“This Is The Culmination Of Everything I Know” - Dr Andrew Huberman #1150

Chris Williamson (0:00)

People of the UK and Ireland, if you are coming to see me on tour this October, I want to hear from you. I want to hear the problems you're dealing with, your most unhinged stories, and I'll be bringing some of you up on stage to talk about them. So if you're coming to see me live, go to chriswilliamson.live slash stories and submit what you want me to talk about on stage. You might actually get to come and see me and look at everyone while we unpack what you've done with your life. Chris Williamson dot live slash stories. Lots of people deal with brain fog and low energy throughout the day.

What's your advice for combating that?

Andrew Huberman (0:33)

I mean, it's funny, I'll probably end up saying this 20 times in today's conversation, but if I had two minutes with somebody and they said, what's the thing I can do for my health? I'd say make the first hour of your day high cortisol and the last hour of your day low cortisol. High cortisol in the morning sets you up for elevated mood, focus and alertness all day long, allows you to buffer stress better and make sure that your nighttime cortisol is going to be low. If you don't spike that morning cortisol enough in the first one to three hours of your day, you're going to have a high flat cortisol curve. Not good. Makes you less resilient to stress, brain fog, less amenable to learning and on and on. Then you just say, well, what can you do? You make this very simple. Bright light, especially from sunlight or 10,000 lux artificial light, and especially in the first 30 minutes after waking, hydration, caffeine, if you like caffeine, exercise in the first three hours of your day if you can, right? Some people can't.

And then roll into your day. At night, in that final hour, you do everything you can to reverse that. You dim the lights, especially overhead lights, dim your screen. You could do the red light thing or the candle light thing, you know, limit caffeine, obviously. Exercise in the final hour before sleep, only if that's the only time you can do it. Some people, that's the only time.

And actually eating in the first three hours of your day, even though I'm a fan of, I personally fast in the first three hours of the day, but that actually can also spike cortisol. People say, why would eating spike cortisol? Well, I mean, basically anything that you do that's sort of pro arousal that's about activity is gonna spike cortisol. So bookending your day with things that spike your cortisol at the beginning and lower your cortisol at the end is really, it really is the, if there is a cheat code to life, now why do I say to life? I mean, is it gonna make you completely stress resilient? No. Is it gonna make you able to learn anything you want with ease? No. But what it does is it sets you up for the best possible sleep, which makes you more alert the next day, of course. It also, it anchors this process that I haven't talked about before on any podcast.

And frankly, that I didn't touch on directly in the book, which is so much of life is about balancing what we call bottom-up and top-down influences. Bottom-up influences would be, you know, you want the cookie, you're going to just eat the cookie.

You know you shouldn't be scrolling. As much as you're scrolling, you just keep scrolling. Those are bottom-up influences. These are impulses that are driven by hypothalamic and other deep brain structures. Then we have, thankfully, we have top-down influences. This is your prefrontal cortex suppressing impulses. Okay, this is the two-marshmallow test in kids, which by the way, a lot of people say was debunked. The debunk was debunked, by the way. Yeah, so the ability to suppress action. It's what I taught my bulldog pit mix strummer the day I brought him home. And it's the basis of everything. You put a piece of food in front of him, he of course wants to take it, right? His prefrontal cortex isn't even on line yet. And you take it away until he learns, and he learns the first day and never forgets that he has to wait until I say, okay, what are you doing there? It's actually not about making him wait for a treat. It's about making him suppress what feels like anxiety and impulse. And that wicks out to every type of waiting. So you say, wait, or like, see you later, I'm going to work. And then you come back and he's not freaking out. He can just, now he doesn't have to actively suppress the whole time, but the ability to suppress impulse. So much of life, the ability to learn and lean in to just enough stress that you trigger learning, the ability to listen when you want to react, the ability to force yourself to get up and work on the book or the thing that you don't want to do.