[0:00]Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
[0:09]I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Recently, the Huberman Lab podcast hosted a live event at the ICC Theater in Sydney, Australia. The event was called The Brain Body Contract and featured a lecture, followed by a question and answer session with the audience. We wanted to make the question and answer session available to everyone, regardless if you could attend. I also would like to thank the sponsors for the event. They are eight sleep and AG1. Eight sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep is the critical foundation for mental health, physical health, and performance. Now, one of the key things to getting the best possible night sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually needs to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and alert, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. Eight sleep mattress covers make it extremely easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment and thereby to control your core body temperature so that you fall and stay deeply asleep and wake up feeling your absolute best. I've been sleeping on an eight sleep mattress cover for about three years now and it has completely transformed the quality of my sleep for the better. Eight sleep recently launched their newest generation of pod cover, The Pod Four Ultra. The Pod Four cover has improved cooling and heating capacity, higher fidelity sleep tracking technology, and the Pod Four cover has snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve air flow and stop your snoring. If you'd like to try an eight sleep mattress cover, you can go to eightsleep.com/huberman to save $350 off their Pod Four Ultra. Eight sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman. The other live event sponsor, AG1, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens and other critical micronutrients. I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they decided to sponsor the live event. I started taking AG1 and I still take AG1 once or twice a day because it gives me vitamins and minerals that I might not be getting enough of from whole foods that I eat. as well as adaptogens and micronutrients. And those adaptogens and micronutrients are really critical because even though I strive to eat most of my foods from unprocessed or minimally processed whole foods, it's often hard to do so especially when I'm traveling and especially when I'm busy. So by drinking a packet of AG1 in the morning and oftentimes also again in the afternoon or evening, I'm ensuring that I'm getting everything I need. I'm covering all of my foundational nutritional needs. And I, like so many other people that take AG1 regularly, just report feeling better. And that shouldn't be surprising because it supports gut health and of course, gut health supports immune system health and brain health. And it's supporting a ton of different cellular and organ processes that all interact with one another. So while certain supplements are really directed towards one specific outcome like sleeping better or being more alert, AG1 really is foundational nutritional support. It's really designed to support all of the systems of your brain and body that relate to mental health and physical health. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkAG1.com/huberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs with your order, plus a year supply of Vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkAG1.com/huberman. And now for the live event at the ICC Theater in Sydney, Australia.
[3:51]Does having an afternoon sleep affect your quality of sleep at night? Um, great question. I can keep this one pretty brief. Um, we just recorded a six episode series that will be aired later this year uh with the one and only mighty Matt Walker, who wrote the marvelous book why we sleep. And uh, we went into this topic in depth. The business of naps is the following. Keep them shorter than 90 minutes, so you don't disrupt your night time sleep. Don't do them at all if it disrupts your night time sleep. So if you're somebody that for whom even 10 minutes of napping disrupts your night time sleep, don't do that. If you're somebody who wakes up from naps feeling groggy, that's what's called sleep inertia. This is what gave rise to the ever famous napochino of having some coffee and then taking a nap, or an espresso and then taking a nap. Again, I get obsessed with nomenclature, why didn't they call it a espresso, espresso nap? I don't know.
[5:25]Naps are wonderful if they're shorter than 90 minutes, don't interfere with night time sleep, but I in particular, am a big fan as many of you know the business of non-sleep deep rest of putting the body into what? Body still, mind awake. And we know based on several studies from the University of Copenhagen that that actually replenishes levels of dopamine in certain key areas of the brain that restore mental and physical vigor. and do not disrupt night time sleep, but rather enhance one's ability to fall and stay asleep or to fall back asleep. So not only are these states of body still mind awake, very beneficial, it seems, or I should say perhaps for creativity because that was all data. But we know from real data from laboratory data on many subjects peer reviewed, etcetera, that body still mind alert is actually an effective means to improve one's sleep and perhaps even make up for sleep that one has lost. So, I encourage you if you're a napper, great, and if you have challenges with sleep in any way that you think might be related to your napping activity, that you consider short 10 minute or maybe 20 minute non-sleep deep rest protocols. By the way, they're completely zero cost and very soon we will be releasing to our YouTube clips channel a 10 minute, 20 minute, and 30 minute non-sleep deep rest protocol that I've narrated. If you don't like my voice, we can there are many out there of more pleasant voices. But, um, what might be a particular interest to you is that the visual is of um, the beautiful sunrise over Sydney. So, you know, it'll bring you home as well. Um, sunrises here are absolutely spectacular.
[8:14]Do you believe in the placebo effect? Absolutely. And there's probably a joke there. But I can't come up with it on the fly. Um, how would I know if it's real? That kind of, um, something like that. Um, so the placebo effect is real. Um, our belief about what we've taken or what is happening to us has a powerful effect on our physiology. It's not purely psychological. The whole business of psychosomatic, even that word is starting to fall away as we start to understand that our beliefs have a powerful effect on what happens to us physiologically. So much so that for instance, my colleague Ali Krum, a Professor at Stanford's Department of Psychology, who's been a guest on the podcast, who studies mindsets has done beautiful experiments on stress. Showing that if you watch a short video about stress and you learn all the terrible things that stress can do to your cognition, your sleep, and your well-being, well, indeed that happens. And that if you watch a short video about how stress can be performance enhancing by sharpening your mental acuity, your access to particular memory stores, etcetera, that indeed that happens. So-called belief effects. Why belief effects not placebo effects? Well, placebo effects tend to be more general. Belief effects tend to be around specific types of information. But the placebo effect has recently been shown to extend to a dose dependent placebo effect. One of the more remarkable papers I think published in the last few years, most people are unaware of it. I talked about this in a journal club episode of the Human Lab Podcast with the one and only Peter Attia. Described a paper where people took either zero, I believe it was 0.25 milligrams, half a milligram or a gram of nicotine, which is known to be a cognitive enhancer. Please don't smoke, dip, huff or snuff. Nicotine that's cancerous in those forms, but and taking nicotine can increase blood pressure, vasoconstriction, etcetera. But nicotine is a cognitive enhancer. It is a cognitive enhancer. And I can't help but tell you one story about this before I get back to placebo effect. Don't worry, I always make my way back.
[11:08]You can see why living with me as a child was so challenging.
[11:17]Um, nicotine, I was told by a very, very famous Nobel laureate member of the neuroscience community, because I visited his office. I won't tell you who it is at Columbia University. I met with him and he was telling me about what he studies, but I noticed he chewed no fewer than six pieces of nicorat during the course of that conversation. And I had to just stop him at one point and say, why are you consuming all this nicotine? And he said, well, it's what's going to allow me to stave off Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, of course. And I don't want to smoke. And I said, really? And he said, yeah, there's some evidence that keeping levels of neuromodulators like dopamine, acetylcholine elevated despite the increases in blood pressure that are caused by consuming nicotine, may indeed offset Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. I'm not telling you this as a clinical trial. I'm telling you this as data. He is a Nobel Prize winner. He's still very, very sharp in his eighties. The point here is that in a study of nicotine and cognition where people's cognition is indeed enhanced by nicotine. Everybody knows that and agrees upon that. People who were told they had a higher dose of nicotine performed better in this cognitive task when in fact, they consumed zero. And people who performed moderately, who were then told that they had consumed a higher dose of nicotine performed better than those that simply consumed the moderate dose and were told they had a moderate dose. In other words, everyone gets the same dose, either zero or moderate, but depending on what you're told, your performance changes accordingly. And that's cool, but what's really cool about the study is they actually recorded from brain centers of these individuals and the levels of activity in particular areas of the brain that are relevant for cognition changed according to what the people believe. So there you go. Placebo effect is changing neural activity. It's not all just through what you think is happening. What you think is happening is the reflection of neural activity, and then you go, well, of course. But I think it's an important study. So I believe in the placebo effect, and it is dose dependent. And that raises all sorts of scary concerns about the placebo effect, but it's also pretty darn cool. Because what it means is that our belief system, including our understanding of the mechanisms that are likely driving certain effects of drugs or protocols or what have you, is going to play a powerful role in whether or not we get the effect that we want. And perhaps that's the most important thing, provided that you're going about it safely.
[14:48]How do I enter the rest and digest state and exit my constant fight or flight state? Well, the fastest way is going to be physiological size, probably repeated two or three times in a row if you don't experience that. The first time the second would be to combine that with panoramic vision. I must say, and I don't want to sound like a like a repeating record here, but there are certain things that if we're not doing on a regular basis, our nervous system is just going to idle at a higher, let's just call it autonomic RPM, which is not, you know, real science language, but if you've ever felt kind of wired and tired from lack of sleep, you know what this is about. The key thing is to get enough sleep each night. You know, so much so that I think we can safely say that stress is not bad for us, provided you sleep well at night. Now, the challenge is for most people, including myself, if you stress a lot, sleep doesn't come easily, or you wake from sleep in the middle of the night. And here again is where zero cost behavioral protocols are truly, in my opinion, unless there's some dire clinical need, the most effective and best practice. And this non-sleep deep rest, which by the way, is indeed a renaming or a partial renaming of yoganidra, which stands for yoga sleep, and again, I have tremendous reverence for the yogic traditions. It's just that I had to make a decision a few years ago, when I'd been introduced to Yoganidra in 2015. I was down at a trauma treatment center and addiction treatment center in Florida, run by a friend of mine, essentially observing what they were doing with these addicts that couldn't recover. No matter what their effort, and they were able to recover to get sober and stay sober, and people were getting over other sorts of traumas through the use of many protocols, of course, talk therapy, etcetera. But they would start their day with 30 minutes to an hour of yoganidra, and I thought, what's yoganidra? I learned it's yoga sleep, you lie down, you do a self-directed relaxation, it also involves intentions, etcetera. And I thought this is really powerful. I spent a lot of time in my laboratory working on it and understanding it and there are other studies as well that now explain how these states of keeping the mind active while the body is still, as a self-directed practice is immensely powerful for a number of reasons. And the reason I decided to call it non-sleep deep rest and SDR, was not to rob it of the official name of yoganidra, but because unfortunately, unfortunately, names like yoganidra or proprietary names or thing when we name protocols after people, it acts as a separator. It often deters people from trying things because it sounds esoteric, so I went with a description of the thing that relates to what the thing is supposed to do. Non-sleep deep rest, or what it's all about. So, um, you know, I actively avoided calling it Huberman breathing, um, or something like that, because that's not my interest. My interest is in people using these tools, and I have taken some heat for that one. Um, I'm not interested in it, it was not an attempt to appropriate something. It was really an attempt to just try and distribute valuable tools because I see a lot of suffering. And it seems like a useful thing to do. So I would encourage anyone that feels like they enter a stressed state too much, to learn self-directed relaxation. First and foremost. So do NSDR anywhere from three to five times a week, 10 minutes a day, as a zero cost tool, as a way to be able to better access better sleep at night. And then if the fight or flight state persists, then of course, things like physiological size, etcetera, should be incorporated. And then, of course, of course, of course, I believe in modern medicine. There are excellent pharmaceutical tools, prescription drugs that can be used for that. But of course, there's the intermediate stuff, things like Theanine and magnesium that, you know, for all the world, can be useful in some context, but they're not the be-all end-all. You know, I as much as I might reference supplements on the podcast from time to time, I don't think they're the place to start. I think one should always use behavioral tools first. And I've said this many times before, um, but I'll, I think it's worth saying again. Our muscles need rest days from the gym in order to grow back stronger. Yes, definitely true. Um, is the brain designed to be consistently learning and developing, or does it need periods of rest from consuming new information? Or is the rest when we sleep? Great questions. Thank you, Timothy. Um, yes, indeed, our muscles get stronger, grow after a proper stimulus is applied to them in the time after we provide that stimulus, which typically is resistance. But since not everyone's interested in that, it's also the case that an endurance adaptation occurs after we embark on the run, the hike, the swim, etcetera. There's something kind of interesting and I'll just want to take a moment and just um, mention that there's something kind of interesting about resistance training is that's the one form of training that because of the enhanced blood flow to the muscles while we do it, gives us a window into what the adaptation might look like once it occurs if we allow proper rest. Whereas with endurance training, it's very different, right? You go further and or you run up a hill until your legs burn and you want to vomit up a lung, and then the next time you do it, you don't feel quite as bad. Right? The adaptation occurs, of course, in a very similar way to resistance training, different mechanisms, but there's a delay in adaptation, you get better. It's just that with resistance training, you can kind of sense the change before the change occurs. Because of the enhanced blood flow to the muscles with endurance training, you sense the limit of your ability, and then you exceed that limit subsequently. Now, in terms of cognitive learning, the same thing is basically true. If you want to get really technical about it, the computational biology, the modeling of this says that if you want to learn something, probably setting the difficulty of what you're trying to learn to about 85% correct trials, 15% error trials is probably ideal. What does that mean? It means if you're trying to learn a new piano piece, you know, or you're trying to teach that to a child, if they're not starting from scratch, let them play something that they know pretty well and then introduce a small percentage, maybe 10 to 15, maybe 20%. You don't have to be exact about this of novel material that's hard for them to learn. But yes, it is the focused, deliberate attempt to learn something that creates that sense of underlying agitation that is the trigger, the stimulus for neuroplasticity. This makes sense. If you could complete something, if you could do something a scale of music, a physical task, speaking a new language. If you could do that, why would your nervous system ever change? And how does your nervous system know if it's supposed to change? Right? Your nervous system doesn't know successful trial versus failure trial. Right? I've tried many times to learn other languages and I'm, you know, modestly terrible at Spanish. But if I were to try and get better, my nervous system doesn't know when I'm failing. It has no idea what it knows is the release of certain neuromodulators, namely adrenaline and nor epinephrin and a few others as well, that are associated with the underlying agitation of like, oh, I'm failing at this. I'm not able to remember that Spanish class because I didn't attend in high school. And this is really difficult. And that agitation, the frustration is the stimulus, but when we say frustration is the neurochemicals that when they bathe the surrounding neurons, those neurons go, oh, something needs to change for next time. And lo and behold, the stimulus for neuroplasticity has occurred. But the actual rewiring of the neurons, either the improvement or the reduction in the strength of synapses, of connections between neurons and in rare instances, the addition of new neurons for neuroplasticity, occurs, yes, when we sleep in states of deep rest or non-sleep deep rest, although there's less data to support that. But the actual rewiring occurs away from the stimulus. So there's really two important principles here. One is that agitation and stress, and the neurochemicals that underlying agitation and stress, that is the stimulus for learning. And goodness, do I wish they had taught me that in school? I mean, they taught me all sorts of things in school, but they didn't teach me that, they didn't teach me the physiological side. Lord knows I would have done better in life if I had a couple of those tools. Instead, they told me, look, you know, if you drive drunk, you could die. That was good information. But they didn't tell us about all the other stuff. So I wish they told us about the stimulus and rest thing, and somehow they had permission to talk about the rest.
[25:35]Quality of sleep going to bed early compared to sleeping late but still for 8 hours. Depends. Depends on whether or not your chronotype, which for a long time I did not think was real, but based on newer data, it's absolutely clear, our real, whether or not you feel best going to bed early, waking up early, or going to bed at a more typical time of 10 p.m. to say wake up or 11 p.m. and waking up at 7:00 a.m. I see that, you know, for any folks leaving there they're like early to bed, right? I get it. I'm not offended. It's fine. The, um, I get it, it would not be the first time that people, uh, I always say if nothing else, the podcast will cure insomnia, because the episodes are very, very long. Um, you know, for some people, they just feel spectacularly better going to sleep early and waking up early. Spectacularly better. I'm one such person. Other people feel much better staying up late, waking up late. The total duration of sleep is important. The regularity of sleep, it turns out is becoming a very important variable. Or it has always been an important variable, but the data are pointing to the fact that if you are somebody who feels best going to sleep around 11 p.m. and waking up at 7:00 a.m., trying to keep that to bedtime within plus or minus one hour anytime you can, except on a time and on night when there's a lecture at the ICC theater, is a good idea. But in general, five nights out of the week, you want to go to sleep within plus or minus an hour of the same bedtime. That's kind of the general goal. And in the sleep series with Matt Walker, he talks about the quality, quantity, regularity, and timing. QQRT, quantity, quality, regularity, and timing of your sleep being the four key features of your sleep to try and dial in. But of course, life isn't about optimizing everything. It's good to get out and party every once in a while, stay up all night, watch the sunrise and just live life also. So, I think sometimes people get the impression because I wear the same shirt all the time that I do everything in the hyper regimented way. But actually it's quite the opposite. I try and do things regularly and as consistently as possible so that deviations from those protocols don't impact me negatively much at all. That's the idea.
