How to Optimize Your Brain for WORK: Achieving Hyper-Efficiency with Dr. Mithu Storoni : 1221

The brain is a complex system. Astrocytes allowed Einstein's neurons to perform exceptionally well. There is this one tiny, tiny region in the brain called the blue dot. But it has influence over the entire state of the brain. The eyeballs are really a representation of what is taking place inside the brain.

Maybe one day your webcam will be able to tell you what's going on in your brain just by looking in your eyes. How far off from that are we? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is going to be a ton of fun because we're going to talk about hyper efficiency and what you can do to change your brain, to change how you work. And as you might have noticed, this is kind of a big deal for me because this has been a theme for most of my life. Partly from having a brain that wasn't very functional, from chronic fatigue syndrome, Asperger's syndrome, oppositional defiant disorder. I think I might have kept some of that, at least whenever they try to tell me I'm supposed to eat garbage. But all the other stuff, OCD that I used to have and to go from there to a brain that can focus the way I want, this is something that I want to teach you and something that is just very central to biohacking. So this episode is for you to learn how to boost your cognitive efficiency, even if there's a bunch of weird stuff going on in the world around you, and which there is because, well, it's the world and there's always weird stuff going on. You're just probably more aware of it and there might be some forces out there amplifying the amount of weirdness that you see. We call those algorithms and evil corporate overlords and things like that. Our guest today is Dr. Mitu Staroni, who's a physician trained at this little school called the University of Cambridge. She's a neuroscientist and she wrote a book called Hyper Efficient Optimize your brain to transform the way you work. This is exactly what I have done. At this point, I have 13 companies, believe it or not. You know about danger coffee and upgrade labs in 40 years of Zen, but there are some other ones in there. And I'm constantly innovating because my brain works and it is the biggest gift I've ever had. So in this episode, we're going to talk about mental performance, clarity, how you can make your brain last way longer so that you can get all the stuff done in a day, including taking care of yourself and your family and your Community, all that kind of stuff. So this will be a really fun episode. We're going to go into all the different aspects of hacking your brain. Dr. Steroni, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure.

I'm a systems guy. I started out as a computer hacker, and I built and taught engineers how to build distributed systems. And the brain's a distributed system. The mitochondria is a distributed system. And I'm always looking at efficiency and emergent behaviors. And there's small parts of the brain that have an outsized impact on what it does, and there's reasons for that. We don't necessarily know what all the reasons are, but they're definitely measurable with eeg, they're trackable, and things like that. So do you see parallels between the way we organize the broader world around us and what happens inside our brains?

This is such a great question. Yes. In fact, you said you're a system, Sky. And the brain is a complex system. It does have a distributed way of processing. And, you know, in many ways, as we have specialized, reduced the world around us to single pathways, to being more understandable, more controllable, reduced its distributed nature to more kind of single nodes. We try to understand the brain that way, but in fact, the brain is much like the world. It is distributed. And the more we learn, the more we realize how it is such a complex system that reducing it to single pathways is not the answer to many of the illnesses, many of the problems that we encounter about the brain. So looking at the brain as a wider part of the ecosystem we live in is actually a great way to understand it.

The ecosystem in the world around us has been heavily modified by people. It seems like our brains have also been heavily modified, maybe without our. We'll say without strategic planning. Do you think it's a good idea to put our brains back to the way they were before we modified them?

So the brain is. Is, as you know, is highly, highly adaptable, but you have functional connectivity on top of the actual hard wiring. We know there's a degree of neuroplasticity, and survival has really meant adaptation above everything else. So as we continue to engineer the world around us, we are adapting. We are trying to adapt. But especially in this time, this day and age, we are discovering that many of the problems that we are perhaps seeing is a result of not adapting simply because we are engineering our environment too drastically to be able to adapt to it well enough to function as we ought to. And to your Point. Certainly, many of the solutions we are finding in the world today, whether it's something as, you know, as common sense. As common sense, a solution, as adding movement back to your life, adding daylight back to your life, aligning yourself with your circadian rhythm, which I know you're a great advocate of, really, all of those things were part of our system. Those are hardwired into us because we adapted to the environment we evolved in. And we have now, really, for the sake of efficiency, ironically changed our environment. And we have quite, with a profound lack of wisdom, modified these essential characteristics of the environment in order to make our world, perhaps more to our predictions or to our volition. But in so doing, we cannot change the way we have been hardwired to it. So, you know, all of these things exercise circadian rhythm. We're now talking about photobiomodulation. All of these things are really reverting to how we used to be. They're not really sudden solutions, sudden, you know, miraculous kind of drugs or potions that, that cure all ills. What we're really doing is returning to how things were. So, yes, in answer to your question.

That makes me pretty happy to hear. I look at biohacking as recreating the signals we were supposed to get from the environment that drive our ourselves in the directions we want. But if you're in the environment and the environment just does what it does, your body's kind of responding to the environment. But if you program your environment using all these technologies, and I stacked all the ones I can think of at Upgrade Labs, which is one of the companies I mentioned earlier, the idea is, well, I can use the environment to direct the brain, to direct the biology, to do what I want it to do, instead of like, going out into nature, which I'm a huge fan of and I think is necessary. But if you only did that, you actually have less control than if you spend time in nature and then you send a specific signal in, are you aligned with that perspective?

I think we need to have a balance. Progress is a little bit like the arrow of time. We can't reverse things. We can't go back to how things were. And the best we can do is create some kind of compromise between the signals, the information, the data that our bodies, our brains rely on and are missing from the world around us and the current world as we have created it. So certainly doing as much as you can to add those things back in within the limits of where we are. If we revert progress, we lose many of its benefits. So it's really a question of working with what you've got. And the brain actually being so remarkably adaptable, if you do very little, it's. It goes a long way.

Which is better, a powerful brain or an efficient brain?

I would argue they're the same.

I knew you were going to say that.

They are exactly the same.

I don't agree with you, though. You can have an inefficient brain that's really powerful. You can also have a brain that's low power and efficient. And the place you'd want to end up would be a brain that's very powerful and very efficient. And I've gone to great lengths on both of those sides of the spectrum. And it seems like Einstein didn't have a bigger brain necessarily. He had a more efficient brain, from what I understand. But if we could have doubled the amount of voltage his brain made, it would have taken better advantage of his efficient networks.

So my point is, you can increase the power by improving efficiency.

That doesn't increase power. That increases output. It doesn't increase power going into the system.

It improves the quality of output. Oh, yeah, it improves the quality of output. So I guess if you're really defining power in terms of the physics. Energy over.

Yeah, the energy going in and the amount of energy the brain can create.

Right, right. So in that sense, yes, of course you can have inefficiency while having energy usage, and hence you have a huge amount of energy waste, which, of course, as you know, is where the mitochondria conversation comes in and oxidative stress and all of that. But if you maintain efficiency in the larger sense, which is the, you know, the broad thesis of my stance, you can optimize the way your brain performs when you need it to perform at highest intensities. And, you know, to your point, I might be wrong here, but the data I've seen is what Einstein had more of is astrocytes in the brain. So he had as many neurons as anyone else, but he actually had more astrocytes, especially in the area, I think, of his prefrontal cortex, some parts of his prefrontal cortex. And astrocytes are really housekeepers within the brain. They mop up extra glutamate, they are involved in giving neurons ketones. And for the. Also for passing on lactate, the lactate shuttle is involved in astrocytic performance. So astrocytes allowed, we could conjecture, allowed Einstein's neurons to perform exceptionally well by maintaining efficiency. To a degree. This is conjecture, pure conjecture. There's paper on astrocytes, but there's no paper on this particular theory, of course.

I love that you're talking about this. Neurons are the rock stars of the brain. Everyone talks about neurons, including me, and no one talks about glial cells. And astrocytes are a type of glial cells, but glial cells are the roadies and the stage manager and the lighting manager for the rock stars and rock stars and are going to sit in a bar playing an acoustic guitar with 12 people in the bar if they don't have all of that infrastructure. And as a CEO, I know damn well that my efficiency comes from the team that supports me and all the work that I'm doing. The neurons are the same way, and I don't want to say they're the CEOs of the brain, because that's a little bit dumb, but they require so much repair and maintenance because they're so high power that most of what you see in the world of biohacking is people talking about neurons, neurons, neurons, and maybe inflammation from glial cells, but it's actually the ordering of the brain, the maintenance of the brain, not just inflammation. So, all right, what do I do to have better glial cells or astrocytes, not just neurons.

So again, I return to my first argument, first point, which is that if I were to really give you a truthful answer to that question, I would have to say, think of the brain, again, as a complex system. So in order to have, as you say, well, functioning astrocytes, you would have to treat the whole system and let it respond to its environment. I mean, one of the. Professor Marian. The late Professor Marian diamond, who studied Einstein's brain, she did a lot of work with mice, and she found that actually stroking the mice, and these were lab mice, so they were not really very loved mice, but showing them some kind of human love and human affection, and she spoke a lot about this, seemed to actually increase the levels of their astrocytes. Now, of course, that's not the only way, and we don't know if the same would work in humans, but it shows you how the brain is really in constant dialogue with the world around you. And the best we can do is modify your dialogue, that particular conversation with the world in order to optimize what. What's actually taking place at the level, at the molecular level in the brain.

Can I be a little politically incorrect with you?

Sure, go ahead.

So that professor, what was her name?

Marie or Maria Marion Diamond.

Marion. Thank you. I knew I didn't quite have. Right. Marianne Diamond. I've definitely read the paper but she stroked the mice and she's a woman. Now you might say, where is Dave going with this? Well, there is very interesting data that says if male lab assistants feed mice, their stress response goes up, and if female lab assistants feed mice, it goes down. And so every time they're doing mouse studies, they say we controlled for all variables. They never control for the gender of the person feeding the mice. And I think there's something going on at an unseen level. It doesn't mean it's not real or measurable. It just means that our biology isn't wired to see it between the masculine and the feminine. And what's going on in the brain, what do you think?

I mean, in science, everything is possible. So I don't have enough knowledge on that. I don't know if Marianne, professor diamond, carried out a, you know, comparison between herself stroking the mouse, the mice, or not. But certainly in science everything is possible. And we don't know the. I certainly don't know the answer to that.

I don't think that. That we have an answer in modern science. I think we probably do have an answer. If you look at, you know, historical accounts or you look at yoga or tantra or traditional Chinese medicine or shamanic practice, like, there's ancient knowledge where we would talk about, about this stuff. And I think it might have something to do with the brain. In my work, one of the sources of nourishment is your intimate relationship and your community around you. Like, actually, that's one, that's two. But there's two of these big sources, after safety and after food and stuff like that. And it feels like making the brain feel safe is necessary for the glial cells to go do their maintenance. Just like in the rest of the body. You don't put on muscle if after you work out, your body isn't nourished and safe because you're stressed. But if you're unstressed and we've seen at upgrade labs, if we can just make people recover so the body feels safe, then they'll put on muscle or change v2 max quickly. But if they're overstressed, they don't do that very much. And the. The astrocytes and other immune cells in the body seems like they follow the same rules. And I. We're still figuring it out at the very highest data levels, looking at things like oxytocin or things like inflammatory markers. But I think that that old hermetic thing, as above, so below, it seems like it's happening inside the brain.

Well, you Know, it's very interesting because there is certainly a lot of data now about how loneliness affects the brain. So at a very, very macroscopic societal level, we used to, you know, it used to be very kind of fluffy stuff 20 years ago or even 10 years ago, but now there is data about it to support it. MARIANNE Professor Diamond's mouse stroking was quite fluffy, but clearly it showed results. I think, to your point, safety is our ultimate or ultimate priority. You know, as you know, we now see the brain as a sort of, it's a way to see it. It's not everything it does, but it's a prediction machine. So it needs to be able to predict what happens next because it uses sort of Bayesian statistics to always be ready for any sort of uncertainty or danger lurking behind uncertainty. It's only when it knows that there is no uncertainty that it can use its resources for its own benefit. Whereas if there is uncertainty, then of course it has to save its resources and have a completely different approach. And you kind of see the same with the history of humanity when humans were, you know, and I'm not talking about any one particular era, but, you know, through ancient history, Middle ages, whenever people were warring, whenever people were living in constant uncertainty, that's when ideas didn't really emerge. Creative ideas and the best of civilizations really emerged once people had some kind of stability within the uncertainty. So again, this relates to your first point about how we reflect the ecosystem and the world we are in.

You mentioned the brain as predicting the future. And there's two people whose work I'm familiar with who have the best models for consciousness that I've come up, I've seen anyone come up with. One of them is Jeff Hawkins, the guy who was a founder of Palm Pilot, like the very first handheld personal organizer, the great, great, great, great, great grandfather of your iPhone. And his book on intelligence talks about how the brain predicts the future a microsecond, in, out, and only notices things that don't match predictions, right? So you're vaguely aware of stuff, but if something doesn't match, like you, you, you look at it. And then the other book is Donald Hoffman, who writes the Case Against Reality. And he says, well, the brain is a user interface on reality for all life. Like that's what life does, so that we exist in a world we can't see. And your consciousness job is to throw out all the stuff you don't need to stay alive. Which of those models is the best one, based on your experience?

I think I would be very naive to commit to one. I think ultimately the answer is going to be it'll. It's a combination of many of these things. I mean, if you look at the research on consciousness at the moment, the span is so incredibly wide. And, you know, ultimately you can. I'm sure there will be a theory of everything at some point, although I would guess there probably won't be because again, our brains will limit how much we can learn about our brain's own function. But if you look at the current data, I think the evolution of AI and intelligent machines is really making use of Bayesian prediction mechanisms. And this is why the predictive nature of the brain has really come into the spotlight recently. Incidentally, so have astrocytes, because they have been using astrocytes to change the weighting of some of the connections in their neural networks. So at this moment, there is a lot of research on the brain being a predictive machine and using Bayesian prediction. And there is a lot of data which we can now replicate some aspects of the brain's performance in AI using intelligent machines, using neural networks. And so that has a lot of credibility. I have heard many theories at the moment. I'm not. I don't know enough. I haven't read enough in those areas to be able to comment on whether they're better or worse. But definitely, you know, the more theories we have, the more avenues we have to pursue to actually get to the truth.

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Ken Wilber definitely has his integral theory. Trying to get everything together. He's been on the show as a fascinating interview. Not just neuroscience, but trying to fit everything. And that stuff always blows my mind. And then we've also had Brian Johnson on a couple times who's a friend and has recently joined the longevity movement. Before that he created a company called Kernel. Are you familiar with what Kernel did with neuroscience?

No. I'm of course familiar with Brian Johnson, but not with Col. No.

So Brian made a fortune at Braintree, which was a payment processing company. And he put $80 million of his own money into building is probably the world's most advanced brain scanning technology. And before he entered the longevity space, I reached out and was like I want to play with one of these for teaching human brains. And he just said no, I built it so I could understand the brain so we can make AI better, right? I'm like no, I just need to see what's going on in there so I can make my own AI better and maybe someday that that'll happen. But there's, there's so much going on where we're looking at the system of the brain from all these different lenses and I'm pretty convinced that we still don't really know what's going on in there. Are you of the same opinion if we know 1%?

Entirely. Entirely. In fact, you know the, at the start of my, of my learning I was much more confident about the brain than I am now. And you know, today also with research on psilocybin and the way neural oscillations are altered, the way the functional connectivity of the brain is being altered through anesthesia, there's so many unknowns in our conversation. And I suppose, you know, ultimately the quest for the brain will be a little bit like physics. So you have a quantum level of theory which in many ways are at odds with Newtonian physics, Newtonian mechanics. So I'm sure we will have, and we actually already do have that sort of interplay at the moment. But again, I think it's all good because the more avenues we pursue, the more likely we are to get there.

If you had to pick one and your goal was creating a hyper efficient brain, would it be psilocybin or ketamine?

Oh gosh, neither. Because my, my point is with hyper efficient, being hyper efficient is you're changing your dialogue with your environment. So in a perfect world I'm going to say neither.

Don't you want to increase BDNF and nerve growth factor and neuroplasticity in order to become better at your environment?

You do, but you can do that through your environment. You don't necessarily need to do that. Of course there are, there is wonderful data on psilocybin and its benefits at the moment, but in the general context of day to day life, I would rather go by the dialogue route with the environment.

Have you tried either one?

No.

Why not?

I'm sort of happy where I am. But no, I haven't, I haven't tried. However, I think the research is fair, phenomenal and I, I 100% support it.

It's funny, a few years ago I interviewed Dr. Nicotine from Vanderbilt University who spent 30 years studying the effects of pharmaceutical nicotine on the brain and has written paper after paper showing that it reduces the risk and the severity of Alzheimer's disease. And at the end of the interview I said, well, what's, what form of nicotine do you use? And he said, oh, I've never tried it. I don't want to bias my research. Like, no, like how do you research something without doing it well?

Okay, so I, I'm going to come back to you with an argument. So I have written, co, written two papers on the ketogenic diet and I have tried that. So I'm, I'm not completely, you know, distant from my research.

What did you learn about the keto diet in your papers?

So I wrote it actually right at the Time when you were, when your bulletproof coffee was incredibly popular. I was living in Hong Kong and this is back in 2013, I think it was 2013, 2014, that sort of time. And the scientific literature on ketosis was really emerging. So we wrote two, so we wrote one hypothetical paper on using the ketogenic diet to treat or potentially control the symptoms of maltov sclerosis. And we wrote a follow up on a condition called Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy. Again, both of them involve mitochondria. And while writing those papers, I thought, this is such an extraordinary way of changing the way you're eating. And of course, bulletproof coffee was everywhere at the time in Hong Kong. All the cafes had it. And I thought, I'm going to try, if I recommend this to my patients, I'm going to try this to my, for myself. And I did. I was on it for, for a pretty long time. And you know, there is now, this was a while ago and there is now much, you know, lots more data on the benefits and on the potential mechanisms of how and, and why it could work and its pitfalls. So we now know how it may be more beneficial. Of course, we do know it's more beneficial for certain brain conditions, but you know, ultimately for, for day to day life, that's a, that's a different factor. You can think of metabolic flexibility and all those other things, but it was a very, it was very important to try it if you're recommending it to your patients for sure.

One of the reasons I wrote the bulletproof diet is that unending ketosis is bad for glial cells. And because the glial cells, these astrocytes we were talking about earlier, they thrive on glucose. That's their preferred fuel source. But neurons thrive on ketones. Which means that the whole point of the bulletproof diet wasn't do keto, because Dr. Atkins did that. The year I was born. His big book came out about ketosis. The problem was when I went into unending ketosis, I could only lose 50 of my £100. And it's not great for the brain. And people say, but I thought ketones were good for the brain. They are. Come out of ketosis at least once a week so that your astrocytes get their dose of glucose and so the body has metabolic flexibility and then pay attention to the type of fats you're eating and the type of carbs and then you get very different results than just ketosis. But a lot of that just got simplified in the world of of, you know, nutritional trolling online saying you have to be in ketosis all the time and run the Kona Ironman, I'm like, that's going to metabolically destroy you. Because glucose isn't always bad, just excessive glucose is bad. Is there an optimum level of glucose and ketones for astrocytes and neurons to have a hyper efficient brain?

I think from what we know of the data so far, if we're talking about a healthy individual with a healthy, relatively healthy brain, so someone with not a diagnosis of a disease, it does seem that metabolic flexibility, just as you described, is an optimal way to exist simply because your ketone levels are not going ridiculously high and at the same time you're getting glucose exposure. So the way in which I know there is something called a fasting mimicking ketogenic diet, which is now being used in therapy, but you know, on a day to day basis. Again, coming back to how we evolved and how we exist and, and if you look at, you know, many communities, long living communities now around the world, again, it's this dialogue with the world around us. We rarely woke up at three in the morning to speak to someone in on the opposite side of the world with lots of blue light and having a couple of Mars bars or burgers, you know, three, we never did that. We usually would have eaten and then we would have fasted and then we would have moved and then we would have eaten and we would have fasted. And most data now suggests, and again, I'm not a nutrition expert, I know about ketogenic diets only in the realm of the brain. I'm not an expert on obesity at all. But we do know that generally for health purposes, this kind of metabolic flexibility puts you in just the right levels of both at regular intervals.

If someone is under chronic stress, should they be in ketosis or not be in ketosis?

It's interesting because if you are following a normal diet and then you go into ketosis or you start a ketogenic diet or you fast, however you enter ketosis during the initial phase, your body actually triggers a stress response because it summons more glucose release. So your glucocorticoid response is going to rise. So if you're very, very hungry, you rely on the sugar response to carry you through because that's how we've evolved in a stress response. And I think the data suggests that you have to wait several days before you reach levels of ketones that bring your stress response down. But then other factors come into play because you are trying to reduce your metabolic. Great. So there's a, there's a whole interplay. But if you're under chronic stress, what is true is reducing anything that increases your inflammation level is a good idea. And so if what you're eating is inflammatory, then eating less of that will help. And the way you're eating, so aligning yourself with your circadian rhythm and kind of changing all the variables around what you're eating. And in terms of stress itself, if you look at ibs, which is a stress related disorder, again, there's certain types of food that seem to be more aggravating if you're susceptible to ibs.

You mean like whole food plant diets?

Why did I know you're going to.

I'm just asking, Abby.

You mean kale is what you're saying?

Again, I'm not a nutrition expert by any means, but it is true that with irritable bowel syndrome there is work done from Monash University who have come up with an acronym of fodmaps, which is a group of sugars essentially which are highly fermentable. And eating less of those seem to reduce symptoms of ibs. And you could still follow, you could still eat plants should you choose to. It's a personal choice.

I'm not anti plants. I believe you want some carbs. So I'm not a all keto all the time kind of guy. Not by long. Just to be clear, for people who are think I only eat meat or something, that's not true. So should you choose to eat plants.

Then you can go low on these FODMAPs. And this does seem to help symptoms. And I know that different centers use slightly different approaches. So some of them say use a trial period where you have very little and then you start reintroducing them bit by bit. But you know, it all depends on your personal progress and your personal symptoms.

One of the things that's confused me a lot because I had massive brain fog. I've had serious memory issues when I was younger and just a lot of brain dysregulation. And Also I had 15 years of antibiotics, so my gut was messed up. And if I ate the fodmaps, the fermentable carbs, I would clear the room with my. Well just say you didn't want to be around me and my brain would get really foggy if I ate those kind of foods. But when I wrote my longevity book and I'd fixed my gut and I increased the amount of fermentable carbs that I ate, that were compatible with my system. I quadrupled the number of types of species of bacteria in my gut, which is a hallmark of a younger person. So our body wants fermentable carbs if we can handle them, because we fix the gut. And those fermentable carbs make butyric acid and propionic acid, which are ketogenic fatty acids made from fermentable carbs that help the brain. So it's really confusing. It seems like it might be the gut, not the brain. How the heck do you solve this in research?

You're completely right. It's. It's incredibly difficult to do, which is why we haven't solved it for a long time. I mean, you know, if 25 years ago you told me that, or you went to a medical, medical conference and you said, you know, multiple sclerosis, we propose that there is a link with a certain fingerprint of gut bacteria. I think you wouldn't have got your poster or paper accepted at the conference at all because it would be so ludicrous. But I think now we are getting to a point where we are having a dialogue between different departments, different medical departments, and we are realizing that there's such a connection between everything. I mean, if you focus on the eye, for instance, the eye is a really small organ. But if you go to an eye hospital, the cornea specialists have never spoken to the retinal specialists, who have never spoken to the glaucoma specialists. We all have. We each have our separate conferences. But of course, now we are discovering that there is so much overlap between all of them. You know, some of the latest incredible data suggest a link between glymphatic circulation and glaucoma. And there's great lines of research. A paper came out just a couple of weeks ago from Andrew, by Andrew Lee, who's a great, great neuro ophthalmologist in the US and he's studying the visual system astronauts about how red light therapy could potentially be one way to ameliorate certain conditions of the cornea. So there's now so much, you know, conversation between the different departments. And I think this is the point, because the gut and the brain are so far away, much further away than the retina and the cornea. And so we've never had a conversation between them.

I saw a vision specialist right before the pandemic and a woman who really goes deep on aging of the eyes, and she looked at my cornea and said, you don't have the yellowing and stiffening of the Cornea. That should be happening with a number of years you've been alive. I don't know what's causing that, but you should keep doing it. And I have a practice of blocking toxic blue light under 490 nanometers. That's why you always see me wearing the true dark glasses. They're not blue blockers. They allow blue through. They just block toxic blue. And I read under a red light, and there are studies showing that reading under a red light improves vision. And there's reasons I do this. And it seems like it works. And if you flip over to Satchin Panda's lab, where they're looking at melanopsin sensors in retinal cells, and you realize they're studded with mitochondria, and those are things that control circadian biology. They're also light sensitive and they like red light. So there's an argument for having, you know, a true light red light, or just using red light at night as part of circadian stuff for the eyes. And this is a question for you because you've studied the brain. I look at the eyes as an extension of the brain, almost like they're not really separate organs, although they are. Do you think eye health is a great proxy for brain health?

100%. The eyes are an extension of the brain because they're the only bit of the brain you can see from the outside. Because when a doctor looks into your eyes, an ophthalmologist looks into your eyes with an ophthalmoscope, and they see this little yellow disc at the back of the eye. That's your brain, that's your cranial nerve. So it's the only visible cranial nerve from the outside. And yes. So for a long time, we assumed the answer was no or unknown. But now, over the last, I'd say maybe 25 years, we are increasingly seeing more and more data to confirm that the eyeballs are really a representation of what is taking place inside the brain that you cannot see. So, for instance, retinal nerve fiber layer thinning, so thinning of the matter of the retina, if you like, that is correlated with brain degeneration as a whole. So you can actually estimate one by following the other. And there are certain brain diseases, such as neuromyelitis optica and ms, where you can find a correlation between the degree of brain thinning of retina thinning, RNFL thinning, and brain pathology. Similarly, if you look at the vessels in the retina, you can estimate what's taking place at the vessels in the brain. And thirdly, the research, the latest research on glaucoma is discovering a link between glymphatic circulation, which is affecting the rest of your brain, and we believe plays a very important role in dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases, is also playing a role in glaucoma. So we can almost use the eyeball as a sort of lab into what happens inside the brain.

That makes me pretty happy because it leads us down the path that maybe one day your webcam will be able to tell you what's going on in your brain just by looking at your eyes. How far off from that are we?

I think from the, at the macroscopic level, we are pretty close. We are pretty close because things like OCT scanning, where, you know, just a level of resolution of the retina of the contents of the eyeball, the back of the eye, beyond what we have been used to for really the large part of the last century, allows a huge amount of deduction, the ability to deduce what is going on at that microscopic level, which extends into the brain. So I think we are very, very close. I couldn't give you a time because the OCT, for instance, has been a step change. So I would say we are few step changes away at the most.

So is that like five years.

Just to repeat? I couldn't give you a time, but we are very close. We are very close for sure.

I feel the same way and I think AI is going to do that for us. When you have billions of hours of people's eye movements and then you know something about their brain state, the data is going to tell us things that are just non obvious. Let's get into some of the brain regions that get affected when you're under constant stress because this goes right in hyper efficiency. What are the brain parts that get tortured by stress?

Really? The whole brain, I would say. Okay, so if you want to become. So one of the approaches I've taken with hyper efficient is that we know, we all know about stress, so we know really about the effects of. You know, everyone knows the term cortisol. We know about adrenaline, we know about the effects of cortisol. So with hyper Efficient what I did was I took a step back and I wanted to know what happens in the step right before you fall into the pool of stress. And there we come. We actually align all the things we've just spoken about. We align the pupils of the eyes, we align the brain and we align the fact that the brain is a complex system because there is this One region in the brain called the locus coeruleus, or the blue dot. And it was discovered by Marie Antoinette's personal physician, if that's of any interest to anyone. And this blue dot has fascinated me since I studied pupillometry as part of my neuro ophthalmic PhD. And because this blue dot, it's a collection of brain cells which contain norepinephrine, which is why they look blue in cadavers. And it's a tiny, tiny region, but it has influence over the entire state of the brain. The neurons within it fire in very three patterns, and each pattern sets the entire brain into a certain pace, a certain mode of functioning, and a certain gain. So the speed and accuracy trade off. So the way to look at it is it sets the brain into kind of three broad gears. And in gear two, the prefrontal cortex is activated the most. If this blue dot region fires more vigorously, you can think of it as sort of being three gears of an engine where your brain is processing information. So if it fires, if the blue dot fires in gear three, everything is working faster. There is too much norepinephrine for your prefrontal cortex to come online completely. And that's the stage you're at before you descend into stress. So rather than looking at how to avoid stress, why not look at how to keep the brain in an optimal gear by knowing what to do to keep this blue dot network functioning in this middle Goldilocks zone?

What can I do in my life to stay in the Goldilocks zone?

So the. The way to see it is, again, your brain has a constant dialogue with the world around you. It's constantly slicing information and presumably because it wants to predict. But of course, we have other theories as well. And the faster this blue dot fires, the faster it processes information. Now, we know that in the mental states where you're daydreaming, your default mode, network, is active. That is where the gear network is slowest, the blue dot is network is kind of active at the slowest pace. Low tonic. So if you're in that state of daydreaming, of creativity, a state which many of us are no longer in ordinarily, in our lives. You know, we wake up, we scroll, we are immediately made alert, we have lots of coffee. They're not always bulletproof, so we immediately become incredibly wired.

Or danger Coffee. The new brand bulletproof, fired me about three years ago. So danger. Who knows what you might do?

There you go. Danger. Whatever your brand, and we have that, and we suddenly get really fired up. And then we rush to work, and then we sit in front of a computer and we work as if we're working on an assembly line, on a mental assembly line. And that completely removes us from the state of gentle curiosity, of gentle creativity, which is actually incredibly helpful for the brain to be in for a portion of the day, not necessarily all day, but a large portion of the day. It's very protective, it's actually neuroprotective. Then we have gear two. In gear two, you can focus. If you can focus. Well, if you have to read a report in front of you or have this conversation and you can focus, your prefrontal cortex is engaged. And that's the Goldilocks zone that we're talking about. The way you stay in these two states is by really avoiding going into gear three. And gear three is the kind of mental state you have where you have a trade off between speed and accuracy. So you trade off accuracy for speed, you become reactive, you see looming deadlines, you're alerted, you have a lot of information for your brain to process. And that puts you in a very fast processing mode, which is really the mode most of us are in in our day to day lives at the moment. Even when you come home from work, you have meetings, you have zoom calls, you have deadlines. So staying in that mode, in that mental state, being very buzzy, very reactive, and not really being able to step back and analyze and solve and create that mental state is gear three. And that's what we don't want to be in. So how do we stay in the first and second mental states? Well, we can play with our environment, we can make time appear to pass slower. But within the workplace, we can do three things. We can deal with mental load. Again, we can deal with perception of time, and we can deal with uncertainty. So we can play with these three things to stay in the right mental state.

How do I translate that into really specific actions?

So the first action is in any day, in any working day, the brain naturally goes through different states. So when you wake up, you're naturally in a creative state. And this is why we wake up actually with red light around us during sunrise. Red light actually stimulates a creative state. A warmer, warmer light doesn't necessarily have to be all red, but sort of a warmer shifted light stimulates creativity. We should really try to embrace that. And then we go into gear 2 around 10 o', clock, when the light is bright, when we're feeling more alert. The way to keep our brains healthy and not go into gear three is by changing the way we work. So at the moment we all work, most of us who are not independent work in a way that really follows the old assembly line template. And what that does is if you keep the brain working at high intensity, at a constant pace, beyond a period of time, your brain becomes fatigued. And when it becomes fatigued, you do one of two things. You either roll down into boredom, into distraction, or you take some coffee and you keep going. And when you keep going, you inevitably end up in gear three. So the very simple way to stay in the right state of mind is to change the way we work. Rather than following an assembly line constant template, we should work in a sort of rhythmic way where we align what we are doing with the time of day, and also where we adjust the intensity of work with the pace of our brains.

One of my friends in the world of biohacking, and I would attribute this if I could remember who it was, someone who came to one of the very early biohacking conferences said that one of the things that biohacking does for you is it lets you move the wall out a lot. And we all talk about, I can only do so much work before I hit the wall. What he said was, it just moves the wall out. So you can do a lot more work before you hit the wall, but it means you'll be going a lot faster when you hit the wall if you're not managing this. So you can have crazy amounts of energy, I think in part from amplifying mitochondrial effectiveness, which is a big part of my brain book. I'm headstrong. And then if you do that, you have more energy and if you drive hyper efficiency. And there's lots of ways to do that that are in your book. And even just mental practices like if you're not in fear mode all the time and you're not in hunger mode all the time. Well, all the thoughts that went to fear and hunger got to go somewhere, so maybe they'll go into something useful. I can do a 12 hour day, I can do six podcasts in a day, and I do not hit the wall. I do not get bored. And as possible to burn me out. It's just harder than it's ever been in my entire life for me to hit the wall. And I'm working on how do I teach that to people so that, that you know how to do that. How do you move the wall out fastest? Is it be more efficient? Is it change your habits? Is it just circadian timing? Is it Everything like, give me some hints.

So ultimately, the way to look at efficiency or being hyper efficient is imagine you're driving a car on a road, on a terrain, and you want to drive in the right gear for the terrain you're driving in, right? So if you're going uphill and you have a manual car and you're driving in gear four, it's really hard to push the car up. Same with cycles. If you're riding a mountain bike, the effort that that that costs is draining and it pushes your brain into fatigue. It's inefficient. So ultimately, efficiency is about being completely adapted to whatever task you're doing so that your entire energy, your mental energy is channeled, always funneled at exactly the right bandwidth for the job you need. And when you can get into that mental state, that's when whatever you're doing actually feels lighter and it feels incredibly efficient. Now, the argument that I make is that the way we live and the way we work, we approach work, we actually never have that dialogue. We are often always in the wrong mental state for the work we are doing, which is why it tires us out. Even if we are bored with what we are doing, boredom actually pushes us into mental fatigue because boredom makes the work we're doing more exhausting. And, you know, a good way to think of this is why we can't daydream while we sprint. We just have to be in the right mental state for what we're doing. Now, what's so interesting is your listeners will know about the flow state. I know you've spoken about that before. The extraordinary thing about the flow state and the subjective descriptions of the flow state is that in the flow state, it appears that you actually are in this state where the energy, the dialogue between motivation and norepinephrine is just right for the task that you're doing. And so the way you are doing it suddenly becomes incredibly efficient. And the energy you need to do it, the effort you need to do it, suddenly feels less deviating a little bit from this. If you look at what the science says behind a flow state, and that really goes by, explains a little bit about why you're able to work for a very long time. I'm ignoring all the other biohacking tools you have, but let's just assume, how would one be able to do that across the day without, you know, without access to tools and other things? If you look at the data about the flow state now, one really interesting angle that, that I describe in the book is a line of research that sees the flow state as a state of hyper efficiency. So you know, when you, when you get into flow and, and you know, we know that there has to be a challenge that stretches you, and then you have to receive feedback as a sort of a receipt for the effort you've put in. So effort, reward, and that reward, or that confirmation or that feedback kind of gives you momentum to do it again. So it ends up being a sort of a volley between effort, reward, or effort result, effort, result, effort, result. And you can always predict the result you're going to get with the effort. Now, what this theory says is that when you're really putting in the effort, you're having to concentrate, you're recruiting your attention networks, the prefrontal cortical networks. When you are receiving the receipt of your efforts as a reward, you're recruiting the reward networks. And this theory posits that when you're doing it just without, without consistency, you know, you're using your attention networks, you're using your reward networks. Finished, you don't get into flow. But if you can do it as a volley, and that volley is perpetuated, what seems to happen is the attention and reward network synchronize like a group of pendulums. So you know the data of if you hang several pendulums together, even if they're not connected, but they're connected to the same base, whether it's a table or a wall, eventually they synchronize. So the same may be happening inside the brain. And this goes one level further, which is that if you imagine an audience after a show clapping, everyone claps at random at the start because, you know, you don't really know who the person 10 rows away from you is. You're not coordinating anything. But suddenly, somehow, the clapping becomes coordinated. Everyone starts clapping together and no one coordinates it. And when that happens, the volume of clapping massively increases because everyone claps together. And yet the energy that's being used is no more than was used five seconds ago. So there's a theory that this is what's happening in the brain when you get into a flow state, that your attention network and your reward network and really all these important networks are working in such synchrony that they're somehow increasing efficiency. And so suddenly the work you're doing feels effortless and you can carry on doing it for long periods of time. And the way to, of course, get into a flow state is really difficult. But one of the another emerging research that's coming out from Paris by two scientists called Pierre Yves Oudeller and Frederic Kaplan was doing AI research is that you can get into this mental state in a day to day setting by playing with mastery, by playing with learning progress and essentially crafting your work so that you get this perfect balance between stretching your skills, learning, improving the outcome inch by inch, bit by bit. And if you can craft your work to feel this way, it helps if you have agency over what you're doing, but you can actually, as you say, push the wall back and have more mental stamina to do what you're doing. And this is why I think that in this age where we're using our brains more than ever, learning how to get into that state is really, really critical.

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Unlike most humans, I've spent six months of my life with electrodes on my head. I'm creating and doing the 40 years of Zen program. And one of the things that I teach is that boredom is a behavior that comes from the ego. And Buddhists will tell you that it's one of the hindrances. And what I've found is that if you can learn egoic control mechanisms, and in my view the ego is an emergent behavior from simple rules repeated in your mitochondria an infinite number of times. That describes it very well. And that's not proven in a scientific paper. It just seems obvious if you know distributed systems. But if that is all happening, it's possible to train the brain to not go into a state of boredom because you learn how to turn on curiosity. And it's very hard for me to get bored because there's always something interesting, even if it's not what's right in front of me. That's not about daydreaming, it's just about pondering what is the role of curiosity and pondering in having a hyper efficient brain?

Really enormous. I'm going to go back to this model of the brain working in three engine settings from when we were very young, before we invented, I won't say invented technology because we did have stone tools. But you know, before the current era of technological kind of ubiquity, we learned how to get into a mental state where we explored the world around us without there needing to be a result for it. And we see evidence of this even today if you look at little infants. So if you take a three month old or four month old and you just watch her movements, you'll see that as is obvious, the baby doesn't expect a reward, doesn't expect any, you know, any sort of clarification or anything like that. The baby just explores out of curiosity and learns while it explores, while she explores. And this way of guiding the brain into the right state where it can learn and it can really demystify the world around us and make it more predictable, is innate within us. But we lose the capacity to do that through the way we engineer, the way we are. So this Innate curiosity, which young infants clearly have and it's not been taught, is really lost by the time that same child is an 11 year old and having to sit down and learn math formula, right? And so it has to be innate. And the ability to channel that, to allow that to emerge to understand your environment, is a lost talent that gets buried in the noise of the world we've created. But if we can learn to tap into that and channel that, then we become very good at staying in the right mental state, no matter what our environment is. And I'll give you a very simple practical demonstration of this. So this whole idea of the gears is based on some of the research on arousal regulation, which, as you know, is famously used by Navy seals. When they regulate their breath and they bring their arousal levels to the middle or to a zone where things are still under control, their prefrontal cortex is engaged. They do that through breathing. And one of the theories of arousal regulation that has been around for at least 100 years is that many of the behavioral kind of problems we encounter in the world around us and many of our inclinations, our appreciation for beauty, our appreciation for happiness, really comes from getting our brains into that middle zone. So, you know, if we listen to music, we all have a certain kind of flexibility here. So some of us find it easier than others, but most of us prefer music that's neither too bizarre nor too predictable. It has to be somewhere in the middle. So this ability to kind of regulate ourselves into this right mental state is lost if we use tools to do it for us. We already see it in schools, but you know, if you imagine a, I don't know, an 18 year old today standing at a bus stop, I'm using a British example. I don't know if Americans also take the bus often, but you know, the.

Equivalent only when we have to. And we have personal defense devices.

Yeah, okay, but just say waiting for something, waiting in a queue at an airport, let's say, there you go. And then you suddenly realize that you can't use your phone. There is no technology, there's no entertainment. Many, many young people now who've grown up in this world will feel really jittery because there is no way of getting into that satisfied mental state, the one that, as you describe in Buddhism, you're trained to do. You learn how to do the frustration that they feel. People who are not used to doing that and rely on technology we term boredom. It becomes frustration, it becomes agitation. And the reason is that from when we are very young, we actually have the skill to do it, but be then delegated to tools. So as soon as we look at a screen, especially a blue light screen, so not with one of your red blocking glasses, you're more likely that has the same alerting effect on you as a strong alerting stimulus, even something like a mild cup of coffee or a hot shower or a run. But when you're using a tool like a tablet or a phone, you're really putting in no effort to get into that mental state by yourself. So if you're always doing that day after day, year after year, you lose the ability to navigate your mind. And then you of course attend a course and you learn how to do it all over again. You do training and you learn how to do it over again. But we should all be able to do it and we used to be able to do it. So I agree with you. So boredom, you know, it has lots of meanings. The way we, we define boredom these days. We associate it with agitation, we associate it with frustration in a negative way. But actually it can be channeled into curiosity. If you have that sort of control.

Over your mind for people who aren't going to sit in a cave for 20 years or do neurofeedback or something like that, how do you get that kind of control over your mind?

Well, self regulation training is, I mean, the first thing I'd say is don't use your phone to wake up in the morning and rely less on gadgets to alert you and so on. But I think generally now what we have data for is really it boils down to self regulation training. And one of the arms of that is focused attention training. So focused attention meditation. If you don't like focused attention meditation, there are even apps that train you to focus attention and there is actually promising data on using those apps to become better at learning how to control your attention. Now as soon as you know how to control your attention, you're able to self regulate your mental state better than you were before.

Okay.

Another way to do it is of course breathing. Breathing exercises are a great famous way to regulate your mental state. And we now know one of the reasons for it, which is that the pre bird singer complex in the brain which sets the rhythm of your breathing has got a direct channel of communication with this blue dot network. So if you change the pace of your breathing, you're actually changing the pace of the blue dot firing, which is absolutely fascinating. And we see that in action. If you slow down your breathing, you of course slow down your physiology, you'll see your sympathetic, sympathetic balance. But you also change the clarity of your, of your mind, your perception of the world around you.

So is something like Buteyko breathing, where you're doing a long slow exhales better? Is it box breathing? Is it holotropic breathing? Is it Wim Hof breathing? What are we talking about here?

So from all the data I've seen, the breathing method that seems most promising is breathing at the frequency of your baroreflex. What that means is it translates to breathing at around about your personal frequency. Slightly different. It's really best measured through neurofeedback, unfortunately. But you can round it up to around about five to six breaths per minute. And there is some data which looks really promising, some of it is coming from Mara Matha's lab in California that shows that breathing at this frequency actually activates your vagus nerve. So rather than stimulating your vagus nerve with electrodes, if you breathe at this frequency, you increase vagus nerve activity. And there is some other really fascinating data. Some of this is still borderline proven. So we have some data, but we need to replicate it, which is that a lot of the vagus nerve modulating approaches that we now have, some are in the market, many are still experimental. What they are actually doing is they're targeting this blue dot network and they're putting you into gear two. So you see how all of these converge at the same place. So in answer to your question, five to six breaths per minute is the optimal. However, slowing down your breath, whether it's ideally through longer exhalations, is another rule of thumb. Option.

Years ago, at 40 years of Zen, we would do some heart rate variability clinical grade analysis to help determine ideal breathing rate. But it took a lot of time. That wasn't worth the time compared to the other things we could do that was better. I've also used a device called a capnometer, which measures the breath that's coming out of your mouth in order to, to be able to identify and even train this. So this is going back 15 years, before I even started the biohacking movement, I guess. Yeah, that was right before I did buy a capnometer. And it took a very short period of time for me to determine I was breathing at the optimal rate for my biology. I'm like, well there's no feedback to do here. Like I'm, I'm done with that. But I'm still wondering. There's debate between these like deep breathing and shallow breathing because there's benefits to both. So which is going to help me better be hyper efficient.

It depends which gear you're in. So you mentioned the WIM HOF method. What I know, I'm not, I'm not an expert on his method at all. But from what I know, if you are wanting to increase sympathetic activity, then you want rapid, shallow breathing. If you want to lower down your sympathetic activity and raise your parasympathetic, then you want to deeper, slower, long exhalation breathing. So if you're about to jump into one of his ice plunges, which I have not done, so I can't, you know, I'm just conjecturing here. I do recall that he recommends something like doing fast breathing beforehand because raising your sympathetic activity sort of heats up your body and prepares you for that response. But really it depends on, you know, how what you're trying to do is you're trying to get into the middle. So if you're really low down, you want to go up. If you're really high, you want to come into the middle and that's the target.

It's important to note we have this idea that if something is bad, you shouldn't have any of it. If something is good, you should only do that if you're over parasympathetic. What happens to the brain and the.

Body over parasympathetic is bad, bad, bad. There are many conditions where the sole problem is too much parasympathetic activity and not enough sympathetic activity. The idea is never just as you say, one is good, so more of it is better. The reason we tend to talk about, I think the reason we tend to talk about, you know, increasing your parasympathetic, increasing vagal activity is we're relating to a very large sample size who on average are living a lifestyle that is very driven, very fast paced, very stressed. And so on average we are all shifting a little bit towards more sympathetic dominance and so bringing everyone back to parasympathetic a little bit more parasympathetic dominance is good. But if you enter any neurological clinic, you will see that there is a variety of diseases, very well known diseases where the sole problem is too much parasympathetic activity. So your intention, the intention we should all have is the middle way is the best way. So stay in the middle zone. Trying to stay in that gear two state.

What that means for listeners is you want to learn what it feels like to be parasympathetic and to be in your sympathetic and to translate that you want to learn if you're in Rest and relax versus in active mode, put it that way. And you can learn the breath that takes you in the other direction. I've had times in my life where I was constantly sympathetic activated and I've had times in my life where I was way too parasympathetic and they both suck. And a lot of people out there who are over parasympathetic are doing meditations that increase parasympathetic and then you feel like crap. And even some of the consumer grade meditation devices out there that drive parasympathetic only I don't think they're doing you any favors if that's not what your body needs. So if something's not working, you might want to stop doing it and do something else. That's, that's the basic rule of biohacking is let's measure it. So how would, how would someone who wants to be more hyper efficient know which kind of breath would be the right one for them based on the symptoms of being parasympathetic or sympathetic? Can you just walk me through those?

Certainly. So if you, as a general, as a generalization you. In most worlds of work, we are in environments which are very driven, very fast paced. We get anxious before a meeting, before a presentation, before a talk. And so in those sort of situations where you can feel yourself really wired, your thoughts are fast, you want to dial down. There are other situations and we actually already sort of have tools for that. One of them again is coming back to your coffee. But other tools, other tools as well, like exercise and any kind of autonomic stimulating activity, we already use these, most of us already use these tools to kind of gear up first thing in the morning. So for most of us, I'd say in a general non pathological context, when we're all healthy and we're all just living our normal lives, we tend to be more wired. And in those sort of situations you want to just come down so slow exhalations are very good. I would actually say though that as a general rule this resonance feedback breathing of around five to six breaths per minute keeps you in the middle. So I would guess that if you are very low it would bring you back to the middle and if you're very high, it would bring you back to the middle also. So I would say that because of the data we have, that's a fairly good rule of thumb at this moment based on what we know.

I really like that advice. And if you're listening, you've never tried breathing. There's a variety of things you can use that help you track your breathing and things like that. Or you could just count it yourself. And for me, when I started doing ardour living breath work many years ago, I did this every morning for five years. One thing that helped me was you would do, you know, 20 breaths with your hands in one position. But counting 20 breaths at first is really hard to do. It's focused attention. So if you just practice that and then you do another number of breaths with your hands here, another with your hands here. But to be able to count the breaths in and of itself is a kind of meditation. And after you do that for a while, you just develop awareness and it becomes easy to do. So maybe that's your. You're beginning biohacking devices, use your brain to count and it's harder than it sounds. Let's talk about ultradian rhythms. What are those? Most people know circadian at this point if they're listening to the show. But I don't talk about those as much. Talk to me about that.

Well, innately we all know about them because it's very rare for films, for matches in the UK, football matches, for instance, to go on beyond 90 minutes without a break. Right. For most of us, we kind of know that if we carry on doing something for 90 minutes for longer than 90 minutes, no matter how interesting it is, we kind of try start to, you know, our attention starts to wane a little bit. We also know that when we sleep, we go through the different phases of sleep every 90 minutes or so. So around 100 years ago, give or take a couple of decades, Nathaniel Kleitman, an American physiologist, guessed that the rhythm that we have during the night, this 90 minute sleep phases, actually also exists during the day. But we don't feel it because we can override it pretty easily. But research that has, and then there was a little bit of, you know, a couple of papers that didn't find anything concrete. Other, other papers that did. There was always a little bit of a, a gray area. But since then, more studies have emerged and it does seem that we do have this second 90 minute rhythm that's embedded in our usual circadian rhythm. And this 90 minute rhythm causes our attention to wax and wane every 90 or so minutes. And what seems to make it more obvious or unmask that rhythm are things like sleep deprivation, where you're running low on resources, which makes sense because you're able to override it. But obviously if your resources are low, you can't. And so if you really also appreciate that, you know, we've innately kind of assumed this. There is clearly something there. So a 90 minute rhythmic cycle seems to exist in relation to attention. And so when you're working, especially if you're doing focused attention work, sustained attention is incredibly energy guzzling. It's very, very expensive for the brain. So if you're doing anything that requires sustained attention, then stopping after around about 90 minutes, I mean, the data goes between 60 to 100, depending on your individual context, your sleep deprivation, time of day, your tiredness level, all of those things. But a rough kind of rule is 90 minutes. Stopping at 90 minutes, giving yourself a break, allows your brain to replenish its resources, allows, we can conjecture, your astrocytes to mop up the waste and carry on.

How long of a break do you need?

So again, it's a question of how long is a piece of string, because it depends on the work you're doing, your individual physiology. But a rough rule of thumb is that the more intense the work you're doing, the more frequent your breaks should be. And the more frequent your breaks, the shorter they can be. So if you're waiting 90 minutes to have a break, a rough rule of thumb is around 20 minutes is fine, is a good kind of rule. If you are doing something where you don't want to lose momentum, keep your break to between three and 10 minutes. So you know if you're thinking of something you don't want to lose, your train of thought don't extend it beyond 10 minutes. But even within a 90 minute time frame, if you're doing something involving sustained attention, you can actually take very short micro breaks as well. That also plays a really good role in kind of giving your brain a chance just to step back on its gear, pull its foot off the pedal, dial back, replenish things for just a moment before you carry on. There is a really great study from a few decades ago that looked at people sitting in exams and pausing for as little as five seconds every two minutes, actually improved scores.

A 20 minute break is actually triggering for me because I have shit to do. What can I do during that break to make it a more efficient break that takes less time?

So first look at your state of mind. So when you're about to take the break, are you just exhausted? No, of course not. You are the human upgrade specialist. Of course not. Are you bored? Are you just wired? Are you very, very wired?

I'm just doing it because you told me every 90 minutes I should take a break. I don't really feel like I need one.

Well, in that case, someone with a mind like yours, then every 90 minutes, just. You can shorten it. If you feel that you're in neither of these extremes and you're not tired, you can shorten it to 10 minutes or 15 minutes. I mean, 10 minutes is really the time beyond which you will lose your train of thought. So if you really want to get on with what you're doing, just bring it down to 10 minutes.

Bring it down to 10 minutes. The things I've found that, that make the biggest difference during a break for me, and I'm not like, stressed. I have to be in high performance. I'm just like, I'm doing fun stuff that I want to be doing, so I want to get back to it. Going outside in sunlight seems to require a much shorter break than if I stay inside. So there's probably something about. Actually not even probably. There's studies about exposing yourself to bright overhead light that's full spectrum, so that might help. Water with electrolytes seems to help, and not just because of the electrolytes, but because I think drinking water does something that's inherently grounding and does something. And then standing on a whole body vibration plate, even for 30 seconds also seems to me, and I need much less of a break. What else would you add to that list?

Right. So actually, if you want to tackle your physiology, then I think those are really great options. So with the daylight factor, there is a lot we still don't know. But if you're working indoors with artificial blue light or with dim light, definitely going outside has a generally more alerting, refreshing effect on you. In terms of other things, I'm actually a big fan of exercise. So if you're sitting in one position looking at a computer, you know, there is a dialogue between the brain and the body. So if you're looking at a computer and your brain is sitting there, you are detaching, dissociating what the two are doing and giving your body a chance to move sort of helps nudge your brain into a better, better state, your. Your mind into a better state when you return. So walking, a quick bout of exercise. But walking in nature, combining the two things you just said in daylight, ideally in the sunshine, but you might not be lucky. All of those things are very, very helpful. I mean, one of the things that, you know, we, we do wrong today is this complete detachment of what we expect our brains to do or we want our minds to do versus what our bodies are doing. And it started during the Industrial revolution, when the hands worked while the head slept. And then during our knowledge age, our heads work while our bodies sleep. So we know that if you move the body, even something like muscle contraction during exercise, we know that there's now a role of myokines in terms of your cerebral, not just stimulation, but you know, we don't know actually what all of these myokines are doing, but they're clearly offering some kind of benefit to the brain. Any kind of movement includes, increases blood circulation. So all of these things will play a role. So yes, moving ideally outdoors in the daylight are great ways to take a break.

Your book is fascinating. And there's so much more available when you go, when you guys read Hyper Efficient in that my view on life is that wasting time on stuff that doesn't do anything for you, or wasting energy even in your brain or in your movement, it's, it's kind of unethical. Like, you only have so much time. Even if you're going to live to 180 or beyond like I am, you still have a limited time. And if you're saying, I'm never going to die, dude, the universe is going to end, you have a limited number of time. So you can be the person who, you know, walks and takes twice as much energy because your gate isn't the way you want it to be. Or you can learn how to move efficiently in the world and you can learn how to think efficiently and breathe efficiently. And efficiency is something that drives your ability to improve yourself and to do things in the world versus being wasteful. And so thinking about the brain and hyper efficiency is one of the things that creates the most freedom in your life, because things that feel hard to do don't feel hard to do when your brain is hyper efficient or when your body's hyper efficient or your mitochondria are hyper efficient. And so I love the whole point behind your book. And most of the things I've done that have, have made the biggest effect on me are either making whatever I'm doing with my brain or some other part of my biology more efficient and sometimes also adding more power to the system. If your mitochondria are at 20% efficiency, you upregulate their efficiency. So then you have more power and then your thoughts can be more efficient, et cetera. But both of those techniques are foundational to everything in biohacking. So I want you guys to go out and read this book. It is called Hyper Efficient. Optimize your brain to transform the way you work and Our guest today is. Me too, Storani. Me too. Thank you so much for a really cool, thoughtful interview.

Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure.

If you like today's episode, you know what to do. Definitely read the book. And whenever you read a book or listen to a book, then it's your job to leave a review for the author. Because if you do that, it's like tipping your barista if you still go to a coffee shop with a green logo. Ew, gross. And while you're reading the book, to be more efficient, may I humbly suggest some danger coffee and breathing five to six times a minute? Sounds like a good plan to me. See you on the next episode. See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.

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