Essentials: How to Optimize Your Hormones for Health & Vitality | Dr. Kyle Gillett

**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. And now for my discussion about hormone health and optimization with Dr. Kyle Gillett. Dr. Gillett, welcome.

**Kyle Gillett** (0:23)
Thank you for having me.

**Andrew Huberman** (0:25)
Well, I'm super excited to talk to you. You are an encyclopedia of knowledge about hormone health for men and for women across the lifespan. So I have many, many questions. When someone comes to you as a patient, in terms of hormone health, what are the sorts of probe questions that you ask and what are you looking for? And I ask this because I'd like people to be able to ask some of these very same questions for themselves.

**Kyle Gillett** (0:48)
So when you do a physical exam and a history, you have a lot of different parts. You have your history of present illness. If they have a complaint, maybe the patient doesn't have a complaint. In that case, things like their social history and their family history are extremely important because that gives you an insight into their genetics and an insight into their hormone health. So patients will tell me, I'm doing okay, but it helps to ask them, well, how are you now? Let's say the patient is 50 How are you now versus when you were 20 and what has changed? So I've got the question a lot. How do you get your doctor to order a better lab work up or to even include your basic hormones and there's no magic answer to that. But what really helps is you tell them, my energy is not as good as it used to be. My focus is not as good as it used to be. My athletic performance is not as good as it used to be. So you don't have to have a pathology in order for a lab to be indicated. You just need to have that pertinent symptom.

**Andrew Huberman** (1:48)
Would you say that using the approach you just described that it's equally effective for men and women or do you find that for one reason or another, that men and women have different challenges and advantages in trying to access their deeper hormone data?

**Kyle Gillett** (2:03)
With women, there's a lot more objective data. So if they're having menstrual irregularities or if they're not having a period, if they're having too heavy of periods, then those are things that they talk about very frequently with their doctor. Men are more hesitant. Men really want to know what their testosterone is, but at the same time, they really don't want to tell their doctor how their libido is or how their energy is because it's almost like they feel less masculine or they feel less like a guy when they say that even if they're just talking to their doctor about it.

**Andrew Huberman** (2:35)
I'd love to just kind of take a snapshot of what you think everybody should be thinking about or doing to optimize their hormone health, male or female, from puberty onward.

**Kyle Gillett** (2:47)
The law of diminishing returns applies. So doing a little amount of what I call lifestyle interventions over a long period of time is going to be far more helpful or efficacious than doing a lot and then doing nothing. So I talk about the big six pillars. The two strongest ones are likely diet and exercise. For hormone health, specifically resistance training is particularly helpful. For diet, caloric restriction can be particularly helpful. Especially with the epidemic of metabolic syndrome that is continuing to on go in this country and in developed countries in general. Those are the two most powerful. For the last four, I have a little bit of alliteration. So there's stress and stress optimization. That has to do with cortisol. That has to do with your mental health. That has to do with societal health and collective health of your family as well. When you're a member of a family or even a very close friend, and trying to achieve optimal health together is very important. It's the same thing with nicotine cessation. It's the same thing with hormone optimization. If you do it as a household unit, it's far more helpful. So after stress, you have sleep optimization. Sleep is extremely important, especially for mitochondrial health as well. And then you have sunlight, which encompasses anything that's outdoors. So you move more, you have cold exposure, you have heat exposure.
That's sunlight. And then the last one is spirit. So that's kind of the body, mind and soul. If you have all the other five, and they're dialed in completely, but you don't have your spiritual health, whatever you believe, then that's going to profoundly impact your body and your mind as well.