Essentials: How to Defeat Jet Lag, Shift Work & Sleeplessness

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today's podcast episode is about jet lag, shift work, and we are going to discuss protocols that are backed by science that can support particular tools that you can use to combat things like jet lag, offset some of the negative effects of shift work, and make life easier for the new parent, as well as for the newborn child, the adolescent, anyone that wants to sleep better, feel better when they're awake, et cetera. Let's just take a step back for a moment and remind everybody what we're talking about. The circadian rhythm is a 24-hour rhythm in all sorts of functions. The most prominent one is a rhythm in our feelings of wakefulness and sleepiness. You also have a rhythm in sleepiness and wakefulness that correlates with that. We tend to be sleepy as our temperature is falling, getting lower, and we tend to be more awake or waking when our temperature is increasing. We have a clock over the roof of our mouth, a group of neurons called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. That clock generates a 24-hour rhythm and that clock is entrained, meaning it is matched to the external light-dark cycle, which is, no surprise, 24 hours. Spinning the earth takes 24 hours. So our cells, our organs, our wakefulness, our temperature, but also our metabolism, our immune system, our mood, all of that is tethered to the outside light-dark cycle. And if we are living our life in a perfect way where we wake up in the morning and we view sunlight as it crosses the horizon, and then by evening we catch a little sunlight, and then at night we're in complete darkness, we will be more or less perfectly matched to the external or ambient light-dark cycle. Very few of us do that because of these things that we call artificial lights and this other thing that we call life demands. So today we're going to talk about when we get pulled away from that rhythm. So what is the perfect day? What does that look like from a circadian sleep wakefulness standpoint? You basically want to get as much light, ideally sunlight, but as much light into your eyes during the period of each 24 hour cycle when you want to be awake, when you want to be alert. And you want to get as little light into your eyes at the times of that 24 hour cycle, when you want to be asleep or drowsy and falling asleep. How much is enough? Well, a good number to shoot for as a rule of thumb is to try and get exposure to at least a hundred thousand lux before 9 a.m., 10 a.m. maybe, but before 9 a.m. assuming you're waking up sometime between five and 8 a.m. the mechanism of circadian clock setting involves these neurons in your eye that send electrical signals to this clock above the roof of your mouth. And that system sums, meaning it adds photons. It's a very slow system. So here we're talking about trying to get that at least a hundred thousand photons, but not all at once. So what do you do? You go outside, going outside, even on a cloudy day could be 7,000, 10,000 lux. It's really remarkable how bright it is, meaning how much photon energy is coming through. So try and get a hundred thousand lux before that 9 a.m. Now, if you can't do that because you live in an area of the world where it's just not bright enough, some people have sent me pictures from Northern England, it's just not bright enough in winter, then sure you can resort to using artificial lights in order to get enough photons. And I'm putting out this hundred thousand lux number as a target to get each day before 9 a.m. You can in theory get it all from artificial lights, but there are some special qualities about sunlight that make sunlight the better stimulus. Then I've recommended based on scientific literature that you look at sunlight sometime around the time when the sun is setting. And the reason for that, of course, is because it adjusts down the sensitivity of your eyes, because here's the diabolical thing. While we need a lot of photon energy early in the day to wake up our system and set our circadian clock and prepare us for a good night's sleep 14 to 16 hours later, it takes very little photon energy to reset and shift our clock after 8 p.m. And that's why you want to, as much as you safely can, avoid bright light and even not so bright light between the hours of 10 or 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. So let's talk about shifting clocks, because for the jet lag person, this ability to shift the clock with light temperature exercise and food is vitally important for getting onto the new local schedule. And there's so much out there about jet lag. Today, I'm going to dial it down to one very specific parameter that all of you can figure out without any technology or devices and can apply for when you travel for work or pleasure or anytime you're jet lagged. And I want to absolutely emphasize that you don't have to travel to get jet lagged. Many of you are jet lagged. You're jet lagged because you're looking at your phone in the middle of the night, you're jet lagged because you're waking up at different times a day, you're jet lagged because your exercise is on a chaotic regime some days at this time, some days at that time. But there are some simple things that you can do. So that's where we're headed. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AeroPress. AeroPress is personally my favorite way to brew coffee. It's similar to a French press, but it's much better. The AeroPress was designed in Palo Alto by Alan Adler, a former teacher at Stanford in the engineering department. 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