The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain - Dr Andrew Huberman - #700

**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. It has never been so easy and also so difficult to remain healthy and perform at your best. The right tools and insights that we all need to avoid pitfalls and maximize our outcomes are thankfully at our fingertips. And today, we get to go through some of Dr. Huberman's favorites. Expect to learn how breathing can literally change the shape of your face, what Andrew thinks of the Huberman Husbands kink, just how bad vaping actually is for you, how to increase your willpower using science, what everyone misunderstands about stress, his opinion on Tom Segura's transformation, how to be more productive and much more. This episode is so good. I absolutely love Dr. Huberman's work. The guy is the biggest health and fitness podcaster on the planet and with good reason. He's made every bro biohacker look very silly over the last couple of years by using science and evidence to work out exactly what we actually need to do to improve our outcomes, our longevity, our health, literally everything. I really appreciate all of the work that he puts in and there is so much to take away from today. Don't forget that if you are new here or a long time listener, you might be listening but not subscribed and that is tres bad because it means you will miss episodes when they go up. The next two months has got a stacked line up of huge guests that you don't want to miss. So navigate to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you are listening and press the subscribe button. It does support the show. It makes me very happy indeed and it ensures that you will not miss episodes when they go up. So go and press it. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Andrew Huberman.
What were you just teaching me about mouth breathing and how it changes the shape of the face?

**Andrew Huberman** (2:11)
So I arrived carrying a copy of the book Jaws, A Hidden Epidemic. This is not Jaws the Shark. This book was written by my colleagues at Stanford, Sandra Kahn and Paul Erlich. And it has an introduction by Jared Diamond, who won a Pulitzer for Guns, Germs and Steel, and a foreword by the great Robert Sapolsky, also a colleague of mine at Stanford. So four heavy hitters on this book, just to credential it first. This book centers around a couple of core concepts, but the first being that people, and in particular children, who overuse mouth breathing as opposed to nasal breathing have changes in the structure of the face that, well, to be quite direct, makes them far more unattractive than if they were to mouth breathe.
It also discusses the chewing of foods as essential to mouth and face development. Sandra Kahn is an expert in craniofacial function and structure, and the fact that if your parents and you did things right, you should be able to place your entire tongue on the roof of your mouth with your mouth closed. Now, I can't do that, okay? So when your teeth closed, come to the roof of your mouth, I can, but I still feel the back of my teeth a bit. So, yeah. Okay, yeah. But the, so that's the second point, that we want to chew, chewing foods is essential to tooth and mouth and face development. These days, many children slurp their food. Many adults slurp their foods. Many adults are eating like babies, and of course, babies, before they develop their mature teeth, and even when they, before they get all over their teeth and need to obviously breast milk and, you know, pudding-like foods. Okay. But, so that's the second point. So nasal breathing, good. Mouth breathing, bad for craniofacial development. Chewing hard foods, chewing a lot on both sides of the mouth. Great for craniofacial development, oral development, tooth development and tooth health, which by the way are correlated with a number of other things like cardiovascular health and metabolic health. Very interesting links there. And then the third point is that the book argues that the entire field of orthodontia, things like braces, things like headgear, things like retainers are the byproduct of poor breathing and let's just say over consumption of soft foods in place of hard foods behavior. And so there's this guy who's from your side of the pond, Mew.

**Chris Williamson** (4:53)
I like him already.

**Andrew Huberman** (4:53)
Touched on the Mew method of restoring normal craniofacial development. The book is chocoblock full of impressive photos of before and afters, impressive because in some cases you'll see kids that were mouth breathers or were eating a lot of soft foods and then they recovered their behavior so to speak and became nose breathers. Of course we have to mouth breathe when we're exercising really hard or when we're eating or speaking we're gonna mouth breathe. But at rest we should nasal breathe is the argument.