The Megyn Kelly Show: Andrew Huberman on Practical Wellness Tips, the Danger of "If Only" Thinking, and "Protocols" For Life

It's me Megan Kelly and today we are bringing you an interview that I just did with Andrew Huberman. We did it on the Megan Kelly show. It was a fascinating conversation about how to improve your sleep, your health, your stressed levels. We even cover nicotine, a favorite of

“Tucker's and maybe some viewers and so many tips on how to live a better life. If you want to”

check out more, head on over to the Megan Kelly show podcast feed and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts for free. There you'll find our daily coverage of news, politics, true crime, legal issues, cultural stories, and more and enjoy for now this conversation with Andrew Huberman. Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly show. We've got a first time guest on the show today, Dr. Andrew Huberman. He's a neuroscientist, Stanford professor and host

of the hugely popular Huberman Lab podcast. He has published more than 75 peer reviewed articles in top scientific journals and delivered more than 100 invited research and keynote seminars around the world. He's had a fascinating life and provided guidance on how to live better to

millions of fans and followers, but he's never written a book until now. His new book is called

“protocols an operating manual for the human body and it's available right now for a pre-order”

it's out later this month and it is a guide to improving brain function, enhancing mood and energy, optimizing bodily health and physical performance, and rewiring your nervous system to learn new skills and behaviors even that could positively transform your life. Always getting in your wallet and that now they're messing with your credit card. They see your credit card and the security it offers are under attack and that

senators Dick Durbin and Roger Marshall want to change the nation's payment system to benefit corporate mega stores like Walmart and Target at the expense of every day Americans. Credit cards can keep your payments secure and provide rewards that families use and rely on to help make everyday purchases more affordable. The electronic payments coalition says the Durbin Marshall mandates would let corporate mega stores cut corners on credit card processing,

routing transactions over cheaper, untested networks with weaker security and fewer protections. Find out more at guardyourcard.com and consider telling Congress to guard your card.

Andrew, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Great to finally meet you. I'll be

at virtually home. Yeah, it's the same. It's a pleasure. I'm a big fan and I've learned a laugh from you over the years just from clips and from your show. So this is a thrill. And I'm loving the chance to get to talk to you about you before we kick off the health and other advice. So you're a California boy. Yeah, right grew up in California and it seems like from the book you had sort of an idyllic first 14 years in the family had dinner together every night

“and that's so important to one's mental health and well-being and then something happened”

in your family that gets downplayed by a lot of people is really not that relevant to a child's mental health but it is relevant and it was life-changing for you and that was your parent's divorce. Yeah, I did have a quite idyllic life. My dad's a scientist. My mom's a writer and along with my sister we had dinner together every night. In my home there wasn't a lot of discussion about sports but I certainly got to hear a lot about the luminaries of science and

ideas from my dad. We always shared that. My mom has a real love of literature obviously and

I have a close relationship with my sister and everything was pretty fantastic and and then you know I was born in 1975 so divorce wasn't as common back when but when I about at age 14 they separated and got divorced so this happens a lot nowadays as we know unfortunately. Look I love my parents. Everyone did the best they could with what they had and but it was a high conflict situation and you know as things played out I found myself

disengaging from academics, disengaging from standard social milieu of school. I went to a very very good public school in South Palo Alto. Keep in mind at this time Palo Alto wasn't the Palo Alto that it is now you know of dot com and tech fame but most of the kids there were their children of academics or engineers or something like that and we were well enough off I wouldn't say we were like at the high end of the well scale or low end we were you know the focus on

in our house was on love and ideas and but what happened was in response to that and I regret this

keep studying keep doing your homework and staying engaged in school sports and activities like what happened for me was I ended up organizing my life around basically skateboarding and hang out with skateboarders because back in the late 80s and early 90s that's where all the feral kids went and I I talk about this a little bit at the beginning of the book even though it's not the main focus of the book what was really great was in that community there were a bunch of kids whose parents

“were not engaged in their lives much right does that was the unifying theme that's why we”

skateboarded because you didn't need your parents to come to baseball or soccer practice and but there's a ton of creativity a lot of those people went on to create big brands like DC I knew those kids that started DC that started all these big brands and some kids got sponsored and turned pro others got really into drugs and alcohol and destroyed their lives and so you know it was a very interesting time for me being completely free um getting exposed to a lot of things way too early

in my opinion looking back um a lot of exposure to violence drugs and sex that frankly as a 14 year old you know I shouldn't have been exposed to but I was witness to a ton of great skateboarding I unfortunately was not a great skateboarder but fortunately by virtue of getting injured a lot I started foraging for other things to do and eventually mainly because of a high school girlfriend who went off to college and I didn't want to be away from her I found my way back to academics

and somewhere in along the way I took a course in neuroscience at the time there wasn't a field of

neuroscience but it was one truly amazing teacher whose name was Harry Carlisle who taught me about

brain function and taught me about these neurochemicals and the brain that controlled things like anxiety depression addiction and I witnessed a lot of that and I thought to myself this is the coolest thing ever especially when I learned about neuroplasticity which is you know this organ that we have in our head is unlike all the other organs of the body and that it can deliberately change itself we can learn new things we can have a new emotional relationship to things and so as my life

went on I pursued a career in science eventually became a continued professor at Stanford ran a research lab for a long time I still teach at Stanford and fell in love with all of that but it was really this kind of merge of the hard things that I had seen and experienced plus the

understanding that there's this incredible organ in our brains that we don't really understand

that much about at least not back then but now we understand enough to make really great choices

“including to you know I think you know even though the discussion about things like psychedelics”

and things of that sort are very interesting for therapeutic purposes that I think because the young brain is so plastic that all kids would benefit from frankly staying away from that this isn't a you know anti drug campaign that I'm on but you know that the developing brain is so fragile and so susceptible to it's both chemical and environmental inputs and I will stand on firm ground and say that while I understand that in some cases it may be necessary that you know having two parents at home

and them getting along and working through things together I love my parents I don't hold any graduate so ever but I think it's it's clear now from the data that's enormously helpful to a child's development so no regrets it all worked out for me but it was there was a high friction

road along the way and I think science an amazing teacher and then others who came along plus the

love of science and a and a care for the world that my father and mother put into me so I'm

“grateful to them too I you know I love them pray for them and with them and and life is good I saw”

I only look back with fondness but it was it was rocky yeah I mean I my own take on it and having read the book is I don't think you'd be doing what you're doing if you hadn't gone through that trauma that traumatic period and many exposed to as many stressors as you were clearly it lit something inside of you that needed addressing needed healing needed some sort of attention and like most people who have had some trauma in their past whether you've made progress on

it or not I think most of us spend the the rest of our lives in some way trying to solve it address it heal it or make it better for others who we can see coming up behind us who have similar issues so I mean I would argue that this book protocols is a direct result of all that you went through and thank you when thanks to your parents in a way because as a result we have such good advice in here I do want to spend one minute on this was such a sad thing so you mentioned

Professor Carlisle who became such a mentor to you and this was an important person in your life and ultimately he dies by suicide yeah so I you know I don't want to give people the

that are your your abilities and sleep and stress mitigation all these things but I touch on the

“the science of grief and and how to get through things in a healthy way and mental health”

and you know along my path what I saw was the following a lot of the kids I grew up with and

with this amazing community of skateboarders I saw some flourish I saw others succumb to addiction

I saw some succumb to mental health issues and as I went into science I incorrectly thought oh you know what's going to happen is the scientists are all going to be super healthy right these are people who understand the brain and as a consequence of understanding the brain and biology I naively thought that they would be immune to a lot of the problems that these this other community had and I found quite the opposite so there were three things that happened along the way for me that really motivated

me further to write the book protocols to have a podcast where we talk about health where I teach about what we do and don't know about the brain and how people can benefit and the first one really was these childhood these observations from my teen years the next observation was that this guy Harry Carlisle who understood mental health depression disease suicidality as chemical issues for whatever reason I eventually you know was able to fill in some of the pieces took his own life

in a pretty dramatic fashion and that told me something right I was close friends with his wife

“and I knew his family it told me that knowledge alone doesn't save us knowledge is important”

it's as we say in science necessary but not sufficient you know and then what happened was I went

off to graduate school and had an amazing time in graduate school everyone says oh you know you

finish graduate school and you you're aged and you're tired I was like so full of life in graduate school and after I loved my graduated advisor she was like a mother to me her name was Barbara Chapman and then she I know I know her family and kids her daughter is a neuroscientist now and she died of cancer at 50 and I thought oh my goodness she had the bracam mutation so she had a genetic susceptibility I thought my goodness and then I became a postdoc at Stanford and my postdoc

advisor the first day of my faculty appointment had a heart attack across the table for me at dinner he survived that it turns out he had pancreatic cancer he was dead a roughly a year later I ended it

“writing his obituary for nature we were very very close and I thought to myself this is crazy”

right like either the joke in my field the kind of morbid joke is you don't want me to work for you obviously because the the odds are you know have it didn't work out so well for these people but but the serious aspect of is at one point I thought what's going on here what's going on and I also noticed in my field of neuroscience people doing tremendously well I know noble prize winners members of the National Academy my closest childhood friend is now the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF

he's doing phenomenally well in life and including family and I thought to myself what's happening here and I realized especially at the beginning of the pandemic scientists doctors parents kids nobody knows the manual the rule book for how to control their stress nobody knows the the the playbook for how to take care of their health and we're supposed to be all about health and we're supposed to eat right sleep right etc but like I'm watching my colleagues

get sick I'm seeing them they look badly out of shape and I understand they're time limited but they're talking about back pain they're talking about their kid as anxiety there's a colleague became a dick this very famous person in my field became addicted to pain killers and then eventually died no one talked about it and I'm thinking myself we're not talking about this stuff we need to talk about in fact this last year one of the

luminaries in our field it's of still gets me um who was a real pioneer in trans cranial magnetic stimulation therapies for depression and also psychedelic therapies the studies of these took his own life my dear friend and colleague Nolan Williams who has helped the veterans community tremendously so I realized at some point people don't know how to take care of themselves they don't even know what self-care is it sounds

very selfish and in some versions of it it can be so what are we supposed to do so in 2020 with the with the world on lockdown and everyone kind of been battling each other I thought look I'm not a virologist I'm just gonna stay out of that whole thing it's a it's a it's a hornets nest for an

academic like me but here's what I will do I'm gonna go online and I'm gonna start talking

about ways to improve your sleep am I lab had worked on a number of things including eye diseases and trying to cure blindness glaucoma we'd worked on brain development and I'd worked on stress mitigation in humans and I knew that there were simple tools that

to have more energy elevated mood and focus throughout the day I knew the literature quite well

“because I teach it and I've done research on it and published on on some of it on how you can”

modify your brain in adaptive ways and how you can start to unpeal some of the emotional load of traumatic experiences and I thought the world needs this so I'm gonna just start blabbing about it into the camera and I teamed up interestingly I teamed up with a guy who had a little bit of a background in media as name is Rob Moore and we started this little production company in my closet with my bulldog Costello snoring in the background and I grabbed some

skateboarders my friend Mike Blaback is now a famous action sport photographer he came up through skateboarding had his own challenges with alcohol and drugs got clean got lean and healthy he's a family man he's got two kids he's doing great I grabbed two skateboard filmers because skateboarders mind you the ones that made it through the shoot of all the troubling stuff they are the original do it yourself filmer editors we all carry around cameras when we

were kids long before smartphones and they are phenomenal at making movies so we're a small packet guys and we did it the same way you'd start a skateboarding company find a space film people doing what they love put it out into the world and I just started giving away tools to the world on sleep on stress mitigation on neuroplasticity on personal development and I would have

gave us some but I would also do these solo episodes where I would explain here here's what

the real story on dopamine is it's not about pleasure it's about motivation here's how you can leverage that to your advantage to stay motivated but not burnout and so on and then eventually I realized that the world needed that information in a different form so that the book is sort of a look up table it tells a story you could go linearly through it but it's kind of a look up to any chapter yes you can you want yes you can have that story to go to that chapter and so on so that's

really the the purpose behind what I do yeah the again the book is called protocols by Andrew Hubertman available available for pre order right now let's spend some time on sleep because I've seen so many clips of you talking about sleep and I can tell you this is definitely an issue for me and a lot of my viewers of a certain age women in particular but a lot of guys out there too lot got a lot of truckers who listen to this show on series XM who are not well-rested

and are not getting the appropriate amount of sleep and I have to say the more time you

“spend talking about how you need to sleep the harder it can be to sleep because then you're in”

your bed at night like I'm supposed to be asleep but I can't follow sleep and it's amazing to me

that you you argue that it begins when you wake up your good night sleep begins the moment you wake up and whenever I hear this next part because I've heard you say this over the years I think Andrew Hubertman is not from the Northeast and does not live in the Northeast and now understanding that you're a California boy it's starting to come into full focus for me because you want us to get up go outside within the first 30 minutes or so and stare at the sun

from you know 10 minutes maybe and now we do mean like at the sun or like right next to the sun not like the full of bright sun but you say you that's not really the sun you're getting in the morning when it first rises anyway but explain why this is important and explain how this is supposed to work for those of us in places like Connecticut when it's minus 15 and off while when you wake up fair fair play you know I largely lived west of Interstate 5 which cuts down

“through the center of California so all fair so here's the thing I'm gonna try we too we also want”

to live the rest of the country the people of Minnesota the people in Washington yeah you guys are are having a couple other other advantages that we can talk about so it all it all evens out here's the deal to really master your sleep and get great sleep but also to have elevated

daytime mood focus etc you really want to master the first hour of your day and the last hour

of your day and fortunately I'm not gonna tell you that you need to do a bunch of things in each of those hours that require finances or require a lot of energy here's the theme which is we know is conducive to better mental health and physical health and longevity you want bright mornings and days and dark nights now if you're gonna tell me well there's not a lot of sunlight out here but here's the deal when you wake up in the morning you wake up because of a

rise in a hormone called cortisol and because of a rise in body temperature most people think of cortisol is a stress hormone and they think oh that's bad I don't want high cortisol you want your morning cortisol high I'll repeat that you want your morning cortisol high it is not a

into the day and if you get your morning cortisol high it helps ensure that your night time cortisol is low and when your night time cortisol is low it's easy to fall and stay as sleep and you get great sleep your metabolic health will be better the hormone melatonin goes up which

“makes you sleepy you want morning cortisol high night time cortisol low so the best way to”

kind of book so think about book ending your days I don't care what time you wake up if it's 4 a.m.

or it's 10 a.m. we can talk about what to do if the sun isn't out yet but within the first hour

of waking up ideally within the first 30 minutes you're gonna get up most people use the restroom I suggest you hydrate your in a little bit of water and if the sun is up and by the way you don't need to be able to see the sun it can be completely overcast but if there's daylight coming through the clouds which there is even in the depths of winter in Boston it's much brighter at 7 a.m. for instance in Boston in the middle of winter then it was at midnight the night before

there's a lot of what we call photons or light energy coming through those clouds you go outside you could even stand on a balcony best not to do it through window but if you have to you go out on a balcony or outside you look in the direction of the sun if you can't see the

“sun because there's a building in the way that's fine take off any hat you might be wearing”

because the sun's coming in from the top you want to get to your eyes and don't wear sunglasses not sunglasses at this time eyeglasses and contacts are fine and you can have your coffee there you can do your morning prayer or meditation there you can bring your dog you can bring a friend you can be completely alone and even if you just grab one minute of daylight it's going to benefit

you why because there's this critical window within the first hour of waking where if you get

bright light in your eyes from daylight from sunlight it amplifies that cortisol peak which makes it much lower before sleep which makes it far easier to fall asleep at night in addition most people want less stress in their life not more if you spike your cortisol that way first thing in the morning any stress you have during the day will lead to a more transient a briefer increase in stress hormones you are better at dealing with stress when you do this and there are a number of

biochemical reasons for this these are not psychological phenomena these are pure physiology this isn't about mindset this is just can you just explain what am I looking you know because they say you're not supposed to look directly into the sun but am I supposed to be looking directly into the sun at this hour great question so as somebody who worked on blinding to diseases of the eye for many years I want to encourage people you can look in the direction of the sun

but blink has needed to protect your eyes if it's really bright for you and you're blinking

great the blink reflexes there to protect your eyes never force yourself to look at any light

sunlight or otherwise that's painful to look at so you can just look in the direction of the sun you could even keep your eyes closed believe it or not the photon energy goes through your eyelids but you look kind of off to the side of the sun if it's in the middle of winter the sun is easy to look at because it's behind so many clouds when the sun is low in the sky such around sunrise or sunset

“and keep in mind I'm not saying you need to see the sun across the horizon if you wake up at nine a.m.”

and the sun's already up you miss sunrise it's rising but when it's low in the sky you'll notice something about the sun if it's not a cloudy day which is it looks a bit more yellow orange red than at other times now of course the light coming from the sun is the same all times of day but what the sun is low in the sky there's an atmospheric phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering whether the UV which are damaging rays for the most part are get scattered and so those aren't

reaching your eyes so you see the what are called the longer wavelengths of light it looks a bit more like candle light and bright but more like candle light so when the sun is low in the sky you don't have to worry about UV damage to your skin you don't have to worry about damage to your eyes or getting cataract when the sun is overhead that's when you really need to be careful about too much UV exposure we know that UV exposure so in the perfect in the perfect human

protocol i'm out i'm looking up i'm maybe just to the right of the sun not directly into the sun i don't have sunglasses on and how and and how long do i need to stand there looking and um is it nons do i need to be looking nons stop or can i like look around at the dogs and the you know like around those how does those photons are bouncing off of surfaces they're getting reflected um take if you take a walk if there's any green space around see this is where the

east coast you have an advantage you know except in some cities you often have a lot more green because you get a lot more rain right uh the organians really benefit here too that the the really beneficial wavelengths of light are bouncing off greenery you know if you were that that long wavelength light that bounces off greenery is tremendously good for our mitochondria it actually can go into and through our body this is a separate story that i cover in the book it can actually lower blood

glucose believe it or not your sugar blood sugar management is much better when you're out in daylight

you shot they shine to red light which have approximate sunlight on people's backs while they

did a glucose tolerance test it blunt glucose levels by nearly it's somewhere between 20 and 30 percent

which is remarkable how could that these the light actually goes into the body through the body and the mitochondria the energy factories in ourselves actually start using more ATP metabolism

“goes up which is remarkable now here's the interest just so i'm clear you you have to be exposing”

your skin in that moment like it's it doesn't count when you know you're skiing and you're completely covered head to toe with that that that the light needs to hit your actual body skin a t-shirt they've shown it can go through a t-shirt or even a shirt like the one i'm wearing you know a thin enough shirt a thick jacket it won't go through so you get outside you take your any brimmed hat off you look in the direction of the sun yes if you need to text someone that's

fine you walk you take a call you talk to somebody it's you know it's especially nice to get five minutes or so i suggest doing a 10 breath meditation you know just focusing on 10 breaths or do your morning prayers that's a big practice for me and then get into the day and you've done it

you spike that cortisol look even better would be if you can get some exercise in the first

hours of the day because you know everyone's so afraid of cortisol but everyone's told to exercise a moderate to high intensity exercise session cardiovascular training or resistance training will triple your cortisol level but transiently that's a great thing early in the day

“and it sets you up for great sleep at night if you have to exercise later in the day that's fine”

and we can talk about that but in that case you'd want to one of the things that really leads to better sleep as long as we're here we might as well just kind of throw in a few things that lead to better sleep if you're having a hard time calming your system down at the end of the day two things really help one you need to lower your core body temperature that's actually how you fall a sleep

the one excellent way to do that is take a hot shower bath you say wait i'm heating up my skin

how's that gonna make me cooler well your brain has a little thermostat region called the medial pre-optic nucleus and when just like a thermostat when the surface of the skin heats up the brain says oh we need to lower a core body temperature and your body temperature starts falling when you get out of that shower bath if you don't have access to a shower bath even a warm compress to the face will accomplish this very easy essentially cost nothing and it will facilitate

the transition to sleep the other thing that is just and this is probably a bigger thing but LA finish a point but can you after this talk about staying asleep yes yes so one of the key things to falling asleep and to stress mitigation you'll notice i'm trying to fire host tools at people that they can use any time right these are all and i'll just point out like I didn't discover these tools i've published on some of them as as tools in my laboratory but

I want to really point out something important in the backdrop here's these mechanisms are hardwired into all of us we're born with them we're going to die with them so there's no real learning except how to activate these circuits hence a user manual for the brain and body right in operating manual so the idea here is you have these cells in your eye they're called melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive retinal gangly cells that's just nerd speak for the

so the cells in your eye that actually know that morning sunlight is hitting them it's different than other forms of light your phone won't do it a computer won't do it an indoor light unless it's a 10,000 luxart official light we'll talk about that in a minute won't accomplish this you we have these cells for for the very purpose of waking us up in the morning for telling the brain and body it's morning that circuit gets activated boom you just go into your day you don't

have to think about it anymore there's another feature to the way that we are hardwired which is we have a little collection of neurons in our brain that communicate with our body in the following way when you are feeling too alert could be stressed could be panic could be public speaking could be a hard conversation could be anticipation of a medical outcome or you're

“having trouble falling asleep or getting back to sleep what you need to do is do a long deliberate”

exhale just like that if you want to make it even more effective you do two inhales through your nose to maximally inflate your lungs and then you exhale what am I talking about here this is not breath work this is a collection of specific neurons that were discovered by my friend in colleague Jack Feldman at UCLA that lead to a slowing of heart rate in a good way your everyone's heard of the vagus nerve now it's this nerve nerves in the body collect sensory

information from the body telling the brain what's going on in the body we're not even thinking about it but there's another part of the vagus nerve which goes from brain to to the silo atrial note of the heart and it controls something called respiratory sinus a rhythmia which sounds bad

slows down so if you want to calm down really fast the fastest way to do that is not self-talk

it's not meditation because you don't have time to run off in meditate it's not a drink even that will take longer we can talk about alcohol later it is to do a deliberate exhale you're too amped up you want to calm down long deliberate exhale there's a specific pathway that slows the heart rate down these days in the fitness circles you're hearing more about heart rate variability a stress monitor like a whoop band or anything that measures HRV it's measuring how often

“your brain sends this break signal to your heart rate that's what HRV is in fact if you do a few”

deliberate exhales during the day just a few times you walk another restroom going back to work you're sitting down to your desk whatever you're driving and picking up the kids you do one long deliberate exhale your HRV gets higher at night in sleep which is great for you and during the day you want high HRV it shows that your nervous system can calm your heart rate down slow it down and this is a well you know I could get into the mechanism the diaphragm you know moves up the

heart gets a little smaller blood moves faster the brain says oh oh blood's moving faster through that smaller volume of the heart slow heart rate down when we inhale heart rate speeds up and everyone's told oh your stress take up take a deep breath that increases your heart rate so you know circa 2019 2020 I'm thinking myself everyone's stressed everyone's saying take a deep breath

“that's not gonna work that's gonna send you in the opposite direction okay humans inhale actively”

and passively exhale we do this all day long we let the air fall out when we actively exhale it activates this circuit that's just sitting there waiting for you to calm yourself down and you actively exhale the reason exercising increases HRV is has a lot to do with how much

exhaling you do during exercise so in that last hour of the day here's what I love for people to

do I understand people watching Netflix they're listening to podcasts they're watching TV they want to know the verdict on this new case I get it I totally get it I'm human too just do this for me try and make the first hour of your day as bright as possible that day if all you can do is flip on all the lights in your house first thing in the morning that's it can't get outside it's too cold you don't want to do it fine just make it bright make as bright as you can even better for people

in the northeast would be to get and I don't have any relationship to the companies that sell these but for about a hundred dollars you can get a ten thousand lux artificial light looks like a TV screen you put in the kitchen or the bathroom you flip it on go about your morning you don't have to stare at it where you get outside get some light in your eyes do that and if you can we can talk

about exercise in the early part of the day great first three hours or so and then in the last

hour of your day think I'm going to try and heat up the surface of my body to cool down internally so I can fall asleep better so hot compress to the face for ten seconds maybe a hot shower hot bath okay if you have time dim the lights if you can't dim the lights try not use overhead lights because the eyes the cells in the eyes that that carry this information about waking up to the

“brain they view the upper visual field that's how they're they're placed so they can see the sky”

so do like the Scandinavians and use desk lamps or a floor lamp okay dim those lights dim your screen and if you're still feeling too ramped up and you can't sleep do some long exhales just a few long exhales this whole thing will have an outside positive effect on people sleep daytime mood focus and alertness and there's a beautiful study out of the UK bio bank of more than 80 thousand subjects which shows that even if people just make their nights darker for instance maybe

an imask while you sleep don't have an imask grab a soft t-shirt throw it over your eyes and when you go to sleep even just making your your sleep environment darker has a significant positive effect on reducing symptoms of depression OCD mania dementia and on and on better to make mornings bright and dark nights but if you look at the way humans have been trending for the last few years we have days that are too dim and nights that are too bright and if you think well

no actually my work environment's pretty bright just putting people near a window or having people look out a window a few times during the daytime has significant improvements on metabolic health longevity at mood we it's not that we should be living out of doors no one's gonna do that right people want we evolved all these ways to live indoors and they're great frankly but brighter mornings dark night even in these subtle ways will help tremendously now there are some people for whom

and I can't get back to sleep and for that I'm gonna offer you a really weird trick but

the reason I'm willing to do this even as a scientist is there's a scientific basis for it and be it works and it's the following we know this is a wild trick but this will get you back to sleep it's why I know it's really wild well to three I saw you do I know I have tried it if you say I know it looks crazy but you'll think you'll thank me later folks I promise and also what's fun about these things is like these were these are in you right this isn't something

“you have to go purchase right you know I'll be happy people purchase the book but frankly”

the reason I go on podcasts like this is all the time and is because I just want people to have these tools I mean I wish I had known as a kid as an adult I can calm myself down fast for a tense moment just doing a deliberate exhale or even better at double inhale long exhale

I can get better sleep because I had sleep issues starting basically in high school in college

I would wake I'd fall asleep I'd wake up in the middle of the night I mean when we're sleeping well life is so much better getting over traumas recovery from addiction dealing with difficult circumstances but also our ability to do all the things that we know we're supposed to do like exercise and earn a living and do all the things that we're striped all our strivings gets so much easier so these are the tools I wish I had had but they weren't out there so

“the thing that you can do to fall back asleep I'll just give you the science very briefly first”

anyone that's ever had a kid or held a kid knows that if you rock the kid back and forth and you walk they fall asleep turns out there's a scientific study of the exact rate of rocking and walking that's ideal for putting babies to sleep turns out in adults believe in scientists are so weird they did a study using a slow rocking bed and it puts people to sleep okay I want one I know I'm like I want one too but for most people it's not practical and then there was this woman who

actually was in she wasn't at Stanford but Francine Shapiro who developed this thing called EMDR which is a trauma treatment where people recount a story while moving their eyes from side to side sounded pretty wacky people made up silly theories that oh that's mimicking rapid eye movement sleep no nothing of the sort turns out based on now three or four really solid publications that when the eyes

“are moving from side to side for whatever reason it quiets the activity of this brain region called”

the amygdala which is involved in stress threat detection and fear as it's commonly referred to the

fear center the critical thing for falling asleep is that you be not stressed but also that you

forget about your body position so it turns out that this rocking motion or the movement of the eyes both suppresses areas of the brain that are involved in threat detection and anxiety and stress but they also help you forget what's called proprioception your knowledge of where your limbs are and that is a requirement for falling asleep so there are two things have happened in the following year first of all a group of brilliant scientists at MIT came up with a sleep mask that they're

developing now I have no relationship to this company but I've tried this mask that creates a very specific eye movement pattern by low level electrical stimulation that causes you to fall asleep and I've done it you fall asleep almost immediately but the eye movement pattern is something that you can create yourself so you close your eyes you're in bed you're wide awake this happened to me last night I woke up once asleep around 10 o'clock woke up at 330 boom wide awake I was having

a some intense dream about some meaningless thing like so many dreams and I thought I'm wide awake what do I do keep my eyes closed so under the eyelids you move your eyes slowly to the left then to the right then up then down try and move them counter clockwise clockwise I know it sounds crazy still with eyes closed kind of point them towards her nose it's not really crossing your eyes and then you do a long exhale you forget when people do this the typical reaction I get because

people write to me is next thing I know it was morning I know that sounds wild and listen I wouldn't put this out into the world that this scale if I wasn't confident that doing that one to three times for most people is sufficient for them to get back to sleep now if you're intensely ruminating on something really troubling you're going to need to do something else but very very often that will do the trick and these eye masks that are now being developed are just

trying to recapitulate that eye movement pattern that's crazy all I can think of is the movie the jerk you know where you put the sunglasses on or the eyeglasses and they've got something

we're not going to do this but what I just described is entirely safe why does it why does it shut down your proprioception your knowledge of body position I can't help myself but tell people why

“that the mechanism is important here because otherwise it becomes a hack right and a hack is something”

that's designed to overcome a problem like if these glasses break and I put a paper clip in the corner to fix them that's a hack it's not what the paper clip was designed for it's not it's not a really good solution it's a temporary solution the reason this is not a hack this is grounded in your physiology your eyes have many connections to the brain some are designed to tell your brain when it's daytime others are designed to let you see colors and shapes and movement

of objects like cars but there's another circuit that goes from your eyes to deep brain structures that then connects to what's called your mini brain a little brain in the back of your brain literally it looks like another brain called the cerebellum most people think of the cerebellum as a

balance structure this is critical for balance it's also critical for learning but the cerebellum

is also critical for taking your eye movements understanding where your eyes are and adjusting your body position accordingly when you walk through any environment office outdoors whatever you don't experience the world as blurry but if I took a picture on my phone and moved my phone it would be blurry how is that the cerebellum takes your eye position and sends the eyes a message to offset any slip in the visual world so you see the world as stable as you move your head around

amazing when you move your eyes the way I described under the eyelids it confuses the cerebellum there's a map of your body in the cerebellum and the cerebellum doesn't know how to deal with these weird eye movements aside aside around and up and down and all of a sudden that

proprioceptive mechanism is shut down and that's the second step in being able to fall asleep

so this is a so lowering your core body temperature keeping the room cool helps to some long exhale breathing before sleep if you wake up in middle of the night keep the room dark

“yes get up and use the restroom if you need to I highly recommend you not look at your phone”

if you can avoid it but when you're ready to go back to sleep do these eye movements you will find almost certainly that you'll fall back asleep much more easily and men I get thousands of notes every day you with a couple of quick ones couple quick ones um when you say double inhale can you show us what that is is that is that regular inhales or something else you want to the two inhales through the nose the second inhale will be shorter because your

lungs are already mostly full and then they exhale through the mouth this is the fastest way to bring your heart rate down and de-stress in real time okay so unless you're under water I can't see a circumstance where you couldn't do this so you you do it the following way until lungs are empty so it was a long inhale filling your lungs then one one extra when you don't think you have extra room you do you want extra and then a low and then a slow exhale

through the mouth inhale through the nose exhale through the mouth the reason for that second inhale is important your lungs are not just too big bags of air they have hundreds of millions of little sacks that actually fill with air and those little sacks are are kind of moist in the middle and like if you're ever trying to blow up a balloon at a kids party sometimes it's easy to blow up the balloon but if there's a little water balloons sometimes what you find is you know

“if you want to put air into a water balloons that you can tie it right because you fill that too much”

you have to get sometimes two two pushes two exhales right so in order to maximally inflate those little sacks you get that big first inhale and that'll inflate most of them but then there are a bunch of them their collapse and kind of sticking together from surface tension you do that second inhale pop they open up they don't burst but they open up great now you can offload more air on the exhale and but and there's a story here also about oxygen coming in and you're offloading

carbon dioxide a lot of our stress is about too much carbon dioxide in the blood you know the

brain has a set of neurons again this neuroscience thing is incredible right it's like you have a

set of neurons that don't tell you when to breathe because you need more oxygen they tell you when to breathe when carbon dioxide gets too high many people have what's called sleep apnea they're not getting enough oxygen during sleep or they have daytime apnea and so they're not getting enough oxygen and there and there's carbon dioxide levels are too high they're three reasons why you want to offload carbon dioxide you need it but you don't want too much of it

building up in your system first of all sleep apnea snoring etc severe cardiovascular and

get the CPAP if you have to um well i have friends who had their uveal is cut out and it stopped their snoring goodness if they said it was very painful that's yeah that doesn't know how that works

“if that's what it takes provided it's done by good surgeon you know do that for some people that are”

overweight or even the guys who like to lift weights and they have these giant necks that's actually can create sleep apnea you don't want to be overly muscled or too much body but you don't want overly anything really but apnea is bad because of the build up of carbon dioxide in sleep can it won't cause dementia but it certainly predisposes you to it and to heart attack and so forth but a lot of people during the daytime they're walking around mouth breathing as much as you can

only breathe through your mouth when eating or speaking now if you're exercising hard great to breathe through your mouth that's fine but would you like the mouth tape that people

don't because i have this must actually be your thing and it never stays on so what i do

i do is when i do my low level cardiovascular exercise like walking unless i'm on a call or if i'm doing a you know easy cardiovascular exercise i restrict myself to nasal breathing it actually sets you up to be a nasal breather in sleep you kind of start deep faulting to nasal breathing but if i'm running harder we're exercising harder i definitely breathe through my mouth the the carbon dioxide thing is real in the sense that when you're stressed there's a build-up

“of carbon dioxide which is that's what stimulates the gas reflex that's what makes you feel”

anxious and you can't shut your thoughts down if you've ever been swimming and you know when kids can be so cruel right you're swimming i grew up with a pack of wild key thens and they're like we're just so they're good kids but you know occasion you'd be swimming learn about some of that exactly and you and you try and say call protocols by Dr. Andrew Huberman you can pre-order yours now go ahead you know you're coming up out of the water and that that mean kid

holds your head right as you're trying to come up listen you add enough air a moment before that

but that split second is terrifying because you i can't your brain knows it needs oxygen so

you have a gas reflex that's looking for oxygen if there's an oxygen hunger breath hunger when you do this double inhale long exhale you reset the carbon dioxide oxygen ratios and it's a wonderful state to be in because you're alert but calm so let's say you're scutting

“you're just maybe a good thing to do at any point during the day like while you're just sitting”

there if you're listening to this program you can be doing a few weeks just a cup you know one even just deliberate long exhale or the double inhale through the nose exhale through the mouth the beauty of this again is your HRV increases you become more of a nasal breather in sleep your sleep is deeper you have less apnea you'll kind of notice that today a lot of the things we move from cortisol to light to breathing a lot of these things are about

being alert when you want to be alert but not too alert and being a sleep when you want to be a sleep in fact i would argue that as a human if you can master the ability to be alert but calm by using these tools long exhales if you need them bright light to be more alert if you can learn to turn your brain off and go to sleep you're going to be a very effective professional parent partner friend and your relationship to yourself gets way better because so many of the

woes of the world have to do with an inability to self regulate in order to get sleep then self regulation becomes even harder or i'm a big captain let me just continue my my couple questions on this because number of hours people have says seven or eight a lot of people can't get that what what what's the bare minimum per night like people really should be striving okay so new parents caretakers and people who are in very stressful times in their life i will tell you this i'm not

recommending it but if you can get that first four hours of sleep that's ideally you'd get more

but you will get some growth hormone release some bodily repair you can carry on for better worse for quite a long while with four to five hours but you're not setting yourself up for health in the long run but i say this because i want to be sensitive to the fact that some people are taking care of us a sick relative some people are in a very stressful life situation where they're raising young kids you will survive you know and then you're like you're gonna get to mention

you survive you're gonna survive once the kids are sleeping better you'll sleep better like you will survive you can you'll be okay you don't want to do this for decades on end or even for you know five years on end but you will be okay for most people they need somewhere between seven and eight i feel pretty darn good at six developing kids probably need eight or nine when you're battling an illness nine or ten is not abnormal and it's healthy but if you only need

need to get more sleep than you need one thing that's critical however is if you are having trouble

“with sleep and you're napping in the daytime you need to stop napping when you get sleepy because of”

the build up of a molecule called a denocene and when you nap you shave off some of that a denocene from your brain and body which is good you come out more alert but at night you want to create the the real fatigue at the end of your day so that you're tired that's why exercise is great that's why napping in the daytime is bad for people who have trouble sleeping if i have a whole section in the book believer not on napping this seems to at one point i thought to myself i'm teaching

people out of nap this is crazy but if you need a nap 20 minutes should really be the limit so that you don't cause sleep inertia which is the tiredness coming out of the nap but also that you're not eroding your nighttime sleep there's also a and i put some reference to this uh in the book even just sitting down and quietly doing a few exhales and just closing your eyes not looking at your phone for believer not making 60 seconds three minutes you'll come out of that feeling some

renewed vigor the promise nowadays i'm a big consumer of media i love media but we every moment is filled with more information coming in so i'm talking about things that take on the order minutes across the entire day cost nothing it thanks for watching today's full episode if you're new here throw us a subscribe see what you think stay in touch there's plenty more goodness where this one came from

as always we really do value your feedback so email me too Megan and egyn at

Megankelly dot com or just leave a comment down below i do read them i manned her over and i scroll through and i find them very entertaining and really appreciate the feedback but in any event join the community by becoming a subscriber so you miss nothing we value your support we may not always

“agree on positions but as you know i'm very open minded to people who disagree with me that's how”

i learn so thanks and thanks for trusting us to always talk about it openly honestly and with provocative conversations think about the last time you call the business and no one picked up what did you do you call the next one on the list customers do the exact same thing when they are reaching out to you which is why i want to tell you about quo spelled q u o it's the business phone

system built so that you never miss a call quo brings all calls texts and voicemails into one

organized hub so anyone on the team can view full conversation histories and respond quickly set up takes just minutes on any device keep existing business numbers and add team members seamlessly with zero IT hassles plus close optional built in AI agent will handle your after hours calls by answering questions and booking appointments ensuring no lead ever slips away it also integrates directly with everyday tools like hub spot to save time trusted by over 90 thousand businesses

quo is the number one rated business phone system on g2 keep every connection alive and look professional every day money is on the line always say hello with quo try quo for free plus get 20% off of your first six months when you go to quo dot com slash mk that's q u o dot com slash mk i take it from this discussion you are against falling asleep to an audio book or a podcast yes and no so after now you know six years of doing public health science education i've come to the

place where i you know i was a years ago i took kids backpacking in the assembly that was my summer job and you learn something working with teenagers which is be a channel not a damn and it turns out that you want to do the same with adults if listening to a podcast or having the news on helps you fall asleep i i actually suggest you keep doing it i do what okay but if you're waking up four hours later and having a hard time getting back to sleep you might want to think

about how the light from the screen or that noise might be impacting you peep you know this whole thing of listening to stuff out of interest is one thing but when we're listening to podcasts while

“we sleep or we are leaving the TV on i think it reflects a much bigger i was asked myself as a”

scientist why are people doing this and i think they're doing it because it's hard to turn our thoughts off you know one of the practices i talk about i'm happy to share now i talk about in the book i'm happy to share now is this practice of non-sleep deep rest which sounds like meditation sounds like a nap but it's not you know one of the great super skills in life that i wish i had had years ago is the following some people have what's can really we call low activation energy meaning

ambitious they're doing sports they're doing this those people tend to be the same people

that are hard have a hard time turning their mind off other people have the motivation issue right i don't have an issue with sleep i just like i have an issue with motivation procrastination

“is an issue right that's what they say people are getting after they're exercising etc they're”

thinking about business family they want to man they the woes of the world or even just the small things are you know circulating in their head needs to learn to get the mind out of thinking and doing and planning and spend a few minutes in order to fall asleep in just pure sensation and there's a practice that was actually developed in India thousands of years ago called yoga nidra which means yoga sleep it involves no movement where you do this won't come as a surprise

now i call it non-sleep deep rest but you take a few minutes during the day and you could do

sitting or lying down and you close your eyes you do a few long exhales to slow your heart right down and instead of meditating by trying to maintain focus on you know between your forehead or instead of trying to clear your mind this that's almost impossible to do right the clear your mind no impossible it's like the don't think of the elephant you know you can't not think of it

“instead you migrate your thoughts like a spotlight around your body your feet the other foot”

your knee the other knee your heart your body and what you're doing there is you're occupying just enough of the brain's attention that it makes it very easy to do you're not trying to turn off your thoughts but what ends up happening is you stop thinking and planning and you start just going into pure sensation and when you do that the brain goes into we now know from really good science goes into this kind of liminal state between a sleep and awake and little pockets

of the brain start mimicking sleep three things happen when you come out of this practice and it could be five minutes could be ten minutes could be twenty there are a lot of these non-sleep deep breaths scripts out on the internet now some with my voice some with much more pleasant voices and and so on they're all zero cost and you emerge from it feeling mentally and physically restored hmm that's interesting learning of physical information cognitive information is enhanced

“in people that do this you could do this once a week three times a week or daily takes very”

little time and people's ability to fall asleep gets better people recover from traumatic experiences

better what's going on here what is going on what's going on is threefold first of all we now

know that in these states of deep relaxation that are not meditation and are not an app there's a clear out of debris from the brain this is called glimphatic clearance we don't have time to go into the mechanisms but there's a clearance of all the stuff of cellar metabolism in the brain ammonia carbon dioxide cellar debris the ability to clear that stuff out has been shown to offset the development of dementia reduces the likelihood of dementia helps you maintain brain

function in addition and some people will just I usually find that people this is the one that really gets people if you've ever had a poor night's sleep you know there's bags under your eyes not yours but I'm speaking metaphorically here you certainly don't have this whatever you're doing you're doing all the right things clearly but what we've all had if I do we have the wrong lighting in here well I don't believe that but in any case that if you've ever had one poor night's sleep you look

in the mirror and you go oh my god what is that have you ever wondered why then two days later after you slept well you're back to great what happened turns out is the build up of glimph this lymphatic fluid under the eyes and in the eyes you can even see in somebody that hasn't slept well their eyes don't quite look right there's actually lymphatic glimphatic clearance from the eyes so these practices of deep relaxation as well as sleep where the majority of this clearance of this waste

product and the glimphatic clearance occurs you can build in these micro practices throughout the day or just one minute or five minutes of doing this and you're offsetting dementia you come out of it mentally and physically restored you don't have the sleep inertia the the groginess of an app and we're finding that people learn faster it's great for stress mitigation I mean the myriad in the book again which is called protocols you you write about you can listen to a scripted

NSDR session non-sleep deep rest scripted so we're work we find that what's that like on YouTube yeah you can find these on YouTube Apple Spotify you can download them for completely free download them to your phone so you don't even know why if I can actually you could be on the plane or wherever you can I put a bunch of them that I really like you go to hubermanlab.com/nstr or you could simply do a web search and just put NSDR I for a really pleasant woman's voice my friend Kelly boys

B.O.Y.S. does wonderful NSDRs she's in the waking up app also there's some with my voice you can find

think she has a bit of a crush on him if I'm honest sorry to my sister but she loves his voice she's like he has the best voice she does Liam's and these are so simple they cost nothing and by the way the reason I renamed Yoganeidra NSDR and put these scripts out into the world is I intentionally took away all the intentions the mysticism I I want to acknowledge the people that initially developed and Yoganeidra but when people hear Yoganeidra and then they hear they have to do intentions

that takes I'm not sure my truckers are into it exactly that takes away from the practice and it's it's sort of like the word hypnosis I have a colleague at Stanford who does medical hypnosis

incredible success rates at a smoking cessation pain modulation even can't even outcomes from cancer

“treatment but I always tell them this you need to rebrand this thing because in his hands hypnosis”

is rapid brain plasticy rewiring of the brain but people hear hypnosis and they think stage hypnosis and people squawking like chickens so what I'm talking about you're gonna get here whether it's cortisol or darkness light breathing exhales non-sleep deep rest I really want to emphasize what I'm talking about is taking your god-given physiology okay the cells and circuits in your brain and body that you're endowed with and just putting them to their best views for your health

that's the whole story in the book I get into I do talk about supplements and pharmaceuticals I talk about nicotine both benefits and risks I talk about how one can if you like to have a drink or two how you can do that and not disrupt your sleep or health as much at least eight to

ten hours before you go to bed ten hours you're in favor of the dardy is basically what we're

“learning this is the college turns for the day part I you got to keep that shit well away from”

the time with go you go I don't drink I did in my past I don't drink now but I understand people like there are people like alcohol have your glass of wine but then do a couple of things simple things like I just described to get your sleep to keep your sleep good or great that we actually don't know whether the the negative effects of alcohol I'm which I'm a low amounts of alcohol could very well be due to the disruption that alcohol has on sleep so do a few other things

and look if you go out and have a bunch of drinks with your friends and you're safe about it you're not alcoholic and you're a age like you're gonna be okay you're gonna be okay I think that some people have taken might podcasts in my book to mean that like everything has to be very rigid I start off the book by saying listen up true optimization is about accepting who you are and what you are and are not going to do and then trying to get the most vigor and enjoyment out

of life and most life while also having the occasional sleepless night sometimes due to crisis sometimes due to celebration that's life. This is a reminder something recently having an x you may have seen it you know Brian Johnson the don't die guy who who's been on this show he he he posted and he knows he's gonna get hit for these things so I kind of admire his honesty but he posted last night I had dinner at a restaurant I asked for caffeine free coffee I'm convinced they brought

me caffeinated the sleep protocol was off I could not do my morning dunk session which I think is related to basketball I think it means actual dunking I though I don't know with Brian Johnson

you never know they had to cancel it because at my whole evening and day we're disrupted

and the responses were so funny one of them was basically Michael Jordan once had 10 beers and then played a game in which he scored 50 points and then went on to do a round of golf at which he was like x under par is like we have weakened ourselves and especially this is a

“man demand situation to the point beyond shame you should be able to have one night of a cup of coffee”

and not post about it and the whole next days activities are off like come on we actually are somewhat resilient. Yes so a couple of brief points about that I know Brian so yes x is an environment where you don't want to show weakness you most certainly if you're going to make exercise claims you need to put videos and if you put videos don't confuse you have to you have to use proper form and full full range of motion or the guys are going to

hammer you right like it it's a very there should be a third party in your life someone who doesn't love or work for you who approves of said video before it gets just so Brian's you know when Brian put that out there I think there's three phenomena going on one is you know I look at Brian's content I think it's mostly generating entertainment content for people I mean his takeaways about sleep

that you know most people are not going to do all the things he's doing and then he has this

chronic disease which kind of undercut the story but anyway listen I think it's great that he's out there just like I think it's great that Matt cable lines out there and Eric Topol you need this is one thing that people really needs understand about health and longevity in the online communities in science in medicine and I observe this in the in the world of skateboarding and action sports you need a community that represent the sort of different extremes right in skateboarding

we have our Tony Hawk we had my friend Danny way jumped the great wall of China you need the variety of characters right and in science you see this too I don't have time to go into it now but I grew up in science and you get a lot of characters and you need the battles you need all that

but at the end of the day people are after truth and some things end up being more for entertainment

“purposes and the take and that's why people paying attention to the space so be it okay let me”

keep it going I have a question for you as a neuroscientist about OCD because I maybe it's just my anecdotal impression but I feel like it's growing I feel like I don't know a mom or dad that doesn't have a kid with this or that isn't doing it themselves I I've got a little bit of this in my own life not like hand washing but just like repetitive movements or counting in my own head and yet I don't think of myself as an anxious person I don't feel any active anxiety

pretty much ever but I do have a tinge of this so is there is that a neuroscientist thing and might some of these techniques because you're big into stress management in the book and there are tons of tools for stress management and I don't know how you'd classify that is that stress what is that yeah a great question so whether we're talking about ADHD or OCD we need to separate the sort of the semblance of those things that many many many people

“have in his normal versus the full blown pathology so the clinical definition of OCD is when the”

compulsion the behavior actually doesn't suppress the obsession it makes it worse so people who have true OCD they feel like they need to wash their hands they wash their hands and then they feel like they need to do it more they feel like they need to count they count then they feel like they need to do it more and it's maddening it is a it is a they are stricken and they'll do it till their hands are raw they'll pull there's you know the hair pulling version of it there's

some very very severe manifestations of this but OCD in that form is just an extreme version of something that many many people have just like I'll give another example if you go to a bridge and you think oh my gosh like what's keeping me from jumping off or people have thoughts and like oh my goodness like why did I have that thought that's actually a healthy reflection of your ability to suppress action and thoughts right you're not going to act on those things it's

perfectly normal now when we're tired when we are stressed symptoms of OCD and people that don't have full blown clinical OCD can worsen now I know these days for understandable reason there's a lot of concern about SSRIs and I agree that when you look at the data it's clear that many many too many adults and children were medicated with with SSRIs but I will say in fairness to the scientific literature SSRIs have greatly helped people with severe OCD OCD we know is associated

with an overgrowth of a particular brain area in what's called a circuit called the basil ganglia that's involved in action and suppressing action and a brilliant scientist at NIH and due to

“the report discovered this years ago remember prior to the 90s like when I started learning”

about neuroscience I claim no discovery here but it was thought that this was all psychological or like bad parenting or you know or trauma based of which it can be but we know this is a brain issue so those drugs in the proper hands and proper dosages can really help people as can behavioral treatments okay and people like you I'm assuming you don't have full blown clinical OCD based on what you told me or people who say I can't pay attention I just like when I

well I noticed like when I was practicing law where I was working all the time and not getting a lot of sleep whenever I was walking on the streets of New York I was counting my steps or when I'd go up or down a staircase I would count the number of stairs it like little things were just pop up here and you're there and you're there where you're then you're like why am I counting what am I doing right something like that great question so and then you know in some

cultures they worry beads right where people are constantly moving the beads in their hands to sort of dispel some of the energy I will venture a guess here an educated guess that you have

a lot of energy you're a focused person you're always looking for ways that you can do better

and be better and so on and people like that when there's not a task right in front of them

massive muts and they love to run then they're lazy but if you don't give them enough exercise they

“start knowing they're paw they need they need to chew we all have our chew right a bulldog needs to”

know a retriever needs to retrieve a rat terrier needs to look for things and as humans we have these tendencies where our brain circuits become thankfully asymmetric towards learning teaching communicating look you're on you're in front of the public eye every virtually every single day and it's high stakes right and it's and so your system learns to relax in that you are a high level professional athlete thinker communicator learner doer and so when you're walking down the street it's hard to just

switch brain modes to oh I'm just walking down the street now I'm just going to be my most chill form and so the brain starts looking for things to do count think about things sometimes listening to a a podcast or a book can help it's very hard to turn the brain off and it's actually not it advantageous for you to walk out of a meeting or this podcast walk to lunch and during that

“walk to lunch you're just completely decompressed and then you eat your lunch and you come back”

and you snap back on the brain doesn't work in what we call step wave function it's square wave functions and you don't go from a sleep awake awake to a sleep they're these transition states so when you're walking down the street and you're thinking I'm kind of obsessing about that why well there's some carryover from the previous thing just like if you were you know waking up you don't immediately feel wide awake and ready to go about your day there's some you know there's

some shifting of circuits and actually in the final chapter of the book I talk about tools for tasks switching you know many people find that they can't focus but actually their challenges in dropping the mindset from the previous thing to be able to focus for you and me who do public facing work that it's a requirement right our phones aren't out you know it's we have to be locked in but I bet within 10 minutes of ending this like one of us will pick up our phone most

likely and so that's normal it's healthy but don't expect your brain to shut off completely and and I'll just we've one other thing in here many people are having attention issues these days there's a study that was done recently that shows that if your phone is upside down on the table in front of you or it's in your bag under your chair completely turned off you have a harder time focusing compared to if it's in a different room but it turns out you can focus if it's

on the table or it's underneath your chair the problem is it takes more mental resources and you

give up what is essentially intelligence cognitive flexibility and creativity so there's a cost but more importantly if you're used to looking at your phone every three minutes or so when your phone is not there every three minutes or so or less your brain gets distracted with no distraction the brain learns these rhythms of the sun comes up in the morning it goes down at night I'm alert in the morning because I got my morning sunlight or one of these 10,000 lux lights

I dim the lights this is something we call entrainment and the beauty of this is that if you take everything we've talked about and you do it for a couple of days the bright lights in the bright mornings darker nights you try and limit your phone for just fight the impulse just every other time to reach for just for an extra 10 seconds what happens is you naturally start to feel

more alert when you wake up in the morning even before you got the light in your eyes I always get the

question how come I wake up one minute before my alarm clock guess why because that rise in cortisol is what wakes you up and that is entrained to your alarm clock now you can entrain it to sunlight also and guess what on the day when you miss it because it's really dreary out in the in the northeast you'll still feel plenty alert and at night I'm going to start texting you pictures of me in January outside well saying damn that inner humor miss it I will be happy to

gift you a 10,000 lux artificial light I send them to people who say I'm just not going to go outside I'm just not going I'm not going to go outside I'm not going to do it just and flip on all the screens some some music or just wake yourself up you will find that book ending your day in this way and just understanding a bit about my brain is doing something normal and healthy here I'm counting things I have a little bit of a superstitious streak I get it and it's our brains attempt to

have some control but also just to take this attention this energy that we have and put it some place and dogs need it humans need it we need more focus and we need deeper sleep and brighter days

“and all of that but I also want to emphasize we need to be human you need to enjoy your life right”

I think I think people saw that the Brian thing and they I think he did do it more for entertainment purposes and we said we're out and it it's like look it most people sleep to prepare for the next

but at most people are not going to do it yeah so he's going to live forever for what yeah

“that's not living thank god at least he has a girlfriend now the girl who's been helping him do”

his online posts so that's that's a plus for Brian let me ask you a question about on the question of light the issue of light expose your skin and eyes to long wavelength light and you say it can be red light near infrared and infrared now I I feel like I've I've heard you talk about this but I can't remember these specifics because red light is becoming more more popular like women are doing it red light therapy on their face for you know even skin tone

and so on some men are doing infrared or you know so on as what what is the story with your eyes

exposing your eyes to red light or infrared light yeah so the best zero cost but perfect

source of long wavelength light meaning red light and infrared light infrared light is the warmth the warmth from the sun is sunlight right god built us the perfect light device for our mitochondria for our skin for our hormone health et cetera there's only one problem you can't

“do it on your schedule you have to do it on the sun schedule because what you want is the long”

wavelength light so these are the yellows oranges reds and then outpass red is infrared right we can't see it but we can feel it that's the stuff that's great for our mitochondria and that my colleague Glenn Jeffrey University College London I've known him for decades did these

studies as I mentioned earlier shine you get that light on your skin or even through a t-shirt

or light shirt and your metabolism is improved but get it also turns out that if you're 40 or older if you get this long wavelength light on your skin or ideally in your eyes you can do that from the morning sunlight viewing or afternoon sunlight viewing sunset viewing you help repair the the cells in the back of the eyes called the photo receptors these are the cells that take photons of light convert them into electrical energy that allows you to see and Pete and you

can offset what he showed in that study was that you can offset some of the age-related vision loss you also offset myopia which is near-sidedness now I had to start wearing readers recently because of writing this book because I was spending so much time up close to a screen when you look at things to close up for and you don't see horizons very much you're not looking at a distance very much the eyeball lengthens and the visual image lands in front of the light sensing portion of the

“eye not on it that's what corrective lenses do they bring the light point point to focus on to the”

right location there is a true epidemic of myopia of near-sidedness and the data on kids and their data emerging on adults too is that if kids just take their tablets computers outside if you get outside more you offset this so the long wavelength light turns out to be the key sunlight is full spectrum you know UV short wavelength medium and long wavelength and the balance is key you don't want too much UV because it can indeed damage your skin there's a lot of debate nowadays about how

much sunlight you need some UV for vitamin D production and for mood and health but you don't want to get a sunburn and indeed it can cause accelerated aging the skin if you're getting too much UV we could talk about that if you like but getting some long wavelength light from sunlight or and or I would say you could get a red light like a red light LED device you could use a red incandescent light we don't have a lot of farmers output goggles on you could put so

so in the evening I will put on short wavelength blocking glasses they look red tinted but that's to block the short wavelengths but when you're out during the day you're getting a lot a long wavelength light penetrating the skin it's benefiting you and it's benefiting your eyes but the study showed this offset of age related vision loss is when people get enough long wavelength light and if you're indoors he's in England so that study was done where people are spending a

lot of time indoors they're under LED lights which we all use now because they're more energy efficient candle light will do it so if you like candles in the evening or if you have a fire in the fireplace or here's a cool trick the farmers taught me this they have a cheap inexpensive solution to all this you get it what they call a pig light it's a red incandescent bulb and it supplies long wavelength light farmers knew this it's very interesting actually as I've written

this book so you don't have to stare at the bulb you just have to be here it fills the room and the beauty of long wavelength light is that it bounces off surfaces all over so you don't have to be looking right at it if you can get outside in a green space if I were to give you infrared glass

and that's because the long wavelength light is bouncing off it it's getting reflected down on you there's a wonderful work showing that recovery from surgery recovery from illness staving off illness including upper respiratory infections skin health i health longevity is get that long wavelength light the key is to not get too much UV because that can be damaging

“so that's why sunlight can be like the red light bed yeah but infrared saunas are great”

if you can afford one an infrared incandescent light is great an LED panel if they tend to be pretty expensive but the incandescent light are not terribly expensive and as I've talked to more and more farmers they they laugh right they're like I get up with the sun I go outside I'm carrying stuff I'm doing work I'm drinking my coffee then I have breakfast afterwards I might catch a quick nap in the afternoon but I have to go out in the evening take the animals

and take care of things I'm not suggesting we go back to a living that way but they nailed it

they nailed it it wasn't so bad they nailed all the light it's my first time you mentioned the

candle light in law school we had to sit alphabetically so the guy next to me on the one side was named Andy Kelly and Andy Kelly was starting to lose his close-up vision you know he from all the reading and law school and so on and he told me at the time that he reversed it by staring at candle light and I remember being like really is that even possible and he saw it was possible and here I am sitting across from a human here moving and hearing yeah it's possible

I mean I think the I think the highly processed food's conversation for the next two years you're going to hear two things I anticipate will be really big in the health space cord is all well no longer be seen as this stress hormone it will be seen as the thing to leverage high morning low at night I hope to play a role in that the other thing that you're going to hear quite a lot about is how all these LED lights which are incredibly energy efficient I mean

“how often do you have to change a light bulb nowadays hardly ever the problem is their short wavelength”

shifted it's not the blue light it's that there isn't enough long wavelength light so we're going to hear about supplementing with long wavelength light that does not mean you have to buy a red light panel candle light fire place get outside when the sun is low in the sky either near sunrise or near sunset get that long wavelength light immensely beneficial also for mental health and for physical health it's so interesting that so many of the things we're talking about in

health are about undoing the damage from the lifestyle and technologies that we built but there's also just a lot of you know this notion that we used to be scared of saber two tigers and that's why we stress no I mean 10,000 years ago I guarantee that people were concerned about their loved ones

when they went off to hunter gather relationships had issues kids got sick stress has always been a

“part of life the key is to teach yourself how to destress to get great sleep turn your mind off get”

focused in alert and I'm a consumer of caffeine and you know if you want we could talk about nicotine but these are just skills that take minutes if that to learn because they work the first time in every time you notice there's no learning curve in anything I'm saying I'm not saying listen if you go outside for three days in a row then these cells will learn it's morning no the first time you do it it works and they know it works first time and every time we've all heard

those radio ads about oing money to the IRS they try to scare you and push you into calling out of fear but tax relief advocates takes a different approach if you owe the IRS 5,000 50,000 or even 500,000 TRA has real solutions to fix your tax problem don't lose hope TRA can often reduce or completely eliminate what you owe their focuses taxes and helping people and businesses resolve IRS problems they have more than a thousand five star Google reviews and an A plus rating

from the better business bureau you no longer have to fear the IRS generous relief programs exist right now that can give you a clean slate so act today go to tRA.com that's tRA.com or call eight hundred five seventy five six eight four five okay again that's eight hundred five seven five six eight four five tax relief advocates real solutions for real people imagine this you're surrounded by fellow fans sharing wings sharing drinks high-fiving random strangers everyone remembers the game and no one remembers

the guy coughing behind you until a few days later at 2 a.m. when you wake up with a fever and your throats on fire now what urgent care closed ER hell no tell a health maybe but the pharmacy's closed that's where a medical emergency kit from the wellness company could come in these are

not first aid kits they contain essential prescriptions used for over 30 common conditions

need them use your doctor developed guidebook to select the right prescription or call their

telemed doctor standing by it's like an urgent care and drugstore at home when you're sick traveling or stranded you could have used a medical emergency kit order online in minutes and it is shipped to your door and save 45 bucks with our promo code mk at urgent care kit dot com slash mk that's promo code mk at urgent care kit dot com slash mk the book spends a fair amount of time focusing or talking about focus motivation and learning chapter six you go you go deep on that

so if you need better focus in your life if you need motivation but the learning thing was interesting to me um protocol three I wanted to talk about embrace errors there's a whole long bit in the

book about embracing errors saying they embrace the fact that errors are an essential trigger for

learning errors that come from genuine attempts to learn something are the signal for plasticity to occur this is true for all forms of skill development cognitive, motor, musical, mathematical, et cetera so whether you're learning a sport a musical instrument or history or news for that matter making errors in the process of learning is critical so can you expand on that? yes so if I could put a banner across the sky I would want people to understand

the following message the agitation you feel from not being able to do something through a genuine attempt so not throw away errors that agitation is the reflection of the release of certain molecules

“we call them neuromodulators in the brain and body that tell your nervous system you need to change”

to close the gap between what you're trying to do and what you currently can do okay we don't tell kids this we don't tell adults this and so we think the friction that comes from the attempt to learn that that somehow is signaling that we're in the wrong place no if you if you think about it logically if your nervous system could do something if your brain could do it if your body could do it why would it change it wouldn't and we've been so captivated by this concept of flow which is a

beautiful concept but this idea of you know forgetting ourselves and just being able to do the skill I mean this is unfortunately the consequence of science fiction and movies where somebody gets the sword they drink the drink they are wake up and you know they get hit by lightning and now they have superpowers like damn that Harry Potter right you know like no that's not how it works that's this thing called fantasy the way it works is that you know nothing you

go from unskilled to skilled skill to mastery mastery to virtuosity how do you do that you make

“genuine attempts to do something in order to do that you have to be alert and focused so you have to”

learn to focus and I talk about that in that chapter then you can't do it that's the signal your nervous system needs to change you get some rest from sleep or non-sleep deep rest ideally both

and you come back a day or two later and you can sort to do the thing amazing we all know this to

be true but it turns out the errors are the signal to your nervous system that needs to change but your nervous system doesn't know error it knows that it's your nervous system speaks to the neuron speak to each other in electricity and chemicals so agitation and that low level stress so alert but calm but a little bit stressed that signals it's time to change that here's the best way to think about it if you've ever played that game hot hands where you know your hands are on

top of someone else's hands and the the person underneath is going to flip their hands over and hit

“your hands that's the level of attention and kind of alertness that you need to learn that just to me”

describes it perfectly you so you're not stressed but you're not too relaxed either so you have to be wrapped with attention and looking for something ready for something trying to throw the dart to the bull's eye trying to you know hit that you know sink the sink the ball trying to learn the language so you have to pay attention there's only so much you can do in a given learning I call them learning bouts because it should feel like a fight with yourself and if you're too stressed

you can't do it now there's even studies that show that if you take a drug like propanolol beta blocker conventional beta blocker after you try to learn something you don't learn it because the adrenaline the adrenaline in your body and nor up an effort in your brain are two of the key neuromodulators for learning this is why unfortunately traumatic experiences

okay you can probably go about your day okay but you have a changed relationship to that location

okay and the what happened was there was a lot of adrenaline and trauma comes about when there's so much adrenaline that it grabs memories that are unassociated with the event so now the sound of cars just gets you ramped up doesn't matter if the cars are having a way from you then walking out on the street gets you ramped up and then the process is of also a plasticity

“where you have to on your public trigger get to unlearn the emotions and now we every form of”

trauma therapy whether it's you know you know EMDR it's talked therapy is about getting you into a calmer emotional state while recounting the event you're not going to forget the thing it's about peeling off the emotional load so when you want to learn something what I call self-directed adaptive plasticity it's a bunch of words but to distinguish it from bad plasticity because brain damage is a form of plasticity but it's not when you want but when you're trying to learn

something you have to be alert so you can be focused I talk about ways to do that should you

or should you not use caffeine or nicotine should you or should you not take a cold shower first

well the best way to get alert is to have a good night sleep the night before but caffeine helps too hydration helps too and if you really care about something that helps too right even kids with severe ADHD can concentrate on their favorite video game we know this they don't have a focus issue they have a focus on things they don't like issue adults as well this is important and then

“they you focus and then you have to try and do something I'm trying I'm trying and people I”

hear it all the time I'm not good at that I'm not good at that why I don't know it stresses me out great now's the opportunity to learn one of the reasons why exercise helps your brain and their many reasons helps with better oxygenation of the brain better sleep et cetera but one of the

reasons that you learn so much better in the four or five hours after exercise is that it makes you

more alert because you have epinephrine and nor epinephrine circulating in your brain and body so a lot of the positive effects of exercise are it's true I should say that yes exercise makes your brain better but really it should be exercise gives you the opportunity to learn you don't get smarter by exercising anyone that's known like a pure jock can not test to that that's a joke against my jock friends but the but anyone that just exercises isn't getting smarter that's not true it makes

gives you the opportunity to learn because you come out of that exercise provided you didn't exhaust yourself we're not talking two hours of squats or something you come out of that exercise and you feel different you why what is that dopamine epinephrine nor epinephrine the so-called catacolymes that cocktail of neurochemicals primes you for learning so 202627 come out of exercise maybe you read for a moment maybe you sit and do some emotional learning you know some people are

trying to be a better spouse they're trying to be better to themselves and they this sounds so silly right but to sit there and think you know I'm going to try and be a little bit kinder to myself today or to other people it sounds really squishy right but if you're in a certain state of mind it it actually works it carries over it's but just telling yourself I'm going to be a nicer person like saying you you know I'm going to be kinder to myself that's about as effective

as telling yourself you know I'm going to learn fluent Japanese by saying I'm going to learn fluent Japanese no it's the state that you're in when you set that intention to learn it's the state that you're in when you arrive at the learning and so we can all learn new things it's just a function of being alert being focused and getting into that agitation and then going doing something else and you'll come back better you will you will master that skill over time

well you write about personal growth in the book and I was actually just talking about this with my audience I've mentioned many times people generally know it but I was saying and this is in your book as well you like the let in my view the less time spent thinking about the past the better I just I try to stay away from it and I've had a great life I it's not because I had a ton of trauma I had some things but I definitely don't ruminate on them and when I start going

to them I try to get myself off of them and I can pretty quickly I just find no good comes from it and I'm trying to teach my kids that same skill like there's really no point in just ruminating or going back or reliving some unfortunate moment the less time spent thinking about it the better and kind of the same about the future like some some planning is required to

“exist on this earth and make something out of yourself you know you have to figure out if you”

want to take a big vacation in June and it's December you might need to buy an airline ticket and so on but the best thing for for happiness is to be in the present and they say that all the time

thought were quite clever again the book is called Protocols by Andrew Hubertman right here you

“can get it on pre-order right now it's coming out soon and I thought these were clever like”

questions that you can ask about your environment that will bring you right right into the room unavoidably yeah the past okay two most dangerous words in the English language are if only I stand by that I didn't say that someone once said that to me you you cannot live in if only but that that that that is death that that is spiritual death that's so that I'll just leave there as a to me a hard truth I will say I'll I'll put it a different way as my as my dear friend

always says the the past is like your ass behind you so being the data that's a good one

the the the data definitely say large-scale data sets definitely say that being present correlates with happiness and that's true even if you're in unpleasant present circumstances so you're with someone who's sick in the hospital interesting

“try not to distract yourself but you need to sleep to be a great caretaker so I I have to”

I want to put two caveats and then total agreement that the first caveat is there's a section in the book where talk about data from this guy named James Penabaker who developed a tool called Expressive Writing where if you're having if there's something in the back of your mind that you can't shake an experience you cannot shake a time when you experience shame or a trauma there are now tens of thousands of quality studies showing that if you take 15 minutes

but just 15 not more and you write about that four days in a row by the end of the fourth day you will have significantly offloaded a lot of the emotional load of that thing so I want to be fair to that so if there's something that like I use their turn sometimes that you know they're these past experiences that are kind of like barbed wire like we they're painful to get off and they're painful to stay on you know so that Penabaker exercise costs

nothing you can tear up the paper afterwards actually suggest you do but you do it four days in a row

you will feel significantly better say the data pretty incredible writing does seem to be

important the hand writing it out set a timer do it you will come out of that first session not feeling great but you'll move about your day symptoms of health immune system function improves they've done all the measures of biology and psychology that one would want to see and it's really impressive okay so that that aside the other thing as I'll just mention a saying I didn't come up with but I that I love is and it's harsh but the difference between winners and losers is the

following losers take things that happen to them happen to them or that they did that they wish they hadn't done and they take the negative feelings around those things and they use it for

“self or outward destruction winners I think we would all agree take the hard things that happen to them”

as well as the gifts they've been given they think about them as much as they need to but then they transmute that those experiences maybe years of experience into things that are good for them and for the world period end of story I know it's harsh winners and losers but let's face it most of the bad stuff in the world is because people are taking bad stuff that happen to them and doing bad stuff they feel justified in doing it there's some full-blown psychosis type stuff but

let me just interject quickly um last week we watched the Novak joke of it's documentary um the wolf of winter he's impressive I think I'm Netflix right now and of course he's like he's the goat and that's saying something in the world of tennis because there are others who are just right there with them but he's got the most uh wins when it comes to grants lamps which is how they measure it so the the the the the movie it's two hours long is a very good but joke of it

is a controversial guy or was very controversial when he started in the tennis world because he was last mature he did some mocking of other players he suddenly got injured in matches that he was losing when he was younger and this turned a lot of people on him and for years he was booed he was

never the favorite they created a rivalry in tennis between federal and edal joke of it wasn't

part of it even though he was up and coming and then very much was in it with those two but would be the lesser than he has a line in his documentary uh table for three please um but they weren't giving this to him because he was never the favorite and what joke of it's talked about was there's something in serbian culture called in it that makes you thrive on that and people who

treating him like a second class citizen and making him feel like odd man out even when he was

number one in the world only fueled him to win more and in fact he's somebody who kind of needs it in order to win so all of his detractors were inadvertently helping him now he's it's changed to his beloved and he's matured and he's totally likable in this documentary entirely but

“in any of it when you talk about that that's what I'm thinking of somebody who takes what could”

be traumatizing for someone else being openly booed by the entire stadium at the Australian Open which you've won something like 16 times and where you should be a king because you leave after getting seriously hurt this is later in his career openly booed what you could you could be talking about that as your trauma on a self-help show yeah instead he it's fuel for him and it's a positive so this is what you're talking about yeah I look I it goes back to the beginning of our

conversation the biggest mistake I made in life the biggest mistake and I own it completely even though I was only 14 was taking the circumstances of my family life at the time and not continuing to apply myself in certain areas of life I should have you know you could say well you're only 14 okay fine and it all worked out but it was a moment and I talk about this in the book it was you know

a moment it was a physical altercation when I was you know first year away at school that

made me realize if I don't take the hard things that have happened and do something with my life no no one's gonna care and I won't have any self respect the the story of a hard childhood is something that we can all like we feel compassion for but I realize I like I'm gonna be like a genuine loser as I I'm gonna be a genuine loser it doesn't matter what else I I do unless I I actually turn my life into something worthwhile and I started developing agency I started running I started

exercising I started studying and I had to fasten myself to a chair with a timer I had to I mean I I will say and I know people work I worked like a maniac and I still worked very very hard and so I have great respect for anyone that can take hardship or shame and I've had other things like my advisors dying and mistakes I've made and there's this transmutation we call it you take the

“negative energy and you have to like pretzel twisted into this expression that is good for you”

and for the world or at least not destructive I mean I think this is why yeah joke of it or like or David Goggins you know we love these people because they're doing it we can we can feel David's pain I mean I've sat down with David I knew him before he had a book and got famous and he was the exact same guy we actually were had a meeting in San Jose this is a wild story and we finished up this meeting as private meeting wasn't being recorded and he said I'm gonna run to the

airport he meant run to the airport he put on a Becky ran like 16 miles to San Jose airport no book no thing no nothing no cameras and I was like the luggage he just like just like ruckus backpack it was

incredible and I thought that's where I you know I don't seem that much but you know because he's

off on his own running but I got a bunch of Goggins stories from before he got famous and he was the same guy he's in a battle with himself the self-hate voice he came on my podcast every day he hears European cigar bitch European that came from the outside but eventually he internalized and when you realize that it's all in your head you realize that you can and need to flip the script flip the script and there's nothing more beautiful about humans than our ability to do this and for people who

don't have intense hardship what because a lot of times now kids will come to you and be like I don't have the trauma story I'm like great well don't get soft you know like you didn't have that you know and a lot of wealthy parents approached me what do I do my kid is like a total loser they don't or my kid doesn't want to work because they got all this dopamine they got everything they wanted with no effort dopamine and rewards without effort first destroy a human it's just

destroys a human it's like giving your dog a treat just for being cute you get a you get an unhealthy dog that dies early fact the dogs have we all have this sometimes it's more latent that in others

“than in others but we have this desire to work we want that friction and overcome that that's what”

makes us feel so alive and that we have capacity and then of course peace and joy and meaning it doesn't have to all be about the grind but you know everyone will tell you that the peace and meaning and love and connection that's all much better on a backdrop of hard work I you know at necessary so I don't believe in focusing on the past but I do believe in transmuting your

you really stuck you need to get off the barbed wire and that penabaker writing exercise costs nothing has been shown to be very effective and the idea is that you do it and then you move on it's nothing you do it every day you do it and then you move on the other piece well but I'm sorry on the I just want to go um raise what what you wrote in chapter seven because you you give people this actual tool writing if your thoughts are elsewhere re-tether them to the present ask questions

anchored in your current surroundings this is such a good tool like I've never heard somebody do this

before because all they just say be in the present be in the moment which is very hard for somebody who's a warrior or an obsessor about the past and you suggest ask questions like how cold or warm is it in this room what does it smell like how many people in line in front of me are on their phone etc but something you say I really says is trivial but it returns your perceptions to the present because they can only be answered right here and now I love this you know so that came about

because you know somewhere around 2015 um I look I was about to get 10 year stand for my life was great but I know as I accumulated a lot of stress and I started studying stress and stress mitigation and I found no one could give me a real time tool for de-stressing fast then I discovered the physiological side it had been around since the thirties but I was hearing all about grit resilience

and mental toughness and no one was telling me how just all these amazing stories that people

being creative I'm like how do you do it I'm a scientist I want to know about cell circuits, mechanisms and protocols so then it was seeing you know the bumper stickers be here now beautiful

“quote from rom-dos or you hear your your life is what your thoughts make it which by the way came”

first from the Bible but then you find in every philosopher said that but then like how do you do that be present I mean there's nothing squishier to me than be present how great tell me how and and you can tell I get a little irritated by I don't I really don't like um hippie wellness I have friends that listen to grateful dad and you know I like a few of their songs but so I'm not like beating up on hippies I just I don't like these terms like calm down or you know or

just take a deep breath no it turns out it's all wrong so the be present thing I thought

I'm a neuroscientist what do I know for sure I know that we can be planning a lot of the brains function is to predict things thank goodness we can remember things great unless we're focused on negative things from the past as you pointed out that are keeping us from moving forward in life or itself damaging or harming others that's not good also focusing on your trauma all

“the time is not solving it it's amplifying those circuits so you need to move past it and then”

I started exploring the neuroscience of perception and what brings the brain from a state of thinking and planning and remembering things of past so stuck in the past or the future to being right in the present and turns out you have to just get into sensation and you need to get into perceptions and asking questions the brain loves questions questions questions help shift the brain from one state to another so if I could just look at the data and I looked at the data on how to get present

it turns out you have people pay attention seemingly trivial things like how cold am I what is what does it feel like the contact of my legs to the chair I'm sitting on something I wasn't thinking about all of a sudden it's not about what you're focusing on it's now what you're not focusing on and once you're in the present then the brain can more easily shift to the positive things that you can do to have some agency over your current conditions we hear a lot about agency this is so good this

is very helpful yeah so like when you're feeling like you don't have control you're like you can go online and watch something it says if you're on access to all about agency right it's kind of like it's all about agency on Instagram not anymore but it's about more entertainment and victim stuff who's the victim I'm the victim there are the victim who's the victim no he's the he's the aggressiveness mine is on acute hair effects but like I like the bulldog stuff and and there's

other stuff too but I'm sort of I'm kind of talking at the extremes but yeah how do you have agency

“well you have to get present because you can't have agency over the past you sure can't have agency”

over the future unless you take care of the right now how do you do that and it's interesting because kids learn this very fast if you teach them I've taught many kids the physiological side and when they're stressed to just focus on what's around them and they learn it so fast but as adults we have these these well-charted reflexes to gosh I'm thinking about that thing again I can't stop thinking about that thing and then people think that they're ruminating and indeed they're

ruminating then they wonder if it's trauma and it might be I mean there are real traumas that

cold or warm is this thing I'm holding that shifts the brain in the direction you want to go

that's not where you want to stop but it brings you back to the presence you can continue forward in the present this is and so there's a lot of this you really don't want to stop on what does it smell like and he's right so this really about that will bring you right now exactly right so it's about brain states it's about understanding that the brain doesn't go from sleep to awake

“from stress to calm it's that you need to do things to bridge these states to get from one state to another”

and you have that power in your mind and body and so I try and provide tools that represent the the fastest and most seamless path to those that doesn't require any learning

and can you learn how to do them but there's no it's not like you you need to master the skill

you have the skill you just have an exercise did before yeah you're gonna you probably weren't asking the right questions now because you've mentioned a couple times can you tell us about the physiological side the physiological side that so that's the double inhale long exhale so that's the and then the exhale through the mouth okay and our study on that a few years back we had people do that repeatedly show that if you were to repeat that and compare to say a meditation practice

or to box breathing which is inhale hold exhale hold or to a meditation practice you would find as they all have some benefit but the physiological side allows you to calm down the fastest and it improves your sleep it improves your mood and it improves resting heart rate heart rate variability it just has so many positive effects and it's so simple and it's costs nothing and if you

“don't remember to do it every day you just do it every once in a while and I know it I know no no no”

I have neurosurgeon friends who use it I have tier one operator friends who use it I know eight year old kids who use it moms you know like even my dog does it but they do it reflexively if you watch your dog before they go down to sleep yeah they do a double inhale right this is the book long exhale and it's to balance their carbon dioxide oxygen ratios dogs are so smart because they don't they don't worry about stuff not mine but most yeah it's it's wonderful to see that others have that in their pets

let's talk about nicotine and caffeine because especially nicotine is all the rage right now the little packs that people put in their mouths what's the story of nicotine okay well 90% of the world uses caffeine every single day and they're not going to quit and I love caffeine the data say can offset dementia if you don't like caffeine and you say to take it before exercise or drink it

“whatever yeah you're obamate which is what I like or coffee I like as well people have different”

caffeine tolerances I will say if you don't like caffeine don't go drink it to try and offset dementia you'll be fine like you but if you do like caffeine you don't have to worry I don't recommend drinking caffeine too late in the day because it can mess up your sleep but I love a 2pm espresso I love it I have to say so and I drink it and I sleep fine nicotine is a special one because humans throughout history ever since they discovered nicotine have found a way to get it into their

systems then they discovered causes cancer they find a new way they create vaping then they find out that vaping isn't good for you not as bad as smoking but it's still terrible causes all sorts of lung issues so then now oral nicotine is all the rage here's the deal I'll tell you the positive first nicotine there is some evidence some evidence that it may help offset Parkinson's and dementia before it forms okay why it increases acetycoline which is one of the major neuromodulators that's

depleted in many forms of dementia and it increases dopamine and movement and Parkinson's and dopamine that whole story is about loss of dopamine urgent neurons most treatments for Parkinson's

are about increasing dopamine so the problem is that nicotine is extremely habit forming

slash addicting okay it's an amazing stimulant because it makes you alert but it also makes you feel calm it puts you in that perfect state for learning and for most daytime activities but it also raises blood pressure which in particular for men can cause cardiovascular issues include and sexual health issues because of blood flow inhibitor right so nicotine can cause problems if taken in excess but the big problem is that now people take one you know let's say a

three to six or even eight milligrams pouch of nicotine and they feel great and then they're doing two a day then three a day and then pretty soon you need an entire canister every few days

just to be at their normal level of alertness so if you really want to use nicotine as a cognitive

enhancer as a healthy person you use it very occasionally three to six milligrams maybe two to three times a week maximum one pouch but most people don't do that they're quickly into multiple pouches per day so it's sort of when I say it's a cognitive enhancer

“that's with occasional use and the same goes for caffeine you need to be alert to get focused”

most people need caffeine just to be alert so you don't get any learning benefit or cognitive benefit from caffeine you're just getting yourself into that plane of alertness that allows you to function but I love caffeine so much I love yearba mate I love coffee and you're not going to take it away from me and I just love it and so I like to acknowledge that some people really

like their nicotine but if you're going to use nicotine make sure you check your blood pressure

and ideally you're exercising too I will say a lot of the guys that I know it doesn't seem to be mostly guys I went out to I won't mention which but a big military school on the East Coast and I didn't inform all pole of how many of the 4,000 students used nicotine and about two thirds of the hands in the room went up and then when I spoke to the sports teams it was like

“almost all of them are using nicotine but their athletes they're young they're running around”

do I suggest it not really but if you're doing that as opposed to smoking cigarettes or vaping great definitely be safer for you than alcohol and I'm not a big fan of cannabis some people can do it without issues but it does predispose to psychosis and some people it's a whole story into itself it gets very political I'm happy to talk about it but I did a podcast showing that there's strong data showing that THC especially in young males can predispose them to permanent

psychosis there's very strong THC products not all but a lot of them and I got vehemently attacked by the left they were like misinformation what are you doing I'm like listen I gave the balance picture I don't tell people what to do but know what you're doing heard from many parents and people like my kid is schizophrenic because of and this is real right then there were some movements on the right the administration was trying to actually make some of the laws around cannabis

a little bit more liberal and then all of a sudden the left started attacking cannabis and so I started realizing like I don't get political but I realized okay most media I know you don't do this but most media that they actually are not reporting the issue from a place of hearts and understanding of data they're just kind of going it's like my team your team stuff so the data are this yeah some people can use cannabis no problem it nukes your deeps rap or your rapid

eye movement sleep that's not good but some people can do it no problem the edible is not a problem for them other people it causes apathy psychotic issues one or the other or in some cases both and so you just need to be very careful and I will tell you as my I've only had the experience of being male and I will tell you young males should not use cannabis you want to develop your life you want to be be ambitious as ambitious as you can while being a kind person and taking care of yourself

cannabis except for extremely talented creatives is a motivation success inhibitor I don't know

“the data for females as well because we don't have a lot of female specific data on it so that's why”

I just sort of mentioned that but I will tell you when young guys are like how do you feel about THC I'm like I love it when my competitors take THC be in anything I you better hope that all your competitors take THC because it's it's a complete killer of I think many of my do yeah and then I will say someone will come along every once in a while and they'll say I know this athlete who uses cannabis and they're a super athlete or my grandfather smoked and and drank every day

and lived to be 100 in two so those stories I always say yeah well you know yesterday and this is a

true story I sat down with somebody who's dad did everything right and got a glioma so you're always and and died so you're always going to have these these margin cases at the extremes where someone does everything right and still get sick and dies and someone does everything wrong and still lives along healthy life but most people are not at those extremes and so if you're going to use the excuse like I'm going to do everything wrong and be okay forget it the data say that's very unlikely

or if you say I'm going to do everything right and I'm certain that I'm going to live to be 150 well that's not true either that's not true either and so what you want to do is most things right most of the time and avoid the pitfalls of that could cause psychosis or drunk driving I mean we sort of know this it's logic but the health messaging has gotten very contaminated by the political sphere in a way that I think has hurt a lot of people I just want people to have the information

in the last 30 years of her life she ate nothing but processed foods she never saw exercise in any

“way shape or form she walked a little bit around her senior citizens complex that she lived and”

lived on her own until she was 100 in a half this is your grandmother and yeah my nana she was stressed out all the things that we're not supposed to do but that's of course the exception not the rule we can't go by that the I thought the exercise and the eating advice in the book was very sound and it was right along the lines of what you're saying nothing extreme you know a normal sort of natural foods diet less processed the better and exercise yes weight training

cardiovascular as well as walking you know a few times a week in addition to like cardiovascular training all all good but and we only have a couple minutes left can you just hit so for the quick for the quick learners or the people who just want to get like a quick highlight what are the top three things you want them to take away when it comes to their wellness what they can learn from your experience bright mornings that involve light ideally from sunlight or artificial

lights some movement some hydration I'm a big you know I'm a big proponent of prayer meditation

“things that orient you to what's really important for me that's prayer in the morning and before”

going to sleep at night these things have an outside positive effect on your health and your mood

and your ability to focus all day long the second thing would be do a long exhale or ideally

two inhale through your nose a long exhale through your mouth anytime you feel stressed or even a couple times throughout the day you'll improve your heart rate variability your resting heart rate you'll find that you actually can handle stress very well you'll lower your baseline levels of stress and you'll feel more control over your mind and body in a way that carries over to everything that tool works anywhere and everywhere unless you're underwater and then darken your sleeping

environment cool it down and do some long exhale breathing before sleep and those three things and of course you still need to do some exercise trying walk a bunch and lift some heavy objects

“now and again heavy for you get your heart rate up doing some exercise don't need too much”

process for this kind of thing the things we all know but if you do those three things you will find

that everything gets better right away daytime energy ability to mitigate stress learning presence with emotional presence and physical presence with people you love your ability to just enjoy life a bit more to pivot your brain state and to reset in that magical phase of our 24 hour cycle sleep that no one seems to get away without doing for very long those things you'll look better you'll feel better you will be healthier you will live longer

and it sounds like good old fashioned advice because I'm saying sleep right exercise don't stress social connection but what no one you know you know humility aside and and and humbly I'll say also no one ever told us how it's like we were told what not to do so I'm not going to bark at you to not drink or not do this or not I'm going to tell you do those things and also learn to enjoy them they're for you and they're so you can show up better for yourself and other

people in life learn to enjoy them they're you got given circuits and molecules like we all have them and put them to use and if you miss a couple days no big deal get get right back on it they take seconds to minutes they cost nothing they're available to you in some form every single day and that I mean there's over 1200 references in the book that support what I'm saying I'm not coming up with this stuff I'm not naming it after me these are not the human in protocols this is your

body your physiology your brain your mind and you deserve to get the best from them and that's my deep deep wish for people I've seen it I've experienced how they can help I've seen how it can help others I just want those for for the world I really really do you got to get the book now it's gonna sell out it's called protocols by Andrew Huberman an operating manual for the human body don't wait it's gonna hit the stores soon but you want to get it now because it'll sell out and then you

want to have it it's a pleasure thank you so much for coming on I hope I get to talk to you again yeah thanks so much for hosting me for forgive me that in my excitement various times I inadvertently spoke over you I'm a big fan and I really appreciate the opportunity to connect your audience and really enjoy your questions indeed I learned a lot during this conversation so thank you all the pleasure is ours all the best you and good luck with the

thank you very much again bye for now wow what a guy so interesting the book is big but it's an

sleep nutrition etc whatever interests you and actually really genuinely will make a great gift as we go like I had into the Christmas season I mean that's what's next here as we say goodbye to the 80 degree days thank you all so much for listening don't forget to go out and buy protocols today