Optimize Your Learning & Creativity With Science-Based Tools

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1:00Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. My name is Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. This podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring you zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Inside Tracker. Inside Tracker analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and health and health needs. I've been getting my blood tested for many years now because it just turns out that many of the things that are important to our health and well-being can only be detected in a blood test or a DNA test. Inside Tracker makes that really easy. They can come to your house to take those samples if you like or you can go to a nearby clinic as well. The major problem with most blood tests and DNA tests

2:02is that it's very hard to make sense of the information you get. A lot of numbers related to metabolic factors, endocrine factors, etc. Inside Tracker makes it very easy to decipher what those levels in your blood and DNA mean and what to do about them. They have a very easy to use dashboard that if you go to it, it can inform about lifestyle choices such as adding or subtracting certain forms of exercise or nutrition. Other things relate to supplementation. It's a really powerful and easy to use program. If you want to try Inside Tracker, you can go to insidetracker.com slash Huberman and put Huberman at checkout to get 25% off any of their programs. That's inside tracker.com slash Huberman and put Huberman at checkout. The second sponsor of today's podcast is Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink. I've been using Athletic Greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. I started using Athletic Greens and I still use Athletic Greens because I find it very complicated and almost dizzying

3:09to figure out which vitamins and minerals I need to take in order to just cover my nutritional bases. Taking Athletic Greens makes that very easy. It also tastes very good. I mix mine with water, a little bit of lemon juice, and I really like it, so I drink it once or twice a day. The probiotics that are in Athletic Greens are also important to me because there are a lot of data now showing that the gut microbiome, which is supported by probiotics, is important for things like the gut brain access, mood, endocrine factors, metabolism, many, many biological functions. And so by taking Athletic Greens, I get the vitamins, the minerals, and the probiotics, all-in-one, easy to consume, great tasting, drink. If you want to try Athletic Greens, you can go to AthleticGreens.com slash Huberman. And if you do that, you'll also get one year supply of liquid Vitamin D3K2. There are a lot of data now as well showing that Vitamin D3 is important for immune function, for mood, endocrine factors, as well as other systems in the brain and body. That's AthleticGreens.com slash Huberman. And I should also mention if you do that, you won't

4:13just get the Vitamin D3K2, your supply, you'll also get five free travel packs of Athletic Greens. Mixing up powders when one is on the road, either in the car, or in a hotel, or on the plane, et cetera, can be kind of messy. These little travel packs make it really clean and easy. So once again, if you go to AthleticGreens.com slash Huberman, you'll get a special offer of your Athletic Greens, but you'll also get the year supply of Vitamin D3K2 and the five free travel packs. The third sponsor of today's podcast is Made For. Made For is a behavioral science company that makes attaining positive changes and growth mindset easy through a simple set of steps and a monthly program. The company was founded by former Navy SEAL Patrick Dossett and Tom's founder Blake Mikoski. I'm the head of their scientific advisory board, and the other members of the advisory board include people like the director of the chronobiology unit at the National Institutes of Mental Health, members of Harvard Medical School, and many other people who are serious about taking science and developing protocols that can be applied towards positive

5:15habits and growth mindset. If you want to check out Made For, you can go to GetMadeFor.com, and if you purchase any of their products and put Huberman at checkout, you'll get 20% off their program. In addition to that, we do a monthly Zoom call where the members of Made For get on it and Patrick and myself, sometimes Blake as well, discuss the Made For program and the personal goals and things that people are trying to achieve with the program, so it's a dialogue back and forth on Zoom call once a month. Once again, that's GetMadeFor.com, put in Huberman at checkout, and you'll be able to get the 20% off as well as access the monthly Zoom calls with us. Let's talk about Neural Plasticity. More specifically, let's talk about how we can optimize our brains. Neural Plasticity is this incredible feature of our nervous system that allows it to change itself even in ways that we consciously decide. That's an incredible property. Our liver can't decide to just change itself. Our spleen can't decide to just change itself through conscious thought,

6:18or through feedback from another person. The cells in those tissues can make changes, sure, but it's our nervous system that harbors this incredible ability to direct its own changes in ways that we believe, or we're told, will serve us better. Today's a really special episode, because while we are going to talk about science, and as always, we will delve into mechanism. Today's episode is really geared toward answering your most common questions about how to leverage Neural Plasticity. The previous episodes were about focus and how to achieve focus for sake of plasticity, as well as the last episode, which is what are some of the hordles into plasticity that relate to movement, how behavior can activate plasticity, as well as how to activate plasticity for behavior itself, how to get better at learning certain movements. Today's podcast is really directed toward answering your most common questions, and the bigger theme of how does one go about

7:21optimizing their brain, or even think about optimizing the brain? What is this thing that we're calling optimizing the brain? In doing so, I'm also going to share some of my typical routines and tools. I don't share these because I think that they are the only ones that are available out there, certainly they're not, nor do I share them because I think that everyone should do them just because I do them, certainly not. I share them because many of you have asked for very concrete examples of what I do and when, and so I'll share those with you, and you can decide whether or not those protocols are for you or not. Everybody's different, but there are some common features of how we are all put together at the level of the nervous system in body that direct us toward particular practices, particular routines that can be especially powerful for Neural Plasticity. So I want to open up the discussion today by emphasizing something that's fundamentally important, which is that Plasticity is not the goal. Plasticity is never the goal. Plasticity is simply a state

8:24or a capacity for our nervous system to change. And so nothing makes me more frustrated, perhaps. Then when I hear, oh, you know, this pill, this potion, this practice, it gives you Plasticity. Plasticity is just change. The real question is, what are you trying to change, and specifically what end goal are you trying to achieve? Specific end goals might be extremely specific, like you want to learn how to speak a particular language, or you want to learn a new motor skill, or you want to get very good at calculus, or you'd like to forget the bad emotions related to a particular human being, or experience, or it can be more general, like you'd like to be more creative, and we'll actually talk about creativity today, or you would like to achieve more focus, or you'd like to be less stressed. So it's very important that you understand that Plasticity and achieving Plasticity is the first step in what we call optimizing your brain. You don't want

9:26your brain to be plastic all the time. In fact, one of the major questions, one of the major unsolved mysteries of neuroscience is how each and every one of us wakes up every day, and knows who we are. Why should that be? Well, the brain is plastic. It has a capacity to change throughout the lifespan, but it's not so plastic that every night when we go to sleep, or in our waking, that the connections get reconfigured so much so that we forget who we are, or how to walk, or how to eat. It's a good thing that we don't have such robust plasticity, or ongoing plasticity, that we have to restructure ourselves each day. It's part of what gives our life cotton. President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years, but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st.

10:52Honestly, I just booked my verbo because there was a sweet wine fridge. Hey, we all have our reasons. Don't walk into a surprise. If you know, you verbo. Terms apply cverbo.com slash trust for details. Do it. So remember, plasticity is not and is never the goal. The goal is to figure out how to access plasticity and then to direct that plasticity toward particular goals or changes that you would like to achieve. And I should just mention, there's no rule that in life, you have to leverage this incredible thing called neural plasticity. No one said you had to do that. This podcast and this episode is particularly for people who are either happy or unhappy with where they're at with a particular aspect of their life. And they want to shift it in some positive way. And many of you listening might say, well, wouldn't everyone want to do that? Well, actually, there are a certain number of people that are pretty good where they're at and they don't want to change. And that's terrific. And I tip my hat to them. And I think that's wonderful. If ever they decide that they want to leverage these plasticity mechanisms, they can't at any stage throughout the lifespan.

11:58Let's start by talking about the different systems within the nervous system that are available for plasticity. And in doing so, I'll frame them in the context of what I do on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, and on a yearly basis. First of all, there are several forms of plasticity. They have names like long-term potentiation, long-term depression, which has nothing to do with emotional depression, by the way, and things like spike timing dependent plasticity. Those names are used to describe cellular phenomenon, the actual ways that the synapses, the connections between neurons change. I'll mention those things and I'll give a little more meat as to what they are, as I mentioned them. But that's probably not the best way to think about plasticity in terms of optimizing your brain. The best way to think about it is in terms of short-term, medium-term, and long-term plasticity. Short-term plasticity is any kind of shift that you want to achieve in the moment or in the day, but that you don't necessarily want to hold on to

13:02forever. What kinds of things are those? Well, for instance, short-term plasticity might be you wake up earlier than you would like to catch a flight, you're not feeling particularly alert, and you want to use a protocol, or you decide to use a protocol, which could be coffee, or it could be a certain form of breathing, or it could be some other tool, to become more alert at a time of day when normally you aren't that alert. But your expectation is that when you return home, you will discard with that the need to do that at 5.30 a.m. because you'll be asleep at 5.30 a.m. So there's short-term plasticity, behavioral plasticity. Then there's medium-term plasticity, which are changes that you might want to make. I call this with respect and a little bit of humor, or at least my kind of humor. I call this the undergraduate pre-med phenomenon. For those of you that have worked with pre-meds and have tremendous respect for medical students and pre-meds, there is a kind of a stereotype, which I don't necessarily agree with, but the stereotype is that

14:05they want to know what they need to know for sake of the exam, but they don't really want to know, they just want the A. And I don't think that's always true. I've worked with a number of different pre-meds over the years, and there are many of them that are absolutely passionate about the knowledge itself, and they also wanted the A. But the pre-med phenomenon, as it's discussed among professors and TA's, is that you know, you've got these students, they just want to know what they need to know so they can get the A. It's medium-term plasticity. They don't actually want it to be embedded in their memory too long, or else they would actually care about the information. So that's medium-term information. And sometimes that's useful, for instance, if you go on vacation to Costa Rica, and you don't know your way around Costa Rica, you want to learn the different town and the routes there, but you don't have any intention of going back. It's just medium-term. You want to just program it in for sake of your time there, and then you want to discard it. Most of the time when we think about or talk about optimizing the brain, we're talking about long-term plasticity. We're talking about the kinds of changes that people want to make so that their brain reflexively works differently. This is what a child does when it goes from not knowing how to walk,

15:09to knowing how to walk. It doesn't have to think about it after it learns how to walk. It becomes reflexive. Long-term plasticity is almost always the big goal. It's I want to know how to speak that language. I want to be able to do that skill. I want to be able to feel this way without having to put much work into it. And there are tools and protocols that one can do to achieve that, and we are going to talk about those. We've talked about a few of them in previous episodes, but I will revisit those protocols today. I'm going to frame all this in the context of the daily life, the weekly life, and the yearly life. And that's because neural plasticity and optimizing your brain rides on a deeper foundation of this thing that governs plasticity. In fact, governs all our life called autonomic arousal, which is that we're asleep for part of the 24-hour cycle, and we are awake almost always. If we push ourselves and stay awake, we're okay. We can do that for a night or two, but almost always, we are asleep for a portion of it, and we are awake

16:10for a portion of it. I've said it before, but I'll say it again. The trigger for plasticity and learning occurs during high focus, high alertness states, not while you're asleep, and the focus and alertness are both key because of the neurochemicals associated with those states. But the actual rewiring and the reconfiguration of the brain connections happens during non-sleep deep rest, which we'll talk more about as always, and deep sleep. So you trigger the change and in sleep, you get the change. So some of the things that we'll talk about today about optimizing the brain are centered around not sleep, but around the autonomic arousal system. We have this system of neurons in our brain and body that's just incredible that wake us up and make us alert. And when we're not accessing that system well, we cannot access plasticity. We cannot optimize our brain. Likewise, if we cannot sleep well and we can't rest well, we will not access plasticity and rewire our brain because that's when the actual configuration between the

17:13connections occurs. So to set this in context, I wake up each day and I'll be totally honest, I usually don't feel like bouncing right out of bed. I usually don't feel completely rested. And that's not because I don't get enough sleep. It's probably because I'm not terrific about timing my sleep so well. Now this month isn't about sleep. That was the previous month, but I really want to emphasize a few points. I wake up generally more tired and groggy than I would like because I tend to go to sleep too late. That's just something that I do. I tend to get up early either because I set an alarm, because I have things to do, or because I naturally wake up early, because the light coming in and so forth. Well, what that tells me is that I'm probably somebody who's natural circadian rhythm. You may have heard of chronotypes. These are genetically program things, but chronotype is shorter than 24 hours. It means that the cycle of waking and alertness for me is probably shorter than 24 hours, which means that getting some light in the late afternoon will

18:18help me shift and make my cycle a little bit longer. It will phase delay me if that doesn't make any sense, see a previous episode, but what it really means is getting some light in the afternoon will allow me to stay up a little bit later. But what it means is that I'm not really matching my hardwired needs of going to bed probably at 8.30 or 9 and waking up at 4am. I tend to go to sleep around 10.30.11, lately around 11.30 or 12, and then I wake up at 6. Of course, I'm going to feel groggy. So, neural plasticity will allow me to optimize my wakefulness, but I have to do something in order to access that. And some of you may already be anticipating what I'm about to say, which is, oh no, he's going to tell us to get sunlight in our eyes in the first 30 minutes of the day. I am going to tell you to do that, but I'm going to also tell you two things that I've have not discussed before, which relate to the plasticity between the melanopsin cells, these sunlight detecting, bright light detecting cells in our eye and the circadian clock. I've never said this before in this podcast, but it turns out that the connections between

19:21these melanopsin cells and the circadian clock are plastic throughout the lifespan. There's a massive configuration of the connections there and a cell type called the astrocytes, which are a glial cell, are actively removing and reinforcing connections between the eye and that clock every day. Now, this is incredible because other aspects of your brain that, for instance, represent you knowing who you are when you wake up in the morning or what your name is, assuming that you're old enough that you've already learned your name, when the first things kids learn and something we rarely ever forget, those connections are changing all the time every 24 hour cycle. So, there's an opportunity for short term plasticity. So, that's why I view sunlight first thing in the day, it helps me wake up. The other president, Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years, but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters

20:27decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st. Paid for by Virginians for fair elections. Struggling with weight that doesn't respond to traditional dieting, Prolon's five day fasting mimicking diet is a clinically developed nutrition program designed to promote fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Long Gevity Institute, it assists the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat, and supports healthy metabolic markers. In just five days, Prolon offers a structured, science-backed approach to weight loss without extreme restriction or guesswork. Get 15% off plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com. Slash begin. If you're groggy in the morning, that's why viewing light is helpful, but the interesting thing

21:32is if you start viewing light frequently in the morning, then those connections between the melanops and cells and the circadian clock become primed or potentiated we would say they become stronger for the anticipation of light and you naturally start waking up earlier feeling more alert. What this says is and what I do is I get that regular light because I know that some mornings I'm just not going to feel very alert all feel especially tired and I might not be able to access sunlight because it's really overcast or I'm traveling or some other feature, but the system is plastic so it's shifted in the right direction. Now it will shift back because it short-term plastic you have to are about two three days so you want to try and get the sunlight exposure on a regular basis. The other thing that I do is I delay my intake of caffeine for the first two hours that I'm awake. Now this can be very painful for people, but earlier we talked about the adenosine system and how the accumulation of adenosine makes us sleepy and caffeine suppresses adenosine it makes us feel alert, but we know that if you ingest caffeine

22:37immediately on waking the signal to the adrenals to release cortisol which is a healthy release of cortisol and the suppression of adenosine that happens as we come out of sleep or in deep sleep the suppression of adenosine. If you ingest caffeine to early there's a mechanism by which the adenosine competes for the receptors etc so that you have a mid-morning crash because if the if caffeine the way it works is if caffeine is occupying the adenosine receptor then the natural endogenous mechanisms for suppressing adenosine are not actually going to have their actions so the brain to adrenal axis is subject to plasticity also and so by delaying caffeine until about two hours after waking I'm able to capture and reinforce to potentiate the neural circuit that exists between the circadian clock and the cortisol release in the adrenals as well as leave those adenosine receptors unoccupied so that I can then use the caffeine to get

23:40a natural lift in alertness and focus two hours later as opposed to using it just to wake myself up out of sleepiness. So while I'm sure there are some eye rolls out there and some yawns about oh no it's the sunlight in the morning thing again it's a powerful tool for readjusting these circuits so the short-term plasticity and the reason for delaying caffeine for the first two hours of the day even if it's painful to do for the first couple days is that then you naturally start to wake up more readily in the morning without caffeine because the adenosine is suppressed and you don't have these competing it's called a competing antagonist for the adenosine receptor so I wake up I get sunlight in my eyes lately because I wake up very early I do use a bright light to stimulate alertness it's not actually designed for that purpose it's just a lightboard that has about 900 lux and then I delay caffeine some of you have asked and again I'm not saying anyone has to do this you know what exactly do you drink I'm a big

24:43believer in black coffee I just happen to like black coffee people have asked me about and I don't want to name brand names here about this type of coffee or that type of coffee mixed with these other kinds of things will that increase focus you know we're gonna I'm gonna talk today a lot about the use of diet and fasting and timing of foods and certain kinds of foods but to be honest black coffee is just a simple choice that's always worked for me I also make sure I hydrate first thing in the morning there are plenty of data now showing that even a slight increase in dehydration meaning just when you're lacking water can make people have headaches it can provide and some additional photophobia for those of you that are migraine prone bright light can trigger migraines that's no surprise to those of you that get headaches of migraines but dehydration can can compound the vulnerability to migraine and headache so I drink water I drink black coffee or I drink mate which is just a because I have Argentine lineage which is just a high caffeine drink first thing in the morning but I delay it until two hours after I wake up and that's because

25:46I want the circuits between my eye and my and my circadian clock and my adrenals to be functioning in a particular way so that then later the caffeine is in addition it adds more alertness now this is a discussion about how to optimize your brain many people who wake up quickly and just naturally feel like bouncing out of bed I envy these people they will do just fine by going into a learning bout or taking care of whatever it is that they need to take care of sometimes that's kind of more mundane tasks like email or and whatnot here's a more or less a rule about how the brain functions vis-a-vis focus learning and creativity and I'm going to discuss this much more in future episodes generally states of high alertness when we're very very alert are great for strategy implementation when we already know how to do something and it's just a some simply a matter of plugging the correct elements into the correct boxes things I've talked before about duration

26:50path and outcome as the three things that the deliberate conscious brain is trying to figure out in order to perform certain tasks even cognitive tasks this is the sort of thing that we are very good at when we're well rested and we're focused and our autonomic arousal or our alertness rather as is at a high level if you are somebody who is hitting that alertness phase of your day very early right after you wake up that's a great time to move right into things that at least the research says you already know have the strategy you just want to implement the strategy this is where I fundamentally depart from the idea that oh you know you have to do the hardest or most critical tasks throughout the day sometimes the hardest and most critical tasks are tasks that require creativity and as we'll soon talk about creativity and tasks related to it oftentimes come come to us best or the brain is best at achieving those when we're in states of calm or even slightly drowsy

27:51which is something that's interesting and what we'll get into but for me for instance I get up I'm not terribly alert first thing and so I try and just get my brain and my thoughts organized it's not a time for me to be responding in a very linear fashion to emails or carrying out calculations that comes about two hours later I think I'm many people out there will relate mid-morning is when we tend to when many people tend to achieve their peak in alertness and focus now many times I get the question and this is this what I'm about to say is directly related to the hundreds of questions I got about this should I use background music in order to learn should I have you know construction next door is that a good thing or a bad thing is it better to be in complete silence etc now this will vary some people can tolerate their own noise within their head much better than others other people find that having some background noise helps cancel that out but there's a simple rule of thumb that one can use because at least my experience is that

28:52sometimes background music background noise is very helpful for allowing me to focus and other times it's very distracting so what actually governs that well we have to ask ourselves what is at the source of the lack of focus if our lack of focus is because our autonomic arousal our alertness is very very high we had a little too much coffee or we if there is such a thing slept a little too long or were really stressed or really activated and we can't seem to focus in that case eliminating background noise and really just trying to get silence so that we can quiet some of that autonomic arousal is going to be best for learning and for implementation of things we already know how to do for any kind of focus linear task which basically learning is a focus linear task is that you're just not necessarily performing it well all the time last time we talked about making errors so as a rule of thumb if you're feeling too keyed up then silence and quiet is going to be helpful

29:54in fact if you're very keyed up a particular circuit related to the basal ganglia starts getting triggered more easily and the circuit I'm going to talk about in depth but it's called the go no go circuit we have circuits that connect our forebrain to our structure in our brain called the basal ganglia which is actually a collection of structures and the forebrain which is involved in rational thought and thinking and planning and action is always trying to plan what should I do and then implement that action and the basal ganglia are intimately involved in that discussion there's a reciprocal loop of communication between basal ganglia and cortex the basal ganglia has one set of connections to the cortex and the cortex back to the basal ganglia that facilitates go if facilitates action and the molecule the near modulator dopamine triggers the activation of go it tends to make us want to do more things it tends to make us bias toward action by the way that

30:54dopamine binds to something called the D1 receptors just a particular type of dopamine receptor for those either want to know the no go pathway the pathway in the basal ganglia and cortex that suppresses action involves dopamine binding to this other receptor called the D2 receptor now D1 receptors you can't just consciously decide oh I only want my D1 receptors my D2 receptors be to be active you have to think about which sorts of states of mind and body facilitate go and which ones facilitate no go now this is critically important because doing focused work accessing plasticity and learning involve doing certain things and not doing others so here's how it works in here's how I apply it on a daily basis because I tend to be most alert first thing mid-morning or so and then I generally have my caffeine mid-morning my peak of alertness in the early part of the day

31:59is occurring for me sometime between 9 30 and 11 a.m. that's just me other people might experience that immediately after rolling out of bed they might be wide awake and ready to go which case they should be cautious about throwing caffeine into the mix because then it's going to make them very very alert there are three sort of levels of autonomic arousal of alertness that bias us more toward go no go or both and this relates to a question that I've gotten now hundreds of times from you in the comment section for this podcast which is is it better for me to listen to music in the background while I work and learn or should I have complete silence and the answer is it depends but it doesn't depend randomly on who you are or even necessarily time of day it depends on your overall overall level of autonomic arousal and it depends because autonomic arousal level of alertness biases the extent to which we are more prone to goes to action or to no goes to suppress action

33:07and dopamine is this molecule that's swimming around and it's going to bias one or the other responses so here's how it works let's say I'm very alert maybe I got a particularly good night sleep the night before I had a little too much coffee and I'm going to sit down to some work the thing to know and what I always tell myself is when I'm very alert I am very prone to go to action but I'm also prone to not no go right I'm not going to be very good at suppressing action so those are two different things being biased toward action and being biased towards suppressing action are two different things okay so those are push pull toward action suppress action so when you're very alert the tendency is for everything to be a stimulus this is why when people say well should I just take a drug like that will increase my level of epinephrine and alertness will that help me learn better no because it will make you do things but it will also make you less good at suppressing actions that you need to suppress so if I'm very alert particularly

34:10alert for me and I recognize what that state is of course because everyone will be different I know what it is for me then I want silence for learning I want it shut down my internet which I do I sometimes use a program that I believe is a free program called freedom where it actually locks you out of the internet for a particular time they're not a sponsor of the podcast I just happen to use it there's another version of freedom where you go to the wireless thing and you turn it off you disconnect from the wireless that's the other one although many people have a hard time not reactivating it so I'm trying to shut down the the go pathway towards distraction and the other thing that I'll do is I'll generally turn off my phone put the phone outside in the car or in really extreme cases I'll put it I'll throw it up on the roof which is hard for me to retrieve so that I can't get to it so if I'm very alert I'm aware that I will have a bias toward action it will be hard for me to suppress non-action but that it's very non-specific because the next kind of level down of alertness or autonomic arousal is clear calm and focused

35:17where we have that kind of sweet spot between our willingness to pursue action we're in a mode of go and it's not always physical action but it can be pursuing hard bouts of learning but that our ability to suppress is also very good and this is because and I don't want to get into too many details because of the way that dopamine competes for these dopamine one receptors in the go pathway and dopamine two receptors in the no go pathway they're always in this kind of pushpull and so there is a sweet spot and that sweet spot isn't flow where it isn't some sort of state where all of a sudden things come naturally to us the state that we're trying to achieve that's optimal for learning is one in which we have the energy and focus to pursue but we also have the energy and focus to suppress action so the basal ganglia are kind of working in a perfect kind of sing-songy manner you know through this parallel pathway now as we get tired or as we round out an ultradian cycle of about 90 minutes what happens is our fatigue even if it's not a physical fatigue that makes us want to go to sleep but our mental fatigue starts to accumulate

36:21because these pathways of go no go are actually very metabolically consuming so what I recognize is that as I start to falter I have a harder time engaging and going I also know or going toward the goal rather I also know that my reflex toward actions that are unrelated to the learning are also going to start increasing because I'm not going to be able to suppress the I'm not going to be able to suppress action and activate the no go pathway so if this all sounds like a mouthful let's make it very simple for you when you are very alert the best situation for learning is going to be silence it's going to be complete quiet if you are low arousal and you're tired and you're kind of sleepy a lot of people find that having some background chatter and some background noise can help elevate their level of autonomic arousal and that's because our auditory system and our visual system are linked and are part of really what's called the salience network which is that we're always scanning our environment for things and when we have a lot of things in our environment

37:25to scan generally our level of alertness goes up this is why environments that are very stark or have very little or very few objects in them tend to make us feel kind of calm because our salience network kind of shuts off a lot of people don't like that they'll go to a meditation retreat retreat or they'll go into an environment where there's very little clutter especially city people and all of a sudden they start feeling really really anxious and that's because their internal level of autonomic arousal is really high and it's not being occupied by all this stuff to pay attention to and so their salience network starts to turn inward they move from extra reception to interoception they're not looking outside themselves they're looking inside themselves and there's a lot of noise in there so as a rule of thumb if you tend to be kind of on the high level of alertness and kind of anxiety and I'm not talking about clinical levels of anxiety but you tend to be pretty high energy well then you are definitely going to benefit more in a learning bout from learning to go as well as activate the no go pathway and that requires a lot

38:28of energy and when you have a lot of distractions in your environment there's a high probability that you're going to be distracted from the learning now some people are just naturally more calm they're like my bulldog costello who's exceedingly calm they're pretty mellow they're kind of clear calm and focused all of the time and those people actually are going to be less flappable they're not going to be yanked around by background noise or they're not going to be around you know bothered from their learning or from their studying by a clanging of a pot from somebody in the kitchen so each one of us generally tends to ride up and down this autonomic ladder so to speak at different times a day for most people three hours after waking those three hours the not three hours on the mark but that three hour bin tends to be the period in which they're most alert throughout the day except I'll tell you later about a unique time right before sleep in which you're also very very alert naturally president Barack Obama Virginia we are counting on you Republicans want to steal enough seats in congress to raid the next election

39:30and wield unchecked power for two more years but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians vote yes by April 21st paid for by Virginians for fair elections struggling with weight that doesn't respond to traditional dieting pro lawns five day fasting mimicking diet is a clinically developed nutrition program designed to promote fat loss while protecting lean body mass developed at USC's longevity institute it assists the body in entering a fasting like state that helps reset metabolism target visceral fat and supports healthy metabolic markers in just five days pro lawn offers a structured science fact approach to weight loss without extreme restriction or guesswork get 15 percent off plus a forty dollar bonus gift when you subscribe at pro lawn life dot com slash begin so that morning three hours is quite vital now

40:33many of you might ask about exercise and when to exercise I think I may have mentioned this on a previous podcast episode but the research shows that at least for performance afternoon exercise might be better in terms of avoiding injury etc but in terms of rising body temperatures they it and matching body temperature to mental alertness etc it's pretty clear that exercising early in the day not only biases us towards waking up earlier but that it also triggers the release of things like epinephrine and other neuromodulators that lend itself to a situation where we have heightened levels of arousal and mental acuity in the late morning and even into the afternoon this can be very good because if you want to restrict most of your focus learning to the early part of the day exercising early in the day does set a neurochemical context or milieu for go it tends to trigger activation of the go pathway and so for those of you like myself we have a hard time kind of engaging and getting into action early in the day early morning exercise within an hour of

41:36waking and certainly no later than three hours after waking will give you quote unquote more energy throughout the day it will make you feel more biased for action you won't feel as lethargic so in kind of reviewing what I've set up until now I do the morning light thing I delay my caffeine two hours after waking and then I generally try and get exercise in in the first hour or ideally within the first three hours of waking up and then I'll move into a focus learning about now some of you wrote to me and said if I exercise early in the day then I feel a crash afterwards if that exercises very very intense you're depleting all your glycogen so you're doing heavy deadlifts etc chances are after you eat you will start to feel a crash so this relates to timing of nutrition and it just as a general rule of thumb fasted states and low carbohydrate states I'm not talking about a keto diet around the clock or all week but fasted states and low carbohydrate states lend themselves to alertness and that's because carbohydrates are rich in trip to fan and

42:40they tend to lend themselves to sleepiness of course ingesting large amounts of any kind of food any substance that fills your gut will divert blood to your gut so if you eat a lot of food regardless of whether or not it's a lot of carbohydrate or not you're going to generally feel more sleepy now many people including everyone use food to modulate their levels of autonomic arousal and typically eating shifts us more towards a state of calm and fasting shifts us more toward a state of alertness and these are hardwired circuits that relate to the need and desire to find food which requires action or the so-called rest and digest system which diverts our resources in our energy towards digestion and makes us feel calm so I personally rely on water, mate and black coffee first thing in the day in order to exercise and get into the first round of work if I find that I'm too alert and then I generally will tend to eat and kind of bring down my level of alertness and we'll continue working now this isn't a strict thing and since people

43:43ask me what I do and I'm not dictating that people follow it exactly of course or even generally but I'll just tell you what I do it is possible if you're drinking black coffee and you're or matte and you're ingesting a lot of water that you're going to dehydrate yourself somewhat because of excretion of sodium provided you don't have hypertension salt is a really good thing a lot of people think that they are low on blood sugar because they're shaky and they can't think or they have a headache when actually they're low in sodium and especially if you're drinking a lot of caffeine so I'm a big believer in salt so I drink salt water first thing in the morning because I drink black coffee and that keeps my levels of alertness really good I always thought that I had messed up blood sugar I had you know shaky hands and I didn't know what was going on I drink a little bit of coffee and feel too amped up and turns out that this it was a sodium issue and if I just drank water with a little bit of sea salt and or even just a general table a typical table salt then I felt rock solid in terms of my blood sugar now again I'm not a physician I'm a professor so I don't prescribe anything but I profess lots of things so I don't want

44:45people who have diabetes or blood sugar issues to you know go off the rails you're responsible for your health not me but it's an interesting parameter to think about and experiment with you know provided that your doctor says it's okay because I think a lot of people probably in just too much sodium but a lot of people might be sodium deficient in particular the people that are fasting I typically eat my first meal right around midday whether or not I've exercised or not and the food content there is actually quite important to me I don't know why this is I don't have a scientific mechanism for this but if I eat hot food for lunch I get sleepy after lunch so I generally don't eat hot food for lunch I might have a little bit of soup or something like that but in general I rely on a low carbohydrate meal I'll eat meat or salad or some variation that and nuts and fats and things like that because of the choline content for focus because the proteins good in my belief and because I believe in eating fruits and vegetables I do that too if I've exercised very hard early in the day I do ingest starches like oatmeal or rice and fruit and

45:48things like that now why am I telling you all this because hundreds if not a thousand people ask me is fasting good for focus and indeed fasting will increase alertness but if you're so hungry or preoccupied with food that you can't focus well then it's not going to be good for learning it's only going to be good for agitation how I'm just going to mark continue to march through my day and this is of course what I experience some people are quite different but what I find is around two or three pm I start getting a little groggy a little bit sleepy I will tend to shift my work from work that requires a lot of duration path outcome really careful analysis and activation of the no go pathway meaning I'm trying to suppress the impulse to look at my phone or answer email or do other things this is why I have an email do you back until three in the afternoon by the way or responded to your text messages whoever you are out there around early afternoon I find I can do kind of typical more mundane tasks because those tasks are require less cost they have

46:54require less cognitive load and they can be done more or less in and out of sequence I can answer a couple email here maybe answer that email there I don't have to do it in pure linear fashion any kind of linear work or learning work is going to take a lot of focus and then typically around four pm or so I do two things sometimes a little earlier some is a little later but I do two things one is I make sure I hydrate because if you're exercising and you're eating you need to digest that food etc I make sure I hydrate so I drink water I try and refrain from drinking coffee in the afternoon this is a new thing for me I sometimes do it but I try and refrain from that and then I always do a non-sleep deep rest protocol sometime in the afternoon this is sometimes a 10-minute yoga ninja type protocol or a 30-minute yoga ninja type protocol these are protocols I have no relationship to no business relationship to whatsoever I've been doing them for years now they involve listening to a script we'll provide the links again although we provide them before

47:55or I'll do a hypnosis protocol from Reverie Health which is my colleague David Spiegel's website that has these free hypnosis apps or scripts that you can listen to and those take me into a state of really deep rest sometimes so much so that I fall asleep and I always set an alarm so that I don't sleep for longer than 90 minutes but typically this goes for about 30 minutes and I do that because for me by about 4.30 in the afternoon I'm capable of doing basically nothing I am just a complete Costello I can't think I can't do I can't respond to email I've just completely troughed my ability to function I personally find it a mistake to at that point down a double espresso and charge really hard it just doesn't work for me I end up really disrupting my sleep schedule I end up disrupting a lot of different things so for me I do the non-sleep deep rest protocol it really helps me later when I need to fall asleep it helps with all sorts of things as I mentioned

48:56before but I usually emerge from that a little groggy or feeling like I have another whole day second win like I could just work work work work work and then I'll do a second bout of learning I'll do some sort of work that either involves linear analysis of something so maybe numerical work or I'm trying to learn something I generally try and really use those bouts of 90 minute focused energy after the non-sleep deep rest as I mentioned in previous episodes there's a lot of evidence that these non-sleep deep rest protocols can enhance and accelerate plasticity the most I think recent and striking of one is the study that we referenced last time in the caption notes it was the cell press article cell reports great journal was showing that these 20 minute kind of shallow naps and non-sleep deep rest can facilitate sensory motor learning president Barack Obama Virginia we are counting on you Republicans want to steal

49:56enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians vote yes by April 21st paid for by Virginians for fair elections struggling with weight that doesn't respond to traditional dieting pro lawns five day fasting mimicking diet is a clinically developed nutrition program designed to promote fat loss while protecting lean body mass developed at USC's longevity institute it assists the body in entering a fasting like state that helps reset metabolism target visceral fat and supports healthy metabolic markers in just five days pro lawn offers a structured science backed approach to weight loss without extreme restriction or guesswork get 15% off plus a forty dollar bonus gift when you subscribe at pro lawn life dot com slash begin so then I'll go into

50:59another learning about that's caffeine free this learning about is very different than the than the morning one this is a work about our learning about that's more in the clear common focus regime because I've come out of this non-sleep deep rest I'm not ingesting caffeine because I want to make sure that I can sleep later that night really well and this tends to be more when I do creative type work now creativity is a topic that we're going to spend the entire month on coming up soon but creativity is a very interesting state of mind in which we're taking existing elements things that we already know and rearranging them in ways that are novel that's what creativity but creativity has two parts it has a creative discovery mode where you're kind of shuffling things around in a very relaxed way and kind of being playful or exploring different configurations and then creativity also has an absolutely linear implementation mode in which you take the idea

52:00or the design you come up with and you create something very robust and concrete and so creativity is really a two-part thing and the first part of actively exploring different configurations sometimes in a playful way sometimes in a in a way that's almost random and just kind of exploring that state is definitely facilitated by being relaxed and almost sleepy that is not a state that I personally can access very well early in the day I've tried to access it coming out of sleep because you one would say well you're still sleepy early in the day and just doesn't work most of what I write down most of what I do is complete garbage and so what I found is there's this block in the afternoon of about 90 minutes where I can do creative type writing or creative type imagination of scientific ideas or experiments we want to do science might not seem like a creative endeavor to many of you but it is has a lot of imagining what if this or we could combine that and thinking of novel concepts or ways of arranging things so when you find yourself in that kind of

53:04clear common focused mode creative works tend to come about very well in those regimes I know that a lot of people out there rely on substances to access creative states I'm not a marijuana user it's just not the drug for me for a variety of reasons I'm not a drinker it's not the not the substance for me for a variety of reasons you know I'm not a cop I'm not now here to tell you what they should do or shouldn't do the problem with using substances to access creativity is that generally the ones that the substances that relax people will allow them to get into that creative brainstorming mode but not so good at the linear implementation mode you know at the other day I was remarking with a friend that there's some ads some advertisements that I've seen over the years that are just incredible I'll just tell you what they are so there's not cryptic or anything I'm revealing my taste here there's a one there's a particular perfume ad that spike Jones made that is just amazing it's just I'll put a link to it because it's just so cool

54:07and it's just so and and it hasn't there's I don't want to give away the end but it has a feature of it that is particularly interesting to me as a neuroscientist and it's just so cool and I I because I grew up in the skateboarding thing I knew a little bit about spikes movies and skateboarding is of course made a lot of very impressive popular movies as well full-length features I don't know in personally so this isn't a you know plug not that he needs my endorsement for anything at all but the the amazing thing about this advertisement is it's a kind of it's a collection of things that you would never really think would be combined and it involves different speeds of motion and all sorts of effects I mean it's like a real classic like spike Jones kind of delivery but what's incredible is when when you think about not just the fact that someone had to imagine that but to actually implement the steps in order to create that when you see this you'll realize that was a ton of work you can't just put that together randomly and so a lot of people not spike clearly but a lot of people who can who having an incredible mind for ideas and novel

55:12novel arrangements of things they are great at accessing that state but not so good at accessing the implementation state and then there it's also true that a lot of people and some who tend to fall on what we would call the kind of like more aspergers or autism end of the spectrum are very good at linear implementation now I'm not talking about all forms of autism of course I'm sensitive to the fact that there are many forms on the spectrum but some people are very good at linear implementation and that's a separate state from a creative states so that afternoon block is when I try and access the freer kind of looser mindset that's associated with the fatigue that comes later in the afternoon and for some of you that state that favors creativity and creative learning might be better in the morning I don't know you're going to have to decide for some of you you're going to be late shifted some of you are going to be morning shifted but where we have alertness generally we are good at linear implementation we're good at activating the no go pathway in suppressing action and we're good at at pursuing particular goals and and strategy

56:17implementation and where we tend to be more relaxed and we tend to be almost in a kind of sleepy mode so for me coming out of one of these non-sleep deep breast modes or sleep that's when we tend to be better at novel configurations of existing elements which is creativity and this brings about a question that I get all the time which is what about psychedelics so I am going to talk president Barack Obama Virginia we are counting on you Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians vote yes by April 21st paid for by Virginians for fair elections struggling with weight that doesn't respond to traditional dieting pro lawns five day fasting

57:17mimicking diet is a clinically developed nutrition program designed to promote fat loss while protecting lean body mass developed at USC's longevity institute it assists the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism target visceral fat and supports healthy metabolic markers in just five days pro lawn offers a structured science-backed approach to weight loss without extreme restriction or guesswork get 15% off plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe at pro lawnlife.com slash begin to some experts on psychedelics I hope to bring some of them in actually speaking on people coming in or creatures coming in a creature that's definitely not on psychedelics who doesn't need any is Costello and he just arrived he seems to be in the sleepy state most all the time hey buddy how you doing you come in yeah he's working on his 15th sleep deep rest episode of the day which is generally followed by a 10 to 12 hour deep rest episodes almost exclusively comprised of REM and I know this because his eyes are open because

58:21they're so droop he can't close them all away and his eyes are going like this and he's going down for the count so yeah nice big yawn okay so psychedelics first of all I want to be very clear I am neither a proponent nor am I somebody who rejects the potential role of psychedelics I do however think that psychedelics can be particularly hazardous for people who have pre-existing psychological issues and are not working with a board certified psychiatrist or physician as well as for essentially all kids I think that the young brain is basically in its own psychedelic state and just naturally and it all kidding aside I think that the young brain is so subject to neural plasticity that drugs which like psychedelics which are very powerful can be detrimental to the developing brain that's just my stance if anyone disagrees with me I'd be happy to chat with you about it in a in a polite and discourse I'll be happy to listen as well as

59:25tell you more why I believe that based on the data I'm mentioning psychedelics because many of you asked here's the deal with psychedelics at least here's how they work in a nutshell psychedelics we're thought to unleash sensory processing and to make it less filtered we have a lot of different inputs from our eyes from our ears from our nose from a taste etc that you're coming in all the time in parallel and we have mechanisms that suppress some of those and allow us to only focus on things that are happening visually generally we don't have synesthesia unless some of us happen to have synesthesia we don't blend what we see with what we hear in a way that is confusing to us we know what's making sounds and we know what is a visual stimulus on psychedelics people report being able to smell colors or to you know hear trees etc and that's because there's a lot of sensory blending however that's led to the misconception that sensory blending itself is a

1:00:25creative process there's nothing creative about sensory blending now there's the essence of a creative process is that some novel configuration of elements whether or not it's notes on a piano or whether or not it's words on a page whether or not it's numbers or whether or not it's movement that some way in which those are configured in some new way that the algorithm the way in which they are configured makes sense to the observer and this is a key thing it seems to me that when people report their psychedelic experiences it makes a lot more sense to the person who experiences it than to the observer and so creative works by definition are new ways of configuring things that lend themselves to a bigger bigger or greater or deeper or novel understanding on the part of the observer and just sensory blending is not going to accomplish that now it is true and there's a great review in the journal cell excellent journal about how psychedelics work and it turns out

1:01:27they don't just work by allowing for more sensory blending they do because of the way that they activate certain serotonin receptors etc they do lend themselves to more lateral connectivity between different brain areas more novel associations so in principle in principle I should say not necessarily in practice but in principle they do allow different areas of the brain maybe even the two sides of the brain to communicate more broadly than they would normally so that has certain elements that speak to creativity but it can't simply be the case that psychedelics are the portal to creativity because creativity as I mentioned before involves not just novel associations and a breaking of kind of space time rules it also involves reconfiguring things such that the new space time rule that one comes up with is interesting stimulating and kind of in many cases delightful to the observer and that's why many claims that psychedelics open plasticity or they increase

1:02:33creativity that's not sufficient for me personally I'm curious about does it not just open the creative thinking process this novel configuration process but does it also lend itself to the implementation of creative works and the answer is no in most cases it has nothing to do with creative implementation now I think that there may come a time and certainly there are clinical trials that are happening now where psychedelics are leveraged toward particular clinical goals and I want to tip my hat to the work at Johns Hopkins that's happening now which really lends itself to the idea the early preliminary data and some of the papers that are coming out they're really fantastic showing that there may be some excellent roles for certain psychedelics in certain clinical context these are clinical studies done with a psychiatrist present that is authorized to do that that can help people through depression trauma etc and we're going to spend a lot of time talking about that including with some of those those folks running those studies so we can look forward to that so all of this is

1:03:37to say that no I don't take psychedelics to access creative states that's not where I think the major role the important role of psychedelics might show up if it's going to for humanity I think that it may have these important roles in the clinical context provided it's done legally and safely I think that that the creative process being a two-stage process means that I am personally best served by having this period of non-linear exploration of concepts whatever it is I happen to be working on in the afternoon but then I'll actually shelve that work I'll just set it aside and then I'll revisit it the next day or even the next day to see whether or not that the work itself is ready for deliberate linear implementation which I would want to do during one of these highly focused states so the long and short way of saying this is that when we're very alert do linear type of operations when we tend to be more sleepy and more relaxed that's when creative works can

1:04:37first be conceived but their implementation requires high levels of alertness now that gets us more to the kind of late afternoon evening now I am as I've mentioned before I'm a proponent of getting sunlight in the evening as well this is a critical thing that I have not mentioned before President Barack Obama Virginia we are counting on you Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians vote yes by April 21st paid for by Virginians for fair elections struggling with weight that doesn't respond to traditional dieting pro lawns five day fasting mimicking diet is a clinically developed nutrition program designed to promote fat loss while

1:05:38protecting lean body mass developed at USC's longevity institute it assists the body in entering a fasting like state that helps reset metabolism target visceral fat and supports healthy metabolic markers in just five days pro lawn offers a structured science fact approach to weight loss without extreme restriction or guesswork get 15% off plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe at pro lawnlife.com slash begin here's how it works many people now have heard me say getting light early in the day is important but that will advance one's clock it'll make you want to get up earlier the next day by getting light in the evening it accomplishes two things for me first of all it makes sure that I don't get up too early that I'm not waking up at three or four in the morning because it's going to shift my clock it's going to delay it a little bit and so this is really important if you want to keep your schedule on a normal routine on a regular 24 hour cycle and not have your circadian rhythms of sleep and wakefulness drifting all over the place and you want some

1:06:41predictability to how your mind is going to work in order to optimize learning and performance well then you need to get morning light any evening light the morning light is going to advance my clock make my system want to get up earlier and the evening light is going to delay my clock a little bit so that on average it kind of bookends my circadian mechanisms and I'll basically want to go to sleep at more or less the same time each night and wake up more or less at the same time each morning that's how it works and that's a hardwired mechanism that's not some subjective thing that I tell myself that's a hardwired mechanism so that gets us to the evening and generally in the evening I'll get that light by going outside or sometimes I'll do it by turning up artificial lights brightly and then I'll start to dim them for the evening because as I've mentioned many times before and I'm not going to belabor the point you want to minimize your light exposure especially overhead bright light exposure regardless of whether it's blue light or not in the evening from about 10 pm to 4 am some of you asked wait I thought it was 11 pm to 4 am well it is but 10 pm to 4 am is even better it's just that when I originally said 10 pm to 4 am people like that that's

1:07:48impossible for most people to adhere to so for me it screens off it's dim lights and that's what favors falling asleep in a good night sleep for me since we were talking about food earlier I'll just revisit a little bit of what I said before my evening meal tends to be more carbohydrates rich more if I have proteins they'll be like eggs fish or chicken or something of that sort or no protein and I eat high carbohydrates so I'm not one of these people that's keto or high high meat only or anything like that remember fasting in low carbohydrate states facilitate alertness carbohydrate rich foods facilitate calmness and sleepiness they stimulate the release of triptophan and the transition to sleep so that's why I do them late in the day also if you've exercise early in the day especially if it's weight bearing exercise or everything's weight bearing exercise I suppose unless you're an astronaut but and you're in space but if you're early in the day exercising with weights or you're doing a long run or something sooner or later you need to replenish glycogen and I realized that the ketones does out there gonna say well you know

1:08:52gluconeogenesis will allow you to replenish glycogen etc I'm just gonna call out the lie right now because I feel like doing it and because I think it just hasn't been stated which is that not everybody but a lot of the people that are proponents of high meat keto diets fine that's fine if that's what they want to do and as you recall I do relatively ketogenic diet during the day to for alertness or fasting but a lot of those people can replenish glycogen really well without ingesting carbohydrate so called gluconeogenesis and enhance protein synthesis because they are hormone enhanced and it's just there's been around a while I know what this looks like they're either thyroid enhanced or hormone enhanced and I don't pass any judgment but when you look at people who look amazing on keto and are able to have a lot of energy and replenish their glycogen on keto they are in many cases not all but in many cases they're hormone enhanced they're

1:09:56taking exogenous hormones that allow them to synthesize and repair muscle in ways that people who aren't taking those exogenous hormones can't this is not just true of the men by the way this is also true of the women and this is a whole discussion unto itself probably not directly related to this month of the podcast so I don't mind that people do this but one problem is when people are following ketogenic diets all the way through to sleep and they have trouble with sleep or they're doing long bouts of fasting and they're having trouble falling asleep that makes sense it's because their autonomic arousal is tilted towards epinephrine release nor epinephrine release and dopamine release so they have a lot of energy but they have a hard time calming down and getting into deep sleep I tend to achieve that state using carbohydrates and it also replenishes glycogen so again you know I'm not trying to draw any fire but if I do I'd be happy to have a conversation about all that again no judgment but I think that most people out there are not aware of some of the other variables remember good science is about isolating variables and so oftentimes what we're seeing in social

1:10:59media is we're getting presented single variables and we're not seeing the full context of the other variables that are being manipulated so I eat pasta and rice and vegetables and things like that in the evening also I just find maybe I'm becoming one of the last people that does that although I hope not I hope there are others out there like me but I just president Barack Obama Virginia we are counting on you Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians vote yes by April 21st paid for by Virginians for fair elections struggling with weight that doesn't respond to traditional dieting Prolon's five day fasting mimicking diet is a clinically developed nutrition program designed to promote fat loss while protecting lean body mass developed at USC's longevity institute

1:12:03it assists the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism target visceral fat and supports healthy metabolic markers in just five days prolon offers a structured science-backed approach to weight loss without extreme restriction or guesswork get 15% off plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com slash begin from all the literature speaks to the fact that carbohydrates not only do that but they also help maintain healthy thyroid function etc so that's my bias that's what I do I do avoid caffeine and whatnot in the evening I do take supplements and I'll be happy at some point to put out the complete list of supplements that I put out take out there but in general these are the core things that I do and they relate to a lot of the questions that that you've been asking over time the next piece of scientific data that I'm going to describe is a very important piece of scientific data for sake of understanding how to optimize your brain and access sleep it also can help and avoid a lot of anxiety issues and these relate to data from Charles Isler doctor he's an MD

1:13:09Chuck Isler's lab at Harvard Medical School he's run a sleep lab out of Harvard Medical School for a long time now does very impressive work what he's shown is that the peak output of the circadian clock for wakefulness in other words the peak of our wakefulness and the suppression of the sleep signal actually happens very late in the day so we have this trough of activity and body temperatures lowest right before waking then as we wake up our body temperature goes up and into the afternoon it continues to go up up up up up up and then it tends to fall in the evening and towards bedtime but there's a brief blip of release of peptides and other substances from the from the sleep centers in the brain and the super cosmetic nucleus that the sleep centers this preoptic area that if you want to look that up this preoptic area not far from the circadian clock that signals the peak of alertness and wakefulness about an hour before bedtime he's saying well that's really weird but a lot of people get into bed they're ready to go to sleep

1:14:13and they're wide awake and they think this is an unnatural thing or there's something wrong with and actually it's not this it's believed I don't know again I wasn't consulted the design phase but this is it's believed is a signal that is helpful to human beings to start gathering up resources and securing themselves for a night sleep during which we you know historically we're very vulnerable to attack from other humans and from animals and so forth and so that desire to run around and clean the kitchen or organize things or just a general feeling of internal anxiety late in the evening that's a natural blip that naturally passes after about 45 to 60 minutes now that's often the time when people start stressing about the fact that they have something and do the next day and they worry about not being able to sleep and it can cascade into a whole set of things so another thing that I do throughout my day is I know that early day I'm going to be alert afternoon I'm going to be kind of sleepy and then as the evening comes in addition to doing all the other things I'm doing I anticipate a peak in alertness and activity

1:15:19and I don't worry about it I use that perhaps to get organized for the next day but basically I just go through if I'm going to do anything it's going to be very mundane task like cleaning or things that require almost zero effort and that probably speaks to my cleaning abilities too but the fact of the matter is we don't just go drift off into sleep there's this blip of alertness right before sleep that I hope just cognitively knowing about will be helpful to people and that raises yet another theme that I think is going to be very important which is physiological mechanisms like these changes in alertness or using breathing tools something we'll talk about in future episodes to shift our levels of autonomic arousal those are concrete biological phenomena so is fasting fasting will increase alertness that way so is caffeine not everybody susceptible to caffeine to the same degree or others but it's a physiological mechanisms we know the receptors we know the ligands as they're called which bind to the receptors we know the mechanisms they involve cortisol and epinephrine those are the sorts of things that

1:16:24I personally try and leverage toward my learning and optimization of my brain and my activity doing physical activity early in the day for instance tends to give us a longer duration wake up signal and tends to accelerate waking up early in the day that's why working out late in the day can sometimes cause people to have trouble falling asleep it will also phase delay you make it so that you want to wake up later the next day it's not just because you're tired it's because you shifted your clock with activity and temperature many people ask me about subjective tools for plasticity what about visualization you know can we just imagine doing a particular activity will that help us get better at that activity there's some evidence that visualization can do that it's true but here's the important distinction and here's why I personally don't do much deliberate visualization first of all I get my best ability or achieve my best ability to visualize things when I'm in kind of a sleepy state I don't know why but that's when I'm able to direct my brain

1:17:27towards internal visualization with my eyes closed and generally I fall asleep and I can't remember anything that I was thinking about before some people and these are work that was done many years ago by Roger Shepherd and by others Roger was at Stanford but and other labs have done this too of course of rotating objects physically in their mind as a way of improving or looking at the speed of spatial calculations and so forth some people are very good at visualization they can close their eyes and they can just see objects and rotate them deliberately etc a lot of people like me when we start doing that our mind drifts too easily but I like to think I'm a reasonably focused person in the waking state so visualization has it's interesting because I think people are very attracted to the idea that they can just think about something and then get better at it that way and it's probably true if you can be very linear in the way that you visualize things so I want to repeat that I think visualization does have certain power if you can remain very linear and deliberate

1:18:32and focused in the visualization but many people like myself who are challenged with maintaining that linear focus with eyes closed and in visualization they don't get much out of visualization and I think the data on performance really supports that now there are examples where for instance people will injure one limb and then they will exercise the intact limb or the non-injured limb rather and they will visualize the opposite limb sometimes there's even the use of mirror boxes so that let's say my left limb is injured I'm maintaining activity with my right limb but I'm using a mirror box so it looks like my left limb is working well yes there's some top down or you know or feedback mechanisms that support the idea that the injured limb can rehabilitate more quickly etc but those are fairly elaborate schemes these aren't the kinds I don't have mirror boxes around my house I think these are our specialized circumstances they're a little bit like the examples that we see in the news where oh so-and-so has a stroke and then spontaneously speaks a new language

1:19:36I I don't know what the answer to that is it shows that the brain has associated networks that are typically suppressed and those can be unleashed but you certainly don't want to go out and give yourself a stroke deliberately to try and unmass some skill because there's just no there's no concrete way to go about that in a way that you could really know that you were going to offset the detrimental effects of the stroke in fact I think it'd be a terrible idea so I think what I'm trying to describe is how a typical I don't know if I'm typical or normal I mean I've been told otherwise it's certainly not normal but in terms of the way that I structure my day I think that's normal that's pretty normal I tend to wake up right around I don't know somewhere between 5.30 and 7am depending on what I've been doing the night before I tend to go to sleep somewhere around 10.30 11 I tend to have one bout in the morning where I can do really focused hard work and I can really activate the go pathway while also activating the no go pathway so that I can really stay focused but I rely on some tools I have a period in the afternoon where I get sleepy

1:20:39and kind of out of it like I think most people and I tend to come out of that with an up recognizing the opportunity of that slightly sleepy state for creative work and for thinking about things in novel ways I get like a couple times a day I eat low carb during the day and I don't say high but you know higher carb I eat starches in the evening so in a way I can sleep and then I really anticipate that late afternoon peak in alertness excuse me late night peak in alertness that many people confuse for insomnia or challenges when actually they're really quite normal in their circadian cycle and then I fall asleep and if all goes well I stay asleep for 4 or 5 hours typically it's 3 or 4 and then I wake up I think I'm like most people I wake up during the middle of the night now one thing that I don't think has been discussed a lot but one of my colleagues at the Stanford sleep lab tells me is that every hour and a half or so we all wake up some of you even look around believe it or not and go right back to sleep and you don't recognize it

1:21:43waking up periodically during sleep is the norm it is not abnormal I don't know why this has been discussed more prominently I tend to wake up and if there's a bright light coming through the blinds or if there's some noise upstairs I've costelo snoring particularly loud I might get up I might go use the restroom I might you know pick up a book and read under low light or something and then I generally fall back asleep and wake up typical time for me again 5.37 am in the morning this waking up in the middle of the night thing as I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast episode today is not necessarily abnormal what it probably reflects is that the real time meaning the time that I should go to sleep is probably closer to 8 o'clock the word midnight was literally supposed to mean midnight we many meaning all of us were meant to go to sleep and wake up with the rise you know with the setting and the rising of the sun and we know this because this beautiful study from University of Colorado where they took people out into the wilderness to

1:22:46reset their circadian clocks by way of you know measured by way of melatonin and cortisol and they had them they were completely out of whack from interacting with screens and staying up too late etc and they basically had them view the sunrise and view the sunset each evening and almost all of them not all of the students but all of them got on to a schedule where they naturally wanted to go to sleep at sunset and wake up around sunrise or just before sunrise even when they were brought back into a normal artificial light setting so I think that's the natural pattern and we've just deviated from it with artificial lights so waking up at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. doesn't necessarily mean that there's something screwed up about you it or that you know you have anxiety or something although you might the what it likely means is that you were supposed to go to bed much earlier and because of this asymmetry in the autonomic nervous system where it's much easier for us to push and to delay our sleep time then it is to accelerate our wake up time in other words it's easier to stay up and hang out at the party even if you don't want to be there then it is to wake

1:23:48up when you're exhausted and you're fast asleep most people are pushing through into the late hours of the evening and night and going to bed much later than they naturally would want to and so I personally don't want to go to bed at 8 p.m. a lot of good things happen between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. and so I want to enjoy those and I push through the the evening hours but as a consequence I'm running out of melatonin my melatonin release is basically subsided by about 3 or 4 a.m. and so it makes sense that I would wake up I don't take melatonin for reasons discussed in previous episodes I do rely on things like magnesium glycinate or magnesium 3 and 8 things like theanine not saying any of you need to take those that's just what I happen to take in order to facilitate my sleep and it's been a great benefit to me if I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm anxious for whatever reason in my mind is looping I have a couple rules one is I don't trust anything I think about when I wake up in the middle of the night any of it unless I've had a magnificent dream and I

1:24:50want to write it down I'll do that every once in a while typically when I go back and read it it's not at all magnificent I can't ever remember coming up with anything really fantastic in one of my dreams that stuck with me or that I implemented I don't really trust the kind of thinking that happens in those wee hours of the circadian cycle for me there's just nothing either for me terribly creative or worth linear implementation at that time but one thing that has been very helpful is to sometimes do one of these non-sleep deep rest protocols as a way to go back into sleep so a hypnosis app by or some of the scripts by Michael Ceeley that I've mentioned before or the referee health or a yoga nidra protocol those for me have been very useful at helping me turn off kind of looping thinking in the middle of the night and fall back asleep in reviewing my schedule for you just as a context for how to implement certain types of tools for optimizing learning realize that it gives the impression that there's a 90 president Barack Obama Virginia we are

1:25:55counting on you Republicans want to steal enough seats in congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians vote yes by April 21st paid for by Virginians for fair elections struggling with weight that doesn't respond to traditional dieting pro lawns five day fasting mimicking diet is a clinically developed nutrition program designed to promote fat loss while protecting lean body mass developed at USC's longevity institute it assists the body in entering a fasting like state that helps reset metabolism target visceral fat and supports healthy metabolic markers in just five days pro lawn offers a structured science backed approach to weight loss without extreme restriction or guesswork get 15% off plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe

1:26:55at prolonlife.com slash begin about of learning and work in the morning and then a 90 minute about of creative typework in the afternoon and that's it there are a lot of hours in between of course and I just want to be very clear those hours for me are occupied by pretty I'm not mundane tasks but things that are kind of random those are things like email or attending to zoom meetings or meeting with colleagues and students and things of that sort I sometimes will read just for sake of my own enrichment I mentioned those two 90 minute ballots because those are the two 90 minute ballots where I'm trying to expand on the mental capacities that I already have they're to really where I'm trying to stretch and grow what I'm able to do on a regular basis reflexively so I want to emphasize that the whole day doesn't just consist of those two 90 minute ballots that's not the way my schedule works and that's not the way my lifestyle is arranged which is fortunate because I enjoy all those other things as well and so for many of you out there who are in school or have a family demands or other demands the key is to slot in those brain optimization

1:27:59segments of about 90 minutes one or two or maybe more per day you're trying to slot those in wherever you can amidst your other obligations and things that you need to do but you want to do that in an intelligent way that's anchored to your biology and then you want to do a number of things which I've talked about today in order to optimize those sessions to get the most out of them so as we round up I acknowledge that once again I've covered a huge range of topics related to how to optimize learning and brain change and essentially mental performance and I've set that in the context of some biological mechanism like the basal ganglia go no go pathways the circadian autonomic system and some of the relationship between food and fasting and particular types of food in alertness or sleepiness linear focus and strategy implementation is best served by high alert states although not too alert and how creative states at least the first phase of creativity

1:28:59which is the creative arrangement kind of brainstorming stage is supported by states of relaxation or even slightly sleepy but the creative implementation is a very linear and focused and deliberate process much like the highly focused state that I described I described how I do these things just to give you a context a lot of you ask for you know what I do in order to set it within a context but by no means are these rigid times and ways of doing things but I think it's fair to say that what I do has a circadian logic it also has grounding in biological mechanisms they're very concrete that we know the cells and mechanisms and neurotransmitters and then some of them are a little bit headed out into the what we would call kind of emerging or you know I don't want to say cutting edge but maybe a front edge of what neuroscience is starting to understand about creativity and so forth we those are areas that are just now coming to some clarity and there's certainly still a lot more work to do a lot of different ways to arrange ones routine but hopefully the tools and practices

1:30:04that I described will be useful to you I want to mention that a lot of people ask me about specific tools and practices they ask me out Wim Hof breathing about ice baths I've talked a little bit about ice baths before I think in cold exposure about binaural beats and things of those sort I think the way to look at any tool to modulate or measure the nervous system is ask whether or not it's going to move you up or down the state of autonomic arousal whether or not it can make you more alert or more calm more focused or less focused that's kind of the the two axes here is that we need to think about sometimes you want to be more alert than you are and indeed things like cold showers ice baths super oxygenation Wim Hof type breathing will bring your level of alertness up there's some cautionary notes associated with each of those you need to read and understand those cautionary notes for yourself everybody's different and some of those carry certain dangers under certain conditions others have huge margins for safety

1:31:04and ice bath generally wakes you up a warmer hot bath generally comes you down right binaural beats there aren't a lot of data and quality peer reviewed journals I did put in the effort to go search it out there are a few binaural beats are listening to frequencies of sound that slightly differ offset for the two ears it has been shown can shift the brain into particular states you'll notice today I didn't really talk about alpha or theta or gamma rhythms I personally in reviewing the literature I don't think it's fair to say that alpha states are great for x and theta states are great for y and besides most of us aren't walking around our homes in our workplaces geared up to e g machines are with wires down below our skull so we don't know when we're in those states anyway I think the subjective reading of whether or not one is alert or calm and whether or not that alertness or calmness matches the goal or the thing that we're trying to achieve in terms of learning including sleep is the most valuable internal tool and recognition that we can all have in

1:32:08other words if I want to be very alert and I need to be very alert and I'm exhausted there might be tools that I should use to wake up it might also speak to the fact that I might not have slept as well as I could ever should of the night before so it's really about a match between where we are on that autonomic arousal scale and what we're trying to achieve and indeed there are going to be a lot of tools including supplements and other prescription drugs and things that can help move us along that autonomic continuum up toward more alertness or toward more calmness but ultimately it's about tailoring that alertness and calmness to the specific types of learning and activities that you are going to do and perform and it's reciprocal meaning some of those activities like exercise early in the day will increase your level of autonomic arousal and alertness certain foods will tend to wake you up certain foods will tend to make you more sleepy and the volume of food and the timing of food is a factor also so it's a huge parameter space it's a huge set of variables the impacts whether or not we're feeling well performing well learning

1:33:09great or not learning great and the key thing is to become an observer of your own system and what works for you and to recognize that there are two bins of tools for optimizing learning and brain performance one are tools that are really anchored in biological mechanism and we are certain of what those are I've talked about some of those the other the more subjective tools for some of you visualization might work terrifically well for some of you one song might really wake you up because of the associations you have with it and for me I might just you know it might repel me from the room because I don't like it or it might put me to sleep but of course volume is kind of a universal loud music tends to wake people up soft music doesn't tend to wake them up quite as much so part of today is really getting you to think about in a scientific way in a structured way about the non-negotiable elements which are that you're going to have a period of every 24-hour cycle when you tend to be more awake and a period when you tend to be more asleep and how to leverage

1:34:10those so you're not fighting an uphill battle to wake up when you actually would want to be and should be sleepy and not trying to go to sleep when you are naturally you know going to be most awake so a lot of it is really anchors back to those core mechanisms of biology and then you start layering on the different protocols of food and supplementation etc and I think it's important to recognize that some people are just more go go go go go and no go and some people are just calmer and have a harder time getting into action and an activity it's just the way that we're wired some of us have autonomic nervous systems that are more geared towards parasympathetic calm states one of the reasons I love bulldogs not just my bulldog is that they are very calm animals in fact they make no spontaneous movements unless there's something to respond to and I find that incredibly relaxing other animals like pit bulls who I also really like and enjoy and other species their tail is always wagging and that they're always in a position to make a movement at any any second because they tend to ride at pretty high levels of autonomic arousal they pop up really

1:35:13quickly when you say it's time to go for a walk Castello does it one limb at a time and sometimes he just goes back to sleep and so that there are people like that too and so you have to know where you are and what particular goals you're trying to pursue as a final closure to this I want to emphasize that today as always I've strived to be accurate I'm sure if I made mistakes some of you will point it out and I appreciate that and I'll post a correction if we agree that I indeed misspoke or miscited something but by no means was I exhaustive I mean I might have exhausted some of you but the information wasn't exhaustive meaning there's no way that I could cover all the ways in which we optimize or can optimize learning and performance I think we've touched on a number of them that I hope that you'll find value in and that you'll explore in your own lives we are continuing with this theme because that's what we do for this podcast we stay on one theme for an entire month for the next episode we're going to explore two very essential aspects of

1:36:19neuroplasticity that actually relate to learning which are pain pain management and neural regeneration and for those of you that don't have injuries or don't suffer from chronic pain the discussion is still going to be a very important one because it's not just going to be about pain that you're trying to get rid of it's also going to be about how certain sensory experiences within the pain network can become amplified as well as how we can use top down modulation we can use our mind to suppress the pain response we're also going to talk about some of the hardwired mechanisms that are bottom up that exist in our periphery in our body to control pain and we're also going to discuss a number of interesting interactions between the pain system and the learning system so again if you're not interested in pain per se it still is going to be a very valid conversation for sake of understanding how to optimize brain performance and neural regeneration goes hand in hand with that discussion so I hope you'll join us for that I suppose I'd be remiss if I

1:37:22didn't mention that Costello has been snoring extremely loudly today you know a good long walk this morning which means up the driveway down the driveway he's an old dog so if you've been hearing him in the background it's been distracting now you know why it probably relates to where you were on your level of autonomic arousal and I'll leave it to you to answer that question for yourself many of you continue to graciously ask how you can help support the podcast and we really appreciate the question the best way is to subscribe wherever it is you happen to be listening or watching so for those of you that it's YouTube please subscribe to the YouTube channel it's Apple subscribe to the podcast on Apple or Spotify subscribe there maybe you subscribe to all three if you have comments and feedback for us suggestions for future podcast episodes or topics to cover please place those in the comment section on YouTube Apple also provides a section where you can give us a rating we would love it if you give us a five star rating or whatever it is that you feel that we deserve and in general if you could tell people about the podcast

1:38:25you hope that you would tell them because you think the information would be of use to them of course tell your friends tell your family tell your co-workers because as we expand the podcast the support for the podcast just grows along with it so that's a terrific way to support us as always check out our sponsors which were mentioned at the beginning and in addition to that we've now set up a Patreon account some of you asked specifically how you can help support the podcast but you weren't interested in our sponsors or you were already engaged with our sponsors so we have a Patreon account you can find it at patreon.com slash Andrew Huberman finally in previous episodes today and in future episodes I mentioned supplements supplements are one way certainly not the only way but they're one way in which we can modulate our nervous system for sake of better sleep learning alertness and several other things as well if you're interested in supplements we've partnered with Thorn THOR and E because Thorn supplements have very high stringency in terms of

1:39:27what's in the bottle the amounts of the substances that are in each capsule or pill etc and they have partnered with other groups such as the Mayo Clinic all the major sports teams so there's very high rigor associated with Thorn which is why we've decided to partner with them if you'd like to check out Thorn supplements and see the supplements that I take you can go to Thorn THOR and E.com slash U slash Huberman and you'll see a list of some of the supplements that I take as well you'll get 20% off any of the supplements listed there as well as anywhere else on the Thorn website so that's Thorn THOR and E.com slash U slash Huberman for 20% off any Thorn supplements last but not least on behalf of me and Costello I want to thank you for your time and attention today and as always thank you for your interest in science struggling with weight that doesn't respond to traditional dieting

1:40:28prolon's five day fasting mimicking diet is a clinically developed nutrition program designed to promote fat loss while protecting lean body mass developed at USC's longevity institute it assists the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat and supports healthy metabolic markers in just five days prolon offers a structured science-backed approach to weight loss without extreme restriction or guesswork get 15% off plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com slash begin struggling with weight that doesn't respond to traditional dieting prolon's five day fasting mimicking diet is a clinically developed nutrition program designed to promote fat loss while protecting lean body mass developed at USC's longevity institute it assists the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism target visceral fat and supports healthy metabolic markers in just five days prolon offers a structured science-backed approach to weight

1:41:28loss without extreme restriction or guesswork get 15% off plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com slash begin