Essentials: Maximize Productivity, Physical & Mental Health With Daily Tools

**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. I decided that we would hold office hours. Office hours in the university setting are when students come to the professor's office, or you meet outdoors on campus or in the classroom to review the material and questions from lecture in more detail. Now, unfortunately, we don't have the opportunity to meet face to face in real life, but nonetheless, you've been sending your questions, putting them in the comment section on YouTube, et cetera. And I've prepared a number of answers to the questions that have shown up most frequently. Now, in order to provide context and structure to the way that we will address these questions, I've arranged the science and science-based protocols that relate to various aspects of life, such as mood, exercise, sleep, waking, anxiety, creativity, et cetera, into the context of a day. Selecting the unit of a day in order to deliver this science information and protocols is not a haphazard decision on my part. It's actually the case that every cell in our body, every organ in our body and our brain is modulated or changes across the 24-hour day in a very regular and predictable rhythm. And so selecting the unit of the day is not just a practical one, but it's one that's related to our deeper biology. So let's talk about how to apply quality, peer-reviewed science to your day and how to optimize everything from sleep to learning, creativity, meal timing, et cetera. I'm going to do this in the context of my day and what I typically do. I tend to wake up sometime around 6 a.m., 6.30. The first thing I do after I wake up is I take the pen that's on my nightstand and the pad of paper on my nightstand and I write down the time in which I woke up. The reason for writing down what time I wake up is because I want to know what's called my temperature minimum. I don't care what my actual temperature is. I care when my lowest temperature is. And I know that that lowest temperature is approximately two hours before my average wake up time. The second thing I do after I wake up is to get into forward ambulation, which is just nerd speak for taking a walk. There's a phenomenon whereby when we generate our own forward motion, forward ambulation, visual images pass by us on our eyes, so-called optic flow. Experiencing visual flow has a powerful effect on the nervous system. The effect it has is essentially to quiet or reduce the amount of neural activity in this brain structure called the amygdala. And many of you have probably heard about the amygdala for its role in anxiety and fear and threat detection. And indeed the amygdala is part of the network in the brain that generates feelings of fear and threat and anxiety. It does a bunch of other things too, but that's one of its primary functions. Forward ambulation, walking or biking or running and generating optic flow in particular has this incredible property of lowering activity in the amygdala and thereby reducing levels of anxiety. That walk is a particularly important protocol each day because it really serves to push my neurology in the direction that I'd like it to go, which is alert, but not anxious. I want to have a high degree of focus and alertness because I'm soon going to move into about of work. I need to lean into the day. So in order to do that, I make sure that the walking is done outdoors. I do it outdoors because I also want sunlight in my eyes. Getting sunlight in your eyes first thing in the morning is absolutely vital to mental and physical health. Even if there's cloud cover, more photons, light information are coming through that cloud cover than would be coming from a very bright indoor bulb. So getting outside for a 10-minute walk or a 15-minute walk will basically ensure that you're getting adequate stimulation of these neurons in the eye that are called the melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive ganglion cells. These are neurons that convey to the brain that it's daytime and it's time to be alert. And it sets in motion a huge number of biological cascades within every cell and organ of your body, from your liver to your gut, to your heart, to your brain. Early in the day, we experience a natural and healthy bump in a hormone called cortisol and promotes wakefulness. It actually promotes a healthy immune system. It's very important that that pulse of cortisol arrive early in the day. That pulse of cortisol is going to happen once every 24 hours, no matter what. It's going to happen and you get to time it. How do you time it? Primarily by when you view bright sunlight. You can combine it with the forward ambulation, with the walk and the optic flow that I talked about before. And that's what I do each morning to generate a sense of alertness in my body and brain to generate a sense of calm yet alert. So now we have a first protocol, which is to write down the time of day that you wake up. The second protocol is to get, take a walk first thing in the morning. And the third protocol is woven in with that walk, at least for me, which is to get that sunlight exposure. I'm a big believer based on quality peer review data that hydration is essential for mental performance. As many of you know, neurons require ionic flow. What that means is neurons need sodium, they need magnesium and they need potassium in order to function. We do tend to get dehydrated at night. I try and make sure that I'm hydrated early in the day before I begin any work. So I make myself drink this water with a little bit of sea salt. How much sea salt, if you really want to get detailed, I suppose it's about half a teaspoon, it's not much. At that point, I start craving caffeine, but I don't drink that caffeine yet. I purposely delay my caffeine intake to 90 minutes to 120 minutes after I wake up. The reason I delay caffeine is because one of the factors that induces a sense of sleepiness is the buildup of adenosine. The buildup of adenosine accumulates the longer we are awake. When you wake up in the morning, your adenosine levels are likely to be very low. However, caffeine is an adenosine blocker. It's actually a competitive antagonist for you aficionados. It sort of parks in the receptor that adenosine normally would park at and prevents adenosine from acting on that receptor. That's why you feel more alert. The reason for delaying caffeine intake 90 minutes to two hours after waking is I want to make sure that I don't have a late afternoon or even early afternoon crash from caffeine. One of the best ways to ensure a caffeine crash is to drink a bunch of caffeine, block all those adenosine receptors, and then by early or late afternoon, when that caffeine starts to wear off and gets dislodged from the receptors, a lower level of adenosine is able to create a greater level of sleepiness. Delaying caffeine to 90 minutes to two hours optimizes this relationship between adenosine and wakefulness and sleepiness in a way that really provides a nice consistent arc of energy throughout the day and brings energy down as I'm headed toward sleep and falling asleep. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, 8 Sleep. 8 Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. One of the best ways to ensure a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. That's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3 degrees. In order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about 1 to 3 degrees. 8 Sleep automatically regulates the temperature of your bed throughout the night according to your unique needs. I've been sleeping on an 8 Sleep mattress cover for over 4 years now and it has completely transformed and improved the quality of my sleep. 8 Sleep has just launched their latest model, the Pod 5, and the Pod 5 has several new important features. One of these new features is called autopilot. Autopilot is an AI engine that learns your sleep patterns to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment across different sleep stages. It also elevates your head if you're snoring and it makes other shifts to optimize your sleep. The base on the Pod 5 also has an integrated speaker that syncs to the 8 Sleep app and can play audio to support relaxation and recovery. The audio catalog includes several NSDR, non-sleep deep rest scripts, that I worked on with 8 Sleep to record. If you're not familiar, NSDR involves listening to an audio script that walks you through a deep body relaxation combined with some very simple breathing exercises. And that combination has been shown in peer-reviewed studies to restore your mental and physical vigor. And this is great because while we would all like to get to bed on time and get up after a perfect night's sleep, oftentimes we get to bed a little late or later. Sometimes we have to get up early and charge into the day because we have our obligations. NSDR can help offset some of the negative effects of slight sleep deprivation. And NSDR gets you better at falling back asleep should you wake up in the middle of the night. It's an extremely powerful tool that anyone can benefit from the first time and every time. If you'd like to try 8Sleep, go to 8sleep.com/huberman to get up to $350 off the new Pod 5 8Sleep ships to many countries worldwide, including Mexico and the UAE. Again, that's 8sleep.com/huberman to save up to $350. My primary objective early in the day is to get into a mode of being focused yet alert so that I can get work done. I found that the best way for me to achieve that state is through fasting. So I don't eat anything until about 11 a.m. or 12 noon. Fasting increases levels of adrenaline, also called epinephrine in the brain and body. And when our levels of epinephrine and adrenaline are increased, we learn better, we can focus better. You don't want epinephrine, AKA adrenaline, too high. That feels like stress and panic. You get jittery, you can't focus. But in its optimal range, adrenaline really provides a heightened sense of focus and the ability to encode, meaning bring in and retain, remember information. Next, I want to talk about what I'm doing while I'm working. A couple of things for optimizing workspace that are grounded in neuroscience and physiology. I've talked before about the fact that when our eyes are directed upward, it creates a state of heightened alertness. And this has a relationship to the brainstem neurons that create alertness and their control over the muscles of the eye and believe it or not, the eyelids. The point here is that you can optimize your workstation in a physical way that leverages this aspect of the visual system and your level of alertness. Try and position your screen or your tablet, whatever device you happen to be working on, at least at eye level and ideally slightly higher. Most people are looking down at their computer or tablet or are angling their eyes at their screen at about 30 degrees. When we look down, when our eyelids are slightly closed, it tends to decrease our levels of alertness and increase our levels of sleepiness. So we're now at the description of my day and these protocols in which I would do a 90-minute bout of work. Now, why 90 minutes? Well, the brain is going through these 90-minute so-called Ultradian cycles throughout the entire day and night. Every 90 minutes, we shift over from being very alert to being less alert and then back to alert again. Here's how it works. At the start of one of these 90-minute Ultradian cycles, my brain is not quite engaged in whatever it is I'm trying to do, but I set a timer for 90 minutes and I try and get a strong bout of work done inside of that 90 minutes with the full understanding that the entire 90 minutes is not going to be uniform in terms of my ability of focus. So the goal is to get into what I call the tunnel, to really get into a tunnel of quality work. The brain loves that state, but it's very hard for many of us to access.