Maximizing Productivity, Physical & Mental Health with Daily Tools

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are going to talk about science based protocols for sleep, mood, learning, nutrition, exercise of various kinds, strength and endurance and hypertrophy. And we are going to talk about some protocols that relate to creativity. We're going to talk about behavioral protocols, supplement based protocols, all science backed by quality peer review literature. The reason that we're holding this episode now is that in the recent previous episodes we've covered some pretty intense and in depth topics. We've talked about vision and how we see and how to get better at seeing and how to maintain vision. We've talked about hearing and balance. We've talked about chemical sensing and we had a guest episode that covered a lot of information about new and emerging technologies in neuroscience as well as mental health. That was the interview episode with Dr. Carl Deisseroth. So, given that we've covered so much detailed information in the previous 27 episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast, I decided that we would hold office hours. Office hours in the university setting are when students come to the professor's office or you meet outdoors on campus or in the classroom to review the material and questions from lecture in more detail. Now, unfortunately, we don't have the opportunity to meet face to face in real life, but nonetheless, you've been sending your questions, putting them in the comments section on YouTube, etc. And I prepared a number of answers to the questions that have shown up most frequently. Now, in order to provide context and structure to the way that we will address these questions, I've arranged the science and science based protocols that relate to various aspects of life such as mood, exercise, sleep, waking, anxiety, creativity, etc. Into the context of a day. Selecting the unit of a day in order to deliver this science information and protocols is not a haphazard decision on my part. It's actually the case that every cell in our body, every organ in our body and our brain is modulated or changes across the 24 hour day in a very regular and predictable rhythm. And it's no coincidence that the earth spins once on its axis every 24 hours. These two things are coordinated by virtue of genes and different proteins and things that are expressed in every cell of your body. And so selecting the unit of the day is not just a practical one, but it's one that's related to our deeper biology. You may have heard in my interview episode with Dr. Carl Deisseroth, that he himself, in order to juggle a tremendous workload, a full time clinical practice, a lab of 40 plus people, a family of five children, et cetera, breaks up his life into units of days. And so today we are going to further dissect the day as a unit that one can manage and manage extremely well and in fact can optimize. So we're basically going to talk about how to leverage science based protocols. And when I say science, I mean quality, peer reviewed science published in excellent journals. We're going to talk about how to take that science, convert it into specific protocols that break up along the course of a single day and direct certain types of behaviors in order to optimize the various features of life. I will couch this in the context of what I do across a daily 24 hour rhythm. That doesn't mean that you have to follow this schedule at all or even in part. It's just by way of example. Any number of the different things that I described could be applied to any number of different schedules or frameworks. But if there's one truth that applies to all of us is that we all have to exist within the context of this 24 hour rhythm that we all possess. So that's what we'll focus on. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Roka. Roka makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that I believe are the very highest quality possible. Developed by two all American swimmers from Stanford, Roka Sunglasses and Eyeglasses were developed with their intention to create sunglasses and eyeglasses that could be worn anywhere. So while exercising or while working at home, while driving. The reason I like Roka glasses so much is that first of all, they're extremely lightweight. The optical clarity of the lenses is excellent, and so I often just forget that I even have them on when I'm outside and I'm wearing sunglasses. They have this really terrific feature which is that I can move in and out of shadows or the cloud cover can change and I can see perfectly well the entire time. You know, many eyeglasses and sunglasses that I've tried, depending on the what we call the ambient lighting conditions, the local lighting conditions outside, I have to take them off or Put them back on. It's really annoying for me, but with Roka glasses, somehow, I'm assuming, because they really understand the science of the visual system, the eyeglasses and sunglasses work seamlessly with whatever environment you're in. So that's absolutely terrific. Another thing about Roka eyeglasses and sunglasses is that their aesthetic is really terrific. I don't think I'm alone in saying that many performance glasses, as they're called, end up making people look like a cyborg. But the sunglasses are of the sort that, you know, you can wear while running or biking or driving or out to dinner. I don't typically wear sunglasses while out to dinner, but you get the idea. You can wear them in anywhere and they look very natural. They have a huge number of different styles to select from. If you'd like to try Roka glasses, you can go to ROKA. That's R-O-K-A.com and enter the code HUBERMAN to save 20% off your first order. That's ROKA R O K A.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's podcast is also brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals. I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long term health can only be analyzed from a quality blood test. With InsideTracker, it alleviates a specific problem that's associated with most, if not all of the other blood tests and DNA tests out there. And that problem is you get information back about the levels of various things, metabolic factors, hormones, etc. But you don't know what to do with that information. With InsideTracker, they have this terrific dashboard that allows you to both see your levels of hormones, metabolic factors and the rest. But also it suggests specific things that you can do with your nutrition, your exercise and lifestyle and so forth in order to bring those levels into the ranges that are best for your immediate and long term health. In addition, they make the whole process of getting your blood and DNA taken very easy. They'll even come to your home to take the sample. If you'd like to try InsideTracker, you can go to InsideTracker.com huberman and if you do that, you'll get 25% off any of InsideTracker's plans. Just use the code HUBERMAN at checkout. That's InsideTracker.com huberman to get 25% off any of InsiderTracker's plans. Today's episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are ideally matched to your sleep needs. I started sleeping on a Helix mattress about eight months ago and I can honestly say it's the best sleep that I've ever had in my entire life. And that's because the mattress was actually designed for me. And you can have a mattress designed for you. If you go to helixsleep.com they have this free, very brief two minute quiz that asks you a number of questions like do you sleep on your side or your back? Do you tend to run warm while you sleep? Or you tend to get cold in the middle of the night? 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So let's talk about how to apply quality peer reviewed science to your day and how to optimize everything from sleep to learning, creativity, meal, timing, etc. As I mentioned earlier, I'm going to do this in the context of my day and what I typically do. However, the specific protocols for any number of different things sleep, relaxation, meal, timing, exercise, etc. Any one or all of those could be rearranged to suit your specific needs. I'm going to tell you what I do from morning until waking and even what I do while I sleep in order to optimize my sleep. So let's start with getting up in the morning. Now for me, I tend to wake up sometime around 6am 6:30, sometimes as late as 7am I don't typically sleep much later than 7amThe first thing I do after I wake up is I take the pen that's on my nightstand and the pad of paper on my nightstand and I write down the time in which I woke up. Now I do sleep with my phone in my room. I realize this is considered a sin and has certain hazards associated with it, but I put my phone on airplane mode about an hour before I go to sleep and then I set my alarm typically for 6:30am and some days the alarm wakes me up. Other days I wake up before the alarm and yes, some days the alarm goes off and I hit snooze a few times. And then usually by 7am I am up and out of bed. The reason for writing down what time I wake up is because I want to know that average wake up time that average wake up time informs what's called my temperature minimum. It tells me when my body temperature was lowest. The temperature minimum is the time in each 24 hour cycle that your body temperature is lowest. I don't sleep with a thermometer in my mouth or elsewhere and I don't think you should either. Instead, I know that the lowest temperature that my body will be at across the 24 hour cycle tends to be two hours before my typical wake up time. And I want to know that number. It's called our temperature minimum. So if you're somebody that typically wakes up at 8am, then your temperature minimum is sometime around 6am Remember, the temperature minimum is a time in the 24 hour cycle. I don't care what my actual temperature is. I care when my lowest temperature is. And I know that that lowest temperature is approximately two hours before my average wake up time. So I highly recommend that you write down when you wake up or track that in some way that works for you and use that as a reference point to determine your temperature minimum. We will return to the temperature minimum and how you can leverage the temperature minimum for several things. Shifting your clock, shifting your circadian sleep schedule and wake schedule. Also for shifting your eating schedule, etc. We will return to that. But even if you don't travel, even if you don't care about things like jet lag, even if you sleep fabulously all year round, never have a poor night's sleep. Knowing your temperature minimum that time when your temperature is at its lowest point is a valuable thing to know. The second thing I do after I wake up is to get into forward ambulation, which is just nerd speak for taking a walk Now I have a dog, and as many of you know, he's a bulldog and he doesn't really like to walk, especially not in the morning. But for humans and for animals, there's a phenomenon whereby when we generate our own forward motion, forward ambulation, visual images pass by us on our eyes, so called optic flow. And for those of you that are low vision or no vision, the same phenomenon occurs in the auditory system. Sounds pass by us in so called auditory flow. Getting into a mode of forward ambulation and especially experiencing visual flow has a powerful effect on the nervous system. The effect it has is essentially to quiet or reduce the amount of neural activity in this brain structure called the amygdala. Amygdala means almond, and many of you have probably heard about the amygdala for its role in anxiety and fear and threat detection. And indeed, the amygdala is part of the network in the brain that generates feelings of fear and threat and anxiety. It does a bunch of other things too, but that's one of its primary functions. There are now at least half a dozen quality papers published in quality peer reviewed journals that show that forward ambulation, walking or biking or running, and generating optic flow in particular has this incredible property of lowering activity in the amygdala and thereby reducing levels of anxiety. There are two papers that I'd like to highlight in particular that relate to this phenomenon. The first one was published in the journal Neuron and the title of this paper is Whole Brain Functional Ultrasound Imaging. That just means they have a cool technique to evaluate the activity of structures in the brain across the entire brain, reveals brain modules for visuomotor integration. What they found in this study, and I should mention the first author, is Mase. This comes from Boton Roska's group. This was work done in mice, but I will talk about other species in a moment. What they found was essentially that when these mice walk forward and their eyes move from side to side, which is a natural consequence of moving forward, so called optic flow is flowing past their eyes. Many brain areas are activated, increase in their level of firing, but the amygdala in particular reduced its levels of firing. That's a very interesting finding, but it is in mice. However, another paper, eye Movement Intervention Enhances extinction via amygdala deactivation, was published in the Journal of Neuroscience, a strong journal, and shows that again, these eye movements, these lateral eye movements from side to side reduce activity levels in this fear, threat, anxiety center in the brain, the amygdala. Now those are eye movements. They didn't specifically look at forward ambulation. And yet other papers have looked at forward ambulation. And we know that forward ambulation, walking forward, generates the sorts of eye movements that cause optic flow and reductions in amygdala activation. So for me, this process of taking a walk each morning isn't about exercise, it's not about burning calories, it's not about any of that. It's really about getting into optic flow and reducing the levels of amygdala activation. Now, I don't have anxiety, at least I don't have chronic anxiety or generalized anxiety. I tend to have a lot of energy, but at these points in the morning, I'm not very energetic. Sometimes I'm sort of shuffling more than I'm walking, in fact. And Costello is almost always shuffling and I'm almost always trying to drag him first thing in the morning. But that walk is a particularly important protocol each day because it really serves to push my neurology in the direction that I'd like it to go, which is alert but not anxious. And it's kind of a fine line sometimes, especially as events surface throughout the day. Emails come in, text messages come in, get bombarded with a number of things. I want to be alert and responsive. I want to be able to focus, but I don't want to feel anxious or reactive to these things. So the forward ambulation and this optic flow is the way that I ensure, based on quality peer reviewed data, that my amygdala activation is slightly suppressed. Now, at the same time, I also want the alertness. I want alert and focused. I don't just want to be sleepy or super, super relaxed. I want to have a high degree of focus and alertness because I'm soon going to move into a bout of work. I need to lean into the day. So in order to do that, I make sure that the walking is done outdoors. That might be sort of a duh, but many people get up and start moving around their house, their apartment, and they don't go anywhere. And just walking around inside it will generate some optic flow, but nothing like the sort of optic flow that you can generate in larger environments, like out of doors environments. If you can't get outdoors, doing it indoors is perfectly fine, but it's not going to have the same magnitude of positive effect. Now, in order to get the alertness, I do it outdoors because I also want sunlight in my eyes. I know many of you have heard me talk about this ad nauseam on various podcasts, and this podcast. But getting sunlight in your eyes first thing in the morning is absolutely vital to mental and physical health. It is perhaps the most important thing that any and all of us can and should do in order to promote metabolic well being. Promote the positive functioning of your hormone system, get your mental health steering in the right direction. There are a number of reasons for this, but before I get into those reasons, let me just emphasize what the protocol is. The protocol is get outdoors, ideally with no sunglasses. If you can do that safely, even if there's cloud cover.