"DO THIS Everyday To Master Your Sleep & Be More FOCUSED" | Andrew Huberman & Lewis Howes

Until you are sleeping long enough and deeply enough, 80% of the nights of your life, you are functioning suboptimally. There are a number of risks to not getting enough sleep.

I think you gotta have a dream.

The school of greatness.

Really.

Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howells.

Sleep is something that I feel like when I grew up, I was told, sleep when you're dead. You know, the athlete, the business mentality was like broke people, you know, sleep a lot. You know, those who are making money or going out and working, burning the midnight oil. But then later, in my 30s, I realized how important sleep was for me to recover, to remember to have emotional regulation throughout the day and not be reactive and defensive. So can we break this down and your thoughts about sleep and how you frame this, some of the research and the science that you've studied around this and what we should be thinking about around sleep?

Sure. So sleep is the fundamental layer of mental and physical health. If there's one thing that we should all be doing is working toward sleeping long enough and deeply enough 80% of the time. I think that 80% is a good goal because things happen. You have travels, kids happen, illness happen.

The weekend you're going out or whatever. Yeah.

Until you are sleeping long enough and deeply enough, 80% of the nights of your life, you are functioning suboptimally.

And what's the biggest risk then if we're not getting enough sleep?

Okay, so there are a number of risks to not getting enough sleep. Deficits in learning, deficits in the immune system, reduction in testosterone and estrogen in both men and women. So disruption of hormones, disruption of gut microbiome, increased cancer risk. There are a bunch of things. The severity of those things depends on a lot of other things too. Prior health, other health conditions, context, age, occupation. You know, if you're not getting enough sleep and you're a high rise construction worker, different than if you're an office worker. So we need to sleep enough now. What's enough sleep? This is an interesting question. Enough sleep has been argued it's six hours. Other people it's seven hours, other people it's eight hours. It's basically waking up without an alarm clock and feeling rested. Insomnia is actually a medical term nowadays. And insomnia is essentially diagnosed as falling asleep during the middle of the day due to lack of sleep at nighttime. But many people who are having trouble sleeping at night are not falling asleep during the middle of the day. They're dealing with grogginess or crankiness or other effects of Having fragmented sleep.

What are the. What are the main causes of not being able to fall asleep? Is it rumination? Is it traumas that you're holding on to? Is it arguments? Is it self doubt or insecurities? Is it your nap too much? Is it the foods you ate too late? Like, what would you say are the main causes of not being able to fall asleep?

All of the above. But the primary one is a failure to turn off your thoughts.

Okay.

And I think that might provide a good anchor point for us to talk about some protocols. Really, a excellent night's sleep begins in the morning. I talked about this on the previous episode, so I won't go into detail, but everyone should get as much bright light in their eyes, ideally from sunlight, first thing in the morning, 10 to 30 minutes outside, depending on how bright it is. Eyeglasses or contact lenses are fine. Don't wear sunglasses if you can do it safely. If you wake up before the sun rises, turn on bright lights, then go outside once the sun rises. If you have no access to sunlight, use a daytime simulator or similar like a ring light and get that light in your eyes.

Okay.

So that's all of that in a compact form. Caffeine. You can inhibit falling asleep with caffeine. You have to figure out when your threshold is. For me, I can drink caffeine up until about 3, 3, even 4 o' clock in the afternoon and sleep like a baby and still sleep.

Well.

Yes. As Matt Walker, our good friend Matt Walker would say that my sleep isn't as good as it would be had I cut caffeine out earlier by like.

11 or 12am Right.

And I want to acknowledge, you know, Matt is the Michael Jordan of sleep science. And so I'm not going to.

You're the LeBron James.

Well, no, no. And thank you for the compliment, but. But no, I'm not. I know a lot of the science and the protocols, but that's Matt's wheelhouse. And so if he says something, it's true. And if I say something and our opinions conflict, it's likely to be something that the data are still emerging or in that case default to Matt being correct because I just out of due respect for his expertise. So caffeine, you know, for some people, they can have a 2 o' clock espresso, 2pm espresso. Some people it's 4pm Some people can drink caffeine at 8pm and fall asleep. But there, I would say it's problematic because you're disrupting the architecture of sleep and the Brain waves associated with sleep, the chemicals and so forth. So get that morning light. Cut your caffeine off at the time that allows you to fall asleep. That morning light also sets the timer on your melatonin rhythm. So you have this gland in your brain called the pineal gland. That pineal is the source of melatonin. Melatonin makes you sleepy, but it does not keep you asleep.

Okay.

Melatonin starts to rise in the late evening and continues into the night and then eventually tapers off. This is naturally occurring melatonin release, not supplemented melatonin release. The fastest way to slam melatonin to the pavement and eliminate it in your system is to look at bright light for, I hate to tell you this, even a few seconds.

So you mean at night?

At night is typically when melatonin rises. It's when it's released in the bloodstream. And when it has this effect of making us sleepy, it does a number of other things.

You want more melatonin at night is right. Right.

You do. And if you wake up in the middle of the night, or it's 8 o' clock and you decide you want to go to bed at 9, or it's 9 o', clock, you want to go to bed at 10, and you go into the bathroom and you flip on the bright lights, your melatonin levels just got crushed down.

So having lights on is a the worst thing you can do?

Yes.

And it doesn't matter if it's blue light, red light, purple light, green light. Bright lights inhibit melatonin very acutely. And therefore you want to avoid exposure to bright lights at night if your goal is to be asleep. So the simple rule that governs all this stuff is when you want to be alert, get bright light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight. So that's true in the morning and throughout the day. And when you want to be sleepy or asleep, avoid bright light in your eyes. Now, many home environments don't allow you to have zero lights, and that's not actually necessary. You can just dim the lights in the evening. Ideally, you also avoid overhead lights because the neurons in the eye that trigger this melatonin suppression and so forth, they reside in an area of the eye that views upper visual space. So you could have desk lamps and just dim those down. If you're going to work on a screen, dim it way down. Will blue blockers help? Yes. But if the light is bright enough, they still gonna go through it. You're still gonna inhibit melatonin.

So how bad is watching TV at night?

If the TV isn't too bright and it's farther away. Yeah. And you're. And maybe you wear blue blockers.

Yeah.

And. Or, or I mean some people are. Go take this to the extreme. They wear sunglasses. I think that's a little extreme. Now candlelight and moonlight surprisingly do. It doesn't seem to block melatonin. Now maybe a really bright moonlit night. Full moon. The lunacy associated with the full moon might actually be due to a suppression of melatonin and an increase in alertness. So those are the things as it relates to light. Then there's this issue of people who have trouble staying asleep. So they can fall asleep fine, but they wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. I happen to do this. If I go to bed around 10:30, I tend to wake up around 3 and I use the restroom. Yeah, I tend to drink a lot of fluids and I have to use the restroom. This is true at every age. This is not just some aging related thing. That's fine. I just keep the lights dim and use the bathroom and you go back to sleep. Very normal, very healthy. One of the best things I ever did for my sleep was to keep my phone out of the room. So that when I wake up at three in the morning, I just didn't start scrolling the newspapers is typically what.

I would read online.

Gotcha.

And then you're just waking up your brain not just by the light, but by the content.

And you know you're activating it again as opposed to coming back to sleep.

Exactly. And sometimes there's a comment and they're like, why is it, you know, your thinking is not very good in the middle of the night?

The other thing is you want to.

Keep the room cool. So in order to fall asleep, your body has to undergo a drop of in temperature of 1 to 3 degrees. There are a couple ways to accomplish this. One is keeping the room cool. The other is to. And that's ideal actually, because you can put a hand or a foot out. We actually lose a lot of our heat through what's called our glabrous skin. So the palms of our hands, the bottoms of the feet.

I always put my feet out of the sheets and just let them feel the cool air.

That's right. And that's a great way to cool off your core body temperature. You're probably doing that unconsciously in your sleep as well. If the room were too warm, the only way for you to cool off would be for you to put your hand in a bucket of cold water and Generally people don't have that accessible.

And then you're going to go pee if you're doing that too.

Right, exactly. And then of course there are all these products nowadays of, you know, things that cover. Yeah. That cover that cool the bed. I'm supposed to try one of these soon. I haven't tried one yet. I tend to just keep the room cool.

Cool, yeah. And what do you keep it at? I keep it around 67, 65.

That's a little cooler than what I do. I put it at about 67, 68.

Okay.

But I tend to wake up hot in the middle of the night, like throw that comforter off, go put some cold water on my face. So don't obsess over waking up too much. And if you do try and stay away from screens or if, you know, some people will read a book, dim light again and then falling back asleep. Some people are waking up at 2 or 3 because they are going to bed too late, their melatonin has run out. So imagine that you're naturally somebody who should go to bed early around nine. But we all have this ability to push forward and stay awake if we have to. Much easier to stay awake than to force yourself to go to sleep. Very hard to force yourself to go to sleep. So let's say your system, you start releasing melatonin around 9pm, but you stay up until 11, then you get into bed, you fall asleep around 11:30 and at 3 in the morning you suddenly wake up. Well, that's because your melatonin tapered off and there's a wakefulness that's occurring. And so ideally you would start going to bed earlier. Now there's a lot of discussion out there about so called chronotypes. So night owls, morning people, people that follow a more typical schedule. Typical would be going to sleep somewhere between 10:30 and 11:30, waking up somewhere between 6:30 and 8. Then there are the people that like to go to bed at 2am, sleep till 10. And then there are people that like to go to bed at 8 and wake up at 4. Huge variation out there. It tends to change across the lifetime.

Yeah, your season of life for years.

That's right. And adolescents and teenagers tend to stay up later and want to sleep in. And there's actually some evidence that they can learn better if they are allowed to use that schedule. But most schools won't adhere to that schedule.

You gotta wake up at 6 and go to school at 8 or whatever. Yeah.

Once you enter adult life, you're generally somebody who's gonna have to learn how to go to bed early and wake up early or at least wake up early. Now, naps, you should feel comfortable. The data say naps. You should feel comfortable napping for 90 minutes or less at any point throughout the day, as long as it doesn't interfere with your nighttime sleep. So some people, like me, I love naps, but it doesn't interfere with my nighttime sleep.

It doesn't.

Does not.

So you can take a 60 minute.

Nap, generally 20 to 45 minutes, and.

Then you fully fall asleep or you're kind of like awake and just resting.

Yeah, I can fall asleep anywhere, anytime. I can fall asleep at a gun range. Yeah. What it's in.

Can you sleep sitting up too, like this?

Oh, yeah.

That's a gift.

Anywhere that's a gift.

It is.

Although it could reflect that I'm pushing my system a little too hard. But it is useful at times. It's incredible, man.

You can fall asleep right on a.

Plane or anywhere, leaning against a. Oh my gosh, in a subway station. If I need sleep, I'm going down.

That's incredible.

Yeah. So the other thing is that during sleep a number of things happen and we can talk about slow wave sleep and REM sleep, but one of the most important physiological functions of sleep is to clear out some of the cellular debris that accumulates throughout the day. The cellular debris creates cognitive deficits. It actually may be related to the aggregation of proteins and things that relate to dementia and Alzheimer's. It's the so called glymphatic system. The lymphatic system is a system of moving through immune cells and clearing out of debris from the body. The glymphatic system is a kind of a equivalent system that exists in the brain that involves so called glial cells, which are support cells, but also do many things actively. They're not just doing support support. The glymphatic system is like a washout.

Of the brain's debris.

And that system seems to function best when feet are slightly elevated above the brain. There's some interesting data from University of South Carolina coming out now that show that if you can get your ankles elevated a little bit higher than your chin, that's great. So when you're sleeping, while you're sleeping.

What'S it do for you?

It increases the glymphatic clearance and there's some data that it can improve function of the brain. The studies that are happening now that I'm aware of, I'm in touch with that group, are mainly Geared towards people that have had head injuries, so concussion and TBI of various kinds. But they also are seeing interesting effects in typical folks that don't have any traumatic brain injury. So I put a pillow underneath my ankles when I fall asleep and to get a little bit of that elevation. And then during the day, if ever you can't get a nap or you are going to get a nap, put your ankles up on the couch and lie down on the floor. That itself can get some of the clearance of the glymphaticity.

And that helps you sleep better. It helps you just clean out the system.

It helps your brain function better when you wake up from sleep.

Interesting.

That's what the data are starting to show. Some of the things I described, like the light viewing is baked into the neuroscience literature. Hundreds of papers, published papers. Some of the things, like the glymphatic system is kind of cutting edge. It's on the way. But because the safety margins of raising your ankles are so large, I mean, there's nothing dangerous about that.

How long do you need to do it for to get the benefits?

Oh, I think these are immediate benefits.

Because two minutes or 10 minutes?

Oh, no, you're doing this the whole night that you're asleep. Your ankles are elevated. If you wake up and you happen to kick the pillow out, it's not the end of the world. But the idea is that you don't want to be sleeping with your head above your ankles either. There is some evidence that when people travel on planes and they're sleeping in chairs, that that's not equivalent to the kind of sleep they'd get when they're lying flat, independent of all the other things that are happening. And we know this because there are great sleep labs at Stanford School of Medicine, at UPenn back east and elsewhere, where people actually go into a clinic and sleep either upright or at different tracks. And they're looking at all this at the level of data.

Okay, so here's one for you. What's the best position to sleep? On your back, on your side, on your stomach.

Ah, great question. And it really, truly depends. And it probably depends on how hot you run. So I tend to run really warm. A lot of the cooling of the body occurs from the palms and bottoms of the feet, but also from the upper back and scapulae because we accumulate what's called brown fat there. It's not the blubbery fat that's under the skin. It's like a furnace, actually, you can increase the density of brown fat by going into cold water repeatedly for, you know, one to three minutes several times each week, it means your furnace actually burns hotter. It allows you to be in cold temperatures more comfortably. Some really beautiful data just published on this. So I don't like to sleep on my back because I start heating up, start sweating. That's right. So I tend to sleep on my side. I sleep in that. What is that? It's like soldier position. But then again there's some people that have shoulder issues and then they can't do that. I can't. I'm relatively flexible through my shoulders, not super flexible. So I can do that. It really depends. Now, of course, if you're sleeping on your stomach, how do you elevate your ankles? You know, it starts becoming a little bit, you know, we are not just science experiments. And so you have to, you have to assume that you're not going to get everything exactly right. But keeping the room cool, keeping the cool, being under a warm enough blanket, but then extending a hand or an ankle out so that you could cool off during the middle of the night, that's going to be good.

Keep the room dark.

Although complete pitch black doesn't seem to be as good as having a little bit of light somewhere in the room. But you don't want a bright blue light or red light anywhere in the room that's going to wake you up. Some people like me have very thin eyelids, exceedingly thin eyelids. Some people have very thick eyelids. So some people are more bothered by a light in the room than others. It really varies. So you have to just tune things to your particular environment.

I'm curious about the neuroscience. Before you go to sleep, how do we set our minds up to. You were saying before about a lot of people, it's hard for them to sleep because they can't shut their mind off.

Right.

Is there something we should be thinking before we shut it off to set our sleep up for success mentally and then to really build into the next day where we wake up feeling like clear minded and without this brain fog, where we have more motivation, where we have more, you know, energy and excitement towards the next day and then doing that in a pattern every night. Is there any science around that? Is it like listening to a hypnosis?

That could be very helpful, which will.

Help you clean, clean out whatever is going on through the day and get clear and ready for the next day. But also fall asleep so you're not thinking about it. You know, is there anything that can help you have better dreams so that you sleep Better like what have you found there in the neuroscience?

Yeah, sure.

The.

So glad you asked this question. There's some really interesting data from a guy named Chuck Charles Zeisler, who is at Harvard Medicine, beautiful studies on sleep in humans for many decades and a really fantastic physician and researcher. They observed something interesting, which is that about 90 minutes or so before your natural bedtime, there's a spike in alertness, planning and almost anxiety that all people undergo. And it's a normal, healthy pattern. The idea, and it's a just so story because we don't really know. I nor Chuck Zeisler nor anyone else was consulted at the design phase, as we say. But we assume this came about because prior to going to sleep, we need to shore up everything for safety. We need to lock things down, make sure everything's in its place because we are very vulnerable in sleep nowadays. This might manifest as, you know, you need to go to bed at 10:30 because you have to get up at 6, et cetera. And then right around 8:30 or 9, you start finding yourself running around doing various things. Many people worry about that and they think, oh, I'm really stressed because I actually need to go to sleep. And here I am wide awake. It tends to subside very quickly. So just the knowledge that that's a normal, healthy spike in alertness and activity, I think can help a number of people. I want to make sure I mention that the other thing is preparing the mind. As you said, turning thoughts off. Turning thoughts off is a skill. We've talked before, gosh, almost a year or more now about Yoga Nidra, which is there are many, many yoga nidra scripts available on YouTube, free of cost. The ones I particularly like are the ones by Kamini Desai. K A M I N I D E S A I Kamini Desai. I just really like her voice. I don't know, Kamini. Never met her.

These are free scripts.

They're yoga nidra scripts that last about 20 minutes. They involve some breathing, some meditation type stuff, but they teach you to turn your thoughts off, which is really wonderful because a lot of people, they just get stuck in this rumination. Now, is there an ideal protocol prior to sleep? It depends, because some people find they have their greatest clarity after the kids are asleep and they're sitting there. So I wouldn't say don't work or do work. You know, you do want to avoid strong stimuli before sleep. So do you really want to watch, you know, politically charged or a violent movie right before sleep? Well, that depends on how triggered you tend to be by politics or violence. Some people aren't triggered, other people are. But you know, that aside, you don't want to go to bed either too hungry or too full because that can inhibit your sleep. So for most people, that's going to be finishing your last bite of food about two hours before bedtime. But I confess there are days when I work, work, work and you know, arrive at a place, a hotel, order some food and just, you know, eat a massive meal and then pass out right again, 80, 20, try and get it right 80% of the time.

What's what, what's harmful of being too hungry or being too full?

Before you go to bed, you'll have trouble falling asleep and wake and you'll wake up.

Both extremes.

Both extremes. And I, I'm not a nutritionist or nutrition expert, but what I found works for me personally is I tend to, I fast until about noon ish each day and then my lunch is low carb. So I tend to eat, you know, some grass fed meat, some, some veggies, maybe some starches if I trained and a piece of fruit if I didn't. I don't. And then I also have an afternoon snack. But then in the evening my meals tend to be relatively low in meat and protein because. And higher in starches which activate the tryptophan system and the serotonin system which makes it easier to fall asleep. You can repack glycogen during the night so you can do muscular work the next day. Training of any kind, but also thinking your brain uses glucose. So at night I tend to eat pop pastas and vegetables and rice and risottos and things like that, not in huge volumes, but I tend to eat less protein. It's not that I don't eat any, but I don't tend to eat big steaks right before going to sleep again, 80, 20, 80% of the time. So foods, certain foods stimulate the neurotransmitter pathways like serotonin that facilitate the transition to sleep. Now what could you take? Well, some people will drink chamomile tea. Chamomile tea is enriched in something called apigenin. Apigenin is, I take it in supplement form, 50 milligrams of apigenin. But it's really just chamomile extract and it tends to make you a little drowsy. And many people experience excellent sleep when they take apigenin and normally they struggle with it. Again with supplements, I don't have a relationship to an apigenin company or Anything like that. I want to be clear. And also supplements. Check with your doctor, of course, all that. But the one thing I don't recommend is that people take melatonin.

Don't take melatonin.

I am not a fan of melatonin for the following reasons. First of all, melatonin does many more things besides just cause the transition to sleep. It also is involved in regulating some of the other hormones like testosterone, estrogen and so on. Most of those studies are animal studies, but some of the data in humans indicate that as well. In kids, melatonin is one of the hormones responsible for suppressing puberty. And then melatonin rhythms change and then puberty happens. So if your kid has already been taking melatonin, I wouldn't be alarmed, but just be aware. And if you talk to your physician, most physicians aren't really aware of this. I would talk to an endocrinologist, frankly. Also most. Matt Walker would also support this statement because I'm lifting it from him, which is that most melatonin supplements contain anywhere from 15% of what's listed on the bottle. So 300% of what's what's listed on the bottle. The regulation of supplements is an issue even from a trusted brand. If you were to take say 3 milligrams or 6 milligrams of melatonin, it's a pretty standard dose out there. You are taking supraphysiological levels of melatonin. Your system does not see those levels of melatonin.

Chamomile tea is okay.

Chamomile tea or apigenin, it's a little hard to find, but apigenin is a great. It's chamomile extract essentially. There are a few other things. Again, margins for safety will depend. Magnesium threonate, which is T H R E O N A T E threonate, you know, 142 milligrams or so of magnesium threonate. Again, you could just shop for cost. I don't want to name brands even though my podcast is associated with one. I don't want this to become about that. The magnesium threonate many people take in 30 to 60 minutes before sleep. With apigenin many people find great benefit. Yes, I am not a fan of taking serotonin or serotonin precursors. 5 HTP L tryptophan prior to sleep for the following reason. The architecture of sleep, as Matt probably discussed here. I need to watch that episode. He's so good. Includes a lot of slow wave sleep early in the night. Repair and recovery of motor circuits in the brain and muscular tissue and connective tissue that might have been worked with or damaged during the day. And the second half of sleep tends to be enriched in so called REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, more dreams that are very intense, etc. That architecture is exquisitely controlled by levels of serotonin at one point and not having serotonin at others. Having acetylcholine release, being very tuned to particular times in the night when you start messing with the serotonin system, you disrupt that. So my experience with 5 HTP, I took it to go to sleep or L tryptophan as I fall asleep like I got clubbed over the head by a grizzly bear and then I wake up an hour and a half later and I cannot fall asleep for me for two days. Very intense. Now I'm pretty sensitive to these things, but that's why I'm not a fan of those. And I rely on magnesium threonate, apigenin, and some people also take theanine. But for the time being, I think magnesium threonate and apigenin or chamomile are great. If people don't want to take supplements, Chamomile tea is a terrific mild sedative to just kind of turn off some of that thinking.

Relax. Okay, and what about working out and sleep? Okay, should you work out in the morning, afternoon, night? How does that affect the sleep when you work out and how you work out?

Yeah, well, I want to be fair to the fact that people have different schedules and different constraints and that work, you know, getting that 150 to 180 minutes of zone two cardio per week is essential. People should be doing some resistance training regardless of goals or in order to maintain muscle because it's so important to avoid injury and maintain metabolism, etc. So you need to get it in somehow. But you then have to ask yourself what's happening around that workout. So are you going into a brightly lit gym at 11 o' clock at night and blasting music? And are you drinking three espresso energy drink before you go? You're going to be awake, you're going to have a hard time going to sleep. It's not just the workout, it's the context around the workout. My preference is always to work out as early in the day as possible. That's my preference. I don't always accomplish that. People should also know that if you work out at the same time for three or four days, your body builds in an anticipatory circuit, you will feel an energy increase a few minutes before that workout. So if you are working out at 10pm at night and you're finding it hard to go to sleep, if you can shift that workout earlier in the day, you will soon become a morning person. It might not be this as natural as somebody who naturally wakes up at 4:30 or 5 in the morning, but let's say you want to get on an earlier schedule. You want to get that morning light, but also force yourself to work out in the morning. And then by the second or third day of doing that, you will start to feel more alert as you arrive to the workout because there are these anticipatory circuits.

That's cool.

Working out late at night. Some people say cardio, okay, but not weight. Some people say I, I think it's highly individual and I don't think there's ever been a really good study addressing that. Regularity is key. I think for me, the best times to work out are three hours after waking up, 11 hours after waking up, just based on body temperature rhythms, or immediately get up and just put the shoes on and just go. And I don't tend to do that last thing very often these days. I tend to wake up and move through the morning a little bit like a lazy bear in the sunlight and then wait for my caffeine. Kathy but every time I do that early morning workout, I feel much better and more alert all day.

You fall asleep probably easily, and I.

Fall asleep much more easily. And the other thing you can do to fall asleep is this might seem a little counterintuitive. I said that you need to lower your body temperature by 1 to 3 degrees. You can take a hot shower or do a sauna, which you would think, well, it heats you up. But when you actually heat the surface of the body, your brain cools off your core body temperature unless you stay in that heat for a very long time. So you take a brief, you know, I don't want to say how long people should shower, get in the sauna or whatnot, and then, or a hot shower and then, you know, maybe rinse off with some cool water for not cold, but cool water, lukewarm water for 10 seconds and dry off and get into bed. Your body temperature will drop. If you get into an ice bath or a cold shower, you'll stay awake. You are, it's, it's very jolting. So I don't recommend people do that late in the day unless they want to be awake for some reason at night. But the other thing is when this is a little counterintuitive. But my colleague at Stanford, Craig Heller, works on thermal regulation. If you are want to cool down and you put a cold towel or ice around your neck, you're cooling the surface of the body just like you would put a cold pack on a thermostat. What's going to happen? Your brain's going to start to heat you up. So I would avoid cold exposure right before sleep, especially if it's very stimulating, like to the point, cold enough that you get that adrenaline bump.

So cold air is key to drop the temperature down, keeping the room cool.

Cool, yeah.

But you don't want an ice box where you're shivering.

Exactly. The acute cold exposure, as we call it, of an ice bath or something, rather a sauna or A lot of people don't have access to sauna. Maybe have a warm or hot shower before sleep. But people tend to be very specific about this too. Some people like to shower in the morning, some people in the evening. I, I like to shower whenever I have an opportunity to shower. Generally I try to shower after I work out because if I don't, everyone suffers. But I think that if people don't have access to a sauna, that hot shower or warm shower before sleep can be very beneficial because the body will naturally start to dump heat and cool off as you get into bed. Gotcha. And then in terms of the actual architecture of sleep and dreams, with dreams, you know that dreams in the beginning of the night tend to be kind of mundane and seem kind of ordinary. And the dreams toward morning tend to be more intense. This is the, you wake up and.

You remember like what just happened, not what happened hours before.

Right. And the early part of the night, in very broad strokes, the early part of the night tends to be when we release growth hormone, when we tend to repair motor circuits and damaged tissues. And there's a real lack of emotional context to those dreams. Now the dreams toward morning tend to have much more emotional enrichment and be very intense. Often if people see visual hallucinations, that's in the so called REM sleep dreams.

Why is that?

It's interesting. Great question. Well, two things. You're also paralyzed during REM sleep. You can breathe, but you cannot move. And there's this interesting thing that happens in sleep where when we are in rem, rapid eye movement sleep, we have high degree of emotionality of dreams, but we are unable to release adrenaline. This is very much like trauma treatment where there's a desensitization, you're coupling an intense experience to an inability for your body to move or to have a reaction to that, that now if you suddenly wake up, which I often do, you'll notice that the adrenaline kicks in. But this is kind of like therapy in your sleep or trauma release in your sleep. And if you deprive people selectively of this rapid eye movement sleep, a number of bad things happen. But one of the primary things that happens that's bad is that when you don't get enough REM sleep, you are more emotionally labile during the day. Little things bother you more, you feel more irritable.

Yeah.

Anytime I see a comment on, on Instagram, to me or anyone else, and someone seems kind of prickly, like, I always just think to myself, I'm not getting enough REM sleep. Yeah. Or I tell myself, yeah, because I want to have some empathy for them, that they're, they're just not neurologically up to snuff, meaning they're not working as well as they could. Now, there are other reasons why people can be combative, but I think lack of REM sleep is one of the main reasons that we feel irritable, easily set off. There are a number of very powerful things that happen in REM sleep that we should all be seeking. So if you wake up in the middle of the night, you really do want to try and get back to sleep. And then as the night goes on, you're spending more, a greater proportion, excuse me, of your sleep in that rapid eye movement sleep. And those are when you have your very rich dreams and when you wake up, oftentimes spending some time with a pad and paper, maybe while you're getting your afternoon, your outdoor sunlight is a great thing because you'll remember components of your dreams. The meaning of dreams has had, you know, has been debated for thousands of years, I would say. And I think you, I think Matt would agree, Matt Walker would agree that some dreams do have tremendous significance, others do not. There seems to be a very powerful effect of having a dream that makes people want to tell someone else their dream. Like we have this thing, I think we just have this need to want to put structure on something that seems very unstructured. It is a way, in a sense, when we're dreaming, we're.

We're crazy.

Like space and time are completely fluid. Everything's. Anything could happen. And when we have a dream that feels powerful to us, I think we, we understandably want to put some sort of interpretation on meaning behind it. Yeah, I've had great insights through dreams. I've Also had a lot of dreams that got me nothing. I wake up in the middle of the night and I tend to write things down that come to mind. I achieve my greatest clarity for kind of psychological and relational things when I wake up first. Immediately I'll have a solution in my head or I'll think, the other day this happened as we were talking about before the recording. I've been working through a very complex set of personal interactions. And these are not true traumatic or anything like that. But I've been working with somebody to try and resolve a really hard problem that we have. And we were both committed to solving this problem. And I'll chip away at this and chip away at this and they are much smarter than I am. So I'm struggling and then I will go to sleep and I'll wake up at three in the morning and boom. The answer, at least to whatever it is that I'm trying to resolve is right there. And I think it's because in sleep you're trying, you're getting those repeats of the different circuits. You're rehearsing things you learn during the day. You're dumping the emotional load through this trauma release type mechanism of REM sleep. And then answers just kind of geyser up to the top. But again, I'm speculating.

What we do know at the neural.

Level is that there's a replay of the neurons that were active during the day in sleep, but at much more rapid rates.

A lot of stuff we won't remember. That's what you're saying.

Much of sleep is. Is there much of the dreaming and sleep is designed to get you to forget things that are meaningless.

What is happening to the brain as you're sleeping? Is it just connecting neurons? Is it flushing? Is it, you know, creating these images for you to remember what's like the, what's the actual mechanics of it?

Yeah. So several things are happening. One is this glymphatic washout. There's this literally like a spin cycle on the brain of dumping all the junk. That's why you want your nice feet elevated, right? That's why you want your sleep. That's why you want your feet elevated. The glymphatic washout is one. The other is adenosine, this molecule that accumulates the longer that we are awake, that actually gets reduced during sleep so that we can wake up feeling rested. In other words, if you've been up for a day and a half, you've got tons of adenosine in your system. Caffeine of Any kind is an indent blocks adenosine function. I want to be careful because it's not actually an antagonist, it's a competitive agonist for the aficionados. But you're basically reducing adenosine function with caffeine. When you sleep, you reduce adenosine, which is why I delay my caffeine 90 to 120 minutes after waking up. So you've got adenosine getting pushed back down, you've got the glymphatic system washout. You have reordering of neurons and creation of new connections so that what you couldn't do previously, you can do the next day. And the next day you're learning. And the trigger for learning occurs during wakefulness through focused, alert, motivated states. The actual rewiring of neurons, meaning the changes in the connections, occurs during sleep, in particular deep sleep. So a lot's happening in there. And during rapid eye movement sleep, the brain is incredibly metabolically active. It's just that the body is paralyzed. And some people experience this invasion of that sleep paralysis into, into the wakeful period. It's really scary. I've had this happen. You wake up and you're still totally paralyzed and you jolt out.

Terrifying. You can't move. I feel like I'm screaming but nothing's coming out.

It's really terrifying.

Terrifying.

Terrifying.

It's called what, sleep paralysis?

Yes, essentially. But that's an invasion of sleep paralysis into the waking.

It's like wake paralysis. Yeah.

And I know you're not a pot smoker, but many pot smokers experience that more often than non pot smokers for reasons that probably relate to the serotonin system and the so called atonia, the inability to move. Interesting. So there's that. What else happens during sleep? Well, there's all sorts of interesting resetting of the digestive system, the microbiome.

Are your muscles growing or.

Muscle growth probably occurs throughout the 24 hour cycle. But a lot of repair of muscles and triggering a muscle growth probably occurred during sleep. He's passed now. He was 11 years old when I had to put him down. But I had this bulldog, Costello. He was a 90 pound English Bulldog mastiff. When he was a puppy I would take a picture of him and then the next day I'd take a picture of him and he was larger the next day. That's crazy. Well, they're just growing at such a tremendous rate. Right. And that's growth hormone. And during puberty sometimes kids will be kind of locked up during sleep. You'll go in and see a Kid sleeping, they'll be in some weird position, they'll get growing pains. Because actually the bones. It's a lot to orchestrate the growth of the bones and the connective tissue and the brain and all that. Not always perfect. And so sometimes there's a few days where things are a little out of way.

I remember for months my knees would hurt when I was a teenager.

Yeah.

And kids, my dad used to come in and push my knees down because he was worried that something was going on. That's the growing. You're growing. I mean, you're growing.

Bones are like spreading, right?

That's right. They're psychological growing things and they're physical. And in your case there was a.

Lot of growing, a lot of physical growing.

I'm not, I'm not short, I'm six.

One but you're six, yeah.

You're a tower six five maybe.

Yeah. Wow.

So there's a lot of stuff going on in sleep.

And are you burning a lot of fat too, during sleep?

Yeah, a lot of metabolism is happening during sleep. There's a beautiful paper that just came out. Gosh, I forget all the micro details, so I'm only going to say a little bit about it. But a lot of the removal of fat from the body from when we burn fat is actually done through the breath we exhale. There's a carbon dioxide component.

Isn't that interesting? It's a sweat and the breath. Right. And then what?

Just not so much, not so much fecal elimination, but more that you're breathing.

Breathing burns more fat than.

Well, no, no, sorry. Elimination of fat from the body if it's going to occur. Because I have to be careful because the nutrition crowd online, they have claws, pitchforks and, and they like.

And they're.

And they're ready, fire, aim type, trigger. You said this exactly. So I want to be very clear. I, I believe in calories in calories out as a basic principle. There are people out there arguing different. But basically, if you ingest more calories than you burn, you're going to gain weight. If you keep them more or less equal, you're going to maintain. And if you burn more than you ingest, you're going to lose weight. Whether or not you lose from muscle fat or other body compartments is a different story. But the utilization of fat as an energy source and the elimination of adipose tissue of body fat eventually boils down to something where yes indeed you are exhaling the, the eventual molecules. Okay, but that's crazy. Yeah. Among other. There are some other Routes as well.

I mean, how much fat are we exhaling a week?

Well, it depends on whether or not you're in a caloric deficit or not.

If we're in a deficit, are we. Then we're exhaling that fat essentially.

Well, but it's been broken down into a number of different metabolic components.

Crazy.

It's really wild to think about. Well, if you think. Yeah. And you might think, well, why not just remove it through the digestive tract? But it's part of a whole lipolysis, meaning the utilization of fat for energy, the lipolysis cycle and an energy cycle. You know, if those of you that enjoyed or suffered through college or high school, you know, the Krebs cycle and ATP and ATP production and the mitochondria and cells and so forth, that was a whole business there. But so in sleep, this paper shows that each stage of sleep is actually associated with a different mode of energy utilization and carbon dioxide offloading and so forth. Or in the last episode we talked about, ideally you are nose breathing during sleep. You are not mouth breathing. So some people actually will shut their mouth with a little bit of medical tape. Huge benefits to that for getting enhanced oxygenation of the brain and body. You do not want to have sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is associated with. With sexual side effects in men and women. It's associated with cardiac arrest. It's associated with a number of bad things. A lot of people who are carrying a lot of extra weight, who sleep on their back or even just who are carrying a lot of extra weight, unfortunately, they have a buildup of carbon dioxide in their system at night, especially if they're mouth breathing and they wake up not feeling rested. In all individuals, regardless of. Of phenotype, as we say, their genotypes and their phenotypes, regardless of phenotype, the kind of droopiness and the bagging of the eyes that can occur from sleep apnea and the effects on. So become a nose breather. We talked about that in the last episode, how to become a nose breather. But you want to nose breathe during sleep if you can, and your partner will thank you too, because you're not snoring as much.

Do you nose breathe asleep?

I think I do. I think I do. I'm told I snore a little bit from time to time. And, you know, a lot of people, even people who aren't carrying a lot of fat, but people are carrying a lot of muscle who sleep on their back, oftentimes they are. They're kind of suffocating during sleep. Every time I hear about a bodybuilder or a very large athlete dying, it's almost always a heart attack during sleep. They're on their back or their side. But there's asphyxiating and the relate. There's a beautiful relationship between breathing and heart rate. Very simply, when you inhale, your heart rate goes up and when you exhale, your heart rate goes down. Wow. This has to do with the movement of the diaphragm and the change in the shape of the heart and signals from the brain. I won't go into all that. But when you inhale, your heart rate speeds up and when you exhale it slows down and that's respiratory sinus arrhythmia for the, for the officianados. So you want to create an environment around your sleep where it's dim lights in the evening, you've had your meal, maybe a cup of chamomile tea. Towards sleep, maybe use supplements, maybe you don't. You wake up, get sunlight in your eyes. This is the kind of landscape you want to create.

Sure.

Cool room you want to avoid. Very stimulating stuff, conversations and activity, you know, right before sleep. Now some stimulating activities before sleep, we won't go into details, have a rebound effect afterwards. Matthew Walker's actually talked about this, how certain types of activities cause a rebound in relaxed. You know, they're very.

So sexual activities.

Yes. I'm not trying to be vague here.

I'm just what does that do for sleep if you have sexual activities before sleep?

So sexual activity includes a. It's really remarkable at the level of autonomic nervous system. So sexual activity involves an increase at first in the so called parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system, the relaxation.

System, but then it involves increases in.

The sympathetic arm of the, of the, of the autonomic nervous system. And orgasm in men and women is actually purely driven by the sympathetic nervous system, the stress system. Huh. It's. And then the post coital period is when the parasympathetic nervous system kicks back on and there's a deep relaxation.

So is it good to have sexual activity before bed or.

Not that good, according to the architecture of what I just described. Yes, yes, it's good. Yes, it's good. Yes, it's good. Yes, it's good. It helps people sleep. And actually when Matt Walker came on my podcast, we talked a little bit about some of the data on this now, even then. So there are all sorts of questions about this that are now coming out now, the interesting thing about studying sex in the laboratory is very hard to do, right? I mean, there are ethical reasons, there are complicated reasons, and good studies have to be done in laboratories or by self report. And with self report, people lie. They make up stories in one direction or the other. They're doing more of what they would like to be. They're either reporting more of what they'd like to be reporting of, or less of what they would like to be reporting less of. But doing those sorts of studies in the laboratory is very difficult. There are sleep laboratories, but it's not often that couples are coming in and staying in those sleep laboratories together. Although that does happen from time to time. But, yes, after sex, there's a rebound in the parasympathetic nervous system, which is a deeply relaxing component of the nervous system. And the reasons for that aren't clear. I mean, one idea is that it's designed to put people in close proximity, not just run off and look for another mate immediately and to smell each other and pair bond through some of the pheromonal systems. Systems, yeah. Powerful. Yeah. Yes, very powerful. An interesting form of pre sleep, you know, biology for sure. And one that, let's be fair, as we were talking about during the break, every species has two main goals. To protect its young and to make more of itself. And while not all sex is designed for reproduction or used for reproduction, I mean, the. The whole architecture of the reproductive axis, as we say, from brain down to genitals, is designed for that arc of parasympathetic, sympathetic, and then parasympathetic.

That's interesting.

Oh, and the duration of that varies between individuals.

Okay, that was a joke. Yeah, you got to go at least 10 minutes to get the full effects.

I'm not setting the parameters that people should or should not follow. That is not my domain.

This is powerful stuff, man. I'm so grateful for your wisdom, as always. Huberman Lab. Make sure you guys check out the podcast, one of the top podcasts in the world right now. It's incredible. People love the science. They love the neuroscience. What you're teaching over there, you got a lot of great stuff about brain states around fear, courage, anxiety, calm, how we can better move into and out of them through visual cues, breathwork, movement supplementation, and all sorts of great stuff. Amazing research. Hubermanlab.com, huberman lab, everywhere on social media. You go live on Instagram, you post on the podcast every week, YouTube, lots of great stuff. We were talking about this before, and I think this could Be a good segue about sex at night. I want to do a whole nother episode on relationships and neuroscience around relationships and intimacy. I think it'd be a fascinating conversation. Marriage, relationships, dating, all that. So if you guys want that conversation from Andrew, then leave a hashtag in the comments below. Relationships. And we'll see on YouTube if how many people want to really see that information. And if you're on the podcast, just DM us or post this over on Instagram and tag us both. If you want to learn more about the science and neuroscience behind relationships, intimacy, all that stuff, I think it'd be fascinating. Have you done an episode on this yet?

I have not. And I think that there's a lot of really great biology, both about sex and reproduction and about relationships. Parent, child, couple, relationships. The biology of breakups is really interesting.

Oh, that'd be huge.

And there's some really interesting data on, you know, how relationships change over time according to changes in biology in individuals. Because we all change over time and not necessarily for the worse. The data. Just to throw out a little teaser, there's this idea that testosterone levels drop with age. The data on this say that there are people in their 70s who maintain testosterone levels. And there's men and women, both have testosterone. It serves similar roles in both, although different at the level of the body, but at the level of the brain is what I'm referring to. That mimic the levels that were present in their 20s. Really? Yep. So it has a lot to do with how people sleep. Sleep, how they certainly stress relation, behavior. But also there's a strong psychological component related to self image that's super interesting. So we could talk about that as well.

Dude, this is fascinating. I'm so pumped for this. Yeah. Keep this information for the next time.

Oh, yeah, I won't put it out there.

My man. Appreciate you.

Thanks so much.

Thanks, brother.

I appreciate you, Louis.

If you enjoyed that interview, then I know you'll love what we have coming. Coming up right now, the famous story about Jim Carrey where he said he would drive up Mulholland Drive here in Los Angeles pretty much every day or once a week and visualize himself acting in the main movies, the blockbuster hits. When he was a like a stand up comic on like open mic night type of stuff, right? He would visualize it and he would sit there and he'd feel a feeling as if he's on the set with the big actors, as if he's receiving the checks and he would write himself a check. I think it was for $10 million or $5 million. And he would imagine this happening, him receiving it. And then he would go do his work throughout the day and take action on it. And he always tells his story or its famous story that he said, this is what I would do. I'd visualize this. I think about it. I wrote a check to myself years before it actually happened. But then it came to me and this idea of thinking again. And you mentioned the idea of like, neediness in a sense of like, if someone's like too needy, then they're not going to get it. People are going to be rejecting that neediness. But when someone's comfortable in their own skin, it's almost like everyone comes to them or things.

It's like they already have it.

Like they already have it. And they talk about this in the Law of Attraction community, about when you're chasing something or you're saying you don't have it, you're like needing something, you're saying you don't have it. But when you become comfortable with where you are, things start to attract you and you have energy, and you have energy and you're like a magnet, as opposed to an opposite magnet, resisting these things that you need and want.

Pursuit is very taxing. And the reason is there's a biochemical reason for this. It's like wandering in the desert not knowing if there's water at all that's really depleting. I mean, epinephrine is in the brain and its chemical equivalent in the body is adrenaline. Those are the same thing. And if you're constantly in pursuit.

Right.

You're just pursuing external goals. External goals. External goals. It will wear your nervous system down, you will be exhausted, and one will eventually run aground. You'll become mentally depressed. The key is to figure out what are the rewards that you can acquire along the way internally. Remember, it's subjective. There can also be external rewards because many things have milestones. A series A or series B for.

A company, then the IPO later reaching.

A million users or doing this.

Yeah, we have engagements before we have weddings.

Typically there are those rare instances where people just go and get married.

But typically there's a lot of buildup that is designed that fortunately provides these reward mechanisms. So the key thing is that you.

Can'T just be all gas pedal all.

The time without rewarding yourself. However, the reward that dopamine is so powerful because it actually, as I mentioned before, it actually is the chemical substrate for epinephrine. It creates a reservoir of more energy. And again, I'm not talking about caloric.

Energy or glycogen mind energy.

It's mental energy.

It's the desire to push on, it's.

The desire to keep going.

And so we need some consistent dopamine hits throughout the days or our months to give us more energy to pursue.

That's right.

But we don't want to be over pursued because then we'll burn out.

That's right. And so everyone has to find where that sweet spot is, that kind of, you know, on the freeway driving where it's really smooth and seamless, where you're not on the accelerator the whole time, where you're in a gear that's appropriate. And you know, we're talking now in terms of sort of, you know, neuroscience lens on these things. But the key is always going to be practices. It's going to be just as earlier. We're talking about bringing stress levels up or down depending on, you know, alertness levels up or down depending on the kind of stress you're experiencing. The reward system is great because when you, let's say you're a person that can very easily access this dopamine reward. So you're always excited. You know, people say hey, let's do this. And you're, you're, your mantra is let's go.

And you just kind of go, what.

We call in science, very low activation energy. You just go, that's great. Those people do run the risk of burnout. Although there are these people that we occasionally encounter that just seem to have boundless energy for everything.

And they tend to get a lot.

More done because they have a lot more internal reward. And you'll notice they're getting rewards from all the little things. And it's 100% subjective. It's like hearing funny jokes all day long. You can just keep going. Incidentally, the beginning of relationships, when people fall in love, you know, it's a real thing, but it is associated with a big flood of dopamine in the system. Makes everything seem exciting and possible and new. And I think that we also know other people that they have a very hard time accessing this dopamine system and they either place it under the complete control of external things. So they're miserable until they get the payoff. And then sometimes they're even miserable or they really just don't. They haven't learned the skills of how to access it.

So how do we trick our mind to find rewards in subjective things that aren't actually physically coming to us?

Okay, so I'll tell a brief Anecdote about an experiment that's really important. This was done many years ago in a psychology department. I think it was done at Bing Nursery School at Stanford.

But I could be wrong about that. So I don't want it state that as absolute fact.

But the experiment nonetheless was done where they looked at kids in schools. These are kids about nursery school age.

Or maybe a little bit older.

And they looked at what they did during recess, and they found that some kids really liked to draw. And so these kids would naturally just orient towards the crayons and pens and draw. And then for a short while, they rewarded the kids for drawing those same kids, they would give them a gold star or a little sticker or something that was special and made them feel special. So they were giving them an external reward. Then they removed the reward. And what they found is those kids drew at a much lower frequency. They somehow lost the intrinsic pleasure of drawing, huh?

Because they were used to getting an extrinsic reward.

Suddenly they associated the drawing.

They weren't conscious, but their nervous system said, oh, I guess I was doing it for the reward. Now there's less reward. And without going into a lot of details, there's a very solid scientific phenomenon called reward prediction error, which says that if you get less dopamine at the end than you anticipated, it's a letdown. If you get more at the end, then it feels great. Now, what this all translates to is once again learning how to attach internal rewards to the process of whatever it is that you want to do in order to get you to the thing you really want. And so the short answer in this.

Actually, I was asked this recently.

Someone said, okay, how can I ensure that once I succeed? This was somebody who was doing very well in their pursuit of a goal, and they were getting close. And they said, how can I be sure that when I get to the win that I don't lose the ability to keep working because I really want this pay.

I'm not satisfied, right?

And I said, well, there's two ways. One is make sure that that reward really basking it, really appreciate what you've done and what's come to you. But, and here's a very important but is, but take that feeling of being saturated with dopamine, the huge win, and attach it to the effort process that got you there.

So when you're thinking, this took me five years to accomplish this thing, but reminding yourself of every day, week, year, all the little things you did on a daily basis to get you there, not we're Here, right?

That's right.

If you think that sort of, let's say, super bowl win, the party at the end is going to be great.

I have to imagine it's really going to be great.

Champagne, you're this huge.

But at that moment, people, the winners anyway, their system is flooded with dopamine, flooded with dopamine. And there's an opportunity because dopamine, we.

Haven'T talked about this, but dopamine is.

A signal to the brain that it should rewire so that in the future.

It has a higher probability of getting back to that experience.

This is how animals learn how to find water and food. This is at the basis of so many reward pursuits. And so if you attach all that plasticity, all that brain rewiring to the celebration, and only to the celebration, you actually can erase a lot of the valuable content that your brain, you know, skills that your brain acquired en route to that goal.

So it's almost like that whole night after you celebrate and maybe the next few days really reflect on the years it took to get you there.

That's right. We tend to so overemphasize the wins. It's the things of movies, right? I mean, there's some movies that are really good, like Rocky, the first Rocky, where he didn't actually win, he loses.

And it was.

But so many people, I think it won Academy Award for best picture, right. So many people associate that film with. With the striving process.

The reward was really striving.

His joy at the end of that was really called.

It was interesting.

He called it to his family to hit to the process.

Right.

It was really a movie that captured that in its best form. When it's just about the win, what you. You lose this amazing opportunity to attach.

The dopamine to everything that came before it. Now, in addition to that, there's one other way to do it.

Nobody likes this one, but it works. Which is also, when you get there, give away the gold star, give it.

Away so you don't fixate on the gold medal all the time.

And really high performers, there are a few people whose names, unfortunately I can't.

Mention that I know who have done.

Incredibly well in the Silicon Valley world. And some of them have given away a substantial portion of what they have. And everyone thought, oh, they want a simpler life and this, that. No, actually they were just setting themselves, themselves up for the next big win. And they've gone on to do this two or three times now, really.

So they keep moving the carrot out.

In front of them. But they also are somehow intuitively understanding this process that what got them there was not the last one yard into the end zone.

Was the 10 years of the journey.

Necessary but not sufficient. Right. But everything that came up until then is so important. So when we have dopamine in our.

System and when we've taken control of.

That process, we want to make sure that we capture everything that led up to that. And it's vitally important in these big kind of, we're talking in these big milestones type of examples. But this can be done across the day. It can be, I'm going to get to noon just really being the most reflective person I can with my child and not just doing that as a sheer effort, like I really don't want.

To do it, but doing it and.

Thinking this is going to be a lot of work. And when I get there, I'm going to take a couple minutes to just register everything that I managed to control, all the things I managed to not do that would have been destructive. And so dopamine turns out to be, I would argue, one of the most, if not the most powerful neurochemicals in our system. There's a great book called the Molecule of. More I didn't write it. I wish I had. That gets into this whole description which is quite accurate about how dopamine isn't just about reward at the end. It's really the molecule of motivation. It's what propels us forward. It's an incredible read, really a lot of real world examples, very accessible book and it really points to how so much of what we're about is the pursuit of these external goals.

But that if we can learn to.

Control these things internally, that's when things.

Become kind of limitless.

You know this word that everybody wants.

To, to access, everyone wants to what's the pill that's gonna make me limitless? What's the technology?

We actually have the chemical inside us. The key is to learn to regulate it and to. And the subjective part, the example of.

Good joke, bad joke is the best.

Example I can give that. You have to decide for you what lets you access that. And obviously those things should be things that are not destructive to you or to other people because that will take.

You down, down a bad path.

It also, we have to understand that dopamine can be attached to the trivial to trivial anything.

I could attach it to picking up.

And putting down this cap for my water bottle. But the point is that if that's not attached to some other thing, it doesn't really work. I know that this is a little bit less concrete than two inhales and an exhale.

I like this.

But this is the way I think I'm certain this is the way that the mind can be trained. We can train our mind to be in pursuit and in regular wins. Regular wins. And this is why I think there's a lot of interest these days in like habits and habit formation. Because when you move that horizon in close and you complete something small, it's not about what you completed, it's the.

Fact that you completed.

You're engaging your bed. It could be writing a page and.

You'Re like flipped open.

Dopamine got deployed.

It's like people who are like list crosser offers, they're engaging this process. So I think what I'm describing again is not completely new. People will look to different examples of.

Their life or other people's lives and say, oh right, that's that, that's that.

But that's exactly the point. I think that's the real utility of a discussion like, about neuroscience like this, which is that once you understand the mechanisms, you can start asking yourself, where does this work for me, where does.

It not work for me?

And how can I maneuver this in healthy ways?

I'm curious, as we're getting to the beginning of the year and a lot of people set goals for the year for themselves, or if they're ending a career, exiting a business, getting out of a relationship, they'll usually set some new type of goal for themselves. So whether it's the beginning of the year or you're just in transition, you want to set new goals. What do you think is based on neuroscience is the best way to set a year long goal for yourself? Should we have 20 massive goals? Should it just be one big goal? Should we have three key goals and how do we create the goal to where it drives us to perform at our optimal best and get closest to that goal, if not accomplish it? And what should we be thinking about throughout the year in order to accomplish the goal?

Yeah, well, I can give an opinion on this, but it's just my opinion. I mean I break up my life into these 12 week, you know, I.

Think it was because I've always done.

12 week training cycles.

You're like an athlete. It's a season.

12 week training cycles just seems manageable somehow with the understanding that there will be setbacks and things of that sort. I think that certain goals are goals of practices that we've already mastered.

So, you know, you're trying to next level what you've already accomplished.

And so those goals are going to require a lot less limbic friction, if you will. And you already know how to access the rewards. You actually can predict the rewards and when they come, you actually know what the rewards are. You've really clearly defined them. Those are goals that I think we're.

Sort of on autopilot with and I think everyone should probably check in at the end of the year and say.

You know, my, if I'm going to continue along that trajectory, it might make sense for me to set some really concrete goals. Sometimes those are quarterly financial quarters or academic quarters, if that's what landscape you're in. But I think that that doesn't require a lot of us, except more of the same.

Right. But those are nonetheless growth goals.

And there's a little bit more friction there because it's pretty challenging. It takes more effort to lean in because you, when you don't already know how to do something, it's a very different goal pursuit.

Right.

So like, so if I already have.

My business and I've been running it for a few years, you know certain practices of how to get to where you've been.

That's right.

And you're thinking, how do I double my business?

That's right.

It's different than I'm trying to learn a whole new skill goal.

Right.

You already know how to forage for water as opposed to you're some young.

Calf or some animal that needs to learn how to walk to survive.

Right. So I think, you know, one big goal of the sort that, you know, we don't actually have the skill set.

Yet or we're not even aware that.

Of what we need in order to accomplish it per year seems like a pretty good goal to me. So learning entirely new language or an entirely new physical skill. But with any long term goal, the problem is don't focus on the destination. That's right.

Well, so you have to move the.

Horizon in, but you have to remember there's that one little pitfall, that cul de sac that I described where you'll tell people, this year I'm gonna do blank and if they reward you enough, you might not do it. Remember, if you get enough dopamine, that's amazing.

I'm so happy you're doing that.

Congratulations. And you say, I know I can do it.

And then you don't, you sort of.

Lose the incentive to do it.

So a lot's been made out of making goals public.

Is it better to make them public or not well.

So this is a question.

I don't know.

I think that in my case, it has for me, telling people, several people, that I'm going to do something because.

I will work very hard to avoid humiliating. But I tend to do that with.

Things I really want to do anyway. But there's a strong fear element, like.

I'm afraid to do this, or I'm.

Kind of anxious about doing this.

So I'll tell people. And then I'm like, okay, now I'm committed.

Yeah, you got to do it now.

And I tell people that I'm certain.

Are going to get give me a hard time. That's just my nature. And I'm not trying to prove them wrong.

I'm just trying to make sure that they don't have any ground to stand on. And that's how I do it. I think for some people, the continuation of what they're already doing, if it's feeling like a lot of work, it's feeling exceedingly challenging.

And they're like, oh my God, another.

Year of this, another five years of that.

I think that's when you have to.

Move the horizon in really close.

I think a lot of people right now are feeling back on their heels.

Because 2020 was such a trying year.

For a lot of people.

So everyone, many people are recalibrating what's possible, although many people are feeling expansion and they're really going to go forward full steam. So I think continuing in pursuits that we already have some degree of mastery over and thinking about where could I notch that up another 2 or 3%? I think that's incredibly valuable.

I think that provides a lot of value to the individual and to their.

Families and to society, really. Because a 2% improvement of, like, what.

You'Re already doing is going to have.

An outsized effect on what other people receive.

Right. Even though for you, you've been down that road many times.

But taking on a new pursuit in parallel to that means really getting excited about the possibility.

You give the Jim Carrey example about the possibility and starting to imagine what.

That would actually be like to be, well, let's say fluent in Spanish and you can just do this reflexively without having to try. That's totally within your reach. And I think there it makes sense to really think about the end point.

Quite a lot as a way to.

Get over those barriers of fear. Because when you already know how to do something, there's no fear barrier. It's just an energy barrier. All trauma, anxiety, fears, they all map back to stress in Some way. Now you can have stress without trauma.

You can have anxiety without trauma, but.

You can't really have trauma without stress and anxiety. So even though there aren't really strict definitions of the boundaries between trauma and stress and fear, I think it's fair to say that trauma is a fear and, or stress response that's happening at the wrong times.

Right.

It's sort of carrying over from an experience, it's making life uncomfortable or in some cases, exceedingly, exceedingly challenging. For example, so someone has a, you know, sexual assault, somebody sees a car accident or is in a car accident. Veterans come back from overseas, there's kind of first person trauma where something happens to somebody, and then there's third person trauma where somebody sees something terrible happen, there's grief. And so there are a lot of categories. And so we don't want to complicate the, the landscape and the answer. But I think it's important for people to understand that the stress response is at the core of all of this. And when we talk about stress, I think it's also important that we divide that into two kinds of stress because it defines the two approaches that people can take to combat stress. Fear, anxiety.

What are the two types of stress?

Okay, the two types of stress are. The one is the one we're almost all familiar with because when we hear stress, we think pupils dilating, hand shaking, heart beating, oh my goodness, oh my goodness. Or really upset, you're stuck in traffic, something is really bothering you, you're angry, you're having the fight or flight response. That phrase gets thrown around a lot. And in those circumstances, it's very important that people take control of their mind and their body in a way that allows themselves to calm down, to reduce the so called stress response. And we can talk about tools to do that that are very concrete and.

That are very reliable.

There's another side of the stress response.

So what would that stress be called? What's that type of stress?

So unfortunately, there's no name for this. This is one of the important things. Maybe we'll figure it out today. Maybe your audience will figure it out. They're a smart bunch and they're living this stuff too. So unfortunately, there isn't a word for this, but this is one type of stress. This is one type of stress which is you're too activated, you're too alert, you're too agitated, and you want to be less alert, less activated and less agitated.

The alert stress.

That's right.

We could call it the alert stress.

Hyper.

Alert stress.

Hyper Alert, stress.

Let's just do that for sake of conversation today. And we are by no means a nomenclature committee, so we can always revise later. There's another side of stress, which is when there are a lot of things happening in the world. Pandemics. You can't work because they've shut, there's another shutdown, or there's strife in your life, or things are really challenging and you're feeling exhausted and you can't get mobilized and alert enough. And this has never really been cleanly laid out for people that what I call the whole process is one of limbic feelings. Friction. Okay, so the limbic system are these areas deep in the brain. Limbic literally means edge. They're near the edge of the brain. And when we're stressed, there's a lot of activity in these brain regions. And then we got our forebrain, our prefrontal cortex for the aficionados. And when we're in a thinking and calm and deliberate and rational manner, when we can control our body and our mind, it's called top down processing, where we're controlling ourselves. But there's a lot of friction with that limbic pathway. I promise I'll get to the practices soon. So when there's this friction, we can call it limbic friction for sake of discussion. You can't control all those impulses and all that anxiety or fatigue for too long. And in fact, as you get more tired, or if someone has frontal damage, if they have brain damage to the frontal lobes, what you find is they become more impulsive. When they feel like sleeping, they just sleep, even if it's socially inappropriate. When they feel like yelling or screaming or swearing, they just do that. And so there's two kinds of limbic friction. One is when we're too activated and.

We want to calm down and we're.

Trying to say, okay, calm down. Don't say the thing that you know you shouldn't say. Don't do the thing you don't, you know you shouldn't do. And then there's the other kind of limbic friction, which is the world is happening really fast and we, we feel buried, we're overwhelmed and we need to get more activated.

We need more energy.

We need more energy. We need to be able to lean into life and we're feeling overwhelmed.

What's that called?

Well, we should come up with a name now. So that would be exhaustion Stress Exhaustion stress or overwhelm stress or overwhelm stress. Now a lot of people start giving these names to things that Sound almost like clinical syndromes, which sometimes they are. But they'll say things like adrenal burnout, which actually doesn't exist. Now there is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome, which is a real medical condition where people can't actually produce enough adrenaline. But most of us have enough adrenaline in our bodies to last 200 years, two lifetimes. So the adrenals don't really burn out. What happens is people are so over activated, they're in this alertness, hyper alert stress for so long that eventually they kind of crash into the over over fatigue stress.

Okay, so one turns into the other one.

Right.

So the first thing for anyone trying to navigate stress and then we'll talk about trauma is to understand what kind of stress they're dealing with. Are you exhausted and having a hard time getting your energy up or is your energy too high and you're having a hard time getting your energy down? Because the solutions to those are often quite different. So on the previous time we met, we talked about a tool for calming the body very quickly, which is this double inhale, long exhale. Typically the inhales are done through the.

Nose, the exhale through the mouth.

So the physiological sigh, which was discovered by scientists in the 30s, and then Jack Feldman's group at UCLA has really identified the underlying brain circuits. And then my lab is now looking at this stuff in humans in a kind of more clinical setting. That double inhale followed by an exhale we know is the fastest real time tool for taking one's state of alertness down.

The hyper alert stress, you're not going.

To crash into sleep, but you're going from, you're not feeling good, you're too agitated, you want to calm down. And what's interesting about that tool is it speaks to a principle which is it's very hard to control the mind with the mind. So when you're stressed, just telling yourself, don't stress, don't stress, don't stress, calm down, calm down rarely works. It also rarely works to tell someone.

Else to calm down, to relax. Hey, relax. Yeah.

Usually it has the opposite effect.

Don't tell me to relax.

And it can be damaging for relationships. If you've ever, you know, someone's really stressed and you tell them to relax, sometimes it actually can create more friction and they don't support it.

What should they do in that moment?

They should look to the body. The nervous system includes the brain, but also all the connections to the body and back again. And so when you can't control your Mind you want to do something purely mechanical like the physiological sigh. Because that, you know, once you take control of the body in that way, then the mind starts to fall under the umbrella of this top down control again. Top down control is what children and puppies don't have.

You know, if we.

Impulsive.

Yeah. I've had a 10 year old bulldog, his name's Costello, he barely does anything.

Now because he's Costello.

But when he was a puppy, everything was a stimulus. He would walk over, pick up a cord and chew on it, then he'd drop it and he pivot to something else. And it's because they literally have no prefrontal cortex wired into this limbic system. They don't have this suppression so there's no friction. The limbic system just does whatever it wants. And actually in humans with frontotemporal dementia and in certain people who have front temporal brain damage, they become very impulsive.

My dad went through, I don't know if I talked about this the last time, but my dad had a traumatic car accident 15 years ago. Fifteen years ago, a couple months ago, where a car went on top of his car and went through the windshield and the bumper hit him in his head, pretty much split open his head. His girlfriend at the time was holding his head together, went to the hospital, airlifted in a helicopter, was in a coma for three months. And it's been a 15 year journey where we had to teach him, reteach him how to write, how to talk, how to walk, like everything where it was almost like he was my father and his body, but his mind was having to relearn like a child. And even today when I see him and visit him, he'll swear just compulsively he'll do things that maybe aren't appropriate because he probably doesn't have the. I don't know, you can probably tell me better as a neuroscientist, but what happens when someone has brain damage especially, especially in the frontal cortex? What happens to the brain?

Yeah, so these top, when I say top down control, there's literally a set of wires, we call them axons from the prefrontal cortex that suppresses these impulsive behaviors in the limbic system. And when there's damage, it's essentially removing that break. And in adults, older adults especially, because they're behaviors aren't quite as, you know, because they're older, they aren't necessarily going to walk over and punch people or scream out explicatives and these kinds of things. Fortunately, although sometimes you See that? Sometimes you see that sadly, but those circuits aren't functioning well. And in young children, if you ever go to a classroom, I guess now kids are home a lot. But in a typical kindergarten classroom, what you'll notice is that some of the kids can sit very still and other.

Kids are rocking back and forth, moving around a ton.

And the teacher is constantly trying to. I was one of those kids.

Exactly.

Trying to corral the children.

And children mature at different rates. And what you're seeing there is the different maturation of their frontal cortex. When you see a child that's very deliberate and can really control their speech and their behavior, you're looking at a.

Child that has a lot of top down control.

The frontal cortex is really engaged now.

Is that genetic? Is that.

It's probably a mixture. It's probably a mixture of environmental influences and genetic, like most things. And I'm not trying to just hedge here. Sure. I think, you know, like for instance, I have a niece who is adopted and she's very deliberate and very calm.

And so we, you know, we wonder.

You know, what, you know, is this genetic? Is it nature, nurture? You know, there's probably some genetic bias then. There's probably also a lot of environmental influences. I mean, a lot of what we're taught in school and at home because.

A lot of kids are home schooled.

Now is about what not to do. Sit still, don't say this, don't say that. We get the say please and thank you, sit up straight, do your dishes kind of stuff. But a lot of the don't language is designed around these things of top down control.

We've set up a lot of important social consultants.

We've all felt this as adults too in two ways. It becomes really extreme when we can't control that limbic system. One is when we're, when we're very fatigued. When we're fatigued or we're sick or we're in pain, physical pain, chances are when something bothers us, we're closer to that threshold of saying the thing that.

We wish we don't have. Patience.

Exactly.

No patience.

That's right.

So how do we learn to have patience when we are hyper alert or overwhelming exhaustive stress?

Okay, so when we are in hyper alert, there's a mechanism associated with that that makes our internal world measure time differently. What happens under those conditions is you feel like the external world is moving very slowly. I think I might have mentioned this in our previous meeting, but when you're really stressed on the hyper alert side it seems like the world is going very slowly. You're going to just knowing that and knowing that, it's likely that you're going to feel impatient and if the world is moving too slow. So like you're, you're trying to get someplace on time and the person in.

Front of you doesn't know where you're going. I was the guy not knowing where.

I was going this morning.

And so.

And we can't see each other in cars. You think, what is this person doing? Oh my goodness. And they're just looking for the right turn.

Yeah.

You know, so there's that. And then when we are fatigued, it seems like the world is going really fast. Okay. And so for people who are exhausted, everything feels overwhelming. Now, of course, the rate that things are actually moving in the, the world is the same, but the perception is that it's just too much and we can't cope. So we talked about a tool to calm oneself. The reason I like the physiological size. We are all equipped with the pathway if people want to know if there are some medically oriented folks out there or if you want to teach this to other folks.

There's a nerve called the phrenic nerve, P H R E N I C.

That goes from the brain down to the diaphragm, that controls that and then controls the lungs. And, and so when you decide, okay, I'm going to use the sigh, the physiological side to calm myself in a way. You're engaging top down control because you're taking control of your internal landscape rather than trying to take control of your thinking, which is very hard.

You can't fix your mind with your mind.

Sometimes trying to control the mind with.

The mind is like trying to grab fog.

It's just going to keep moving. Right.

If you've ever tried to grab or.

Smoke, it just moves. It doesn't, it's vapors. You're never going to grab it. The key is to take control of the system by taking control of a real physical entity. This phrenic nerve. And the reason I describe this stuff is not to put a lot of unnecessary detail, but I think when people realize this isn't something that you build up over time and then are able.

To do that, you literally have a.

Wire, set of wires that goes down to your diaphragm, this muscle in your abdomen that can move your lungs. And then as you blow off carbon dioxide, when you do that exhale, your brain starts to calm down and then your mind, the top down control of the cortex can start Taking control of the limbic system again, it's like. It's almost like you're losing control of the automobile and you're trying to steer, but really there's another lever that if you just pull it, then the steering wheel will stabilize for you.

So that's the way to think about.

The physiological sigh on the other side of things, when you're feeling overwhelmed and fatigued, there are two ways to approach that. First is the kind of foundation of fatigue, which is almost always poor sleep and scheduling of sleep. This is something that doesn't get discussed a lot. I don't think I've discussed this on any podcast previously. But getting better at sleeping is a.

Whole set of practices.

But sleep is a slow tool. It's not a real time tool. Because if you're feeling exhausted and you have to get up and have your day, deal with children, deal with work, deal with life, we can talk about how to get better at sleeping. But in real time, what you want to do is you want to bring more alertness into the system. Focus, Focus and alertness. The way to do that is to take advantage of a very well established medical fact. All medical students learn this, all MBs know this, which is that there's a direct relationship between how you breathe and your heart rate. And so I'll give a little bit.

Of the background and then I'll give.

The specific practice just so that people understand where this is coming from. So when we inhale, when we inhale, it almost feels like everything's moving up. But actually what happens is our diaphragm moves down. Okay? So when we inhale, our diaphragm moves down. When that happens, our heart literally gets a little bit bigger. The volume of the heart gets a little bit bigger, which means that whatever blood in there is moving per unit time, a little bit slower. And there's a set of neurons in the heart called the sinoatrial node that sends a signal to the brain and says, hey, blood flow is slowing down. And the brain sends a signal back to the heart and says, okay, let's speed up. And speeds up the heart rate. So the short, concise way to put it is when you inhale more vigorously or longer, you're speeding up your heart rate. This actually, there's a name for it.

In the medical community.

But the important thing to understand is as you inhale, you're sending a neural signal to your heart to speed up. And when you exhale, the diaphragm moves up, the heart gets a little bit smaller, literally, because there's less space there. Then there's a signal sent to the brain. And the brain sends a signal back and says, slow, slow down the heart rate.

And so this is happening quickly. So if you inhale, it's speeding up.

That's right.

If you exhale, it's slowing it down.

That's right. So if you want to become more alert, you actually can just simply make your inhales a little bit more vigorous or a little bit longer than your exhale.

So let's say you get up longer inhale, shorter exhale.

That's right. To speed up your heart rate and to be more alert.

Not longer exhale, double intake.

Right. So longer or more vigorous inhales will speed up your heart rate and make you more alert. Longer or more vigorous or more vigorous exhales will slow down your heart rate and make you less alert. And this has a name, which is. It's a certain kind of arrhythmia, but that makes it sound bad. This is actually what's happening all the time. This is the basis of heart rate variability. When people talk about heart rate variability is good, you know that you don't want your heart rate to be one level all day, high or low.

A lot of people don't realize that.

They think, oh, I got a nice slow heart rate.

You think, all day long we're asleep.

That's right.

Well, slow heart rate is better than high heart. Artificially high, you know, sorry, excessively high heart rate. But you don't want your heart rate to be like this. You want your heart rate to go through these fluctuations. Heart rate variability is good.

Why?

Because heart rate variability reflects the activation of what's typically called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the brain's ability to slow down and calm the nervous system. So when your heart rate is going like this, it means that your heart rate is speeding up, and then your brain is slowing it down, your heart rate is speeding it up, and your brain is slowing down. And that's what's happening all day long as you're moving through things in a.

Kind of calm, alert way.

But when you get that troubling text message or you see a post or.

A comment and you go. And all of a sudden your heart rate just goes.

And you feel like you immediately want to respond, or you're going to say the thing that maybe you shouldn't say, or you're going to do the thing that maybe you shouldn't do, or you just want to be more thoughtful and more targeted in Your response, The key is to slow down the heart rate by making your exhales longer or more vigorous. So it could sit simply be. And then shorter inhales, longer exhales. Or do the physiological sigh. Or if you wake up in the morning and you're experiencing the other kind of stress, which is you look at your fog in the news, the world is overwhelming me, my life is overwhelming.

I don't know what I'm going to do.

I don't even know what sequence I'm.

Going to do things in.

You're just discombobulated and a lot of people struggle with this. The key is to do a few breaths, even while you're getting out of.

Bed and, and preparing your morning coffee.

Or water or whatever it is, and just start breathing in a way that's inhale emphasized, which sounds weird, but basically what you're doing is you're speeding up your heart rate. At some point, usually within only two or three of those breaths, you're gonna feel more alert and then you can just go back to breathing normally.

So you don't have to do this for hours, you do this for a few moments or minutes.

That's right. And while I'm a fan of breathwork.

As its own thing, because breathwork can teach you how to operate these levers in your brain and body, so to speak, breathwork is a dedicated practice that you do away from these stressful events. Whereas learning to control your heart rate and thereby your mind, using your breathing. So it goes breathing, heart rate, mind, in that sequence. So if your mind isn't where you want it to be, don't start with the mind, start with your breathing then, which will control your heart rate, which will then allow you to control your mind.

So don't think your way out of a moment of stress, Breathe your way out of this moment of stress.

That's right. And one of the things, and I'm certain there are going to be people out there listening to this saying, wait a second. The yogis and the yogic community has been talking about this for centuries. What are you doing? This is just a re ready recasting of what we already know. I agree, I agree. Within the science community, these things have been given crazy names like arrhythmias and heart rate variability and the diaphragm and the phrenic nerve. And so the language of science has known all about this for many centuries also, but it's been shrouded by language and the yoga community has known about.

This for a long time, but it's.

Been shrouded by language. So by bringing this discussion forth, I.

Just want to be clear that I'm.

Not trying to reinvent the wheel or pretend that I invented the wheel by any stretch. I'm trying to say that we all have these circuits, these levers in our body that we can pull and push and people learn how to do this intuitively, but we're never really taught the underlying mechanisms. And I do believe that once. And yoga's not big on mechanisms, they're very good on naming and on yogis in different areas of the world, when they say something, they usually know what the other one is talking about. Scientists do as well. But mechanism. If people can just understand a little bit about why the heart slows down when you exhale more than you inhale or why the heart speeds up when you inhale more than you exhale. I do believe that having that knowledge.

In the mind allows people in a.

Moment of stress to say, oh, I understand what's happening to me and therefore.

I should go to this particular tool.

You know, I. I do understand that one doesn't need to understand how an engine works in order to drive a car, but you do need to know.

How the control panels work.

Right, right.

This is why we send people to driving school and why we don't let 10 year olds drive. Although I'm sure there's some out there.

Yeah, yeah.

On a farm somewhere. Yeah.

Well, actually there was this one news thing. I don't know if you've seen this, where a state trooper pulls or a CHP or somebody pulls over a car that's kind of weaving through the lanes on. And they pull over and I think the kid was 6 years old.

Oh my God.

He actually managed to get onto the freeway and he was driving the left hand lane and his driving was pretty bad, but he was below the.

That's crazy.

Well, that just tells you that the young mind is eager to steer things and press pedals and things of that sort.

Explore.

We are definitely not recommending that. But this is very different than driving a car in the sense that all the panels and all the controls are there.

We have. We're all.

Most people are taught how to drive a car. Most people are not taught how to drive their nervous system.

And so a lot of what I'm.

Talking about here is just one language, one version of the language of how to drive and control your nervous system.

And you can't drive your nervous system with thoughts and controlling your mind alone. You have to connect the whole vehicle is What I'm hearing, you can't just steer thoughts. You need to also use the brakes or also use different levels, which is the entire car.

That's right.

It's very hard to control the mind. With the mind, it can be done. There are people that get better at that.

Right. Maybe it's a practice over time, but using.

I say when in moments of stress, either excessively alert stress or excessively fatigue stress, look to the body, because there are mechanisms that have been built into the body for hundreds of thousands of years designed to do this. Now, the reason I have can say that is that the physiological side, the double inhale, exhale is controlled by a specific set of neurons in the brain stem that Jack Feldman's lab discovered. When children or adults have been sobbing very hard, or when they're out of air in a claustrophobic environment, they naturally do that to reopen these little sacs in their lungs. Now, inhale, emphasized breathing can be practiced in a way, sort of away from stress in a kind of offline approach that can be beneficial for raising what we call stress threshold. So there's a whole other way to look at stress, which is to say, how do I get calmer in the mind when my body is freaking out? You don't even have to ask about a lifetime of short sleep. We can ask about these really, you know, one week of short sleep or even one night of one hour of lost sleep. And I think that's how fragile our brains and our bodies are to this thing called lack of sleep. And you could then ask, well.