The School of Greatness
How To Optimize Your Brain Health With Your Morning Routine
Fri, 24 Jan 2025
I'm going on tour! Come see The School of Greatness LIVE in person!Get my new book Make Money Easy here!This is a deep dive into the fascinating connection between brain health and routine management with an all-star lineup of experts. Dr. Andrew Huberman reveals the science behind morning routines and optimal brain function, while Glucose Goddess Jessie Inchauspé shares groundbreaking insights on how sugar impacts our cognitive performance. Dr. Daniel Amen joins in to discuss how maintaining healthy glucose levels can protect against cognitive decline and dementia. From practical morning routines to revolutionary food hacks, this episode provides a comprehensive roadmap for optimizing your brain health through better glucose management.In this episode you will learn:Why timing your morning light exposure and caffeine intake is crucial for optimal brain functionHow glucose spikes can lead to brain fog, inflammation, and accelerated agingFour powerful hacks to manage glucose levels without restrictive dietingThe scientific connection between blood sugar management and long-term brain healthWhy post-meal movement can help protect your brain from glucose-related damageFor more information go to https://www.lewishowes.com/1724For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960More SOG episodes we think you’ll love:Andrew Huberman – greatness.lnk.to/1455SCGlucose Goddess – greatness.lnk.to/1575SCDr. Daniel Amen – greatness.lnk.to/1243SC Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy!Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX
Chapter 1: What is the importance of a morning routine for brain health?
I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. And if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life, and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you want to make it easier, you want to make it flow, you want to feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy.
I really think this is going to help you transform your relationship with money and this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and stay tuned to this episode on the School of Greatness. I'm curious, where does brain fog come from? And how can we
make sure that we have great morning routines to support us so that we don't have brain fog at all in the morning or later in the afternoon?
Chapter 2: How does sleep affect brain function?
Great question. Well, there are a lot of sources of brain fog. The most obvious one would be a poor night's sleep. Okay. And sleep, of course, being the most fundamental layer of mental and physical health. I mean, You don't sleep well for one night, you're probably okay. For two nights, you start to fall apart. Three, four nights, you're really a degraded version of yourself in every aspect.
Emotionality is off, ability to do most anything is off, hormones start suffering. So sleep is fundamental. But assuming that you slept well, There are a number of things. One is your breathing patterns. We often get into discussions of breathing, but this is a slightly different one than we've had in the past. A lot of people have sleep apnea.
They are not getting enough oxygen during their sleep or they are mouth breathing during sleep. These days, it's become popular in some circles to take a little bit of medical tape and tape the mouth shut and to learn to be a nasal breather.
And there is excellent evidence now that being a nasal breather, most of the time, as long as you're not speaking or eating or exercising hard enough that you would need to breathe through your mouth, that it's beneficial to be a nasal breather for a couple of reasons. First of all, if you are deliberately nasal breathing during the day,
The tendency is that you will nasal breathe at night, which tends to lead to less sleep apnea, less mouth breathing during the middle of the night, and less brain fog. Why brain fog?
Well, during sleep, a number of restorative processes occur, but if you're not getting enough oxygen into the system, the brain is literally becoming hypoxic, and a lot of the cleaning out mechanisms, the lymphatic system, etc., as they're called, don't get an opportunity to function as well as they ought to.
So you wake up in the morning, you slept your normal six to eight hours, but you're feeling kind of groggy and out of it. And of course, there could be other reasons that you're experiencing brain fog. Maybe you... For people that drink alcohol the night before, maybe they had alcohol. For people that maybe they ate a meal that was too large before sleep, maybe any number of reasons, right?
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Chapter 3: What breathing techniques can reduce brain fog?
But getting adequate oxygenation of the brain during sleep is key. So learn to be a nasal breather. And for those of you out there that say, well, I have a deviated septum, a lot of people think they have deviated septums. The problem is they're not nasal breathing enough. The sinuses actually can learn to dilate if you nasal breathe.
Exercising while nasal breathing will kind of depend on the sport. Like if you box, oftentimes there's the need to do a shh or, you know, kind of like exhale on impact type thing. So I don't think anyone should tamper with their normal breathing patterns as it relates to sport or singing or some you know, activity.
But what I'm talking about is when you're just standing around, when you're walking down the street, any low level activity, you're working at your desk, you should be nasal breathing and breathing regularly. That will reduce brain fog in many cases.
So what's the routine then, the ultimate morning and evening routine to set your brain and your mind up
for optimal performance and not getting brain fog okay um i will describe that uh by listing out the protocol first and then i'll give some of the scientific mechanisms second yes because in the past what i've tended to do is uh give the mechanism and then give the protocols i know some people it's like you know enough for these academic guys they'll just give me the give me tell them just tell me what to do but if people want the mechanism i'd be happy to flesh that out yes
I should say that what I will mention is not everything I do. So for instance, I get up and like most humans, I use the restroom and I have a glass of water.
I do those things.
So I'm not listing every right foot, left foot step through the morning. But the things that are geared towards getting the mind into a proper place, for me, I'll describe it as my routine. I generally get up somewhere between... 5.30 and 7 in the morning, depending on when I went to sleep. I'm not super regular about when I go to sleep, but generally that's between 10.30 and midnight.
I try and avoid that midnight hour, but it happens. So I get up and Obviously I use the restroom, I drink some water. I do think that hydrating is very important. So I'll drink some water. And then the fundamental layer of health is to set your circadian rhythm. The simplest way to do that is to go outside for 10 minutes and get some bright light in your eyes.
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Chapter 4: Why is morning light exposure crucial for mental clarity?
What about a window? Well, the filtration of the important wavelengths of light through the window is just too high, and so it would take hours for you to set your circadian clock that way.
you want to do this because once every 24 hours you're going to get a peak in cortisol which is a healthy peak you want that peak to happen early in the day because it sets up alertness for the remainder of the day there are really nice studies done by my colleagues in stanford psychiatry and biology department showing that if that cortisol peak starts to drift too late in the day you start seeing signs of depression it's actually a well-known marker of depression
So you want that cortisol almost stressed out kind of the day's beginning. I have a lot to do feeling that's a healthy thing. You want that happening early in the day. The sunlight will wake you up. And what's really cool is that over time, you'll start to notice the sunlight waking you up more and more. The system becomes tuned up. If you miss a day, it's not the end of the world.
Because it's a, as we call it, a slow integrating system. But don't miss more than one day. And if you live in an area where it's very cloudy outside, just know that the sunlight, the photons coming through that cloud cover are brighter than your brightest indoor lights. Now, if you live in a very dark region of the world or it's unsafe or purely impractical to get outside in the morning...
Then it might make sense to get a sunrise simulator or one of these lights, but they tend to be very expensive. What I recommend people use instead is just a ring light, a blue light. This is a case where you can blast your system. Wow. So get that morning light. It sets a number of things in motion, such as your melatonin rhythm to happen 16 hours later to help you fall asleep.
I would say this is the fundamental... step of any good morning. And if you don't do this enough, you are messing yourself up in a number of ways. Does this mess with digestion also? Yeah. So every cell in your body has a 24 hour clock. All those clocks need to be aligned to the same time.
So imagine a clock shop with lots of different clocks and you don't want them alarming off at different times. This sunlight viewing or bright light viewing early in the day, I would say within 30 to 60 minutes of waking up, for about 10 minutes, or if it's very cloudy, maybe 30 minutes or so.
That activates a particular type of neuron in the eye called the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cell, if people wanna look that up, signals to the circadian clock, which is right above the roof of your mouth, but that is the master circadian clock that then releases a bunch of signals into your body.
This all happens very fast, and every cell in your body gets tuned to the exact same time reference point so that your system can work as a nice concert of cells as opposed to out of whack. your gut has a clock, your liver has a clock, your heart cells have a clock, every skin cell has a clock.
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Chapter 5: How does caffeine intake timing affect energy levels?
In the morning, or I do a portion of that weekly cardio. And I just alternate. Weight train one day, cardio the next. And then one day a week, I don't do anything. I don't do any exercise.
Six days a week you exercise.
Yeah, and I miss days. Occasionally because of travel or other schedules or appointments, I might take two days off. I never go seven days. I personally do well having a complete day off each week. But the hour of exercise generally is five, ten minutes of warm-up. And it's hard work.
This is a new thing that we can get into when I talk about dopamine, but I do not allow myself to check social media, text message, phone calls, and lately not even music when I train for reasons that we can get into later. I'm really trying to get focused on what I'm doing, and I'm trying to extract the greatest amount of joy from the process in its purest form. So no phone, essentially.
I try not to have the phone. Occasionally I'll use music or I'll listen to a podcast because it's such a great time to do that. So I don't want to say I never do, but most of the time I'm trying very hard to just do my exercise. And it doesn't matter if you run, swim, bike, row.
uh you know people these days can do calisthenics or weight training or something of that sort the weight training thing is interesting because muscle building aside it's very clear that five sets a week per muscle group is what's required to maintain muscle and this is true for men this is true for women and obviously in young kids you don't want them weight training with heavy loads because it can shut down their long bone growth
that's the myth or what they say anyway, but I don't know, kids are developing anyway. So I don't know, I'll leave that to the coaches to decide that and the parents.
But I think for people that are in their late teens, early 20s and onward, it's really important if you look at longevity, a lot of the major injuries and early deaths and not just due to accident, but chronic illness comes from people falling and breaking a hip, just not being strong. And so I think being strong, regardless of who you are, is important.
And so that's five sets per week minimum per muscle group and probably more like 10. Routines splay out differently. So I do my thing. People have their thing. So I try and exercise. Or I do a 90 minute work about. And if I exercise, we could talk about that. Then I would shower and do my 90-minute workout. But sometimes I do the 90-minute workout first.
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Chapter 6: What are effective strategies for managing glucose levels?
Exactly. Or if you really need the snack, the sugar snack, what you do is another hack that I call put clothing on your carbs. So what does that mean? So first of all, carbs. Carbs are two types of foods, starches. So that's bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, oats, or sugars. Anything that tastes sweet from a banana to chocolate cake. Those are carbs, okay?
When you eat them on their own, for example, a slice of cake on its own or a bowl of pasta on its own, well, carbs break down to glucose molecules. So those naked carbs, very quickly, they end up as lots of glucose in your bloodstream, therefore, a glucose spike. What you want to do instead is put some clothing on your carbs. And the clothing are proteins, fats, or fiber.
Before.
or with them. You can have them before or with them.
So, for example... So, you could have a bite of cake, but then have something else... Yes, you could... ...of that within that.
Yeah, you could have, like, some Greek yogurt with the chocolate cake, or with a bowl of pasta, add some chicken or some cheese or some spinach, right? Put clothing on your carbs.
Don't eat it naked.
Exactly. Never eat your carbs naked so that they don't cause as big of a glucose spike. Because when you put clothing on those carbs, digestion happens more slowly. So you're still eating the carb that you love with less impact on your glucose levels.
And this is just one of many different hacks that I have that help us eat the stuff we love with fewer consequences on our physical and mental health.
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Chapter 7: How can sugar intake impact cognitive performance?
Exactly. Your hunger hormones are more balanced instead of you feeling famished every two hours. So naturally, when you focus on the hacks, a lot of things fall into place into your body. And then on the fasting topic, I just want to remind people that intermittent fasting is not necessary to have a healthy body. You don't need to fast in order to be healthy.
It's much more important to eat well in a way that keeps your glucose level steady than to restrict your eating window, for example. Especially for females, we have to remember that fasting is actually a stressor on the body.
So if you already have a life where stressful job, kids to take care of, you don't sleep a lot, you drink coffee, you do intense cardio exercise, maybe you do cold showers, you add fasting on top of that, that is a lot of stress for your body to handle. And that's why you see some women who are piling on all these things, their hormones are breaking down. They feel exhausted all the time.
Their body is just being like, no, that's too much stress. So I love fasting when I'm on vacation, for example, and it feels like an easy... stress to add on. But when I'm working and I'm doing lots of stuff, I prefer to have breakfast, to have a savory breakfast, as I explained, to keep my glucose level steady, and to just eat three times a day. Really? Yeah.
Something you mentioned here, that I love is around freedom. And I think a lot of people don't feel free today with food, diets, restrictions, needing to biohack their life all the time. It feels like they always have to do something else or restrict something they love in order to be healthy, in order to optimize their life. And the more I'm hearing you speak about
Just understanding, it's almost like intuitive eating as opposed to restricting, counting calories, fasting, all these other things that are trendy right now. So, because my fear is that a lot of women specifically, and now men more so with social media, feel like they need to look perfect all the time.
They feel like they need to eat a certain way and be on the recent trends in order for their bodies to morph in a way that makes them feel like they're enough.
It's so tough.
So how do we apply these hacks without feeling like it's some new trend, but more understanding, it's more intuitive for me to just live a holistic, healthy life.
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Chapter 8: What are the best practices for maintaining brain health?
Five to 10 minutes.
Wow. 30% less of a spike.
Yep. So you still eat the carbs you love with less impact on your glucose levels. Interesting. Yeah. But if you hate this hack, it's fine. The other hacks are just as powerful, right? So the savory breakfast one will transform your entire day. The experience of your whole life, essentially. And then the third hack is called the veggie starter hack.
So that hack means having a plate of vegetables at the beginning of a meal. And you might think, OK, actually, this has been done for a long time. In France, we have this concept called crudités, which is raw veggies at the beginning of a meal. In Italy, antipasti, all the roasted nice vegetables. In the Middle East, they eat herbs by the bunch at the beginning of a meal.
You know that salad with vinaigrette? It's quite a common way to start a meal. And now we understand why. It's because veggies contain an amazing substance called fiber. Fiber, she's amazing. I love her. She's on fire. She's amazing.
And fiber, when you have fiber in vegetables at the beginning of a meal, the fiber has time to go and coat your upper intestine and to create a sort of protective shield, like a superhero deploying herself on the walls of your upper intestine. Really? Yeah. And it's this sort of gooey, viscous mesh that is improving your gut lining.
And then any glucose coming down afterwards will not be able to get through to your bloodstream as quickly. Wow. So the veggie starter is an incredibly powerful hack. And you can even combine it to the vinegar hack by making a little vinegar dressing and putting it on your veggies.
does that what does that do does it decrease even more it decreases even more the glucose spike of the meal yeah so you still have the pasta and whatever you like but if you add this hack yeah so you see what happens when you do these hacks is that you can still eat the carbs you love but then you're creating less of a spike therefore the carbs are first of all not having as big of a negative impact on your health less inflammation less glycation less insulin release and
you're avoiding the creation of that cravings roller coaster, which is the main issue because most of us, when we have something sweet, then two hours later, we want more sweets. And then it's 11 p.m. and you've eaten 56 cookies, right? Yes. That's what we want to avoid. We want to have the stuff we love without creating this cycle of becoming a victim to more sugar cravings.
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