Mental Health Toolkit: Tools to Bolster Your Mood & Mental Health

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 discussing tools for mood and mental health. I will include tools and resources taken from the guest episode that I did with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, who is a psychologist and neuroscientist who is whose laboratory focuses on mood and emotions. During that episode she mentioned several important tools that I do believe everybody should apply and that indeed I've been applying to my own life and have found to be extremely beneficial. I will also highlight some of the specific research articles those tools are based on, which were not covered in the podcast with Lisa. I will also discuss tools gleaned from the four episode series that I did on mental health with Dr. Paul Conti, who is a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry. And that episode, as some of you may already know, focused on mental health and the self as well as relationships, and it included a deep discussion of what is the self. We talked about the unconscious mind and the conscious mind and we also covered a lot of tools for understanding oneself both within the context of therapy, but also within the context of things that one can do alone and that require zero cost. In addition, we talked about tools for improving relationships. We talked about first principles of so I will provide highlights and takeaways of those tools during today's episode. And thirdly, I will include tools what we often refer to as protocols gleaned from some recent publications, indeed publications that came out as recently as two weeks ago, which really emphasize specific things that we can all do that again are zero cost that have been shown in quality peer reviewed research to significantly improve mood and mental health. For instance, if you are a regular listener of this podcast, you are probably familiar with my nearly constant reminder that people should view morning sunlight and afternoon sunlight. And if you can't to embrace some alternatives like looking at bright artificial light, although sunlight is best. Well, there was a recent paper published in the journal Nature Mental Health, an excellent journal, focusing on not just the positive effects of viewing light at those times of day and indeed throughout the day, but also the independent and positive effects of of being in darkness for six to eight hours every night. That's right. Not only is light during the day correlated with significantly improved mental health outcomes, but darkness at night, that is avoiding lights, not just bright lights, but lights for up to 8 hours at certain periods of your 24 hour circadian cycle has been correlated with improved mental health outcomes and indeed has been shown to significantly offset certain negative mental health outcomes. This is a spectacular study. Again, it involved a enormous number of research subjects, more than 85,000 research subjects, and it touches on a large number of actionable protocols that I've distilled down to just one or two things that all of us can easily do to improve our mood and mental health on a consistent basis. 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 Plunge. Plunge makes what I believe is the most versatile at home Self Cooling Cold Plunge for Deliberate Cold Exposure I've covered the topic of deliberate cold exposure several times on this podcast. Indeed, we did an entire episode about deliberate cold exposure. This is and what's very clear from the research literature is that deliberate cold exposure can induce dramatic positive shifts in so called catecholamines, I.e. dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine. This is a small collection of molecules that are released in the brain and body when we do deliberate cold exposure and that subjectively lead to greatly enhanced feelings of mood, alertness and focus for many hours afterwards. That's perhaps the best substantiated reason and the most popular reason why people who get into deliberate cold exposure, no pun intended, continue to do deliberate cold exposure on a consistent basis. Plunge uses a powerful and very easy to use cooling, filtration and sanitation unit to give you access to deliberate cold exposure in clean water whenever you want. I've used the Plunge for several years now and I really like it because first of all, it can use a standard outlet. You don't have to modify the electricity in your home or yard, and it's very easy to clean. In fact, it stays clean for long periods of time. We which makes it very easy to maintain as well. Plunge has several different models to select from, including their new all in Cold Plunge, which offers faster cooling, smartphone connectivity, and more. If you're interested in getting a plunge, you can go to plunge spelled p l u n g e.comhuberman to get $150 off your cold plunge. Again, that's plunge.comhuberman to get $150 off Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and Sleep Tracking Capacity I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep that is getting enough quality sleep on a consistent basis is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. Now, one of the key things to getting the best possible night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature needs to drop by about 1 to 3 degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about 1 to 3 degrees. With eight sleep, controlling the temperature of your sleeping environment is made extremely easy. 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Waking up is a meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga NIDRA sessions, and NSD sleep deep rest protocols. I started using the Waking up app a few years ago because even though I've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing Yoga Nidra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an app turned out to be the Waking up app which could teach you meditations of different durations and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain and body into different states and that he liked it very much. So I gave the Waking up app a try and I too found it to be extremely useful because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times I have longer to meditate and indeed I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the Waking up app has lots of different types of Yoga Nidra sessions. For those of you who don't know, Yoga Nidra is a process of lying very still but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations and there's excellent scientific data to show that Yoga Nidra and something similar to it called Non Sleep Deep Rest or nstr, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy even with just a short 10 minute session. If you'd like to try the Waking up app, you can go to wakingup.com huberman and access a free 30 day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com huberman to access a free 30 day trial okay, let's talk about tools for improving mood and mental health. I think it goes without saying that these are extremely important topics for everyone. Not just to know about, but in my opinion, also for people to implement. And the reason is that we are currently in a worldwide mental health crisis. And while we could debate the reason why we are in a worldwide mental health crisis, it's very, very clear that mood disorders and challenges with mental health abound. And of course, there are many different therapies for the treatment of mood disorders and mental health. Everything from talk therapy with a psychologist or psychiatrist or social worker, prescription drug treatments, their nutritional approaches, somatic approaches. And I want to be clear that I do believe that there's value in all of these approaches. What tends to matter in terms of what sorts of tools and approaches one adopts includes both access. So whether or not people have access to these type of therapies, whether or not they can afford them on a consistent basis, and also, of course, the severity of the mood or mental health disorder. And I'd be remiss, of course, if I didn't make the statement, and I don't say this just to protect me. I also say this to protect all of you and those that you know that if you are concerned about yourself or somebody else having a serious mood or mental health disorder, please do seek out help from a licensed clinical psychologist or psychiatrist or other healthcare professional who's qualified to help you in that regard. With that said, we can now have a discussion about tools and protocols for enhancing mood and mental health that truly apply to everybody, regardless of age. To start off, I want to talk about a fundamental aspect of mood and mental health enhancement that was discussed both in the guest episode with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, as well as in the guest series with Dr. Paul Conti. And that has to do with what Dr. Paul Conti referred to as the first principles of self care or mental health. The first principles of self care include, but are not limited to, taking excellent care of one's biology, which of course includes both the mind and the body. And in order to make this very simple and actionable, I've distilled out what I refer to as the big six. I've sometimes referred to these as the six major pillars of health, both mental health and physical health, as well as performance for that matter. But if we're going to talk about tools for mood and mental health, we absolutely can't discard discussions about our biology. That is, we need to make sure that we're taking care of our normal biological function and indeed enhancing the production of specific neurotransmitters and neuromodulators that we are optimizing. Yes, I use the word optimizing, the function of our so called autonomic nervous system, that aspect of our nervous system that's humming in the background all the time. It's operating unconsciously to regulate our sleep wake cycles. It's regulating how well or poorly we react to things. It's regulating how much dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine, acetylcholine we are producing. All of this stuff is humming in the background and sets the stage for all the conscious work that we might put to, for instance, trying to understand what our life narrative is, what our unconscious mind is doing, what sorts of defenses am I producing? All of the sort of high level and directed work that we're going to talk about a little bit later exists on a background of autonomic function, of neurotransmitter production, of hormone production, not just testosterone and estrogen, but things like cortisol, prolactin, and on and on. So it's important to understand that if our goal is to be in the best possible mood given our life circumstances, and to have the best possible mental health given our life circumstances, and to improve our mood and mental health consistently over time, that we have to pay attention to what I'm referring to here as the big six or the six pillars of mental health. And those are just to list them off. Then I'll go into a little bit more detail. Sleep, sunlight. Although I'd like to modify sunlight because based on some new data that just came out a couple of weeks ago, I'd like to now make that second pillar not sunlight, but light, dark. So we could even just think about it as light, when and how much light you get. But what you'll soon learn is that how much dark you get is also extremely important. So we've got Sleep, Light Movement is the third Nutrition, Social connection, and stress Control. Now these are topics that I've spoken about extensively on previous Huberman Lab podcast episodes. So I don't want to go into a deep dive of each of these six pillars right now, but I am going to just give you a few highlights of each and then of course we will provide links in the show, note captions for which you can go on the deep dive if you like. And I also would like to mention that if you ever have questions about specific protocols or tools and you're seeking those out, or previous episodes or specific timestamps of previous episodes of this podcast, you can go to our newly revamped hubermanlab.com website and put any topic of interest, or even several topics of interest into the search function and it will take you to the very specific timestamps and other resources that provide information on those topics. So I'm going to go into a few of the key bullet points about each of the six pillars, or what I also refer to as the big six of self care and mental health. Again, this is a necessary list, but is not sufficient, again, necessary to do these things every 24 hours, indeed every 24 hours, if you want to have the best possible mood and mental health. But it is not sufficient. That means you still need to do some of the other things that we're going to talk about in terms of directed approaches at improving mood and mental health. If you are to quote, unquote, optimize your mood and mental health, or if you are, let's just say, trying to constantly improve your mood and mental health. But these are the necessary but not sufficient pillars of mental health. So under the heading of sleep, it's safe to say that most people need between six to eight hours of sleep per night. Some people can get away with five. Some people need as much as nine or 10. Certainly growing kids, babies, teenagers, and those that are suffering from some sort of illness are going to need more as much as 9, 10, maybe even 12 hours of sleep per night. However, most people do well to get somewhere between six and eight hours of sleep per night. You're just going to have to experiment and figure out what's best for you. Now, one thing I heard recently, so I can't claim this as an original idea, but that I think is a really good way to think about sleep, is that sleep, much like physical fitness, is something that we have to constantly be working on. It's not the sort of thing where you can get a great night's sleep one night and then the next night just kind of let all the protocols go and expect to get a great night's sleep. You don't have to be neurotic about getting a great night's sleep. Indeed, I do believe that we should strive to get enough quality sleep as many of the nights of our life as possible. And if you can't do that, hopefully it's for good reasons. But of course, things happen in life, raising kids, you have emergencies, all nighters to study, so you can make sure you get that best possible grade on exam, et cetera, et cetera. But we should all strive to get the best quality sleep that we can and as much of it most nights of our lives. So it's important to look at sleep as a process that you're going to be working on for the rest of your life. Just like fitness. And I don't say that to overwhelm you. I say that so that if on any given night you get a poor night's sleep, you don't stress that too much, you just get right back on the wagon and you try and get the best possible night's sleep the next night and the next night and the next night. Much like Fitness, there's no 10 week program that's going to transform your physical fitness forever. Okay? Just like there's no sleep program that's going to transform your sleep forever. It's a daily, or rather I should say nightly investment. Although some of the things that are going to positively impact your sleep or perhaps damage your sleep are things that you do during the daytime, right? So avoid that caffeine too late in the day, get that morning sunlight and on and on. But view sleep as something that you're constantly investing in and it is a critical investment for your mood and mental health. The other thing that's not often discussed, and I really haven't talked about terribly much on this podcast, is the importance of having a fairly consistent sleep routine. Now, I realize that not everybody can get to sleep at the exact same time each night and wake up at the exact same time each morning. And frankly, that's not practical. I certainly don't do that. However, what we know from the circadian health literature is that everybody should strive. Again, that strive. Nobody's perfect. But strive to get to sleep at more or less the same time each night and wake up at more or less the same time each morning. This turns out to be really Important for regulating mood and mental health and indeed for improving your overall levels of sleep. Getting the optimal amounts of slow wave sleep, AKA deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep. And what we know is that ideally you're going to get to sleep within plus or minus one hour of your regular sleep time. So if your regular to bedtime is 10 o', clock, you're used to getting in bed at 10 o' clock and falling asleep somewhere around 10:30. Well then if the next night you fall asleep at 9:30, great, you're still within the plus or minus one hour. And if the next night you go to sleep and you don't fall asleep till 11:30, don't sweat it. In fact, you're still within that plus or minus one hour. However, if you start getting into a habit of going to bed at vastly different times, deviating more than or less than one hour from your normal to bedtime, well then you're going to start to run into issues such as waking up, feeling groggy, even if you got enough sleep. So even if you slept the full eight hours that you're used to getting, people who go to sleep much later than they normally do or much earlier than they normally do, start getting into kind of issues of mood regulation, energy regulation, not just in the morning, but in the afternoon. Likewise, try and wake up at more or less the same time each morning, plus or minus one hour. That's really going to help you anchor your overall sleep schedule and it's really going to help lead to predictability of your overall levels of energy, mood and focus throughout the day. The second pillar in that big six is light. And I used to refer to this as sunlight. Right. I'd say, and I'm going to say it again now, although I've covered this in a lot more detail. So again, just hitting the top contour critical elements, try to view sunlight, that is with your eyes, view sunlight as early as possible after waking. Whenever I say that, the most common question I get is what do I do if I wake up before the sun comes out? Well, unless you have superpowers that I'm not aware of, you can't make the sun come out any earlier. So just flip on artificial lights as needed until the sun comes out and then get outside, face east in the morning, take off those sunglasses. It's perfectly safe to look at low solar angle sunlight without sunglasses, providing you're not driving into bright light and you crash this kind of thing. Get outside, look at the sunlight, definitely blink to protect your eyes as needed, but get that sunlight in your eyes early in the day. This has myriad positive effects on mood, focus and alertness and nighttime sleep later that night. And it does so through a number of well defined biological and endocrine hormonal pathways that I've discussed on many previous podcast episodes. And you want to do this for about 10 minutes on non overcast days and as long as 20 or 30 minutes on overcast days. And that highlights the second most common question I get, which is what do I do if there's no sun where I live? I live in an area where there's no sunlight. Look, if you live on planet Earth, there's always sunlight. There might not be very much of it, it might be very overcast where you live, it might seem very dark. But trust me, there's far more photons light energy coming through that cloud cover even in the darkest mornings of winter than there are at night in those dark winters. So get that light in your eyes and do it as consistently as possible. And also do that in the late afternoon and evening. That's critical for regulating your circadian clock, for reasons that I've talked about previously, but I'll get into in a future podcast really explaining how those clock oscillators and mechanisms work. But just to keep it really simple, since this is a toolkit episode for mood and mental health, your mood and your mental health will benefit tremendously from getting morning sunlight in your eyes. Now, if you need to get more light in your eyes because indeed there's just not enough sunlight, or you don't have the opportunity to get outside and view sunlight in the morning for whatever reason, you might invest in getting a bright light source that you can plug in. You probably want one that's as bright as 10,000 lux, so that's pretty bright. Those fall under the category of so called sad lamps, sad seasonal affective disorder lamps. And you can purchase those. They can be somewhat expensive. You can also opt to get a 900 lux drawing tablet. By the way, I have no financial relationship to any of these sorts of light sources, but you can find them pretty easily and in the case of the 900 lux light tablet, fairly inexpensively online. And you can put that on your desk or where you have your morning coffee and try and enhance the total amount of light that you're getting in the morning. But frankly, nothing is as good as sunlight. So if you can't get sunlight, you might think about investing in one of those sad lamps. And indeed, those sad lamps aren't as good as sunlight, but they are the Next best thing, if you really can't get sunlight on a consistent basis. A few other fine points that I always get asked about. First of all, it is absolutely okay to wear eyeglasses or contact lenses. Those sorts of corrective lenses are actually going to focus the light to your retina, which is where you want it. However, this whole process of viewing morning sunlight in afternoon light does not, again, does not work through a window or windshield, because windows and windshields filter out the relevant wavelengths of light that you want to get directly onto your retina. Okay? So that's the reality of it. In addition, please don't feel that you have to look directly at the sun, and certainly don't stare directly at the sun. Never force yourself to look at any light, sunlight or otherwise, that's so bright that it's painful to look at. So if it's comfortable for you to look directly at the sun and just blink every once in a while, and you can do that without any pain or discomfort or watering of the eyes, please do that. You're getting a lot of photons into your eyes, and they're transmitting that to your brain and your brain to the rest of your body, and on and on. However, if you find it uncomfortable to look directly at the sun, in that case, what you'll want to do is offset your gaze to, you know, 10 or 20 degrees, which is nerd speak for just a little bit to the right or a little bit to the left, and get the sunlight into your eyes indirectly. Okay. And I often also get asked, well, can I stand in the shade while I do this? What if I have an overhang in my apartment? The best thing is, of course, going to be to face directly to the sun and look either directly at it or slightly offset. But if you can only get morning sunlight by going out onto your balcony, and your balcony doesn't face east, rather it faces west, you'll still get a lot of photons from the sun reaching your eyes there. But ideally, you would find some way to look toward the sun first thing in the morning. I realize that with kids and work and other obligations, this can be challenging, but it is a challenge worth meeting. Meaning don't lose your job or forget to take care of your kids to do this, but you can bring your kids to do this, and indeed you should. It sets their circadian rhythms also, and people often will ask, well, does it work on dogs? You know, indeed, dogs and other animals have these exact same circuits and pathways for setting their circadian rhythm. So it's great for Them too. Now, there are also clear and documented benefits for mood and mental health to getting bright light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight, throughout the day. As much as you safely can, please don't get sunburned, don't get cataracts by getting too much sunlight, but getting outdoors and getting sunlight in your eyes during your lunch break or a walk here and there, or if you have to remain indoors during the day, getting the lights in that environment as bright as possible, as is safely possible, I should say, is known to improve mood and mental health. Why? Well, because there's a special so called opsin within the cells of your eyes called melanopsin that doesn't respond to the same differences in color that are present in sunlight in the morning and the evening, but rather responds to the overall brightness of light. So very bright lights, either from artificial sources or ideally from sunlight, activate these cells. And these cells project these little wires we call axons, into specific parts of the brain that improve your mood and feelings of well being. So I can't give you a specific number, you know, of five minutes a day or ten minutes a day, just get as much light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight throughout the day, as is safe for you. Meaning where you're not getting sunburned and you're not damaging your retina. And if you want to know if you're damaging your retina, well, anytime you have to blink or turn away from light because it's really bright, that's a signal that the light is too bright. So while you want to place yourself into bright environments, you don't want to place yourself into any environment so bright that it's painful to be in. Okay? So use that as a metric and you should be just fine. And the last point about light for mood and mental health is a relatively recent theme that's emerging from the scientific literature and that really was driven home by a recent study that I mentioned a little bit earlier in the episode. This is the study published in Nature Mental Health, showing that darkness during a particular stage of your 24 hour cycle, your so called circadian rhythm, is also very beneficial for mood and mental health. And, and it's beneficial for mood and mental health in a way that is independent from light and from sleep. Now what do I mean by that? Okay, well, there are a number of different ways that this can be examined, but in this particular study, which I like oh so much, entitled Day and Night Light Exposure are Associated with Psychiatric Disorders, an objective light study in more than 85,000 people, what the researchers did is they analyzed how much light and or dark people were getting across the 24 hour cycle and correlated that with mental health outcomes, looking at a range of different mental health challenges, including bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, PTSD and much more. And I'll go into this study in a lot of detail in a future episode because it's such an important study with so many gems within it that we should all know about. But one of the key things from this study is that the positive effects of daytime sunlight exposure and the positive effects of nighttime dark exposure, that means of course, the absence of light are independent of one another. Put differently, making sure that you are in very dim to completely dark environments for a continuous 6 to 8 hours within every 24 hour circadian cycle is correlated with much better mental health outcomes. In other words, we shouldn't just think about the presence of light in the morning and throughout the day as positive for mental health. That's all true. It's absolutely true, and this study further verifies that. But that's been known for some time, indeed decades, from the scientific research. And of course, it's been known for thousands of years, intuitively and subjectively, without detailed scientific measurement.