The New Science Of Longevity, Resilience & Breaking Bad Habits - Dr Andrew Huberman - #836

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Andrew Huberman. He's a neuroscientist, associate professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and a podcaster. From personal dramas to scientific operas, it's been a wild year for the biggest health and fitness podcaster in the world. And today we get to discover his biggest new insights about life, relationships and protocols. Expect to learn whether you actually should drink coffee within 90 minutes of waking up, how to get the best sleep of your life according to the latest science, how to become a morning person, what Andrew has learned about the perils of fame and public scrutiny, what new research says on the world of longevity supplements, why you should always do your research when testing with peptides, and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Andrew Huberman. There's been a lot of controversy over the last few months. The internet's been ablaze with speculation. I think it's important to get it up top. What is happening with the state of the adenosine system research within the first 90 minutes of the day?

**Andrew Huberman** (1:25)
Adenosine is an incredibly interesting molecule. It exists in the brain and body. It accumulates with the number of hours that you're awake. So the longer you're awake, the more adenosine accumulates. It does many things in the brain and body. One of the most important things that it does is to give us the subjective experience of feeling sleepy and the objective feeling of our body being fatigued, of feeling literally heavier, requiring more energy to move ourselves. When we sleep and when we allow ourselves to go into states of deep rest that are similar to sleep, we can talk about this, the adenosine system is adjusted so that there's less effective adenosine circulating or bound to adenosine receptors, okay? So this sort of adenosine 101 There's a lot more to it, but that's sufficient for what we need to talk about for now.
The drug, the most commonly used drug, the drug we're using now and that we're on right now, caffeine, which is consumed by, it's estimated, more than 90% of the world's adult population, effectively works by blocking the adenosine receptor. There's some nuance there, but we can think of it that way for simplicity's sake. And in doing so, it prevents the sleepiness-inducing actions of adenosine. However, when caffeine wears off, the adenosine that was around trying to bind to those receptors is still around. In fact, it's accumulated even more, which at least partially explains the so-called caffeine crash or the dip in energy, the fatigue that is, that we experience maybe three or four hours after consuming caffeine. Okay. As I mentioned before, when we go to sleep at night, adenosine is cleared from our system. There was a lot of debate over the years about why we sleep. In fact, the great Matt Walker wrote the book, Why We Sleep. And a lot of that has to do with the cell biology of regulating potassium and other ions that are in neurons. And for those that are interested in the cell biology, it's about readjusting the amount of potassium inside and outside the cells, which is happening on an ongoing basis. But you could think of the time that we sleep as doing many things. But one of the most important things is to bring those adenosine levels down. Whatever adenosine has accumulated, to bring it back down such that when we wake up in the morning, we feel alert. Okay, there are a lot of reasons why we feel alert. Some of them we can call pro-alertness mechanisms, like the release of cortisol. Some of them are about removing the break on wakefulness, like reducing adenosine. Here, we're talking about removing the break on wakefulness by reducing adenosine. So let's say, what time do you go to sleep at night typically? If you add your way.

**Chris Williamson** (4:25)
10 o'clock.

**Andrew Huberman** (4:26)
10 o'clock. And what time do you typically wake up feeling great with no alarm clock?

**Chris Williamson** (4:31)
6.30, 6.45.

**Andrew Huberman** (4:33)
Great. So let's say you go to sleep at 10.3 and you wake up at your usual time. Chances are you will have cleared a lot, but not all the adenosine that's required for you to wake up feeling very alert. Let's say you stay up a little bit later. Maybe you stay up until 11 Maybe you wake up twice that night to use the restroom for whatever reason. You consumed a bit more fluid. Maybe it takes an extra 10 minutes for you to fall back asleep the second time. And then you wake up in the morning and you didn't get the total amount of deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep that you're used to getting. Without question, your levels of adenosine upon waking are going to be slightly higher than they normally would. Once you understand what adenosine does, you think about that scenario, it's kind of an obvious thing. However, most people don't sleep until they naturally wake up feeling refreshed. Most people are using an alarm clock. Most people are not going to sleep as early as they need to or sleeping as late as they need to or both. So as a consequence, when you wake up in the morning, your adenosine levels are not zeroed out to the place where you would be maximally awake. There is a lot of or some residual adenosine present. What do people typically do? Typically people get out of bed, might look at their phone. As you know, I encourage them to go find sunlight if the sun isn't out to turn on bright lights and then get outside and get sunlight in their eyes as soon as they can. But chances are they're going to grab some caffeine. They're going to pour themselves a cup of coffee or they're going to have some, if you're me or Brahmati, they're going to perhaps have an energy drink, all fine and good. But now think about what we just said, which is that what you're doing then is blocking the adenosine receptors effectively. And whatever residual adenosine was there, because you didn't sleep enough to clear it out, persists. Plus you're now starting to accumulate more adenosine such that by mid-morning, that adenosine has accumulated, the caffeine has worn off, and maybe by early afternoon, especially after a meal, many, not all people experience an afternoon crash in energy, somewhere between 1 p.m. typically and 4 p.m., somewhere in there. For me, the trough in my natural energy levels in the afternoon is consistently between 2 and 3 p.m. Regardless of how well I slept the night before, many people also find a consistently placed trough in their energy, independent of all this. Okay, so what can we do? Some years back, I started suggesting that people consider if they have an afternoon crash in energy, that they delay their morning caffeine intake for 90 minutes after waking. Some years after that, an academic review was published saying, well, there's really no evidence that that specific practice is necessary, but I still think, and I stand by the fact that it can be very useful for those that experience an afternoon crash. Why? Why? Well, two things. First of all, by delaying caffeine for the first 60 to 90 minutes after waking, there's an interesting phenomenon whereby even though you are out of bed and walking around, you're not asleep. If you don't block those adenosine receptors, there's still clearance of adenosine occurring, in part because you're sort of still asleep. The other thing that works remarkably well to clear out residual adenosine is upon waking, if you don't feel rested enough, to do something I've talked also a lot about, which is another one of these zero-cost tools that has a growing amount of impressive science to support it, which is non-sleep deep rest or NSDR, also called yoga nidra, which is its proper name. The ancient practice is yoga nidra, so we want to be fair to its proper naming. A 10 or 20 or 30 minute yoga nidra or NSDR, if you prefer, done upon waking, but before getting out of bed, or maybe you go into the living room and put on your headphones or listen to an NSDR script. They're available all over the internet, done by me, done by a woman named Kelly Boyes, who has a really lovely voice. If you prefer a woman's voice, it's actually the one I typically use. You will emerge from that feeling much more rested. Now, Dr. Matt Walker himself and I are collaborating on a project to evaluate how NSDR impacts brain states to see if it actually mimics sleep. There's some beautiful studies already published out of Scandinavia showing that longer yoga niger type practices, non-sleep deep rest, can replenish dopamine stores in an area of the brain called the basal ganglia, which prepares you for mental and physical action. So this is a very well established tool from the sort of yogic perspective. It's a tool that's gaining increasing scientific evidence. And for everybody I know that has tried this who reports back to me about it, it's a remarkably energetically replenishing exercise that requires no payment, no nothing, just 10, 20 or 30 minute NSTR. Now, what could be happening in that state? In that state, the body is still, the mind is active, which mimics very closely rapid eye movement sleep. So the test that Matt Walker and I are doing, the experiment is to see, is having your body completely still, but your mind active able to clear adenosine stores in the same way that being deeply asleep is. My guess is that it's not the same, but that it might be a midway effect. That's the hypothesis. We could be wrong. I look forward to seeing the results. So by delaying your caffeine for the first 60 to 90 minutes after waking, but making sure that you hydrate, get your electrolytes, something like element, which we both enjoy and make good use of, you are clearing out the adenosine that is residual in your system. Now, why do I also keep harping on this idea of going out and getting bright light in your eyes, ideally sunlight, especially on cloudy days, but if it's not out yet, you can turn on bright lights? Well, when one does that, you actually amplify the naturally occurring peak in cortisol that occurs soon after waking. So about 30 minutes before waking, your cortisol starts to rise. It's part of the mechanism that wakes you up without an alarm clock. As soon as you get out of bed and you start moving around, that cortisol increases further. Your body temperature, by the way, is increasing in parallel. When you view bright light, and these are very well established studies in humans, as well as animal models, but in humans, when you view bright light, 10,000 lux indoor light, if you're using a seasonal effective disorder treatment lamp, or getting outside even on a cloudy day and looking toward the sun, looking east in the morning, without sunglasses, eyeglasses and contacts, fine, you induce a near 50% increase in the height of that cortisol peak. That might sound like a bad thing because everyone's afraid of cortisol, but that's not a bad thing. It prepares your day, prepares you for a day where your immune system is bolstered, your energy and alertness is bolstered, and your ability to learn and your mood, I maybe said mood twice, forgive me, are bolstered. And in addition to that, there are interactions between light and the adenosine system. Light impacts the functional availability of the adenosine receptor in very interesting ways. Light increases, bright light that is, viewed by the eyes, increases the height of that cortisol peak, and then the cortisol peak also helps to counteract the adenosine system. Now, in addition to that, when you get sleepy at night, part of that effect is due to the increase in melatonin, which is released from the pineal gland, a pea-sized gland, midway, sort of deep in the vestiges of your brain. When you view bright light at night or during the day, and especially in the morning, it quashes those melatonin levels. So when you wake up in the morning and you haven't slept enough, or even if you have, your adenosine levels are still not to zero, your melatonin levels are still not to zero, and your cortisol is rising. So you've got a pro-wakefulness system, cortisol, that you can accelerate or amplify, rather, by viewing bright light. You've got a anti-wakefulness system in the form of melatonin and adenosine that are pushing back on your wakefulness. You're in this kind of like grogginess, and you can further suppress those systems without caffeine by viewing bright light. So viewing bright light both increases the pro-wakefulness systems in the brain and body and suppresses the anti-wakefulness systems in the brain and body, both pushing down on the accelerator of wakefulness, mood and alertness, and reducing the break, right? Otherwise, you're sort of trying to drive with the emergency break on. Then if 60 to 90 minutes later, you ingest caffeine, now you're blocking the adenosine receptor. Sure, that's fine. I love caffeine. I certainly drink a lot of caffeine and enjoy it for all its effects.