends, like losing of people and the structures that we relied on also for safety. That's gotta be hard.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, someone next to me breathing and they're still asleep.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Well, if it was like my bulldog Costello that's snoring. I'm going to get another dog soon. So I would like a dog that breathes with less snoring than Costello. Although I must say I miss his – Bulldogs. His like incredibly deep snores. The early versions of this podcast, the early episodes, we kept him in the room snoring. And by the way, the watering up of my eyes, these are truly tears of joy.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Did you feel as if you had to accomplish certain things, degrees, et cetera, first in order to allow yourself this? Because I hear this a lot. And in the backdrop of this entire conversation, I have one little piece of neural real estate, which is devoted to the audience that is saying, okay, I can do these things once I have a job, once I have blank, once I have the resources.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But at the same time, I do want to highlight for people that Everything that we've talked about in terms of practices and things to do, you just do them. There's no purchase. It's inside of us. There's no looking to something in a package or in even a program. It's all within us. So it can be done at really anywhere and with any amount of resources or lack thereof.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Okay, there's that. So you have the capacity for extreme resilience.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And it perhaps took you too far.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And inevitably, a much kinder, more generous version of ourselves emerges when we're living our truth. I mean, it's a foregone conclusion, but still worth stating. Yeah, I can personally say that most of my suffering has been the consequence of the fact that I love love. And I'm blessed with many great friends and things of that sort, business partners, etc.,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But I have a tendency to get into relationships quickly and ending them feels near impossible. And this has caused me and, you know, and also others too much suffering.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You know, and so a lot of that is the reason I raised this is that it's about holding two truths at the same time, which feel incompatible. On the one hand, really loving and caring about someone.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I said at the beginning of the podcast,
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And at the same time, knowing that the loving, caring thing to do is to go separate ways. And it's this relationship to loss that I sort of can't accept or haven't been able to. Like, I can accept that people die. All three of my academic advisors are wonderful people. Suicide, cancer, cancer. Like, so I had to come to the conclusion pretty early on in my academic career, like –
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
wow, like I'm the common denominator. I joke, you know, like, and it took me a long time to realize like, this might not be my fault. You know, I know it's crazy. Like how would that, you know, but I think that it also woke me up to the idea, you know, like life as we know it in this life ends. And so to try and make the most of it, but the idea that people would move apart.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
podcast I said listen I have a bulldog he's getting toward the end of his life so we're gonna keep him in the room and so when you hear that breathing in the background that snoring let's call it what it is he's in here like so sorry not sorry so anyway so yeah so there's some bulldog breathing you can have as many dogs in the room as you want just listen and maybe you hear birds outside maybe you hear the ocean maybe you hear wind maybe you hear people talking or the noise of traffic just just listen for a minute
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Even in circumstances where death doesn't separate them.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
To me, it's like, it's so painful.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this has roots in all sorts of things in me, of course. But the reason I raise it is that I think that when we have two incompatible truths, that's when we feel stuck. Like we love people, we want to take care of them. Maybe we want them to remain in our lives, but we have to, like the letting go process sucks.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
100%.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
That's very useful. Thank you. And I know it will be very useful to many people. What is the suggestion for people that are trying to figure out what they want or need or both?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, it's like this isn't safe.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, I like the sound of kids playing.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, it's caused me and I think others a lot of suffering because I think what ends up happening is that when we get separation from that person, then we do a little bit of self-recovery, but then it's like all fractured.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And repeat, right, exactly. What you just described is extremely helpful. I'm curious in your role as a coach to many people. Mm-hmm. how often are romantic relationships, partnership type things, whatever form that takes for people, how often is that like the bulk of what people struggle with, at least in terms of what they bring to the table?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Or is it more often, I don't like my job, I'm in the wrong life? Professionally, you know, if you had to give us like the non-peer reviewed study, but like kind of crude breakdown,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Like the whole thing. Oh, great.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
No. Well, it's interesting that you say that because I feel like professionally, it's like there's like a gravitational pull. Like I wanted to get into tropical fish when I was a kid. And I was like, tropical fish, I would spend all day at the tropical fish store. Then it was birds. Then it was skateboarding. Then it was, you know, I wanted to be a firefighter, like whatever.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Eventually it was neuroscience and it was podcasting. You know, it's just like, I can't miss anything. And when I say that, I mean, I can't keep myself from doing what I really want. I would say likewise with friendships, I'm fortunate to have a great relationship to my biological family. It was really rocky for a lot of years, but it's like the work has paid off and they've done a lot of work.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You know, I'm a Californian at heart. I like it in the 70s and 80s. Perfect. Not too humid. Yeah. It's weird that a don't jumps in, but there's something about the sound of airplanes flying over.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
In romantic partnership, it's like a carve out. It's been much more challenging. I've had some amazing partners and partnerships, like amazing. I'm still on excellent terms with many of them. And then I've had some like really, really brutal, like barbed wire, just like, and you know, I've had to take a look at my role in that too, right? So in this case, for me, it's like a carve out.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I think of it as like this, like wedge shaped carve out. It just seems so much more challenging. But I think in talking with you today, it's clear that it's because of this thing of like, it's not, I'm not approaching it from the standpoint of like, I want to do this and it's good for me.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
to be frank. Whereas in the work domain, it's like what feels good ends up being really good for me.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Right. Well, and that's often the case, right? And I think so this notion of others getting hurt when we make the choice that's most in line with our own integrity, whether it's relationship or family or the decision to move or leave a job, how do you sit with that? I mean, how does one sit with that?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I mean, I think I have clearly internalized some script that says if someone else is really upset, even, and obviously the right thing is often not the thing that makes people feel best, et cetera, et cetera, but how do you work with that?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It always depresses me. It must be some parrot association. Something like that. Sometime like, I don't like that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Bird chirping. Who doesn't like birds chirping?
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yes.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah. The compassionate thing is to do the right thing.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Sorry, I didn't mean to laugh at that, but I did. I don't know. I find it hilarious. I mean, sorry. Not sorry. That was just nothing to do but laugh there. Goodness. Yeah, I think this notion of things ending because we realized that we were telling lies.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And gosh, it even hurts to say. Yeah. You know, it's like... Because we weren't trying to tell lies.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
We didn't know we were telling lies. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
To me, that often grows from what I think of as empathy. Probably not, certainly not the best form of empathy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But I think that there's a human phenotype that I'm familiar with where we We feel other people's emotions, which I think is healthy.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Can be healthy.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And we love seeing people enjoy. Yeah. And we delight in it. So it feels good to us.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
To, you know, feed this addiction. Oh, I know the feeling. It's not like, it's like, oh, here I am, Marta. I'm like, I'm bleeding out, bleeding out, bleeding out. But it's not in line with this essential self.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And here, I guess the little vignette that's related to this is that I do think there's one very healthy form of this, which is I believe, at least for me, with a dog – I like other animals too, but with a dog, when we love them – we are seamlessly attached to their love of us. And so loving them and empathizing with them means like double the love.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Like we love them and we can feel their love and it's like a perfect, it just feels like a perfect circle. And with people, that can happen too, I imagine. I've felt that a few times. I certainly feel that in my friendships. I feel that with my sister. And I've felt it in a few of my romantic relationships. But The empathy for the other's pleasure can go too far.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Those deep rooted desires that are unique to you and your history and what will make your life most fulfilling. By the end of today's episode, you will be armed with new intellectual and practical knowledge, and you will be able to adopt the best possible stance for you as you navigate forward in your life.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And then when we, quote unquote, lose ourselves, I think it's because there's a component of ourselves that's like not attached to the part that still has our own needs.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, it's my partner next to me, my... Dog is, you know, I told myself I wasn't going to get another bulldog.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I love that.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's so interesting because I feel like in the domain of work and with my friends and largely with family, giving feels great and then people are sated and then they go on their way. But I noticed a contrast with romantic partnerships when, as I've said, I maintain good relationships with a couple of Girlfriends that I had, you know, in some cases, I'm good friends with their husbands.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Like they actually, one just came and visited with her sister and her kid recently. And like on just great platonic terms. But for years, I like...
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
worry about them but I felt like I could still feel the energetic pull even though they weren't asking for anything right and then when I attended their wedding this particular person's wedding I was like oh I was like my work is done yeah and I got to enjoy and still get to enjoy the friendship with the whole family yeah
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But I think I'm going to get another bulldog. You are. They're the best.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But it really showed me how much the whole – so much of the relationship had been about like trying to make sure the other person was okay.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
They're like the essence of efficiency of metabolism, meaning they do as little as possible and they experience as much joy as possible. Oh, that's perfect. They're hedonists when it really comes down to it.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
What a mature and generous thing for them to say. Yeah, they are. It sounds like it. This is your oldest. The contrast, and I think what drives a lot of what we're really talking about here is codependency.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah. For those that don't know, we haven't caught on. Right, exactly. Is that sometimes when we... cut people off, or we just say, hey, I can give, but only to this point, or you can get this aspect of me, but not these other aspects, especially if they've been receiving them before. They get pissed.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I mean, and it's unclear, especially if the relationship had been different up until then, that, you know, like that's why it sometimes feels unfair to do. It's like, you know, it's one thing to invite someone over for a drink, then to discover that they're an alcoholic, continue to fill their glass. enjoy the exchange and then one day realize they're an alcoholic.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I guess that term isn't used anymore. I've been told by many audience members, forgive me, it's alcohol use disorder.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
No, quite all right. I think that field of addiction medicine is nascent enough that we're still making the transition. And I don't say this, by the way, for political correctness. I'm not a politically correct person. It's just, I've had to learn to reframe these things for the specific purpose of trying to be more, to bring more people into the conversation.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And they are capable of protecting if they need to, but I honestly don't care about that. You know, all that stuff, like all that, like my bulldogs, I don't care about any of that.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Also, I like the sound of, I don't like the idea, but the words alcohol use disorder, the disorder piece is also controversial. But what I love is that as soon as we start to name things and rename things, we're all talking about those things and then there's no way out of the conversation. So that's my kind of jujitsu-ing out of that.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So that means we have to talk about it, just like autism spectrum disorder or autism or neurotypical, atypical. Well, guess what, folks? Now we're all talking about it and it needs to be talked about. So in any case, at some point, there's the idea like I'm cutting you off. And the person says, but this is what we do. This is the kind of promise that you made.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And so then we find ourselves in like the other scripts of like, well, now I'm like, being bad. I'm doing the right thing, but I'm breaking a promise, which we're told from like the time we're little, like you don't do.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
In the notion of galaxies developing or something like that?
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Awesome, I am way off.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I'm like trying to be Elon Musk here and you're like, no, it's about pigeons, cool.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I love pigeons. I even have a pigeon tattoo. Yeah, I do.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah, I'm good there.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
They perseverate.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because with work, it's like I love learning, organizing information, having conversations like this and sharing them with the world. It feels kind of like the relationship to a dog. It's like this reciprocity. And if people don't like it, okay. And if you like it, great. And if you love it, even better. But I would be doing it anyway. I'd be doing it anyway.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah. I'm a Wyeth fan.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Like there's no feeling of loss. There's no metabolizing of self, any of that.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And people pay me to do this. And I still can't believe it. I come in here and I talk to my producer, who's also my business partner and my closest friend, Rob. And I'm like, I can't believe they pay us to do this. I can't believe it.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And that's also how I felt about science the first time I looked down the microscope and saw a slice of a particular brain area called the dorsolateral geniculate nucleus. And we had labeled this. And I turned to Barbara Chapman, my graduate advisor there. And I was like, wow. This is amazing. And her response was so funny. She was also Harvard trained Radcliffe to be specific.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Well, recently I saw a caption. I don't know if this is true because it was an Instagram post that the woman in the field image. Oh, Christina's world.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And she said, yeah, brains are really cool. They're kind of like little walnuts. And I was like, so Barbara, the smartest people I ever met. She was just like, and I was like, and I thought, and then I looked around her lab. I was doing rotations where you get to sample different labs and you hope they'll take you. And she had green counters in her lab instead of black counters.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And she had pictures of mushrooms.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And she had this picture of a cat coming out of a farm silo. It's like its hat. And I thought, I really like this lady. Like, I want to work here. I'm going to do my PhD here. And I had already committed to another lab. And I started sneaking into her laboratory at night to do experiments.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
She got over it. So in the professional domain, I'm a completely different animal when it comes to these things. I walked into the other woman's lab. I mean, she's done tremendously well without me. So I just said, listen, I'm gonna join this other lab. But like I have no trouble doing that in the work domain, none.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's like, you know, when I started the podcast, sure there were these voices in my head, one of my colleagues gonna think this and that. And, you know, I was like, nah, I hope they're living their best life. I'm gonna live mine. Like, and I see them and some love it, some hate it.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And some, you know, like really I can tell, like I hear the judgments and I also hear the, like, I love it, you know, that kind of thing. It's a mix because public facing anything is gonna evoke different responses from people. And, but I'm sort of like, you do you, I'll do me and we'll both be good.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yeah. I didn't know the name of it. Thank you. That this was a neighbor of theirs that had a degenerative neural condition. And rather than use a wheelchair of sorts, she insisted on crawling everywhere. And so that image is actually of her crawling out into the field happily to enjoy the field. Because my impression of the painting before was that
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
She's taking some work. She's taking some work.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's not going to – Unfortunately, it's a lot more complicated than that. But I am seeing a portal toward I guess what you're calling like true integrity where in the back of my mind, I have this like very – vestigial understanding of what all of that relationship stuff actually looks like when it and feels like when it's right for me.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I just, I think it's not going to look like the way I try to script it out.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
That's reassuring to me.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Your partner is awesome. Oh, I just met one of them.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Somehow because she's seated up there, it looks like in my mind I projected onto it that there's some like desperation there or something to get back to the house. But that's not it at all. It turns out this is a woman who preferred to move with her own agency, even if it meant crawling to enjoy nature.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And so that's how you- That was eight years ago.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
No, we have no master, no overlord. Are you kidding me? I mean, what we're talking about here is love, first of all. Like, I mean, let's just be, you know, of all the things to cut out of a podcast, we're not going to cut love out of a podcast. Oh, I love that about this podcast because a lot of people would. Yeah, well, not me.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And for people that, like, balk at that or it creates internal friction in them, then I just invite you to, I don't know, visit your compassionate witness self, see if it's still there. And if it's still there, then, you know, hey, I actually believe that humans, partially based on developmental wiring, like, experiences, but also just differences in wiring, like, just fundamentally –
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I believe in this. I mean, one of my closest friends, my third postdoc, my third advisor, who was my postdoc advisor at Stanford is the now, unfortunately he died of pancreatic cancer, is the late Ben Barris. He was born an identical twin girl. Wow. Okay. Then went up through medical school, living as a woman, graduate school as a woman, and then transitioned to Ben pretty late in life.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
So I only met Ben. Ben was a close friend and then unfortunately had probably because he had the BRCA2 mutation, died of multiple cancers, but that initiated by pancreatic cancer. First transgender member of the National Academy of Sciences. Wow. I wrote his obituary for the journal Nature.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
We were very, very close and just an amazing, very quirky dude, you know, and didn't have a romantic partner, at least not at the time when he passed or in the time that I knew him, to my knowledge. And, you know, Ben used to say, like, there are components of our wiring that are ubiquitous.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
The parts that control breathing, you know, the parts that control heart. And then there are parts of our— Wiring that are just different. And to me as a scientist, like it makes perfect sense. Like the notion that any of that would be controversial is like, what?
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Like it doesn't make any sense whatsoever that one would like not believe that people have differences in wiring because most people want to believe in differences in wiring when it's like convenient for themselves. So I really appreciate that you're sharing this because yeah, the every which version works.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I also learned from my graduate advisor, Barbara Chapman, she used to say, tolerance has to go both ways. So I also love and applaud the whatever traditional nuclear family, is it still called that? Oh my gosh, yes.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's a magnificent painting.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Yes. Maybe not the original, although that would be awesome.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Maybe have the other person read it.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Totally. That would be – that I can do. As difficult as it is to have certain conversations, I could certainly write things down and just like slide an envelope.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I love it. And I really appreciate that you shared that. And I know people listening will as well.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Then I'm waking up in the Met.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Well, one of the reasons I oriented very young towards and still love punk rock music, like that genre, is because to me, I could be wrong, maybe classical music being an exception, but to me, it's the only genre of music where all the versions of self and emotions are welcome. There's angry music. There's like political music. There's sad music. There's...
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
you know, music about friendship and camaraderie about loss. And you look at the community, like I'm really into this stuff. So look at the community like that. My good friend, Tim Armstrong is created around certain bands. He's going to be on the Mount Rushmore punk rock or the great Joe Strummer from the clash political music.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
You know, or Laura Jane Grace, like one of the first transgender, like outwardly facing transgendered people in the punk rock community and does amazing music was against me. And then Laura Jane Grace, I'm like, she's a hero of mine. One of my short list of heroes. I love, love, love what she's done. at so many levels.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And it's like, there's like this tapestry of all the different humans and human experiences in a kind of single genre. And I don't know much about other genres of music, but I don't see that.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I don't see that, like maybe across the totality of rock and roll or whatever, but you know, and so like, if ever there was a sector of life that's like all inclusive, it's that, but not because it's loud, it's fast and it's anti, it's like so much of it is like pro-social. So I think there's a big misunderstanding around that. So that ethos is something that's always resonated.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And I feel the same way about like relationships or on social media. One of the reasons I can go on social media and not have it like spike my cortisol constantly Because I'm there and I'm like, okay, there's some like mentally healthy people here, some mentally unhealthy people here. People are here to fight. People are here to love. People are here to find partners. People are here to flirt.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And you know what? People are here to attack me like, cool, I'm glad I'm giving you a purpose for your morning. You know, that kind of thing. I try and just approach it all that way where you just made all of this very clear in a much more succinct way where you just said like, great, I like it.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's awesome. Yeah, yours with a real genuine sense of joy.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Like, no, like, well, I like it. There's no friction in that statement. It's just, I like it.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I love that you like it a lot and that you can say it that way.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
What was the quote from Jesus?
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Were you all, well, of course the answer is going to be yes. I was going to ask, were you always like this? Meaning that you could hold this position on the balance beam. And then I feel like you've taken this balance beam and like created this big mesa for others to stand on. So, so, cause it's a really stable place to be once you're there, but getting to this place of like
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
essential self and the path to integrity. I mean, can I just say it the way I feel it? Yeah. It's fucking difficult. Yeah.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I feel like it starts with the scope of self. Like we have to do this for ourselves before we can do this with and for other people.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And then at some point, the fantasy in my mind right, like it sounds like my mother, my mother from the youngest age I can remember in myself was talking about like trying to heal the world. And I've seen the toll it's taken on her. Like she'll call sometimes and I'll be like, how's it going? And like something will have happened in the news. Like I can just tell like it really wears on her.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And it's hard for me to hear and see, cause I've, you know, like I feel it too. It's like, goodness, like, do you feel, there's hope for our species. I mean, I'm trying to not throw the whole problems of the world at you, but- No, I've been thinking about it. I mean, like what? I'm almost 50. I feel like at this point I've seen enough to be like, there's so much goodness in people.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is BetterHelp.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I'm a mountains guy. As much as I love California, you know, I've realized that I just went out to Boulder, Colorado for the first time for a week just by myself. And I fell in love with it. Yeah. So I'm in the mountains. Colorado feels right to me. And there's water.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
But there's also like the capacity for so much like misunderstanding bad. You got the developmental wiring. You got the hurt people hurt people. We're all, everyone's doing the best they can. Everyone wants safety and acceptance and they're just trying to find it this way. And like, and then there are your truly bad actors because they're either miswired or whatever.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And they're like creating havoc. Like, is there... any real hope for like a different version of things that's persistent?
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
I have a feeling I am too. And I'm certain that... I'm in it thanks to you. Seriously, in large part. I've told the story earlier that the path I'm on and the fact that anyone's listening to this and watching it is the consequence of having read your books and done the exercises and will continue to do them. I must say there really aren't words
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
A river. They've got great rivers there. Yeah, they do. Or the little streams. I like the little streams that they have there because the rivers are so loud. That's true. The rivers are really loud when they get going. Yeah. And –
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
to express how much this means to me that you would come here, take the time to share with us your wisdom and to delve into some topics that are of particular interest to me, because I, like everyone else, I'm a work in progress who's curious about the best ways to to move forward. And yeah, every time you speak and just when you show up someplace, it's an incredible thing.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Everybody learns, everybody gets better, and everyone walks away with tools and empowerment. And I just want to say thank you so much. There's really not a whole lot else.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Thank you. That might be the only podcast to ever end in tears. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Martha Beck. I hope you found it to be as informative and as meaningful as I did. To learn more about her work and to find links to her many excellent books, please see the links in the show note captions.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please be sure to follow the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
It's entitled Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, Twitter, now known as X, Threads, Facebook and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlap with the contents of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the contents of the Huberman Lab podcast.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. If you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, our neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes what we call protocols, which are brief one to three page PDFs that cover things such as neuroplasticity and learning dopamine optimization, how to get better sleep.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
things like deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol. We have a protocol all about habit forming and much more. To sign up, again, at completely zero cost, you simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu function in the corner, scroll down to newsletter, and you provide your email. I should point out that we do not share your email with anybody.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Martha Beck. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
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Dr. Martha Beck: Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination
Definitely small town. I can't be too isolated. If I'm going to be in a city, I'm going to be in Manhattan. It's like it's all or none. So if I'm going to be in nature, I want to be in nature. So a small town.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
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. My guest today is Dr. Jamil Zaki. Dr. Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University. He is also the director of the Social Neuroscience Laboratory at Stanford.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
This is very important because there's a lot of confusion about these words and what they mean. But I can assure you that by the end of today's discussion, you will have new frameworks and indeed new tools, protocols that you can use as strategies to better navigate situations and relationships of all kinds and indeed to learn better.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
How different is cynicism from skepticism? You know, I can think of some places where they might overlap, but cynicism seems to carry something of a lack of anticipation about any possibility of a positive future. Is that one way to think about it?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I'd also like to mention that Dr. Zaki has authored a terrific new book entitled Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. And I've read this book and it is spectacular. There is a link to the book in the show note captions. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
When I think about scientists, one of the first things I think about is not just their willingness, but their excitement to embrace complexity. Like, okay, these two groups disagree or these two sets of data disagree. And it's the complexity of that interaction that excites them. Whereas when I think of cynics in the way that it's framed up in my mind, which is
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I'm getting more educated now, but admittedly, my understanding of cynicism is still rather superficial. You'll change that in the course of our discussion. But that cynics are not embracing the complexity of cynicism. disagreement. They are moving away from certainly any notion of excitement by complexity. It seems like it's a heuristic. It's a way to simplify the world around you.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Maui Nui. Maui Nui venison is the most nutrient dense and delicious red meat available.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Wow, there's certainly a lot there that maps to many people's experience. So you pointed out that some degree of cynicism likely has roots in insecure attachment. That said, if one looks internationally... Do we find cultures where it's very hard to find cynics? And there could be any number of reasons for this.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Or perhaps even more interestingly, do we find cultures where there really isn't even a word for cynicism?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I've spoken before on this podcast about the fact that most of us should be seeking to get about one gram of quality protein per pound of body weight every day. That protein provides critical building blocks for things like muscle repair and synthesis, but also promotes overall health given the importance of muscle as an organ.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. By now, many of you have heard me say that if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1. The reason for that is AG1 is the highest quality and most complete of the foundational nutritional supplements available.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
What that means is that it contains not just vitamins and minerals, but also probiotics, prebiotics, and adaptogens to cover any gaps you may have in your diet and provide support for a demanding life.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
For me, even if I eat mostly whole foods and minimally processed foods, which I do for most of my food intake, it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits and vegetables, vitamins and minerals, micronutrients, and adaptogens from food alone. For that reason, I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, and often twice a day, once in the morning or mid-morning, and again in the afternoon or evening.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
When I do that, it clearly bolsters my energy, my immune system, and my gut microbiome. These are all critical to brain function, mood, physical performance, and much more. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim their special offer. Right now, they're giving away five free travel packs plus a year's supply of vitamin D3K2.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim that special offer. What is the relationship, if any, between cynicism and happiness or lack of happiness? When I think of somebody who's really cynical, I think of an Oscar the Grouch or a curmudgeon-like character.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
And as I ask this question, I'm thinking specifically about what you said earlier about how cynicism prevents us from certain forms of learning that are important and very valuable to us. Here's the reason why. I'll give just a little bit of context. I remember when I was a kid, my dad who went to – classic boarding schools.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
He grew up in South America, but he went to these boarding schools that were very strict. And he was taught, he told me, that to be cheerful and happy, people would accuse you of being kind of dumb. Whereas if you were cynical and you acted a little bored with everything, people thought that you were more discerning.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
But that he felt it was a terrible model for going through life because it veered into cynicism. My dad happens to be a scientist. He's a... relatively happy person. Sorry, dad. A happy person. Seems happy, but meaning he's a person who has happiness and he has other emotions too.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Eating enough quality protein each day is also a terrific way to stave off hunger. One of the key things, however, is to make sure that you're getting enough quality protein without ingesting excess calories.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I wouldn't say he's happy all the time, but he experiences joy and pleasure in daily activities, small things and big things in life. So clearly he rescued himself from the forces that were kind of pushing him down that path. But that's the anecdote. But I use that question more as a way to frame up the possible collaboration between cynicism and
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
and exuding boredom or a challenge in shifting somebody towards a happier affect. Because when I think about cynics, I think that they're like kind of unhappy people. And when I think about people who are not very cynical, I think of them as kind of cheerful and curious. And there's some ebullience there. They might not be Tigger-like in their affect, but they kind of veer that direction.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Maui Nui venison has an extremely high quality protein to calorie ratio, such that getting that one gram of protein per pound of body weight is both easy and doesn't cause you to ingest an excess amount of calories. Also, Maui Nui venison is absolutely delicious. They have venison steaks, ground venison, and venison bone broth. I personally like and eat all of those.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
In fact, I probably eat a Maui Nui venison burger pretty much every day, and occasionally I'll swap that for a Maui Nui steak. And if you're traveling a lot or simply on the go, they have a very convenient Maui Nui venison jerky, which has 10 grams of quality protein per stick at just 55 calories. While Maui Nui offers the highest quality meat available, their supplies are limited.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
In other words, cynics are not being scientific. Their hypothesis is cast, but they're not looking at the data equally. Right. And we should remind people that a hypothesis is not a question. Uh, every great experiment starts with a question and then you generate a hypothesis, which is a, uh, a theory or conclusion essentially, uh, made upfront.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
And then you go collect data and you see if you prove or disprove the hypothesis. Yeah. And you can never really prove a hypothesis. You can only, uh, support it or not support it with the data that you collect depending on the precision of your tools. But, um, That's very interesting because I would think that if we view cynics as smarter, which clearly they're not as a group, right?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
You're saying cynics are not more intelligent, right? I believe that's covered in your book. And if one knows that, then why do we send cynics in kind of like razors to assess what the environment is like? Is that because... we'd rather have others deployed for us to kind of like weed people out? Is it that we're willing to accept some false negatives?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Meaning for those, I guess we're using a little bit of a semi-technical language here, false negatives would be, you know, you're trying to assess a group of people that would be terrific employees. And you send in somebody to interview them that's very cynical. So Presumably in one's mind, that filter of cynicism is only going to allow in people that are really, really right for the job.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
And we're willing to accept that there are probably two or three candidates that would also be right for the job, but we're willing to let them go. Some false negatives. as opposed to having someone get through the filter who really can't do the job.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Like we're willing to let certain opportunities go by being cynical or by deploying a cynic as the, you know, I'm imagining the person with the clipboard, you know, very rigid. Like cynicism and rigidity seem to go together. So that's why I'm lumping these kind of psychological phenotypes.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Is cynicism domain specific? And there again, I'm using jargon, meaning... if somebody is cynical in one environment, like cynical about the markets, like, well, things are up now, but you know, have an election come, so things could go this way or that way, depending on, you know, do they tend to be cynical about other aspects of life, other domains?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Again, that's mauinuivenison.com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Juve. Juve makes medical grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there's one thing I've consistently emphasized on this podcast, it's the incredible impact that light can have on our biology.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Now, in addition to sunlight, red light and near infrared light have been shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellar and organ health. including faster muscle recovery, improved skin health and wound healing, even improvements in acne, reducing pain and inflammation, improving mitochondrial function, and even improving vision itself.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
His laboratory focuses on key aspects of the human experience, such as empathy and cynicism, which lie at the heart of our ability to learn and can be barriers to learning, such as the case with cynicism.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
So much of schooling in this country is based on at first cooperation, like we're all going to sit around and listen to a story and then we're going to work in small groups. But in my experience, over time, it evolves into more independent learning and competition learning. They post the distribution of scores. That's largely the distribution of individual scores.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
There are exceptions to this, of course. I've never been to business school, but I think they form small groups and work on projects. It's true in computer science at the undergraduate level and so on. But to what extent do you think having a mixture of cooperative learning
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
still competition perhaps between groups, as well as individual learning and competition can foster kind of an erosion of cynicism. Because it sounds like being cynical is, I don't want to be hard on the cynics here, but they're probably already hard on themselves and everybody else. We know they're hard on everybody else. But, oh, there was my presumption. Okay, I'm going to stay open-minded.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Maybe they're not. You'll tell me. That they are, on average, less intelligent is what I'm hearing. And that there's something really big to be gained from anybody who decides to embrace novel ideas. Even if... they decide to stick with their original decision about others or something.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Provided they explore the data in an open-minded way, even transiently, it sounds like there's an opportunity there. You gave a long-term example of these two phishing scenarios. So the neuroplasticity takes years, but we know neuroplasticity can be pretty quick.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I would imagine if you expose a cynic to a counterexample to their belief that it's not going to erode all of their cynicism, but it might make a little dent in that scenario. neural circuit for cynicism.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
What sets Juve lights apart and why they're my preferred red light therapy devices is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning it uses specific wavelengths of red light and near infrared light in combination to trigger the optimal cellular adaptations. Personally, I use the Juve handheld light, both at home and when I travel.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I'd like to take us back just briefly to these developmental stages. Maybe I'm bridging two things that don't belong together, but I'm thinking about the young brain, which of course is hyperplastic, and comparing that to the older brain. The young brain learns a number of things while it does a number of things. It handles heart rate, digestion, et cetera, unconsciously.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
It's only about the size of a sandwich, so it's super portable and convenient to use. I also have a Juve whole body panel, and I use that about three or four times per week. If you'd like to try Juve, you can go to juve, spelled J-O-O-V-V, .com slash Huberman. Juve is offering an exclusive discount to all Huberman Lab listeners with up to $400 off select Juve products.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
And then in many ways, the neuroplasticity that occurs early in life is to establish these maps of prediction. If things fall down, not up in general, things fall down, not up. and so on, so that mental real estate can be used for other things and learning new things. So I'm thinking about the sort of classic example of object permanence.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
You show a baby a block or a toy, and then you hide that toy, and they At a certain age, a very young age, will look as if it's gone. And then you bring it back, and then they're amazed. And then at some point along their developmental trajectory, they learn object permanence. They know that it's behind your back.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
And then we hear that characters like Santa Claus are real, and then eventually we learn that they're not, and so on and so on. In many ways, we go from being completely non-cynical about the physical world to being... One could sort of view it as cynical about the physical world, right? Like, I love to see magic. In fact, we had...
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
probably the world's best or among the very best magicians on this podcast, Ozzy Wind. He's a mentalist and magician. And to see him do magic, even as an adult who understands that the laws of physics apply, they seem to defy the laws of physics in real time. And it just blows your mind to the point where you're like, that can't be, but you sort of want it to be.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
And at some point you just go, you know what? It's what we call magic. So it seems to me that cynics apply almost physics-like rules to social interaction. Like that they talk in terms of like first principles of human interactions, right? They talk about this group always this and that group always that, right? These like strict categories.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
thick black lines between categories, as opposed to any kind of blending of understanding or blending of rules. And one can see how that would be a really useful heuristic, but as we're learning, it's not good in the sense that we don't want to judge, but it's not good if our goal is to learn more about the world or learn the most information about the world. Can we say that? Yes.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Again, that's Juve, J-O-O-V-V, .com slash Huberman to get $400 off select Juve products. Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up. Waking Up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and more. I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old, and it made a profound impact on my life.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function. I recently became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
While I've long been a fan of blood testing, I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood, urine and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health, my hormone status, my immune system regulation, my metabolic function, my vitamin and mineral status and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors on your results. For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had two high levels of mercury in my blood. This was totally surprising to me. I had no idea prior to taking the test.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Function not only helped me detect this, but offered medical doctor-informed insights on how to best reduce those mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption, because I had been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC and acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification, and worked to reduce my mercury levels.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
And by now there are thousands of quality peer reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our focus, managing stress and anxiety, improving our mood and much more. In recent years, I started using the Waking Up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health, and while I've been doing it for years, I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I've been so impressed by Function, both at the level of ease of use, that is getting the test done, as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are, that I recently joined their advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try Function, go to functionhealth.com slash Huberman.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman Lab listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com slash Huberman to get early access to Function.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
love that your examples of awe both pale blue dot and uh everyday compassion bridge the two uh what i think of as um time domains that the or i should say space time domains that the brain can encompass you know this has long fascinated me about the human brain and presumably other animals brains as well which is that you know we can sharpen our um aperture to
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
you know, something so, so small and pay attention to just like the immense beauty. And, you know, like I have a lot of ants in my yard right now. And lately I've been watching them interact because they were driving me crazy. They were just like, you know, they're like everywhere this summer and they're climbing on me. And I thought, I'm just gonna like watch what they do.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
And clearly there's a structure there. I know Deborah Gordon at Stanford has studied ant behavior and others. And it's like, there's a lot going on there. But then you look up from there, you're like, wow, there's a big yard. And then the sense of awe for me is that Interactions like that must be going on everywhere in this yard.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
And, you know, it frames up that the aperture of our cognition in space and in time, you know, covering small distances quickly or small distances slowly. And then we can zoom out literally and think about us on this planet. balls in space, right? And that ability, I think, is incredible. And that awe can be captured at these different extremes of space-time cognition. Amazing.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
It seems to me that what you're saying is that cynicism and awe are also at opposite ends of the continuum. And that's taking us in a direction slightly different than I was going to try and take us, but I love that we're talking about awe because to me, it feels like it's a more extreme example of delight.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
And I'd like you to perhaps, if there's any examples of research on this, touch on to what extent a sense of cynicism divorces us from delight and awe, or I guess their collaborator, which is creativity. To me, everything you're saying about cynicism makes it sound anti-creative because you're, by definition, you're eliminating possibility.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
And creativity, of course, is the unique original combination of existing things or the creation of new things altogether, creativity. So what, if anything, has been studied about the relationship between cynicism, I guess we call it open-mindedness, and creativity and or awe?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits, but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice. What I and so many other people love about the waking up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from, and those meditations are of different durations.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice, both from the perspective of novelty. You never get tired. tired of those meditations. There's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation. And you can always fit meditation into your schedule, even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Today, you'll learn the optimal mindsets to adopt when trying to understand how to learn conflict resolution and how to navigate relationships of all kinds and in all contexts, including personal relationships and in the workplace.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
It's so interesting to think about all of this in the context of neuroplasticity. I feel like one of the holy grails of neuroscience is to finally understand, you know, what are the gates to neuroplasticity? We understand a lot about the cellular mechanisms. We know it's possible throughout the lifespan. We know that there's sure a and involvement of different neuromodulators and so on.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
But at the level of human behavior and emotional stance, not a technical term, but I'll use it, of say being curious. To me, curiosity is an interest in the outcome with no specific emotional attachment to the outcome. Yeah. But, of course, we could say you're curious with the hope of getting a certain result. So one could modify it.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
But there is something about that childlike mind, so-called beginner's mind, where you're open to different outcomes. And it seems like the examples that you're giving keep bringing me back to these developmental themes because – If it's true that cynics exclude a lot of data that could be useful to them, it seems that the opportunities for neuroplasticity are reduced for cynics.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I also really like doing yoga nidra or what is sometimes called non-sleep deep rest for about 10 or 20 minutes because it is a great way to restore mental and physical vigor without the tiredness that some people experience when they wake up from a conventional nap. If you'd like to try the Waking Up app, please go to wakingup.com slash Huberman, where you can access a free 30-day trial.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
To flip it on its head, to what extent are we all a little bit cynical? And how would we explore that? Like if I were in your laboratory and you had 10 minutes with me, what questions would you ask me to determine how cynical I might be or how not cynical I might be?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
So it loads the questions or it's open-ended where I would, would you say, what are people like? And then I would just kind of free associate about that.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Oh, I absolutely zip it over to them. Yeah. Yeah, I'm curious. Great. And I'm willing to lose the money. So I suppose that factors in as well.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Again, that's wakingup.com slash Huberman to access a free 30-day trial. And now for my discussion with Dr. Jamil Zaki. Dr. Jamil Zaki, welcome. Thanks so much for having me. Delighted to have you here. And to learn from you, you have decided to tackle an enormous number of very interesting and challenging topics.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
There does seem to be a salience about negative interactions or somebody stealing from us or doing something that we consider cruel to us or to others. nowadays with social media, we get a window into, gosh, probably billions of social interactions in the form of comments and clapbacks and retweets. And there certainly is benevolence on social media.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
But what if any data exists about how social media either feeds or impedes cynicism, or maybe it doesn't change it at all? And I should say that there's also the kind of, I have to be careful, I'm trying not to be cynical. I maintain the view that certain social media platforms encourage a bit more negativity than others. And certainly there are accounts.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I'm trying to think of accounts like on Instagram, like Upworthy, which its whole basis is to promote positive stuff. I like that account very much. But certainly you can find the full array of emotions on social media. To what extent is just being on social media, regardless of platform, increasing or decreasing cynicism?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Challenging because my read of it, not just your book, but of these fields in the science that you've done, is that people default to some complicated states and emotions sometimes that in some ways serve them well, in some ways serve them less well. So I'd like to talk about this at the level of the individual and interactions between pairs and larger groups and so on.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
But just to kick things off, what is cynicism? I have my own ideas, but what is cynicism? What does it serve in terms of its role in the human mind?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
So much there. I have a I suppose, a mixed relationship to social media. I teach there and I learn there. And I also have to be very discerning in terms of how I interact with it. And you made this point that I've never heard anyone make before, which is that many people feel alone by virtue of the fact that they don't share in this warring nature that they see on social media.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
It's almost like sometimes I feel like I'm watching a combat sport that I don't feel quite cut out for. And then when I'm away from it, I feel better. But I like everybody else. Sometimes we'll get sucked into the highly salient nature of a combat between groups on social media. It can be very alluring in the worst ways. This mean world syndrome, what's the inverse of that?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
The kind world syndrome, I suppose. But attempts at creating those sorts of social media platforms have been made, things like Blue Sky, which has other aspects to it as well. And while it may be thriving, I don't know, I haven't checked, recently. It seems like people aren't really interested in being on there as much as they are these other platforms. Clearly the numbers play out that way.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Why do you think that is?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Do you think it's possible to be adequately informed about threats to be able to live one's life in the most adaptive way while not being on social media? None of the social media platforms. can you have a great life that way, a safe life?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I'm not anti-social media, but I have to circle back on this yet again. A former guest on this podcast, one of our most popular episodes is with a former Navy SEAL, David Goggins, who's known for many things, but chief among them is striving and pushing oneself. And David has said many times that...
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Nowadays, it's easier than ever to be extraordinary because most people are basically spending time just consuming experiences on social media and doing a lot less.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
just literally doing a lot less not just exercising and running as he does although by the way he's in school to become a paramedic so he's essentially gone to medical school um and is always doing a bunch of other things as well so um he's also an intellectual learner um now i don't know if i agree with him completely but it's an interesting statement you know if social media is um
Huberman Lab
Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
What sets Dr. Zaki's work apart from others is that he's able to take laboratory research and apply that to real world scenarios to direct optimal strategies for things like how to set personal boundaries, how to learn information in uncertain and sometimes even uncomfortable environments, and then how to bring that to bear in terms of your relationship to yourself, your relationship to others, and how to collaborate with others in more effective ways.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
bringing out our cynicism, polarizing us, and perhaps taking away, I would probably agree with David, at least to some extent, taking away our time where we could be generative, writing, thinking, socializing, building in other ways that one builds their life. Then I guess an important question is, do you think social media could be leveraged to decrease cynicism
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
or as you referred to it, to generate hopeful skepticism, like this notion of hopeful skepticism as a replacement for cynicism is something that is really intriguing. What would that look like? We were just gonna do the Gedanken experiment here. What would a feed on social media look like that fed hopeful skepticism as opposed to cynicism?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I believe in your book, you quote Kurt Vonnegut, who says, we are who we pretend to be, so we need to be careful who we pretend to be. What do you think that quote means? How do you interpret that quote?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Do you think there's a version of AI that is... less cynical than people tend to be. The reason I ask this is I'm quite excited about and hopeful about AI. I'm not one of these, I don't know what you call them, but AI doomers. And it's here, it's happening. It's happening in the background now. And I've started using AI in a number of different realms of life and I find it to be incredible.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
It seems to me to combine neural networks and Google search with PubMed and it's fascinating. It's not perfect. It's far from perfect. But that's also part of its beauty is that it mimics a human lack of perfectness well enough that it feels something kind of like brain-like, personality-like.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
You could imagine that given the enormous amount of cynicism that's out there, that some of the large language models that make up AI would be somewhat cynical, would put filters that were overly stringent on certain topics. You also wouldn't want AI that was not stringent enough, right? Because we are already and soon to be using AI to bring us information extremely quickly.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
And the last thing we want are errors in that information. So if we were to take what we know from humans and the data that you've collected and others have collected about ways to shift ourselves from cynicism to hopeful skepticism, do you think that's something that could be laced into these large language models?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I'm not talking about at the technical level, that's certainly beyond my understanding, but could you build an AI version of yourself that could forage the internet for news and what's going on out there that is, you know, where you, it's, you know, tune down the cynicism a little bit since it's difficult to be less cynical.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
In other words, could it do a better job of being you than you and then therefore make you better?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I mean, that's what I want. I was thinking about my Instagram feed and cynicism versus hopeful skepticism versus, I guess, awe. And I'll use the following examples. I subscribe to an Instagram account that I like very much, which essentially just gives me images of beautiful animals in their – in their ultimate essence.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
It's an account by a guy named Joel Sartore, who works for National Geographic, and he's created what's called the photo arc. He's trying to get images of all the world's animals that really capture their essence, and many of them are endangered, and some very close to extinction. Others are more... you know, more prolific, uh, right now.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Nonetheless, I think of that account as all goodness, all benevolence. And then at the other extreme, I subscribe to an animal account called nature is metal. We've actually collaborated with nature is metal on a, on a great white shark grabbing a tuna, um, video that, uh, that I didn't take, but someone I was with took and we got their permission to post it.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
In any event, nature's metal is all about the harshness of nature. And then I think about like the planet earth series hosted by David Attenborough and so forth, which sort of has a mixture of, you know, beautiful ducklings, you know, and, but then also animals hunting each other and dying of old age or of starvation. And so the full array.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
So I think about that as an example of, you know, if you, if you look at nature's metal long enough, you, And it's a very cool account. I highly recommend people follow all three of these accounts. But if you look at it long enough, you get the impression like nature is hard. Life is hard out there. And it can be.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
You look at the Sartori account and you get the impression that, you know, animals are just beautiful. They're just being them, right? And he has such a, he has a gift for capturing the essence of insects, reptiles and mammals and everything in between.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
When I think about social media or I even just think about our outlook onto the landscape of real life, non-virtual life, I feel like the human brain potentially can like all these things. But what you're describing in cynicism is the people that – for whatever reason, they're skewed toward this view that like life is hard and therefore I need to protect myself and protect others at all times.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
In reality, how dynamic is cynicism? Earlier you described how it can be domain specific, but if somebody is pretty cynical, And they're older than 25. They're outside the sort of developmental plasticity range. What are the things that they can do on a daily basis to either tune down their cynicism or create room for this hopeful skepticism in a way that enriches them? Let's just start with them.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Because after all, they're cynics. We can't bait them with the good that they'll do for the world, but they'll do that too. What are some tools that we can all apply towards being less cynical?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Are you adopting children? Yeah.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I love those three, and I love the... distinguishing features of savoring versus gratitude because there's so much data to support gratitude practices. I don't think I've ever heard those two distinguished from one another, but clearly savoring things is equally powerful towards our neurochemistry and our well-being. I love that you include both sensory and interpersonal aspects to this.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
These are highly actionable and I'm sure people are as excited about them as I am because all this knowledge from the laboratory is indeed wonderful. But of course we always wanna know what can we do now that you've made such a strong case for tuning down our cynicism a little bit in order to make ourselves smarter, better,
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
happier and in touch with with with awe on a more regular basis uh would love to hear about some of the actions one can take as well yeah so
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I love those practices. And thank you for reinforcing the process of reinforcing the experiences. Because many times I'll be listening to an audio book or I'll think of something when I'm running and I'll put it into my voice memos or notes in my phone and then I move them to this very notebook or another similar to it.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
And I'll go back and read it, but many things don't, don't get passed through the filters that, um, uh, I forget because I didn't do that. And we know this is one of the best ways to solidify information is to think about experiences and information after being exposed to it. This is true studying.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
This is true clearly for, uh, emotional learning and, and our own personal evolution, which brings me to, um, uh, Another example of somebody from the, I don't know what to call them. Is it sort of philosophy, wellness, self-help space? You mentioned Pema Chodron. Yeah. Wonderful writer.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
There's someone else more or less in that space, Byron Katie, who a lot of her work is about challenging beliefs by simply asking questions about our core beliefs. Mm-hmm. This is something that I've started to explore a bit. Like one could have the idea that, you know, good people always, you know, I don't know, show up on time. And wouldn't we all love to be punctual?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
And as an academic, I confess, for me, everything starts 10 minutes after the hour. So we're consistently on time, but late, right? So the non-academics. My friends from the military have a saying, which is five minutes early is on time, on time is late. And if you're late, you better bring lunch. So that kind of thing. In any event, the practice that she promotes in essence is,
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
to take a core belief and then just start challenging it from a number of different directions. Is that always true? You know, are there cases where that's not true? What would that look like? Et cetera, as a way to really deconstruct one's own core beliefs, which is, I think a bit of what you're talking about. And I feel like this could go in, um, at least two directions.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
You can have a core belief that leads in the direction of cynicism that you can deconstruct by just simply asking questions. Is that always true? Are there ever instances where that's not true? And what would it mean if that weren't true in a given instance, this sort of thing.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
And then on the other side, where we tend to err toward hopeful skepticism as opposed to cynicism, there too, I could imagine it would be useful to explore hopeful skepticism also as a scientist, right? Are there cases where hopeful skepticism, here I'm gonna be cynical, can really get us into trouble? For instance.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Anyway, obviously I haven't run a study on this just because I came up with this example on the fly, but does what I just described fit more or less into the framework that you're describing?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I love that. And one of the things that we've done on this podcast is to always invite comments and questions, critique and so forth in the comment section on YouTube. And I always say, and I do read all the comments and sometimes it takes me a while and I'm still sifting through them.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
But I think comment sections can be, yes, they can be toxic in certain environments, in certain contexts, but they can also be tremendously enriching not just for the reader, but for the commenter and to see what people's core beliefs are really about. Now, oftentimes comments are of a different form and that's okay, that's all right.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
But I think that because of the anonymity involved, I think I can see that now through the lens of what you're saying as a license for people to really share their core beliefs about something as something that can be really informative and really enriching.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Although I much prefer, I confess, the model that you're presenting where people are doing this in real time face-to-face as opposed to just online. As long as we're talking about polarization and the wish for less polarization. What are the data saying about the current state of affairs?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
We're recording this about what, three months or so out from an election or 90 some days or so from an election, presidential election. So without getting into discussions about political camps per se, what do your data and understanding about cynicism and hopeful skepticism tell us about that whole process and how the two camps are presenting themselves.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Wow. I say that for several reasons. First of all, I've never heard the landscape described that way. And I confess I didn't know that the landscape was as toward the center as it turns out it is. I have also many theories about how media and social media and podcasts, for that matter, might be contributing to this perceived polarization as opposed to the reality.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
And there's certainly a lot to explore in terms of what we can each and all do to remedy this. our understanding of what's going on out there.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
As a consequence, I'll ask, can some of the same tools that you described to better interact with one's own children, with one's own self, with other individuals and in small groups be used to sort of defragment some of the cynicism circuitry that exists in us around this polarized, excuse me, perceived highly polarized political landscape?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
How early in life does cynicism show up? I'm thinking about Sesame Street characters, which to me embody different neural circuits. You know, you've got Cookie Monster, some strong dopaminergic drive there. Knows what he wants, knows what he likes, and he's going to get it.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I want to be very clear that today's discussion, while focused on cynicism, trust and empathy, is anything but squishy. In fact, it focuses on experimental data derived from real world contexts. So it is both grounded in solid research and it is very practical, such that by the end of today's episode, you'll be armed with new knowledge about what cynicism is and is not what empathy is and is not.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Even if he has to eat the box in order to get to the cookie quicker. You have Elmo, who's all loving. And you have Oscar the Grouch. Somewhat cynical, but certainly grouchy. And then in, you know, essentially every fairy tale, or every Christmas story or, you know, there seems to be sort of a skeptic or somebody that can't be brought on board the celebration one would otherwise have.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Jamil, Dr. Zaki, thank you so much for sharing your incredible, what can only be described as wisdom into this area of humanity, right? I mean, to be a cynic is one potential aspect of being human, but you've made very clear that we have control. There is plasticity over this aspect of ourselves if we adopt the right mindsets. apply the right practices.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
And it's so clear based on everything you've shared today that humans are operating rationally and yet irrationally at the same time. I'm certainly not the first to say that. But in the context of cynicism and in the context of being happier individuals and families and couples and groups, to really take a hard look at how cynical we are and to
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
start to make even minor inroads into that through belief testing you know i i wrote down as we were talking that uh what i really feel you're encouraging us to do correct me if i'm wrong is to do both internal and external reality testing in an effort to move us away toward internal and external polarization and you know i can't think of any higher calling than that and your
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
giving us the tools and those tools are supported by data. These aren't just ideas. They are data supported ideas. And I just want to thank you for your incredible generosity and coming here today to talk about those ideas. Your book is phenomenal. I already learned so much from it and I highly encourage people to read it. And what you've shared with us today is phenomenal. And
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
I do hope to have you back again to talk about another topic that you are expert in, which is empathy, but we'll have to all wait with bated breath for that, myself included. So once again, I just want to thank you for your time, the incredible work that you're doing, and the evolution that you're taking us on. So on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching, thank you ever so much.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Well, thank you. I'll take that in. And it's a labor of love and an honor and a privilege to sit here today with you. So thank you ever so much. And please do come back again. I would love that. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Jamil Zaki. To learn more about his work and to find a link to his new book, Hope for Cynics, please see the links in the show note captions.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
to exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
But even though kids are learning about cynicism and grouchiness and curmudgeons, I often think about those phenotypes in older folks, because that's how they've been written into most of those stories. I guess Oscar the Grouch is, we don't know how old Oscar is. If one observes children, how early can you observe classically defined cynicism?
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
If you're not already following me on social media, I'm Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, formerly known as Twitter, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I cover science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the Huberman Lab podcast.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media channels. If you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, our Neural Network newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter. that has protocols, which are one to three page PDFs that describe things like optimizing your sleep, how to optimize your dopamine, deliberate cold exposure.
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
We have a foundational fitness protocol that describes resistance training, sets and reps, and all of that, as well as cardiovascular training that's supported by the scientific research. And we have protocols related to neuroplasticity and learning. Again, you can find all that at completely zero cost by going to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the right corner, scroll down to newsletter,
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Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset
you put in your email and we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Jamil Zaki. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we are discussing skin health.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Whereas short wavelength light, which only hits that epidermal layer on the outside of the skin, may be bad for our skin. And I say maybe because it's really a function genetic background, okay? If all this is seeming rather complicated, I'm going to make it very simple. And before I do that, I do want you to ask yourself a question.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I want you to ask yourself where you reside on the continuum of beliefs about sunscreen, UV light, and skin cancers. So here it goes. My read of the landscape out there is that there are some people, it's a small minority, but there are some people who feel that sunscreen in any form is bad for them.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
These are other proteins within skin that give skin its youthful, or in some cases where it's degenerative, non-youthful appearance, things like wrinkles and sagging skin. So we'll talk about all of that. We'll also talk about the various products that have been developed in order to treat wrinkles, treat sagging skin, reverse acne, et cetera.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
They think, okay, sun is great for them and sunscreens of any kind, chemical or physical barrier is bad for them, okay? Some people believe this. I'm not saying I believe this. In fact, I don't believe that. I'm a big believer in sunlight and the power of sunlight for health, but I am not what is called a sunscreen truther, okay? I'm not somebody who thinks that sunscreen has no value.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
In fact, quite the opposite under certain conditions and certain sunscreens. I want to say that for the record. Other people out there believe that certain sunscreens can be valuable, but only the sunscreens that lack certain chemicals because they are concerned about chemicals in certain sunscreens being so-called endocrine disruptors, or maybe even causing cancer on their own, okay?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Other people are so afraid of sunlight and believe that it causes so many issues as it relates to skin cancer that they basically create beekeeper uniforms for themselves so that anytime they're out in sunlight, they want to have sunglasses on, they want to have a hat, they want to cover their neck, every part of their body.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
They sit at the opposite extreme of the people who don't believe in using any sun protection whatsoever. And now of course, there's the backdrop of how much natural melanin production we each make. That is how dark our skin happens to be according to our genetics.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And of course, there's the issue of where we live on the planet and how much sun we have available to us in order to potentially expose ourselves to. And perhaps also ask yourself if you are in what I believe is the largest category of people out there, which is the category of people who probably don't wear sunscreen every day.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Maybe they put it on occasionally, but only if it's very bright out, very hot out, because they don't want to get a so-called sunburn. And I believe most people fit into that general category of A, not wanting to be burned, B, not wanting to age any faster than they would were they to not wear sunscreen? At least that's their belief.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And C, they've just been told that sunscreen is good for them and they'll reach for whatever sunscreen is on the shelf or that was recommended to them either by their dermatologist or that they happen to find in the pharmacy or when they're out skiing and they, You know, they notice it's a bright day and so they buy some sunscreen and slather it on.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So before I go any further, just ask yourself those questions. You know, where do you reside? Are you afraid of sunscreen? Do you love sunscreen? Are you in the beekeeper category? Like you think all sun is bad, it's going to give you skin cancer, it's going to age you faster.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
We'll get to the aging component in a few minutes, but just ask yourself that question as we wade into the material I'm about to cover. So what's the story with sun exposure, sunburn, sunscreen, skin cancer, and aging? I spoke to several different dermatologists about this, including one expert in skin cancers specifically. And what I was told is the following.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
First of all, sun exposure will disrupt the collagen and elastin, but mostly the collagen composition of your skin in a way that makes it appear as if you're aging faster. Okay, so sun exposure, yes, ages the skin. Now that does not mean, however, that you want to avoid all sun exposure because the same dermatologist said that some sun exposure is healthy for us. Why?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
We'll talk about which ones are safe, which ones are not safe, and which ones for which there still is no clear answer. I want to make very clear here at the outset that while I'll discuss various skin products during today's episode, I nor the podcast has any financial relationship to those products. I will provide examples of certain products and provide a few links in the show note captions.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Because our skin is also an endocrine organ. It's involved in making various hormones. It's part of the vitamin D production pathway. Although a little bit later, we'll talk about the fact that most people get their vitamin D from their diet and in some cases also from supplementation.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
but it is a good idea to get some sunlight for sake of vitamin D production, but also the production of other hormones like testosterone and estrogen, okay? So every single dermatologist that I spoke to said that some sun exposure is good for us, but that too much sun exposure will accelerate the appearance of aging in our skin. So let's pin that up on the wall as fact, okay?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
This again is not saying you should avoid sun completely. It's also not saying you should get excessive sunlight exposure. It's saying, by virtue of the UV wavelengths ability to cause mutations in the epidermal layers of the skin and to impact the collagen composition of the dermal layers below it, as well as some of the other proteins present in the keratinocytes, okay?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
One of the major skin cell types. and other cell types of the skin does lead to the appearance of aged skin, which is one rationale for wearing sunscreen.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now, when I say sunscreen, everyone, including myself, thinks about lotions or in some cases sprays, but let's pay attention to the one fact that I do think everybody, regardless of what category they are in the general population or what background training a dermatologist has,
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
believes, which is a physical barrier, a shirt, a hat, a jacket, a physical barrier can provide in some cases, very good protection from the sun. And I don't think there's any controversy whatsoever as to whether or not the composition of the physical barrier is having negative effects on the skin, okay?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
You will find those niche communities out there that are saying, okay, certain chemicals present in certain
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
materials that clothing are made with can be problems for the endocrine system but we're not talking about that here okay what i'm saying is that all dermatologists i spoke to and i think most every rational human being on earth would say that a physical barrier can help to a great degree in order to protect our skin from the sun as it relates to sunburn but also acceleration of the appearance of aging in our skin okay so i don't think there's any dispute about physical barriers for protecting the skin
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
How much you want to protect your skin from the sun, well, that will depend on what category you decided you were in from the earlier discussion. We'll get back to that. What else did all the dermatologists and skincare experts that I spoke to also agree upon? Well, they all said that indeed excessive sun exposure can increase the propensity for certain skin cancers.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I want to go on record by saying, I believe that. Why? Well, because of this ability of UV light and some other wavelengths of light potentially to cause mutations in skin cells that can lead to certain skin cancers. I don't think that's a debated topic out there.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
There might be a few people out there who are going to hang their hat on a study that I'll go into a little bit later, which is that the relationship between sun exposure and all-cause mortality is a tricky one. It's one that we'll parse. Meaning, I'll just give it a little hint into what I'm saying. People who avoid the sun entirely
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
don't tend to live as long as people that get some sun exposure, but there are a bunch of confounding variables that have to be understood in order to really interpret that statement and the study that we'll parse a little bit later.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
For now, let's just accept the reality that the vast, vast majority of dermatologists out there and skincare experts really understand that sun exposure can accelerate aging of the skin, but most will also tell you that some sun exposure is good for you, not just for skin health, but for overall brain and body health.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
But I want to point out that those serve merely as examples that I found during researching this episode, which, by the way, included speaking to several board-certified dermatologists, including a dermatologist expert in oncology, cancers of the skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now, as it relates to skin cancer, the dermatologist oncologist that I spoke to, all right, who did his training at Stanford, and I'll provide a link in the show note captions to his clinic, and you can learn more about some of his work. He's published some really nice papers, said the following, and this was surprising to me.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
He said, it turns out that the skin cancers that sun exposure causes, while they can be serious and should be taken seriously, they should be treated Those generally are not the most deadly of the skin cancers. Now, why would he say something like that? Okay, he said it because it turns out that there are lots of different kinds of skin cancer.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Some of them arise or can arise through sun exposure, others, and indeed some of the most deadly of skin cancers, are independent of sun exposure. And this is where things can get a little bit tricky. You'll hear out there, oh, you know, sun can cause skin cancer, but not the skin cancers that kill you. I don't think that's really a fair statement.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
You'll also hear, however, that all the skin cancers that are out there are the consequence of sun exposure, and that also is not true.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And if anything, this provides motivation, not just on the part of the dermatologist, but it should be motivation from within all of us to make sure that we understand our background genetics, not just how much pigmentation we carry in our skin by virtue of our genetics, but we should know by asking, if you're not going to get genetically sequenced, which you can do nowadays, of course, but you should know whether or not your family, your genetics,
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
tends to carry certain mutations that make you more prone to skin cancers in general, not just the type that can be exacerbated by sun exposure. What I'm basically saying is that if you have particular genetics in your family, even if you avoid all sun exposure, nobody should do that, of course, you need some sunlight.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Like all other or most all other creatures on earth, sunlight is important for us. It's important for setting our circadian rhythms. That's why I'm always telling people to get sunlight in their eyes early in the day, which by the way, when the sun is low in the sky, low solar angle sunlight, the UV index tends to be very low.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So by the end of today's episode, you will have a much clearer understanding about skin and what it is at the level of biology and function, its relationship to other systems in the body, including the immune system and gut microbiome, and you will be armed with the knowledge to make the best possible decisions for you in terms of skin health and skin care, depending on your age, your goals, and any current conditions you may have.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So you are at the lowest possible risk of getting burned, of getting any kind of mutations to your skin. That doesn't mean you should overdo it. It doesn't mean you should stare at the sun and damage your eyes. I've talked about this a lot on other podcasts, how to get morning sunlight exposure properly. But when the sun is low in the sky, that's generally a safe time to get sun exposure.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It's that midday sun typically between the hours of 11 a.m. or even 10 a.m., depending on time of year and where you're at, and 2 or 3 or 4 p.m. that the sun is overhead and at its greatest intensity and where the UV index can be very high. It's very easy to look up the UV index. And when the UV index is very high, right?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I was down in Australia earlier this year and the UV index down there is so high, you can almost feel it. You actually can feel it. You step outside and you immediately feel like, wow, my skin is really being bombarded with the sunlight. And I'm somebody who tolerates sunlight pretty well because my dad's fairly... and dark pigmentation just naturally by virtue of being South American.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Normally I can tolerate the skin pretty well, but you should not rely on just that subjective feel. You should look up the UV index and we'll provide a few links of good UV index sites that you can look up the UV index and where you might want to be extra cautious about providing a physical barrier or a chemical barrier to protect your skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now, a lot of people out there also believe that if you avoid sunburn, you're avoiding skin cancer. Perhaps you're very pale or it's the early phase of the summer season, or you have a susceptibility to sunlight such that You step outside and you get too much sunlight on a given day and you get a sunburn.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
That reflects an immune reaction, an inflammatory reaction within the dermal layers of the skin. So that means the vasculature, right? Those vessels and capillaries, they're going to dilate. You oftentimes will get infiltration of things like cytokines, which are of the immune system. You get an inflammatory response. That's why it's red. That's why it's tender to the touch.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
The nerve endings there can be overly activated. So the reason why your skin actually feels warm, right? When you touch your sunburn is because in fact, You have an activation of some of the nerve endings at that site, as well as the activation of the local immune system properties that give rise to, again, vessel and capillary dilation. It's a wound of sorts induced by excessive sun exposure.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Our skin is an incredibly important organ, not just for our appearance or because it serves as a barrier to the other organ systems of the body, but because it actually reflects the health status of all the other organs and systems in our body, including our brain. As well, you'll learn today about the direct and reciprocal relationship between the immune system and our skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now, does sunburn cause skin cancer? There's no direct relationship between sunburn and skin cancer, except the fact that sunburn reflects excessive sunlight exposure. And yes, as I mentioned before, It's conclusive that excessive UV sun exposure to the skin can cause certain mutations in skin cells that give rise to certain skin cancers. Why are we parsing things at this level of detail, right?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Is this all just semantics? No, it's not just semantics. Many people believe that if they didn't get a sunburn, they are not... at additional risk for inducing skin cancer or other issues with skin, right? We're not just talking about skin cancer, we're talking about accelerated aging of the skin according to sun exposure. So let's make this very simple.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
You don't need a sunburn for the sun to accelerate the aging appearance of your skin. you don't need a sunburn to induce the kind of mutation that may, again, I want to highlight, may give rise to a skin cancer. It's also not the case that if you've got a sunburn or even multiple sunburns that you'll necessarily develop skin cancer.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Although by virtue of the fact that sunburn reflects UV exposure, multiple sunburns would reflect increased UV exposure and therefore increased risk for certain skin cancers. So all of this to say, avoid sunburn however you can. And if you're somebody who just loathes sunscreen, that doesn't want to even hear the discussion we're about to have next about which sunscreens are safe and which ones
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
appear to be less safe. If you're just one of these people that does not want to put sunscreen on because you're very concerned about whatever chemical might be in sunscreen, well then consider that the physical barrier of an article of clothing or a hat or a bandana of sorts can indeed shield you from the sun to some degree, often to a great degree.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Juve.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And again, I don't think there's any controversy as to whether or not those are safe. As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for more than 10 years now, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast. To be clear, I don't take AG1 because they're a sponsor. Rather, they are a sponsor because I take AG1.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
In fact, I take AG1 once and often twice every single day, and I've done that since starting way back in 2012. There is so much conflicting information out there nowadays about what proper nutrition is, but here's what there seems to be a general consensus on.
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Whether you're an omnivore, a carnivore, a vegetarian or a vegan, I think it's generally agreed that you should get most of your food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources, which allows you to eat enough but not overeat, get plenty of vitamins and minerals, probiotics and micronutrients that we all need for physical and mental health.
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Now, I personally am an omnivore and I strive to get most of my food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources. But the reason I still take AG1 once and often twice every day is that it ensures I get all of those vitamins, minerals, probiotics, etc. But it also has adaptogens to help me cope with stress.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It's basically a nutritional insurance policy meant to augment, not replace quality food. So by drinking a serving of AG-1 in the morning and again in the afternoon or evening, I cover all of my foundational nutritional needs. And I, like so many other people that take AG-1, report feeling much better in a number of important ways, such as energy levels, digestion, sleep, and more.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So while many supplements out there are really directed towards obtaining one specific outcome, AG-1 is foundational nutrition designed to support all aspects of wellbeing related 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.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
They'll give you five free travel packs with your order, plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman. Okay, so before we dive into our discussion about sunscreens and the chemicals in sunscreens, Let's just take a moment and talk about vitamin D. Vitamin D is important for a great number of bodily and brain functions.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
As I mentioned earlier, most people get their vitamin D from the foods they eat. If you eat dairy, in most countries, the dairy is fortified with vitamin D. Many people nowadays supplement with vitamin D, anywhere from 1,000 IUs to 5,000 IUs. There are folks out there
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
who perhaps even take 10,000 IUs, seems a bit high for most people, but it's going to depend on how much sun exposure you get, the pigmentation of your skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
But there are a number of people, especially in countries where they don't get a lot of sun exposure in particular times of year, and maybe they're not eating enough dairy fortified with vitamin D, who would benefit from vitamin D supplementation. And many people find they feel better
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
when they supplement with vitamin D, but I encourage you that if you're going to supplement with vitamin D to probably start at the lower end of supplementation, like 1,000 to 3,000 IU, maybe 5,000 IU. Best would be to measure your vitamin D levels.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Juve makes medical grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there's one thing I've consistently emphasized on this podcast, it's the incredible impact that light can have on our biology.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Many people are surprised to find that even if they live in a part of the world where they get a fair amount of sun exposure and they eat some dairy that's fortified with vitamin D, that for whatever reason, their vitamin D levels are still too low and benefit from supplementation with vitamin D.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
The dermatologist that I spoke to told me that yes, even if you wear sunscreen or a physical barrier, okay, this is interesting. Even if you wear sunscreen or a physical barrier, when you get outside into the sun, it can still have a positive effect on your vitamin D levels. This was surprising to me, but then of course it makes sense. Sunlight is full spectrum light.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It's not just UV and short wavelength light. The ability for longer wavelength light to penetrate the skin is clear and those longer wavelengths can also impart a positive influence on the vitamin D pathway, okay? So if you're concerned about wearing sunscreen because you're worried that it's going to impair your vitamin D synthesis or metabolism in any way, probably no reason to be concerned.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now, if you're somebody who is in the beekeeper category, who's completely avoiding sun exposure for whatever reason, well, then you probably want to get your vitamin D levels checked and you may want to rely on supplementation or something of that sort.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
At the same time, because of variation in genetic background, there will even be some of you out there who are super anti-sunscreen, who are peeling your shirts off all the time, who are getting lots of sun exposure, who may, surprisingly, have vitamin D levels that are still low. That's rare, okay, for all the obvious reasons, but it could still be the case.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And indeed, some of the dermatologists that I spoke to said they occasionally have a patient like that. Vitamin D, as you may recall, is involved in a bunch of different things. It acts as a hormone. It's involved in calcium absorption. It's involved in some of the other hormone pathways.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now, in addition to sunlight, red light and near infrared light have been shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health, including faster muscle recovery, improved skin health and wound healing, even improvements in acne, reducing pain and inflammation, improving mitochondrial function, and even improving vision itself.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And I should mention that there's a study, I'll link to this in the show note captions, that shows that some amount of sunlight exposure to the skin, this is an Israeli study where they had people get several tens of minutes of sunlight exposure in the afternoon during particular times of year. They didn't have them going naked outside, okay?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
This was sort of like context and culturally appropriate. Skin exposure to the upper body and to the legs could induce increases in hormones such as testosterone and estrogen, which were correlated with, it wasn't causal, but it was correlated with improvements in mood, wellbeing, libido, et cetera. Well, some of that probably relates to testosterone and estrogen
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
synthesis directly again the skin as an endocrine organ okay there are certain elements within the keratinocytes skin cells that can literally communicate with some of the organs of the body that produce testosterone and estrogen even some of the glands pituitary etc this is through a number of different stations it's not necessarily direct but also through the sun's ability to impact the vitamin d pathway that then impinges on those testosterone estrogen and
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
things like luteinizing hormone pathways. We don't have time to go into all this now. I covered this in an episode about testosterone and estrogen. You have hormones such as luteinizing hormone, which then stimulate the gonads, the testes of the ovaries, to make testosterone and or estrogen.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
The skin is a not so obvious player in this whole thing, whereby external environmental stimuli, such as the availability of sunlight, which in most places in the world varies across the year, can stimulate more or less vitamin D production, luteinizing hormone production that can impinge on testosterone and estrogen production.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
These pathways are one of the reasons why when we get the right amount of sunlight, not too little, not too much, we feel better. We feel better because certain hormones are being produced at certain levels when we're getting that sun exposure. And when we don't get that sun exposure, we have lower levels of those hormones.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
This is well-established, and the study that I linked to in the show note captions, which I've covered in previous episodes, is but one example of that phenomenon. Okay, let's talk about sunscreens. Now, the reason I changed my tone of voice with this is that if you look on the internet, you will see claims that I don't use or believe in sunscreen. That is just false.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
worn sunscreen my entire life. I don't necessarily wear it every day. I don't tend to burn easily. I have some natural level of pigmentation in my skin based on my genetics, as I mentioned earlier. But as we talked about earlier, just avoiding sunburn is not going to protect me or anyone else against certain sun-induced mutations in skin cells and the aging effects that sun can have.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So I do believe in certain sunscreens, meaning I will put sunscreen on on certain days, on certain parts of my body. However, I do believe, now having spoken to multiple dermatologists and looked into the literature very deeply, that there are certain chemicals in certain sunscreens that are of concern.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
What sets Juve lights apart and why they're my preferred red light therapy devices is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning it uses specific wavelengths of red light and near infrared light in combination to trigger the optimal cellular adaptations. Personally, I use the Juve handheld light both at home and when I travel.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I don't mean that if you put these on once or even twice that you are going to suffer negative consequences. I mean, they are of concern, meaning we should pay attention to them. And when given the option, we should opt for the healthier choices. And in fact, there are known healthier choices.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
To make all of this very clear, I'm going to tell you what is very clear to the dermatology community at this point in time, okay? In June of 2024, here's what we know. There are two major types of sunscreens out there. Well, really three. We talked about physical barrier before. No one argues about a physical barrier. No one's worried about the chemical composition of physical barriers, okay?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
When we talk about sunscreen, so lotions, creams, sprays, et cetera, there are two major types. The first are organic types, which is essentially chemical sunscreens, okay? So when you hear organic sunscreens, that means chemical type sunscreens. And then there are inorganic types, which are sometimes referred to as mineral-based sunscreens.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Here's what most everybody seems to accept, that mineral-based sunscreens, meaning sunscreens that tend to include either zinc oxide or titanium dioxide, or both in some cases, are generally thought to be safe up to concentrations of 25%. 25% is a pretty high concentration. You can find sunscreens out there that have 25% zinc oxide or 25% titanium dioxide. They're rare to find, however.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
More often you'll find sunscreens that have 15%, 10%, 18% zinc oxide, sometimes alone, or in combination with titanium dioxide. You'll find some pure titanium dioxide sunscreens out there, while those are a bit more rare, right? A little bit harder to find. Here's the story.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Zinc oxide and titanium dioxide reflect back UV light, the short wavelengths of light that would otherwise potentially cause mutations in your skin cells at the level of the epidermis, okay, in the outermost layers of skin. Remember, short wavelength light doesn't pass very deeply into the skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Sunscreens containing zinc oxide and or titanium dioxide were engineered for that specific purpose, to reflect back UV light. This is very different than organic or chemical sunscreens, which contain certain compounds. These go by different names, oxybenzone, avobenzone. There are a bunch of these different chemicals that are contained in so-called organic or chemical sunscreens.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Those chemicals in general don't serve to reflect back UV light, but rather absorb UV light. Okay, so when they're applied to the skin, they're designed to absorb the UV light so that the UV light can't negatively impact the skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It's only about the size of a sandwich, so it's super portable and convenient to use. I also have a Juve whole body panel and I use that about three or four times per week. If you'd like to try Juve, you can go to juve, spelled J-O-O-V-V, .com slash Huberman. Juve is offering an exclusive discount to all Huberman Lab listeners with up to $400 off select Juve products.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Those chemical, again, chemical, AKA organic components within organic sunscreens, again, sometimes called chemical sunscreens, are designed to absorb UV light, mineral-based sunscreens, so-called inorganic sunscreens containing things like zinc oxide or titanium dioxide, are designed to reflect back UV light. Why am I telling you this?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Well, I'm telling you this because it's generally believed that the zinc oxide and titanium dioxide containing sunscreens are safe up to concentrations of 25%, whereas there is some, again, some concern about the chemicals within chemical aka organic sunscreens as potential endocrine disruptors. So disrupting things like testosterone synthesis, estrogen synthesis and other hormones.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It's not all just about testosterone and estrogen folks, other hormone pathways that many people, including some governing bodies and Agencies that assess the safety of different cosmetic and sunscreen products are concerned about. Now, how concerned they are depends on where you are in the world, okay?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So in Europe, they have different stringencies for what is considered safe versus unsafe or just of concern as opposed to in the US. Here's what every dermatologist in the US, because those are the ones I spoke to, told me, which is that it is advised that on children younger than six months of age, you do not use chemical-based sunscreens. Why?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Well, young skin, even the skin on the external part of the body, in children six months or younger acts more like mucosal skin in that it can very easily absorb things transdermally through the skin. However, even as we age, so into puberty, our young adult years, and even into our elderly years, there is still a capacity for things to pass transdermally through the skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Although, because of some of the additional barriers formed within the dermal and epidermal layers of the skin, things like extracellular matrix, the changes in collagen, et cetera, there is less tendency for compounds to pass transdermally through the skin. Now,
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
That just simply highlights the fact that if you are a very young person, or if you're applying sunscreen to a very young person, maybe six months or younger, but also perhaps older, depending on how careful you want to be, to avoid these chemical-based sunscreens.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
There is very little, if any, evidence that the mineral-based sunscreens are of concern for transdermal passage into the skin at concentrations of 25% or less. Meaning, Sunscreens containing zinc oxide and titanium dioxide are probably safe, or at least have been deemed safe enough that they are freely available on the market. And we are told that they are safe for people of all ages.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So if you are somebody who is concerned about the chemicals in sunscreen, most every dermatologist or chemist who works on sunscreens will tell you, well, mineral-based inorganic sunscreens are going to be your safer option if you're concerned.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
But get this, the chemical-based sunscreens, while some of the chemicals in them indeed can be quite scary when you read the literature, you look at some of these things like oxybenzone, avobenzone, and some similar substances Even at low concentrations have been shown to be endocrine disruptors. People talk about how the fact when they apply these sunscreens, they can taste them in their mouth.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
There's a lot of fear around these. And some of that fear is substantiated. When one goes and looks at the studies that have been done on these chemical-based sunscreens, you may find it interesting to note that the way these studies were done often involves having people apply a ton
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Again, that's juve, J-O-O-V-V, .com slash Huberman to get $400 off select Juve products. Today's episode is also brought to us by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for over three decades. Initially, I didn't have a choice.
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of these chemical-based sunscreens, like two full bottles of these sunscreens over the course of a very short period of time, and then have their blood drawn, and then it's revealed that some of these chemical components are within the blood.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So a big issue that's not often discussed because it's very difficult to control for in a natural setting, but is straightforward to control for in a laboratory setting, is how much sunscreen one is applying and how often. and across how many years of time.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So there's no real prescriptive that can tell you, hey, if you put chemical sunscreens on once, that's problematic, although certainly pay attention to that six months and younger, what is essentially a rule that I mentioned earlier, and do not put chemical-based sunscreens on really young kids. You might want to avoid them entirely, depending on how stringent you are about this stuff.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
But when it comes to chemical-based sunscreens, personally, I avoid them, but then it becomes a question of if you could only use a chemical-based sunscreen, you simply look at the label. Some of these have, by the way, zinc oxide, titanium oxide, and chemical-based components, okay? Keep that in mind. Some are purely mineral-based, some are purely chemical-based.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
But if you look at a sunscreen label, you know, okay, well, this is the only thing available on this very hot day with a very high UV index, and otherwise I'm going to get a burn. Well, if you're really concerned, then I would resort to a physical barrier.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
If you are less concerned, then you could perhaps tell yourself, okay, you get to put it on that day, but you might not want to use it every day. And you might want to use a small volume of it, right? Or maybe just on parts of your face or your ears or your neck that are particularly sensitive to sun. Okay, these are the things that need to be taken into consideration.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
But when we step back from all of this, all of the literature, including, by the way, some of the literature that assessed, and I'll put a link to this review, a review on the potential neurotoxicity of titanium dioxide nanoparticles. I'll get into this in a moment. It has been explored whether or not titanium dioxide is more risky than zinc oxide. Talk about that in a moment.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
But when you step back from all of this, Here's what you get. Physical barrier, no one argues about that. No one believes that clothing is dangerous per se when it comes to avoiding excessive sun exposure. Again, excessive relates to your skin tone, your background genetics, your activities, and where you are in the world and what time of year, okay? Very specific to your needs.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Very few folks are concerned about mineral-based inorganic sunscreen. So if you want to use sunscreen, as many people do, and you want to make sure that it's not an endocrine disruptor and it's not a neurotoxin or something else that's been raised for some of these chemical-based sunscreens, well then find a sunscreen that has 25% less zinc oxide and or titanium dioxide.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
If you were a bit more concerned about say titanium dioxide and some of the suggestive evidence, only suggestive evidence that maybe titanium dioxide is more risky than
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
zinc oxide, especially when it's in its nano form, the very small form that may indeed allow it for more easy passage through the layers of the skin, that transdermal passage, well then find a sunscreen that is purely zinc oxide sunscreen. And again, they always have other things in them, but what I mean is the only active ingredient in a zinc oxide only containing sunscreen is zinc oxide.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And then there are a bunch of other things that allow it to be a lotion, for instance, again, up to 25% concentration. Why would somebody not want to use zinc oxide containing sunscreen up to 25% and opt for anything else, you might ask, right? If that's considered safe. The reason is the consistency of the zinc oxide is it's pretty sticky and thick and it's kind of pasty, right?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It was a condition of being allowed to stay in school, but pretty soon I realized that therapy is critical to overall health. In fact, I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular physical exercise, which of course I also do every week.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Back in the 80s and 90s, some of you may recall that zinc oxide Sunscreens that would actually, you know, color the nose white. So you could really see it was really prominent on the face. They tried to turn that into a fashion statement. Didn't go over so well over time.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
But in any case, the addition of titanium dioxide to those zinc oxide containing sunscreens allow it to be a bit silkier so that it would spread on more evenly. And then you may say, well, why even put chemicals in sunscreen at all if there's risk?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
The reason why chemical-based organic sunscreens even exist is that they can come up with compositions of those sunscreens that are very silky and that could spread on clear over makeup and things of that sort. but there are these concerns about some of those chemical components as endocrine disruptors and potentially as mutagens that could cause other issues or any number of different things.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
You can find all sorts of concerns out there on the internet. Most of those concerns are not substantiated, but these chemicals can be problematic at high concentrations. And that takes us back to the point made earlier, which is that in the studies of those chemicals and the reasons in some cases being banned in certain countries and other countries carrying
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
warning recommendations, the amount of those chemical-based sunscreens that were applied was exceedingly high. So if you're wearing sunscreen very often, you're wearing a lot of it, probably best of year towards a mineral-based sunscreen. If you are concerned at all about the chemicals in chemical-based sunscreen, wear a mineral-based sunscreen and or use physical barrier.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And if you're somebody who just doesn't believe that sunscreens are safe whatsoever, well, You know, as far as I know, it's a free world. You don't have to wear sunscreen, but then I would say you need to be very aware of the fact that sun can induce the appearance of accelerated aging in the skin, right? That's an actual process that takes place. There's really no debating that, frankly.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And sun exposure can potentially accelerate or even give rise to certain skin cancers, and nobody wants that. Okay, before we move on to a discussion about what can be done to increase the youthfulness of our skin or the appearance of youthfulness in our skin, we need to have a bit more discussion about skin cancers.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
research tells us that excellent therapy includes three critical ingredients the first ingredient is a strong rapport between you and the therapist somebody that you can really trust and talk to about the issues that are concerning you second great therapy should provide support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance towards the issues you're facing and third excellent therapy should provide insights either directly from the therapist or that you arrive at that you would have
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Notice I said skin cancers, plural, because there are many different forms of skin cancer. Some of them relate to sun exposure, as we discussed earlier, others do not. And in fact, some of the more deadly skin cancers are independent of sun exposure. They can relate to genetics and to other factors. So the most straightforward story about all of this
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
is that approximately 80 to 90% of melanomas, which are skin cancers and they are very serious skin cancers that can indeed be very deadly, arise in what's called de novo skin. De novo skin is non-mole skin. Now, does that mean that you should not pay attention to the shape and any changes in your moles? No, you absolutely should.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
But for people who have naturally darker pigmentation everywhere or who have very few moles, then you aren't going to be able to use the monitoring of your moles as the only readout of potential development of skin cancer. And frankly, everybody should be thinking about these more serious skin cancers independent of moles or changes in moles.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Here are a couple of things that everyone should pay attention to. If you have a pimple-like condition,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
or you have any kind of spot on your skin that seems like it's an acne that's lasted more than a month, or you have an area that's seeping something that might look like plasma or pus or blood, and it persists over a long period of time, like a month or more, absolutely get that checked out by a dermatologist, okay? Don't wait any longer than a month, get it checked out.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
In addition, it's highly recommended that you go in and you get your moles checked by a dermatologist. And frankly, that you get all of your skin checked by a dermatologist at least once per year. This is going to really protect you against both the sun induced skin cancers and other forms of skin cancer. The most common form of sun exposure induced cancers are basal cell carcinomas.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And indeed those are less deadly than many of the melanomas, but they still can be exceedingly problematic and they can be deadly. So it's very important to get these checked out. Now there are websites and I'll provide a link to one of them in the show note captions for which you can look at a bunch of different examples of different moles and how they change over time.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And if you happen to have a mole that resembles the appearance of any of the moles in that image gallery, then you would be wise to go to a dermatologist right away because it could be, again, could be, cancer of some sort. You do not want to let these things linger for too long.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
At the same time, many people get concerned about one mole that didn't have an irregular border and then suddenly has an irregular border. There are a lot of different features that you'll learn from the website or if you talk to your dermatologist that relate to whether or not something is predicting skin cancer or has become skin cancer. It's not just irregular border, it's changes in size.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Certainly changes in pigmentation, vascularization, bleeding, any kind of seeping. There are a lot of different things there. So don't be alarmed at first appearance of one of these things, but do take it seriously. And keep in mind that there are things that your dermatologist can do to help prevent certain skin cancers.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So for instance, there's a growing trend now among dermatologists to suggest laser resurfacing of skin. That is a laser used to essentially disrupt that epidermal outermost layer, turn it over so that it regenerates because it can indeed regenerate to create new cells there. Keep in mind that UV light and other factors in the environment can cause mutations within that skin layer.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Sometimes they're caused by genetic factors, but often environmental factors like sun and chemicals and other things. And by encouraging turnover of that skin layer through laser resurfacing, which, by the way, may also increase the sort of youthfulness appearance of your skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So many people are motivated to do it for that reason, can dramatically reduce the incidence of certain kinds of skin cancer. In fact, The dermatologist that I spoke to who's an expert in derm oncology, okay, cancers of the skin, said that laser resurfacing can cause a 30% reduction in skin cancers because of this ability to rejuvenate that epidermal layer.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And that's especially true for areas of the body like the face, ears, neck, tops of the hands, et cetera, for which the sun often induces the most damage because those are the most exposed parts of the body on a regular basis. And by the way, this whole thing about skin cancer is not a trivially small number. It's a big number.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
otherwise not been able to arrive at had you not had that emotional support and strong rapport. With BetterHelp, they make it easy for you to find an expert therapist with whom you can have those three critical components. And because BetterHelp is carried out entirely online, it can mesh well with your schedule. You don't have to commute anywhere. You don't have to find parking.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
In the US alone, there are up to 4 million cases per year of what's called squamous cell carcinoma, one of these forms of skin cancer. So getting checked out by a highly qualified dermatologist on a yearly basis, maybe even more if you're really concerned about this, because you have a lot of familial, genetically inherited skin cancers, things of that sort is really highly advised.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the correct amounts and ratios and nothing you don't, which means no sugar.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now, I and others on this podcast have talked about the critical importance of hydration for proper brain and body functioning. even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, are critical for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons, your nerve cells. Drinking Element dissolved in water makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
To make sure I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of Element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I'll also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot, losing water and electrolytes.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
They have a bunch of different great tasting flavors of Element. My favorite is the watermelon, although I confess I also like the raspberry and the citrus. Basically, I like all the flavors. And Element has also just released a new line of canned sparkling Element. So these aren't the packets you dissolve in water.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
These are cans of Element that you crack open like any other canned drink, like a soda, but you're getting your hydration and your electrolytes with no sugar. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement spelled L-M-N-T.com slash Huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. Now with respect to everything we've talked about about sun exposure, sunscreen, and skin cancer, I'd be remiss if I didn't discuss a study that's often used kind of as a wedge or a weapon in the online debates about sun exposure, skin cancer and mortality.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And the title of this study is, quote, avoidance of sun exposure as a risk factor. That's right. Sun exposure as a risk factor for major causes of death, a competing risk analysis of the melanoma in southern Sweden cohort.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So the basic design of this study was to evaluate people's self-reported amount of sun exposure across many years, and then to correlate that with all-cause mortality, and then to relate it to different causes of disease, in particular cardiovascular death, compare this to smokers. Keep in mind that some of the people who were reporting their sun exposure were smokers, some weren't.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And the conclusion of this study that drew a lot of attention and continues to draw a lot of attention is the following. quote, and here I quote from the abstract, non-smokers who avoided sun exposure had a life expectancy similar to smokers in the highest sun exposure group. Okay, I'm going to repeat that.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
You can fit it into essentially any schedule. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com slash Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Roka. Roka makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are the absolute highest quality.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Non-smokers who avoided sun exposure had a life expectancy similar to smokers in the highest sun exposure group. So what many people take this to conclude is that avoiding sun exposure is as dangerous as smoking, okay?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
That's not the conclusion that I'd like you to take away because what this study basically shows is, and here I continue, quote, compared to the highest sun exposure group, life expectancy of avoiders of sun exposure was reduced by 0.6 to 2.1 years.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So you go, wait a second, can this really be true that people that are avoiding sun exposure have a lower life expectancy than people who get sun exposure? And indeed in this particular study, that does seem to be the case, but the interpretation of this is not completely straightforward. Here's what we know. Getting some degree of sun exposure appears to be good for life expectancy.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
That is true. But is it directly related to sun exposure? That's a critical question. And is the increased sun exposure that one gets, if you do get sun exposure, linked to other issues, in particular, the development of melanoma? As you recall, melanoma was even in the title of the study. So here's how I think we should think about this study.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It does appear that getting sun exposure is correlated with longer life expectancy, but there could be any number of different reasons for that. For instance, people that are getting regular sun exposure presumably are also enhancing activation of the vitamin D pathways, which is related to any number of different things. They no doubt are experiencing increased feelings of wellbeing.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I talked about papers that have substantiated that earlier, and frankly, We didn't even need a scientific study to substantiate that, although it's always great to have it. We know that being out in sunshine for some period of time each day, as long as we don't get burned in the sun, feels good. Why does it feel good?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It leads to the production of testosterone, estrogen, some of the endorphins that generally make us feel good. It is directly related to the pathways associated with dopamine release. There's a whole story there about seasonality, both in humans and other animals about dopamine synthesis.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
When we get sunlight, there's elevated dopamine and serotonin and testosterone and estrogen and feelings of wellbeing and libido. This is all well substantiated in animal models and humans. So getting sun exposure makes people feel good. When people feel good, they tend to be lower stress.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
When people are feeling good and they have energy, because there indeed is a direct relationship between sun exposure, especially to the eyes early in the day and our feelings of elevated mood and alertness, and energy, they tend to exercise more, walk more. And of course, if you're outside exercising more, walking more, cycling, swimming, you're also going to get more sun exposure.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And we know that exercise is strongly related to improved or extended life expectancy, okay? So the study basically says getting sunlight as opposed to very little sunlight is good for life expectancy, but it doesn't say get too much sunlight, right? Because, and this is interesting,
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I've spent a lifetime working on the biology of the visual system, and I can tell you that your visual system has to contend with an enormous number of different challenges in order for you to be able to see clearly from moment to moment. Roka understands all of that and has designed all of their eyeglasses and sunglasses with the biology of the visual system in mind.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It is very clear that the people who lived longer because they were getting more sunlight also tended to have more cancers, including melanoma. But this is a very important point. It's also the case that the longer one lives, the more likely you are to develop a cancer.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Okay, so as you can see, these studies that many people just draw one straightforward conclusion from, such as people who get less sun exposure don't live as long as people to get more sun exposure. Well, that's true, but when you get more sun exposure, very likely you're doing other things like exercise and feeling better that relate to living longer.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So it's very difficult, if not impossible to isolate one single variable, in this case, sun exposure as the key variable. However,
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I'm happy to go on record saying that we know from so many studies of animal models and humans that sun exposure, especially early day sun exposure, when the sun is low in the sky to set your circadian rhythm and late day sun exposure, okay, I'm not talking about middle of the day getting baked in the sun and sunburned or things of that sort, but around the time of sunset, especially sun exposure to the eyes is powerfully modulating your circadian rhythm to elevate daytime mood focus and alertness and improve sleep.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
both of which are strongly correlated with improvements in mental health, immune system function, feelings of wellbeing, enhanced cognition. I mean, there's this whole story about people with Alzheimer's and disruptions in circadian rhythms and sleep. So sun exposure to the eyes in terms of setting circadian rhythm, powerful, powerful improvement of life expectancy and immediate health.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Sun exposure to the skin, no doubt, very powerful, positive modulators of certain hormone and neuromodulator pathways such as dopamine, testosterone, estrogen, and so forth that make people feel good and do things generally that are good for them. Okay, generally, not all the things people do with elevated dopamine, testosterone, and estrogen are good for them. We know that for sure. But
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Getting some sunlight, that is some appropriate dosage of sunlight, especially to the eyes early in the day, don't stare at the sun, don't damage your eyes, but getting some of that sun exposure to your eyes early in the day and some to the skin, especially in the early and later part of the day, clearly is positively correlated with various health metrics in terms of mental health and physical health, and not surprisingly with lifespan.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So I mentioned the study because I do think it's very interesting, right? I think it's really interesting that people who completely avoid sunlight
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
are not living as long as people who get some sun exposure and some of this actually is on par with what's experienced with cigarette smoking i think something that everyone agrees is negative in terms of life expectancy and certainly is not good for a great a number of different systems within the brain and body.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Roka eyeglasses and sunglasses were first designed for use in sport, in particular for things like running and cycling. And as a consequence, Roka frames are extremely lightweight, so much so that most of the time you don't even remember that you're wearing them. And they're also designed so that they don't slip off, even if you get sweaty.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
But I think the study sometimes is used to highlight the wrong conclusion, which is that sunlight itself is extending lifespan. I think that that very simple conclusion can be taken too far.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
and can start to negate some of the equally important messages about excessive sunlight exposure causing certain problems as it relates to skin cancers, which we talked about earlier, as it relates to things that you can do in order to offset some of that risk with if I were to suggest, a physical barrier if you need it, a chemical-based sunscreen if you choose to use sunscreen.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And of course, that's an independent choice that each of us have to make for ourselves. Okay, let's talk about youthfulness of skin or the appearance of youthfulness in skin. Before I did this episode, I put the call out on social media for questions about skin and skin health. And I must say that the vast majority of questions related to this topic.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And if you think about it, you've seen this relationship in action before. When any of us is feeling fatigued or sick, the color, the tone of our skin tends to be a bit quote unquote off, at least for us, relative to what it normally is. Conversely, when we are feeling particularly well rested and vibrant and healthy, our skin reflects that. So today we will discuss the skin as an organ.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And it's a very interesting one because it relates to a lot of decisions that people are making about what to do, what to buy or not buy as the case may be.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And it is an enormous, probably hundreds of billions of dollars industry, if not trillion dollar industry over time, this business of devices, products, and procedures to try and reverse aging or the appearance of aging in skin, or even create de novo new synthesis of collagen in skin and other things to make skin look more youthful.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Okay, so if we step back from this whole area, we have to ask ourselves, what do we know for sure about what makes skin look youthful and what can be done to make skin look more youthful? And to understand the answers to those questions, we simply have to go back to the beginning of today's discussion for just a moment.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Remember that we have the epidermal layer of skin, we have the dermal layer of skin, we have the vasculature, the blood vessels and capillaries, you have the nerve inputs there. You have a bunch of different cell types in there, the keratinocytes. You have different proteins within those cells.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
like collagen, elastin, that over time can, yes, be mutated by things like UV rays from the sun, but that over time tend to lose their elasticity, which leads to wrinkles and sagging skin. You also have this issue of hydration of the skin, right? Skin has a lot of watery components within it, actual water within it.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And those watery components are what give it its kind of plump, moist look, smooth look, as opposed to desiccated, sagging, wrinkled look. to speak in extremes. And there are hundreds, if not thousands of different chemicals out there that dermatologists, as well as cosmetic surgeons, as well as just frankly manufacturers of products assert are going to be good for skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now, even though Roka eyeglasses and sunglasses were initially designed for sport, they now have many different frames and styles, all of which can be used not just for sport, but also for wearing out to dinner, to work, essentially anytime in any setting.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So let's talk about where there is a lot of evidence for certain things that you can do if your goal is to increase the youthfulness or the appearance of youthfulness in your skin. And one of the main ones is collagen itself. And now I have to admit, I was very surprised when I looked at this literature, but I was positively surprised. Here's why.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
As you know, there are various macronutrients present in foods. You can have proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. When we ingest proteins such as beef, chicken, fish, eggs, as well as some vegan sources of proteins like beans or lentils or tofu, things of that sort,
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
They contain different amounts of different essential amino acids, and those essential amino acids and other amino acids are used as the building blocks for proteins in our muscles, in our tendons, in essentially all the organ systems of our body. The lipids are also used for cell membranes, et cetera, okay?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
This has been discussed various times on this podcast before, people like Dr. Lane Norton, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, and others. It's well established that when these proteins are broken down in the gut, some of those amino acids go and serve for the purpose of tissue repair. Others are for the purpose of other things.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
What most people in the field of nutrition agree upon and what certainly I believe is that if you were to say, eat a little bit of liver, right? You might have a little bit of cooked liver or a little bit of skeletal muscle in the form of like a steak, that there's no selective trafficking of the amino acids that are broken down from the liver that you eat to your liver, right?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So when you hear that eating liver supports your liver, it may do that by the broad process of certain amino acids and vitamins and lipids, et cetera, serving your liver and other organ and tissue systems of the body, but not selectively your liver. However, when we talk about collagen, this protein that forms one of the most essential aspects of what makes our skin what it is, which is elastic
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I wear Roka readers at night or Roka eyeglasses if I'm driving at night, and I wear Roka sunglasses in the middle of the day anytime it's too bright for me to see clearly. My eyes are somewhat sensitive, so I need that.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
and to have some tensile strength where you can push on it, it returns to its original position, especially if it's well hydrated and makes our skin very youthful in appearance when we're young. And then as it degrades, when we get old, it makes it look less youthful, wrinkles and sagging and so forth.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Well, then why would eating collagen protein, which can come from any number of different sources, it can come from fish sources, it can come from, believe it or not, animal hoof sources, can come from any number of different sources, tendon, et cetera. Why would ingesting collagen be selectively trafficked to the collagen in our skin, right? That doesn't square with everything we know.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And yet, when you look at studies, including meta-analyses of studies where people supplement with collagen powders, and these powders typically come from fish or tendon, any number of different sources,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
When people do this and then measures are taken as to skin appearance, skin elasticity, there are a bunch of measures that can be done in humans in the laboratory to do this, you often will find studies that show statistically significant improvements in collagen composition and skin appearance, and even the appearance of reduction in wrinkles and so forth.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So this is an interesting exception where the ingestion of a particular protein that naturally exists in abundance in certain tissues, such as skin, but also other tissues like tendon, ligaments, et cetera,
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
seems to be assisting in either the repair and rejuvenation of collagen, or perhaps some other aspect of collagen synthesis that leads to improvements in collagen composition and the appearance of skin in humans. That's very interesting. And the study that I find particularly interesting is one that I'll link to in the show note captions.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I do not wear sunglasses in the morning when I'm getting my morning sunlight viewing for sake of setting my circadian rhythm, but I do wear Roka sunglasses often at other times throughout the day when it's very bright out. I particularly like the Hunter 2.0 frames, which I have as eyeglasses and now as sunglasses too.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It's entitled, quote, Exploring the Impact of Hydrolyzed Collagen Oral Supplementation on Skin Rejuvenation, a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. And the basic takeaway of this and other meta-analyses and the studies within this meta-analysis is that when people supplement with anywhere from five to 15 grams, okay, grams of hydrolyzed collagen per day,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
in particular in combination with vitamin C, it doesn't have to be a lot of vitamin C, that one can observe, okay, not always, but can observe some visible improvements in skin composition, meaning less wrinkles, even some reversal of wrinkles, less skin sagging, more youthful appearance, more kind of, let's just call it rebound elasticity of the skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I realize that's not the appropriate technical term, but the ability of a skin to bounce back from an indentation when you push down on it, as opposed to sitting down or sagging. So some pretty impressive results when one considers that what people are basically doing here is just mixing up some hydrolyzed collagen protein and then drinking that down once per day or so.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now that is not to say that you have to supplement with hydrolyzed collagen. Why? Well, collagen is also present in various foods. So for instance, drinking bone broth, beef bone broth, chicken bone broth is a rich source of collagen. You can go online and simply look up just by web search.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
You can just say, you know, what foods contain high levels of collagen, and you'll get a list of things back there. Hopefully a few of those are not just palatable to you, but you actually like, and you can start to include those in your daily diet, or you could supplement with hydrolyzed collagen protein. There are any number of different sources for these.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It's interesting that while indeed I don't believe, and there is frankly zero evidence for selective trafficking of amino acids arising from a particular organ source to that particular organ when you ingest it, it is interesting that consuming hydrolyzed collagen in the form of a supplement or deriving it from foods like bone broth
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
et cetera, does seem to be able to improve collagen synthesis or the appearance of skin, making it more youthful. For those of you that are interested in ingesting collagen peptides as a way to improve the youthfulness of your skin, should mention that the dosage is there, come in a range depending on the studies that you've looked at.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And the dermatologist that I spoke to said, if one decides to go down this route of supplementing or getting collagen from food sources, you want to aim for anywhere from 15 grams to 30 grams of collagen peptides per day. Okay, that's a bit higher than what was used in a number of studies, but you'll find studies that use 30 grams and that that whole process can be augmented, can be improved.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
through ingestion of 500 to 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C as well.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
If you'd like to try Roka, you can go to roka.com slash Huberman to get 20% off your purchase. Again, that's roka.com slash Huberman to get 20% off. Okay, so let's talk about skin health, and by extension, skin care. What should we all be doing to take care of this organ that we call our skin?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
But check the label on those collagen peptides that you might be supplementing with, because oftentimes they already include that 500 to 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C. I should also mention that the dermatologist I spoke to said that they like collagen protein supplementation, not just for the reasons discussed up until now, but that they liked them for a number of other reasons, such as the potential anti-inflammatory effects of collagen proteins.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
To be honest, I don't know what the exact mechanism of that is. Maybe if you get a certain protein threshold, inflammation is down. But anyway, that's still cryptic to me. But in any case, they did describe some of the potential mechanisms by which collagen ingestion can do its thing in terms of improving youthfulness.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It's broken down in the blood into dipeptides and tripeptides, which then are used within the collagen itself of the skin. This is the hypothesis. And that it can increase the chemotaxis, the mobility of fibroblasts, which make up some of the skin tissue. and give rise to the appearance of more youthful skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
There's also evidence that ingestion of hydrolyzed collagen peptides can improve the elasticity of the skin barrier on the outside, make it look nice and taut. If I guess we say nice, we're sort of passing subjective readout on this, make it appear taut through the increase of certain proteins unrelated to collagen, such as filigrees, elastins, et cetera. What about other peptides?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Okay, so this is a big topic nowadays, especially in the online communities. I did an entire episode of this podcast about peptides. Keep in mind that insulin is a peptide, Ozempic, what is essentially an agonist for glucagon-like peptide one. This is a very popular prescription drug now for the treatment of obesity and for the treatment of diabetes.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
There are lots of things that qualify as peptides. A peptide is simply a small chain of amino acids. A polypeptide is a bit, longer chain of amino acids, and then proteins are made up of amino acids, okay? So when we say peptides, that means many, many things.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
But these days, when you hear about quote unquote peptides, especially in online communities, generally people are referring to exogenously given, okay? So pills, or more typically injections of peptides that are designed to achieve some specific biological or physiological outcome.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And one of the more common of these peptides being used nowadays is one that I've talked about before called BPC-157, body protection compound 157, which is essentially a synthetic version of something found in gastric juice in all of us. It's known that certain peptides within the gut
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
that BPC-157 is known to mimic, or it actually is a synthetic version of that exact sequence or a portion of that sequence, can assist in tissue and wound repair of different kinds, tendon, anything involving fibroblasts. All of that has been well-demonstrated in vitro in a dish, So not in vivo, as well as in vivo in certain cases, but only in animal models.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now, our skin is a very interesting organ, as I mentioned earlier, not just because it protects all the other organs of our body, and I should mention it protects them not just by a physical barrier, but there's also chemical things, a chemical composition, a skin microbiome to the skin that also provides additional layers of support, such as neutralizing different bacteria that land on your skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
To my knowledge, there's only one study. And frankly, it's not a very good study at all on BPC-157 in humans. And yet a lot of people are taking BPC-157 either orally in the form of a capsule or pill, or more typically injecting it. What does it do or what does it likely do in humans? We know from animal models that BPC-157 increases angiogenesis, the growth of capillaries in blood vessels.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
We know this. It can accelerate wound healing by virtue of increasing fibroblast motility. For this reason, it's used post-injury in sports, It's used by people who want to build more muscle. It's used by endurance athletes. It's used for cosmetic purposes.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Anytime people are using BPC-157 for any of those purposes, it's likely that they're using it in part to increase the blood flow that's available to a given tissue and the repair of that tissue. Now, again, I do want to caution people that there is very little, basically no evidence in humans besides the anecdotal that people say they healed faster.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
What I do know is that anytime you get vascularization of tissue, you're going to get improved blood flow. So it all makes sense mechanistically. I also know that vascularization due to BPC-157, even if it's injected locally, into a given tissue is likely to occur globally throughout the body.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
This is why some people taking oral BPC-157 or injecting it, you know, just subcutaneously at the level of, you know, their stomach a little bit, you know, under the skin at the level of their stomach report faster wound healing, even in a distal limb or like a hand or a nerve injury in their foot or something like that.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
That also tells us that there's going to be increased vascularization of other tissues, such as skin, such as tumors, if tumors exist. So you need to be very careful.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I need to say that upfront as a cautionary note, because it is very clear that many people are starting to either inject BPC-157 or apply it in the form of a topical cream in effort to get more vascularization of skin in order to make that skin appear more youthful. And more and more products are out there that contain BPC-157. I can't in good conscious recommend those products.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I can only offer to you the likely mechanism by which they work, if they work, and also offer you the caveat that it is unclear that BPC-157 can go transdermally if it's applied topically. So if you put it on a, say, wrinkly portion of your face, like I've got crow's feet, crow's feet come from either aging, smiling, or both.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
You know, the crow's feet are the kind of wrinkles that extend out the corners of your eyes when you smile, or for me, because I'm, you know, 48, you know, and probably... I do that even when I don't smile.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
The logic would be that if you take a cream containing BPC-157 and you put it on there, that you'll get increased vascularization of that area, delivery of more growth factors and nutrients, and those wrinkles will either be halted in their aging progression or that they will reverse. That's the logic.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
To my knowledge, there are no clinical studies, and I'd love to know from you if you've tried these products. please put your experience of those in the comments on YouTube so we can get a sense of whether or not people are having good results with this. That, of course, is not a controlled study, but I'm very curious as to know.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Many of the products that contain BPC-157, by the way, also contain copper. Copper is a trace mineral. It's found in your diet. There is some evidence that copper is important for some of the collagen and other elements of skin synthesis pathways. And so the mechanistic logic and the biochemical logic is there on paper.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
There's a lot more to skin than you might realize. But to start off, let's just talk about what skin is at the level of its structure, some of the cell types, because in understanding that you'll be best equipped to understand some of the recommendations for skin health and skin care. The skin, like many other organs in the body, is a layered structure.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
However, it's also clear that ingesting too much copper can induce an inflammatory response and would lead to the exact opposite desired effect that people who are using copper and usually copper BPC containing products are taking them for, which is to halt or reverse the appearance of aging in their skin. Why am I going through this whole gymnastics of, you know, BPC-157 and copper?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Well, because nowadays many, many products are starting to include quote unquote peptides for skin rejuvenation. And most often those peptides are of the copper variety, of the BPC-157 variety, and oftentimes also with things related to collagen synthesis, sometimes collagen directly.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So you'll find oral products that one takes by pill form that are BPC-157, copper, and collagen or things that promote synthesis of collagen. You'll find ointments that are pure BPC-157, still unclear if those go transdermal. Okay, so this is still a very, very young science. And most of this is not being explored in randomized control trials.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
However, I know some of you out there are pretty experimental. You like experimenting with this kind of stuff. You like hearing what's working for other people. Here's what I suggest. If a sunscreen or a lotion or a pill or an injection is asserted to contain peptides to help with skin rejuvenation. Make sure you look and see which specific peptides are included.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Know the risks associated with BPC-157. It's uncertain risk about acceleration of tumor growth, but the mechanistic logic is just as strong for that with BPC-157 as it is for BPC-157 encouraging vascularization of any other tissue, muscle, tendon, ligament, or skin for that matter. So I'm not telling you what to do, just know what you're doing and understand the likely mechanisms behind it.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
in the absence of any of these randomized controlled trials. I will say in service to making sure that your diet and or supplementation includes enough trace mineral copper, copper has been shown to play a key role in DNA repair, which is a critical component of the turnover of collagen and other proteins in skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It has been shown to reduce so-called reactive oxygen species, so it serves as a so-called antioxidant. And this relates to what I just said, reduced inflammation, but too much copper is a problem. So I wouldn't run out and start supplementing with excessive amounts of copper. Please don't do that. But you want to make sure that you're getting sufficient amounts of copper from your diet.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And you can simply look up online what sufficient amounts of
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
copper are given it's a trace mineral and it's very likely that if you ingest any kind of supplement that is a multi-vitamin mineral supplement or a foundational nutrition supplement that includes at least some copper so it's likely that you're sort of quote unquote topped off in terms of the amount of copper that you need but very unlikely to be excessive amounts of copper but if you start supplementing with copper beyond that again you can induce an inflammatory response so
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It's a dosage kind of middle ground issue there. You don't want your copper too low. You don't want your copper too high. You want it right there in the middle. Okay, as I mentioned before, we will talk about other components of food that are great for skin health. And we will also talk about components of certain foods like advanced glycation end products.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So the very outermost layer is called the epidermis. The epidermis has cells in it. Below that, there are other cells that comprise what's called the dermis, or sometimes referred to as the dermal layer. And then beneath that, you have subcutaneous fat.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I don't know if you've heard of those before, but very interesting, not good stuff that you want to avoid if you can, especially if you're concerned as youthful looking skin and healthy skin and frankly health overall.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
But before we do that, I think it's worth paying attention to a few things that you can potentially take that can really improve the youthfulness of your skin for which there is excellent science to support it.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Okay, so when I spoke to board certified dermatologists who trained at excellent institutions, what people can do to improve the youthfulness or the appearance of youthfulness in their skin and that There specifically be peer reviewed studies to support their statements. They mentioned hydrolyzed collagen protein in combination with vitamin C. We talked about that earlier.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
They mentioned a bunch of do's and don'ts as it relates to sun exposure and nutrition, et cetera, some of which we've covered, some of which we are yet to cover, but will soon. And they mentioned supplementing with niacinamide. Niacinamide is a form of vitamin B3. It is also sometimes referred to as nicotinamide.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And I was told that when taken at twice per day at a dosage of 500 milligrams per dose for a total of one gram or 1000 milligrams per day, that niacinamide supplementation can increase the production of ceramides, which relate to the lipids in skin that improve the moisture in skin. And by the way, moisture in skin is a key component of the youthfulness or plump appearance of that skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And when I say plump, I don't necessarily mean outwardly rounded plump. I mean, the fact that the skin looks like the outermost layer of the skin, which you now know as the epidermis, is kind of taut and the skin looks hydrated and smooth at the level of its outer appearance, all of that.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
is improved by niacinamide supplementation, but that the supplementation has to be carried out for three to six months or more before that effect is noticed. Now, the origin of the niacinamide effect on the youthfulness of skin could also be related to the fact that there's evidence that niacinamide supplementation can reduce inflammation of skin overall.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
We haven't talked so much about the immune skin relationship, although as I alluded to at the beginning of the episode, this is a key relationship. But for those of you suffering from rosacea, from acne, So rosacea being a reddening of the skin. We're going to talk more about it later and specific things that can be done for it.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Acne almost always involves some reddening, often painful reddening of specific pox on the skin. Sometimes even the appearance of, you know, pus-filled bumps, this sort of thing. That niacinamide supplementation may also assist there because of the reduction in inflammation. And we'll talk all about the relationship between inflammation and acne.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now, of course, in different areas of the body, the skin, and as a consequence, these different layers of the epidermis and dermis and the fat layer below it, are of different composition and different thicknesses. Think for instance, about the thickness of the skin on your forearm versus the thickness of the skin on your belly versus the thickness of your skin on your eyelid, okay?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Regardless of whether or not you suffer from rosacea or acne or not at all, that niacinamide supplementation may benefit you. Also because niacinamide supplementation appears to balance the level of oil production in the skin. You need oil in the skin. You need oil down in those pores, but not too much. And that it can definitely help reduce the appearance of clogged pores.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And if you're concerned about pores that appear too large, this typically happens in the face, around the nose, on the upper cheeks, although other regions of the body as well, niacinamide supplementation may assist with that as well. There's also a number of people out there that are concerned with specific spots that they see as hyperpigmented spots.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So regardless of whether or not overall your skin is very light or very heavily pigmented, Supplementation with niacinamide can reduce the appearance of accumulation and maybe even the actual accumulation of melanin at particular spots, so-called dark pigmented spots that some people decide that they don't want for whatever reason, usually just cosmetic reasons.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Although there may be reasons why hyperpigmentation in a given area could relate to skin cancers. We talked about that earlier. Another reason to go get not just your moles, but all of your skin checked at least once per year. Now, if you decide to supplement with niacinamide, you have the option of either taking that 1,000 milligrams and two 500 milligram dosages per day.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
You also have the option of using any number of different topical niacinamide ointments or serums that exist out there. Keep in mind that many skincare products already contain niacinamide, so check the label. And there, the dermatologists tell me that to be effective, the niacinamide needs to be present at at least a two and as high as 10% concentration within those ointments or serums.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Keep in mind that many serums and ointments also contain what's called hyaluronic acid. Hyaluronic acid is a natural component of the skin that provides a physical substrate for holding in water, so moisture within the skin. It does a bunch of other important things too within the extracellular matrix and elsewhere, the regions between the cells, that is.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And supplementation with hyaluronic acid or ointments or serums that contain hyaluronic acid and niacinamide are pretty common out there. because of the already stated effects of niacinamide and the fact that hyaluronic acid can serve as what's called a humectant, something that serves to sort of barrier in moisture at the level of the skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Okay, so it gives that kind of plumping, moist look of skin that's characteristic of youthful skin as opposed to aged skin. The dermatologists and the cosmetic surgeons that work on faces,
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
that I spoke to, I told you I consulted with a fairly large and diversified group of folks in preparation for this episode, all agreed that supplementation with collagen, vitamin C, niacinamide and hyaluronic acid was something that they suggest to their patients.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
The other supplement, well, actually it's a prescription treatment most often that dermatologists recommend if the goal is youthful appearing skin. are things within the so-called retinoid pathway, such as retinol. Okay, many of you have perhaps heard of this. And it's a whole story related to the relationship between vitamin A and skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Okay, so tretinoin is the common name for it, although some of you may know it as Retin-A, and prescription drugs that are similar to that are basically derivatives of vitamin A. Why? Why are these used for skincare? Why are they used to increase the youthfulness of skin?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Well, vitamin A gets into skin cells and is converted into something called retinaldehyde, then into something called retinoic acid. Very important to know that retinoic acid is involved in a lot of different cellular processes, especially during neural development.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And as soon as you think about your eyelid, you realize, okay, this thing that we call skin varies tremendously in thickness, depending on whether or not we're at the scalp, the eyelid, the face, the chin, even neck versus chin, body, et cetera.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
This is why, and please pay careful attention to this, this is why women who are pregnant or breastfeeding should avoid taking these products because it can seriously disrupt the development of the fetus. And keep in mind that many times people don't realize they're pregnant for some period of time. So this is of paramount concern.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
We could have a whole discussion as to the role of retinoic acid in fetal development, but you don't want to tamper with that pathway. Very serious consequences can occur. So when retinoic acid gets into cells, it can activate what's called transcription factors.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Transcription factors bind to DNA, your genetic code, and can induce the transcription and translation of DNA into RNA and RNA into proteins of particular types. So think of transcription factors as sort of setting a menu of different proteins that ultimately will be formed.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
okay, by binding to DNA, and then you get DNA to RNA, RNA to protein, and you're getting a set of proteins related to a particular process. That's generally how transcription factors work.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And Retin-A, tretinoin, and things similar to that are going to induce the formation of collagen protein within skin, as well as other proteins that relate to the formation of de novo skin, new skin, and can replace old degenerated skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So the dermatologists that I spoke to were really bullish about the fact that, believe it or not, they felt that people starting in their 20s could very well, as long as they're not pregnant or lactating or planning to get pregnant, could take Retin-A or things similar to it in order to stimulate the production of more skin and look more youthful.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now, for people already in their 20s, by my rate, they're already youthful, but that they could initiate the use of these compounds at least in one's 20s and continuing on really as long as they wanted through life. And they told me about, quote, remarkable results. So I said, well, why isn't everyone aware of this? Why isn't everyone taking them?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Well, it turns out that these different compounds can also increase sensitivity to light, make you more prone to sunburn, to some of the other effects of light on skin, even from screens or from artificial light. So one has to be careful about inducing too much skin sensitivity to light of all kinds, not just sunlight. that they can also induce some redness or dryness.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So what we think of as skin, while it may have a designated set of layers that have particular names, can vary tremendously in terms of its overall thickness, and therefore its vulnerability to things like sunlight, which indeed can mutate the cells within the skin, cause them to have dysregulation of the expression of DNA and the production of other cells. We'll get into that.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So one has to get the dosage right, the frequency of use right. And they can be a little bit tricky to work with, but that if one can home in on the right dosages, the right frequency, et cetera, the dermatologist felt like this was one of the best things that one could do to improve the youthfulness or the appearance of youthfulness in one's skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now, I find this interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, I've heard of Retin-A, right? I've heard of these compounds before, but I hadn't heard about all these, you know, reportedly spectacular things like improved angiogenesis, vascularization of the skin. This is why people are taking the rather experimental, untested BPC-157 that I talked about before.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
The improved elasticity of skin, which somehow seems related to the ability of these compounds to remove degenerated elastin within the skin, to clear that out, as well as to induce de novo synthesis and even the number of different fibroblasts that are present in skin. So more new skin, clearing away of old skin, improved vascularization.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And while all of this sounds a little bit too good to be true, the mechanisms by which it's asserted to work all hold up. So that's always reassuring, right? Mechanism isn't everything, but it's really nice to see there. For instance, these compounds are known to get into the nucleus of cells, right? To impact gene expression. We talked about that before.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
You have receptors on the surface of cells. Okay, so cell surface receptors. You also have nuclear receptors and the ability of certain things, we call them ligands, but these are chemicals, right? In this case, you know, in the vitamin A pathway to get into the nucleus of cells and impact gene expression.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
This is actually how hormones like testosterone and estrogen change the way that people look so dramatically during puberty. They actually... They operate by binding to cell surface receptors. They also get into the nuclear compartment of the cell.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
They bind to nuclear receptors and they turn on entire genetic programs that cause, for instance, deepening of the voice or the growth of hair or breast tissue, et cetera. So these are powerful compounds. Now, I talked to a cosmetic surgeon, expert in face specifically,
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Remember cosmetic surgery is done for a number of different areas of the body, but for face specifically, who also specializes in these sorts of treatments for skin. And they've started using and are frankly quite confident in the use of retinoid esters that, can be applied to the surface of the skin. These things are available not by prescription.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
There's far less research on these sorts of compounds, but these compounds get enough positive support from the people that have tried them, reporting improved youthfulness of skin, et cetera, that some of them are becoming quite sought after and people, let's just say, are very enthusiastic about them.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And I will say that in discussing the various mechanisms of this with these cosmetic surgeons and some dermatologists, the logic holds up. So you're starting to see more and more of these. Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of today's episode, there is zero business relationship between me, the podcast, or any of these people that
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
have marketed serums or creams or prescription drugs for that matter, related to skin health and skincare. However, I have provided a couple of links in the show note captions of some of the different sources of these.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Obviously, if you need a prescription for something like tretinoin or something similar, because you're interested in this whole retinol, retin-A, vitamin A pathway story, you need to talk to a board certified dermatologist who could potentially prescribe that for you if they decide it's right for you.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
In terms of these topical ointments and serums and creams and things like that, I do provide a link to at least one source of those that uses the retinoid ester. Just keep in mind that these various ointments and serums do not yet have the randomized control trials to support them that some of the other compounds that we were discussing do have.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now I'd like to talk about things that one can do to improve the health and appearance of one's skin that don't involve taking anything or putting on any kind of ointment or serum or anything like that. And what I'm referring to is phototherapy.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So I just want you to think about skin as having these critical components of layers, epidermis and dermis below it. And by the way, within the dermis, is where you're going to find the blood supply, the vessels and capillaries that innervate the skin. Innervate simply means that supply or go to the skin. You of course have hair follicles and hair growing out of those follicles in many cases.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now at the earlier part of the episode, I talked about how different wavelengths of light like UV light and long wavelength light can penetrate skin to different depths and some of the negative, but also positive things that that can do. So for instance, we talked about UV light mutating DNA in cells and potentially causing cancers, accelerating the aging process and so forth.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
But as you also recall, long wavelength light, so-called red light, and near infrared light, which is even longer wavelengths of light, can penetrate deep into the skin tissue, so past that outer epidermal layer into the dermal layers of the skin, and can access the vasculature,
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
the neurons, some of the glands located deeper in the skin, and of course, the cells there, like cells in the epidermis, I should point out, contain things like mitochondria for which red light has been shown to be beneficial. Why? Red light and near-infrared light phototherapy has been shown to reduce reactive oxygen species and thereby to improve mitochondrial function in cells.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And that in turn has been shown to be beneficial for all the different processes within cells that involve mitochondria, which of course include energy production, but a bunch of other things too. So when I say that phototherapy has been shown to be beneficial for cells of the body, it's not just cells of the skin. In fact, a Nobel Prize was granted in the early 1900s
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
for the use of phototherapy for the treatment of lupus. So this is not a new technology. At the same time, While there are many studies exploring the use of phototherapy for improvement of skin health and appearance, most of those studies have fairly low sample sizes, but there are a lot of those studies.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And fortunately by now, there are a few meta-analyses and reviews that take into account lots of different studies using slightly different wavelengths of light applied to different portions of the face for different purposes, treatment of acne, maybe even putting red light near infrared light on one half of the face to have a so-called within-person control
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
the changes in skin or lack of changes in skin as the case may be between one side of the face and the other. I'll put links to some of these studies and some of the meta-analyses and reviews of these studies. One that I like in particular was published in 2018 entitled Light Emitting Diodes in Dermatology, A Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Of course, randomized controlled trials being one very powerful way to analyze the utility of a practice or a compound. It's not the only way to assess the utility of something. I know some people argue that they are very useful, but keep in mind in the field of medicine, we often have entire fields or even entire chapters of medical books that are based on case studies.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
For instance, we implicate the so-called hippocampus of the brain for its function in human memory, which it absolutely has. And that fact largely grew from one major case study that then exploded into a number of different animal model and then human studies later on.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So we all love randomized control trials, reviews of randomized control trials and the uses of their phototherapy for treatment of skin conditions and improving the quality of skin are wonderful and point to the fact that
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Phototherapy can indeed improve the appearance of skin in conditions like acne, can accelerate wound healing, can improve the youthfulness appearance of skin, but these effects tend to be somewhat mild to moderate when they occur. And certainly there are many studies that show no significant effect, no statistically significant effect.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
That said, I'm of the belief based on my read of the literature, and this is a literature I've spent a lot of time with, frankly, because I did an episode all about light and health, I've also been very interested in the use of phototherapy for the treatment of eye diseases and offsetting age-related decline in visual function. There's some interesting evidence there.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And then of course you have skin that does not have hair, the so-called glabrous skin, like on the palms of your hands, the bottoms of your feet, et cetera. So I don't want to give the impression that skin is the same everywhere. It varies in thickness. It varies in terms of the presence of hair. hair or lack of hair.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Again, mild to moderate effects, but that can be meaningful in the real world. And when I step back from all of the literature, here's what I see, and this is what I ran by a dermatologist to make sure that They thought that this protocol would be useful or not useful, right? I asked them, I didn't tell them, do you think this will be useful? Tell me yes, I asked them.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And what we basically converged on was that if somebody decides to do phototherapy, the use of phototherapy that involves long wavelengths of light, so red light plus near infrared light typically,
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
at a distance of about a foot to two feet from the light source, depending on the intensity of the light source, although that doesn't seem to be so critical, but one can't be across the room from the red light source, nor should one get right up next to the red light source so that there's a lot of heat generated from the red light source that one can feel.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
But at a distance of about a foot to two feet away at fairly high intensities, done for anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes, five to seven days per week on a consistent basis does seem on average to lead to improvements in the youthfulness appearance of skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Why this would be the case isn't exactly clear, but there are a number of different logical interpretations, such as reduced inflammation, improved mitochondrial function, all downstream of reduced reactive oxygen species, improved blood flow to that particular area because of the effect that long wavelength light can have on vasodilation,
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
sort of expansion as opposed to contraction of blood vessels and capillaries. All of this makes mechanistic logical sense. And the effects that one sees in these various peer reviewed papers, randomized control trials seem pretty good, meaning they are mild to moderate.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
None of them are sort of jaw dropping, like, wow, complete reversal of severe acting or, you know, massively accelerated wound healing. And we also, of course, have to take into account that many people who are doing phototherapy often are combining it with other things, sometimes, in today's era, like injections of BPC-157 or the use of hyaluronic acid or niacinamide, et cetera.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So these things aren't always being examined in isolation, but when we look at this literature, I think it's fair to say that there is now substantial evidence for the use of phototherapy for improving the quality of skin, and in some cases for
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
reducing the symptoms of acne, reducing the symptoms of psoriasis, basically any condition where improved blood flow, lowered inflammation, fewer or reduced oxygen species, improved mitochondrial function, delivery of nutrients, anytime some or all of those things are going to be involved, phototherapy makes logical sense. And so it's no surprise that we're seeing increased evidence
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It varies according to a lot of different parameters, including how much oil is produced in one region or another. But if you just know that the skin has an epidermis, an outermost layer, a dermis, or sometimes referred to as the dermal layer, which is below it, and then it has fat below that, and that the vasculature, right, the vessels and capillaries are at the level of the dermis.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
for phototherapy in these conditions. Now I've provided a link to the review of the randomized control trials that I mentioned a bit ago. I also provided a few links to some specific studies that show pictures of before and after, in some cases on two sides of the very same face. I did an entire episode about light and health. I'll also provide a link to that episode.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
We'll talk a little bit about the biology of skin so that everybody's on board the nomenclature of the different cell types in the skin and how they're affected by various things. And then we will discuss those things such as sunlight and sun exposure as it relates to We'll talk about sunscreens, of course, something that I know garners a lot of interest these days, and even some controversy.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And if you don't want to listen to or watch that entire episode, you can go to specific timestamps in that episode to learn about the uses of phototherapy for the treatment of skin, eye, and other conditions related to mental health and physical health. Now, keep in mind that when people hear phototherapy, they almost immediately think about a device. And that makes sense, right?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Red light and your infrared light. However, if you recall, There's this thing called the sun that emits a full spectrum light, which of course includes red light and longer wavelengths of light, okay? So just because you can't see those longer wavelengths of light, that doesn't mean they're not there, just like UV light. You can't sense UV light with your eyes.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
By the way, ground squirrels and some other animals can. It's thought to be the case that they have photoreceptors to detect UV because they actually, this is sort of strange, but interesting, you'll never forget this, that they'll take their urine and they'll spread it on their stomach with their little paws and they'll stand up and they'll like signal flash one another from across the,
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
prairie or whatever it is across the lawn to signal to one another so they're sending uvp signals across the lawn i'm not making this up i actually studied a little bit of this when i was an undergraduate but not at the level of the urine and the signaling at the level of the retina Any discussion about skin has to include a discussion about nutrition. Why?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Well, remember the fact that I mentioned at the beginning of today's episode that your skin and your immune system have a very intimate relationship. It's bi-directional. Your skin reflects the status of your immune system in many ways. And this is why many people with autoimmune conditions, things like lichen planus, you can look it up or if you, you know, mind,
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
particularly striking photographs, please don't look it up, but people that have autoimmune conditions that often manifest in skin conditions. We'll talk more about this in the context of psoriasis in a little bit, but anytime we're talking about the immune system or skin, we need to take into account the gut microbiome and nutrition.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So many people asked, what are the things that they should eat to have healthy appearing youthful skin? They also asked, what are the things that one eats that could exacerbate things like acne and what can one eat in order to reduce their acne? So let's just start off with the basics.
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And here I'm going to be fairly brief because I think we all know the big take-home message about nutrition nowadays.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
we hear over and over again, and we should pay attention to the fact that the vast majority of our food, well, I should say, if one desires to be healthy, mentally healthy, physically healthy, and a high-performing individual in any number of different things, cognitive, physical, or otherwise, we want to consume the vast majority of our foods from non-processed or minimally processed sources, so-called whole foods, so fruits, vegetables, if that's within your diet.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Some people include grains, some people don't. I'm not here to discuss that. meat, eggs, fish, chicken, and so forth, if that's within your diet plan or your nutrition, or if you're a vegetarian or vegan, you make the associated adjustments so that you can make sure you're getting enough protein and amino acids, but it's in keeping with your ethical and maybe your health goals.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Okay, so we're not here to discuss vegan, vegetarian, omnivore, of which I am, or carnivore, okay, that's not the discussion. I think all of those groups agree that getting the majority of your nutrition from non-processed or minimally processed foods is going to be best.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
They come up through the subcutaneous fat and into that dermal layer, but they don't reach into the epidermal layer, that outermost layer. And if you understand also that nerve endings, okay, the little terminals, as we call them, of neurons, nerve cells, also go up into that dermal layer, You've got temperature sensors in the skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And that of course, if you're human, sometimes you'll ingest processed foods, but really trying to avoid highly processed foods is critical. Now, with respect to the specific foods that can improve skin appearance and skin health, It's very clear that diets that are of the so-called low inflammatory type that don't spark inflammation.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So these would be things that sometimes are referred to as the Mediterranean diet or a paleo like diet. You hear these terms, but what are we really talking about? Mostly whole foods, minimally processed foods. Okay. And then there's variation depending on whether or not you emphasize or deemphasize meat and fish or emphasize or deemphasize vegetables, this kind of thing. Again, I'm an omnivore.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I love fruit. I love vegetables. I do like rice, oatmeal, and some pastas. I like a great sourdough bread. I like butter. I like olive oil. I like meat. I like fish. I think I am representative of most people out there because I eat most all those things, but I also eat the occasional croissant. I also eat the occasional slice of pizza. I don't eat a lot of that stuff, but I eat it now and again.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And then of course you have people that are super strict. What do we know about the relationship between specific foods and skin health and skin appearance? Well, anti-inflammatory diet. We've more or less spelled out what that represents without getting into too many specifics. And then there are the specific components within food.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So vitamins, minerals and micronutrients, as well as things like collagen present in bone broth that can be really useful to include. So one of the, I think, best accounts on dermatologic health and skin health and appearance on the internet is Dr. Andrea Suarez.
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She's a medical doctor, board-certified dermatologist, and she has a wonderful video that describes the various foods that one can eat to promote skin health and skin appearance.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And rather than repeat that entire video, because A, that wouldn't be right, and B, it already exists out there in excellent form, I'll just give a brief synopsis of some of the things that she suggests, because I entirely agree. And again, there's no need to be repetitive. and she does an excellent job. So she certainly mentions collagen and bone broth.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
She also mentions various sources of omega fatty acids that are often lacking in people's diets that they should pay extra careful attention to get. So things like walnuts, flax, fatty fish. I personally am a big believer in supplementing with liquid form fish oil. That's what I do. Why am I a big believer in that? Well, I don't tend to cook much fatty fish.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I love the taste of it if it's prepared right, but I don't tend to do that very often. So I use a liquid form fish oil or capsules, but the liquid form is generally more affordable. This was discussed in an episode that I did with Dr. Rhonda Patrick. So we can put a link to that particular segment in the show note captions.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It's also suggested that we eat a lot of leafy greens, so dark leafy greens. You're probably noticing a lot of these recommendations are kind of typical for what people describe. Anytime they're talking about nutrition for health, she highly recommends people get enough folic acid for the role that folic acid plays in
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
All of this becomes very important for our discussions of skin conditions, things like rosacea, things like acne, which sometimes can be painful or can be exacerbated by things like heat. They can be suppressed in some cases or even activated by things like cold.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
DNA synthesis and repair of skin cells, among other cells, and cell proliferation. And of course, we should get our colored fruits and veggies. So our oranges, our strawberries, the reds and oranges are critical out there. And she also highlights something very important that I want to reiterate, which is that we have a critical need for vitamin A for our skin health.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And this was covered, albeit through the lens of exploring the pharmacology of tretinoin and those retin-A compounds. But Vitamin A is crucial for a number of different processes within the cell types that make up skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
She appropriately cautions against supplementing with vitamin A because as a fat soluble vitamin, it's very easy to overdose vitamin A. If one is supplementing with too much of it, she recommends rather getting enough vitamin A from things like oranges, carrots, sweet potatoes. She recommends as much berry intake as is appropriate for someone and one can afford.
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The berries are so delicious, but they tend to be expensive depending on time of year, ingesting things like garlic because garlic has sulfur, which is key for collagen synthesis and repair. And she talks about the critical role of taurine. Anyway, she does such a terrific job of describing the nutrition for skin health and skin appearance. Those are just a few of the highlights.
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So I do encourage you to check out that video and her other content is spectacular as well. Again, she has an Instagram account, YouTube channel that are really wonderful.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So again, without doing a deep dive into nutrition, decide whether or not you're going to be vegan, vegetarian, omnivore, or carnivore, and then make sure that you're getting enough of the vitamins and minerals and micronutrients from your foods or supplement if necessary. But note that caution about vitamin A supplementation in excess.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And also make sure you're avoiding excessive amounts of highly processed foods. You know, I mentioned earlier these advanced glycation end products. These are things that are present in a lot of processed foods like crackers and chips and things like that. that make those foods inflammatory. So you're getting the theme now.
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Inflammation is bad, not just for the skin, but for all organ systems of the body. It's not just about the high density of calories and the high density of taste present in highly processed foods. Those are problematic, but a lot of the issue with these highly processed foods is the high heat conditions used to make those foods stable on shelves or stable in packaging over time.
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So there's a whole discussion to be had here that frankly, I don't think Amy had enough, but that is outside the scope of today's episode. The point is that when these highly processed foods are basically made, right, they're constructed, they involve the interactions between sugars and proteins and fats at high heat that make them stable on the shelf or in packaging.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Okay, so if you just understand that there are three layers, epidermis on the outside, dermis below it, subcutaneous fat, and that skin varies in thickness and that nerves, that is nerve endings and blood vessels and capillaries are within the dermal layers of the skin, well, you're going to be very well equipped for the rest of today's discussion.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And those can be very inflammatory. And that can show up in the form of reactive skin. It can make your psoriasis worse. Yes, it can make your acne worse. It can make your skin more tender and painful. It can make your skin basically more reactive to some of the underlying predispositions you might have, either because of genetics or other things you're doing or not doing.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Maybe you're going through a particularly stressful time. Maybe you're getting a little bit of extra sun and you're eating more highly processed foods and those things are combining and making your skin break out or flush more than it would ordinarily. Again, there's so many reasons to eat most of your foods from non-processed or minimally processed sources.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And of course, and now I sound like a broken record because you can hear this all over the internet, ingesting foods that are excessively high in sugar, excessively high in sugars combined with fats, just not good to do. Pro-inflammatory, it's going to cause all sorts of issues.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And we're going to get into this more as it relates to acne in particular, because as you probably know, when you ingest foods that are high in sugars or even just carbohydrates generally that also contain a lot of fats, and in particular when those foods are highly processed, well, then you initiate an inflammatory response and you often can initiate additional things happening in the pores of cells that can start to really aggravate acne and cause more acne.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
This has to do with the whole insulin pathway. So when we talk about acne, I'll talk about diets that create a high glycemic load. We're not necessarily talking about the glycemic index of food. You may know that when people measure the glycemic index of food, they're looking at the blood sugar response after eating that food typically in isolation and not in combination with other foods.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
What I'm talking about, is eating combinations of foods that induce high levels of insulin, high levels of blood glucose, that then lead to all sorts of things in the hormone pathways and cell growth pathways that exacerbate acne. So we'll get there in a moment, but I think the take home message around nutrition is pretty clear. So much so that I don't want to spend any more time on it.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
We all know what the best nutrition really is for us, regardless of whether or not you're vegan, vegetarian, omnivore or carnivore, it's nutrition. non-processed or minimally processed foods representing probably anywhere from let's say 75 to 100% of your food intake, depending on how strict you want to be.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And then sure, make some room if you want for some processed foods, but just know that those advanced glycation end products and
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
the high glycemic load that comes from those processed foods can really exacerbate inflammatory responses in skin and set forward a whole domino set of issues related to hormone pathways and cell growth pathways that make everything, acne, psoriasis, and overall appearance Yes, your skin will appear to age faster.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And on the positive side, most of the foods that we think of as healthy and anti-inflammatory are actually quite delicious. So enjoy. Ah, and I forgot to say what's absolutely clear. You know that myth that they told us when we were teenagers, that eating a lot of fried food would make you break out, would make your skin worse? Guess what? It's true.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I'll throw in some additional information about oil production within the hair follicle and a few other things like extracellular matrix, which as the name suggests is extracellular, it's outside where the cells reside, but gives it its composition as either plump and moist appearing on the outside, or it can be kind of sagging and wrinkled and dry appearing.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
That high heat preparation required for creating things as delicious as the donut or French fries, right? There's a reason people love these foods. They're so delicious. They do cause problems. They're pro-inflammatory. Does that mean you can never have a French fry? No. You decide what's best for you, but know what you're doing.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
As a segue to talking about acne, we need to talk about the gut microbiome. And this is a direct outgrowth of our discussion about nutrition. Here's the simple takeaway that I believe everyone should follow, not just for sake of healthy appearing skin, but also for sake of
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every organ and tissue system in your body, which is, the data clearly show that ingestion of sufficient amounts of fiber, so prebiotic and probiotic fiber, so fruits, vegetables, sometimes this can also come from grains. Some people will supplement with additional fiber if they feel they need it. as well as ingestion of low sugar fermented foods. I've talked about this before.
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So regular listeners of this podcast may have heard this. Things like kimchi, sauerkraut, the sort of sauerkraut that has to stay in the fridge. So not the stuff that's stable on the shelf at room temperature. Anything containing a brine, that salty brine. So pickles, but not the pickles that are stable at room temperature, the ones that have to be
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kept in the refrigerated section of the grocery store. These low sugar fermented foods are powerful enhancers of the gut microbiome. And when the gut microbiome is healthy, you have reduced overall inflammation in the body. This is often reflected at the level of the skin and basically skin health and the youthfulness appearance of skin is enhanced, okay?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
This can also help with conditions like acne or psoriasis, especially in conditions where there's a direct immune system skin relationship that we'll talk about more in a little bit. Okay, so I highly recommend people have anywhere from one to four servings of low sugar fermented foods per day, or try and enhance the health of their gut microbiome generally.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Maybe you take a pill probiotic, although those can be very expensive. There's a little bit of data suggesting that if you chronically take pill probiotics that yield very high levels of bacteria, well then maybe there's some associated
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
brain fog, that's a little unclear, pun intended, but they are very expensive, they have to be kept refrigerated, and let's face it, low sugar fermented foods, if you find the ones that you like, are really great to ingest because they're tasty and they're good for you. Now, why am I talking about this? In part because we keep coming back to inflammation as a general issue for skin health.
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And that points us also towards some specific do's and don'ts as it relates to lifestyle. Let's face it, pun intended, if you sleep well, so maybe you need six hours, maybe you need seven, maybe you need eight, maybe you need nine, but if you sleep well on a consistent basis, your skin is going to look so much better, so much healthier, more vibrant than if you are not getting enough sleep.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
If you drink alcohol and you wake up the next morning, you know your skin's going to look puffy. It's not going to look good, but Many of you can ingest alcohol without issues. I've done an entire episode about alcohol. Yes, it's a poison. Up to two drinks per week for adults who are non-alcoholics is probably safe.
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Zero is better than any, but let's face it, alcohol is going to exacerbate most skin issues. This is just clear from the literature.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
All of that relates to the different components of proteins and other things within those skin layers. But if you understand what I just told you, even at a crude level, if you can just imagine it just a little bit, those three layers, you're going to be very well equipped for the rest of today's discussion. I should also mention that there are glands within the skin.
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Doesn't mean you never have a glass of wine, doesn't mean you never have a beer or a cocktail, if that's your thing, but alcohol consumed in excess, and it doesn't take much to get there, is going to cause sleep issues, microbiome issues, so indirectly and negatively impact the skin appearance and health, and indirectly and negatively impact the health of other tissues in your body.
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But it's clear some of that is reduced to increase inflammation, some is related to decreased sleep quality or duration. So get great sleep, avoid alcohol in excess, maybe avoid it altogether. Drink plenty of water. This sounds like such basic advice, but proper hydration is key. Get enough water and electrolytes. It absolutely will impact your inflammation levels by reducing them.
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It absolutely will impact your skin health and appearance in a positive way. So these are just basic things that I'd be remiss if I didn't mention. The other one is smoking and nicotine from non-smoked sources. So it's very clear that smoking, vaping, dipping, or snuffing is bad for skin appearance and health. Bad, bad, bad. Every dermatologist said this. Why?
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Well, with smoking, you can imagine why, okay? A lot of carcinogens and toxic end products generated from smoking, even from vaping. Yes, even from vaping, it will make your skin age faster. That's clear. But it's also the substance itself. Why all of those things, in addition to increasing inflammation, nicotine itself is a vasoconstrictor.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So you're doing the exact opposite of what you want when it comes to skin health and appearance. And that's why people take things like BPC-157. That's why people take nicotinamide. That's why people are trying to improve the hydration status of their skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So if you're somebody that's vaping nicotine or even taking nicotine in some other form, pouch or smoking nicotine, and you're interested in having youthful appearing skin, you are really shooting yourself in the face. And as we all know, our emotions impact the appearance of our skin and yes, it can exacerbate so-called breakouts. And we'll get to that in a moment as to what the exact pathway is.
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But I've done entire episodes about controlling your stress. We have a master stress episode that talks about real-time tools that you can use, like the physiological sigh, provide a link to a clip about the physiological sigh. It's the fastest way that I'm aware of to reduce one's levels of stress. This is something my laboratory has studied in detail at Stanford.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
There are also things you can do, and we're all aware of what they are, proper sleep, meditation, non-sleep deep rest. We'll provide a link for that. All things that we can do that are zero cost, very minimal time investment. Physiological side takes about 10 to 15 seconds. Non-sleep deep breast, AKA yoga nidra, sometimes called, takes anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes per day.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And that reduced stress can dramatically improve not just the health, but the appearance of your skin. And it makes perfect sense as to why that is.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
The stress hormones such as cortisol, but other hormones too, such as adrenaline, when they are chronically elevated because of the fact that adrenaline impacts vasoconstriction in the skin, it's going to reduce blood flow to the periphery, to the skin. It can cause all sorts of issues at the level of nerve endings that can lead to, believe it or not, enhanced flushing when we're under stress.
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This won't be surprising to most of you. Those glands will produce oil, either more or less, depending on certain conditions. And there are things that live on the skin, on that epidermal layer and within it that we call microbiota. You've no doubt heard of the gut microbiome, right?
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This is why we measure the galvanic skin response. So not just sweating, but also blood flow and other things to the skin when we are studying stress. Okay, so direct relationship between stress and skin appearance. Learn to control your stress.
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Stress is part of life, but learn to control your stress in real time and through tools like non-sleep deep rest that are zero cost that can help you reduce your overall levels of stress, get great sleep, Don't use nicotine. If you do use nicotine, know what you're doing. Maybe use it sparingly and please don't smoke or vape it, dip it or snuff it.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
There are other forms and I don't recommend those forms because they're very addictive. And keep in mind that things that improve blood flow, reduce inflammation, give you lower stress, better sleep, all of that is going to make you look more youthful. It's not an imagined effect, it is real. Let's talk about acne. Acne is very common.
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It impacts anywhere from 80 to 90% of young people at some point. Some people get very bad cystic acne, you know, deep acne in the cheeks, on the back of the neck, the back. It can be very uncomfortable, very painful. Some people only get the occasional pimple, but they get them very deeply. They're very painful. And look, nobody likes acne. likes the appearance of acne on themselves.
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It can be very distressing for people. It can cause additional stress that then feeds back in terms of inflammation. And I guess my first request, I suppose, I can't tell people what to do and never do, but for people that have acne, be compassionate, okay? Young people, be compassionate. I remember when I was younger, some of the kids with bad acne got teased and it really upset me.
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That's really frustrating, especially when going through puberty, because there's this hormonal component to acne. Now, fortunately, there are things that we can do for acne. I'll provide a link to one of the major sources I used for researching this episode.
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I also, of course, spoke to dermatologists, one of whom really knows an exceptional amount about acne and its relationship to the immune system. The paper that I'm referring to now is a systematic review and network meta-analysis of topical, pharmacological, oral pharmacological, physical, and combined treatments for acne vulgaris, which is the technical name for acne.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
There are a lot of things that impact acne. Let's just briefly talk about what acne is. Anytime you talk about acne, you're usually thinking about pus or oil. That's called sebum. The sebum accumulates in essentially the follicle around the hair. This also occurs on non-hairy skin or where they're just tiny little hairs
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The existence of trillions of little micro bacteria that live within your gut that provided they are varied in their composition and of the right sort. really support your immune system and other aspects of health, including brain function and health?
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That's why it's very unusual to get acne on say the glabrous skin of the palms. I suppose it could happen, but it's very rare. At any given moment, 10% of people worldwide will have acne. As I mentioned, up to 90% of young people have acne. So very common, very distressing. The accumulation of that sebum in the follicle can be due to a number of different things.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Some of it can be related to androgens, things like testosterone, increasing the amount of sebum that's produced. This is why you often see acne during puberty. In addition, the anabolic, the pro-growth effects of androgens such as testosterone, and by the way, these occur in both males and females because both males and females have testosterone and estrogen.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
The androgenic effects of testosterone can also cause hypertrophy growth of the hair follicle, right? So an increase in the number of keratinocytes, the cells in and around the follicle, which can compress that and hold some of that additional sebum beneath the surface. And that's why you're getting a swelling of what looks like a pimple or a cyst.
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So there's the potential for a hormonal influence on increasing acne. Now, if someone's going through puberty, you just have to deal with that increase. Now, if there's a sudden increase in acne when one is post-puberty, you may want to look at levels of androgens that are being produced.
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And nowadays with increasing numbers apparently of things like polycystic ovarian syndrome, which in part relates to increases in androgens, this is becoming an additional concern. So getting a quality blood test, looking at androgen levels over time can be very beneficial for both males and females. Now, in addition, insulin, that is related to our diet.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So insulin and glucose generally go up together or down together, depending on whether or not we're ingesting foods or amounts of foods that greatly increase our insulin and blood glucose. So insulin is part of an anabolic pathway as well, a cell growth pathway, pro-growth pathway, we should call it, that involves mTOR, mammalian target of rapamycin, that is a general growth signal for cells.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So this occurs in the eye, this occurs in the liver, mTOR is involved in growth of cells of all kinds, including cells within the skin. When our diet, increases the amount of insulin and glucose to a degree that is in excess of some threshold that's going to be different for everybody, depending on your activity levels, your metabolism, the way you manage insulin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Well, you also have a skin microbiome, that is the existence of microbiota on the outside of your skin that serve as a barrier to infections, but that also provide things that are nourishing to the skin and give it that vibrant look that most people want. And by cleansing your skin in particular ways,
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
When that happens, you get increases in mTOR that then can feed back on those androgen receptors, increase the levels of things like testosterone further, that then feed back on the production of increased sebum, okay, that oily stuff, increased keratinocyte proliferation, and you get more acne.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
In other words, having a diet that has a high glycemic load or evokes a large insulin response can be problematic. So what to do? Well, we talked about it before. You want to eat mostly non-processed, minimally processed foods. You definitely want to exert portion control, right? You don't want to eat much sugar or sugar in excess. You don't want big spikes in insulin and blood glucose.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
You want to avoid an inflammatory diet. So again, fewer, if any, highly processed foods because of those glycation end products that we talked about before. And on the positive side, if one exercises something like say intermittent fasting, and here I don't necessarily think young people, especially people going through puberty should do this because they're growing, they need nutrients.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So you have to strike that balance between getting enough nutrients and not overloading the system with insulin, glucose, and calories. But things like intermittent fasting could be useful or making sure that if you ingest complex carbohydrates, as I mentioned, I do, okay? I'm an omnivore. that you don't do it in excess to the point where you're getting big spikes in insulin and blood glucose.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
All of this, the dermatologists tell me, can help serve to reduce acne. And while it might seem indirect, this relationship between testosterone and sebum accumulation, the relationship between insulin and mTOR and increased testosterone and sebum accumulation and growth of the keratinocytes, these are real pathways that have been established.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And some of those are discussed in detail in the review. So much so that there has been the exploration of specific foods, in particular dairy and whey. You know, we hear a lot about ingestion of whey protein.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It's a very high quality protein, high bioavailability, high in the amino acid leucine, which for those of you that are interested in muscle building and repair, there's a lot of discussion about leucine being a critical component there. You want leucine. But it does appear that people that overconsume whey, people that overconsume dairy can run into issues.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now, does that mean you shouldn't consume whey protein? No, I take whey protein. Do I suffer from acne? No. If I did, would I reduce my whey protein intake? Well, I might decide to run a bit of an experiment where I reduce the amount of whey protein that I eat for a little bit and see how that goes. Should I reduce the amount of dairy I ingest? Ah, well, here's where things get interesting.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
that is washing it with certain substances and avoiding other substances, you can support as opposed to diminish that skin microbiome. Okay, so to start today's discussion, I want to jump right into the deep end, meaning into one of the more controversial issues related to skin health and skincare out there right now, which is sun exposure and sunscreen.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So in discussing this with a dermatologist who also happens to know a lot about nutrition, they told me something very interesting. A lot of people think that high fat dairy will exacerbate their acne, but here's the situation. Nonfat and low fat dairy has emulsifiers is actually based on work. I believe some of which was done at Stanford that can spike insulin more than full fat dairy.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So some people in an attempt to reduce the amount of acne they're getting will move from high fat dairy or full fat, I should say, to nonfat milk or nonfat dairy or low fat dairy, and their acne will actually get worse. And that could be because of the insulin spike associated with some of the emulsifiers in that nonfat and low fat dairy.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So what this means is that you don't have to avoid dairy altogether, but you might be better off ingesting full fat dairy. You might be best off not ingesting any dairy at all. Maybe you want to run that experiment on yourself and just see what works and what doesn't work or if there's no change at all.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
In addition, if you're consuming a lot of fried foods, so those French fries, you're ingesting cheeseburgers and things of that sort, it may not be so much the fat content of those meals, but rather the big insulin response that occurs when we ingest high fat meals in combination with things like sugary milkshakes or fried foods.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
like French fries and things of that sort that's leading to the acne by way of increased inflammation. So there are a lot of different pathways, inflammation, androgens like testosterone, insulin leading to increases in testosterone and inflammation. A lot of pathways converge. to exacerbate acne.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And oftentimes it's just the removal or even just the reduction of some of this food intake or types of food intake that can really lead to big improvements in one's acne. So all of these things combined to support lower inflammation, appropriate amounts of sebum production, because you do need sebum production.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
You do need keratinocytes in and around the hair follicle, but you don't want too many of them. and so on. But what can be done to directly address acne? Well, there are a number of different prescription treatments that your dermatologist can suggest. But one thing that all the dermatologists agree upon is first of all, getting adequate sleep, reducing stress,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
taking care of your gut microbiome, the nutrition recommendations that we've been talking about up until now. But also, get this, this is interesting, not over-cleansing. A lot of people with acne will start to wash their face constantly and will often use harsh cleansers that can exacerbate that acne, either by virtue of removing some important skin microbiome components
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
that then lead to even other infections like fungal infections or additional inflammation, because you're removing that microbiome barrier. But they all recommend regular cleansing of the skin, usually two or three times per day, but not in excess of that, using a gentle, unscented, unfragranced, cleanser. Okay. So there are a number of different types of these.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I personally, my, basically my entire life that I, at least as far as I can remember, I've always used unscented, unfragranced Dove soap. Okay. I have no relationship to Dove soap. I'm sure people out there are going to say, oh my goodness, you know, it contains a bunch of things that are bad for you, but that's what's worked for me. and not the liquid form, just bar soap.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And there are things like Cetaphil. These are some brand names. And there are a bunch of other more sophisticated, gentle cleansers that one could use. There are also a lot of products out there that contain what's called salicylic acid. Okay, this is often as a clear fluid that you put onto a cotton ball or a tissue, and then you spread on the face.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now, it makes sense why this would be such a heated issue, no pun intended, because most everyone is exposed to the sun or has the opportunity to be exposed to the sun to some degree or another every single day, even on cloudy overcast days.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It's very important, very, very important that if you're going to use these products, that you do it on clean skin. That is skin that's been cleaned with a... combination of mild zero-fragrance soap and lukewarm water, okay? Because of the relationship between inflammation and acne, that's what gives it its red appearance.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
You don't want to use extreme temperatures of especially hot water when washing your skin. So lukewarm water, mild soap, And then, and only if it's been recommended by your dermatologist, the salicylic acid. Salicylic acid comes from the same class of drugs as aspirin. So it tends to reduce keratinocyte stickiness, right? The extent to which those cells stick together. Why do I mention aspirin?
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
You may have heard that some people will take aspirin to reduce the stickiness between their platelets in an attempt to improve heart health. We'll cover that on another episode at some point. But salicylic acid reduces the stickiness of the keratinocytes so it can lead to less clogging of the pores by accumulation of keratinocytes, or I should say by less accumulation of the keratinocytes.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
and it can reduce swelling in and around the area related to the acne. Sometimes if people get an acne pimple, especially if they have an event or they don't want to be seen with that pimple, the use of a little bit of corticosterone cream put on there can reduce the redness or swelling. The dermatologists tell me you should absolutely not pop your pimples.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Part of the problem when you pop a pimple, I know there are entire videos about this online. I know, please don't go look at them. The whole community is around this, it's super gross. But I know people find it very satisfying in some cases to pop these pimples, get the infection out.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
While there are certain use cases for that, where someone has an infection, it just absolutely needs to get out, then be cleaned, then covered. with a bandage and maybe some topical antibiotic that would be a use case for that. The dermatologist practically begged me to tell you, don't pop your pimples because A, they will go away in not too much time if you leave them alone.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It's also the case that we've learned a lot in the last 10 years or so about how different sunscreens and their components may be good for us, may be less good for us. And today we're going to talk about what is known and what is still unknown. But before we do that, we need to take a step back and look at the context in which all this controversy is happening.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And B, you can always put a little bit of corticosterone cream on top of them to reduce the redness or swelling. But most importantly, they tell me that when you pop those pimples, what ends up happening is you get a
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
a physical disruption of that area, which to you might just seem like, okay, whatever, it turns a little bit red and that's transient, but you get the influx of what are called matrix metalloproteases.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
These are enzymes, and remember, anytime you hear an ACE, it's usually an enzyme, matrix metalloproteases that then and go eat at the extracellular matrix, and then you can get an indentation scar that is permanent. So if you're concerned about the appearance of your skin, avoid popping those pimples. I know it can be hard to do, but really try and avoid popping
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It can lead to scarring because of the matrix metalloproteases and the eating away of the extracellular matrix. Keep the area clean, cover it up if you need to, get some corticosteroid cream on there if you want to reduce the redness.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
If it's really bad and you have some big important event, like you're getting married tomorrow and it's right on the tip of your nose or something like that, then you can potentially go to the dermatologist and get it injected with a corticosteroid to reduce the redness in a more potent way. But they did ask that I ask you to please not pop your pimples.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And if you're somebody that suffers from acne, I'd like you to know, I provide a link to a paper in the show note captions entitled acne and diet, a review of pathogenic mechanisms.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And I also provide a link to the review I mentioned before that covers all of the other aspects of treating acne, topical, pharmacological, oral, pharmacological, physical, and combined treatments for acne vulgaris, because again, I do sympathize with the fact that acne can be very distressing, very painful.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Fortunately, there are a number of different avenues that you, without a dermatologist, but ideally you and a dermatologist can use to attack acne at the level of inflammation through diet, through lifestyle, if needed, prescription medications, and again, gentle cleansing and thinking about the various things that indirectly will impact that acne. So much so that a few of the derms told me
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
that they have patients young and old who will be suffering from really bad acne that will sometimes just make a few adjustments to their diet, the exclusion of certain things, mainly highly processed foods, maybe reducing dairy a little bit or weigh a little bit or completely, and increasing the amount of things that reduce inflammation, so more fruits and vegetables and meat, fish, eggs from healthy sources, and seeing dramatic improvements in acne.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So that's always reassuring to hear. It doesn't always require prescription medication, but if you need it, You should take it. Okay, let's talk about rosacea. Rosacea is reddening of the skin. And some people suffer from this pretty severely, other people mildly, some people transiently, but it tends to be kind of distressing for people.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And the reason it's distressing is that it can look like blushing or flushing of the face when in fact one isn't emotionally embarrassed. However, being embarrassed or having any flushing of the skin can exacerbate existing rosacea. So it's thought to be caused by a combination of genetics.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
There can perhaps be some, again, over inflammation of the skin, which probably reflects inflammation more globally at the level of the gut and body, et cetera. We've been talking a lot about that today. And there are things that can exacerbate rosacea such as alcohol intake or anything that acts as a vasodilator that dilates the vasculature, innervating the skin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
My read of the online community as a whole, as it relates to sunscreen and sun exposure in particular, is the following. I think most everybody, I didn't say everybody, but most everybody out there seems to accept the idea that excessive sun exposure can cause certain cancers of the skin. That's the general belief out there.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So the approach to treating rosacea is pretty much similar to the other things that we've talked about, consuming a low inflammation, low glycemic, low diet, trying to get enough sleep, keeping alcohol intake in particular to a minimum or cutting out alcohol completely. The reason I say in particular is that a lot of people that suffer from rosacea who cut out alcohol completely
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
essentially eliminate the rosacea or dramatically reduce it. So oftentimes it's alcohol that's the culprit, either directly or indirectly, we don't know. Again, alcohol is a poison, but it could be the indirect manner in which alcohol impacts sleep and the gut microbiome negatively that's causing the rosacea. Without knowing the direct or indirect mechanism,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
We will talk about common conditions of skin that concern people such as acne, rosacea, psoriasis, eczema. And of course we will talk about so-called anti-aging treatments for skin. That is the things that can be done to help reduce the degradation of the protein components in skin, things like collagen, things that you can do to improve collagen turnover, as well as elastin.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
reduce or even eliminate your alcohol for a bit and see if your rosacea improves. That will give you a strong indication of what might be going on and even better, it could give you a potential solution to the problem. Now, for those that don't experience a reduction or elimination of rosacea,
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
If you eliminate alcohol, get your sleep right, get your diet right, there are some additional things you can do. First of all, you want to follow the same recommendation we talked about for acne, which is also the general recommendation for skincare. Use lukewarm water, not excessively hot or cold water, a gentle, unfragrance cleanser. You want to use sunscreen regularly.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Remember, sun damage to the skin is also inflammation. So that's going to exacerbate rosacea. And of course, sunlight, because of the release of nitric oxide is also going to act as a vasodilator. Does that mean you have to go full beekeeper mode? No, it doesn't. You can if you want to, I suppose, but use a quality mineral-based sunscreen, which we talked about earlier in the episode.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And you should use some sort of moisturizer to help lock in the moisture within your skin. You could use things like hyaluronic acid or use any kind of gentle moisturizing cream that's not going to cause inflammation or kind of irritate the skin in any way and can keep the moisture within the skin. And there are a lot of different versions of these available out there.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And frankly, a lot of them are not terribly expensive. You can find super expensive varieties of any and all these things, but many of the things that meet the criteria of gentle unfragrance cleanser SPF 30 mineral only sunscreen as well as a quality moisturizer are not necessarily the most expensive available.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And what justifies the higher expense in some cases could be, I don't know, the silkiness or the packaging. It could be any number of different things. I'm not going to say that
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
The cheapest varieties are necessarily as good as the most expensive varieties, but I do think, and the dermatologist that I spoke to definitely confirmed that there's a lot of price inflation out there related to kind of the overall milieu of packaging and purported exclusivity of certain skincare products. Look for the things that meet the criteria you are trying to establish for your skincare.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Just like with acne, just like with general skincare, if you have rosacea, you want to think about mild treatments for the skin at the level of cleaning, at the level of sun protection, at the level of locking in moisture. And then there's some additional things that if you can spare the expense, could also be beneficial, like nicotinamide, niacinamide, as it's also called.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Or there's also been some evidence that things like licorice root can be a benefit, okay? These things are typically found as a topical ointment or in a topical ointment. But in the case of niacinamide, nicotinamide, we talked about how this can be available in an ointment form, a topical form, or it can be taken as two 500 milligram dosages per day.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And there is good reason for that belief because indeed the sun as full spectrum light includes long wavelengths. It's probably easier to think about those long wavelengths as the reds and oranges and yellows and so forth that are present. And well, they're always present from sunlight, but they're most obvious to us when the sun is low in the sky, so-called low solar angle sunlight,
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Gave you the long list of the various mechanisms by which it can improve skin health, reduced inflammation, production of collagen, et cetera. All of that still holds for the potential treatment of rosacea. Be sure to avoid any kind of things that are acting as strong astringents or that increase heat. So people who have rosacea will often try to avoid hot peppers. So spicy foods of any kind.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I know that's tough. I'm somebody who really enjoys spicy foods. So if you have to avoid spicy foods, I sympathize with you, that's rough. Anything that acts as an astringent or can really irritate the skin from the inside or from the outside. So think not excessively hot foods as it relates to spicy or temperature, things of that sort. Now I should point out there are different types of rosacea.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
The dermatologist I spoke to who is expert in rosacea told me there are four major types of rosacea. Many of them respond to the sorts of guidelines that we've been talking about up until now. Some of them that also include acne need some additional treatment. We talked about acne treatments that can be easily folded into the treatment for rosacea.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
There are people who have very stubborn rosaceas. This may be due to excessive use of cleansers. And again, we're talking about how over-cleansing can really be a problem. So we're not saying don't wash your face. We're not saying don't take a shower, please do.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
In fact, and I should have said this earlier, by the way, for a lot of reasons related to your comfort and appearance and other people's comfort,
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
After you work out at a gym, regardless of whether or not you're rolling around on the floor with a foam roller or you're rolling jujitsu or you're lifting weights, you're doing cardio, it is a good idea to take a shower and cleanse with a gentle cleanser as soon as possible.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
I know this sounds like just basic advice, but a lot of people just throw on a clean shirt or they don't rinse off or they don't wash their face and they're wondering, why they're getting all sorts of skin issues. Well, there's a lot of bacteria in gyms, a lot of sweating people. There are a lot of bacteria on you, a lot of bacteria on the equipment.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And yeah, you can spray down the equipment and do these various things, but it's a good idea to shower as soon as possible or to bathe rather as soon as possible, wash your face. after going to a gym for your sake and for the sake of others.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Now, some rosacea is very stubborn, meaning it does not go away even if somebody makes all the appropriate lifestyle adjustments, tries any number of different medical treatments. And by the way, rosacea is a medical condition. And in some cases, people will get angiomas, the accumulation of blood vessels near the surface of the skin that can be, for them, something they don't want.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So we could say unsightly, but they just don't want it. Or in some cases they'll treat their rosacea and then they'll get an accumulation of broken vessels near the surface of the skin. This is pretty common for people that experience rosacea and treat rosacea. For these people, there is a treatment.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It has to be done in a dermatologist's office called pulse dye laser, where they use a laser of a particular wavelength that can penetrate, excuse me, the superficial layers of the skin.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And now you know how different wavelengths of light can penetrate to different depths within skin and destroy the blood vessels or the broken blood vessels that then call in immune system cells to clear out the destroyed endothelial cells and other stuff around it and take it away, get rid of those blood vessels that sit beneath the surface. Let's talk about psoriasis.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
at sunsets and also at sunrise. But of course, as full spectrum light, sunlight also includes UV, ultraviolet light of different types. We'll talk about those types today, as well as blue light and green light. And in midday sun, when the sun is overhead, we just see the sun as white light, right? Because it's containing all those different wavelengths.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So when I was researching this episode, I asked the dermatologist, is psoriasis related to yeast or overproduction of skin cells? And what they told me was really interesting. They said for more than 80 years within the dermatologic community, it was thought that psoriasis was just an overproduction of skin cells. but it wasn't really known what the source was.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And it turns out that now almost all the derms, at least the ones I spoke to, said that it has something to do either directly or at least powerfully and indirectly with the immune system. So what can be done to treat psoriasis? you'll probably guess, things that reduce the overall level of activation in the immune system.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Not so much that you become susceptible to infections, because that's not good, but you treat this like any other autoimmune condition. There are now drugs, these are prescription drugs, that directly target the interleukins, the components of the immune system that are directly involved in
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
psoriasis such as interleukin 17 and interleukin 23 and i'm told that these drugs are very effective in the treatment of psoriasis so that's very reassuring you know i know um especially in communities online that are focused more on behavioral tools and nutrition-based tools or supplementation-based tools of which i am right we focus on those but as you probably noticed in this and other episodes of the human lab podcast we also talk about prescription drugs that have proven to be very effective in certain conditions
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So it's very reassuring to hear that there are excellent prescription drugs that can target the specific interleukins that are over-activated in psoriasis because psoriasis is now known as an over-activation of the immune system and a kind of turning of the body on itself, if you will, to create this itchy, scaly, uncomfortable, and in some cases, unsightly overproduction of skin cells at the scalp and elsewhere.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Okay, so we've covered a lot of topics thus far. We've talked about skin biology. We talked about various skin conditions that are very common, such as acne, psoriasis. and so forth. We talked about ways to increase the youthfulness or the appearance of youthfulness in skin that are based on data, some that are a bit more experimental.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
And we talked about even some laser procedures and phototherapy, things of that sort. And at the same time, I acknowledge that there are many topics and conditions related to skin health and skincare that we did not talk about. We didn't talk about eczema. We didn't talk about Botox. We didn't talk about an enormous number of topics that I know are of interest and relevant to many of you.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So as a consequence, the plan is to host various expert guests, both dermatologists, expert in particular areas, as well as yes, a cosmetic surgeon who, believe it or not, does not like to cut, but rather likes to use fairly non-invasive procedures that touch on some of these very same mechanisms.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Yes, injections of certain things, things that operate at the surface level of the skin and sometimes surgical procedures, that I know when people hear cosmetic surgery, they think, oh, people just trying to improve the youthfulness of their look or something of that sort, but that also relate to certain serious skin conditions for which surgery and non-surgical approaches can assist in.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So while this is not a discussion about wavelengths and optics, for sake of today's discussion, just understand that long wavelength light tends to be more of the red, orange, yellow variety, okay, loosely speaking. And down at the other end of the spectrum, the short wavelength light is more of the blue and green and so-called ultraviolet light.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
So the point is that any discussion about skin health and skincare is going to be an ongoing discussion, one that I do plan to continue on this podcast in the form of expert guest episodes, maybe even another solo episode.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
We've occasionally done so-called toolkit episodes where we summarize some of the main points of previous solo episodes and that arrive with guest episodes and that reflect the latest knowledge that gets published in between episodes. I do plan to cover this topic in more detail going forward.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Meanwhile, I like to think that what I've covered today provides at least an introduction to the biology of skin and an understanding about the various things that we all can and should do for our skin health and appearance, as well as ways to attack certain pain points
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
related to certain skin conditions that come from expert sources, from excellent literature that has been established over many, many decades. And I personally find this organ that we call skin to be infinitely fascinating, not just by virtue of what it does, but by virtue of all the different organ and tissue systems that it interacts with in our body.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
and by virtue of the fact that our skin is this incredible living organ on the outside of our body that tells us oh so very much about how we and others are doing in terms of our immediate and potentially our long-term health. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Please also subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple.
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That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast.
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If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or topics or guests you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols, An Operating Manual for the Human Body.
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This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep, to exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.
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The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, An Operating Manual for the Human Body. If you're not already following me on social media, I am hubermanlab on all social media platforms.
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So that means Instagram X, formerly known as Twitter, Threads, Facebook and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I cover science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content I cover on the Huberman Lab podcast. So, again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.
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If you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, our neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes summaries of podcast episodes as well as protocols in the form of brief one to three page PDFs that explain protocols for things like deliberate heat or deliberate cold exposure.
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So it's well accepted light of different wavelengths, such as UV, blue light, green light, all the way out to red light, even near infrared light can penetrate into cells. It can actually pass through surfaces. It turns out that long wavelength light can actually go deeper into the surface of our skin, right? It literally can penetrate just by shining a red light on your skin.
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for optimizing dopamine, for improving your sleep, for neuroplasticity and learning. Again, all zero cost in the format of one to three page PDFs. To access it, you simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab, scroll down to newsletter and enter your email. And we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion all about skin health and skincare.
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And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
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It can actually penetrate the skin to a deeper layer than can short wavelength light like UV light. And it's well accepted that UV light when it penetrates mostly that epidermal layer of the skin, that outermost layer, it can cause changes in the way that DNA functions.
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How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
It can cause mutations such that DNA, which as many of you probably remember from high school biology, DNA is transcribed into RNA and RNA is translated into proteins. The proteins are the things that the cells produce. They're actually made up of proteins. Well, UV light can disrupt which DNA are expressed and how they are expressed
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
in some cases leading to overproduction of too many cells or disruptions in the functions of cells. And that's why people link UV light to skin cancer. That's the whole idea there. And that's the whole notion behind using sunscreens. And notice I'm saying sunscreen, so ways to screen out UV light or maybe all sunlight in some cases in order to prevent
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
that penetration of the UV light into cells, which can cause mutations, which in some cases can lead to skin cancer. Now, I realize as I'm saying this, there's probably a group of you out there saying, what's the evidence that sunlight can actually cause skin cancer? Well, there is clear evidence that sunlight can cause skin cancers.
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
Which skin cancers and how deadly those skin cancers are, we'll get to in a few moments. That turns out to be a very interesting twist in the whole story. But I want to highlight the fact that there's very little controversy as to whether or not UV light can cause mutations in cells, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Improve Skin Health & Appearance
But what you should be asking yourself is, well, why would long wavelength light, like red light, perhaps be good for skin? We'll talk about that later. There are therapies, phototherapies that use, that exploit red light, which can penetrate deep into skin that actually can enhance the health of skin if done correctly.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. Hi, everyone. I'm delighted to kick off this premium subscriber AMA. And today I have some great announcements to make, including the fact that we have now expanded our SciComm, that is the parent company of the Huberman Lab Podcast.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
This is my opinion. I like to do deliberate cold exposure in the following way. I don't even do it for time. I do it for... what I call walls. So if you're having a hard time even persuading yourself to get in the thing, well then that's one wall you need to get over.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So we essentially have a 4X what we would otherwise give in terms of supporting exciting new research on humans in various laboratories at Stanford and elsewhere. I'll just touch on a few areas that we are supporting going forward. This is not an exhaustive list, but for instance, we are supporting some exciting work using deliberate heat exposure.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
And then if you get over that wall, which hopefully you do, you get in and you start to breathe very quickly, just know that if it's very cold, you'll breathe quickly. And after about 20 seconds, your ability to think clearly will come back online. Okay, that's right about the time that most people say that their hands or feet hurt.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Okay, I do recommend putting your hands under, it's not necessary, but hands and feet under. If you're in the shower, getting your body as small as possible. Sometimes people will huddle. In the shower, if you really want to make it uncomfortable, you can raise your arms and get in your armpits, which is especially cold. But in any case, it should be uncomfortable.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
And then you should stay in until you adapt to that. I'm like, okay, so maybe that's 30 seconds, maybe it's 10 seconds, maybe it's a minute. And then I suggest getting out at that point. So I would say anywhere from one to three minutes for most people, maybe 30 seconds,
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
if you're really experiencing a lot of mental barriers to getting in there, and it should be just cold enough that you don't want to be in there that you want to get out, but that you can stay in for that one to three minutes safely. Why do I say this? Well, if you get into very, very cold water, like 30 degree Fahrenheit water, and you're...
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
and really hyperventilating, you do run the risk of hypothermia, you run the risk of putting your cardiovascular system into shock. I mean, there is a real danger to these things. And by the way, you should never, ever, ever do any kind of breath work prior to getting into deliberate cold, prior to getting into very cold water.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Because if you're doing a lot of exhaling, you're blowing off a lot of carbon dioxide, that will limit your gas reflex. And there have been people who have done cyclic hyperventilation, deep breathing, then gone into water. and they didn't realize that they needed to breathe. They didn't get that gasp reflex early enough, and unfortunately they blacked out and died. So that's very serious.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So what do I recommend in terms of cold water? Great to have somebody there. Ideally, you have somebody there with you who's not in the water with you, who can monitor you. If you're talking about cold shower or cold plunge, and you're talking about, okay, should I do it at 40 degrees or 45 degrees Fahrenheit or 50 degrees?
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Well, put your hand in and then ask yourself on a scale of one to 10, how eager am I to get in? If it's 10, well then it's probably a little too warm, or maybe you're just highly motivated. If it's a five or a six and you're kind of feeling some resistance, great, provided it's not so cold that it's dangerous.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So for me, the typical temperature, if you just want me to throw one out there is somewhere between 45 and 50 degrees. And a few of my friends who really like it extra cold or like an ice bath, will say, oh, that's weak. Well, that's what works for me. I never like the cold. I love getting out of it. Sometimes I like being in there after a little while, but I never like getting into it.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
I much prefer heat and the sauna. And while we're here, I'll just mention how hot for the sauna. Again, same thing, hot enough that you feel a little uncomfortable, but not so hot that you put yourself in danger. And here we really have to emphasize danger because It doesn't take much of a temperature increase to overheat the brain. So for me, I'm pretty heat tolerant.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So I'll put the traditional sauna, not infrared sauna, but traditional sauna to about 210 and I'll last about 10 to 20 minutes in there maximum. And then I'll go into the cold plunge and back and forth. Okay. So if you're going to do the cold plunge for the first time, maybe start it, 55, 60 degrees and stay in a little longer.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
If you're going to be more experienced with this and you're more cold tolerant, try 45, 50. And then if you're really aggressive and you want to try getting down into the low 40s or so, high 30s, well then make sure you have somebody there and make sure that you Don't force yourself to do something that's going to cause tissue damage or cardiovascular damage.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
to treat symptoms of depression, a really interesting and forward-looking approach to treating depression for which there's already some really exciting preliminary results. We are going to be supporting work on goal setting at New York University. This is really exciting work.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Cold is a very potent stimulus and you should go with the minimum effective dose, but you don't have to obsess over the difference between 58 degrees and 56 degrees or 46 and 48. I think subjective feel is going to help. Just make sure that you build in some safeties so that you can adjust quickly, stay out of danger. No deep breathing. prior to getting in there.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Now, some of you might be asking, well, what about deep breathing while I'm in there? That's how I calm myself down. That's fine, but no emphasizing the exhales to blow off carbon dioxide, certainly no submerging yourself intentionally, okay? So be safe, have fun with it.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Deliberate cold exposure I think is a wonderful tool for increasing alertness, not just while you're in there, but when you get out. In fact, that's the best part, if you ask me, is getting out. All right, next question is from Katie. It's about self-motivation. Do you have any suggestions or steps to self-motivate to start a new routine? I do, I do, I do, I do.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
First of all, be very careful who you announce and what you announce to people in terms of starting a new routine, unless they are going to really be on you about accountability. In general, talking to people about our goals, less effective, in my opinion, and there's some research to support this, than just simply making the decision, writing it down, simple, you know,
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Old school, like me, eight and a half by 11 paper. Write down what the goal is. Give yourself a check for each day that you do it or the times of day that you do it. Sometimes signing your signature as if you have a contract with yourself can help. These are all different tricks. Some people will say, should you reward yourself for completing something? Sure.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Should you scare yourself into doing something? Sure. There's data to support that also. I covered this in the episode. with Emily Balchettis and about goal seeking and habits that I did as solo episodes. We have a newsletter on this. Here's the deal. There are going to be multiple barriers to starting a new routine. I do believe in incremental approaches to these things.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Right now I'm working on some bonus chapters of my book. And while I'm pretty motivated person, I'm excited to share that information with the world. I must say that Setting aside time to do these bonus chapters has been challenging because I've got a lot else going on.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So rather than tell people that I'm doing that, I actually have a contract with myself that I sign each time I complete anywhere from a 10 to 60 minute writing block. So a contract with yourself can really help. I think it's far more valuable than stating to the world what you're going to do.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
I don't know why that tends to work, but we know why stating to the world what you're going to do often wears off because typically and this reflects both good and bad things about human behavior and psychology.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Many, many people struggle with goal setting and habit formation that can serve them in their career and in their personal life and fitness goals, health goals. This work directly relates to that. In other words, you're supporting that work. We are also supporting work on immune system, nervous system interactions.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Typically, people will support you by saying, great, you're going to do great, the book's going to be great, or your new exercise program is going to be great, you're going to do, and they're just supporting you, supporting you, supporting you. And that support turns out to be sufficient to create this mindset that you could do it at any point, or you've got the support you need.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Sometimes a little bit of additional friction, what Tim Ferriss would call fear setting, is a good idea. You think about worst outcomes if you don't do the thing. But let's face it, You can't lie to yourself and believe it. So if you know that not doing the thing isn't going to markedly change your life for the worse, well, in that case, you need some additional support.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
You need some additional motivation. So you could use all sorts of tools and protocols like a cold shower to increase epinephrine, adrenaline, and dopamine, and get more motivated and then do something. You could, and I think this is probably the best tool anyone could apply, which would be to put away your phone, turn it off, put it in the other room.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
I now have a box for my phone that I've dedicated to keeping my phone in when I'm busy doing other types of work for which the presence of the phone would be an intrusion. It would limit my work output. I do think that the contract with self is going to be the best way. You say, I am going to do 30 minutes of whatever resistance training three times a week.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
And then you're going to sign off by the end of the week. And when you complete each one, that's your reward to yourself that you were accountable. There's no external reward. Why do I say this? The work itself should become the reward. We know, This from all the work on growth mindset that we've talked about, Carol Dweck's wonderful work and David Yeager's wonderful work.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
He was a guest on the podcast. I've done solo episodes about their work, about growth mindset, that ultimately the work becoming the reward is how you're going to sustain motivation over time. So when you sign off that you did the work and that's the reward,
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Well, then there's this kind of cyclical relationship between what you've promised yourself you would do, what you did and rewarding yourself for the work, no additional external reward, the work becomes a reward. So I like the idea of being a bit of a, what we would call closed loop system on motivation, rather than going out and seeking excessive support from others.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
And I say this not to isolate, I encourage healthy relationships, et cetera, but, If we start seeking external validation or pressure in order to do what we know we want to do or would love to be able to do without external support, we limit ourselves. And when that support isn't there, we tend to be far less productive and move toward our goals far less well.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So it's an internal process of reshaping your psychology. There's also some deeper psychology around this stuff of agency and what you feel you deserve. You deserve, I'll tell you this, because I believe everyone deserves to be able to better themselves through these kinds of self-directed actions.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
And I also like the idea of a closed loop because you can be really honest with yourself at the end of a week. Did you do your three sessions? Did you sign off three times? Keeping some of that reward system and validation internal, really helps you become stronger also to be able to support other people if they need your support.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
This is an area of science that's now really progressing quickly that explores how, especially in babies and kids and young adults, but also in more mature adults, interactions between the brain and nervous system and the immune system can cause all sorts of interesting susceptibilities, but also patterns of resilience in people that do specific things as it relates to supporting their immune system.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Whereas if you have a committee of people that you rely on, that you need to hear from, you need their support in order to be motivated, while that can be great, coaches can be great and support systems are wonderful, I don't think it's nearly as effective as being your own committee, your own chair and secretary in this case, and member of your own committee.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
And then of course, seek social support and reinforcement for other areas of your life that you need and be a source of social support, but also encourage people to be in this kind of cyclical loop of motivation and to really impart the principles of growth mindset, which is really what we're talking about. Make the effort the reward. Okay. I'm going to take a sip of tea here.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Lou asks, what can you do if you're not getting enough rapid eye movement sleep? What are the consequences? Okay, so to remind everybody, rapid eye movement sleep is more enriched towards the end of the night. It differs from slow wave sleep or deep sleep. tends to be dream rich sleep. The dreams tend to be more elaborate.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
You also dream during deep sleep, during slow wave sleep, but your dreams are far more emotionally laden during rapid eye movement sleep, more vivid, et cetera. And rapid eye movement sleep is associated with learning. So getting enough rapid eye movement sleep, especially on the first night after trying to learn something,
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Rapid eye movement sleep is also important for removing the emotional load of previous day and previous day's experiences. So it's its own form of trauma therapy. During rapid eye movement sleep, your body is essentially incapable of releasing adrenaline. So you can have these very intense emotional experiences in your mind.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Without adrenaline in your body, you're actually paralyzed during rapid eye movement sleep. It's a healthy paralysis, sleep atonia it's called. How do you get more REM sleep? Well, one of the best ways to get more REM sleep is to simply add anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes to your sleep schedule, adding that 10 to 30 minutes in the morning. Most people can't do that, however.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Another way to increase the amount of rapid eye movement sleep that you get is to get a bigger surge of epinephrine of adrenaline in the early day prior to that sleep. So this is a great reason to do deliberate cold exposure in your shower in the morning. You could also get it through exercise.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So exercising early in the morning, and then we're talking about the rapid eye movement sleep that occurs the very next, that same night, okay? So we're talking about a Monday morning where you exercise and get deliberate cold exposure.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
By the way, it is true that if you do deliberate cold exposure after resistance training, you can limit some of the strength and hypertrophy increases or adaptations, but at other times it seems to be fine. And there is zero evidence that taking a cold shower after resistance training is going to limit strength or hypertrophy So you don't have to be too paranoid about deliberate cold exposure.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
In fact, I think the best recommendation I can make about deliberate cold exposure is neither be too paranoid nor too obsessive about it. So spiking your adrenaline a bit in the early part of the day with exercise and or deliberate cold exposure can help get more rapid eye movement sleep later that night, sleeping in a bit, even 10 minutes more going back to sleep.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
This is a case for hitting the snooze. You go back to sleep maybe even two or three times. of course better to just sleep the whole way through until a maximum long night is achieved, long night of sleep that is.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So thanks to you and these dollar for dollar matching donors, we are able together but mainly thanks to you to support these exciting areas of human research. And as the data come in, we are going to relay what the new findings are, and of course, translate those where appropriate to protocols for improving mental health, physical health, and performance.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
If you wake up and you're not rested enough, or if you're looking at your sleep score and you don't see enough rapid eye movement sleep, the other thing you can do is a non-sleep deep rest protocol, which by the way, Matt Walker's laboratory and I are gearing up to do some studies on non-sleep deep rest and how it impacts the brain specifically as opposed, and this has been done in other studies, but not with modern methods in a while.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So we're excited about that. So do a 10 to 30 minute or 10 or 20 minute non-sleep deep rest protocol. Those are easy to find. I have zero cost ones that are on YouTube. You simply put NSDR Huberman. There's a 10 minute one, a 20 minute one. We have them in Spotify format. There's actually a link on the hubermanlab.com webpage
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
that links out to audio format so that you don't have to go onto YouTube. If you don't want to do that, you can download that script from Spotify and that way you have it in your phone. You don't need to even have internet access. So if you're camping or you're out of internet access, you can still do that non-sleep deep rest.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
And then if you prefer a female voice, Kelly Boyes, B-O-Y-S, has some wonderful NSDR and yoga nidra scripts on YouTube and has her own. She also is on the Waking Up app doing NSDR and yoga nidra. So I would do that first thing in the morning to get a bit more REM-like rest is what we'll call it until the data are in.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
REM-like rest puts the brain into this very interesting state with body completely still, right? Similar to sleep atonia that you observe in REM sleep. and mind active, very similar to REM sleep. This is actually our hypothesis, which is that non-sleep deep rest mimics rapid eye movement sleep, but that hypothesis still needs to be tested formally. And Dr. Walker and I are going to do that.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So that's another way to get more REM sleep. The other way, and this is kind of a tongue in cheek answer is if you don't get enough REM sleep on one night, you can be sure that if you allow yourself sufficient sleep the next night, you'll get more REM sleep than you normally would anyway, had you slept well the previous night. What does all that mean?
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
It means that there's something called the REM sleep rebound. If you don't sleep enough or you don't get enough REM sleep on say Monday night, Tuesday night when you go to sleep, provided you didn't blitz your system with caffeine, you're not ingesting anything that would disrupt your REM sleep such as caffeine late in the day, well,
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
or alcohol, which will disrupt REM sleep dramatically, well, then you will get more REM sleep on Tuesday night. There's a REM compensation. Anyone that's tracked their sleep has observed this. So that's another way. Right now, there's no clear pharmacology to induce more REM sleep, unfortunately. There are some tools to increase slow-wave sleep, deep sleep, pharmacologically.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Some of the growth hormone secretagogues that are in common peptides will do that. But right now there doesn't seem to be any pharmacology directed specifically at increasing REM sleep. There are a few, these go by brand names like Quivivic and things like that, that are thought to do this, but it's still somewhat debated as to whether or not they specifically increase REM sleep, okay?
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Danielle says the top three most impactful things schools could do to raise student capacity for learning. What a great question. Well, I'll add a fourth because I don't want to, I don't want to try and wriggle out of the question by just saying sleep again, but I think trying to get kids to sleep enough is going to be key. So that means off phones and iPads in the middle of the night.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
That means starting school a little bit later. I don't know if that's ever going to work, but that would be a marvelous thing for learning because as you know, or we all should know or remember, neuroplasticity and learning is triggered by focused attention, which is supported by having slept well the night before, but the actual rewiring of neural connections occurs when? It occurs during sleep.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So I want to extend a deep, deep, deep message of gratitude to you for supporting science, for supporting new research, and for supporting the evolution of new data to serve humanity. Thank you ever so much. Okay, so without further ado, let's get to answering your questions about mental health, physical health, and performance.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
It occurs during deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep. That's when the reorganization of neural connections occurs, the strengthening of particular synapses, the weakening of other synapses. And there's a small, small, small, perhaps infinitesimally small percentage of neuroplasticity that is the consequence of the addition of new neurons.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So most neuroplasticity is not that, most neuroplasticity is the reorganization of existing neural connections, but nonetheless, that happens during sleep. So getting kids to sleep enough, nap enough, sleep late if they need to is actually a great thing, but who knows if schools will change their protocols. What else can we do? What can schools do?
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
I'm a big fan, as you know, of non-sleep deep rest. Wouldn't it be wonderful if in every school that started the day with a five minute meditation or non-sleep deep rest, where kids would do some quiet, focused breathing, bringing their attention back to their breathing, bringing their attention back to the spot just behind their forehead, just before beginning a learning session. Why? Why?
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Is it about mysticism? No. Is it about trying to understand consciousness? No. It's about a study done by Wendy Suzuki's laboratory at, She's their current Dean of Letters and Science, as far as I know. She is a neuroscientist. She has a spectacular record in the field of neuroscience and psychology.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
And her laboratory showed that even a very brief meditation session, in that particular study, it was about 13 minutes per day, can significantly improve working memory, which is the ability to keep information online in one's mind active. It can increase Other forms of memory, it can increase focus, it can decrease stress, and it is a zero cost tool.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So I think, unfortunately, we think of meditation as a mystical tool to explore consciousness, and it can be, but if you think about it, exercise can also be an ultra marathon to run 242 miles or something to win a trophy. or it can be something to improve cardiovascular health. So similarly, meditation is just a perceptual exercise.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
I think that if kids learn that they can bring their perception internally to what we call interoception, as opposed to looking at things externally, exteroception, understand that they have some control, some regulation over their focus and attention, bringing their attention back
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
to interoception whenever it drifts, well, then they get better at focus over time and it improves learning in the long-term, but also in the bout of learning that they go into immediately after. So, you know, if I had a magic wand, every classroom would begin a session of learning with five minutes or maybe even three minutes of what is typically known as third eye or focused meditation.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
with no interest in mysticism, pure interest in improving the ballot of learning. I think another thing that a school should include to increase capacity for learning is they should include micro gaps. So we know that if you take gaps in information delivery, so for instance, if I were to just pause now and then continue to, it seems like kind of an odd interruption.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
The first question comes from Robert, and the question is, is there any way to repair thinning skin as we age? I'm 77 years old, and in the last few years, the skin on my arms has gotten noticeably thinner. Thank you. Well, thank you for this question. It's a very timely question given that we just had a solo episode. I did a solo episode about skin health and appearance on the podcast.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
And then every once in a while at random introduce a short 10 second pause or so. What do we know happens? We know based on now a number of different really high quality papers that have looked at musical learning, mathematical learning, concept learning, physical skill learning, that those little micro gaps allow for very rapid replay of the information that's relevant.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
for whatever reason in reverse in the brain very quickly within the hippocampus and the neocortex areas of the brain critical for encoding and storage of memories. And these little micro gaps and the rapid replay of the information one is trying to learn at 20 to 30 times the normal rate increases the number of repetitions. You're basically getting 30 repetitions for doing nothing.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
This is exactly what happens in what? In rapid eye movement sleep. When you learn something, like maybe you learn something today in our discussion thus far, and you go to sleep at night, there's a very strong chance that if we were to record from your brain, we would see that the same areas of your brain that were active during specific portions of this discussion
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
which arguably is more of a lecture than a discussion. But those brain areas would repeat at 20 to 30 times speed within a very compressed time. And then you'd go back to a different pattern of brain activity. What is going on? Well, in rapid eye movement sleep, the brain is rehearsing, it's generating repetitions of certain forms of behavior and certain forms of
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
learning of cognitive information at high speed, you're generating more repetitions. And this is critical for the learning process. We know this from animal studies. We now know this from human studies as well. So if in the classroom teachers would just say, okay, we just finished discussing, I don't know, the cell cycle or the Krebs cycle. Now let's take a moment
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and students are not checking their phone at that time or reviewing the material at that time. They just got 20 to 30 repetitions of, and by the way, at a subconscious level, they're not aware of it, of the material they had just been exposed to. And so you introduce these, excuse me, at random. You could do anywhere from one to five of these per hour. You could do as many as 10 per hour.
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You're just introducing these brief micro rest intervals. There's a beautiful literature to support this.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
And the third thing that's very important is I think it's very, very clear that physical activity, in particular cardiovascular training, any kind of physical activity, running, jogging, swimming, et cetera, is going to facilitate learning, especially if the learning is done immediately after that activity.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
That's right, if the learning is done immediately after the activity, and that's probably related to the increase in the various catecholamines, dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine associated with physical activity, then making coding of new memories and coding of new information more readily accessible.
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So this is a call for including PE class or even just some basic movement, even walks or things of that sort. We can look at this through the other lens and say, what are the worst things for learning? Terrible sleep. being delivered information like through a fire hose with no pauses and forgive me if from time to time, I tend to do that.
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As some of you know, we've expanded our SciComm Huberman Lab Podcast philanthropy to support great, exciting science that is going to directly relate to mental health, physical health and performance tools in the very near future.
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Maybe I should start introducing microgaps into the podcast, but you can always just pause it, go back to it. I feel like real life provides that. There is the strong, strong incentive for including some physical movement each day. And then I suppose if we were going to include another one, we'd say that Kids and teachers should have a discussion about optimal learning protocols.
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They should understand where their thresholds are after which their attention falls off. There's really no point in trying to learn information if you're not focused on what you're trying to learn. And then there's a whole discussion to be had about caffeine. There's a whole discussion to be had about nutrition as it relates to maintaining alertness throughout the day.
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I should mention that that episode was reviewed by a derm oncologist. I consulted with different dermatologists prior to that episode. And my general sense is that it's been received very well. There are a few areas within the skin health and appearance field that are of controversy, mainly around sunscreens. I'll just go on record saying that it's very clear that excessive sun exposure
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Anyone that's ever gone into a lecture on a college campus or a high school elementary school, even after lunch, you'll see that people's brains are just kind of idling there in the background. It's the rare student that's wrapped with attention, even after a big lunch, even after running around outside. So structuring of the day properly is essential. And of course, get that sleep at night.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
okay um alec could you share your thoughts on how shilajit might influence cognitive function and physical health specifically its impacts to boost testosterone i get a lot of questions about shilajit shilajit is a mineral pitch from the himalayas there are a lot of fake versions out there but the authentic versions are basically this is stuff that um basically they take soil and and grasses and a bunch of things and they mash it down and they take the extract and they
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and create this stuff called Shilajit, which sometimes is sold as a thick paste, kind of a tar-like paste. Sometimes it's in capsules. What do we know about Shilajit? Shilajit contains minerals that are thought to augment some hormone pathways. And that's why people have argued and it's marketed that Shilajit increases vitality.
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It's been argued that Shilajit can increase testosterone, maybe estrogen as well. There are actually a few studies on this that are covered at examine.com. I'm going to bring up one just now. so we can induce a little gap effect here if there's a pause.
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There is some data, not a ton, but there's some data that support the use of Shilajit for testosterone increase, but I would place it on the low end of the effectiveness scale in terms of things to increase testosterone. And then of course the real question is, are you getting enough authentic Shilajit to really have an effect? The dosaging on this is very mysterious.
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In other words, I personally wouldn't play Shilajit high on any list of ways to, to generate hormone support. There are far better ways. I mean, the best ways, of course, are to make sure that your body fat percentage is neither too high nor too low, okay? People who are overweight, who are obese, who lose body fat will improve their hormone profiles dramatically.
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However, people who are already very lean, who get excessively lean, you can disrupt testosterone levels dramatically. And by the way, anytime there's a discussion about testosterone, I want to remind that both men and women have testosterone. It's important in both men and women.
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Yes, it's related to libido, but having sufficiently high levels of estrogen in both men and women is also critical for libido. People that take drugs like an Astrozole to disrupt the aromatase conversion of testosterone into estrogen can sometimes find themselves with reduced libido. And that's because estrogen is critical for libido in men and women, as is testosterone.
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So it's all about the ratios. Going back to Shilajit, Let's look at the human effect matrix on Shilajit. There is one study here with 60 participants that cites a small increase, small but statistically significant increase in follicle stimulating hormone, FSH, which in females is critical, in males is critical, and The extent of the increase is just very small.
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So it's not clear that it would be worth taking Shilajit given the risks and the cost. It depends on how aggressive you are in trying to increase testosterone. Certainly there are other ways. Sperm quality, one study showing a small improvement in sperm quality. One study of 60 participants showing a small increase in testosterone.
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will age skin more rapidly, okay? That's just categorically true, okay? So if anyone's debating that, you know, there's an issue there, right? There shouldn't be any debate about that. It's absolutely true that sunscreen can help, and there are sort of three major forms of sunscreen. This relates to how to protect skin from thinning. One is a physical barrier.
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And then of course, there's a bunch of other things that have been looked at. the perhaps most impressive effect is a reduction in some LDLs. But again, even though I say the most impressive, it's still a small effect. So I wouldn't place Shilajit high on the list of supplements to consider. Always, always, always, before talking about supplements, you want to get your nutrition right.
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I've talked about how to do this. You want to be exercising, but not overtraining. You want to do both resistance training and cardiovascular training, maybe on the same day or different days, whatever your schedule allows. You want to make sure you get enough sleep at night. If you want to increase your testosterone significantly, get an extra 30 to 60 minutes of sleep each night.
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Even a 20 minute increase in rapid eye movement sleep is going to serve your testosterone far better than taking Shilajit. Will taking Shilajit increase your vitality? It'll probably increase your energy a bit. You might increase libido a bit. You have to ask yourself, is it transient? Is that effect transient? Is it directly related to testosterone increases? Probably not.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
It's probably directly related to follicle stimulating hormone increases. And for women who have a menstrual cycle that is obviously going to lead to different constellations of hormones, markedly different constellations of hormones, such as,
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
follicle stimulating hormone, estrogen, progestins, et cetera, different times throughout the cycle, taking something like Shilajit because it can stimulate FSH release can potentially disrupt that. If you're a male who's doing everything else, like you're exercising, you're sleeping well, your nutrition is locked in, you are,
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you're taking creatine and fish oil, you're taking care of your gut microbiome, and you want to experiment with Shilajit, well, by all means, find a reliable source of Shilajit. They are out there. Just look for one that has some testing for authenticity.
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And then you're likely to be able to see within about a week or so if it leads to a significant increase in vitality, libido, whatever it is that you're seeking. But I wouldn't place Shilajit high on the list. of things to pursue. And I will also say having tried Shilajit, it's pretty messy. It's hard to get the dosaging right in the tar form. The capsules make it a little bit easier.
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If you wanted to explore other ways to augment testosterone that have a bit more data to support them, I would say things like Tonga Ali, which may have its effects on increasing libido in both men and women by virtue of increasing testosterone or maybe free testosterone, more likely it's an increase in luteinizing hormone in that case, which is upstream of testosterone.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So this can all get into some pretty extended discussions about biochemical pathways and hormone pathways. this on the episode about optimizing testosterone and estrogen as a solo episode that I also covered with Dr. Kyle Gillette and with Dr. Peter Attia.
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By the way, if you go to hubermanlab.com and you put in any combination of search items, if you put, for instance, Sheila G testosterone, it will take you to the timestamp that covers that. If you put Tonga Ali testosterone or libido, Tonga Ali will take you to the timestamps across different episodes.
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directly to those timestamps so that you don't have to listen to entire episodes or go searching for this information. It's all there. We also have an AI engine at hubermanlab.com that allows you to do searches on this sort of thing. But of course, I'm happy to talk to you about it as well. I'm delighted to.
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So again, if you have the budget and you're somebody who likes to experiment, maybe Shilajit is the right thing for you. Find a good brand. It shouldn't be hard to distinguish the real brands. They always have a label of authentication on there. And if you're going to,
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Pretty much nobody disputes a physical barrier, a hat, a long sleeve shirt, long pants, et cetera. However, those don't always cover all the areas of the body that need sun protection, such as the ears, the back of the neck, portions of the face and so forth.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
already be doing everything else right behaviorally, and you want to explore supplementation for improving testosterone, vitality, et cetera, then I would say don't start with Shilajit. You'd probably be best off starting with something like Tonga Ali, maybe Fidojia. I've talked about these things previously. Okay. Let's see. Two questions popped up in front of me.
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So I'll just take the first one. Alexander, Alexander, I like the way you spell your name, Alexander. It's unusual. I dig it. What has your process been for the writing of your book? Slow. I have a saying that I say in my lab or that I have said for many years in doing science when I was a graduate student, a postdoc, and then in my lab,
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And by the way, because sometimes people ask about this, I still have research funds for human studies. I closed my animal lab, focusing mainly on teaching, which I'll be doing again this year, teaching in the spring, maybe in the winter as well to undergraduates. I may get re-involved in some human clinical studies on vision, an area that I've loved for many years.
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But in any case, there's a saying that I always would reiterate to my students in post-docs, which is I go as fast as I carefully can, okay? So I believe in a sense of urgency. I like to sit down to write and think, okay, I'm going to go as fast as I carefully can. It's that right balance between urgency and precision, okay? Going fast is rarely good in its own right.
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Going too slow isn't good either. So there's that place where I feel like I'm just pushing myself a little bit, but then you have to be careful, right? So as fast as you carefully can. So the process has been slow, but I've been going as fast as I carefully can. Any recommendations on overcoming obstacles and how did you deal with them? Yes, put that phone away, put it in the other room.
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If you have to generate accountability measures, do it. When I used to write grants in my laboratory in San Diego, you can ask my lab. I used to walk in and say, okay, I'm giving my phone to somebody. And if I ask for it back before 5 p.m. today, you each get $1,000. And I did not have $1,000 to give everyone in my lab. I had a pretty big lab and I didn't have the money.
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So you may have to create some barriers and gosh, about an hour and a half in, I'd think, okay, gosh, I was supposed to respond to this person today. They're going to think that I've dropped off the map. Oh my goodness. And then I'd remember, oh, I have an office phone. If someone really needed to get ahold of me, if it was an emergency, they'd let me know.
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When it comes to sunscreen, sometimes called sunblocks, I think there's general agreement that the sunscreens, and I'll use sunscreen and sunblock interchangeably, that are mineral-based, that is inorganic, meaning that the active ingredients are either zinc oxide or titanium dioxide or some combination of those up to a concentration of 25% are generally deemed safe by most all dermatologists.
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And if I couldn't be reached that way, someone would find me. I realized for people with kids, et cetera, this might not be feasible, but if you have to do that, you do that. Set stakes, okay? Give someone a check for an exorbitant amount of money that you can't afford to give away, but that you do have in your bank account. Give them that check and say, you know, if I don't,
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stop writing for the next hour, then you can tear up the check. Otherwise you can go cash it. So you can put some fear in there, but again, as I mentioned earlier, better to generate these kind of incentives with yourself. So I like to put my phone away. I like to take about 10 minutes to transition into the writing. And then I actually set rules for myself.
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I don't allow myself to get out of the seat, even to use the bathroom. It's true. I've never gone to the bathroom in my seat, but I resist the temptation to get up until the timer goes off. That's how I did it as an undergraduate. That's how I did it writing grants. That's how I've done it writing fellowships as a graduate student. And that's how I write the book now.
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And I find that after about 20, 30 minutes, I don't want to stand up. I'm super happy. And then if an interruption comes, then I get frustrated because I want to keep writing. So give it a try, set some high stakes incentives for yourself. I mean, don't, don't make them too high, but set some high stakes incentive. Thank you for saying, looking forward to the book. I appreciate it.
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If you want to buy a pre pre-order copy, it's a protocols book.com. It's there in multiple languages. Now I'd, you know, Be grateful if you did. On the other hand, if you don't want to buy it or you just want to wait until it comes out, that's fine too. And I'm just grateful that I have the opportunity to put this information into one place that people can access if they like.
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Mike Torres, and I think this is the last question, right? Are we down to about the last question? Two more? One more? All right, here we go. I'm asking my producer here. Mike, where can I find information from Huberman Lab regarding addictions and recovery? Great question. I get this a lot. A lot of people struggle with addiction.
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Addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure in ways that can be very disruptive for your life. These can be process addictions, meaning behavioral addictions. These can be substance abuse issues. First of all, I just want to say, while I have no formal relationship to them, there are wonderful zero-cost resources in every city around the world, 12-step communities.
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Go online, look for that. The meetings and programs that they provide are very useful. have proven very useful. Actually, this was explored in a study from Stanford Psychiatry a few years ago, because there hadn't been a lot of science on those sorts of programs. And the conclusion was they can be very, very useful. In terms of Huberman Lab resources, if you go to hubermanlab.com, put addiction,
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
into the search function.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
It will take you to specific timestamps, mainly of an episode that I did with Dr. Anna Lemke, who is our director of the Dual Diagnosis Addiction Clinic at Stanford, the author of Dopamine Nation, an absolute virtuoso in terms of the description of the underlying biological mechanisms, mostly surrounding dopamine, but also the approach to treating and getting over addictions. You can get
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
over addictions. People get sober from their addictions. It takes time, it takes energy, it takes effort. And in every case, it's an incredibly rewarding thing that just makes your life and other people's lives better. So I highly encourage anyone that's struggling with process addictions or substance abuse addictions or alcohol use disorder or things of that sort,
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to pursue those resources, both on our website and of course the other resources that I mentioned a few minutes ago. Also Ana's book, Dopamine Nation is a wonderful one. It will allow you to see and understand that these are brain mechanisms that are at play. These are not, It's not a lack of willpower. It's a disruption in neurochemical circuit regulation.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
And that should give you some grace and some feelings of ease because what that means is that while it is not quote unquote your fault, it is your responsibility to deal with it. And you can, and there are great zero cost resources to do that. So please access those. And then just popped up on my screen. It says, happy birthday, Karen. I hope I pronounced that correctly.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Now, there are some people who will point out that there's some controversy around certain forms of titanium dioxide. The evidence for that, however, is not conclusive. I would say that if you're really, really concerned about any of that, then just stick with a pure zinc oxide formula up to 25%. Why would people not use zinc oxide formulas?
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Happy birthday, Karen, and happy birthday to anyone else whose birthday happens to be today or in the vicinity of today. I guess this is going to be recorded and put out eventually, and then it'll be somebody's birthday on every day at some point. But happy birthday, Karen. Thank you for being a premium subscriber. Thank you all for tuning in.
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Thank you to those of you that listened to this at a later time recorded. I really appreciate your questions. I really appreciate your support of Huberman Lab. As I've said many times before, it's a labor of love. It continues to be a labor of love. I spend my life, basically all of my waking life, minus some self-care, and some care of others and hopefully a bulldog soon, another bulldog soon.
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I can't wait, I've been looking for bulldogs and there will be another one soon. I don't know his or her name will be, but in the absence of tending to those things, I'm focusing 98% of my waking life to trying to suss out the best health and science information for you all and get it out to you in formats that are convenient for you, that are useful for you and that you can apply.
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Also discussions with expert guests, So there are the guest episodes, the solo episodes, there's hubermanlab.com has a lot of resources like the AI engine. Please give that a try if you like, it's basically an AI version of me, which is kind of weird to me, but it does a pretty good job. I would say it does a very good job of encapsulating a lot of themes.
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It's a great way to generate your own brief protocols. If you want to do that, you can ask it to generate a, you know, exercise plan based on Huberman lab protocols or what have you. And then the newsletters, I'm assuming most of you already subscribed to, but
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If you would be so kind as to make sure that you follow the podcast by clicking subscribe on YouTube, following the podcast on Apple and Spotify, just click. If you already follow, by the way, make sure you don't accidentally unfollow. But if you go click that follow tab, that really helps us. It's zero cost.
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Give us a five-star review if you think we deserve it or different review if you think we deserve that. I love your comments on YouTube. I do read them all. I really do read them all. I even go and find the hidden comments that get filtered and I read those too. So please, if you feel inclined, you can support us in that way.
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And most importantly, take the protocols and the information that you think works for you, apply it, Discard the protocols and the information that you don't feel is for you, discard it, that's great. And of course, I don't deserve credit for any of these protocols per se, right?
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These are the product of so much great science and health studies out there, clinical studies, and I'm just a funnel in a filter, but it is a true pleasure to be able to be that funnel and filter. So thank you for letting me funnel and filter today's knowledge for you. And as always, thank you for your interest in science.
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Well, they tend to be kind of pasty and they don't spread on very easily compared to some other sunscreen formulas. Sunscreens that are quote unquote chemical based. Okay, everyone will say, well, everything's a chemical. Yes, but they're chemical based. They use a different approach to blocking or reflecting or absorbing UV rays. Those do indeed have some controversy around them.
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There are a few studies in which very large amounts of those chemical containing sunscreens, these are chemicals like oxybenzene, et cetera, are applied to the skin and they do make it into general circulation. They do blood draws.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
that some of these chemicals can be endocrine disruptors, leading some people to believe that chemical-based or sunscreens that contain some of these chemicals are to be avoided. Now, I want to be very clear on my stance, which is if you need sun protection and the choice is either to use those types of sunscreens occasionally versus no sun protection, I would say probably better to just use them.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
And we've been able to do that thanks to all of you, because we use a significant portion of the funds from the premium channel subscribers to support exciting work on humans. So these are laboratories working on questions such as improving mental health, physical health and performance from a variety of approaches at all major universities.
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but if you are picking a sunscreen, AKA sunblock, where you are going to be using it all summer or very frequently, well, in that case, probably best to go with a mineral-based sunscreen because you'll be doing more frequent exposure application, okay? And then of course, There are people that will argue that the chemical based sunscreens are in fact fine.
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And if that's your threshold, meaning that there isn't enough conclusive evidence that they're problematic, then that's fine. So those are the three general categories. But yes, sun will damage the skin. That doesn't mean you shouldn't get any sun exposure to your skin. Turns out that generating vitamin D, of course,
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getting your circadian rhythms right, hormone production, et cetera, actually requires some exposure to sunlight. You just don't want to do it during the highest UV index portions of the day, like the middle of the day. You don't want to burn. However, and please note this, you do not have to burn in order to put yourself at a greater risk for skin cancer.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So, you know, avoid burns, but avoid excessive sun exposure for you as well. Now back to Robert's question, the skin is thinning. Why is it thinning? Well, as we get older, composition of the proteins in skin, and there are many different proteins, but in particular, the collagen and elastins start to either mutate or weaken. There can be less production of these.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
The skin sometimes loses moisture as well. And the basic solution to this is the following. We know that sun protection will help.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
We also know, and I covered this in the episode, that there's some evidence, okay, I would say it's moderate evidence, it's not extremely strong, it's not weak, that ingestion of collagen proteins, believe it or not, can improve skin elasticity and the appearance of smoothness and plumpness, as it's subjectively rated in these studies. You might ask yourself, well, how is that?
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Is it that you ingest collagen? And by the way, people typically do this at dosages of anywhere from, you'll see as low as five grams per day, but as high as 30 grams per day of collagen protein. Typically there's some vitamin C in there as well, which seems to help its absorption or utilization. And they will observe,
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
in these studies over time, some improved elasticity, appearance of smoothness and plumpness of the skin. So should you ingest collagen protein? Well, the results are again, statistically significant, but they're not overwhelming in the sense that you're not going to reverse all the thinning and kind of the, what appears to be a little kind of local sagging of the skin completely.
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AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
by ingesting collagen, but it can help. Collagen can be ingested through things like bone broth. By the way, collagen is a composition of not just skin, but of tendon and ligaments and things of that sort. Typically people will get their collagen in powdered form. It's relatively inexpensive. There are a lot of different forms of this from fish, from animal sources.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
There are some plant-based sources. It's a little unclear whether or not those are as good. But in any event, five to 30 grams, typically 15 to 30 grams in most of the studies does seem to be moderately effective in improving skin elasticity, plumpness, and appearance of smoothness. Okay, so that's one area. The other area where there's some interesting research is red light exposure.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
And we've supported work at Stanford, Columbia University, University of Oregon coming up. We're actually supporting some programs related to student training and teaching. in the realm of neuroscience and happiness. So some really exciting groundbreaking areas all made possible thanks to you and the fact that we now have three dollar for dollar matches from exceptional donors.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So red light exposure is an interesting one because of course in sunlight, we have full spectrum light, right? If you ever put a prism and you get a light beam through it, you need to get the rainbow, right? It includes red. There are long wavelengths, AKA red wavelengths of light. I pause as I say red wavelengths, because they're actually long wavelengths of light that appear red.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
And it has been shown that light panels that are emitting red light or near infrared light, or typically both, can also improve skin appearance if done for about 10 to 15 minutes per day maybe five days per week minimum over the course of a few months. Again, the results in those studies are statistically significant in many of those studies.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
And I would place them in kind of the moderate result, meaning it's not a striking result, but you could imagine combining red light with the collagen. So you start to get perhaps a synergistic effect, but those studies combining them have not been done. It does seem that one of the best, that is dermatologists supported ways to improve skin appearance is to ingest a retinoid.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Now, these are prescription drugs. The retinoids do require that you work with a qualified dermatologist. They require that you stay out of the sun for some period of time because they can increase sensitivity to the sun, but they will improve collagen composition, and that's from the inside out.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So, and by the way, there are also some different supplements that one can take that can protect your skin so that you don't have to put sunscreen on. It's actually the extract of a vine. I did not cover that on the skin health and appearance episode, but we very soon have a guest, Dr. Teo Silomani, who is an expert dermatologist oncologist trained at Stanford and Harvard and UCLA.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
who was going to talk about the use of essentially sun guarding by the ingestion of certain compounds that change the chemical composition of the skin from the inside. So that's very interesting. He also added another tool for improving skin appearance, and this is true for the face and for the arms, et cetera, is the use of laser resurfacing. Now this is not,
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
a cosmetic procedure as much as it is a procedure to remove the very top epidermal layer, the very, very superficial layer of dead keratinocytes and other cells of the skin, excuse me, as a means to reduce cancer risk, okay? So he's a derm oncologist. It does have the consequence of making skin look quite a bit younger, so it does work.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
And like anything in the realm of kind of laser resurfacing and things of that sort, it does require a period of peeling, of staying out of sunlight, and being really strict about that because the skin is more sensitive in the immediate days and even week after. the laser resurfacing.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
It was kind of remarkable for me to learn that this laser resurfacing and the retinoids are very well supported by dermatologists as a preventative measure for certain forms, not all forms, but certain forms of skin cancers, and that they can dramatically improve the appearance of skin that is to make it look more youthful. So certainly that would work on the arms as well.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So we've got, we're talking about collagen, red light, retinoids. by a qualified dermatologist or derm oncologist ideally. And the reason I emphasize the derm part is there are a lot of people who do kind of plastic and cosmetic work on skin who are probably very qualified.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
And then there's probably some who are not as qualified and there can be some real issues raised by using excessive laser power and things of that sort. This is something I also touched on in the episode. So those are the four major ones. And then of course, eating a diet that's low inflammatory.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
When we started this premium subscription model to support science, we had one still have this one absolutely spectacular dollar for dollar donor match from the tiny foundation and now two others have joined in. So for every dollar that is used from the premium channel to support, these exciting areas of research. We now have $3 being donated to match that dollar.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So limiting fried and highly processed foods, of course, making sure that you're getting enough essential fatty acids in the form of either supplementing or ingesting fatty fish oils, all of these sorts of things, fruits and vegetables, fiber, all the sorts of things that support healthy skin internally, some directly, some indirectly by virtue of the gut microbiome.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
So I think that's probably a sufficient answer. I will add one last thing for your question, Robert. It's very clear that the appearance of skin is also very supported by hydration and moisture. So applying a regular moisturizer, a high quality moisturizer regularly, pick a non-fragranced moisturizer regularly to the arms, that will help as well. And then there's some,
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
more aggressive approaches that I'll talk about with Dr. Soleimani, things like hyaluronic acid and things of that sort that can help with the kind of plumpness or moisture of the skin, but we'll hold off for that episode, which comes out in a few weeks. So thanks again for your question. I like to think that those are some actionable tools and then depending on people's disposable income time
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
and energy they wanted to devote to this. You could go with the zero cost one, the moderate cost one, or on the combination of all of them if you're able to. Okay, the next question comes from Jen Shaw. How cold does the water need to be for cold therapy to be effective?
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
This is a great question, especially since at least in the Northern hemisphere, it's summer and people are doing cold plunges more, cold showers. Such an effective tool for shifting the state of your mind. Any debate about deliberate cold exposure to me that centers around metabolism or how long the dopamine increase lasts is kind of a trivial one in my mind.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
in my estimation, because what do we know for sure? We know that deliberate cold exposure is very, very low cost or even cost saving if you use a cold shower, because you're saving on the heating bill. We know that if you can afford a cold plunge or access a safe river or stream or cold plunge, Great, what do we know it does? It changes your state, it shifts your state.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
It makes you more alert, not just while you're in there, but in the minutes and certainly up to an hour or more afterwards. And let's face it, rarely does it feel good getting in. Sometimes it feels good being in it because you're very, very warm before you get in it. Maybe you came from a run or from the sauna,
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
but it always feels great getting out and you always feel much better afterwards, provided you get the right stimulus, which is really what this question's about. So what is the right stimulus? How cold? Cold enough that you feel a bit uncomfortable and you want to get out, but you can safely stay in and you stay in for a little bit longer.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Now, I know that sounds vague, but there has never been a systematic study of exactly how long to stay in at a given temperature at a given time of day. Why do I say at a given time of day? Well, try doing a cold shower first thing in the morning. It can be pretty rough, pretty jarring.
Huberman Lab
AMA #18: Cold Therapy Advice, Skin Health Tips, Motivation, Learning Strategies & More
Try doing it at night when you're tired, far bigger barrier to getting in that cold shower or cold plunge, unless you are particularly warm because you exited the sauna. or exceptionally motivated. So the point is to make the water just cold enough that you would kind of retract from it, that you don't want to be in it, but not so that it's like an icy burn, so cold that it burns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Bob Dylan didn't show up to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize. That's punk. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He probably grew in notoriety for that. Maybe he just doesn't like going to Sweden, but it seemed like it would be a fun trip. I think they do it in a nice time of year. But hey, that's his right. He earned that right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
You got to verb it through, download your inner thing. I don't think we've talked about this, that this obsession that I have about how Rick has this way of being very, very still in his body, but keeping his mind very active as a practice. Went and spent some time with him in Italy last June.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And we would tread water in his pool in the morning and listen to a history of rock and roll and a hundred songs. Amazing podcast, by the way. It is. Yeah. And then he would spend a fair amount of time during the day in this kind of meditative state where his mind is very active, body very still.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And then Karl Deisteroth, when he came on my podcast, talked about how he forces himself to sit still and think in complete sentences late at night after his kids go to sleep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
You know, there's a state of mind, rapid eye movement sleep, where your body is completely paralyzed and the mind is extremely active, and people credit rapid eye movement sleep with some of the more elaborate emotion-filled dreams and the source of many ideas. And there are other examples, Einstein,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
People described him as taking walks around the Princeton campus, then pausing, and would ask him what was going on, and the idea that his mind was continuing to churn forward at a high rate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
So this is far from controlled studies, but we're talking about some incredible minds and creatives who have a practice of stilling the body while keeping the mind deliberately very active, very similar to rapid eye movement sleep. And then there are a lot of people who also report great ideas coming to them in the shower or while running.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
So it can be the opposite as well, where the body is very active and the mind is perhaps more on kind of like a default mode network, not really focusing on any one specific thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Right, and we know, we just did this six-episode special series on sleep with Matt Walker. We know that... When you deprive yourself of sleep and then you get sleep, you get a rebound in rapid eye movement sleep. You get a higher percentage of rapid eye movement sleep. And Matt talks about this in the podcast. And he did an episode on sleep and creativity, sleep and memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And rapid eye movement sleep comes up multiple times in that series. There's also some very interesting stuff about cannabis withdrawal and rapid eye movement sleep. People are coming off cannabis often will suffer from insomnia, but when they finally do start sleeping, they dream like crazy. Cannabis is a very controversial topic right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah, we did an episode about cannabis, talked about the health benefits and the potential risks, right? It's neither here nor there. Depends on the person, depends on the age, depends on genetic background, a number of other things. We published that episode well over a year ago and it had no issues online, so to speak.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And then a clip of it was put to X where, you know, the real action occurs, as you know, your favorite spot. Um, yeah, the, the, the four ounce gloves, as opposed to the 16 ounce gloves, um, that is X versus Instagram or YouTube. There was, um, kind of an immediate dog pile from a few people in the cannabis research field. The PhDs and MDs, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
There were people on our side, there were people not on our side. The statement that got things riled up the most was this notion that for certain individuals, there's a high potential for inducing psychosis with high THC-containing cannabis. For certain individuals, not all. That sparked some issues. There was really a split. You see this in different fields.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
There was one person in particular who came out swinging with language that, in my opinion, is not of the sort that you would use at a university venue, especially among colleagues. But that's fine. We're all grownups.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah, it's tough because most academics don't understand that people outside the university system are, they don't, they're not familiar with
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
like the inner workings of science and um and the culture and so you have to be very careful how you present when you're a university professor um and when yeah so you know he came out swinging at some you know a four-letter word type language and he was obviously upset about so i simply said what i would say anywhere which was hey look you come on the podcast let's chat and um why don't you give your tell me where i'm wrong and let's discuss and and fortunately he agreed
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
and initially he said well no how can i be sure you're not going to misrepresent me and so i said we got on a dm then an email then eventually phone call and just said hey listen like you're welcome to record the whole conversation we've never done a gotcha on my podcast and let's just get to the heart of the matter i think this this little controversy is perfect um kindling for for a really great discussion and um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And he had some other conditions that we worked out. And I felt like, cool, like he's really interested. You get a very different person on the phone than you do on Twitter. I will say he's been very collegial. And that conversation is on the schedule. I said, we'll fly you out. We'll put you up. He said, no, he wants to fly himself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
He really wants to make sure that there's like kind of a space between. I think some of the perception of science and health podcasts in the academic community is that it's all designed to sell something. No, we run ads so it can be free to everyone else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But I think, look, in the end, he agreed and I'm excited for the conversation. It was interesting because in the wake of that little exchange, There's been a bunch of press from traditional press about cannabis has now surpassed alcohol in many cultures as within the United States, as when I say cultures, I mean demographics, the United States as the drug of choice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
There have been people highlighting the issues of potential psychosis in high THC containing cannabis. And so it's kind of interesting to see how traditional media is sort of on board certain elements that I put forward. And I think there's some controversy as to whether or not the different strains, the indicas and sativas, are biologically different, et cetera.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
So we'll get down into the weeds, pun intended, during that one. And I'm excited. It's the first time that we've responded to to a direct criticism online about scientific content in a way that really promoted like, oh, here, the idea of inviting a particular guest. And so it's great, let's get a guest who is expert in cannabis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I believe, I could be wrong about this, that he's a behavioral neuroscientist, it's slightly different training, but look, he seems highly credentialed, it'll be fun. And we welcome that kind of exchange. I deeply- And I'm not being diplomatic. I'm just saying like, it's cool. Like he's coming on, you know, and he was friendly on the phone, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Like he literally came out online and was like, basically like, kind of like F you. Like F this and F you. But you get someone on the phone and it's like, hey, how's it going? And they're like, oh yeah, well, you know, there was an immediate apology of like, hey, listen, I came out- Normally I'm like, not like that, but online. You know, you get a different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
So it's a little bit like, it's a little bit like jujitsu, right? People say all sorts of things, I guess. But if they, if you're like, all right, well, let's go. Then it's probably a different story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
They regress. And they also are protected. You know, when you remove the... I mean, no scientific argument should ever come to physical blows, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But when you remove the real world thing of being right in front of somebody, people will throw all sorts of stones at a distance and over a wall, and they've got their wife or their husband or their boyfriend or their dog or their cat to go cuddle with them afterwards. But you get in a room and it's like, confrontational people,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
in real life are pretty rare, but hopefully if they do it, they're like willing to back it up with knowledge in this case, right? We're not talking about physical altercation. Yeah, he kept coming and he kept putting on conditions. How do I know you want this? And I was like, well, you can record the conversation. How do I know you want that? Listen, we'll pay for you to come out. How do you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And eventually he just kind of relented and to his credit, you know, he's agreed to come on. I mean, he still has to show up, but once he does, you know, we'll treat him right like we would any other guest. Yeah, you treat people really well, and I just hope that people are a little bit nicer on the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah, well, you know, X is an interesting one because it thickens your skin, you know, just to go on there. I mean, you have to be ready to deal with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Years ago, I was a student in TA, then instructor, and then directed a Cold Spring Harbor course on visual neuroscience. These are summer courses that explore different topics. And at night, we would host what we hoped were battles in front of the students.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
where you'd get two people on a, you know, would it be neural prosthetics or molecular tools that would first, you know, restore vision to the blind kind of arguments. And you kind of like, it's kind of a silly argument because it's gonna be a combination of both, right? But you'd get these great arguments. But the arguments were always couched in data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And occasionally you'd get somebody would go like, or would curse or something. But it was the rare, very well-placed insult. It wasn't coming out swinging. I think ultimately, Twitter's a record of people's behavior. The internet is a record of people's behavior. And here I'm not talking about news reports about people's behavior. I'm talking about how people show up online is really important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
You've always carried yourself with a ton of composure and respect, and you would hope that people would grow from that example. Well, I'll tell you that the podcasters that I'm scouting, it's their energy, but it's also how they treat other people, how they respond to comments,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
You know, we're blessed to have pretty significant reach when we put out a podcast like someone else's podcast, it goes far and wide. So like a skateboard team, like a laboratory where you're selecting people to be in your lab, you want to pick people that you would enjoy working with and that are collegial. Etiquette is lacking nowadays, but you're in the suit and tie, you're bringing it back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
James Hollis is a 84-year-old union psychoanalyst who's written 17 books, including Under Saturn's Shadow, which is on the healing and trauma of men, the Eden Project, excuse me, which is about relationships and creating a life. I discovered James Hollis in an online lecture that was recorded, I think, in San Diego. It's on YouTube. The audio is terrible, called Creating a Life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And this was somewhere in the 2011 to 2015 span. I can't remember. And I was on my way to Europe and I called my girlfriend at the time. I was like, I just found the most incredible lecture I've ever heard. And he talks about the shadow. He talks about your developmental upbringing and how you either align with or go 180 degrees off your parents' tendencies and values in certain areas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
He talked about the specific questions to ask of oneself at different stages of life to live a full life. So it's always been a dream of mine to meet him and to record a podcast. And he wasn't able to travel, so our team went out to D.C. and sat down with him. We rarely do that nowadays. People come to our studio.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And he came in, he had some surgeries recently, and he kind of came in with some assistance from a cane and then sat down and just... just blew my mind. From start to finish, he didn't miss a syllable. And every sentence that he spoke was like a quotable sentence with real potency and actionable items.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I think one of the things that was most striking to me was how he said, when we take ourselves out of stimulus and response,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
and we just force ourselves to spend some time in the quiet of our thoughts while walking or while seated or while lying down, doesn't have to be meditation, but it could be, that we access our unconscious mind in ways that reveals to us who we really are and what we really want. And that if we do that practice repeatedly, 10 minutes a day here, 15 minutes a day there,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
that we start to really touch into our unique gifts and the things that make us each us and the directions we need to take. But that so often we just stay in stimulus response. We just do, do, do, do, do, which is great. We have to be productive. But we miss those important messages. And interestingly, he also... put forward this idea of, what is it? It's like, get up, shut up, suit up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah, something like that. Like, get out of bed, suit up, and shut up, and get to work. He also has that in him, kind of a Goggins-type mindset. So be able to turn off all this self-reflection and self-analysis and just get shit done. Get shit done, but then also take dedicated time and stop and just let stuff geyser to the surface from the unconscious mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And he quotes Shakespeare, and he quotes Jung, and he quotes
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
everybody through history with with incredible accuracy and um and in exactly the way uh needed to drive home a point but that conversation to me was one that i really felt like okay you know if i don't wake up tomorrow for whatever reason that one's in the can and i feel really great about it it's it to me it's the most important um guest recording we've ever done um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
in particular because he has wisdom. And while I hope he lives to be 204, chances are he's got another, what, 20, 30 years with us, hopefully more. But I really, really wanted to capture that information and get it out there. So I'm very, very proud of that one. And he's the kind of guy that anyone listens to him, young, old, male, female, whatever, and you're going to get something of value.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Jung said it, we have all things inside of us, and we do, and some people are more in touch with those than others, and some people it's repressed. I mean, does that mean that we could all be, you know, horrible people or marvelous people, benevolent people? Perhaps, I think that... thankfully more often than not people lean away from the like violent and harmful parts of their, their shadow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But I think spending time thinking about, you know, one's,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
shadow shadows is super important how how else are we going to grow otherwise you know we have these unconscious blind spots of denial or um repression or whatever you know the psychiatrists tell us but it clearly exists within all of us i mean we have neural circuits for rage we all do we have neural circuits for altruism um and no one's born without these things and some people they're atrophied and some people that are hypertrophied but
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Looking inward and recognizing what's there is key.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I have a lot of new practices around this. I mean, I'm always exploring for protocols. I have to. It's like in my nature. When I went and spent time with Rick, I tried to adopt his practice of staying very still and just letting stuff come to the surface or the Dicerathian way of formulating complete sentences while being still in the body. What I...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
FM works better is what my good friend Tim Armstrong does to write music. He writes music every day. He's a music producer, he's obviously a singer, guitar player for Rancid, and he's helped dozens and dozens and dozens of female pop artists and punk rock artists write great songs. Many of the famous songs that you've heard from other artists, Tim helped them write.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Tim wakes up sometimes in the middle of the night and what he does is he'll start drawing or painting. So what he's done, and Joni Mitchell talks about this too, you find some creative outlet that's like 15 degrees off center from your main creative outlet. And you do that thing. So for me, that's drawing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I like doing anatomical drawings, neuroscience-based drawing, drawing neurons, that kind of thing. And if I do that for a little while, my mind starts churning on the nervous system and biology. And then I come up with... areas I'd like to explore for the podcast, ways I'd like to address certain topics. Right now, I'm very interested in autonomic control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
A beautiful paper came out that shows that anyone can learn to control their pupil sizes without changing luminance through a biofeedback mechanism. And that gives them control over their so-called automatic autonomic nervous system. And I've been looking at what the circuitry is, and it's beautiful. So I'll draw the circuitry that we know underlies autonomic function.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And as I'm doing that, I'm thinking, oh, like, what about autonomic control and those people that supposedly can control their pupil size? Then you go in and there's a paper published in Nature Press, one of the nature journals, and there's a recent paper on this. Like, oh, cool. And then we talk about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And then how could this be put into a kind of a post or how could this, you know, so doing things that are about 15 degrees off center from your main thing is a great way to access, I believe, the circuits for, in Tim's case, painting goes to songwriting. I think for Joni Mitchell, that was also the case, right? I think it was drawing and painting to singing and songwriting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
For Rick, I don't know what it is. Maybe it's listening to podcasts. I don't know. That's his business. Do you have anything that you like to focus on that allows you then an easier transition into your main creative work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Any cognitive enhancers? I've got quite the gallery in front of me. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Should we walk through this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
This is not a sales thing. It's just I tend to do this bounce back and forth. Your refrigerator just happened to have a lot of different choices.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
This is all my refrigerator. I know, right? There's no food in there. There's water. There's element, which they now have canned. Yeah. And yes, they're a podcast sponsor for both of us, but that's not why I cracked one of these open. I like them provided they're cold.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
There's an orange one. I pushed the sled this morning and pulled the sled from my workout at the gym, and it was hot today here in Austin. So some salt is good. And then matina yerba mate, zero sugar. Full confession, I helped develop this. I'm a partial owner, but I love yerba mate. Half Argentine, been drinking it. mate since I was a little kid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
There's actually a photo somewhere on the internet when I'm like three sitting on my grandfather's lap, sipping mate out the gourd. And then this, my fun, interesting, this is just a little bit of coffee. with a scoop of Brian Johnson gave me cocoa, just like pure unsweetened cocoa. So I put that in chocolate and I like it. Just for the taste. Well, it actually nukes my appetite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And since we're not going out to dinner tonight until later, I figure that's good. Yeah, Brian's an interesting one, right? He's really pushing this thing. The optimization of everything. Yeah. Although he just hurt his ankle. He posted a photo that he hurt his ankle. So now he's injecting BPC, body protection compound 157, which many, many people are taking, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I did an episode on peptides. I should just say, you know, BPC-157, one of the known effects in animal models is angiogenesis, like development of new vasculature, which can be great in some context, but also if you have a tumor, you don't really want to vascularize that tumor anymore. So I worry about people taking BPC-157 continually, but, and there's very little human data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I think there's like one study and it's a lousy one. So a lot of animal data. Some of the peptides, are interesting. However, there's one that I've experimented with a little bit called pinellin, which I find, even if I've just taken it twice a week before sleep, then it seems to do something to the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
circadian timekeeping mechanism, because then on other days when I don't take it, I get unbelievably tired at that time that normally I would do the injection. These are things that I'll experiment with for a couple of weeks and then typically stop, maybe try something else. But I stay out of things that really stimulate any of the major hormone pathways. When it comes to peptides,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Well, I'm very sensitive to these things, and I have been doing a lot of things for a long time, so if I add something in, it's always one thing at a time, and I notice right away if it does not make me feel good. Like there's a lot of excitement about some of the so-called growth hormone secretagogues, hypermorelin, testamorelin, sermorelin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I've experimented a little bit with those in the past, and they've nuked my rapid eye movement sleep, but given me a lot of deep sleep, which doesn't feel good to me, but other people like them. I also just generally try and avoid taking peptides that tap into these hormone pathways because you can run into all sorts of issues. But some people take them safely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But usually after about four or five days, I know if I like something or I don't, and then I move on. But I am not super adventurous with these things. I know people that will take cocktails of peptides with multiple things. They'll try anything. That's not me. And I do blood work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Um, but also I'm, you know, I'm mainly reading papers and podcasting and, um, I'm teaching a course next spring, Stanford, I'm going to do a big undergraduate course. Um, so I'm trying to develop that course and things like that. So, um, I don't need to lift more weight or run further than I already do, which is not that much weight or, or far as it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
No, and I'm not trying to get down below whatever, you know, 7% body fat or something. I don't have those kinds of goals. So hydration, electrolytes, caffeine in the form of mate, and then this coffee thing. And then here's one that I think I brought out for discussion. This is a piece of Nicorette. They're not a sponsor. Nicotine is an interesting compound. It will raise blood pressure, and it...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
It's probably not safe for everybody, but nicotine is gaining in popularity like crazy, mainly these pouches that people put in the lip. We're not talking about smoking, vaping, dipping, or snuffing. My interest in nicotine started, this was in 2010. I was visiting Columbia Medical School, and I was in the office of the great neurobiologist Richard Axel, won the Nobel Prize.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
co-recipient with Linda Buck for the discovery of the molecular basis of olfaction. Brilliant guy. He's probably in his late 70s now. Probably, yeah. And he kept popping Nicorette in his mouth. And I was like, what's this about? And he said, oh, well, this was just anecdote, right? But he said this. He said, oh, well, you know, it protects against Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. I said, it does?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if he was kidding or not. He's known for making jokes. And then he said that when he used to smoke... It really helped his focus and creativity, but then he quit smoking because he didn't want lung cancer, and he found that he couldn't focus as well, so he would choose Nicorette.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
So occasionally, like right now, I do a half a piece, but I'm not Russian, so I'm a little, you know. Did you just pop the whole thing in your mouth? So I'll do a couple milligrams every now and again. And it definitely sharpens the mind on an empty stomach in particular, but you fast all day. You're still doing one meal a day?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah. Yeah, I did a nicotine pouch with Rogan at dinner and I got high. Yeah, that's a lot. That's like usually six or eight milligrams. I know people that get a canister of Zin, take one a day, pretty soon they're taking a canister a day. So you have to be very careful. I will only allow myself... two pieces of Nicorette total per week.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And you will notice that, you know, in the day after you use it, you know, sometimes your throat will feel a little bit like, like a little spasmy, like you might want to cough once or twice. And so, you know, if you're a singer or you're a podcaster or something, you have to do long podcasts. You want to just be mindful of it. But yeah, you're supposed to kind of like keep it in your cheek and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Here we go. But it did make me intensely focused. In a way, that was a little bit scary. The nucleus basalis is in the basal forebrain. Nucleus has cholinergic neurons that radiate out axons, little wires that release acetylcholine into the neocortex and elsewhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And when you focus on one particular topic matter or one particular area of your visual field or listening to something and focusing visually, we know that there's an elaboration of the amount of acetylcholine released there and it binds to nicotinic acetylcholine receptor sites there. So it's a kind of an attentional modulation by acetylcholine. So you're getting with nicotine, you're getting a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
or artificial heightening of that circuitry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
He literally said it makes his dick very hard. He said that publicly also. Okay, well, as little as I want to think about Tucker Carlson's sex life, no disrespect. The... Major effect of nicotine on the vasculature, my understanding is that it causes vasoconstriction, not vasodilation. Drugs like Cialis, Tadalafil, Viagra, et cetera, are vasodilators. They allow more blood flow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Nicotine does the opposite, less blood flow to the periphery, but provided dosages are kept low. And I don't recommend people use it frequently or at all. And I don't recommend young people use it, you know, you know, 25 and younger. Brain's very plastic at that time. And certainly smoking, dipping, vaping, and snuffing aren't good because you're going to run into trouble for other reasons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But in any case, even there, vaping is a controversial topic. Probably safer than smoking, but has its own issues. And I said something like that, and boy, did I catch a lot of heat for that. You can't say anything as a health science educator and not piss somebody off. Just depends on where the center of mass is and how far outside that you are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
If they experience a crash in the afternoon, this is one of the misconceptions I regret maybe even discussing it. For people that crash in the afternoon, Oftentimes, if they delay their caffeine by 60 to 90 minutes in the morning, they will offset some of that. But if you eat a lunch that's too big or you didn't sleep well the night before, you're not going to avoid that afternoon crash.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But I'll wake up sometimes and go straight to hydration and caffeine, especially if I'm going to work out. Here's a weird one. If I exercise before... 8.30 a.m., especially if I start exercising when I'm a little bit tired, I get energy that lasts all day. If I wait until my peak of energy, which is mid-morning, 10 a.m., 11 a.m., and I start exercising then, I'm basically exhausted all afternoon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And I don't understand why. I mean, it depends on the intensity of the workout. So I like to be done, showered, and heading into work by 9 a.m., but I don't always meet that mark. So you're saying it doesn't affect your energy if you start out with exercising? I think you can get energy and wake yourself up with exercise if you start early, and then that fuels you all day long.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I think that if you wait until you're feeling at your best to train, Sometimes that's detrimental because then in the afternoon when you're doing the work we get paid for, like research, podcasting, et cetera, then oftentimes your brain isn't firing as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I haven't really rigorously tried that wake up and just start running or listening. This is the Jocko thing. And then there's this phenomenon called entrainment, where if you force yourself to exercise or eat or socialize or view bright light at a certain time of day for three to seven days in a row, pretty soon there's an anticipatory circuit that gets generated. This is why
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Anyone, in theory, can become a morning person to some degree or another. And this is also a beautiful example of why you wake up before your alarm clock goes off. You know, people wake up and all of a sudden it goes off. It wasn't because it clicked. It was because you have this incredible timekeeping mechanism that exists in sleep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And there's some papers that have been published in the last couple of years, Nature Neuroscience and elsewhere, showing that people can answer math problems in their sleep. Simple math problems, but math problems nonetheless. This does not mean that if you ask your partner a question in sleep that they're gonna answer accurately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
What happened? What happened? Here's the deal. A few years back, I did a four and a half hour, after editing, four and a half hour episode on male and female fertility. The entire recording took 11 hours. And at one point during the... And by the way, I'm very proud of that episode. Many couples have written to me and said they now have children as a consequence of that episode.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And my first question is, what were you doing during the episode? But in all seriousness... We should say that it's four and a half hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
It talks about sperm health, spermatogenesis. It talks about the ovulatory cycle. It talks about things people can do that are considered absolutely supported by science. It talks about some of the things kind of out on the edge a little bit that are a little bit more experimental. It talks about IVF. It talks about ICSI. It talks about all of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
It talks about frequency of pregnancy as a function of age. et cetera. But there's this one portion there in the podcast where I'm talking about the probability of a successful pregnancy as a function of age. And so... There was a clip that was cut in which I was describing cumulative probability.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And by the way, we've published cumulative probability histograms in many of my laboratory's papers, including one that was a Nature article in 2018, so we run these all the time. And yes, I know the difference between independent and cumulative probability. I do. The way the clip was cut
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And what I stated, unfortunately, combined to like a pretty great gaffe, where I say, you're just adding, I said, you're just adding percentages, 20 to 120 to 120%. And then I made a kind of, unfortunately, my humor isn't always so good. And I made a joke. I said, 120%, but that's a different thing altogether. What I should have said was,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
that's impossible, you know, and here's how it actually works. But then it continues where I then describe the cumulative probability histogram for successful pregnancy. But somewhere in the early portion, I misstated something, right? I made a math error. which implied I didn't understand the difference between independent and cumulative probability, which I do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And it got picked up and run and people had a really good laugh with that one at my expense. And so what I did in response to it was rather than just say everything I just said now, I said, I just came out online and said, hey, folks, in an episode dated this on fertility, I made a math error. Here is the formula for cumulative probability, successful pregnancy at that age.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Here's the graph, here's the, you know, and I offered it as a teaching moment in two ways. One, for people to understand cumulative probability. It was sort of interesting, too, a number of people that had come out critiquing the GAF. Also, like Bology and folks came out pointing out that they didn't understand cumulative probability. So there was a lot of posturing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
You know, the dog pile, oftentimes people are quick to dog pile. They didn't understand, but a lot of people did understand. Some smart people out there, obviously. I called my dad and he was just laughing. He goes, oh, this is good. This is like the old school way of hammering academics. But the point being, it was a teaching moment. Gave me an opportunity to say, hey, I made a mistake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I also made a mistake in another podcast where I did a micron to millimeter conversion or centimeter conversion. And we always correct these in the show note captions. We correct them in the audio now. Unfortunately, on YouTube, it's harder to correct. You can't go and edit in segments. We put in the captions. But that was the one teaching moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
If you make a mistake, it's substantive and relate to data. You apologize and correct the mistake. Use the teaching moment. The other one was to say, hey, you know, in all the thousands of hours of content we've put out, I'm sure I've made some small errors. I think I once said serotonin when I mentioned.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
dopamine and you know you're you're going you're you're riffing and it's a reminder to be careful um to edit double check but the internet usually edits for us and then we go make corrections but it didn't feel good at first but ultimately you know i can laugh at myself about it um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Long ago at Berkeley, when I was TAing my first class, it was a biopsychology class, it must be 1998 or 1999, I was drawing the pituitary gland, which has an anterior and a posterior lobe, actually there's a medial lobe too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I had five, 600 students in that lecture hall, and I drew, it was chalkboard, and I drew the two lobes of the pituitary, and I said, my back was to the audience, I said, you know, and so they just sort of hang there. Mm-hmm. And everyone just erupted in laughter because it looked like a scrotum with two testicles. And I remember thinking like, oh, my God, I don't think I can turn around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I can face this, you know. And I'm like, oh, I got to turn around sooner or later. So I turned around and we just all had a big laugh together. It was embarrassing. I'll tell you one thing, though. They never forgot about the two lobes of the pituitary. Yeah, and you haven't forgotten about that either. Right, there's a high salience for these kinds of things. And it also was kind of fun to see
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
how excited people get to see people trip. It's like an elite sprinter trips and does something stupid, like, you know, runs the opposite direction out of the blocks or something like that. Or, you know, I recall at one World Cup match years ago, a guy scored against his own team. I think they killed the guy. Do you remember that? Some South American or Central American team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And they killed the guy. But yeah, let's look it up. I just said World Cup. Yeah, he was gunned down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I think it would protect you. Listen, you know, so... There are some gaffes that get people killed, right? So, you know, how forgiving are we for online mistakes? You know, it's the nature of the mistakes. People were quite gracious about the gaffe and some weren't. And, you know, it's interesting that, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
We, as public health science educators, we'll do long podcasts sometimes and you need to be really careful. What's great is AI. allows you to check these things now more readily. So that's cool. And there are ways that it's now gonna be more self-correcting. I mean, you know, I think there's a lot of errors out there on the internet and people are finding them and it's cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Like things are getting cleaned up. Yeah, but mistakes nevertheless will happen. Do you feel the pressure of not making mistakes? Sure. I mean, you know, I try and get things right to the best, you know, to the best of my ability. I check with experts. It's kind of interesting when people really don't like something that was said in a podcast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
A lot of times I chuckle because I'm, you know, at Stanford, we have some amazing scientists, but I talk to them else people elsewhere. And it's always interesting to me. How. you know, I'll get divergent information and then I'll find the overlap in the Venn diagram. And I have this like question, do I just stay with the overlap in the Venn diagram? Like I did an episode on oral health.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I didn't know this until I researched that episode, but oral health is critically related to heart health and brain health. There's a bacteria that causes cavities, streptococcus, you know? that can make its way into other parts of the body through the mouth that can cause serious issues. There's the idea that some forms of dementia, some forms of heart disease start in the mouth basically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I talked to no fewer than four dentists, dental experts, and there was a lot of convergence. I also learned that Teeth can demineralize, that's the formation of cavities. They can also remineralize. As long as the cavity isn't too deep, it can actually fill itself back in, especially if you provide the right substrates for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
That saliva is this incredible fluid that has all this capacity to remineralize teeth, provided the milieu is right. things like alcohol-based mouthwashes, killing off some of the critical things you need. It was fascinating. And I put out that episode thinking, oh, I'm not a dentist. I'm not an oral health episode, but I talked to a pediatric dentist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
There's a terrific one, Dr. Downscore Stacy, S-T-A-C-I, on Instagram, does great content. Talked to some others. And then I just waited for the attack. I was like, here we go. And it didn't come. and dentists were thanking me. I was like, whoa, you know? That's a rare thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
More often than not, if I do an episode about, say, psilocybin or MDMA, you get some people liking it, or ADHD and the drugs for ADHD. We did a whole episode on the Ritalin, Vyvanse, Adderall stuff. You get people saying, thank you, you know, I prescribed this to my kid and it really helps. But they're private about the fact that they do it because they get so much attack from other people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
So I like to find the center of mass, report that, try and make it as clear as possible. And then I know that there's some stuff where I'm going to catch shit. What's frustrating for me is when like I see claims that I'm like against fluoridization of water, which I'm not, right? Like we talked about the benefits of fluoride. It builds hyper strong bonds within the teeth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I went and looked at some of the, literally the crystal structure, excuse me, not the crystal structure, but essentially the like micron and submicron structure of teeth is incredible and where fluoride can get in there and form these super strong bonds. And you can also form them with things like hydroxyapatite. And why is there fluoride in water? Well, it's the best.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Okay, you say some things that are interesting, but then somehow it gets turned into like you're against fluoridization, which I'm not. Or I've been accused of being against sunscreen. I wear mineral-based sunscreen on my face. I don't want to get skin cancer, or I use a physical barrier. There is a cohort of people out there that think that all sunscreens are bad. I'm not one of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I'm not what's called a sunscreen truther. But then you get attacked for like, so we're talking about there are certain sunscreens that are problematic. So what, and Rhonda Patrick's now starting to get vocal about this. And so there are certain topics it's interesting for which
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
you have to listen carefully to what somebody is saying, but there's a lumper or lumping as opposed to splitting of what health educators say. And so it just seems like, like with politics, there's this like urgency to just put people into a camp of expert versus like renegade or something. And it's not like that. It's just not like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
So the short answer is I really strive, really strive to get things right. But I know that I'm going to piss certain people off. And you've taught me And Joe's taught me and other podcasters have taught me that if you worry too much about it, then you aren't gonna get the newest information out there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Like peptides, there's very little human data, unless you're talking about Vilisi or the stuff in the alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormone stuff, which are prescribed for female libido, to enhance female libido, or sermorelin, which is for certain growth hormone deficiencies. With rare exception, there's very little human data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
but people are still super interested and a lot of people are taking and doing these things. So you want to get the information out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yes. So like, for instance, there's a community of people online that believe that like, if you consume seed oils or something that like you're setting up your skin for sunburn. And if you don't, you know, like there's all these like theories, but I liked it. So I like to know what the theories are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I like to know what the extremes are, but I also like to know what the standard conversation is, but there's generally more agreement than disagreement. I think where, um, you know, I've been kind of bullish actually as, you know, or like supplements, like people go, oh, supplements. Well, there's food supplements, like a protein powder, which is different than a vitamin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And then they are compounds. There are compounds that have real benefit, but people get very nervous about the fact that they're not regulated, but some of them are vetted for potency and for safety with more rigor than others, you know? And it's interesting to see how people who take care of themselves and put a lot of work into that are often attacked. That's been interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Also, one of the most controversial topics nowadays is Ozempic, Monjaro. I'm very middle of the road on this. I don't understand why the... quote unquote, health wellness community is so against these things. I also don't understand why they have to be looked at as the only route. For some people, they've really helped them lose weight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And yes, there can be some muscle loss and other lean body loss, but that can be offset with resistance training. They've helped a lot of people. And other people are like, no, this stuff is terrible. I think the most interesting thing about Ozempic Monjaro is that they are GLP-1, they're in the GLP-1 pathway, glucagon-like peptide one, and it was discovered in Gila monsters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
which is a lizard, basically. Now the entomologist will dive on me. It's a big lizard-looking thing that doesn't eat very often, and they figured out that there's this peptide that allows it to curb its own appetite. at the level of the brain and the gut, and it has a lot of homology to, sequence homology to what we now call GLP-1.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
So I love anytime there's animal biology links to cool human biology links to a drug that's powerful that can help people with obesity and type two diabetes, and there's evidence that can even curb some addictions. Those are newer data. But I don't see it as either or.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
In fact, I've been a little bit disappointed at the way that the, whatever you want to call it, health wellness, biohacking community has like slammed on Ozempic Monjaro. It's like, they're like, just get out and run. Listen, there are people who are carrying substantial amounts of weight that running could injure them. They get on these drugs and they can improve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And then hopefully they're also doing resistance training and eating better. And then, you know, you're bringing all the elements together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
think if it's a pharmaceutical, it's bad. And then, or if it's a supplement, it's bad depending on which camp they're in. And wouldn't it be wonderful to kind of like fill in the gap between this divide? You know, what I would like to see in politics and in health is neither right nor left, but what we can just call a league of reasonable people that looks at things on an issue by issue basis
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And fills in the center, because I think most people are in are I don't want to say center in a political way, but I think most people are reasonable. They want to be reasonable, but that's not what sells clicks. That's not what that's not what drives interest. But I'm a very like like I look at issue by issue, person by person. I don't like in-group, out-group stuff. I never have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I've got friends from all walks of life. I said this on another podcast, and it always sounds like a political statement, but the push towards polarization, it's so frustrating. If there's one thing that's discouraging to me as I get older each year, I'm like, wow, are we ever going to get out of this polarization? Speaking of which, how are you going to vote for the presidential election?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I'm still trying to figure out how to interview the people involved and do it well. What do you think the role of podcasts is going to be in this year's election?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
i don't think people really appreciate how skilled he is at what he does and the number i mean the three or four podcasts per week press plus the ufc announcing plus comedy tours and stadiums plus um you know doing comedy shows in the middle of the week plus you know, a husband and a father and a friend in jujitsu. The guy's got like superhuman levels of output.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I agree that long form conversation is a whole other business. And I think that people want and deserve to know the people that are running for office in a different way. and to really get to know them. Well, listen, you know, I guess you, I mean, is it clear that he's going to do jail time or maybe he gets away with a fine?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Because I was going to say, I mean, does that mean you're going to be podcasting from jail?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
That just doesn't feel an authentic way to get the interview, but yeah, I understand. Yeah. You wouldn't be able to wear that suit. You'd be wearing a different suit. That's true. Yeah. It's going to be interesting. And you do, I'm not just saying this because you're my friend, but you would do a marvelous job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I think you should sit down with all of them separately to keep it civil and see what happens. Here's one thing that I found really interesting in this whole political landscape. When I'm in Los Angeles, I often get invited to these like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
They're not dinners, but gatherings where a local bunch of podcasters will come together, but a lot of people from the entertainment industry, big agencies, big tech, like big, big tech. Many of the people have been on this podcast. And they'll host a discussion or a debate. And what you find if you look around the room and you talk to people is that about half the people in the room
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
are very left-leaning and very outspoken about that. And they'll tell you exactly who they want to see win the presidential race. And the other half will tell you that they're for the other side. A lot of people that... people assume are on one side of the aisle or the other are in the exact opposite side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Now, some people are very open about who, who they're for, but it's been very interesting to see how, um, when you get people one-on-one, they're like telling you they want X candidate to win or Y candidate to win. And sometimes I'm like, really? I can't believe it. Like you like, yep. And so it's what people think about, um, people's political leanings is often exactly wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And that's been eye-opening for me. And I've seen that in university campuses too. And so it's gonna be really, really interesting to see what happens in November.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah, I mean, here's, to me, the most interesting question. Who is gonna be the next... big candidate in years to come. Who's that going to be? Right now, I don't see or know of that person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Well, that's the issue, right? Who wants to live in this 12-hour news cycle where you're just trying to dunk on the other team so that nobody notices the shit that you fucked up? That's not only not fun or interesting, it also is just like, it's gotta be psychosis inducing at some point. And I think that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
you know, God willing, we're going to, you know, some young guy or woman is like on this and refuses to back down and was just like determined to be president and we'll make it happen. But like, I don't even know who the viable candidates are. Maybe you, Lex, you know. We should ask Sagar. Sagar would know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah. Maybe Sagar himself. Sagar's show is awesome. Yeah, it is. He and Crystal do a great thing. He's incredible. Especially since they have somewhat divergent opinions on things. That's what makes it so cool. He's great. He looks great in a suit. Looks real sexy. He's taking real good care of himself. I think he's getting married soon. Congratulations, Sagar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Forgive me for not remembering your future wife's name.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
That just shows the fundamental difference between the two. With a poem inscribed in it. Which was pretty damn good. I realize everything we bring up on the screen is like really... Depressing, like the soccer player getting killed. Can we bring up something happy? Sure, let's go to Nature's Metal Instagram. Those are pretty intense. We actually did a collaborative post on a shark thing. Really?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah. What kind of shark thing? So to generate the fear VR stimulus for my lab in 2020, Was it, yeah, 2016, we went down to Guadalupe Island off the coast of Mexico. Me and a guy named Michael Muller, who's a very famous portrait photographer, but also takes photos of sharks. And we used 360 video to build VR of great white sharks. Brought it back to the lab.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
We published that study in Current Biology. in 2017, went back down there. And that was the year that I exited the cage. You lower the cage with a crane. And that year I exited the cage. I had a whole mess with a air failure the day before. I was breathing from a hookah line while in the cage. I had no scuba on. Divers were out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
The thing got boa constricted up and I had an air failure and I had to actually share air. And it was a whole mess. Story for another time. But the next day, because I didn't want to get PTSD and it was pretty scary, the next day I cage exited. with some other divers. And it turns out with these great white sharks in Guadalupe, the water's very clear and you can swim toward them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And then they'll veer off you if you swim toward them. Otherwise they see you as prey. Well, in the evening, you've brought all the cages up and you're hopefully all alive. and we were hanging out fishing for tuna. One of the crew on board had a line in the water and was fishing for tuna for dinner, and a shark took the tuna off the line. And it's a very dramatic take.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And you can see the just absolute size of these great white sharks. The waters there are filled with them. That's the one. So this video, just the Neuralink link, was shot by Matt McDougall, who is the head neurosurgeon at Neuralink. There it is. Now, believe it or not, it looks like it missed, like it didn't get the fish. It actually just cut that thing like a bandsaw.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
So I'm up on the deck with Matt. Yeah. And so when you look at it from the side, you really get a sense of the girth of this freaking thing. So as it comes up, if you look at the size of that thing. And they move through the water with such speed. Just a couple. So when you're in the cage and the cage is lowered down below the surface. They're going around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
You're not allowed to chum the water there. Some people do it. But, and then when you KJAG sit, they're like, well, what are you doing out here? And then, you know, you swim toward them, they veer off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But what's interesting is that if you look at how they move through the water, all it takes for one of these great white sharks, when it sees a tuna or something it wants to eat, is like two flicks of the tail and becomes like a missile. It's just unbelievable economy of effort.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And Ocean Ramsey, who is, in my opinion, the greatest of all KJX at shark divers, this woman who dove with enormous great white sharks, she really understands their behavior when they're aggressive, when they're not going to be aggressive. She and her husband, Juan, I believe his name is, they understand how the tiger sharks differ from the great white sharks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
We were down there basically not understanding any of this. We never should have been there. And actually, the air failure the day before, plus KJXing the next day, I told myself after coming up from the cage exit, that's it. I'm no longer taking risks with my life. I want to live. Got back across the border a couple days later. I was like, that's it. I don't take risks with my life any longer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But yeah, McDougal, Matt McDougal shot that video. And then it went, quote unquote, viral through Nature's Metal. We passed them that video.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Right towards them and they'll bank off. Now, if you don't see them, they're ambush predators. You're swimming in the surface.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Some people will actually roll them, but if they're coming in full speed, you're not going to roll the shark. But here we are back to dark stuff again. I like the shark attack map and the shark attack map shows that, you know, Northern California, there were a couple, actually a guy's head got taken off. He was swimming north of San Francisco. There's been a couple in Northern California.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
That was really tragic. But most of them are in Florida and Australia. Florida. The Surfrider Foundation Shark Attack map. There it is. They have a great map. There you go. That's what they look like. They have all these scars on them. So if you zoom in on... I mean, look at this. If you go to North America- Look at skulls. Yeah, where there are deadly attacks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But in Northern California, sadly, this is really tragic. If you zoom in on this one, I read about this. This guy, if you can click the link, 52-year-old male, he was in chest high water. This is just tragic. I feel so sad for him and his family. He's just- Three members of the party chose to go in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
He was nigh, was in his chest high water, 25 to 50 yards from shore, breached the water, seized his head, and that was it. So it does happen, it's very infrequent. If you don't go in the ocean, there's a very, very, very low probability.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Who do you think wins, a saltwater crocodile or a shark? Okay, I do not like saltwater crocodiles. They scare me to no end. Muller, Michael Muller, who dove all over the world, he sent me a picture of him diving with...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
saltwater crocs in cuba it was a smaller one but goodness christ have you seen the size of some of those saltwater crocs yeah um i'm thinking i'm thinking the the sharks are so agile they're amazing they've head cammed one or body cammed one um moving through the kelp bed um and you look and it's just they're so agile moving through the water and and it's looking up at the surface like the camera's looking at the surface and you just realize if you're out there um you're not
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
and you're swimming and you get hit by a shark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah, and turning one of those big salties is probably not that, you know, turning around, it's like a battleship. I mean, those sharks are unbelievable. They can hit from all sorts. Oh, and they... They do this thing, we saw this, you're out of the cage or in the cage, and you'll look at one and you'll see its eye kind of like looking at you. They can't really foveate, but they'll look at you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And you're tracking it, and then you'll look down and you'll realize that one's coming at you. They're ambush predators, they're working together. It's fascinating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Very primitive, eyes on the side of the head. Their vision is decent enough. They're mostly, obviously, sensing things with their electro-sensing in the water, but also... Oh, faction. Yeah, I spend far too much time thinking about and learning about the visual systems of different animals. If you get me going on this, we'll be here all night.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Because this is from a shark. Goodness. Yeah, I can't say I ever saw one with teeth this big, but it's beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
It's beautiful. Yeah, it's probably... probably your blood pressure just goes and you don't feel a thing. Before we went down for the cage exit, a guy in our crew, Pat Dawson, who's a very experienced diver, asked one of the South African divers, so what's the contingency plan if somebody catches a bite? And they were like, he was like every man for himself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And they're like, basically saying, if somebody catches a bite, that's it. Anyway, I thought we were going to bring up something happy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
well that is happy well nature is beautiful yeah nature is beautiful uh we lived um but you know that there are there are happy things you brought up nature as metal this see this is the difference between russian yeah americans and americans it's like maybe this is actually a good time to bring up um your ayahuasca journey i've never done ayahuasca But I'm curious about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I'm also curious about Ibogaine, Iboga. But you told me that you did ayahuasca and that for you it wasn't the dark, scary ride that it is for everybody else. Yeah, it was an incredible experience for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I've done high-dose psilocybin. It's terrifying, but I've always gotten something very useful out of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
That's the fundamental biological timer. You know, every mammalian species has a short wavelength. So you think like blue UV type, but like absorbing cone and a longer wavelength absorbing cone. And it does this interesting subtraction to designate when it's morning and evening, because when the sun is low in the sky, you've got short wavelength and long wavelength light.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Like when you look at a sunrise, it's got blues and yellows, orange and yellows. You look in the evening, reds, orange, and blues. And in the middle of the day, it's like full spectrum light. Now, it's always full spectrum light, but because of some atmospheric conditions,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
elements and because of the low solar angle, like that difference between the different wavelengths of light is the fundamental signal that the neurons in your eye pay attention to and signal to your circadian timekeeping mechanism. Like we are at the core of our brain and the suprachiasmatic nucleus, we are, we are like, wired to be entrained to the rising and setting of the sun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Like, that's the biological timer, which makes perfect sense because, you know, obviously, as the planets spin and revolve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
So maybe that affects... Well, their social rhythms, their feeding rhythms, sometimes in terms of some species will signal the timing of activity of other species. But yeah, getting out from the canopy is critical. Of course, even under the canopy during the daytime, there's far more photons than...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
at night you know this is always when i'm telling people to get sunlight in their eyes in the morning and in the evening people say there's no light no sunlight this time here like it go outside on a really overcast day it's far brighter than it is at night right so um there's still lots of sunlight even if you can't see the sun as an object but i i love um time perception shifts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And you mentioned that in the jungle, it's linked to the rising and setting of the sun. You also mentioned that on ayahuasca, you zoomed out from the earth. These are like, to me, the most interesting aspects of having a human brain as opposed to another brain, of course, if only you ever had a human brain, but which is that you can, consciously set your time domain window.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Like we can be focused here, we can be focused on all of Austin, or we can be focused on the entire planet. You can make those choices consciously, but in the time domain, it's hard. Like different activities bring us into fine slicing or more broad bending of time, depending on what we're doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
programming or exercising or researching or podcasting, but just how unbelievably fluid the human brain is in terms of the aperture of the time-space window of our cognition and of our experience. And I feel like this is perhaps one of the more valuable tools that we have access to that we don't really leverage as much as we should, which is when things are really hard, you
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
need to zoom out and see it as one element within your whole lifespan and that there's more to come um you know i mean people commit suicide because they can't see beyond the time domain they're in or they think it's going to go on forever um when we're happy we rarely think this is going to last forever but uh which is interesting contrast in its own right but i think that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
psychedelics, while I have very little experience with them, I have some, and it sounds like they're just a very interesting window into the different apertures.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Do you have any interest in iboga? I'm very interested in Ibogaine Iboga. There's a colleague of mine and researcher at Stanford, Nolan Williams, who's been doing some transcranial magnetic stimulation and brain imaging on people who have Take in Ibogaine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Ibogaine, as I understand it, gives a 22-hour psychedelic journey where no hallucinations with eyes open, but you close your eyes and you get a very high-resolution image of actual events that happened in your life, but then you have agency within those movies. I think you have to be of healthy heart to be able to do it. I think you have to be on a heart rate monitor. It's not trivial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
It's not like these other psychedelics. But there's a wonderful group called Veterans Solutions that has used Iboga combined with some other psychedelics. in the veterans community to great success for things like PTSD. And it's a group I've really tried to support in any way that I can, mainly by being vocal about the great work they're doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But you hear incredible stories of people who are just like, like near cratered in their life or zombied by PTSD and other things post-war, um, get back a lightness or achieve a lightness and a clarity, um, that they didn't feel they had. So I'm very curious about these compounds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Um, the state of Kentucky, we should check this, but, um, I believe it's taken money from the, uh, opioid crisis settlement for Ibogaine research. I mean, so this is like no longer, yes. If you look here, let's see, uh, did they do it? Oh no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
They were going to use the money to treat opioid. Now officials are backing off 50 billion. What is on its way over the coming years? $50 billion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Kentucky has some of the highest number of deaths from the opioid. So they were going to do psychedelic research with Ibogaine, supporting research on illegal folks, psychedelic drug called Ibogaine. Well, I guess they backed away from it. Well- Sooner or later we'll get some happy news up on the internet during this episode. I don't know what you're talking about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's true. And you survived the jungle. Well, that's the thing. I was writing to you on WhatsApp multiple times because I was going to put it on the internet. Are you okay? And if you're like alive, and then I was going to just like put it to Twitter, just like he's alive. But then of course you're far too classy for that. So you just came back alive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I was going to ask you, it's kind of a silly question, but like give me a small fraction of things on your bucket list. Bucket list.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah. What's the status of that? I don't know, I'm being patient about the whole thing. Red Planet ran that cartoon of you guys going to Mars. That one was pretty funny. That's true. That was pretty funny. The one where Goggins is already up there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
What about seeing different animal species? I'm a huge fan of this guy, Joel Sartori, where he has this photo arc project where he takes portraits of all these different animals. If people aren't already following him on Instagram, he's doing some really important work. This guy's Instagram is... Amazing. Like portraits of animals. Well, look at these portraits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
The amount of, I don't want to say personality, because we don't want to project anything onto them, but the, like the eyes, and he'll occasionally put them, moving like that, there's a little owl. I delight in things like this. I've got some content coming on animals and animal neuroscience and eyes. Dogs or all kinds? All animals. And I'm very interested in
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
kids content that, that incorporates animals. So we have some things brewing there. Like I could look at this kind of stuff all day long. Look at that bat. Like bats, people think about bats as kind of like little flickering, a little annoying disease carrying things. But look how beautiful that little sucker is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Oh yeah. We've been in discussions with Cookie. The, um, I can't say too much about that, but Cookie Monster embodies dopamine, right? Cookie Monster wants cookie, right? Wants cookie right now. It was that one tweet, Cookie Monster, I bounce because cookies come from all directions. It's just embodying the desire for something, which is an incredible aspect of ourselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
The other one is, do you remember a little while ago, Elmo put out a tweet, hey, how's everyone doing out there? And it went viral. And the Surgeon General of the United States had been talking about the loneliness crisis. He came on the podcast. And a lot of people have been talking about problems with loneliness, mental health issues with loneliness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Elmo puts out a tweet, hey, how's everyone doing out there? Everyone gravitates toward it. So the different Sesame Street characters really embody the different kind of aspects of self through very narrow neural circuit perspective. Snuffleupagus is shy and Oscar the Grouch is grouchy, right? And the Count, one, two. The archetypes of, yeah, this is very Jungian once again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah, and I think that the creators of Sesame Street clearly either understand that or it's an unconscious genius to that. So yeah, there are some things brewing on conversations with Sesame Street characters. I know you'd like to talk to Vladimir Putin. I'd like to talk to Cookie Monster. It illustrates the differences in our sophistication. or something. It illustrates a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But yeah, I also, I love animation. So I'm not anime. That's not my thing, but animation. So I'm very interested in the use of animation to get science content across. So there are a bunch of things brewing. But anyway, I delight in Sartori's work and there's a conservation aspect to it as well. But I think that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Mostly want to thank you for finally putting up something that like where something is not being killed or like let some sad, sad outcome. These are all really positive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
They're really cool. And every once in a while, look at, look at that mountain lion. But I also like to look at these and, and some of them remind me of certain people. Right? So let's just scroll through. Like for instance, I think when we don't try and process it too much. So like, okay, look at this cat, this civic cat, amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Like, I feel like that's somebody, I feel like this is like someone I met once as a young kid. Curiosity and a playfulness. Carnivore. Carnivore, frontalized eyes. Found and forced to the areas. Right. So then you go down, you know, it's like, this beautiful fish. Neon pink. Right. It reminds you of some of the influencers you see on Instagram, right? Except this one's natural. Just kidding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Let's see. No filter. No filter. Yeah. Let's see. I feel like... Bears. I'm a big fan of bears. Yeah, bears are beautiful. This one kind of reminds me of you a little bit. There's like a stoic nature to it, a curiosity. So you can kind of feel like the essence of animals. You don't even have to do psychedelics to get there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Right. I mean, one of the reasons I love New York City so much despite its problems at times, is that everywhere you look, there's life. It's like a tropical reef. If you've ever done scuba diving or snorkeling, you look on a tropical reef and it's like, there's some little crab working on something. And like everywhere you look, there's life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
You know, in the Bay Area, if you go scuba diving or snorkeling, it's like a kelp bed. You know, the Bay Area is like a kelp bed. Every once in a while, some big fish goes by. It's like a big IPO. Yeah. But like most of the time, not a whole lot happens. Actually, the Bay Area, it's interesting as I've been going back there more and more recently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
There are really cool little subcultures starting to pop up again. There's incredible skateboarding. The GX1000 guys are these guys that bomb down hills. They're nuts. Like they're just going like crazy. So it's just speed, not tricks. You got to see GX1000. These guys going down hills in San Francisco. They are wild. And occasionally, unfortunately, occasionally someone will get hit by a car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But GX1000, look, into intersections. They have spotters. You can see someone there. Oh, I see. There's somebody looking out. Yeah, into traffic. In San Francisco. Yeah, this is crazy. Like, this is unbelievable. And they're just wild cars. But in any case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Well, I'm working on a book. So I'm actually going to head to a cabin for a couple of weeks and write, which I've never done. People talk about doing this, but I'm going to do that. I'm excited for that. Just the mental space of really dropping into writing. Like Jack Nicholson in The Shining cabin? Let's hope not. Okay. Let's hope not. You know, before...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I mean, I only started doing public-facing anything, posting on Instagram in 2019, but I used to head up to Wallala on the northern coast of California, sometimes by myself, to a little cabin there and spend a weekend by myself and just... read and write papers and things like that. I used to do that all the time. I miss that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
So some of that, I'm trying to spend a bit more time with my relatives in Argentina, relatives on the East Coast. I see my parents more. They're in good health, thankfully. I want to get married and have a family. That's an important priority. I'm putting a lot of work in there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah, putting a lot of work into the runway on that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And then I'll listen to it someday and see if I hit the marks. Yeah. Well, obviously pick the right partner, but also like do the work on yourself. Know yourself, the Oracle, know thyself. And I think, listen, I have a friend, he's a new friend, but he's a friend who I met for a meal. He's a very, very well-known actor overseas and his stuff has made it over here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And we become friends and we went to lunch and we were talking about work and being public facing and all this kind of thing. And then I said, you have kids, right? And he says, he has four kids. I was like, oh yeah, you know, I see your posts with the kids. You seem really happy. And he said, he just looked at me, leaned in and he said, it's the best gift you'll ever give yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And he also said, and pick your partner, the mother of your kids very carefully. So, you know, that's good advice coming from excellent advice coming from somebody who's, you know, very successful in work and family. So that's the only thing I can pass along. We hear this from friends of ours as well, but Kids are amazing and family's amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
All these people who want to be immortal and live to be 200 or something, there's also the old-fashioned way of having children that live on and evolve a new legacy, but they have half your DNA. So that's exciting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Let's go. Right, well, the chaos of kids is kind of the... It can either bury you or it can give you energy. But I grew up in a big pack of boys always doing like wild and crazy things. And so that kind of energy is great. And if it's not a big pack of wild boys, it's, you know, you have daughters and they can be, you know, different form of chaos, sometimes same form of chaos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
How many kids do you think you want? You know, it's either two or five. Very different dynamics. You're one of two, right? You have a brother. I mean, I'm very close with my sister. I couldn't imagine having another sibling because there's so much richness there. We talk almost every day. Three, four times a week. Sometimes just briefly, but we're tight. We really look out for one another.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
She's an amazing person. Truly an amazing person. And has raised her daughter in an amazing way. She's like... My niece is gonna head to college in a year or two, and my sister's done an amazing job. And her dad's done a great job, too. They both really put a lot into the family aspect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I just had Jonathan Haidt on the podcast, the guy who's talking about the anxious generation causing the American mind. He's great. But he was saying that, you know, in order to keep kids healthy, they need to not be on social media or have smartphones until they're 16. I've actually been thinking a lot about getting a bunch of friends onto neighboring properties.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
You know, everyone talks about this. Not creating a commune or anything like that, but I think Jonathan's right. We were more or less, our brain wiring does best when we are raised in small village type environments where kids can forage, the whole free range kids idea. I mean, I grew up skateboarding and building forts and dirt clod wars and all that stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
It would be so strange to have a childhood without that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I mean, it's cool to see, for instance, kids in New York City just kind of moving around the city with so much sense of agency. It's really, really cool. The suburbs, like where I grew up,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
like as soon as we could get out take the 7f bus up to san francisco and hang out with you know wild ones like you know while there were dangers i mean we couldn't wait to get out of the suburbs the moment that you know forts and dirt clod wars and stuff didn't didn't cut it we just like wanted into the city so i um bucket list i will probably move to a major city not los angeles or san francisco um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
in the next few years, New York City, potentially. Those are all such different flavors of experiences. Yeah. So I'd love to live in New York City for a while. I've always wanted to do that, and I will do that. I've always wanted to also have a place in a very rural area. So Colorado and Montana are high on my list right now. And to be able to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
pivot back and forth between the two would be great, just for different experiences. And also, I like a very physical life, so the idea of getting up with the sun in a Montana or Colorado-type environment. And I've been putting some effort towards finding a spot for that. And New York City, to me, I know it's got its issues, and people say, it wasn't what it was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Okay, I get it, but listen, I've never lived there, so for me, it would be entirely new. And... you know, Schulz seems full of life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Yeah, you walk down the street, there's like a person with like a cat on their head and no one gives a shit. Yeah, that's great. San Francisco used to be like that. The joke was like, You have to be naked and on fire in San Francisco before someone takes it. But now it's changed. But again, recently I've noticed that San Francisco, it's not just about the skateboarders.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Definitely. I mean, I came up within and then on the periphery of skateboard culture. And for the record, I was not a great skateboarder. I always have to say that, because skateboarders are relentless if you call something you didn't do or whatever. I mean, I could do a few things, and I loved the community, and I still have a lot of friends in that community.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
There's some community houses of people in tech that are super interesting. There's some community housing of people not in tech that I've learned about and known people have lived there. And it's cool. There's stuff happening there. in these cities that's new and different. I mean, that's what youth is for. They're supposed to evolve things out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Do you do like daily habits? Yeah, I do. My... I wake up, if I don't feel I slept enough, I do this non-sleep-depressed yoga nidra thing that I've talked about a bunch. We actually released a few of those tracks as audio tracks on Spotify. 10 minute, 20 minute ones puts me back into a state that feels like sleep and I feel very rested. Actually, Matt Walker and I are gonna run a study.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
He's just submitted the IRB to run a study on NSDR and what it's actually doing to the brain. There's some evidence of increases in dopamine, et cetera, but those are older studies, still cool studies. So I'll do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
get up, hydrate, and if I've got my act together, I punch some caffeine down, like some matina, some coffee, maybe another matina, and resistance train three days a week, run three days a week, and then take one day off. And like to be done by 8.39, and then I want to get into some real work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I actually have a sticky note on my computer, just like reminding me how good it feels to accomplish some real work. And then I go into it right now, it's the book writing, researching a podcast and just fight tooth and nail to stay off. social media, text message, WhatsApp, YouTube, all that. Get something done. How long can you go? Can you go like three hours, just deep focus?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
If I hit a groove, yeah, 90 minutes to three hours if I'm really in a groove.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Oh, yeah. The agitation. But I've sat across the table from you a couple years ago when I was out here in Austin doing some work, and I was working on stuff. And I noticed you would just stare at your notebook sometimes, just like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
pen at the same position and then you'll get back into it like they're those building that hydraulic pressure and then go yeah i try and get something done of value then it the communications start and talking to my podcast producer my team is everything i mean like the the magic potion in the podcast is rob moore right um who's in the has been in the room with me every single solo
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Jim Fibo at Deluxe, you can look him up. He's kind of the man behind the whole scene. I know Tony Hawk, Danny Way, all these guys. I got to see them come up and get big and stay big in many cases, start huge companies like Danny and call him a case, or DC. Some people have a long life in something, some don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Costello used to be in there with us because that's it people have asked journalists have asked can they sit in friends have asked nope just Rob and uh for guest interviews he's there as well and I talk to Rob all the time all the time we talk multiple times per day and um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
You know, in life, I've made some errors in certain relationship domains in my life in terms of partner choice and things like that. And I certainly don't blame all of it on them, but, you know, I've played my role. But in terms of picking business partners and friends, like, you know, to work with, I mean, Rob's just, it's been bullseyes. And it's just Rob has been amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Mike Blayback, our photographer, and the guys I mentioned earlier, like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
we just communicate as much as we need to and we pour over every decision like near neuroticism before we make we put anything out there and so including like even creative decisions of like topics to cover all that yeah like a photo for the book jacket the other day mike shoots photos then and then we look at them we pour over them together um logo for the perform podcast with andy gallop and then we're launching like is that the right contour mike's the real he's got the aesthetic
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
because he was at DC so long as a portrait photographer. And he's cute, was close friends with Ken Block, did Jim Khanna, like all the car jumping in the city stuff. Like, I mean, Mike is a master. He's a true master of that stuff. And we just pour over every little decision. But even with sponsors, you know, there are dozens of ads now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
By the way, that whole Jawserciser thing of me saying, oh, a guy went from a two to a seven. I never said that, that's AI. Like I would never call a number off somebody, a two to a seven. Are you kidding me? It's crazy. So is AI. If you bought the thing, I'm sorry. But like our sponsors, we list the sponsors that we have and why on our website.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And like the decision, do we work with this person or not? Do we still like the product? I mean, we've got ways with sponsors because of like changes in the product or change, you know. Most of the time it's amicable, all good. But you know, like just every detail and that just takes a ton of time and energy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But I try and work mostly on content and my team's constantly trying to keep me out of the other discussions. But I, cause I obsess, but yeah, you have to, you have to have a team of some sort, someone that you can run things by. For sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But one thing I observed and learned a lot from in skateboarding at the level of observing the skateboarders and then the ones that started companies. And then what I also observed in science and still observe is you do it for a while, you do it at the highest possible level for you. And then at some point you pivot and you start supporting the young talent coming in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I used to spend a lot more time alone. That's on my bucket list, spend a bit more time dropped into work alone. I think social media, like, causes our brain to go the other direction. I try and answer some comments and then get back to work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
So after that morning block, I'll eat some lunch and I'll usually do something while I'm doing lunch or something and then a bit more work and that real work, deep work. And then around 2.30, I do a non-sleep deep rest, take a short nap, wake up, boom, maybe a little more caffeine. And then... lean into it again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And then I find if you really put in the deep work, two or three bouts per day by about 5 or 6 p.m., it's over. I was down at Jocko's place not that long ago and in the evening did a sauna session with him and some family members of his and some of their friends. And it's really cool. They all work all day and train all day and then in the evening they get together and they sauna and cold plunge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
I'm really into this whole thing of gathering with other people at a specific time of day. I have a gym at my house and Tim will come over and train. We've slowed that down in recent months. But I think gathering in groups once a day, being alone for part of the day. It's very fundamental stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
We're not saying anything that hasn't been said millions of times before, but how often do people actually do that? And call the party, you know, like be the person to like bring people together if it's not happening. That's something I've really had to learn, even though I'm an introvert. Like, hey, I'm like, gather people together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
You came through town the other day and a lot of people at the house. It was rad. Actually, I was playing because I was getting a massage when you walked in. I don't sit around getting massages very often, but I was getting one that day. And then everyone came in and the dog came in and like everyone was piled in. It was very sweet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And, you know, we're fortunate to have a lot of them. It'll also show you who really has put in the time to try and understand you and understand people, like people are complicated. I love that, so can you read the quote once more?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Definitely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
It definitely makes you stronger. Let's go get some food. Yeah. You're one meal a day guy. Yeah. I actually ate something earlier, but it was like a protein shake and a couple pieces of biltong. I hope we're eating a steak. I hope so too. I'm full of nicotine and caffeine. Yeah. What do you think? How do you feel? I feel good. Yeah. I was thinking you'd probably like, I only did a half a piece.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And I won't have more for a little while, but a little too good. Yeah. Thank you for talking once again, brother. Yeah. Thanks so much, Lex. It's been a great ride, this podcast thing. And you're the reason I started the podcast. You inspired me to do it. You told me to do it, did it. And you've also been an amazing friend.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
You showed up in some, some very challenging times and you've shown up for me publicly. You've shown up for me in my home and my life and, you know, it's an honor to have you as a friend.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
In fact, the greatest scientists, people like Richard Axel, Catherine Duloc, there are many other labs in neuroscience, Karl Deisseroth. They're not just known for doing great science, they're known for mentoring some of the best scientists that then go on to start their own labs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And I think in podcasting, I am very fortunate I got in in a fairly early wave, not the earliest wave, but thanks to your suggestion of doing a podcast, fairly early wave. And I'll continue to go as long as it feels right. And I feel like I'm doing good in the world and providing good, but I'm already starting to scout talent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
My company that I started with Rob Moore, Sycom Media, there's a couple other guys in there too, Mike Blayback, our photographer, Ian Mackey, Chris Ray, Martin Phobes. We are a company that produces podcasts. Right now that's Huberman Lab Podcast, but we're launching a new podcast, Perform, with Dr. Andy Galpin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And we want to do more of that kind of thing, finding a really great talent, highly qualified people, credentialed people. And I've got a new kind of obsession with scouring the internet, looking for the young talent in science, in health, and related fields. And so will there be a final episode of the HLP? Yeah. I mean, bullet buster cancer aside, you know, someday they'll be the very last.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And thank you for your interest in science. And I'll clip out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Or at least we don't know. Yeah. Right, you don't know. I don't know if he knows. Bears everywhere are worried. Yeah, I think it's always a call. The last... A few years have been tremendous growth. We launched in January 2021, and even this last year, 2024, has been huge growth in all sorts of ways. It's been wild. And we have some short-form content planned,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
30-minute shorter episodes that really distill down the critical elements. We're also thinking about moving to other venues besides podcasting. So there's always the thought and the discussion. But when it comes to when to hang up your cleats, there just comes a natural time where you can do more to mentor the next generation coming in. than focusing on self.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
And so there will come a time for that. And I think it's critical. I mean, again, I saw this in skateboarding, like Danny and Colin and Danny's brother, Damon, started DC with Ken Block, the driver who unfortunately passed away a little while ago, rally car driver. And they eventually sold it, I think, to Quicksilver or something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
But they're all phenomenal talents in their respective areas, but they brought in the next on the next line of amazing writers, the Plan B thing, you know, Paul Rodriguez. For skateboarders, they know who this is. Now, in science, there are scientists like Feynman, for instance. I don't know if anyone can name one of his mentor offspring. So there are scientists who are phenomenal
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
like beyond world class, right? Multi-generational world class who don't make good mentors. I'm not saying he wasn't a good mentor, but that's not what he's known for. And then there are scientists who are known for being excellent scientists and great mentors. And I think there's no higher celebration to be had at the end of one's career.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
If you can look back and be like, hey, I put some really important knowledge into the world. People made use of that knowledge. And guess what? You spawned all these other people scientific offspring or sport offspring or podcast offspring. I mean, in some ways, we look to Rogan and to some of the other earlier podcasts. It's like they paved the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#435 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Controversy, Politics, and Relationships
Rhonda Patrick, first science podcast out there. So, you know, eventually, the baton passes. But fortunately, right now, everybody's active and it feels really good.