Optimize & Control Your Brain Chemistry to Improve Health & Performance

**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. Today, we're going to discuss your brain chemistry and how to control and optimize your brain chemistry for all aspects of mental health, physical health and performance. Many times before on the Huberman Lab podcast, and frankly, every time I'm a guest on another podcast, I get questions about science and science-based tools for things like enhancing sleep, enhancing focus, enhancing creativity, improving relationships, getting over grief, and on and on, all of which are valid questions and for which there are protocols that are based in science and that work the first time and every time. However, far more important than knowing a protocol is understanding why a given protocol works. That's why I'm always hammering on mechanism and explaining the cells and circuits and chemicals, at least to some detail, so that people can understand not just what to do, but why it works and therefore how to change a protocol as their life circumstances change or as goals change. Now today we are going to go even a layer deeper. We're going to explore the foundations of your biology in your brain and body that allow any protocol to work because as it turns out, all of the protocols out there, whether or not it's a breathing protocol or a supplement or a prescription drug or an exercise routine, they all tap into and leverage a core set of just a few biological mechanisms. That's right. Beneath everything you are able to do and feel and indeed beneath every protocol that allows you to change for the better and optimize your mental health, physical health and performance, there's just a small subset of chemicals that you're leveraging toward that change. So, today we're going to talk about the four major pillars of neurochemistry that allow you to, for instance, be focused when you want to focus, that allow you to relax when you need to relax and de-stress, that allow you to optimize your sleep, that allow you to optimize your exercise routine or to work through a pain point in relationship or in career or in your relationship to yourself. So, what I can say for sure is that by the end of this episode, you will have a much richer understanding about how your brain and nervous system and indeed your entire body work, and you will have a much firmer understanding as to which protocols and tools to reach for given your particular goals in the moment, in the day, across the week, across the month, across the year, and indeed across your entire lifespan. So, what we're really going for today are principles, deeper understanding of why any given protocol works. And we are also going to discuss specific protocols. Some of those protocols I've discussed on previous episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast, but I must say many of the protocols and tools that I will discuss are brand new and based on research that I have not discussed at all, simply because the research papers came out only recently, or these are papers that I only recently unearthed. In fact, I'm going to share with you two recent studies in a moment that are exceedingly important for optimizing your sleep. And these are studies that again, I've never discussed in any episode on sleep or on any other podcast. So by the end of today's episode, you're going to have far more knowledge about your biology and psychology than you did at the start. And you'll be armed with many more tools and most importantly, principles so that you can navigate not just the tools presented on this podcast, but in the vast landscape of tools that are out there for mental health, physical health and performance. Every so often, I come across a study or set of studies that I get so excited about that I start telling everybody in my immediate life. And I insist on also sharing it with you, the listeners of this podcast, because I find the information to be so incredibly interesting and actionable. The two studies that I'm going to discuss both relate to sleep and sleep states and how to access better sleep. The first one was published in the journal Cell Reports, Cell Press Journal, excellent journal. The title of this paper is, Rapid and Reversible Control of Human Metabolism by Individual Sleep States. We will provide a link to the study in the show captions. The first author is Norah Nowak, N-O-W-A-K. And basically what they did is they measured the different forms of metabolism that occur while humans sleep. As far as I know, this is one of the first studies of this kind. There are many studies of metabolism. There are many studies of sleep. This study focused on how different states of sleep, such as rapid eye movement sleep, which is associated with dreaming and high emotional content dreams versus slow wave sleep, which tends to be more focused on physical repair of the body, more mundane dreams, how those different states of mind during sleep relate to different aspects of metabolism. And what they found was absolutely fascinating. First of all, they found that sleep states regulate more than 50%, half of all the metabolite features detected in human breath. What does that mean? Well, it turns out that you can figure out what humans are metabolizing in particular, more lipids or more carbohydrate, whether or not they're relying more on glucose metabolism based on the contents of their breath. This is true during waking and during sleep. And this is what allowed them to do these incredible measurements of what's being metabolized during sleep. They measured close to 2000 metabolites in breath every 10 seconds across the entire night sleep. And what they found was that there are major pathways related to lipid metabolism, fat metabolism, or to carbohydrate metabolism, or other forms of metabolism that are up or down regulated as human beings transition between slow wave sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, and waking. And you might say waking. Well, yes, they also looked as people fell asleep and as they emerged from sleep. And believe it or not, every so often during sleep, you wake up, you didn't know this, but you wake up in the middle of the night, you look around and you go back to sleep. You're not aware of it because you're still in a rather sleep-like state, although you are awake. What they found was that sleep and the various states of sleep regulated individual metabolic pathways. They found, for instance, that the switch from sleep to wakefulness reduces fatty acid oxidation. So that means while you're asleep, you're oxidating more fatty acids. And as you wake up, that becomes less the case. And there's a switch in slow wave sleep that increases fatty acid oxidation. And there's this transition from rapid eye movement sleep to other aspects of sleep that brings about things like the so-called TCA cycle. Some of you familiar with metabolism will be familiar with the TCA cycle, the so-called tricarbolic acid cycle intermediates. That's fancy nerd speak for specific aspects of metabolism being regulated during this rapid eye movement sleep transition. What does all this mean? And how is this actionable? Well, on many episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast, such as the master sleep episode and the episode that we're going into in further depth today, we're going to talk about sleep and how to optimize sleep. It's been thought of, but not really tamped down, that quality and depth of sleep and duration of sleep is important for metabolism during the daytime. And indeed, that's the case. If people are sleep deprived or they're not sleeping enough, things like glucose metabolism, et cetera, get really disrupted during the daytime. But what this current study shows is that the metabolism that you experience during sleep, or to be more specific, the range of different types of metabolism that you experience during sleep may serve to tune up or to ensure that the specific aspects of metabolism that you require during wakefulness are working properly. In addition to that, this study clearly shows that getting enough sleep allows you to transition through all the various forms of metabolism and use all those different forms of metabolites during sleep in a way that's immensely beneficial for the systems of your brain and body. So the take home message here is that as the authors state, sleep and experiencing the different states of sleep, slow wave sleep early in the night predominantly, plus rapid eye movement sleep toward the end of the night is extremely important for optimizing metabolic circuits for human performance and health. In other words, by not getting sufficient duration sleep, you're not allowing your body and brain to transition through all the different aspects of fuel utilization and you're not teaching your brain and body how to use similar types of fuels during wakefulness. So again, all of this points to the fact that we need to be getting sufficient quality and duration of sleep. So if you're sleep deprived even by an hour or so, you're going to get far less rapid eye movement sleep because rapid eye movement sleep is what occurs toward the end of a sleep night. During the early part of the night, far more slow wave sleep. In getting less rapid eye movement sleep, we know it makes you more emotionally labile, but now we know it's also going to alter certain forms of glucose metabolism during the night and during wakefulness. So that all underscores the need to get sleep. But then the question is how to get enough sleep and how to make sure you get into all these different sleep states. And this is particularly important for you so-called night owls. There's a lot of controversy out there as to whether or not different so-called chronotypes exist. That is people who just naturally or genetically want to be an early bird, wake up early and go to bed early. So these people that wake up at 4 a.m. and would be most comfortable going to bed by 7 or 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. Then there are so-called night owls, people that would feel best or tend to feel best when they go to sleep at 1 a.m., 2 a.m., even 3 a.m. and like to wake up later, 8, 9, 10, or even 11 a.m. or noon. And then of course most people go to sleep somewhere between 10 p.m. and midnight and wake up somewhere between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. or I suppose more typically 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. Now, whether or not real chronotypes exist or whether or not people simply select schedules for sleep and wakefulness that they like because of their social schedules or the activities they enjoy. For instance, some people like to really go out. They like to go out dancing or hear music or spend time in venues that are only open late at night and don't even open until noon or after. Other people like myself rarely go out at night, but I like to get up early. I like to exercise. I like to see the sunrise, et cetera. So I don't know if I'm a morning person or an evening person. I just know the things I enjoy tend to happen in the early part of the day. And the things that I don't enjoy quite as much tend to happen late at night. Regardless of whether or not they're real genetic propensities to be a night owl or an early bird or a sort of typical person right there in the middle, it's very important that people have some control over their sleep schedule. And even more important that people are able to get sufficient amount of REM sleep and slow wave sleep for many reasons, but including the reasons I discussed in the previous study related to metabolism. I'm very excited therefore about a study that came out in Sleep Medicine. This was a few years ago, but somehow I missed this one. It was published in 2019 And the title of this article is Resetting the Late Timing of Night Owls Has a Positive Impact on Mental Health, Physical Health and Performance. This is a study done in humans focusing specifically on people that like to stay up late and sleep in, but who desire to be able to get up and feel alert in order to go to work or study, and they want to go to sleep a bit earlier. And so there are a lot of questions embedded in this study, in particular, whether or not people can actually shift their schedule by a few hours or more. Some people out there contend that if you're a night owl, that's just going to be impossible or very, very challenging to do. Turns out it's not impossible, and it's not even that challenging to do provided you do the right things. Just a brief overview of the study, and then I'll give you the key takeaways. It was a randomized controlled trial. It involved a number of different people, both male and female. And what they did was they used non-pharmacological, practical interventions in a real world setting. Here I'm paraphrasing. They used targeted light exposure. They used consistent sleep-wake times. They used fixed meal times, caffeine intake and exercise. And this is one of the reasons I love this study so much, because I've done episodes where I've talked about temperature, exercise, feeding, and most importantly, light exposure as a way to control and shift your sleep-wake cycles, your so-called circadian timing and entrainment. What did they find? Well, they found quote, significant improvements in terms of mood. So far less depression and stress subjectively measured, as well as improved cognitive performance that was objectively measured. So improved reaction times, improved physical grip strength, which is actually a measure, not just of strength per se, but also of nervous system function. And a number of things that people could do in order to optimize their morning hours, even though they were night owls previously. What do they have people do? Well, I'm going to just going to list this off in sort of rapid fire succession. Then we'll provide a link to the study if you want to learn more. First of all, they told participants to try and wake up two to three hours before their typical wake up time, two to three hours. That seems brutal to me and probably seems brutal to you. If you're somebody who typically wakes up at 10 a.m. to try and get up at eight or even 7 a.m. consistently. But they were also asked to maximize outdoor light exposure during the mornings for reasons that if you've listened to this podcast before, if you heard me talk about before, you know that I'm constantly talking about, I'll probably go into the grave shouting, please get as much light exposure from sunlight early in the day as possible because it sets in motion a huge number of things that are beneficial for your mental health and physical health, including dopamine production, timing melatonin production correctly, reducing cortisol peaks late in the day, et cetera, et cetera. So they asked them to get a lot of outdoor light exposure. They didn't give them a specific amount where they said, maximize outdoor light exposure during the mornings, the time before noon. And again, they had them waking up two to three hours before their habitual wake up time. They were also told, and this is very important if you're going to shift your schedule earlier, to try and keep sleep wake times fixed between their workdays and their weekends. So not sleeping in on the weekends, or not having any sleep in days. Regardless of how well they slept the night before. How fixed within 15 to 30 minutes of their pre designated time. So if they were waking up at seven o'clock one day, they set their alarm and they made sure they got out of bed at seven o'clock every day, plus or minus 30 minutes, but never later than 7.30, never earlier than 6.30. Participants were also asked to try and go to sleep two to three hours before their habitual bedtime. So again, these are people that want to stay up late, 11 p.m. perhaps, but even as late as 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. And now they are asked to go to sleep two to three hours before the habitual bedtime and to wake up two to three hours earlier, as I mentioned earlier. They were also told, and I love this because it fits with many of the things we've talked about on this podcast before, to try and limit light exposure during the evenings, dim the lights or limit altogether artificial lights. Lot of reasons for that. I covered that in the Master Sleep episode. I covered that in the Optimize Health Using Light episode. You can find those at hubermanlab.com. They're asking them to do that here. And they ask participants to keep a regular schedule for their daily meals. Not eating on the hour consistently at 9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m. exactly, but within, again, about 15 to 30 minutes, they're always eating at the same times. That was also important. And again, that's because we have these so-called food entrained circadian clocks. When you eat tells your body when to be alert and when you're not eating, when to be asleep. And they were told to not drink any caffeine after 3 p.m. in the afternoon. Another theme that we've talked about on this podcast. They were also told not to take naps after 4 p.m. Naps are an interesting feature of the sleep-wake cycle. To be very brief about this and to pull from the episode that I did with World Sleep Expert from University of California, Berkeley, Matt Walker. Naps are great for many people, but don't nap if it interferes with your nighttime sleep. And in this study, they told them, don't nap after 4 p.m. And if you are a napper, don't nap for more than 90 minutes. 10-minute naps are fine, 20-minute naps are fine, zero-minute naps are fine, but don't nap for more than 90 minutes and don't nap after 4 p.m. And to exercise during the morning. Now, this one can be a bit controversial because I know a lot of the PTs out there and a lot of the online gym rats and people who, and runners too for that matter, will say, well, according to body temperature and research, it's best to exercise in the afternoon. Look, it's better to exercise sometime as opposed to no time, but if you're focused on how to shift your schedule earlier, meaning get up earlier and go to sleep earlier, this study had people exercise in the early part of the day, certainly before 2 p.m. and ideally before noon. So again, this is a really important study because it combines a lot of different variables to arrive at this very impressive shift where people can get up two to three hours earlier and then pretty consistently and reflexively start going to bed two to three hours earlier, feeling more alert during the day. Again, improvements in cognitive performance, mood and physical performance, grip strength, et cetera. Very few studies are able to or willing to tackle so many variables and combine them in one study. This paper, I think, does a marvelous job of doing this and is incorporating things that individually each have some support for them in animal studies and previous human studies. But as far as I know, this is one of the few studies that really combines all these different features in one place, eating times, keeping those consistent, getting maximal sunlight exposure earlier in the day, getting up at a consistent time, going to sleep at a consistent time and on and on. It's a really marvelous study for that reason. And I think for any of you that are night owls and any of you that want to reinforce your early waking and early to bed times, and I think for most all of you who fall into that general middle category of tend to go to sleep somewhere between 10 PM and midnight, because that's most people and tend to wake up sometime between 6 AM and 8 AM. Well, maybe you want to become more of an early riser or maybe you're going to travel or the seasons are changing and you want to shift your time or you have a new job, et cetera, or something that's actually very common in terms of relationship struggle. You want to match your wake sleep times or maybe you want to offset your wake sleep times from a significant other. These sorts of approaches that I described here and that are supported by the data in this paper are absolutely powerful and science supported. And I'm certain that if you were to apply them that you would see essentially the same effects that were observed here. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's 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's supply of vitamin D3K2. 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 Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the exact ratios of electrolytes are in Element. And those are sodium, magnesium and potassium, but it has no sugar. 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So again, if you want to try Element, you can go to elementlmnt.com/huberman.