Use This MORNING ROUTINE To Destroy Laziness & Eliminate BRAIN FOG! | Andrew Huberman

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.

This video is sponsored by Endel and you'll hear more about them later in this video. I think you gotta have a dream. The School of Greatness. Really? Yeah. Please welcome Lewis Howes. 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. 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, you know, 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. 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 shh or, you know, kind of like exhale on impact type thing. So, 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. You know, their mouth are 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, you know, 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 where 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 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 nasal microbiome, a mouth microbiome, we have a urethral microbiome and in women there's a vaginal microbiome. 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. Eyes, 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 wanna 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, you know, really gnawing on food is actually good for the jaw. Whereas the twin in these twin studies were, went off to cultures or areas of the world where they were eating a lot of soft foods. There's, 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 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. Very hard. 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 going to 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 your 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 and 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. This 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 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 dying underwater. So please don't do that. But 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 hyper-oxygenating, 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. and 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 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. 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? As you can tell by this episode, we can always count on Andrew for science-backed tips and advice on how to optimize ourselves. And after this conversation, I was so inspired myself to actively seek out a product that will help improve my day-to-day life. And today's sponsor is Endel, an award-winning app that harnesses the power of sound to improve your focus, sleep, and overall mental health. And let me give you a quick tour of this app. Endel takes into account the current amount of outdoor natural light in my location, the weather, my heart rate, my wake-up time, and my activity level to create a soundscape in real time just for me. Now, Endel uses AI technology to understand your exact needs and enhance your state of mind through sound. Whether you need to get to sleep, concentrate on the task at hand, or unwind after a long day, Endel generates personalized soundscapes in real time that are customized to you. Endel also integrates with Apple Watch, Oura Ring, and Alexa, allowing you to deepen its personalization. I used it while doing some work to prep for an interview, and I was able to zone in and get into deep focused state. If you want to try it for yourself, I've worked with the team at Endel to give you a whole month for free with full access to Endel's soundscapes, library, and features. If you want to try it for free right now, head to endel.io/Lewis to grab your free month. Now let's get back to the interview.

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, you know, 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 run down, but then I would also do the shower, make sure you get some decent food and get a good 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 mechanism 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. They'll 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. Yes. 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. Yeah. trying to 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. Go outside. 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. 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 it's 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 it just a ring light, a blue light. This is a case where you can blast your system.

Wow.

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. No, 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 red 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 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? Or 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 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. You don't want to look directly at the sun. You don't want to look directly, there's a safety mechanism. I guess if 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 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 like waiting for that. You're savoring it. It tastes so much better. And that relates to the dopamine system, which I know we're gonna talk about later. I sometimes will drink yerba mate instead of. Yeah, I love mate.

Mate has a. Can you put honey in it or anything?

I sweeten it with stevia or something.

I don't really like sweet stuff too much.

And I wish I had that disease. Yeah, it's. You know, I wish I had. I like savory things and salty things. I, 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... How do you... That's a crime, isn't it? It's a crime. Well, it's not a crime I committed. I love the instrument. It's a crime 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 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 job opportunities.

Connection, relationships.

Absolutely. And there's, well, and relationship opportunities. If you're 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. Right. 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 gonna 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. It helps you, we should be careful 'cause sometimes this gets tricky. It helps you utilize fat as an energy source.

And not needing the sugar.

Right. Whether or not you 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 an energy resource, which is very good. And it also has some indirect effects on blood sugar regulation through the insulin management pathway.

And Monté is caffeinated or no caffeine?

Oftentimes it's caffeine and oftentimes it can be very high caffeine. The one that I like-- I thought.

You said no caffeine until 90 minutes after, right?

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 get going for it, I really have this. Doing both. I like to see the mate and the coffee. Double, double, double. 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- so Mate's.

Got a lot of those ingredients.

Mate doesn't have electrolytes, it doesn't have salt. But for, 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, but 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.

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 90-20 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, an 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. We're not talking sprints. There's just a myriad of effects on heart health, vascular health all over the body, gut microbiome, 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 train. 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 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.

Yeah.

Okay. And it doesn't matter if you, you know, run, swim, bike, row, you know, 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. But 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 and people have their thing. So 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 drink the caffeine. And the 90-minute workout 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. You know the two marshmallow tests? 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, some kids can do it. That's pure, that's a no-go task. You're saying how well can you resist the urge to just go and 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 work bout 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, 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 that we call eyes are, as people probably heard me say before, 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 from kind of everywhere. imagine spotlights just kind of moving around, bringing those spotlights to a common location, and then intensifying that spot. And since most work involves what we call exteroception, looking outside ourself, 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 and 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.

Get up and 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.

And I bet consistently you can create some amazing work.

You can do, you will do your best work. 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 hungry now. I'm hungry if I of 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 analogy would be you do your hardest workout in the morning and 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 indeed 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.

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. 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. There 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 get. Just get. 15 seconds of focus, I noticed that I could focus better. It's not like sets and reps in the gym where there's a fatigue and you, for instance, if you do 10, 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 drop into a groove. Now, after about 90 minutes, it's very hard to maintain that. and there's 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, as 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, et cetera. 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 seconds gaps, give you many more repetition. So it's, if ever there was a little, what is 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 everyone's while you just stop and do nothing, you don't have to close your eyes, and you're getting more repetition. 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 nap's 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. 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 that 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, you know, checking things or. Brainstorming with people, which is also a lot of fun. 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.

Wow.

I'm talking, I mean, this is a little dang 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. There's an equivalent experiment that's been done in humans, but it was a naturally occurring death of these dopamine neurons. 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, et cetera. 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 pursuit, 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 comments, 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 then 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, thousand or even thousand 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. I 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. He reached a point where his friends had graduated high school, he went to community college, and he kind of fizzed out of that. He wasn't into that. This resonated with my earlier story. He was working a job, but then he wasn't feeling like working. 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 was mainly playing video games, video games, video games, 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 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, you know, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. Yeah. 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, down, down. Now there are a few hacks that can actually help, and Ana 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. I'm a grown adult and I spend two hours on it. But I do a lot of work. I'm trying to put out content that's educational. But sometimes I think to myself like I'm a grown man. I'm spending 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 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, 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, I think, they probably say they could do it, but it would be very challenging for them. 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, 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 that 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 say, 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 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 drink 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. Yeah. 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 amazing. Yeah, he's amazing.

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, there's a beautiful story unfolding there with, with him. But, yes. So that could be it, too. You know, there's a kind of a let down. And so I think it's, it may be helpful for people to understand that the postpartum depression that people feel after a big celebration.

It's 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 going to 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 bout. 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 Anna's talked about. And again, we can look to our friend Wim Hof. Other people have done this, although this was 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 2.5x increase in dopamine that lasts many hours. So it's a unique stimulus because it's not like a small spike and then it drops. It's like a long arc increasing your baseline dopamine, increases alertness, feelings of well-being. They did blood draws in this study, so these are real data. It wasn't conjecture. 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 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.

This stuff is fascinating, man.

It's really interesting to me because dopamine, coming up in neuroscience, I've been in the game a long time now, almost 30 years. 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. Pro-lactin 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 bitcoin, 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 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. It'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 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. I say that because I We have a big homeless population issue in California and elsewhere too. And oftentimes we see people acting crazy and we think, oh, 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. Sorry, I don't mean to make it dark, but I think that there is a 1% of the world's population is a huge number.

That's a lot.

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 or focus?

Okay.

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 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? People are going to use it whether they know about it or not.

They just know what you're doing. Yeah, just know what you're doing. Let's take nicotine first. I have a colleague not at Stanford who has a Nobel Prize who chewed 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 taking 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. Okay. 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 sounding, I'm not a parent and I'm sounding like a parent. But, you know, I think the, what does vaping do 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 and 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. Got it. I actually have several friends that dip Nicotine all day long. Some people feel sick doing it. Some people love it. There, I should mention some safer alternatives perhaps. 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 out. 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 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. It's also involved in the sense of self and your self-image. Who you think you are in the world is 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.

Wow.

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 alcoholism. 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 a just kind of a tranquilizer to shut everything down. Okay.

But it doesn't help you focus.

No. So a lot of people self-medicate by. 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 going to 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. 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 have. You don't actually have control over your nervous system. That's, you know, 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 sure. Sure. If you still want to pursue pharmacology. Yeah. 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 of anxiety. And then, of course, there's this huge array of strains now where anytime I tell a really seasoned pot smoker that I don't like cannabis, I just don't. Admittedly, I tried it many years ago. I did inhale and I didn't like it. And so I didn't do it again. 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 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 didn't 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 is 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.

Yes. Yes.

And, and, and again, there are drugs like modafinil, armodafinil, 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. 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 podcast because you've been a tremendous inspiration and source of support in 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 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've got them up here, so I'm.

Curious if it's the same thing. Oh my, okay, well if I migrate off those... If it's different, that's great.

I guess it means there was neuroplasticity. There you go, yes. So, three truths, if this was your last day and we didn't have access to any of your information, what would you say are those three truths that you would share with the world?

Three lessons you've learned?

That you would share with the world?

Well, I'm a big believer in what the Oracle said, which is know thyself. I think 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 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, you know, when you wake up in the morning, your brain is in that kind of liminal state between wakefulness and sleep. And if you bombard yourself with sensory information through mainly through screens, you lose out on a key opportunity to hear some of what your sub truly your subconscious process during the middle of the night. and so I suggest when you go outside, take a little notebook and a 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 a really a sacred time, and it's one that I think we've We've kind of bulldozed out of the way by just bringing in more stuff. And all that stuff is great. I love the internet. I really do. 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 life experience and that happens in that early morning time. So just create a little bit of space and you'll benefit. I like it.

I like it. You hit one of the three, so that's good. 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, I admire the way you show up to things. I 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.

If you enjoyed that interview, then I know you'll love what we have coming up right now.

We've all heard the sayings, you know, how do you, you know, journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. or how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? Or, you know, all these sayings and it goes back to the Bible and earlier, right? I mean, this is not new. These are not new sayings, but they're showing up in different forms. What's lost in those short descriptions, however, is that every step is not equivalent. If it were just that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, everyone would pursue their goals. Everyone would push back against adversity. Everyone, I mean, you can read the inspirational stories as many times as one needs. And I do think inspirational stories are very high value. In fact, I think they're vicarious dopamine. I think they give us the sense that we could, which then orients hope, which then orients us to the world again.

Maybe it's possible for me.

That's right. So let's say, let's take the example of somebody who's-- But to finish, that's.

That story of it's not about just taking a single step and one step at a time. Is it because there's adversities every 10 steps you go and so it's harder and harder?

It's not just-- well, it's just very non-linear. You know, it's some days go, you know, I know this from my scientific career. Some days it's easy, some days it's hard, it's all over the place, right? So I think the thing to remember is that dopamine is this incredibly powerful molecule that allows us to buffer the effort process. It allows us to be in effort longer and it allows us to actually eventually enjoy the process of effort.

And not think about the reward. but just say, oh, I'm enjoying the process.

Right. Well, you just described the first step. The first step in learning to attach dopamine to the effort process, which is the key operation in order to succeed, is to be very careful about how much you focus on the end goal. Keeping the goal in mind is important for a proper orientation. You have to know the ultimate destination. But if at any point if we were to evaluate our progress relative to that end goal, or if we don't know what the end goal is, there's a huge gap there. And it can feel overwhelming and depressing.

And I'm not good enough, I should just give up, what am I doing this for?

That's right.

Those thoughts will affect us.

And they're very realistic, right? I mean, as Carol will say and other people have said in the psychology field, positive self-talk oftentimes, unless you do it correctly, you're badly wrong. Lying to yourself won't work. saying, I'm a winner, I'm a winner, I'm a winner, when you haven't lost or you haven't won yet is great.

But that's not the most effective use of these systems. Well, you're also being out of integrity with yourself. You're telling yourself a lie. You're like, and then you're losing your.

Ability to have confidence because you're just lying to yourself. And if it's really extreme, there's a name for it, it's called delusional. And people will start to point that out and then it becomes harder to recruit people into your your goals. So I think the key thing is to attach that sense of reward to the effort process. It's saying, look, I am oriented in the right direction and rewarding the things you're not doing. I'm not back on my heels. I'm not just staying in bed in the morning. A good example of this came to me recently. I have a good friend. He did nine years in the SEAL teams. His name is Pat Dawson. And we were talking about the Admiral McRaven thing, get up and make your bed. They really do that. And I think the way it was described was, so at the end of the day, even if everything doesn't go well, your bed is still made. For me, that's not that big of a reward, frankly. And so I said that.

I love it though. I make my bed.

Oh, I definitely make my bed in the morning. But I mean, going back and seeing that at the end of a hard day, it's not enough. I felt like there was something else there. So I asked him, he said, well, it's very interesting. because part of it is about not just making your bed, but it's the things you're not doing by making your bed. You're not lying in bed and ruminating. You're not back on your heels.

You're not on your phone.

That's right. When you look at, and you have spent a lot of time with people in high performing communities, mainly through some consulting work, but what you find is that we can all be either back on our heels, flat-footed, or forward, center of mass. And when you look at people who are in these high performance communities, they try and keep their center of mass forward almost through what seemed like trivial things like making your bed or making the cup of coffee. But it's not just about what you're doing. It's all the things you're not doing that can put you down the path of ruminating or put you down the path of unhealthy behavior. So the key to this is if we want to be very concrete, we should probably focus on actions. And I'll use fitness as an example because it translates to everybody. Whereas people's circumstances differ. Let's say somebody really wants to take on a fitness routine. They hate running or they want to lose weight in a healthy way, this kind of thing. So we've all heard the example, well, you put your shoes by the door on day one. Day two, you put them on. Day three, you go out the door. Day four, you walk around the block and then, you know, and then eventually like they're running marathons. Okay, great, but to sustain that behavior or even to make the behavior pleasureful, and to give you energy, the key is to subjectively reward those steps. So it's not going to be, let's say I go out and I run a mile and my goal is to run 10 miles in a few weeks. The key is as you're in the strain of that mile, the hard part, you want to tell yourself, this is the good part. This is the part that gives me energy. And I'll be very surprised if people don't actually feel like they could continue further. So, it's a journey of 1,000 miles starts with single steps. But the key is to reward the harder steps, not the easier ones and not the ones where you get the thing that you want.

Don't reward yourself for putting your shoes on and taking a step outside.

You could if that was a huge barrier for you.

It was very hard.

It is very hard for you.

Running the 10 miles, that's hard.

Find the wall and push a little bit further through that wall and reward that process. so this is why I think reps in the gym, the final reps like reps to failure, are usually not the best example. First of all, most people aren't doing reps to failure and it doesn't translate to young kids and stuff where they probably shouldn't be doing heavy reps to failure, this kind of thing. What you want, however, is if you're going to go there to think about, this is the hard part because that's when adrenaline, norepinephrine are getting maxed out and that's when you have an opportunity to bring dopamine in and teach those neural pathways to slam that back down. And I don't want to highlight them too much because they are a very niche and specialized community, but you look at people in special operations, you look at the process, like the whole evaluation process of who gets in and who doesn't. It's really about putting people into stress and seeing who can not just make it through that stress but buffer that stress, reward the process through teamwork, reward the process of stress through some internal dialogue that has everything to do with not being back on your heels, not being flat footed, but center of mass forward. And I should also be clear, I'm not talking about everybody being super aggro and always like, you know, work, work, work. In fact, if you're spending too much epinephrine, if you're too much of an adrenaline junkie, you will burn out eventually unless you can find ways to recover yourself or to buffer that with dopamine. And the recovery process is especially important. There's a second reward system. So you've got the dopamine system, and I guess to really put a box around it, the subjective reward needs to be done at the hardest portion of a process. The tough conversation with a significant other, it's like when it's really tough and you want, you just, that's when you want to start telling yourself, this is the good part because I'm not speaking or this is the good part because I'm not reacting. Right, I'm not reacting or this is the good part because I'm probably not doing it correctly, but I'm on the right path, right? They're upset, they're not feeling your empathy, this kind of thing, or you're not really understanding what's going on, you're getting frustrated. But if you tell yourself, this is the neural pathway getting ground in there, like really dialed in so that the next time this... I'm going to breeze right past this. That's really how the process works. Because remember, no one comes along and drips dopamine in your ear, even if you get a billion dollars or you win a Nobel Prize or you win the presidency. It's all internal. These neurochemicals are all internal. And while some of them are designed to be released in response to things very reflexively, like food, sex, sleep, all these things will trigger these neurochemicals, we have this big forebrain which allows us to place subjective context on things.

How do you do it then? How do you bring dopamine in your brain subjectively through daily conversation with yourself.

So, there's a process I'm going through right now where I'm trying to write a book and it's hard. And I was told that the harder it is, the better I'm probably doing it. And I was like, great. My editor is ready to kill me because I'm slow. And I know and I'm a very slow person. I drive people crazy. I'm like glacially slow because science is slow and I like to get things right.

-You want to rush it?

I like to get things right, but I'm very proud of the fact that everything we've published, I can stand behind. It was the best we could do with the tools at the time. And I just know that when I look back on a writing career or a scientific career, I want to be able to say, you know, every journal we put it in was rock solid. Everything was rock solid. We had fun doing it. The relationship. So I go slow.

Yeah.

But as a consequence, what I'm finding is there are a lot of interferences these days. I'm, I'm, I think social media is great. I teach neuroscience on social media because I think it's important to do public education. It's a distraction too. But it's incredible. And it's incredible how much time and energy it can take. So what I've started doing now is I turn off my phone and I lock it in safe. And I experience extreme anxiety.

It's so weird. Why is that? Is it because it gives you so.

Much dopamine that when you're not having it? Well, this is scary because I actually think, brief anecdote, on the weekend I was driving, there's a kid that I mentor and I picked up my phone, I was texting while I was driving. and he said to me, that was really embarrassing for me, he said, you know, I wish you wouldn't text while you drive. And I put it down and I realized, this is crazy. I know that my life and his life is far more important and the lives of the people around me are far more important than any text message, which means I wasn't doing it rationally. It's just pure reflex at this point. So I don't think I pick up the phone because I don't even know what I'm looking for. there anymore. It's just become reflexive. So for me lately, the longer I can keep that phone in a safe and write a grant or my or this book, what I tell myself is the agitation is good. It's at least I'm not doing that. And then I find that as I start to write and I get into the process, I start feeling good about it and I'll pause and say, okay, I have control. I have ultimate control over my behavior. I can put that thing away. There might be a nuclear war out there and I'm just doing this anyway. I have control over my thoughts, my feelings and behavior. So I tell myself that and then I find I have immense energy and all I want to do is write. And I kind of tunnel into the process. And I think that sometimes people need to write these things out for themselves so it's really concrete. I think some people are so unskilled at subjective rewards that writing it out is really powerful.

So, what would you write out for yourself as a subjective reward for this experience?

As long as I'm writing, I'm on the right path. As long as I'm not writing and I'm looking at my phone, I'm not on the right path. Because for me, the two or three things that are most important for my career are writing grants, working on this book manuscript, and writing scientific manuscripts.

I mean, there are other things as well. Anything else that you're not doing is holding you back from doing that. That's right. So you need to be focused, center mass forward on doing those things.

That's right. So I don't do any jumping around, power poses, things like that. I will use tools to kind of ramp up my dopamine. I mean, there are certain songs that are really embedded in my, emotionally embedded in my emotional thing that go back to, you know, when I was a, you know, wild, you know, skateboarding, punk rock teenager that will get me fired up.

And I think there's real utility. That's pure dopamine.

That's just dopamine, but it's not sustainable. You have to assume objectively keep yourself motivated, I guess. That's right. And then if I finish a chapter, I will stop for a moment and I'll just kind of smile and laugh at myself. I'm big on self-reflection with humor and just thinking, this is crazy. My brain is under my control. There would be people out there that say there's no free will, but I do not believe that. I put my hands in a lot of brains. You stimulate certain brain areas, people do things. You stimulate other brain areas, people think things. ultimately, unless you have electrodes in your head and someone's stimulating them, we are in control of our thoughts and behaviors. We can't control all of them, but my goal is to be as deliberate and non-reflexive as possible in life. That's my goal from when I wake up in the morning until I go to sleep.

How do we get to that place?

Little by little and by rewarding each thing. If you get up and you, we use the make the bed, make the bed, you're not back on your heels. You make a cup of coffee, you sit down, you script out something in a journal, you exercise, maybe you call a relative that you think might need to hear from you or that you'd like to talk to. You do something in a deliberate way, just being deliberate and learning to push away the things that are trying to make you reflexive is so important.

Reflexive, same thing as reactive or what's reflective?

Yeah, so there are two modes of brain operations. So now this is getting a little nitty gritty, but one is deliberate where we're thinking duration, path, and outcome. What should I do? How long should I do it and what's the outcome? Deliberate, intentional.

And it feels like work.

This is what people need to understand. The deliberate thought, deliberate action, writing the book, doing the workout you don't want to do, whatever it is, having the conversation, it's supposed to feel hard. It's supposed to feel hard, but you should subjectively reward it so that you get better at at doing that. So it's supposed to feel hard because it's associated with this release of these neurochemicals that create this agitation. The mental strain you feel when you're learning something is the trigger for neuroplasticity for your brain to change.

Say that again. The mental strain you feel while doing something is the what?

Is the trigger for neuroplasticity.

Which neuroplasticity allows you to expand your mind to do more things.

That's right. So neuroplasticity is a process of taking something where there's duration, path, and outcome. Where I'm working hard, I'm thinking hard, maybe it's a hard conversation, maybe it's a business plan, maybe it's a scientific career. And the goal of neuroplasticity is to.

Make things reflexive so you don't have to think about them. For instance, I just started taking Spanish class one-on-one and it's extremely hard. It makes me want to say, why am I doing this? This is going to take me years until I'm conversational. Who knows how long until if it's this hard as like this stage, man, is it ever gonna get easier? I have those moments every time I'm doing class. I'm like, this sucks.

Right.

Because I'm like, oh, I'm 37. Can I learn this language at this point? It's so much easier when you're five. Now it's almost impossible. I watched your video on this a couple days ago on social media. And the video you talked about this is, yes, it's harder when you're older to expand your neuroplasticity. but it's going, it's almost the, what I'm hearing you say is like it's the only way to live is the order you get, you need to constantly be expanding it, otherwise you'll be going backwards.

That's right. So, you know, when you want to learn something new like Spanish or a new physical skill, your mind shifts over, the forebrain comes on and says, okay, we're gonna pay attention to things and now what am I doing? I get so tired, I'm like, and we get, and we start doing evaluative stuff to other people, to ourselves, and you can start using all sorts of examples like, wait, you know, I was a professional athlete in your case, or I want to be clear, I was never a professional athlete, but you were a professional athlete. You've been successful in other regimes of life, but it still feels like effort, right? And so, but that effort is because two things are happening. One is adrenaline epinephrine is being released, so it doesn't feel great. It's not fun. It's like, and then, And in addition to that, by bringing focus to something, you're recruiting a neuromodulator called acetylcholine, which is the molecule of focus. Now, it's important- which takes energy and effort.

It takes energy and effort.

You feel it in your body and in your brain, and it tends to highlight acetylcholine will highlight the areas of your brain that are active during that learning phase when the teacher's talking or you're talking and making that effort, it's paying attention how you're moving your mouth, what it sounds like to you, feedback cues, and it's marking those brain areas for change. And then later, when you sleep or when you work out or when you're having a conversation with somebody, that's actually when the brain changes occur.

So, during the actual activity, it's when you're not doing the activity, resting or recovering, when it starts to expand or it starts to grow.

It's when the, so, neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to change and to experience and is the main way in which we go from deliberate action, duration, path, outcome stuff to reflexive action and thought. That process has two parts. One is the trigger, which is in adults is triggered by focus and attention and even heightened state of agitation. The more frustrated you feel, the more you're actually triggering learning. It's saying, this is important. This is important. Because the brain just wants to do whatever it wants to do. It needs to cue itself to, oh, this must need to change. And then the second part is deep relaxation, meditation, in particular a form of meditation called yoga nidra, which we could talk about, but forms of deep relaxation, deep sleep, like slow wave sleep. That's when the connections between neurons called synapses actually get stronger. That's when the connections that you don't want get removed. And that's also in certain cases where you get new neurons actually born in your brain to help these circuits speak Spanish.

This is why in sports growing up, I remember I would go to like basketball camps in the summer and I would always learn new footwork. And I always just wanted to be like the fancy guy doing like whatever finger roll layups or something as a kid. But then we would go to these basketball camps and we just work on the fundamentals and footwork and like all this different stuff. And I remember being in the moment of being very frustrating and challenging. I was like, I don't get this. and I would suck at it. But then the next day I would come back and I would all of a sudden have it after a few times of doing it. But I never learned how to do it in the moment. It was always like, okay, I might have got it once, but then I fumbled on it. It was the next day or the next few days where it's like, oh.

I can do it. It just shows up.

It shows up. It just shows up. And that's because when the mind is able to relax, it's then making the.

Connections on how to do that thing. Yeah. So in deep, deep sleep and rest is when the connections actually get built up. It's sort of like in with resistance training, right? The gym is a little misleading. Resistance training because people get the, you know, the famous pump. And so they get a visual glimpse into what they might look like later. But then of course it goes back down, right? But actual hypertrophy, the enlargement of the muscle fibers and the strengthening of the neural connections, which you see fibers is later when you sleep.

So it's the same thing with neuroplasticity. So important is it for us to.

Constantly be learning and challenging our mind.

The older we get.

Well, I believe it's very important for living a full life. And, you know, my hero in this two heroes actually is, I would say, Richard Feynman, the great physicist who had a very playful attitude about learning. That's one thing that I really should illustrate. If you are in frustration and strain, a sense of play is great because in play you have focus. You intention and alertness and it keeps you light enough that there's that dopamine release. Dopamine is released in play for a reason because kids and animals, young animals and young children learn social interactions through play. A puppy bites another puppy and the puppy barks out loud, that's why they have those sharp puppy teeth, to say that's too much of a bite. Then they play a little bit more. They're finding the boundaries. They're finding the limits to which they can use physical force for hurting another or just for playing. They learned soft bite. Play in animals is an ancient form of sampling these neural pathways. And as adults, we tend to be more demanding of ourselves. We don't tend to embrace as much play. Richard Feynman is somebody who really incorporated a lot of play into his adult life. He learned how to, in addition to being a Nobel Prize winning physicist, he also played bongo drums. learned how to sketch and paint late in his life. He didn't float tanks. He was kind of a wild man, but he had a lot of fun and he was a lifetime learner. So I think it's important because it's a great way to learn dopamine release and it's a great way to expand one's experience of life.

This is when I was in Poland with Wim Hof earlier this year. I took a group of 13 guys and we were all nervous to get into this ice tub together for 10 minutes, up to here. And for the first two minutes, it was not fun. We were just like, this sucks, this is cold. But then all of a sudden we were like, let's have fun. We're gonna be in here for eight more minutes. We might as well try to enjoy it. So we started chanting, we started singing, we started like, just like in a rhythm together, like smiling, and it was like, it's more enjoyable. It's still gonna be challenging, but you might as well try to have the.

Most fun in the challenge than just suffer, right? Yeah, team and community. Not by coincidence is a powerful tool for buffering stress. Children can learn very easily, their brain is hyper plastic and very quickly is the whole job of the young brain is to take things that it's taught and very quickly pass it over to reflex, including morals and beliefs. Yeah, and this is what's scary is also the things that kids hear and they're exposed to, those beliefs become reflexive. Now, around age 25 or so, the brain is still plastic and forever for the entire life, but then you need more focus and you need what's called self-directed plasticity, neuroplasticity. Self-directed, meaning the only person that can change their brain for the better after about age 25 is the actual person. You. You can't force neuroplasticity on somebody, positive neuroplasticity. The other element that's really important to plasticity is this deep rest phase. And it's associated with the release of the molecule neuromodulator serotonin. Serotonin is a reward molecule just like dopamine, except that it's released in the brain in response to the subjective experience that we have enough resources. So when we eat a big meal or we enjoy, even better, when we enjoy a meal with friends or family and and it just feels like one of those incredible evenings. You know, you're reset. It's that feeling of being reset. It's an anti-depressive effect. When we are, when you hold, you know, if you hold your child or a partner that you love or your dog, if you love your dog, there's this feeling of having enough. And so whereas dopamine is really the molecule that makes us look at things outside the boundaries of our skin, like to be in pursuit of things, It really is the pursuit motivation molecule. Serotonin is really about feeling like we have enough in our immediate environment. And it's so powerful because unless that serotonin box is checked off periodically, we cannot lean back into the dopamine outward pursuit process for very long.

So we need serotonin.

Absolutely.

To feel more, what, complete, whole, safe. Safe.

Once you feel, this is where people I think that the go-getters get it wrong, no pun intended, where getting after it and being hard driving is really important. We've all seen examples of this. I've seen a number of these in Silicon Valley friends that did very well in tech get to the point where they reach that finish line and then they don't have a whole lot or a whole lot of people to share that with and they end up very isolated and depressed. They go through this whole cycle of trying to find themselves. You need to balance serotonin and dopamine. Maybe across the day, maybe across the week. I think in religious practices, all religions really, there's a kind of Sabbath, there's a rest period for many or I think all of them. That makes sense because there needs to be a renewal. We don't even have to ask about a lifetime of short sleep. We can ask about these really one week of short sleep or even one night of one one hour of lost sleep. And I think that's how fragile our brains and our bodies are to this thing called a lack of sleep. And you could then ask, well.