LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the ICC Sydney Theatre

**Andrew 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. Recently, the Huberman Lab podcast hosted a live event at the ICC Theatre in Sydney, Australia. The event was called The Brain Body Contract and featured a lecture followed by a question and answer session with the audience. We wanted to make the question and answer session available to everyone, regardless if you could attend. I also would like to thank the sponsors for the event. They are 8Sleep and AG1. 8Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. I have spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep is the critical foundation for mental health, physical health and performance. Now, one of the key things to getting the best possible night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually needs to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and alert, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. Eight Sleep Mattress Covers make it extremely easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment and thereby to control your core body temperature so that you fall and stay deeply asleep and wake up feeling your absolute best. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep Mattress Cover for about three years now, and it has completely transformed the quality of my sleep for the better. Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of pod cover, the Pod 4 Ultra. The Pod 4 Cover has improved cooling and heating capacity, higher fidelity sleep tracking technology, and the Pod 4 Cover has snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve airflow and stop your snoring. If you'd like to try an Eight Sleep Mattress Cover, you can go to eightsleep.com/huberman to save $350 off their Pod 4 Ultra. Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman. The other live event sponsor, AG1, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens and other critical micronutrients. I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they decided to sponsor the live event. I started taking AG1 and I still take AG1 once or twice a day because it gives me vitamins and minerals that I might not be getting enough of from Whole Foods that I eat, as well as adaptogens and micronutrients. Those adaptogens and micronutrients are really critical because even though I strive to eat most of my foods from unprocessed or minimally processed Whole Foods, it's often hard to do so, especially when I'm traveling and especially when I'm busy. So by drinking a packet of AG1 in the morning, and oftentimes also again in the afternoon or evening, I'm ensuring that I'm getting everything I need. I'm covering all of my foundational nutritional needs. And I, like so many other people that take AG1 regularly, just report feeling better. And that shouldn't be surprising because it supports gut health. And of course, gut health supports immune system health and brain health. And it's supporting a ton of different cellular and organ processes that all interact with one another. So while certain supplements are really directed towards one specific outcome, like sleeping better or being more alert, AG1 really is foundational nutritional support. It's really designed to support all of the systems of your brain and body that relate to mental health and physical health. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs with your order, plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com/huberman.
And now for the live event at the ICC Theatre in Sydney, Australia.
Does having an afternoon's sleep affect your quality of sleep at night? Great question, I can keep this one pretty brief. We just recorded a six episode series that will be aired later this year with the one and only Mighty Matt Walker, who wrote the marvelous book Why We Sleep. And we went into this topic in depth. The business of naps is the following. Keep them shorter than 90 minutes so you don't disrupt your nighttime sleep. Don't do them at all if it disrupts your nighttime sleep. So if you're somebody for whom even 10 minutes of napping disrupts your nighttime sleep, don't do that. If you're somebody who wakes up from naps feeling groggy, that's what's called sleep inertia. This is what gave rise to the ever famous nappuccino of having some coffee and then taking a nap or an espresso and then taking a nap. Again, I get obsessed with nomenclature. Why didn't they call it espresso nap? I don't know. Naps are wonderful if they're shorter than 90 minutes, don't interfere with nighttime sleep. But I, in particular, am a big fan of, as many of you know, this business of non-sleep, deep rest, of putting the body into what? Body still, mind awake. And we know, based on several studies from the University of Copenhagen, that that actually replenishes levels of dopamine in certain key areas of the brain that restore mental and physical vigor and do not disrupt nighttime sleep, but rather enhance one's ability to fall and stay asleep or to fall back asleep. So, not only are these states of body still, mind awake, very beneficial, it seems, or I should say perhaps for creativity, because that was all anecho data, but we know from real data, from laboratory data on many subjects, peer-reviewed, et cetera, that body still, mind alert, is actually an effective means to improve one's sleep, and perhaps even make up for sleep that one has lost. So, I encourage you, if you're a napper, great, and if you have challenges with sleep, in any way that you think might be related to your napping activity, that you consider short 10-minute, or maybe 20-minute non-sleep deep-rest protocols. By the way, they're completely zero cost, and very soon, we will be releasing to our YouTube Clips channel a 10-minute, 20-minute, and 30-minute non-sleep deep-rest protocol that I've narrated. If you don't like my voice, there are many out there of more pleasant voices. But what might be of particular interest to you is that the visual is of the beautiful sunrise over Sydney, so it'll bring you home as well. Sunrises here are absolutely spectacular. Do you believe in the placebo effect? Absolutely, and there's probably a joke there, but I can't come up with it on the fly. How would I know if it's real, something like that. So the placebo effect is real. Our belief about what we've taken or what is happening to us has a powerful effect on our physiology. It's not purely psychological. The whole business of psychosomatic, even that word is starting to fall away as we start to understand that our beliefs have a powerful effect on what happens to us physiologically, so much so that, for instance, my colleague, Ali Crum, a tenured professor at Stanford's Department of Psychology, who's been a guest on the podcast who studies mindsets, has done beautiful experiments on stress, showing that if you watch a short video about stress, and you learn all the terrible things that stress can do to your cognition, your sleep, and your well-being, well, indeed, that happens, and that if you watch a short video about how stress can be performance enhancing by sharpening your mental acuity or access to particular memory stores, et cetera, that indeed, that happens. So-called belief effects. Why belief effects and not placebo effects? Well, placebo effects tend to be more general. Belief effects tend to be around specific types of information. But the placebo effect has recently been shown to extend to a dose-dependent placebo effect. One of the more remarkable papers, I think, published in the last few years, most people are unaware of, I talked about this in a Journal Club episode of the Huberman Lab podcast with the one and only Peter Attia, described a paper where people took either zero, I believe it was 0.25 milligrams, half a milligram or a gram of nicotine, which is known to be a cognitive enhancer. Please don't smoke, dip, huff or snuff nicotine. It's cancerous in those forms. And taking nicotine can increase blood pressure, vasoconstriction, et cetera, but nicotine is a cognitive enhancer. It is a cognitive enhancer. And I can't help but tell you one story about this before I get back to placebo effect. Don't worry, I always make my way back. You can see why living with me as a child was so challenging.