Eliminate Brain Fog, Increase Your Focus & Control Your Motivation w/Andrew Huberman EP 1204

This is episode number 1204 with neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. Welcome to the School of Greatness.

My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today.

Now let the class begin.

Welcome back, my friend.

My guest today is neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. And Andrew is a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford, as well as Andrew runs Stanford's lab that primarily studies brain states such as fear, courage, anxiety, and how we can better move into and out of them through practices like visual cues, breath work, movement, and supplementation. It's always a pleasure to have Andrew back on the show, and you guys have shown so much support in the past when we have them on. So we wanted to bring them back for some incredible things we break down today. So make sure to check out our previous episodes in the show notes to learn more about Andrew and everything he's up to as well. But today in this episode, we discuss why we experience brain fog and the best morning and night routines to get rid of it. The 90 minute focus hack that you need to try, how to manage your dopamine levels to stay motivated, how the Gap effect can hugely benefit your ability to accelerate your learning, how drugs and alcohol affect your brain and body and so much more. This will be a powerful one for so many. So if you're enjoying this, please copy and paste this link and share it to your friends, text people, post it on social media, and make sure to tag me and Andrew Huberman over on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn as well when you share it. And a quick reminder, if you have not subscribed to the School of Greatness, now is your time to go to Apple Podcast or Spotify, click the subscribe button and leave us a review that really helps us spread the message to more people over on those ecosystems. And I wanna give a shout out to today's fan of the week from Slasher who said, I'm a daily listener of the show, and I've yet to find an episode I don't enjoy. From finance to health, I always have a new skill to add to my life, and I truly feel like Lewis and his guests are helping me become the person I've always wanted to be. So, slasher, thank you so much for being a part of this, and thank you for leaving the review and being the fan of the week this week. And if you want a chance to be shouted out on the podcast, just head over to Apple podcast. Leave us a review for your chance to be shouted out on the podcast in the future. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Andrew Huberman overman. How many times have you gone to the pharmacy with no idea what you're going to pay for your prescriptions? It used to happen to my team member all the time, but now she checks GoodRx and not only does she know how much her medication is going to cost, she also knows she's getting the lowest price. She was prescribed a brand name medication, but insurance would only cover the generic brand and she had side effects with the generic brand, so she was forced to pay out of pocket for the brand name. With GoodRx, she was able to save a lot of money on her medications. You see, prescription prices can vary between pharmacies by as much as $100 which is news to me, but GoodRx allows you to instantly compare prices at pharmacies in your neighborhood before you go so you know exactly what you'll pay when you get there. So, for simple smart savings on your prescriptions, check GoodRx. Go to goodrx.com/greatness that is goodrx.com/greatness. GoodRx is not insurance but can be used instead of insurance. In 2020, GoodRx users saved an average of 79% off retail prices.

Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness.

We've got the man, Andrew Huberman, in the house. My man, good to see you, brother. Great to see you.

It's great to be back.

You're becoming our resident neuroscientist. You're the one we've had on a couple of times now. It's the third time on. I'm so excited. Yesterday, I woke up with brain fog, and I usually don't have brain fog. I was telling you about this a little bit for a second. and I went into my Spanish lesson, which I told you before that I'm in Spanish classes, and I was just like, it was hurting me. Like, every minute I felt like I'm struggling. I felt like I wasn't recalling, I wasn't receiving the information. I couldn't conjugate the stuff I was trying to do. And I was just like, I'm not in a good space. I need to stop. Like, 20 minutes in, I was just like, let's call it a day. I'm curious, where does brain fog come from, and how can we make sure that we have great morning routines to support us so that we don't have brain fog at all in the morning or later in the afternoon.

Great question. Well, there are a lot of sources of brain fog. The most obvious one would be a poor night's sleep.

Okay.

And sleep, of course, being the most fundamental layer of mental and physical health. I mean, you don't sleep well for one night, you're probably okay. For two nights, you start to fall apart. Three, four nights, you're really a degraded version of yourself in every aspect. Emotionality is off. ability to do most anything is off. Hormones start suffering. So sleep is fundamental. But assuming that you slept well, there are a number of things. One is your breathing patterns. We often get into discussions of breathing, but this is a slightly different one than we've had in the past. A lot of people have sleep apnea. They are not getting enough oxygen during their sleep or they are mouth breathing during sleep. These days, it's become popular in some circles to take a little bit of medical tape and tape the mouth shut and to learn to be a nasal breather. And there is excellent evidence now that being a nasal breather most of the time, as long as you're not speaking or eating or exercising hard enough that you would need to breathe through your mouth, that it's beneficial to be a nasal breather for a couple of reasons. First of all, if you are deliberately nasal breathing during the day, the tendency is that you will nasal breathe at night, which tends to lead to less sleep apnea, less mouth breathing during the middle of the night, and less brain fog. Why brain fog? Well, during sleep, a number of restorative processes occur, but if you're not getting enough oxygen into the system, the brain is literally becoming hypoxic, and a lot of the cleaning out mechanisms, the glymphatic system, et cetera, as they're called, don't get an opportunity to function as well as they ought to. So you wake up in the morning, you slept your normal six to eight hours, but you're feeling kind of groggy and out of it. And of course, there could be other reasons that you're experiencing brain fog. Maybe for people that drink alcohol the night before, maybe they had alcohol, for people that maybe they ate a meal that was too large before sleep, maybe any number of reasons, right? Gotcha. But getting adequate oxygenation of the brain during sleep is key. so learn to be a nasal breather. And for those of you out there that say, well, I have a deviated septum. A lot of people think they have deviated septums. The problem is they're not nasal breathing enough. The sinuses actually can learn to dilate if you nasal breathe. Exercising while nasal breathing will kind of depend on the sport. Like, if you box, oftentimes there's the need to do a sh or, you know, kind of like exhale on impact type thing. So I, I don't think anyone should tamper with their normal breathing patterns as it relates to sport or singing or some activity. But what I'm talking about is when you're just standing around, when you're walking down the street, any low-level activity, you're working at your desk, you should be nasal breathing and breathing regularly.

That will reduce brain fog in many cases. Absolutely. It's interesting when I went to India to study meditation, I guess it was five years ago now, I learned that the monks breathe through, they keep their mouth shut all day long. their mouth is shut, they breathe through the nose, unless they're eating or they're having a conversation, their mouths are shut. And they seem to always just be very relaxed and sharp and with it, they probably get great sleep. And it's interesting, as you were saying, these symptoms, breathing through the mouth, poor sleep, I realized two days before this brain fog day, I was in Vegas at the Canelo fight and I stayed up really late. It was daylight savings. but I stayed way past the time. I was on an early flight back. I just didn't get a lot of sleep in 24 hours before then. I had a good night's sleep the next night, but the next day, so two days after the poor sleep, and for the last month, I've been breathing through my mouth because I had a surgery where I had three implants or missing teeth are. So, I had three titanium rods and a bone graft. so I couldn't keep my mouth shut, I had to keep it open to breathe because it was just painful. So maybe those combinations of poor sleep a couple nights before and breathing through the mouth is what caused it, which.

Makes sense to me. Seems very likely. And then in Vegas, you've got the air conditioning, so you're breathing a lot of dry air in the middle of the night. The other thing is about the immune system. So we hear about the gut microbiome and indeed we have a lot of microbiota that live in our gut. you can have healthy or unhealthy microbiota. It's essential part of our biology. It is, you know, supports the nervous system, the immune system and all of that. But if you think about the gut, the gut is obviously when we think about the gut, we think about the stomach. But of course it runs all the way up to the mouth and nose. We have a microbiome, we have a nasal microbiome, a mouth microbiome. We have a urethral microbiome. And in women, there's a vaginal microbiome. And the microbiome are these bacteria that maintain a healthy, ideally a healthy condition of the mucosal lining. So without doing a whole lecture on the immune system, your primary barrier to infections of all kinds, bacteria, viruses and parasites is your skin. If you have a cut in your skin, you're more susceptible, right? But these are your entry points. You actually have an ocular microbiome too. Ears too, but it's mainly eyes, nose and mouth are the primary sites of entry for infection.

And the nose has a filter where.

The mouth is just like you're sucking it in. that's right. So the nose actually is better at scrubbing or filtering out bacteria, viruses, and we'll leave parasites aside for the moment, but then is the mouth. And so being a nasal breather actually is better in terms of combating different types of infections, all kinds of infections. And there's a wonderful book about this that was written by a couple of my colleagues at Stanford. If people want to do a deep dive, the book is called Jaws: A Hidden Epidemic. and the authors are Paul Ehrlich and Sandra Kahn. And it has a foreword by Jared Diamond and an intro by Robert Sapolsky. So some serious heavy hitters on this book. And it talks about how nasal breathing, deliberately nasal breathing during the day leads to better sleeping at night, leads to better jaw structure. It actually creates more space for the tongue on the roof of the mouth and the teeth. They have some beautiful and not so beautiful images of twins that were raised apart. One was a nasal breather and chewed a lot of hard food. So a lot of using of the jaw to chew your food, really gnawing on food is actually good for the jaw. Whereas the twin in these twin studies went off to cultures or areas of the world where they were eating a lot of soft foods. There are examples, for instance, of kids that had allergies to a pet hamster, there's one example. And the change in this kid's face, he went from having a very attractive face to a extended, you know, the eyes tend to droop, right, because the sinuses are all changing shape. Now, the beauty of this system is that when you switch to becoming a nasal breather, the entire structure of the face and jaws change and the eyes become less droopy. This book documents all this.

Wait, so you can reverse it too?

It's reversible. Come on. It is reversible. Wow. It involves a little bit of work. One of the things that you can do that's kind of fun and a little challenging is just on your jogs or on the treadmill or any kind of low level, level cardio besides swimming, just nasal breathing. Only go as hard as you can still maintain nasal breathing. It's very hard for the first few sessions, but by the second week or third week, you actually discover that you have a greater capacity to exercise. My friend Brian McKenzie, who's done a lot of work on this, he works with elite performers in terms of singers, opera singers, but also athletes, and he's done a lot in terms of using nasal breathing during exercise. But, the point is that if you deliberately nasal breathe, even when emailing or texting. You also avoid what's called email apnea or what we should call now text apnea. They've done studies where people are texting and they're holding their breath. So you're cutting off oxygen supply. So I think the important thing to bring us back to brain fog is that you want to get oxygen into the system and ideally you're bringing that oxygen into the system mainly through your nose and not through your mouth. It doesn't mean that breathing through your mouth is a terrible thing to do. It just means that most of the time you want to be breathing deeply and rather slowly through the nose, maybe anywhere from four or five breaths per minute. Don't hold me too close to that number, but you want to be breathing slowly and deeply through your nose most of the time. So it's probably the 80-20 rule, right?

Where you're speaking and eating 20% of your day.

Yeah, if you're sprinting, you're gonna huff and puff through your mouth. If you're weightlifting, you're doing martial arts, you're doing anything that requires breathing through your mouth in order to perform better.

Than just obviously do that. The rest of your resting time, try to breathe through your nose as much as possible.

That's right. And while you sleep. That's right. And it also helps with ear infections and things of that sort because the whole system, when you hear ear, nose and throat, you have ear, nose and throat doctors, ENTs, it's because the whole system of drainage from the ears, nose and throat, they run together like a bunch of little rivers that all drain to the same location. The microbiome of the nose stays healthier if you're a nasal breather. If the mouth is a terrible filter for viruses, meaning things can get in and cause problems, most of the time, an illness starts with a throat tickle, like something's happening back there.

Like a little cough or something, right?

Yeah, it's that little itch in there, that's the -oh.

What is that tickle?

It's irritation of the mucosal lining and there are neurons that sit right below there that are now getting exposed because the mucosal lining is getting worn away or the chemistry of the mucosal lining is changing.

What's the best way to reverse that when you start to feel the tickle in your throat?

Ah, there we can look to our good friend. Well, a couple things. slow down whatever you're doing. Obviously, if you can get a nice hot shower or bath or sauna and then get into bed and get 10 hours of sleep, that would be ideal. But if you're at the Canelo fight and you've got that, our friend Wim Hof practices something called tumo breathing, it's sometimes called, and that goes by other names as well. And there's a beautiful study that was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. peer-reviewed work showing that if you take two groups of people, you inject them both with E. Coli, a bacteria which makes you very, very sick. But one group does a simple meditation and another group does breathing of the sort that I'll describe in a moment, that Wim and tumo type breathers and other people have talked about, actually for centuries.

Yogi breathers.

Yeah, what it involves is hyper oxygenating the system, so that you release adrenaline from the adrenal glands, which sit right about your kidneys. And adrenaline is the trigger for a number of different immune system cell types to combat infection. And what they found was if people do a particular style of breathing prior to the injection of E. Coli, they are able to greatly avoid fever. They reduce the amount of inflammatory cytokines, things like IL-6, interleukin-6, etc. and increase anti-inflammatory cytokines like interleukin 10. It's a really wonderful study. The pattern of breathing is really simple. I do it anytime I'm starting to feel a little worn out or like I might be catching something or if I was on a plane and someone around me seemed like they weren't doing so well or I just am feeling a little worn out. Forgive me because there's no other way to do it but just to do it. But it involves 25 deep breaths in through the nose, in this case out through the mouth. Okay, so this is a case where breathing through the mouth is appropriate. So in through the nose, out through the mouth, then at the end of that exhaling all your air, holding your breath for 15 to 60 seconds. Don't fight the impulse to breathe when you feel the impulse to breathe. Breathe in and then hold your breath for as long as you can until you feel the impulse to breathe. Obviously don't do this in your water. Believe it or not, a few people have actually died doing this because they did it in a bathtub or before dive underwater. So please don't do that. But it basically, I won't do the all 25, but it goes something like this. So big deep breaths, right? And I can already feel I'm kind of heating up. That's the release of adrenaline.

A little tingly feeling.

You're hyperoxygenating, you're releasing adrenaline. Adrenaline is the signal for the immune system to deploy these killer cells and these cells that go and combat infection. We don't often think about the fact that stress actually is the go signal for the immune system. We always hear stress depletes your immune system, and that's true if you remain chronically stressed. But humans are phenomenally good at combating stressors, and then they stop, they relax, and boom, they get sick because the adrenaline signal drops. The other way you could do this would be to do an ice bath or really cold shower. You get the adrenaline release. that's basically the effect of the ice bath or cold shower. It's the adrenaline release. Some people will do well by doing a short HIIT workout, a high intensity interval training workout, because again, it's adrenaline. So, not a depleting workout, but 12 minutes of sprint, walk, sprint, walk. My sprints are very different than your sprints, because you actually sprint.

You're faster than me still.

And not in my best, best dream, but thank you for that. You can lift more, that's for sure. Not in my best, best dream. But thank you for that. Thank you for that. So this is something that I occasionally do if I'm traveling or I'm just feeling kind of worn down, I'll do it, I'll do maybe two or three rounds of what I just described. And it all boils down to adrenaline release. Really? That bolus, as we call it, a shot of adrenaline to your system, signals the immune system to turn on and to defend itself. To defend itself. Getting sick. That's right, and this is why people who have ever taken care of a sick child or a sick relative, you can go, go, go. You don't eat, you don't sleep. There's no self-care and you're not getting sick. Now, of course, if you're exposed to enough viral load or you're exposed to enough of a bacteria, it might get you. But this is the sort of thing I would do if I was feeling a little bit of a throat tickle, a little rundown. But then I would also do the shower, make sure you get some decent.

Food and get a good night's sleep. So what's the routine then? The ultimate morning and evening routine to set your brain and your mind up for optimal performance and not getting brain fog. Okay.

I will describe that by listing out the protocol first and then I'll give some of the scientific mechanisms second. Because in the past, what I've tended to do is give the mechanism and then give the protocols. I know some people, it's like, you know, enough for these academic guys. Let's just give me the, give me, tell them, just tell me what to do. But if people want the mechanism, I'd be happy to flesh that out. I should say that what I will mention is not everything I do. So for instance, I get up and like most humans, I use the restroom and I have a glass of water. I do those things. So if I'm not listing every right foot, left foot step through the morning, but the things that are geared towards getting the mind into a proper place, For me, I'll describe it as my routine. I generally get up somewhere between 5:30 and 7:00 in the morning, depending on when I went to sleep. I'm not super regular about when I go to sleep, but generally that's between 10:30 and midnight. I try and avoid that midnight hour, but happens. So I get up, obviously I use the restroom, I drink some water. I do think that hydrating is very important. So I'll drink some water. And then the fundamental layer of health is to set your circadian rhythm. The simplest way to do that is to go outside for 10 minutes and get some bright light in your eyes. I'll just list off some of the things that people always ask. What if you wake up before the sun rises? Well, simple rule, if you want to be awake, turn on as many bright lights in your house as possible. But then when the sun comes out, excuse me, get outside and see some sunlight. you do not have to look directly into the sun, but you do want to get outside out of shade cover if you can. Don't wear sunglasses if you can do that safely. Don't try and do this through a window. Don't try and negotiate with me on this point. What about a window? Well, the filtration of the important wavelengths of light through the window is just too high, and so it would take hours for you to set your circadian clock that way.

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You want to do this because once every 24 hours, you're going to get a peak in cortisol, which is a healthy peak. you want that peak to happen early in the day because it sets up alertness for the remainder of the day. There are really nice studies done by my colleagues in Stanford Psychiatry and Biology Department showing that if that cortisol peak starts to drift too late in the day, you start seeing signs of depression. It's actually a well-known marker of depression. So you want that cortisol almost stressed out kind of, the day's beginning, I have a lot to do feeling, that's a healthy thing. You want that happening early in the day. The sunlight will wake you up and what's really cool is that over time, you'll start to notice the sunlight waking you up more and more. The system becomes tuned up. If you miss a day, it's not the end of the world because it's a, as we call it, a slow integrating system. But don't miss more than one day. And if you live in an area where it's very cloudy outside, just know that the sunlight, the photons coming through that cloud cover, are brighter than your brightest indoor lights. Now, if you live in a very dark region of the world or unsafe or purely impractical to get outside in the morning, then it might make sense to get a sunrise simulator or one of these lights. But they tend to be very expensive. What I recommend people use instead is just a ring light, a blue light. This is a case where you can blast your system. So get that morning light. It sets a number of things in motion, such as your melatonin rhythm to happen 16 hours later to help you fall asleep. I would say this is the fundamental step of any good morning. And if you don't do this enough, you are messing yourself up in a number of ways.

Does this mess with digestion also?

Yeah. So every cell in your body has a 24-hour clock. All those clocks need to be aligned to the same time. So imagine a clock shop with lots of different clocks, and you don't want them alarming off at different times. This sunlight viewing or bright light viewing early in the day, I would say within 30 to 60 minutes of waking up for about 10 minutes, or if it's very cloudy, maybe 30 minutes or so, that activates a particular type of neuron in the eye called the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cell. If people want to look that up, signals to the circadian clock, which is right above the roof of your mouth, but that is the master circadian clock that then releases a bunch of signals into your body. This all happens very fast and every cell in your body gets tuned to the exact same time reference point so that your system can work as a nice concert of cells as opposed to out of whack. Your gut has a clock, your liver has a clock, your heart cells have a clock, every skin cell has a clock. And for those that are not incentivized enough by the cortisol stuff and all the other things, actually the replenishment of stem cells in the skin, hair, and nails is activated by the system. So hair grows more readily, skin turns over, and nails grow more quickly because you have stem cells, literally cells that release more cells that become new hair cells or new skin cells and new cells that make up the nails. So skin hair and nails also benefit and it has to be light exposure to the eyes. When we talk about all these things like the gut and the skin, et cetera, it's tempting to say, oh, it's sunlight on the skin. It's actually only can be signaled through the eyes because the clock lives deep in the brain, that master clock, and you need the signal to get to that master clock.

So don't wear sunglasses.

If you can avoid wearing sunglasses safely, right? There are people, for instance, who have macular degeneration, who have to avoid bright lights, and they know this because their ophthalmologist tells them. If you wear corrective lenses, contacts, even if it has UV filtration, that's fine. In fact, if you think about what an eyeglass or a contact lens does is it focuses light onto the eye, actually on the retina on the back of the eye, whereas looking through a window filters it. It blocks a certain amount of light coming in, even if it's a very clear window. So go outside. If you wear glasses, fine. If you wear contacts, fine. And if you can get out on a porch and be, you know, east facing in the morning when the sun comes up, great. You don't need to see the sun cross the horizon. but ideally you see the sun when it's at what we call low solar angle, it's not directly overhead. If you wait two or three hours after waking up to get bright light in your eyes, you are setting yourself up for a complicated sleep-wake cycle that leads to a lot of what we call insomnia.

So this is important to do in the first 60 minutes of waking up, get outside, 10 minutes. You don't have to be in the sun, but you want to be able to look and see the sun, right? Is it okay to be in the shade or you want the sunlight hitting your skin?

It depends on how bright it is. So for instance, this morning I woke up because of where I live, there's a lot of tree cover, but I saw that the sun was, there were a lot of shadows, but it was casting a nice patch of light in the street right out in front of my house. So I'm the weirdo that walked out there with my coffee. Actually, I delay my coffee. It was with my water in the morning. I'll talk about why I delay coffee. I'm leaning against a tree. I confess I was text messaging at part for part of that. Forgive me, I'm human. And catching the sunlight coming in through my eyes for a few minutes, I allow myself to blink, obviously.

I'm not sure.

You want to look directly at the sun?

You don't want to look directly.

There's a safety issue. I guess it's a lower horizon. It's not that intense. We have a built-in safety mechanism, which is if you need to blink and close your eyes, close your eyes. But yeah, I got sunlight in my eyes. I get the weird looks from my neighbors, but they know me. and they do it too. Sometimes they'll join me. Animals will naturally do this. They'll migrate to the sun. So then I go inside. It's 10 minutes or so. It seems like a long time, but it is so beneficial. And then inside, if I want to be awake, I try and turn on as many bright lights as I can. One of the big mistakes that we've made in the last few years as a culture is assuming that blue light is bad. During the day, lots of blue light is great because it that's the best signal for these cells that wake up your system. It activates all sorts of important hormone pathways and wakefulness pathways. Interesting. It can reduce brain fog in some sense. Sure. It's in the evening that you want to avoid blue lights and bright lights of any kind. We can talk about that. Okay. So then I come back inside and then I do not drink caffeine right away. It's important in many ways to delay caffeine enough so that you can clear out some of the chemical signals in the brain and body that lead to a feeling of fatigue. So the longer you're awake, the more a molecule called adenosine builds up in your system. And when you sleep, you push that adenosine level back down. When you wake up in the morning, that adenosine level can be zero, but oftentimes there's still some hanging around. Caffeine is an adenosine antagonist. It blocks adenosine function. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's effectively what it does. So if you wake up and you've got, let's say 20%, let's make, this is arbitrary, but 20% of your adenosine still hasn't been cleared out, that's sort of a drowsiness that you woke up with. Then you go and you drink your coffee and you crush that ability of adenosine to have that effect, but it hasn't gone away. So that when your coffee wears off mid-morning, now that adenosine is there and you feel like a there's a mid-morning crash or an afternoon crash. So I delay my caffeine intake for about 90 and ideally 120 minutes after I wake up. Because in that way, you bring your adenosine level down very, very low to zero, and then you don't get this rebound crash in the afternoon. For years, I would get this post-lunch crash, and I thought maybe I'm eating too much for lunch, which I probably was, or maybe I'm eating the wrong foods. Turned out it was all related added to my timing of caffeine. And your system learns how to wake up naturally. You get the natural cortisol and adrenaline. Give it the time. Give it the time. And people hate this one because it's a little painful for the caffeine addicts, but I'm a pretty serious caffeine addict and I embrace that.

And I'll tell you, it also makes.

The joy of the coffee so much greater. You're waiting for that. You're savoring it. It tastes so much better. And that relates to the dopamine system, which I know we're going to talk about later. I sometimes will drink yerba mate instead of.

I love mate.

Mate has a couple of honey in it or anything?

I don't.

Sweet tea or something?

I don't really like sweet stuff too much.

I wish I had that disease. Yeah, it's, you know, I wish I had. I like savory things and salty things. I like yerba mate for a number of reasons. I don't like the really smoky mates. And my dad's Argentine, so I grew up drinking mate. But you don't speak Spanish, though, do you? I speak four words of Spanish and, and, and those I speak poorly.

So your dad's fluent?

He's fluent. Come on. I know. Parents who are bilingual. That's a crime, isn't it? It's a crime. Well, it's not a crime I committed. I love my dad. I committed. Well, bilingual parents, please encourage your children to learn multiple languages.

Musicians, parents.

Teach your kids the instrument. Have you ever seen the people who play guitar in college?

Let's just say their lives are better than everyone else's. What are the benefits? As we're just as a side point here, I was just talking about Mate, what are the benefits of learning two languages in early childhood development over only learning one?

Well, probably multiple benefits in addition to the practical benefits in life and jobs and opportunities that come your way.

And relationships.

Oh, absolutely. And there's, well, and relationship opportunities. If you're with, ever with someone, I was in a relationship for several years with somebody, who was from France and spoke French. And I eventually picked up some French and I could understand, but I could never really understand the subtlety of the humor. And so there was a lot that we couldn't share, unfortunately. So there are multiple reasons to do that. I mean, there are many, many reasons to learn languages, but from a brain perspective, I mean, you've got this, as we say, neural architecture, these areas of the brain that are devoted to language, primarily on the left side, but really It's there's functionality on both sides. And those areas are like a template for whatever language you're exposed to. You can pack a lot more into that neural real estate if you learn multiple languages, and that affords you a flexibility at better language learning for new languages. So, you know, the languages that are Latin-based, so you could learn French as a child and speak English and then find it easier to speak Italian. Or learn Italian, find it easier to learn French. Just like if you learn how to play the oboe as a child, the guitar is actually gonna be easier for you just because of the neural circuits for understanding scales and pitch and these kinds of things. You can tell I'm not a musician. Those are there. So I think there's a tremendous utility to it. But the mate is for the caffeine. The mate also tends to be, you know, it's never a pleasant topic, but it's somewhat of a laxative, which I think keeping digestion, flushing, your system and it contains something called glucagon-like peptide-1, GLP-1. GLP-1 is something you're going to hear a lot more about in the years to come. It's actually now in clinical trials for the treatment of diabetes and obesity. It enhances lipolysis, the conversion of fat into energy. And it's just a-- so does that.

Mean it helps you burn fat?

It helps you burn fat. We should be careful because sometimes this gets tricky. It helps you utilize fat as an energy source.

And not needing the sugar.

Right. visibly lose fat or not will depend on whether or not you're in a caloric deficit. But it helps shuttle, direct the metabolism, let's say, toward using fat stores as a energy resource, which is very good. And it also has some indirect effects on blood sugar regulation through the insulin management pathway. And that's in Mate is caffeinated or no caffeine? Oftentimes it's caffeine and oftentimes it can be very high caffeine. Caffeine, the one that I like.

I thought you said no caffeine until 90 minutes after, right?

Right. So, I'm not touching mate until 90 to 120 minutes after waking up. It was, we were talking about coffee. Sometimes I'm drinking coffee, sometimes I'm drinking mate. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. And if I'm really going for it, I really have this doing both. I like to see the mate and the coffee. And I like to just sip one, then the other. Mate is kind of nice too, because it contains electrolytes. so it's not as depleting. Dehydrating. Yeah, well, your neurons run on sodium, magnesium, and potassium. That's how neurons fire. Sodium ions rush into the cell. If you're low in sodium or you're dehydrated, your brain isn't going to work as well. So, caffeine in the form of coffee is great, but you should probably drink two volumes of water for every one volume of coffee you drink in order to hydrate. And a lot of people feel jittery when they drink. caffeine or they feel lightheaded or they suddenly get hungry. Oftentimes that's because they're sodium depleted. I think 2022, I think we're also going to hear a lot about the value of salt. Salt is an essential nutrient. Obviously, people with hypertension should not be consuming too much salt, but there's a lot of good science now to support the fact that if you're feeling lightheaded or you feel like you have quote unquote low blood sugar, oftentimes taking a little pinch of salt, putting in some water and drinking that, maybe with some lemon juice to adjust the taste. All of a sudden, your shaking stabilizes, you feel more alert. Why? Because salt and water have an interesting relationship. It increases blood volume and oftentimes then you're getting more blood flow to the brain simply by increasing your sodium intake.

And so I think we're- Monti's got.

A lot of those ingredients. Monti doesn't have electrolytes. It doesn't have salt. I would say for anyone that's thinking about their morning routine and brain fog, there's no reason why in your morning water you might just put a little tiny pinch of salt. And if you're drinking a lot of coffee in any form or caffeine in any form, I should say, then you want to be sure you're getting enough sodium. And you'll notice that if you drink a lot of caffeine that you'll crave sodium. And this has a whole relationship in the kidney and aldosterone and we don't have time to go into it. I always make sure that if I'm drinking water before or with my caffeine that I try and put a little bit of salt in there.

Got it.

Okay. And there are a lot of supplement companies now spinning up. We don't have to throw out brands that are selling salt solution. This is becoming big.

Big. Okay. So water, bright light, no caffeine until 90 to 20 minutes.

What's next? Water with salt. Okay. And then it's a question of whether or not I'm training that day or not. so I do believe getting exercise is important. I think the data, having reviewed the data and talked to a number of experts on this, in particular, there's a guy who's really terrific. You may know him, Dr. Andy Galpin, who's down at Cal State Fullerton, excellent exercise physiologist. But also, if you look across the massive studies on exercise and heart health, there are a couple of things that become clear. One is that Everybody should be getting 120 to 150 and maybe even 150 to 180 minutes of so-called zone two cardio a week. This is the kind of cardiovascular exercise where you're doing work, you could have a conversation, but you're kind of at the threshold where it's not super easy to have a conversation, but we're not talking sprints. There's just a myriad of effects on heart health, vascular health all over the body, gut microbiome, muscle musculoskeletal stability, mental health, all these kinds of things. So, I have a routine where I either weight train for an hour in the morning or I do a portion of that weekly cardio. And, I just alternate weight train one day, cardio the next, weight drink, and then one day a week I don't do anything. I don't do any exercise.

Six days a week you exercise.

And, I miss days. You know, occasionally because of travel or other schedules or appointments, I might take two days off. I never go seven days. I always, I personally do well having a complete day off each week, but the hour of exercise generally is 5-10 minutes of warm-up and then it's hard work. And this is a new thing that we can get into when I talk about dopamine, but I do not allow myself to check social media, text message, phone calls, and lately not even music when I train for reasons that we can get into later. I'm really trying to get focused on what I'm doing, and I'm trying to extract the greatest amount of joy from the process in its purest form.

So no phone, essentially.

I try not to have the phone. Occasionally I'll use music or I'll listen to a podcast because it's such a great time to do that. So I don't want to say I never do, but most of the time I'm trying very hard to just do my exercise. And it doesn't matter if you run, swim, bike, row, so people these days can do calisthenics or weight training or something of that sort. The weight training thing is interesting because muscle building aside, it's very clear that five sets a week per muscle group is what's required to maintain muscle. And this is true for men, this is true for women, and obviously in young kids you don't want them weight training with heavy loads because it could shut down their long bone growth. That's the myth or what they say anyway. I don't know, kids are developing anyway. So, I don't know, I'll leave that to the coaches to decide that and the parents. But I think for people that are in their late teens, early 20s, and onward, it's really important if you look at longevity, a lot of the major injuries and early deaths, and not just due to accident, but chronic illness comes from people falling and breaking a hip, just not being strong. And so, I think being strong, regardless of who you are, is important. And so that's five sets per week, minimum per muscle group, and probably more like 10 routines splay out differently. So I do my thing. People have their thing. So I. I try and exercise or I do a 90-minute workout. And if I exercise, we could talk about that. Then I would shower and do my 90 minute workout. But sometimes I do the 90 minute workout first. And that's generally what, when I'm starting to the caffeine. And the 90-minute work bout is a serious non-negotiable time in which I don't allow myself to be on the internet. I'm not checking email. I'm not texting. My phone is off, off, off. And not on airplane mode. And it's a process of learning to focus and learning to do what we call no-go functions in the brain. So we have an area of the brain called the basal ganglia. that control go functions like reaching out for a pen and no-go, which is resisting the urge to do something. And these are circuits that are very important for learning how to control attention and for controlling behavior. Young animals, puppies, humans don't do no-go very well. Do you know the two marshmallow? Yes. Okay, the two marshmallow, you offered kids a marshmallow and you said if you don't eat it, you'll get two marshmallows. In 10 minutes. In 10 minutes, some kids can do it. that's a no-go task. You're saying, how well can you resist the urge to just go and eat the marshmallow? And there are a number of things that mimic this. Another no-go type behavior would be meditation, for instance, where you sit down, it's kind of painful to sit cross-legged, your thoughts are drawing you off, you remember something you need to do, and you're resisting the temptation to get up and do something else. And so this 90-minute Workout is a kind of combined meditation but also functional work for me. So for me, that could be writing, it could be planning a podcast, it could be reading. It's something that's kind of hard. And the thing to understand about this 90-minute workout is that you should expect some friction early on. It's not like you just flip a switch and you're in. That it takes some time to get into this focus mode and throughout that time, your brain will flicker in and out. And there's a tool that you can use to enhance your focus prior to this 90-minute workout, and I actually do this, sounds a little crazy, but it actually is grounded in really good neuroscience, which is that you place a crosshatch, you know, just a target at some distance on a piece of paper, and you force yourself to stare at it and not blink for about 30 to 60 seconds. And what you're doing is you're ramping up the neural circuits in the brain that drive go, no-go, and harnessing your visual attention. Your focus. You're focusing visual focus. drives cognitive focus. And for people that aren't sighted, auditory focus drives cognitive focus.

So, visual focused drives cognitive focus.

Yes. These two little bits of that we call eyes are, as people probably heard me say before, are two little bits of brain that are outside the cranial vault. They're the only way that your brain knows what to do in terms of whether or not it's day or night, who's out there, et cetera. But it's also a mechanism by which you draw your attentional systems into from kind of everywhere. Imagine spotlights just kind of moving around, bringing those spotlights to a common location, and then intensifying that spotlight. And since most work involves what we call exteroception, looking outside ourselves, this is very different than sitting in meditation where you're focusing internally. Because when you sit down to work, you kind of want to forget about your heartbeat and how your feet feel on the floor and that you're back in you know, might be a little sore or something. You want to be in the work. And so I do, I set a timer and I force 90 minutes of this and it, and it's really tough, Louis. Some days, some days I, it's anything to go get something out of the.

Fridge, any, and it could happen, distract myself.

And occasionally I fail. I will get up and go do something and, or I'll look at my phone. I do falter sometimes. But if you can learn to do this 90 minute bout, I bet consistently.

You can, create some amazing work.

You can do, you will do your best work. And what's really wonderful is it's not just about the work that you perform in that bout. What ends up happening is really special. This sort of combined meditation work bout, as I'm calling it, has this effect of you are actually tuning up and making your neural circuits for focus and attention better. So that after that, okay, you flip on the internet, you check your email, you're doing text messaging, you're probably hungrier I'm hungry now. I'm hungry if I've exercise, I'll eat my meal, my lunch. I tend to fast till about lunch most days. But what happens then is after lunch or something, you decide, oh, you know, I'm gonna sit down and read something or I'm gonna do some more work. But I've only got 20 minutes. You can drop in like a laser. It's because the circuits have learned you recognize that state. It's a, I guess the the analogy would be you do your hardest workout in the morning and you, or maybe it's a skill learning period, I know because you used to play professional sports. And then in the afternoon, it's going to be hard to recreate that entire 90-minute session, but you go back and you can drill it and you're right there because your nervous system recognizes you're right there. And so that's a holy part of my morning, as holy as the sunlight viewing. Wow. And it's something that's very hard to build in, but I actually schedule it just like I would a Zoom call. And it's cool because when you then, for instance, if you have a social interaction where someone comes to you and they say, I've got something to do and you're sort of distracted or something I need to tell you, you'll notice that you can quickly intensify that, what we call attentional spotlight in neuroscience. And so it's a skill. And I hear these days a lot about attention deficit and trouble focusing and some people have clinically diagnosed attention deficit. And I want, you know, there are resources for them. I did a whole podcast on ADHD, but many people don't have attention deficit in the clinical sense. They created it because they've never actually taught their brain how to focus for very long. And the phone sitting right here and there's distraction everywhere. And then of course it raises all these questions like people say, well, do you listen to music? Do you listen to white noise? There are a lot of tools and tricks. Sometimes music helps, sometimes music hinders. Sometimes being in a cafe can help, sometimes pure silence helps. It's really individual and it's really context dependent. So I don't want to give a prescriptive, but that 90-minute workout, if I can do all those things and then get that 90-minute workout and then eat my lunch, I feel like the system is set to make the rest of the day even better. Because we often hear about the perfect morning routine, but we're not thinking about how that routine influences the rest of the day's routine. Yes.

When did you start implementing that 90-minute focus?

Well, this whole thing around deliberate focus really started for me in college because to make a long story short, I was not a very disciplined high school student. I barely finished high school. I eventually got my act together. I went to college and after the first year, I did very poorly. I left, went to community college, came back and decided it was time to get serious. So I, this was all pre-cell phone because I'm 46 now. So I used to sit down at my desk. I would allow myself, it was CDs back then, two different CDs. It was a rancid CD and a Bob Dylan CD. Those are the only CDs I'd allow myself to listen to. I had my coffee, my water, and I would use the bathroom, and then I would not allow myself to get up for two hours. I would just study. And there were times when I spent a lot of time just looking at the tip of my pen wondering, if this was ever going to kick in. But then I realized if I could just get 15 seconds of focus, I noticed that I could focus better. So it's not like sets and reps in the gym where there's a fatigue and you, for instance, if you do 10, you know, I'm making this up. I don't do these kinds of routines, but 10 sets of 10, it's very hard to maintain that output 20 minutes later. I noticed that with focus, it's something that you kind of drop into a groove. Now, after about 90 minutes, it's very hard to maintain that. And there are a lot of data showing that these 90-minute, what are called ultradian rhythms, much of our life is broken up into 90-minute cycles. These 90-minute learning bouts are very good. And there are a couple other little tricks if people really want to get fancy. There's some really cool data that were published this last year in cell reports on what are called gap effects.

Okay.

So, when you learn something, whether or not it's a physical skill or you're learning a language, let's say you're working on sentences in Spanish because you're learning Spanish as we know, and you're really drilling it hard, harder, you're working at it. Turns out that if you stop randomly every once in a while and take 10 seconds and just do nothing, the brain, this has been now demonstrated by brain imaging, the brain runs many repetitions inside of that little rest block of the material that you were trying to learn. And the speed of learning and the depth of learning is much faster. So these gap effects have been shown for physical skill learning, language learning, math learning, music, etc. And this is the same process that happens during sleep. So normally you learn something during the day, you try and learn, you go to sleep and during sleep there's a rapid replay of the information. And that's when so-called neuroplasticity rewiring of connections occurs. These little gaps that you're doing, that you're inserting at random, not every three minutes or so, but just at random taking these 10 second gaps give you many more repetition. So if ever there was a little, was it like a cheat code? Is that what they called in video games? I don't play video games, but a cheat code, it's this. That every once in a while you just stop and do nothing. You don't have to close your eyes and you're getting more repetitions and then you go back into it. So some people like to do that and then we're about done with the morning but I'd be remiss if I didn't say that I always after lunch do a 10 to 30 minute either non-sleep deep rest or hypnosis.

What does that do for you?

Well, what it does is it, at least what the data show, because there have now been two studies published last year, one in cell reports and I believe the other was also in Cell Reports, Cell Press Journal, excellent journal, showing that 20-minute naps or things of the sort that I just described, the hypnosis I described, allow the neural plasticity that was triggered during that learning bout to occur much more quickly. And so people learn faster.

Interesting.

Yeah. So you're, and for some people, a nap isn't a feasible thing. Some people say our naps good or bad. if your nap interferes with your nighttime sleep, it's bad. If your nap does not, then it's okay. And naps that are shorter than 90 minutes, so anywhere from 10, 20, 30, 45, but certainly not longer than 90 minutes, are going to be better than naps that are longer than 90 minutes for reasons related to sleep. So that kind of ends the morning, and then the rest of the day just depends on what's happening. And I think it's too varied to describe, but I do suggest that people try and get a little bit of sunlight as the sun is setting in the evening or late afternoon, depending on time of year and where you live. Same practice because now you're sending two signals to that master circadian clock of when there's morning and when there's evening. And that clock has what we call a morning and an evening oscillator. So, if you can give more signals, then the system becomes more robust. It also ensures you a little bit against some of the exposure to nighttime bright light for reasons related to retinal sensitivity. So go outside for 10 or 15 minutes, check fine if you need to check your text messages, do it out front of your building or your home. That's going to be very good.

That's cool. Okay. That's the ultimate morning routine for you.

That's the ultimate morning routine for me. People might say, well, you're only working for 90 minutes, but I would wager In that 90 minutes of focus is.

Better than six hours of distraction.

In that 90 minutes, I'm accomplishing much more than I would accomplish in three, four hours. I will often do a second 90-minute bout in the afternoon. But very few people can do more than three hours or four hours of really focused work per day. And I'm talking about real work. I'm not talking about checking things or finding emails. Brainstorming with people, which is also a lot of fun. and can feel like work. But I'm talking about creative work. I'm talking about hard math. I'm talking about working on a problem where it actually feels like strain and friction. And I'm talking about not getting up to get a drink of water even if you're thirsty. I'm talking, I mean, this is a little... You're saying folks. Yeah, this is very, it's a little bit masochistic, but the payoff is huge because of what you accomplish, but also because of your ability to reinforce those circuits so that those circuits can kick in for six minutes when you need to do six minutes of something focused in the afternoon. Someone comes to you with a spreadsheet and says, this doesn't make any sense. Do you want to do this? Do you really want to fly to this meeting that you're going to? And you can just laser in and take care of everything, and then you can go right back to what you were doing in a very seamless way.

That's cool. Can you talk about, you mentioned dopamine a little bit. Can you talk about dopamine focus and motivation and how to manage our dopamine hits because it seems like every 30 seconds we're getting dopamine now, whether it's drinking coffee, having candy, social media, email pings, dings on the watches, whatever it is, it's a dopamine overload it feels like.

Yes.

So how do we stay motivated and manage dopamine at the same time?

Yeah, great question. Dopamine is the molecule of motivation.

The molecule of motivation.

Absolutely. I mean, for years and years, people thought dopamine was about pleasure, but dopamine is mainly about craving and motivation and drive.

Okay.

There's a simple experiment that illustrates that, but I would be remiss if I didn't first mention two excellent resources for people that want to learn a lot about dopamine. These would be perhaps interesting people for you to talk to directly. The first is a book called the Molecule of More, which is all about dopamine. The author is Lieberman. I don't know him personally, but I love the book. I wish I had written it. The second is Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. And the author there is Anna Lembke, L-E-M-K-E. She's a medical doctor and psychiatrist and runs the Dual Diagnosis Addiction Clinic at Stanford School of Medicine. She's a colleague. consider her a friend and she is world class, second to none in all things dopamine as it relates to addiction. So wonderful reads. And so a lot of what I'm going to talk about is kind of paraphrasing elements from their book. So I want to be clear. So here's the experiment. Take two rats. You give them a lever, they can press, and they can get food out of that lever. They can get heat if their cage is cold. they can get all sorts of things that are great for a rat, including a mate to mate with if they press this lever. Both rats press the lever just fine. Now you take away dopamine from one of those rats. You can actually do that by using a toxin that can kill off all the dopamine neurons. Okay? There's an equivalent experiment that's been done in humans, but it was a naturally occurring death of these dopamine dopamine neurons much in the same way that Parkinson's destroys dopamine neurons. What you find is that both rats or both people still experience pleasure from food, from sex, from warmth when they're cold, from cool when they're too warm, etc. However, if you take that rat, both rats, and you move them one rat length away from the lever, so they have to just do a little bit of work, a little bit of work in order to press the lever. Or you take a human who has no dopamine neurons or very little dopamine, and you make the pleasureful thing a little bit more challenging to get to. The ones with no dopamine do not pursue pleasure at all. That's just one example of what now are hundreds of examples in the neuroscience literature showing that dopamine is the molecule of suit, craving, motivation, drive. Pick your favorite word.

Dopamine is a good thing in motivation.

Provided it's in proper levels. Yes. That's right. If your dopamine is depleted, you will feel not motivated. Now, there's a double-edged sword here because many things, as you mentioned, accurately trigger dopamine release. Seeing positive comment, a compliment, food, the more palatable a food, a really tasty chip compared to a slice of a potato that's baked but doesn't have anything on it, one truly releases more dopamine than the other. I could list off a number of things, but we have a baseline level of dopamine. Nicotine, for instance, increases that by about 50%.

Gives you more dopamine.

Dopamine is released. You have two major dopamine pathways in the brain. There's one related to movement, one related to reward, broadly speaking. there are others, but broadly speaking, the so-called mesolimbic reward pathway. And then the other one, we don't have to throw out names, but we'll just confuse people. But you have these reward pathways and dopamine is involved in movement. So nicotine, about a 50% increase. Cocaine, 100% increase, a doubling. Methamphetamine, 1000 or even 1000-fold increase.

Holy cow.

So huge increase in dopamine.

That's why it's so addictive.

So addictive, but what happens after that big dopamine increase is that the baseline levels of dopamine go below what they were before. How low that drop is below baseline is proportional to how big the increase was before.

That's why it's so addictive to stay on these things.

That's right. Well, and that's why if you're getting lots of little dopamine hits from things, as we call them, you're going to feel kind of depressed and those things don't feel as rewarding anymore. Okay, now eventually the system can reset if you don't indulge. Let me give an example. This is a true story example. Out of respect for the individual, I don't want to reveal his name, but in talking about dopamine, someone I know has a child. The kid is in his 20s. He was a decent student, excellent athlete, really charming, nice kid. I've known him since he was little, and he reached a point where his friends had graduated high high school, he went to community college, and he kind of fizzed out of that. He wasn't into that. You know, this resonated with my earlier story. He was working a job, but then he wasn't feeling like working. And he was convinced he had ADHD and he was depressed, and he started taking off down the path of medication, which, by the way, have helped many, many people. Most of the medications for ADHD, by the way, are drugs that increase dopamine because dopamine increases focus. it increases motivation and it increases drive, essentially, the willingness to get into action in pursuit of goals, just like the rats that have dopamine or the humans that have dopamine pursue. The ones that have depleted dopamine do not. So this guy who is a real story was struggling in a major way. So about three months ago, he was watching a lot of videos online. He was texting a lot. He's mainly playing video games, video games, video video games, but he wasn't really enjoying them as much anymore. And one thing you see with people with ADHD is they actually can focus if they're really interested in something. Why? Because their dopamine levels are elevated and they're able to focus. He heard about the dopamine system and Anna's work and I talked to him and he decided to do what some people call dopamine fast, but for him that meant no video games. and he did two weeks of no screens, which at first I think was agonizing for him.

Oh my gosh.

It's now three months later. It's a little less than three months later. I actually talked to his parent today. Working full time off all ADHD meds.

Hmm.

Has a girlfriend. I don't know if that's related or not, probably because he's got his life together a little bit more, which is an attractive feature as opposed to someone who's, you know, spiraling out, doing nothing, living at home, which frankly is an unattractive feature, regardless of boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. He's very focused on his work. He's excited by things, and he allows himself a short period of time each day where he plays video games and he enjoys them again like never before. There is a simple explanation for this, which is that his dopamine system is reset. When you're constantly pursuing things, eating highly palatable foods, engaging in very stimulating anything, any behavior that's very stimulating, there's a drop below baseline and it takes an increasingly great stimulus, high threshold stimulus in order to excite you. So if people are feeling bored, unmotivated, unstimulated, most of the time it's because they are overindulging in things that keep pounding this dopamine system, but the baseline of dopamine is going down, down, down. no, no, no. Now, there are a few hacks that can actually help and Anna talks about some of these in her book. The main thing is to if someone is engaging in any truly addictive behavior or substance or a behavior that just doesn't feel like it's that great but you're finding yourself doing it compulsively.

Like, what are some examples?

Texting, Instagram. I limit my Instagram time to two hours per day, which itself just sounds like a lot. grown adult and I spend two hours on it. But I do a lot of work there, right? I'm trying to put out content that's educational. But sometimes I think to myself, like, I'm a grown man. I'm saying two hours a day on Instagram. Well, that's a lot of where we spend our time now. But if you allow yourself four hours a day on social media, you'll probably find that it's.

You're scrolling.

You're not even sure what you're looking for. Like, what am I doing? Exactly. I just wasted this time. Exactly. And what you're looking for is something to jolt that. baseline. So you want to limit those behaviors or in some cases if it gets really severe like it was for this individual you want to eliminate completely for 30, 60 days. Ideally it's 30 days. Now this is the same prescriptive that they give alcoholics, heroin addicts, et cetera. But some of those drugs of course have actual withdrawal symptoms that can be problematic. You know these days I'm not a pot smoker, I've never liked drugs or alcohol, I kind of lucked out that way. but, you know, there's, and I'm not trying to demonize, I'm not passing judgment, but, you know, cannabis, for instance, is pretty prominent in prominent use. And a lot, and a lot of people, the idea of 30 days without that is that I think they probably say they could do it, but it would be very challenging for them. But, and I'm not here to tell people what to do. Right. Then there's about drugs, alcohol or anything, but the idea is 30 days of no interaction with that thing. person, behavior, I mean, all sorts of things, so that you can enjoy other things. I like to say, you know, addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. And if I may, enlightenment is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure. All of that hinges on this dopamine system. So, you have to be very judicious in your interactions with things that deliver pleasure or else they will soon not deliver pleasure, and they will diminish your pleasure for everything else that you interact with. So the way to think about this is just to set up constraints. And as I'm stealing Anna's words left and right, forgive me, Anna, she has many more important things to say, and she says them much more eloquently than I. But she says, you know, we don't give our kids chocolate cake for breakfast. But we sort of understand that dessert comes at a certain time of day, and after completing certain things. But we for some reason, we just allow ourselves to just dive into this immense dopamine sensory landscape of social media. Because social media isn't just comments, you and me saying, oh, like Lewis put something up, there's that, that stuff's great. But then there's also a lot of violent stuff, politically intense stuff, there's a lot of friction, there's a lot of joy. I mean, you're essentially going to the dopamine carnival. And so you need to restrict the amount of time. And especially if you're somebody who wants to get work done and your work is not the, you know, social media. And I'm pointing at social media, but this could be anything, anything that you enjoy. Food, for instance, you don't want to overindulge in highly palatable Foods. It's just bad for us. We know this for a number of reasons. So the key is to take this dopamine system and set it up for you to be able to be motivated and focused. And the way to do that is to make the experiences around that thing that you want to be motivated to do a little less or a lot less exciting.

What do you mean?

This is why I don't listen to music these days or check text messages while I'm in the gym. And sometimes I'll listen to a book or a podcast, but I really try and just be just work out, including while I'm running. Why? Because these days we are layering in dopamine. We're getting dopamine from the energy during we're drinking. Okay, big increase in dopamine. I forget the actual numbers, but I think it's 1.8 times increase. And some of them have l-tyrosine, which is a dopamine precursor. Some of them have caffeine, which also increases dopamine and upregulates dopamine receptors. So you're getting it from the energy drink. Plus, it's the video game you're playing. Plus, you're with your friends. It's just a dopamine soup, which sounds great, except that other things that you do afterwards are going to seem under stimulating. And you're going to think, I can't focus on this. So I also kind of wonder whether or not you were having trouble focusing in your class because the Canelo fight was that awesome.

It was insane.

It was. Yeah, he's amazing. I am a boxing fan.

It was crazy.

And he, if you had to like build a boxer, you'd build him like that. Just his head, his shape, the right hook.

And it was just like the roar of the crowd and just the energy, it was amazing.

Yeah, yeah. That's great. There's a beautiful story unfolding there with him. So that could be it too. There's a kind of a letdown. And so I think it may be helpful for people to understand that the postpartum depression that people feel after a big celebration is real. That's real. And if you just wait a little while, that system will reset. You don't necessarily wait 30 days, but if you just had a great party, you should expect that there'll be a long tale of joy. But then you might feel a little low, a little underwhelmed.

So true, man.

And if you're gonna sit down and try and do work and you're finding yourself not that focused, you might want to think about some of the behaviors that led up to that work. So I really try to get into my work in a focused way by making the period right before it's a little boring. Frankly, going outside, getting some sunlight, drinking my mate, it sounds like a pretty boring life, right? It's not like blasting a bunch of music and getting really amped up. But, I'm able to get a nice peak of dopamine during that work out, and I think that's a functional dopamine increase. And then afterwards, yes, indeed, there's a drop. Now, there's some other hacks that Ana's talked about. And again, we can look to our friend Wim Hof. Other people have done this, although this was happening long before Wim. There's a beautiful study published in the European Journal of Physiology showing that getting into cold water, so this could be cold shower, could be ice bath, could be any number of different plunge type things or an ocean or whatever that people want to use for anywhere from three to six minutes creates a 2.5 X increase in dopamine that lasts many hours. So it's a unique stimulus because it's not like a spike and then it drops. It's like a long arc increasing your baseline dopamine increases alertness, feelings of well-being some they did blood draws in this study. So these are real data. You know, they weren't, it wasn't conjured. sure. They really know this. And there are some cases of people who were full-blown addicts or people who are struggling with ADHD who start doing regular cold water exposure, you know, three to six times a week, three to six minutes at a time, and discover that, wow, they actually can focus because they're getting that dopamine increase.

Yeah. This stuff is fascinating, man.

It's really interesting, I think, to me, because the dopamine, you know, coming up in neuroscience. I've been in the game a long time now, almost, you know, gosh, almost 30 years. But dopamine was always thought of as pleasure. But it's confusing because it's associated with pleasure, but it's not the actual experience of pleasure. And immediately after sex, immediately after any powerful experience that's very pleasureful, dopamine system crashes down.

What happens in the body when dopamine crashes?

Well, there's an interesting thing that happens because there's a hormone called prolactin, which is actually involved in milk letdown for nursing, but is also increased in both men and women in anticipation of childbirth. This is actually responsible for the so-called dad bod. Prolactin lays down body fat stores, tends to make people a little more sedentary, and this has been shown in humans and in animals. it tends to reduce libido and sex drive. And so if you think about dopamine is a currency of motivation that biology has used for hundreds of thousands of years. So, you know, whether or not, you know, we think about currencies like dollars or euros or bitcoins or ethereum, all of those actually relate to dopamine. Dopamine is the fundamental currency that we're all working for. And dopamine has this quality of making us focused on things outside our immediate experience. This is why people were on cocaine or methamphetamine, which is a really extreme version of dopamine increase. They tend to be all about plans and action. They're not sitting there thinking about how wonderful they feel in their own body, whereas drugs like cannabis and psilocybin and drugs, these are not drugs that I recommend people use recreationally. I'm not passing judgment, but I just want to be clear about what I'm saying and not saying, that any drugs that increase serotonin tend to make people kind of still focused on their internal landscape, their thinking, that's kind of internal reflection thing. So the serotonin system and the dopamine system are kind of antagonistic to one another. And the prolactin system is associated with the serotonin system. So prolactin is kind of about, it's a mellowing out. Interesting. And, just to nail the point, there are many people in the world who suffer from schizophrenia, 1% of the world's population, a huge number, a very sad thing, psychosis, hearing things, et cetera. And most of the drugs designed to treat schizophrenic psychosis are drugs that reduce dopamine. And oftentimes you'll see people on the street who are taking these drugs and they'll be writhing like this with their face. Sometimes men will have gynecomastia, they'll have breast development because these drugs block dopamine, increase prolactin, and disrupt the motor pathways that are associated with movement. I say this for two reasons. One is it illustrates the relationship between prolactin, dopamine, movement, et cetera. But the other is to hopefully invoke a little bit of empathy for people that oftentimes we will see people who if they're shouting and acting crazy, that's probably an unmedicated a dissociated person who's bipolar or has schizophrenia. But if you see someone in their catatonic or they are writhing and acting very strange, that's a person who's, we don't know for sure, but very likely is actively trying to treat their own psychosis to eliminate the voices and things of that sort. So I say that because I, you know, I, we have a big homeless population issue in California and elsewhere, too. And oftentimes we see people acting crazy and we think, oh, you know, we make this disparaging judgment that everyone's prone to doing it, of course, but they're crazy. But oftentimes that those crazy movements and the things they're doing are the reflection of drugs that block the dopamine system.

Gotcha.

Yeah. So I don't mean to make it dark, but I think that there is a, you know, 1% of the world's population is a huge number and a lot of people suffering from these things.

Now, I want to bring it home with this idea about drugs, specifically smoking alcohol and let's say marijuana, I guess the most commonly used drugs by most people. How much did those three substances affect dopamine and motivation of focus? And how do they affect the brain chemically? If you're using them on a consistent basis, let's say every week you're using one of these, does it affect the brain that much or does it not really affect the brain in terms of focus, motivation, and dopamine?

Okay. With the caveats, excellent question by the way, and I think actually a fundamentally important question because we live in a world of substances. I mean, we all have to eat, we all have to hydrate. I'm drinking caffeine right now. As I mentioned, drugs and and alcohol have never been my thing. I was part of an MDMA clinical trial. I did two of those sessions. That's a drug, right? But it was part of a medically supervised clinical trial. But I'm not a person who uses recreational drugs. And so I want to just also set up the caveat that I have no judgment whatsoever. I think if people are informed, they.

Can make better decisions for themselves. Yeah, I'm curious more about the scientific data.

What is it?

If people are to use it, whether.

They know what they're doing. Just know what you're doing.

Yeah, just know what you're doing.

Let's take nicotine first.

Yes.

I have a colleague not at Stanford who has a Nobel Prize who chose Nicorette. Why? I asked him why and he said, well, for years he was a smoker and it allowed him to focus. And then he realized that lung cancer is something he doesn't want. So he switched, he quit and he couldn't focus as well. So he started Nicorette. That's right. Constantly throughout the day. Nicorette stimulates acetylcholine receptors called nicotine receptors, and they are located in multiple places in the brain and body, but they are highly enriched in an area of the forebrain called nucleus basalis that increases focus and the ability to focus. So nicotine increases focus. I won't lie, it does. It's the smoking part that can mess you up. And nowadays, I see a lot of people vaping. That seems to be a big thing. And that's a big concern with kids. And again, now I'm not a parent and I'm sounding like a parent. But I think the- what is vaping.

Doing to the brain though?

Well, they're becoming highly addicted to nicotine stimulation. And it's very, very hard to quit nicotine stimulation because the level of pleasure and focus that you get from nicotine stimulation is significant. You get a dopamine increase and the nicotine increase and that makes you feel motivated. focused. It's like the perfect storm of chemicals to allow you to do really focused work. And so nicotine, and because it increases dopamine and acetylcholine, is this magic elixir for motivation and focus. But it's potentially addictive and hazardous in some cases. I actually have several friends that dip Nicorette all day long. Some people feel sick doing it. Some people love it.

There.

I should mention some safer Alternatives, perhaps. This is. This isn't really about supplements, but there is something called Alpha GPC, which I occasionally take 300 milligrams of Alpha GPC to do a work about. It does increase Focus because it increases acetylcholine release. Got it. There is some evidence that Alpha GPC at, I think, 600 to 900 milligrams per day can offset some of the mental decline associated with Alzheimer's and aging. But this is an over-the-counter thing people have to check with their doctor. Okay. So that's nicotine, that's how that works. But that's why people smoke, that's why they take Nicorette, that's why people are vaping, and that's why people are taking Alpha-GPC. And nowadays, the whole business of nootropics is smart drugs are mainly geared towards, mainly consist of things that have caffeine, to increase adrenaline for alertness and dopamine for motivation and things that increase acetylcholine and things like alpha GPC. Got it. Okay. Then there's alcohol and alcohol is more of a sedative. Alcohol's main effect is to reduce the amount of activity in the forebrain, which is involved in planning and inhibiting. It's involved in the no-gos. Right. Right. It's also involved in the sense of self and you're sent your self-image, who you think you are in the world. It's kind of interesting. So when people have a drink or two, they feel less inhibited. They also, at least at the early stages of drinking, they tend to feel more confident. They tend to continue drinking, then they tend to lose their self-image. They forget who they are. They can even go blackout drunk. And the downstream chemicals are interesting for a small, maybe 8% of the population, alcohol causes a huge dopamine increase. These are the people that from the first drink, they discover that they are an alcoholic or very prone to alcohol. I've known people like this. Then these are the people that can drink like nobody else. It's not just a tolerance, it's that dopamine system kicking in. Whereas for most people, it's more of a sedative, it works through the so-called GABA system, and it's more of just kind of a tranquilizer. to shut everything down. Got it.

Okay.

Okay.

But it doesn't help you focus.

No, so a lot of people self-medicate. So being alert is a prerequisite to being focused, but being too alert makes it hard to focus because then your spotlights are going all over the place. Some people use alcohol as a way to reduce that level of alertness slightly and get into kind of a groove where they can focus a little better than they would otherwise. Ideally, you would know how to do that without alcohol, but a lot of people use alcohol for that reason. You know, I'm always, I'm gonna make some enemies here, but I have family members who will say, I need a drink. You know, people will say, I need a drink. That is a sign of somebody that can't regulate their nervous system. Right? Like, I need a cup of coffee is a, and I'm not being disparaging of these statements. I've said, I need a cup of coffee. coffee. But what you're really saying is that your system requires this chemical to get a lift. It's not a crime for most people, but if you need a drink in order to relax, in my mind, you don't actually have control over your nervous system. That's no judgment, but it would be wise to try and develop some behavioral tools that could perhaps work alongside your pharmacology, if that's what you're looking for. If you still want to pursue pharmacology. And then there's cannabis, there's marijuana, and there we have to divide nowadays among CBD versus THC and the potency of a lot of edibles and people smoking cannabis, the potency has gone way, way up. So, there's big dopamine increases, big serotonin increases, which is the kind of mellowing effect or the lack of anxiety. And then, of course, there's this huge array of strains now where, like, I anytime I tell a pot, a really seasoned pot smoker that I don't like cannabis, I just don't. I, you know, admittedly, I tried it many years ago. I did inhale and I didn't like it. And so I didn't do it again. And, but I'm told that there are now many different strains, some of which have a certain type of psychoactive effects and make people focused and alert, others that are make them more sleepy. There's a huge array of effects. Dopamine, serotonin, and what's called the cannabinoid system. And this is interesting, the cannabinoid receptors are actually named because they bind cannabis, are in the hippocampus and other areas of the body. They're involved in pain modulation. Not surprisingly, a lot of people will smoke cannabis for chronic pain or for glaucoma because it reduces eye pressure and it's a disease of pressure in the eye. and it's involved in learning memory and forgetting. Oh, that's right.

So, but it's involved in forgetting.

That's right.

Not remembering.

Correct. So, stimulation of the cannabinoid system makes you more prone to forget things. And let's just put it this way, pot smokers are not, they're not savants when it comes to remembering things. And if they are, it's fair to say that they would be better at remembering things if they use cannabis. Interesting. But again, I want to be clear what my stance is on this because I know that many people derive great benefit from some of these things.

Yes.

And provided it's done legally, age appropriate, et cetera. Again, no judgment. I think that there are people who derive benefit. It's a question of context. And the one context that we know this is very problematic, all of this is problematic, is in the developing brain. Because up until about age 25, the amount of neuroplasticity that you can get from any single event, chemical or behavioral or otherwise, is very robust. And so if people are growing up using a lot of a particular drug, then the brain is reshaping and those dopamine circuits are reshaping and those serotonin circuits are reshaping according to that chemical environment. And so I think it's important to know. that. And so for some people, for instance, who relied heavily on ADHD drugs, Ritalin and Adderall during childhood, it's very hard for them to come off as adults.

Yes.

And again, there are drugs like modafinil, Ritalin, Adderall that have helped millions of people. And there are also millions of people who are relying on these compounds who probably don't need them. but they aren't aware of some of the other protocols and approaches. So it's sort of a situation whereby the pharmacology is very potent, it's available, and so people go to the lowest hanging fruit.

You're a wealth of information. HubermanLab.com, the podcast Huberman Lab, if you guys want a weekly dose of neuroscience and information on optimizing the body, the brain, sleep, all these different things. You've got one of the top podcasts in the world, YouTube channel, Instagram channel. It's all@hubermanlab everywhere. I highly recommend you subscribe. I'm trying to get you to do a book soon. I keep saying it.

I don't know if there's a book in the works, but hopefully-- Did my editor ask you? I've been working-- I finished the book and then I have not sent the book back to the publisher. I eventually there will be a book or books plural.

Yes, multiple.

We need multiple books. As you probably noticed, you know, I'm not very succinct. And so for me, it's just been great fun. And by the way, I owe you a great deal of thanks, you know, to join the ranks of the podcasters. Because you've been a tremendous inspiration and source of support in having me on several times and getting the word out there. Podcasting is one form, books are another. And one of these days I'll get my act back together and finish this.

It's coming. They're coming. But Huberman Lab in the meantime is an amazing show, YouTube channel, Instagram. You do Instagram lives that are very informative. You break down all the science, which I love. So, people need to go check you out there. We're going to do a part two. We're going to come back and talk about sleep and all things sleep here. So, make sure you guys are coming back for that when we drop that. I want to ask you the three.

Truths again in your definition of greatness.

And see if it's changed.

These are always the hardest questions.

I got them up here, so I am curious if it is the same thing.

Oh my, okay, well if I migrate off those...

If it is different, that is great.

I guess it means there was neuroplasticity.

There you go, yes. So, three truths, if this was your last day and we did not have access to any of your information, what would you say of those three truths that you would share with the world? Three lessons you have learned that you would share with the world.

Well, I am a big believer in what the Oracle said, which is know thyself. It's very important for all of us to repeatedly take stock of where our strengths are, where our weaknesses are, where we find meaning and purpose, and where we find joy. And to take stock of those. And it's a simple exercise. You just take a walk or write it down and be as honest with yourself as one can be. and to try and lean into the strengths and try and make up some of the deficiencies, which we all have, but I certainly do. Many, many deficiencies, as the people in my life will tell you. But I think it's a very important exercise. That's probably the first one. The second one is take care of your physiology. You know, I, I believe in Psychology. We are psychological animals. We are storytellers. But if your physiology isn't where it needs to be. If the foundation is troubled, it's going to be very hard to navigate your mental states. And so, I've often said, and I'll say it again, that if you can't control the mind with the mind, if you want to look to the body to control the mind. So, if your thoughts, if you're having a hard time controlling your thoughts, your feelings and emotions, you're feeling triggered, you're feeling like everything's bearing down on you, try to get out of that trap by focusing on particular patterns of breathing, take a cold shower, go for a walk, get some sunshine, do something to shift your physiology so that you can approach that challenge from a different stance. And then the third one is one that I'm getting increasingly into these days, which is what I would call get the download. I'm getting a lot of value from this personally, which is when you wake up in the morning, your brain is in that liminal state between wakefulness and sleep. And if you bombard yourself with sensory information mainly through screens, you lose out on a key opportunity to hear some of what truly your subconscious process during the middle of the night. And so I suggest when you go outside, take a little notebook and piece of, you know, a pen or a pencil and jot down what comes to mind, if anything. Some days something comes to mind, sometimes no. But again, if you're allowing space for it, you'll be amazed at what kinds of ideas and clarity can come about as it relates to your work and your relationships and yourself. It's really a sacred time and it's one that I think we've kind of bulldozed out of the way by just bringing in more stuff. and all that stuff is great. I'm, you know, I love the internet. I really do. I think it's, I think it's really cool. And there's so much learning to be had and pleasure to be had. But I think that try and get the download of your, of your life experience. And that happens in that early morning time. So just create a little bit of space and, and, and you'll benefit.

I like it. I like it. You've, you hit one of the three, so it's good. I like it. I like it. I want to acknowledge you. Andrew, for constantly showing up, man. You constantly show up on the research data. You're just studying and obsessing about how to find the best strategies based on data to support human beings. And that's what we're all about here at the School of Greatness, is how do we learn the things that can improve our life? And so I'm so grateful for you. I appreciate you. And the world is better having you in it, having your information. and the way you break it down, you really break it down in a scientific way that's also easy to understand. You use the big terminology, but then you'd say, well, this is what this means and how to use it. So I really appreciate how you show up your almost 30 years of commitment to this work and understanding the brain, you know, sleep, the body, all these things for optimizing our life. So I appreciate. Appreciate you, my friend.

Thank you. I appreciate you, too. And I, I admire the way you show. to things. I admire your energy levels and your positivity, but hearing all that is very gratifying. And, thanks so much for having me on. It's always a tremendous pleasure.

Of course, man.

Final question, what's your definition of greatness? Constant, deliberate focus on self-improvement.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.