How to Defeat Jet Lag, Shift Work & Sleeplessness

**Andrew D. Huberman** (0:00)
welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm 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 to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. Along those lines, I want to thank today's sponsors of the podcast. Our first sponsor is Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink. I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or twice a day is that it helps me cover all of my basic nutritional needs. It makes up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, it has probiotics, which are vital for microbiome health. I've done a couple of episodes now on the so-called gut microbiome and the ways in which the microbiome interacts with your immune system, with your brain to regulate mood, and essentially with every biological system relevant to health throughout your brain and body. With Athletic Greens, I get the vitamins I need, the minerals I need and the probiotics to support my microbiome. If you'd like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com/huberman and claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2. There are a ton of data now showing that vitamin D3 is essential for various aspects of our brain and body health. Even if we're getting a lot of sunshine, many of us are still deficient in vitamin D3. And K2 is also important because it regulates things like cardiovascular function, calcium in the body and so on. Again, go to athleticgreens.com/huberman to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3 K2. Today's episode is also brought to us by LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the exact ratios of electrolytes are an element and those are sodium, magnesium and potassium, but it has no sugar. I've talked many times before on this podcast about the key role of hydration and electrolytes for nerve cell function, neuron function, as well as the function of all the cells and all the tissues and organ systems of the body. If we have sodium, magnesium and potassium present in the proper ratios, all of those cells function properly and all our bodily systems can be optimized. If the electrolytes are not present and if hydration is low, we simply can't think as well as we would otherwise. Our mood is off, hormone systems go off, our ability to get into physical action, to engage in endurance and strength and all sorts of other things is diminished. So with element, you can make sure that you're staying on top of your hydration and that you're getting the proper ratios of electrolytes. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element, that's lmnt.com/huberman, and you'll get a free element sample pack with your purchase. They're all delicious. So again, if you want to try element, you can go to elementlmnt.com/huberman.
Today's episode is also brought to us by Thesis. Thesis makes what are called nootropics, which means smart drugs. Now, to be honest, I am not a fan of the term nootropics. I don't believe in smart drugs in the sense that I don't believe that there's any one substance or collection of substances that can make us smarter. I do believe, based on science, however, that there are particular neural circuits and brain functions that allow us to be more focused, more alert, access creativity, be more motivated, et cetera. That's just the way that the brain works, different neural circuits for different brain states. Thesis understands this. And as far as I know, they're the first nootropics company to create targeted nootropics for specific outcomes. I've been using Thesis for more than six months now, and I can confidently say that the nootropics have been a total game changer. My go-to formula is the Clarity formula, or sometimes I'll use their Energy formula before training. To get your own personalized nootropic starter kit, go online to takethesis.com/huberman. Take a three-minute quiz, and Thesis will send you four different formulas to try in your first month. That's takethesis.com/huberman, and use the code Huberman at checkout for 10% off your first order. Today's podcast episode is about sleep and wakefulness. We are going to discuss jet lag, shift work, babies, kids, and the elderly, and we are going to discuss protocols that are backed by science. That means quality peer-reviewed papers published in excellent journals 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 new born child, the adolescent, anyone that wants to sleep better, feel better when they're awake, et cetera. If you've listened to the previous three episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast, we've been exploring these themes of wakefulness and sleepiness, how to fall asleep, how to stay asleep. And we've been discussing parameters like light, exercise, temperature, et cetera. If you've had a chance to listen to those episodes, great. Today's discussion will be even more digestible for you. If you haven't, that's okay. I will provide a little bit of background here or there so that it's not necessary that you have listened to those previous episodes. But if you get a chance to listen to them, please do it. I think it will help you digest the information better. Let's just take a step back for a moment and remind everybody what we're talking about. We're talking about an endogenous, meaning within us, rhythm that we call the circadian rhythm. 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. So believe it or not, the experiment has been done throughout history, not often, but it's been done where people will go down into a cave and will exist in constant darkness for some period of time. There are also cases where people have been in constant light for some period of time, but because people can close their eyes, it's actually easier to do the experiment where you're in constant darkness to address the question of what is the endogenous, meaning the internal rhythm that we all have. And it turns out we all have this rhythm of about 24 hours, although it's not exactly 24 hours, meaning every 24 hours, your body temperature goes from low to high and back down to low again. And it takes 24 hours for that to repeat, not 18, not six, 24, plus or minus a couple hours. 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. This is a biological fact. It is right down to our DNA. We actually have genes in every single one of our cells that ensure that every cell is on this 24 hour-ish rhythm, close to 24 hours. 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. Now you may immediately be thinking, well, I've heard there are night owls and there are morning larks, they're sometimes called, and there are genetic polymorphisms, that's just a fancy name for genetic variations that make some people want to wake up early and other people want to stay up late and teens want to sleep in more. Sure, that's all true. That's all true regardless of what names we give those. However, there's no escaping the fact that human beings are a diurnal species. We were designed, literally, our cells and the circuits of our body were constructed to be awake during the daytime and asleep at night. How do I know that? Well, I wasn't consulted at the design phase, but I'm certain of that because many studies have shown that when we deviate too far from a diurnal schedule and we try and become nocturnal, we can pull it off, but serious health effects, both mental and physical, start to arise. I'm not going to spend much of today talking about all the negative effects of jet lag. I'll talk a little bit about it, or the negative effects of shift work, or trying to scare you by telling you about the quite valid data around depression, amnesia, dementia, all the terrible things that happen when you're not sleeping well. Rather, I'd like to focus on what you can do and arm you with tools. So let's talk about that perfect schedule for a moment, and then let's talk about jet lag and what jet lag really represents and how to push back on jet lag, shift your clock faster, and escape some of the severe bad things that can happen with jet lag, including just feeling miserable when you're traveling for work or vacation. So what is the perfect day? What does that look like from a circadian sleep wakefulness standpoint? I'm about to summarize what I've said in the three previous podcast episodes, as well as now countless Instagram posts. Here's the deal. 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, you don't want to go so high with the light exposure that you damage your eyes because, as many of you heard me say before, the eyes are actually two pieces of your brain, your central nervous system, that were extruded out of your skull. And as pieces of the central nervous system, aka your brain, they will not regenerate. At least right now, the technologies don't exist to regenerate those neurons in humans. You do not want to damage them. So what is too bright? Well, when it's painful to look at. When you have to blink or close your eyes in order to bear it. So please don't look at very bright lights, it's so painful that they're likely going to damage your eyes. However, if you get up in the morning and it's still dark out and you want to be awake, you would be wise to turn on artificial lights, in particular overhead lights for reasons I've discussed previously, but those overhead lights will optimally trigger the neurons, these melanopsin cells in the retina that will activate your circadian clock. When the sun comes out, even if there's cloud cover, the sun does come out every day, regardless of where you live, unless you live in a cave. People have said to me, well, I live in an area where I can't really see the sun. Well, the sun is there. It might be hiding behind clouds, unless it's very, very dark where you live, like Scandinavia and the depths of winter, which case you might want some artificial light. Get some sunlight in your eyes when you can. Here's the deal with sunlight and artificial light that I have not discussed previously.