Huberman Lab
Essentials: Boost Your Energy & Immune System with Cortisol & Adrenaline
Thu, 13 Mar 2025
In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, I explain how specific hormones influence both energy levels and the immune system and discuss practical tools for increasing energy throughout the day and managing stress. I discuss the mechanism through which cortisol and epinephrine (adrenaline) impact the brain and body and why it’s important to regulate their levels, considering factors like time of day or stress levels. I also cover the positive benefits of short-term stress and behavioral protocols to increase energy and enhance stress resilience. Additionally, I explain how to optimize hormone levels through tools like sunlight exposure, meal timing, and supplements such as ashwagandha. Huberman Lab Essentials episodes are approximately 30 minutes long and focus on key science and protocol takeaways from past Huberman Lab episodes. Essentials will be released every Thursday, and our full-length episodes will continue to be released every Monday. Read the full episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Huberman Lab Essentials; Immunity & Energy 00:01:34 Cortisol, Epinephrine (Adrenaline) 00:03:32 Sponsors: BetterHelp & LMNT 00:06:03 Cortisol & Epinephrine Biology 00:07:50 Timing Cortisol Release, Tool: Morning Sunlight Exposure 00:10:07 Daytime Stress, Learning & Cortisol 00:11:30 Tool: Increase Energy, Ice Baths, Cyclic Breathing, HIIT 00:16:23 Sponsor: AG1 00:17:26 Tool: Building Resilience; Cortisol vs. Epinephrine Effects, Immune System 00:21:29 Brief Stressors & Immune System 00:25:12 Sponsor: Function 00:26:59 Chronic Stress, Cortisol, Hunger & Food Choice 00:29:18 Stress & Gray Hair? 00:29:55 Reduce Cortisol & Supplements, Ashwagandha, Apigenin 00:31:39 Optimizing Cortisol & Epinephrine, Tool: Meals, Circadian Eating, Fasting 00:34:15 Recap & Key Takeaways Disclaimer & Disclosures
Chapter 1: What are cortisol and adrenaline's roles in energy and immunity?
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. 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. Today, we're going to focus on how particular hormones influence our energy levels and our immune system. We're going to talk about the hormones cortisol and epinephrine, also called adrenaline.
If you're somebody who has challenges with sleep or you're somebody who has challenges getting your energy level up throughout the day and getting your energy level down when you want to sleep, today's episode is also for you. And we're going to talk about the immune system and how to enhance the function of your immune system.
I think it's fair to say that most people would like to have a lot of energy during the day, if you work during the day, and they'd like their energy to taper off at night. And I think it's fair to say that most people don't enjoy being sick. And it turns out that the two hormones that dominate those processes of having enough energy and having a healthy immune system are cortisol and epinephrine.
I just want to cover a little bit about what cortisol and epinephrine are, where they are released in the body and brain, because if you can understand that, you will understand better how to control them. First of all, cortisol is a steroid hormone, much like estrogen and testosterone in that it is derived from cholesterol.
So understand that cholesterol is a precursor molecule, meaning it's the substrate from which a lot of things like testosterone and estrogen are made. please also understand that cholesterol can be made into estrogen or testosterone or cortisol, and that cortisol is sort of the competitive partner to estrogen and testosterone.
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Chapter 2: How do cortisol and epinephrine function in the body?
What this means is no matter how much cholesterol you're eating or you produce, whether or not it's low or it's high, if you are stressed, more of that cholesterol is going to be devoted toward creating cortisol, which is indeed a stress hormone. However, the word stress shouldn't stress you out because you need cortisol. Cortisol is vital. You don't want your cortisol levels to be too low.
It's very important for immune system function, for memory, for not getting depressed. You just don't want your cortisol levels to be too high and you don't want them to be elevated even to normal levels at the wrong time of day. epinephrine or adrenaline has also been demonized a bit. We think of it as the stress hormone, this thing that makes us anxious, fight or flight.
The fact of the matter is that epinephrine is your best friend when it comes to your immunity, when it comes to protecting you from infection. And epinephrine, adrenaline, is your best friend when it comes to remembering things and learning and activating neuroplasticity. We're going to talk about that as well.
Once again, it's a question of how much and how long and the specific timing of release of cortisol and epinephrine, as opposed to cortisol and adrenaline being good or bad. They're terrific when they're regulated. They are terrible when they're misregulated. And we will give you lots of tools to regulate them better. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, 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.
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Chapter 3: What tools can increase energy and stress resilience?
In fact, I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise, including cardiovascular exercise and resistance training, which of course I also do every week. There are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all, it provides a good rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about all issues that you're concerned about.
Second of all, it can provide support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance. And third, expert therapy can provide useful insights. With BetterHelp, they make it very easy to find an expert therapist with whom you resonate with and can provide those benefits that come through effective therapy.
Also, because BetterHelp allows therapy to be done entirely online, it's very time efficient. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com slash Huberman. For this month only, March 2025, BetterHelp is giving you the biggest discount offered on this show with 90% off your first week of therapy. Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman to get 90% off your first week.
Today's episode is also brought to us by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need, but nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance.
It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, are vital for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking element dissolved in water makes it extremely easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes.
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 that I'm doing. They have a bunch of different great tasting flavors of Element.
They have watermelon, citrus, et cetera. Frankly, I love them all. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman Lab to claim a free Element sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman Lab to claim a free sample pack. Cortisol Biology 101 in less than two minutes.
Your brain makes what we call releasing hormones. And in this case, there's corticotropin releasing hormone. CRH is made by neurons in your brain. It causes the pituitary, this gland that sits about an inch in front of the roof of your mouth and the base of your brain to release ACTH.
ACTH then goes and causes your adrenals, which sit above your kidneys and your lower back, to release cortisol, a so-called stress hormone. But I would like you to think about cortisol not as a stress hormone, but as a hormone of energy. It produces a situation in the brain and body whereby you want to move, and whereby you don't want to rest and whereby you don't want to eat, at least at first.
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Chapter 4: How does morning sunlight influence cortisol levels?
Epinephrine or adrenaline 101 in less than two minutes. When you sense a stressor with your mind or your body senses a stressor, excuse me, from a wound or something of that sort, a signal is sent to neurons that are in the middle of your body. They're called the sympathetic chain ganglia. The name doesn't necessarily matter. They release norepinephrine very quickly.
It's almost like a sprinkler system that just hoses your body with That will increase heart rate, will increase breathing rate. It will also increase the size of vessels and arteries that are giving blood flow to your vital organs. You also release adrenaline from your adrenals. Again, riding atop your kidneys.
And you release it from an area of your brain called locus coeruleus, and that creates alertness in your brain. Okay, so we have cortisol and we have epinephrine and their net effect is to increase energy. So the first tool is to make sure that your highest levels of cortisol are first thing in the morning when you wake up. One way or another, every 24 hours, you will get an increase in cortisol.
It's to stimulate movement from being asleep, presumably horizontal, to getting up and starting to move about your day. The best way to stimulate that increase in cortisol at the appropriate time is that very soon after waking, within 30 minutes or so after waking, get outside, view some sunlight. Even if it's overcast, get outside, view some sunlight, no sunglasses.
Do that because in the early part of the day, you have the opportunity to time that cortisol release to the early part of the day. It will improve your focus, it will improve your energy levels, and it will improve your learning throughout the day. So here's how it works. On a sunny day, so no cloud cover,
provided that the sun is not yet overhead, it's somewhere low in the sky, could have just crossed the horizon, or if you wake up a little bit later, it could be somewhat low in the sky. Basically the intensity of light, the brightness, is somewhere around 100,000 lux. Lux is just a measurement of brightness. On a cloudy day, it's about 10,000 lux. So tenfold reduction.
But bright artificial light, very bright artificial light, is somewhere around 1,000 lux. And ordinary room light is somewhere around 100 to 200 lux. So even if you have a very bright bulb sitting right next to you, that's not going to do the job. Your phone will not do the job, not early in the day. To get the cortisol released at the appropriate time, you need to get outside.
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Chapter 5: What role do brief stressors play in immune function?
So let's just set a couple general parameters. If it's bright outside and no cloud cover, get outside for 10 minutes. If it's a cloudy day, dense overcast, you're probably going to need about 30 minutes. If it's light cloud, broken cloud cover, it's probably going to be somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes.
This is why it's vital to get this light on a regular basis to get that cortisol released early in the day. That sets you up for optimal levels of energy. Now, throughout the day, you're going to experience different things. Most of you are not spending your entire day trying to optimize your health. Some of you might be, but most of you have jobs and you have families and you have commitments.
Life enters the picture and provides you stressors. Those will cause increases in cortisol and epinephrine. The key is these blips in cortisol and epinephrine need to be brief. You can't have them so often or lasting so long that you are in a state of chronic cortisol elevation or chronic epinephrine elevation.
This system of stress was designed to increase your alertness and mobilize you towards things, get you frustrated and provide the opportunity to change behavior. And the reason it works is that cortisol when it's released into the bloodstream, it actually can bind to receptors in the brain.
It can bind receptors in the amygdala, fear centers and threat detection centers, but also areas of the brain that are involved in learning and memory and neuroplasticity. And this is why I say that neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience, is first stimulated by attention and focus and often a low level state of agitation.
So understand that and you won't be quite so troubled about the little stress increases that you experience throughout the day. Now, there are ways to leverage stress, epinephrine and cortisol in ways that serve you and to do it in a deliberate way.
There are also ways to do that that increase your level of stress threshold, meaning they make it less likely that epinephrine and cortisol will be released. So I want to talk about the science of those practices because I get asked about these practices a lot. Things like Wim Hof breathing, which is also called TUMO breathing, things like ice baths, things like high intensity interval training.
All of those things have utility. The question is how you use them and how often you use them. Those tools, just like stress from a life event, can either enhance your immunity or deplete it. That's right. Those same practices of ice baths, tummo breathing, high intensity interval training or training of any kind can deplete your immune system or it can improve them.
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Chapter 6: How can supplements help manage cortisol levels?
Excuse me, they can improve it, meaning they can improve your immune system. The key is how often you use them and when. And so I want to review that now in light of the scientific literature, because in doing that, you can build practices into your daily or maybe every other day routine that can really help buffer you against unhealthy,
of cortisol and epinephrine, meaning cortisol increases that are much too great or that last much too long. Epinephrine increases that are much too great or that last much too long. Let's say somebody tells you something very troubling, or you look at your phone and you see a text message that's really upsetting to you.
That will cause an immediate increase in epinephrine, adrenaline in your brain and body. And chances are it's going to increase your levels of cortisol as well. Let's say you get into an ice bath or a cold shower. That will cause an equivalent increase in epinephrine and cortisol.
let's say you go out for high intensity interval training, you decide you're going to run some sprints, you do some repeats, or you're going to do some weightlifting in the gym, or you decide that you want to do some hot yoga, you're going to increase your epinephrine and cortisol levels. And guess what? They increase your levels of energy and alertness.
So if you're somebody who struggles with energy and alertness, It can be beneficial, provided you get clearance from your doctor, to have some sort of protocol built into your day where you deliberately increase your levels of epinephrine and your levels of cortisol.
So it's really important to understand that the body doesn't distinguish between a troubling text message, ice, tumour breathing, or high-intensity interval training or any other kind of exercise. It's all stress. cognitively reframing that and telling yourself, I like this, I enjoy it, is not going to change the way that that molecule impacts your body and brain.
I sort of chuckle because people would love to tell you that all you have to do is say, oh, this is good for me. No, what it does to tell yourself that it's good for you or that you enjoy it is that it liberates other molecules like dopamine and serotonin that help buffer the epinephrine response.
Now, the way that it does that, I've talked about previous episode, but I'll just mention that dopamine is the precursor to epinephrine. Epinephrine is made from dopamine.
And that's why if you tell yourself you're enjoying something, and because dopamine is so subjective that you can, in some ways, as long as you're not completely lying to yourself, you can get more epinephrine, you get more mileage or more ability to push through something. And you can sort of reframe it, but it's not really cognitive reframing.
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