In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, I explain how to optimize hormones—particularly testosterone, estrogen, and related sex steroids—to enhance fertility and overall well-being. I discuss the sources of testosterone and estrogen and how their levels fluctuate with age in both males and females. I also cover how behaviors such as exercise, cold and heat exposure, light exposure, illness, and breathing patterns affect hormones. Additionally, I examine specific supplements and replacement therapies, highlighting important precautions to consider when adjusting hormone levels. Huberman Lab Essentials episodes are approximately 30 minutes long and focus on key scientific insights and protocol takeaways from past Huberman Lab episodes. These short episodes will be released every Thursday, while our full-length episodes will continue to be released every Monday. Read the show notes for this episode at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Huberman Lab Essentials; Hormones 00:01:15 Testosterone & Estrogen Sources & Age, Adrenals 00:03:34 Sponsor: Eight Sleep 00:05:05 Competition, Males & Testosterone; Dopamine 00:09:27 Testosterone Decreases, Expectant Fathers, Illness 00:11:30 Sleep Apnea, Testosterone, Estrogen, Cortisol, Tool: Nasal Breathing 00:15:57 Sponsor: AG1 00:17:00 Dopamine, Cortisol, Fertility, Tool: Light Viewing Behavior 00:19:31 Heat, Cold & Hormone Levels 00:21:14 Resistance & Endurance Training, Testosterone, Tool: Exercise Order 00:23:26 Estrogen, Menopause, Hormone Therapy 00:25:07 Sponsor: Function 00:26:54 Vitamins, Opioids, Supplements, Tongkat Ali, Cancer Risk 00:31:26 Luteinizing Hormone, hCG, Fadogia Agrestis, Tool: Blood Tests 00:36:00 Recap & Key Takeaways Disclaimer & Disclosures
Chapter 1: What are the sources of testosterone and estrogen?
There are a lot of different glands in the body that produce hormones. But when we're talking about the sex steroid hormones, estrogen and testosterone, the major sources are ovaries for estrogen and the testes for testosterone, although the adrenals can also make testosterone. Now, there are also some enzymes. Enzymes are things that can change chemical composition.
And the enzymes that we're going to talk about today are the aromatases mainly. The aromatases convert testosterone into estrogen. So in a male, for instance, that has very high testosterone, some of that is going to be converted into estrogen by aromatase. The important thing to know is that prepubescent females make very little estrogen.
Chapter 2: How do exercise and breathing affect hormone levels?
And when we talk about estrogen, we mainly talk about estradiol, which is the most active form of estrogen in both males and females. So prepubescent females, very low levels of estrogen. During puberty, levels of estrogen, AKA estradiol, basically skyrocket. And then across the lifespan, Estrogen is going to vary depending on the stage of the menstrual cycle.
But as one heads into menopause, which typically takes place nowadays, somewhere between age 45 and 60, levels of estrogen are going to drop. And then post-menopause levels of estrogen are very low. As well, testosterone will fluctuate across the lifespan. Testosterone is going to be relatively low pre-puberty in males. During puberty, it's going to skyrocket.
And then the current numbers are that it drops off at about a rate of 1% per year. So let's talk about other sources of these hormones. And then it will make clear what, you might want to take in order to optimize these hormones. The other glands and tissues in the body that make these hormones, testosterone and estrogen, as I mentioned briefly, are the adrenals.
So the adrenals right on top of the kidneys and the release of these steroid hormones from the adrenals in particular testosterone and some of its related derivatives are mainly activated by competition. Pretty interesting. There's a lot of evidence in animals and humans that competitive scenarios, at least short-lived competitive scenarios, can liberate testosterone from the adrenals.
Chapter 3: What is the role of competition in testosterone levels?
I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. Now, I've spoken before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each night. Now, one of the best ways to ensure a great night's sleep
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Chapter 4: How do sleep and breathing patterns influence hormones?
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Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Huberman. So let's talk about competition because it turns out that competition is a powerful influence on the sex steroid hormones and the sex steroid hormones powerfully influence competition. So most people don't realize this, but most males of a given mammalian species never get to reproduce. In fact, they never even get to have sex at all.
And we don't often think about that, but testosterone plays a powerful role in determining which members of a given species will get to reproduce, which ones of that species will actually get access to females. And so here, I'm not talking about humans specifically,
but it's well known in species like elephant seals, in species like antlered animals and rams, for instance, that the higher levels of testosterone correlate with access to females. Now, one interpretation of this is that the females are detecting which males have high testosterone and selecting them.
They're more receptive to them, but it's actually more so that the males that have higher testosterone forage further and will fight harder for the females. And this is really interesting because there's very good evidence now that testosterone can reduce anxiety, promote novelty seeking and promote competitive interactions.
And so before you leap too far with this in your mind and think about all these human behaviors, just stay with me because there's a little bit of biology here that makes it all make sense. And it turns out to be pretty simple. We have a brain region called the amygdala. In Latin, that just means almond, but the amygdala is most famous for its role in fear.
We hear a lot about fear and the amygdala, but the amygdala is really involved in threat detection. It sets our thresholds for anxiety and what we consider scary or too much. Testosterone secreted from the gonads and elsewhere in the body binds to the amygdala and changes the threshold for stress.
So I've said before on previous versions of this podcast and on other podcasts that testosterone has this incredible effect of making effort feel good. But what I was really referring to is the fact that testosterone lowers stress and anxiety in particular in males of a given species.
Testosterone increases generally lead to more foraging, more novelty seeking, increases in libido and increases in desire to mate. So it is the case that increases in testosterone promote competitive and foraging type behaviors in humans and in non-human mammals. But it's also true that competition itself can increase androgens such as testosterone.
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Chapter 5: What is the impact of light exposure on hormone optimization?
Chapter 6: What supplements and therapies affect hormone levels?
You actually need both in both males and females. It's just that in females, the testosterone levels are always going to be lower than the estrogen levels. And in males, the estrogen levels are always going to be lower than testosterone levels. So just as there are behaviors that can increase testosterone, there are behaviors that can decrease testosterone.
And one of the most well-characterized ones in humans is becoming a parent. So expecting fathers, have an almost 50% decrease in testosterone levels, both free and bound testosterone. It turns out that these effects of reduced testosterone, increased estradiol and reduced cortisol can all be explained by an increase in prolactin.
It is a well-known phenomenon that testosterone is going to drop, prolactin is going to increase, estradiol is going to increase in males and females that are expecting children. The other behavior that markedly reduces testosterone in both males and females and markedly reduces the desire for seeking sex and sex itself is illness.
And many of you might say, well, duh, when people feel sick, they don't feel like seeking out mates, they don't feel like having sex. But have you ever wondered why that actually is? Well, it turns out that it can be explained by the release of what are called inflammatory cytokines.
So cytokines are related to the immune system, they travel in the lymph and in the blood, and they attack invader cells like bacteria and viruses. And under conditions of illness, we make a lot of different cytokines. Some of them are anti-inflammatory, but some of them are pro-inflammatory. And the best known example of a pro-inflammatory cytokine is IL-6.
And it's known that IL-6, when injected into individuals, will decrease the desire for sex and eventually will reduce levels of testosterone and estrogen independent of feeling lousy. Now IL-6 doesn't just travel to the gonads and shut down the gonads.
It actually has ways to interact with some of the receptors that the steroid hormones, estrogen and testosterone bind to and impact those receptors so that the sex steroid hormones can't have their effect. In short and put simply, inflammatory cytokines like IL-6 are bad for sex steroid hormones.
One of the main behaviors that's been shown to be associated with poor levels of estrogen relative to age match controls for people with ovaries or lower levels of testosterone compared to age match controls for people with testes. is apnea. So what is apnea? Apnea is under breathing or mainly cessation of breathing during sleep.
So people are holding their breath and then they'll suddenly wake up. People who are dramatically overweight also suffer a lot from apnea during sleep. And it's well established that going into deep sleep and getting the proper patterns of slow wave sleep and REM sleep are important for hormone optimization.
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