Using Cortisol & Adrenaline to Boost Our Energy & Immune System Function

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.280 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.900 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.740 | [upbeat music]

00:00:08.320 | I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology

00:00:12.420 | and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.620 | This podcast is separate from my teaching

00:00:17.460 | and research roles at Stanford.

00:00:19.280 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:00:21.340 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:00:24.400 | and science-related tools to the general public.

00:00:27.400 | In keeping with that theme,

00:00:28.680 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

00:00:31.660 | Our first sponsor is Inside Tracker.

00:00:34.320 | Inside Tracker is a personalized nutrition platform

00:00:37.080 | that analyzes data from your blood and DNA

00:00:39.880 | to help you better understand your body

00:00:41.560 | and reach your health goals.

00:00:43.560 | I've long been a fan of doing blood tests,

00:00:46.680 | and more recently as they've been developed,

00:00:48.440 | also DNA tests.

00:00:49.960 | And the reason for that is that so many of the factors

00:00:53.200 | that impact our immediate and long-term health

00:00:55.760 | and that inform our health choices

00:00:58.040 | can only be analyzed by way of blood or DNA tests.

00:01:01.640 | The great thing about Inside Tracker

00:01:03.160 | is they make getting the blood and DNA tests extremely easy.

00:01:06.780 | They'll come to your home if you like,

00:01:08.320 | or you can go to a place where you can get your blood drawn

00:01:11.320 | and your DNA swab taken there.

00:01:13.840 | As well, once you get the information back

00:01:16.560 | from Inside Tracker, it's very easy to understand

00:01:19.240 | what to do with that information, how to interpret it.

00:01:21.440 | And that's really what sets Inside Tracker apart, I believe,

00:01:24.160 | from other blood and DNA testing tools and companies.

00:01:29.120 | Most sources and companies will give you information back

00:01:31.640 | about what your levels of hormones are

00:01:33.320 | and metabolic factors, et cetera,

00:01:35.400 | but no clear directives about what to do

00:01:37.200 | with that information to get those markers

00:01:39.440 | in the ranges that you want

00:01:41.480 | in order to optimize your health.

00:01:43.120 | Inside Tracker makes that all very easy.

00:01:45.020 | It gives you directives about exercise, about nutrition,

00:01:48.720 | about various supplements you may or may not want to take.

00:01:52.000 | And once again, only through blood and DNA tests

00:01:54.320 | can you access that information.

00:01:56.380 | If you want to try Inside Tracker,

00:01:58.920 | you can visit insidetracker.com/huberman.

00:02:01.940 | And if you do that,

00:02:02.780 | you'll get 25% off any of Inside Tracker's plans.

00:02:05.780 | That's insidetracker.com/huberman

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00:02:11.980 | Today's episode is also brought to us by Athletic Greens.

00:02:15.040 | Athletic Greens is an all-in-one

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00:02:19.320 | I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012,

00:02:22.560 | and so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast.

00:02:25.060 | I started taking Athletic Greens

00:02:26.580 | and I still take Athletic Greens once or twice a day

00:02:29.560 | because it covers all my nutritional vitamin mineral

00:02:32.720 | and probiotic bases.

00:02:34.300 | Of course, you can get vitamins and minerals

00:02:35.880 | and probiotics from food,

00:02:37.480 | but many of us, including me,

00:02:38.640 | find it hard to do that on a consistent basis,

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00:02:56.960 | I like to mix mine with water

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00:02:59.460 | I take it once early in the day

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00:03:04.080 | The fact that it includes probiotics

00:03:05.800 | is really important to me.

00:03:07.240 | There are so many data now pointing to the fact

00:03:10.060 | that probiotics and gut brain health

00:03:12.720 | and gut health generally are very important

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00:03:19.400 | So many vital things related to our health.

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00:04:05.540 | Today's episode is also brought to us by Headspace.

00:04:08.440 | Headspace is a meditation app that makes meditation easy.

00:04:11.920 | I started meditating many years ago,

00:04:14.280 | but I found it was difficult to stay consistent

00:04:16.700 | with my meditation practice.

00:04:18.400 | In fact, when I would get stressed or really busy,

00:04:20.360 | that's when I probably needed

00:04:22.000 | the meditation practice the most

00:04:23.360 | and that's when I tended to drop the meditation practice

00:04:26.260 | and run around doing other things.

00:04:27.580 | So it was really a kind of catch 22.

00:04:29.720 | I learned about Headspace a few years ago

00:04:31.400 | on JetBlue flights when they had them included

00:04:33.240 | as an option of whether or not to watch a movie

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00:04:53.060 | that a meditation practice is beneficial

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00:04:57.520 | and a number of other health metrics,

00:04:59.140 | cardiovascular disease, risk, et cetera.

00:05:02.240 | The great thing about Headspace is it's allowed me

00:05:04.680 | to stay really consistent with my meditation practice.

00:05:06.900 | They have meditations of different duration

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00:05:11.420 | I actually look forward to my meditation practice

00:05:13.380 | and it continues to benefit me.

00:05:15.140 | In fact, since starting Headspace,

00:05:16.620 | I've been consistent with meditation for much longer

00:05:18.660 | than I ever had previously.

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00:05:41.560 | Today, we're going to continue our discussion about hormones

00:05:44.500 | and we're going to focus on how particular hormones

00:05:47.620 | influence our energy levels and our immune system.

00:05:51.680 | Now, last episode, I mentioned at the end

00:05:53.740 | that we were concluding our month on hormones,

00:05:55.980 | but we decided to include this additional episode.

00:05:59.060 | So this would be the fifth episode

00:06:00.740 | in the sequence of episodes about hormones

00:06:04.040 | because there are two hormones which are vitally important

00:06:07.100 | for a huge number of biological functions

00:06:09.560 | that we will talk about today,

00:06:11.220 | but that are particularly important for energy levels

00:06:14.020 | and your immune system.

00:06:15.220 | This is something that I get asked about a lot.

00:06:17.740 | So rather than skip to the next general topic,

00:06:19.900 | today, we're going to talk about the hormones cortisol

00:06:23.220 | and epinephrine, also called adrenaline.

00:06:26.540 | You do not have to have heard the previous episodes

00:06:29.260 | on hormones in order to understand and digest the material

00:06:32.380 | from today's podcast.

00:06:34.180 | If I mentioned anything related to previous episodes,

00:06:36.780 | I promise to give a little bit of quick background

00:06:39.000 | to get everyone up to speed.

00:06:40.820 | Today, we're going to talk about the biology of cortisol.

00:06:43.680 | We're going to talk about the biology of epinephrine.

00:06:46.040 | As always, we'll talk mechanism

00:06:47.360 | and there are going to be a lot of tools.

00:06:49.460 | If you're somebody who struggles with stress

00:06:51.660 | and energy levels and balancing stress and energy levels,

00:06:55.640 | today's episode is going to be vital for you.

00:06:58.440 | If you're somebody who has challenges with sleep

00:07:00.280 | or you're somebody who has challenges

00:07:01.540 | getting your energy level up throughout the day

00:07:04.620 | and getting your energy level down when you want to sleep,

00:07:07.180 | today's episode is also for you.

00:07:09.100 | And we're going to talk about the immune system

00:07:11.380 | and how to enhance the function of your immune system.

00:07:14.180 | We're also going to get into some fun topics

00:07:16.140 | related to learning and memory

00:07:17.900 | and how you can leverage cortisol

00:07:20.140 | and epinephrine in particular in order to learn faster.

00:07:23.680 | We're going to talk about so-called nootropics, smart drugs,

00:07:26.160 | and how they work because there are several of them

00:07:28.240 | that tap into the epinephrine system

00:07:30.420 | that aren't often discussed and that you have access to.

00:07:33.700 | We're going to talk about how caffeine

00:07:35.060 | can actually rewire your brain for better or for worse.

00:07:38.620 | And we're going to talk about the biology of comfort foods

00:07:41.260 | and why they work so well and what they're doing.

00:07:44.140 | And in understanding that,

00:07:45.660 | you'll be able to better understand your food choices

00:07:48.980 | as they relate to short-term and long-term energy.

00:07:51.500 | So we have a lot to cover.

00:07:52.820 | Everything will be timestamped.

00:07:54.260 | I want to just remind people that we caption every episode

00:07:56.720 | in English and in Spanish.

00:07:58.780 | The captions take a day or two to pop up on YouTube.

00:08:01.640 | So if you're not seeing those within the first couple days,

00:08:04.340 | please be patient with us in order to get captions

00:08:06.460 | that actually read similarly to what I'm saying.

00:08:10.220 | We go through a captioning service

00:08:12.020 | and so we have them done by experts

00:08:13.560 | and that takes a little bit of additional time.

00:08:15.880 | Meanwhile, if you have any questions

00:08:18.540 | as the episode evolves, please write them down,

00:08:20.560 | please put them in the comment section,

00:08:22.140 | please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already,

00:08:24.700 | and let's get started talking about

00:08:26.460 | how to increase your energy and improve

00:08:29.020 | and increase your immunity by leveraging the biology

00:08:31.980 | of cortisol and adrenaline.

00:08:34.660 | Before we dive into the biology of increasing energy

00:08:37.700 | and your immune system, I want to cover three topics

00:08:41.040 | that I promised I would mention from previous episodes.

00:08:44.660 | The first one relates to intermittent fasting.

00:08:48.000 | The second one relates to why your stomach grumbles.

00:08:51.580 | I forgot to mention the biology of that last time.

00:08:54.140 | And the third is a powerful way to increase growth hormone,

00:08:57.480 | which is powerful for increasing metabolism,

00:08:59.660 | fat burning and tissue repair, et cetera,

00:09:01.700 | that doesn't involve a sauna

00:09:03.600 | or wrapping yourself in plastic bags and going for a jog.

00:09:07.060 | So first, intermittent fasting.

00:09:08.900 | Last episode, I talked a lot about growth hormone

00:09:11.100 | and thyroid hormone and I mentioned things like sauna

00:09:13.900 | and exercise and sleep and how they can increase levels

00:09:16.900 | of growth hormone within the healthy ranges

00:09:19.820 | and why increasing growth hormone can be very beneficial

00:09:23.380 | because it can burn off body fat,

00:09:25.780 | it can improve muscle and general tissue health,

00:09:29.020 | cartilage, et cetera, and we tend to lose

00:09:31.380 | or our levels of growth hormone are reduced as we age.

00:09:35.220 | Many people ask me, well, what about fasting?

00:09:37.420 | Everyone's been promised on the internet

00:09:39.460 | that intermittent fasting leads to these big increases

00:09:42.460 | in growth hormone.

00:09:44.020 | The reason I didn't mention it is that I couldn't find

00:09:46.380 | a study that actually pointed to the underlying mechanism.

00:09:48.720 | I saw lots of claims, lots of podcasts,

00:09:51.480 | lots of degrees behind people's names,

00:09:54.280 | sometimes biologists, sometimes entirely different fields

00:09:56.840 | talking about this, but very few studies.

00:10:00.060 | And then I found what I would consider the study.

00:10:02.680 | We will link to this study.

00:10:04.140 | Turns out that fasting does increase growth hormone levels

00:10:08.940 | and the way that it does it is fascinating.

00:10:11.740 | I mentioned in a previous podcast about hunger

00:10:14.240 | and timing of meals and timing of hunger

00:10:17.540 | that when you're hungry, you release a hormone

00:10:20.660 | in your body called ghrelin,

00:10:22.260 | sometimes actually called ghrelin.

00:10:24.020 | Thanks for all of you ghrelinistas or ghrelinistas

00:10:26.680 | that corrected my pronunciation.

00:10:27.960 | It's both ghrelin or ghrelin, either one works.

00:10:31.040 | Ghrelin makes you hungry.

00:10:33.600 | When blood glucose, your blood sugar is low,

00:10:36.240 | ghrelin is secreted and makes you hungry.

00:10:39.420 | And it turns out that ghrelin, this hunger hormone,

00:10:42.460 | actually binds to the receptor in the brain

00:10:46.560 | that normally binds what's called growth hormone

00:10:51.280 | releasing hormone.

00:10:52.480 | So believe it or not, the hunger hormone

00:10:54.160 | can act like growth hormone releasing hormone

00:10:56.360 | and thereby stimulate growth hormone.

00:10:59.200 | Now, the levels of growth hormone that fasting promotes

00:11:02.660 | through this ghrelin system are pretty substantial.

00:11:05.040 | It's about a doubling of growth hormone levels

00:11:07.180 | in the waking state.

00:11:08.920 | So we know that you can release growth hormone in sleep.

00:11:11.380 | Intermittent fasting, it turns out,

00:11:13.100 | can increase growth hormone by binding ghrelin

00:11:16.860 | to the growth hormone releasing hormone receptor.

00:11:19.520 | And it does it also during the daytime.

00:11:21.380 | So yes, indeed, fasting can increase growth hormone,

00:11:24.340 | not to the supra levels that taking growth hormone

00:11:27.540 | would increase it or that a sauna could increase it,

00:11:30.560 | but it does seem to increase growth hormone.

00:11:33.560 | Later in today's episode,

00:11:35.020 | we're going to talk a lot about different patterns

00:11:37.880 | of fasting and eating that can control epinephrine.

00:11:42.540 | And so we will return to specifics about how long a fast.

00:11:46.600 | You need to fast for two or three days or 23 hours.

00:11:49.320 | Fortunately, for people like me who love to eat,

00:11:51.680 | that's not the case.

00:11:52.940 | So we'll talk specific fasting protocols

00:11:55.040 | later in the episode.

00:11:56.160 | We also said we were going to talk about tummy grumble.

00:12:00.520 | When your stomach growls,

00:12:02.480 | it is not because of fluid sifting around in there.

00:12:04.800 | A lot of people think, oh, you know,

00:12:06.200 | it's fluid sifting around.

00:12:07.080 | It turns out that your stomach has smooth muscle

00:12:10.760 | that lines its sides.

00:12:11.940 | And when you eat something or you don't,

00:12:14.000 | every once in a while,

00:12:14.840 | your stomach cinches off at the two ends

00:12:16.920 | like a bag with a hose on either end,

00:12:19.240 | 'cause that's essentially what your digestive system is.

00:12:21.820 | And if there's nothing in there,

00:12:23.620 | what happens is the muscles

00:12:26.040 | that line the sides of your stomach,

00:12:28.160 | they kind of extend around the stomach in these cables.

00:12:32.320 | Those are always there.

00:12:33.400 | And if you have food in your stomach,

00:12:35.320 | what they do is they churn your stomach.

00:12:36.960 | They literally turn the muscles of your stomach

00:12:38.920 | like a tumbler to help break up the food

00:12:41.240 | that presumably you didn't chew well enough

00:12:43.020 | 'cause you were eating too fast.

00:12:44.620 | When you don't have any food in your stomach,

00:12:47.980 | that churning continues.

00:12:49.400 | And that contraction of the muscle

00:12:50.860 | and the turning, literally turning over of your muscles,

00:12:53.460 | they don't flip over completely,

00:12:54.880 | but the turning over the muscles,

00:12:56.080 | that's what causes the stomach growling.

00:12:58.900 | If you don't want to be the person in the meeting

00:13:01.200 | or sitting there in a quiet theater

00:13:03.440 | whose stomach is growling, chew your food better.

00:13:06.820 | That's the simple solution.

00:13:08.340 | And last episode,

00:13:09.220 | I talked a lot about how sauna controlled safe hyperthermia

00:13:13.780 | can cause huge increases in growth hormone release,

00:13:16.420 | anywhere from 300 to 500,

00:13:18.660 | even 1,600% increases in growth hormone release,

00:13:23.420 | really staggeringly high increases.

00:13:26.780 | I point out that many people don't have saunas

00:13:28.980 | in their yard or in their homes,

00:13:30.740 | and they would go through some other measures

00:13:32.840 | to increase safely their body heat,

00:13:35.300 | creating a steam room in their bathroom

00:13:38.000 | or jogging with extra sweats on, this kind of thing.

00:13:41.100 | Many of you asked about hot baths.

00:13:42.860 | Hot baths will increase growth hormone, excuse me.

00:13:46.080 | However, the temperatures that you need

00:13:48.220 | in order to increase growth hormone

00:13:50.640 | are high enough that you run the risk of burn.

00:13:52.820 | And so I really can't make any recommendations

00:13:54.820 | about hot baths, but if you can tolerate a nice hot bath,

00:13:57.640 | you are going to get some growth hormone release.

00:13:59.560 | However, the sauna has this advantage

00:14:01.260 | of you being able to enter 175 degree

00:14:04.140 | or 200 degree environment,

00:14:05.780 | provided you're not pregnant, you're not a young child,

00:14:08.320 | et cetera, you can do that safely.

00:14:10.320 | And getting big increases in growth hormone,

00:14:12.360 | the hot bath will lead to lesser increases

00:14:14.940 | in growth hormone.

00:14:16.540 | We're going to talk a lot about temperature regulation

00:14:18.240 | in a future episode, but as always,

00:14:20.780 | if you're ever going to start playing with hypothermia

00:14:23.480 | or hypothermia, cold baths, ice baths, hot showers,

00:14:27.140 | hot baths that are beyond the kind of norm

00:14:29.020 | of what's comfortable, you have to be extremely careful

00:14:31.880 | and please consult a doctor.

00:14:33.520 | I think it's fair to say that most people

00:14:35.420 | would like to have a lot of energy during the day,

00:14:38.460 | if you work during the day,

00:14:40.540 | and they'd like their energy to taper off at night.

00:14:43.860 | And I think it's fair to say that most people

00:14:45.700 | don't enjoy being sick, nobody wants to get sick.

00:14:48.700 | In other words, you want to have energy

00:14:51.800 | and you want your immune system to function well,

00:14:54.820 | to ward off infections of various kinds,

00:14:56.900 | bacterial infections, viral infections, et cetera.

00:15:00.180 | And it turns out that the two hormones

00:15:02.300 | that dominate those processes of having enough energy

00:15:05.900 | and having a healthy immune system

00:15:07.980 | are cortisol and epinephrine.

00:15:10.820 | Epinephrine is the same thing as adrenaline.

00:15:14.540 | In the body, we tend to call adrenaline adrenaline

00:15:17.620 | and in the brain, we tend to call adrenaline epinephrine.

00:15:20.940 | And I'm sorry for that, I didn't create this naming system.

00:15:24.380 | And the story behind it is uninteresting

00:15:26.620 | and not worth our time.

00:15:27.620 | I will use the words adrenaline and epinephrine

00:15:30.540 | interchangeably today.

00:15:32.740 | Cortisol is cortisol.

00:15:34.420 | And I just want to cover a little bit

00:15:36.440 | about what cortisol and epinephrine are,

00:15:38.820 | where they are released in the body and brain,

00:15:42.060 | because if you can understand that,

00:15:44.240 | you will understand better how to control them.

00:15:46.840 | First of all, cortisol is a steroid hormone,

00:15:53.300 | much like estrogen and testosterone,

00:15:56.880 | in that it is derived from cholesterol.

00:16:00.640 | Now that could be cholesterol that you eat.

00:16:03.080 | It could be cholesterol that's produced by the liver.

00:16:06.040 | As many of you probably know,

00:16:07.320 | the relationship between dietary cholesterol,

00:16:10.760 | the fats that you eat and blood cholesterol

00:16:14.420 | and liver cholesterol is a very controversial one.

00:16:17.740 | It's a barbed wire topic.

00:16:19.660 | There are people that claim that dietary cholesterol

00:16:21.680 | has zero impact on circulating cholesterol

00:16:25.400 | coming from the liver.

00:16:26.240 | There are people who argue the exact opposite,

00:16:29.280 | both with good data in hand, I would say.

00:16:32.200 | There are some problems for the idea

00:16:34.720 | that all your cholesterol levels

00:16:36.380 | are determined by dietary intake,

00:16:39.680 | namely that anorexics often have very high levels

00:16:43.040 | of cholesterol that their liver produces,

00:16:44.660 | even though they are eating very little

00:16:46.100 | and sometimes not eating at all.

00:16:47.940 | So understand that cholesterol is a precursor molecule,

00:16:52.340 | meaning it's the substrate from which a lot of things

00:16:54.580 | like testosterone and estrogen are made.

00:16:57.100 | Please also understand that cholesterol

00:16:59.440 | can be made into estrogen or testosterone or cortisol,

00:17:03.680 | and that cortisol is sort of the competitive partner

00:17:07.800 | to estrogen and testosterone.

00:17:09.320 | What this means is no matter how much cholesterol

00:17:12.380 | you're eating or you produce,

00:17:13.760 | whether or not it's low or it's high,

00:17:15.700 | if you are stressed, more of that cholesterol

00:17:19.160 | is going to be devoted toward creating cortisol,

00:17:23.060 | which is indeed a stress hormone.

00:17:25.520 | However, the word stress shouldn't stress you out

00:17:28.820 | because you need cortisol.

00:17:30.240 | Cortisol is vital.

00:17:31.440 | You don't want your cortisol levels to be too low.

00:17:34.220 | It's very important for immune system function,

00:17:36.440 | for memory, for not getting depressed.

00:17:39.280 | You just don't want your cortisol levels to be too high

00:17:42.120 | and you don't want them to be elevated

00:17:44.660 | even to normal levels at the wrong time of day.

00:17:47.900 | So we're going to talk about how to control the timing

00:17:50.700 | and level of your cortisol.

00:17:52.840 | Epinephrine or adrenaline has also been demonized a bit.

00:17:59.280 | We think of it as this stress hormone,

00:18:01.560 | this thing that makes us anxious, fight or flight.

00:18:04.400 | We used to get chased by lions and tigers and bears,

00:18:06.560 | and now we don't, and it's this ancient hangover.

00:18:09.240 | That's all wrong.

00:18:10.240 | The fact of the matter is that epinephrine

00:18:12.200 | is your best friend when it comes to your immunity,

00:18:15.960 | when it comes to protecting you from infection.

00:18:18.840 | And we're going to talk about why.

00:18:20.620 | And epinephrine, adrenaline, is your best friend

00:18:24.040 | when it comes to remembering things

00:18:25.760 | and learning and activating neuroplasticity.

00:18:28.460 | We're going to talk about that as well.

00:18:29.940 | Once again, it's a question of how much and how long

00:18:33.200 | and the specific timing of release

00:18:35.040 | of cortisol and epinephrine,

00:18:36.460 | as opposed to cortisol and adrenaline being good or bad.

00:18:40.580 | They're terrific when they're regulated.

00:18:43.260 | They are terrible when they're misregulated.

00:18:45.420 | And we will give you lots of tools to regulate them better.

00:18:48.920 | Cortisol biology 101 in less than two minutes.

00:18:52.640 | Your brain makes what we call releasing hormones.

00:18:57.440 | And in this case, there's corticotropin-releasing hormone,

00:19:00.200 | CRH, is made by neurons in your brain.

00:19:03.160 | It causes the pituitary, this gland that sits

00:19:06.040 | about an inch in front of the roof of your mouth

00:19:08.620 | and the base of your brain, to release ACTH.

00:19:13.580 | ACTH then goes and causes your adrenals,

00:19:17.000 | which sit above your kidneys and your lower back,

00:19:19.960 | to release cortisol, a so-called stress hormone.

00:19:23.400 | But I would like you to think about cortisol

00:19:25.700 | not as a stress hormone, but as a hormone of energy.

00:19:30.160 | It produces a situation in the brain and body

00:19:33.300 | whereby you want to move

00:19:36.060 | and whereby you don't want to rest

00:19:39.080 | and whereby you don't want to eat, at least at first.

00:19:45.120 | Epinephrine or adrenaline 101 in less than two minutes.

00:19:49.220 | When you sense a stressor with your mind

00:19:52.520 | or your body senses a stressor, excuse me,

00:19:55.600 | from a wound or something of that sort,

00:19:57.600 | a signal is sent to neurons

00:20:00.720 | that are in the middle of your body.

00:20:02.140 | They're called the sympathetic chain ganglia.

00:20:03.920 | The name doesn't necessarily matter.

00:20:05.800 | They release norepinephrine very quickly.

00:20:07.800 | It's almost like a sprinkler system

00:20:10.220 | that just hoses your body with epinephrine.

00:20:14.740 | That will increase heart rate, will increase breathing rate.

00:20:18.500 | In some cases, it will constrict your blood vessels.

00:20:20.900 | It will also increase the size of vessels and arteries

00:20:25.420 | that are giving blood flow to your vital organs.

00:20:28.960 | This is why your extremities get cold when you're stressed

00:20:32.260 | and your heart is beating faster.

00:20:33.580 | More of that energy is being devoted toward your core.

00:20:37.880 | You also release adrenaline from your adrenals.

00:20:42.960 | In, again, riding atop your kidneys.

00:20:45.880 | Those are a second system whereby your system gets flooded

00:20:50.860 | with adrenaline in pulses.

00:20:52.860 | So you can get one pulse, you can get 10 pulses.

00:20:54.560 | We'll talk about how to regulate the number of pulses.

00:20:57.340 | And you release it from an area of your brain

00:20:59.160 | called locus coeruleus,

00:21:00.780 | and that creates alertness in your brain.

00:21:03.380 | If you want to learn more about the stress response

00:21:06.880 | and all the details of that,

00:21:08.240 | including some protocols of how to regulate stress,

00:21:10.420 | please see our episode about stress.

00:21:12.320 | I go into a lot of detail there.

00:21:15.360 | I will touch on some of the same themes today,

00:21:17.540 | but I really want to cover energy and the immune system.

00:21:20.640 | And if you're very much interested in stress per se

00:21:24.220 | and stress regulation, please see the episode on stress.

00:21:27.720 | Okay, so we have cortisol and we have epinephrine,

00:21:32.180 | and their net effect is to increase energy.

00:21:34.380 | So first of all, I want to give you a tool

00:21:37.500 | that will help you regulate cortisol

00:21:42.500 | and can also help stave off certain patterns

00:21:47.260 | of mental illness.

00:21:48.100 | Now, of course, it's not going to cure mental illness

00:21:49.820 | on its own, but it can support healthy state of mind

00:21:53.340 | and can help reduce unhealthy states of mind,

00:21:55.700 | including depression.

00:21:57.260 | So the first tool is to make sure

00:21:58.980 | that your highest levels of cortisol

00:22:01.400 | are first thing in the morning when you wake up.

00:22:03.960 | One way or another, every 24 hours,

00:22:06.420 | you will get an increase in cortisol.

00:22:08.520 | That is non-negotiable.

00:22:09.780 | That is written into your genome.

00:22:12.220 | That increase in cortisol is there to wake you up

00:22:16.420 | and to make you alert.

00:22:17.980 | It's to stimulate movement from being asleep,

00:22:21.020 | presumably horizontal, to getting up

00:22:23.700 | and starting to move about your day.

00:22:26.000 | And I've said it before, but I will say it again,

00:22:28.460 | the best way to stimulate that increase in cortisol

00:22:32.060 | at the appropriate time is that very soon after waking,

00:22:35.700 | within 30 minutes or so after waking,

00:22:38.300 | get outside, view some sunlight.

00:22:41.460 | Even if it's overcast, get outside, view some sunlight,

00:22:44.160 | no sunglasses, never look at any light so bright

00:22:47.620 | that it could damage your eyes,

00:22:48.540 | but do that for two to 10 minutes.

00:22:51.020 | If it's very bright, two minutes.

00:22:52.300 | If it's not so bright, 10 minutes.

00:22:54.660 | Do that because in the early part of the day,

00:22:57.740 | you have the opportunity to time that cortisol release

00:23:01.260 | to the early part of the day, which will improve,

00:23:04.900 | this has been backed by peer-reviewed studies,

00:23:06.640 | it will improve your focus,

00:23:08.300 | it will improve your energy levels,

00:23:10.460 | and it will improve your learning throughout the day.

00:23:13.460 | It will also prevent a late shift in cortisol increase.

00:23:18.460 | And late shifted cortisol,

00:23:20.260 | meaning cortisol that increases around eight or 9 p.m.

00:23:24.140 | is a signature feature of many depressive disorders,

00:23:27.740 | including major depression, anxiety,

00:23:30.540 | and that of course correlates

00:23:31.740 | with things like insomnia, et cetera.

00:23:33.740 | So that's a key tool,

00:23:35.800 | and I don't know how many of you are already doing that,

00:23:38.580 | but it is vital to do.

00:23:40.420 | Now I mentioned sunlight even on cloudy days,

00:23:43.340 | and there are specific reasons for that.

00:23:44.900 | So I want to just briefly cover the data

00:23:48.000 | because in the episodes on sleep,

00:23:49.680 | I talked about brightness of light

00:23:51.220 | in regulating cortisol in sleep,

00:23:53.600 | and I talked about how to measure lux, brightness,

00:23:56.900 | but I was not specific enough, I realized,

00:23:59.900 | based on the questions that I've received

00:24:01.460 | since that episode.

00:24:02.500 | So here's how it works.

00:24:04.160 | Going outside and getting some sunlight

00:24:06.940 | requires that I also tell you

00:24:08.540 | how long and under what conditions.

00:24:11.240 | I've said looking through a window is not as good.

00:24:13.420 | It takes 50 times longer to get as much light,

00:24:15.860 | et cetera, et cetera.

00:24:16.900 | Many, many questions have told me

00:24:19.180 | that I'm not being specific enough.

00:24:20.620 | So I'm going to give you the data,

00:24:22.100 | and from the data, you will understand

00:24:23.780 | exactly how long you need to do this each day.

00:24:26.660 | On a sunny day, so no cloud cover,

00:24:29.440 | provided that the sun is not yet overhead,

00:24:32.940 | it's somewhere low in the sky,

00:24:34.600 | could have just crossed the horizon,

00:24:35.920 | or if you wake up a little bit later,

00:24:37.000 | it could be somewhat low in the sky.

00:24:38.800 | Basically, the intensity of light,

00:24:42.040 | the brightness is somewhere around 100,000 lux.

00:24:44.960 | Lux is just a measurement of brightness.

00:24:47.180 | If you want to download the app Light Meter,

00:24:50.440 | that is a free app that will allow you to do that.

00:24:52.500 | You can hold your finger down on the little button there,

00:24:56.320 | and you can move it around,

00:24:57.480 | and it will continuously give you a lux readout.

00:24:59.280 | It's not perfect, it's not exact,

00:25:01.500 | but it's pretty good, and it is zero cost.

00:25:04.260 | I have no relationship to Light Meter, the company.

00:25:08.260 | On a cloudy day, it's about 10,000 lux, okay?

00:25:12.020 | So 10-fold reduction.

00:25:14.200 | But bright artificial light, very bright artificial light,

00:25:17.960 | is somewhere around 1,000 lux.

00:25:20.500 | And ordinary room light

00:25:24.140 | is somewhere around 100 to 200 lux.

00:25:27.780 | And it has to do with how much light scatter there is.

00:25:29.920 | So even if you have a very bright bulb

00:25:31.420 | sitting right next to you, that's not going to do the job.

00:25:33.700 | Your phone will not do the job, not early in the day.

00:25:36.360 | To get the cortisol released at the appropriate time,

00:25:39.660 | you need to get outside.

00:25:41.380 | So let's just set a couple general parameters.

00:25:44.660 | If it's bright outside and no cloud cover,

00:25:48.340 | the light can be indirect.

00:25:49.720 | You don't have to be staring into the sun.

00:25:51.020 | Please don't damage your eyes.

00:25:52.360 | We can't regenerate those neurons yet

00:25:54.240 | and restore vision that's lost.

00:25:56.060 | But if you have to blink, that means it's too bright.

00:25:58.460 | It's fine to blink, of course.

00:25:59.820 | Please do if you need to.

00:26:01.820 | Get outside for 10 minutes.

00:26:03.440 | Or five minutes should suffice,

00:26:07.220 | but 10 minutes is sure to suffice.

00:26:09.640 | If it's a cloudy day, dense overcast,

00:26:12.240 | you're probably going to need about 30 minutes.

00:26:14.340 | If it's light cloud, broken cloud cover,

00:26:16.140 | it's probably going to be somewhere

00:26:17.240 | between 10 and 20 minutes.

00:26:19.220 | And if you can't get outside or you're on an airplane

00:26:21.580 | and it's bright overhead artificial lights

00:26:24.980 | or ordinary room lights,

00:26:26.540 | it's going to take you about six hours of light.

00:26:29.260 | And by time you reach the middle

00:26:32.060 | of your sort of wakeful period, it's too late.

00:26:34.740 | You won't be able to shift your clock

00:26:36.000 | and your cortisol will start drifting later and later.

00:26:38.340 | This is why it's vital to get this light on a regular basis

00:26:41.220 | to get that cortisol released early in the day.

00:26:44.700 | That sets you up for optimal levels of energy.

00:26:47.580 | It sets you up for great sleep,

00:26:49.420 | but today's not really about sleep.

00:26:51.740 | It's more about energy.

00:26:52.820 | That cortisol pulse and the stress that you might feel

00:26:55.300 | early in the day from having a little bit extra energy,

00:26:58.700 | that is the energy that you want in order to move about

00:27:02.140 | and learn and do various things.

00:27:03.900 | That is a healthy level of energy.

00:27:06.080 | So please try and get that sunlight

00:27:10.120 | if it's within your protocols to do that

00:27:12.700 | and try and get sufficient sunlight

00:27:14.140 | first thing in the morning, again, within the first hour.

00:27:16.460 | That's the best way to make sure

00:27:17.780 | that you time your cortisol appropriately.

00:27:20.260 | Now, throughout the day,

00:27:21.180 | you're going to experience different things.

00:27:23.860 | Most of you are not spending your entire day

00:27:25.860 | trying to optimize your health.

00:27:27.540 | Some of you might be, but most of you have jobs

00:27:30.320 | and you have families and you have commitments.

00:27:32.520 | Life enters the picture and provides you stressors.

00:27:35.980 | And those stressors, whatever they may happen to be,

00:27:38.620 | a difficult coworker, some disappointment about something,

00:27:42.180 | you didn't get the raise you expected

00:27:43.700 | or you didn't get the vacation that you expected,

00:27:46.260 | those will cause increases in cortisol and epinephrine.

00:27:50.780 | This is important to understand.

00:27:52.500 | You don't have the luxury

00:27:54.480 | of just having this morning cortisol

00:27:56.140 | and then having it taper off.

00:27:57.580 | You want that major cortisol early in the day,

00:27:59.880 | but then you can expect, you should expect,

00:28:02.820 | increases in cortisol and adrenaline throughout the day

00:28:05.960 | based on events that are unpleasant to you.

00:28:08.180 | So for me, the events that are most unpleasant to me

00:28:10.420 | are things like traffic,

00:28:12.380 | emails that ask me to fill out a form

00:28:14.560 | for which I can't find the link.

00:28:16.100 | These kinds of things stress me out.

00:28:17.660 | I'm a human being.

00:28:18.840 | I don't lose my cool over them,

00:28:20.380 | but I can feel my level of alertness

00:28:22.960 | and kind of frustration increase.

00:28:24.340 | The normal kind of things that go with stress

00:28:26.420 | tense up a little bit.

00:28:27.560 | The key is these blips in cortisol and epinephrine

00:28:32.060 | need to be brief.

00:28:33.860 | You can't have them so often or lasting so long

00:28:37.920 | that you are in a state of chronic cortisol elevation

00:28:41.380 | or chronic epinephrine elevation.

00:28:43.960 | This system of stress was designed

00:28:46.520 | to increase your alertness and mobilize you towards things,

00:28:49.180 | get you frustrated and provide the opportunity

00:28:52.500 | to change behavior.

00:28:53.420 | That's what they were designed to do.

00:28:54.580 | So if you find yourself getting stressed

00:28:57.540 | and staying stressed,

00:28:58.780 | there are great tools that we provide in the stress episode

00:29:01.740 | that relate to things like the double inhale exhale,

00:29:04.400 | the so-called physiological sigh,

00:29:05.980 | you can incorporate an NSDR,

00:29:07.460 | a non-sleep deep rest protocol, et cetera,

00:29:10.100 | but understand that the energy

00:29:12.600 | that you experience during stress,

00:29:14.200 | that sudden increase in alertness and attention

00:29:16.940 | that comes from seeing something difficult,

00:29:18.920 | that is a healthy hormonal system

00:29:21.260 | and neural system that's working.

00:29:22.660 | And the reason it works is that cortisol,

00:29:25.720 | when it's released into the bloodstream,

00:29:27.480 | it actually can bind to receptors in the brain.

00:29:30.920 | It can bind receptors in the amygdala,

00:29:32.660 | fear centers and threat detection centers,

00:29:34.340 | but also areas of the brain that are involved in learning

00:29:37.320 | and memory and neuroplasticity.

00:29:39.300 | And this is why I say that neuroplasticity,

00:29:41.540 | the brain's ability to change itself

00:29:42.900 | in response to experience is first stimulated

00:29:47.380 | by attention and focus

00:29:48.980 | and often a low level state of agitation.

00:29:52.020 | So understand that, and you won't be quite so troubled

00:29:56.300 | about the little stress increases

00:29:58.060 | that you experience throughout the day.

00:30:00.100 | Now, there are ways to leverage stress,

00:30:03.620 | epinephrine and cortisol in ways that serve you

00:30:06.180 | and to do it in a deliberate way.

00:30:08.020 | There are also ways to do that

00:30:10.300 | that increase your level of stress threshold,

00:30:13.060 | meaning they make it less likely

00:30:15.920 | that epinephrine and cortisol will be released.

00:30:18.940 | So I want to talk about the science of those practices

00:30:21.140 | 'cause I get asked about these practices a lot.

00:30:23.420 | Things like Wim Hof breathing,

00:30:25.220 | which is also called Tummo breathing,

00:30:26.980 | things like ice baths,

00:30:28.300 | things like high intensity interval training.

00:30:31.100 | All of those things have utility.

00:30:33.860 | The question is how you use them

00:30:36.820 | and how often you use them.

00:30:39.100 | Those tools, just like stress from a life event,

00:30:43.500 | can either enhance your immunity or deplete it.

00:30:46.280 | That's right, those same practices of ice baths,

00:30:48.960 | Tummo breathing, high intensity interval training

00:30:51.500 | or training of any kind can deplete your immune system

00:30:53.960 | or it can improve them.

00:30:56.420 | Excuse me, they can improve it,

00:30:58.160 | meaning they can improve your immune system.

00:31:00.960 | The key is how often you use them and when.

00:31:04.200 | And so I want to review that now

00:31:05.860 | in light of the scientific literature,

00:31:08.040 | because in doing that,

00:31:08.960 | you can build practices into your daily

00:31:11.320 | or maybe every other day routine

00:31:13.180 | that can really help buffer you

00:31:14.860 | against unhealthy levels of cortisol and epinephrine,

00:31:18.940 | meaning cortisol increases that are much too great

00:31:21.580 | or that last much too long.

00:31:23.300 | Epinephrine increases that are much too great

00:31:25.580 | or that last much too long.

00:31:27.320 | And of course, we'll talk about all the negatives

00:31:30.460 | that go along with having too much cortisol,

00:31:32.340 | too much epinephrine for too long,

00:31:34.220 | but you hear about those a lot.

00:31:35.660 | You hear about Cushing syndrome,

00:31:36.760 | you hear about abdominal fat accumulation,

00:31:39.260 | you hear about sleep disturbances.

00:31:40.780 | I want to arm you with the tools first

00:31:42.780 | and then we can talk about the dark side

00:31:45.580 | and all the things that hopefully

00:31:46.500 | you'll be able to avoid entirely

00:31:48.180 | or that you can get yourself out of

00:31:49.400 | once you have the tools in hand.

00:31:51.400 | Let's say somebody tells you something very troubling

00:31:54.340 | or you look at your phone and you see a text message

00:31:56.540 | that's really upsetting to you.

00:31:58.220 | That will cause an immediate increase

00:32:01.300 | in epinephrine, adrenaline in your brain and body.

00:32:05.260 | And chances are it's going to increase

00:32:07.260 | your levels of cortisol as well.

00:32:09.960 | Let's say you get into an ice bath or a cold shower.

00:32:13.480 | Even if you love the cold or if you hate the cold,

00:32:17.160 | that will cause an equivalent increase

00:32:19.980 | in epinephrine and cortisol.

00:32:22.300 | We don't know the exact levels,

00:32:23.560 | but it's probably about the same.

00:32:25.660 | Let's say you go out for high intensity interval training.

00:32:27.840 | You decide you're going to run some sprints.

00:32:29.800 | You can do some repeats

00:32:31.180 | or you're going to do some weightlifting in the gym

00:32:33.360 | and you love lifting weights in the gym.

00:32:35.640 | Maybe you're like the powerlifting thing

00:32:37.380 | or you decide that you want to do some hot yoga

00:32:39.860 | or something that you really enjoy or you hate.

00:32:43.560 | You're going to increase your epinephrine

00:32:46.380 | and cortisol levels.

00:32:47.600 | There's simply no way around this.

00:32:49.460 | Let's say you decide to sit down

00:32:51.820 | and you're going to do some deep breathing.

00:32:53.880 | We all hear about the benefits of deep breathing.

00:32:55.720 | So inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.

00:32:57.940 | You're going to get big increases

00:32:59.760 | in epinephrine and cortisol.

00:33:01.880 | The data from multiple studies support this.

00:33:05.500 | All of those are stressors in air quotes.

00:33:09.860 | Now there is a way that you can cognitively reframe

00:33:13.340 | what those are.

00:33:14.180 | You can tell yourself,

00:33:15.020 | I love high intensity interval training

00:33:16.240 | or I love weight training or I personally love exercise.

00:33:19.760 | I'm not crazy about the cold.

00:33:21.600 | I do some cold exposure stuff now and again.

00:33:23.840 | And we're going to talk a lot about how to do that

00:33:25.600 | in the optimal way in an upcoming episode.

00:33:28.960 | But getting into the cold doesn't feel good to me.

00:33:32.160 | I tell myself it's good for me and I enjoy it

00:33:35.640 | at some point usually when I'm getting out.

00:33:38.520 | All of those increase epinephrine and guess what?

00:33:41.040 | They increase your levels of energy and alertness.

00:33:44.200 | So if you're somebody who struggles

00:33:46.060 | with energy and alertness,

00:33:48.060 | it can be beneficial provided you get clearance

00:33:50.740 | from your doctor to have some sort of protocol

00:33:53.200 | built into your day where you deliberately increase

00:33:56.080 | your levels of epinephrine and your levels of cortisol.

00:34:00.640 | And I want to put the emphasis on deliberately.

00:34:03.280 | So how would you do that?

00:34:04.720 | Well, it's quite easy to turn the shower cold

00:34:08.100 | and get into that.

00:34:08.940 | That will wake you up and it literally wakes you up

00:34:11.400 | because of increases in epinephrine.

00:34:13.160 | You can do deep breathing of the sort

00:34:15.600 | where you inhale and exhale repeatedly 25 or 30 times.

00:34:19.880 | Maybe hold your breath for a few seconds on an exhale

00:34:22.600 | and then repeat so-called Wim Hof or Tummo type breathing.

00:34:25.280 | Lots of adrenaline is released into your system

00:34:27.520 | when you do that.

00:34:28.360 | You'll have more energy afterwards.

00:34:30.840 | So it's really important to understand

00:34:32.720 | that the body doesn't distinguish

00:34:34.640 | between a troubling text message, ice, Tummo breathing

00:34:38.920 | or high intensity interval training

00:34:40.200 | or any other kind of exercise.

00:34:41.520 | It's all stress.

00:34:42.900 | Cognitively reframing that and telling yourself,

00:34:46.360 | I like this, I enjoy it,

00:34:47.760 | is not going to change the way that that molecule

00:34:51.040 | impacts your body and brain.

00:34:53.160 | I sort of chuckle because people would love to tell you

00:34:56.700 | that all you have to do is say, oh, this is good for me.

00:34:58.880 | No, what it does to tell yourself that it's good for you

00:35:03.100 | or that you enjoy it is that it liberates other molecules

00:35:06.360 | like dopamine and serotonin

00:35:08.680 | that help buffer the epinephrine response.

00:35:12.040 | Now, the way that it does that,

00:35:13.440 | I've talked about previous episode,

00:35:14.840 | but I'll just mention that dopamine

00:35:17.000 | is the precursor to epinephrine.

00:35:19.080 | Epinephrine, adrenaline is made from dopamine.

00:35:23.640 | Cortisol is made from cholesterol.

00:35:26.500 | Epinephrine is made from dopamine.

00:35:28.920 | And that's why if you tell yourself

00:35:30.400 | you're enjoying something

00:35:32.180 | and because dopamine is so subjective,

00:35:34.080 | that you can in some ways,

00:35:36.120 | as long as you're not completely lying to yourself,

00:35:37.880 | you can get more epinephrine.

00:35:40.060 | You get more mileage or more ability

00:35:42.660 | to push through something and you can sort of reframe it,

00:35:46.000 | but it's not really cognitive reframing.

00:35:47.800 | The cognitive part is the trigger,

00:35:49.480 | but it's a chemical substance

00:35:51.960 | that's actually occurring there.

00:35:53.300 | It's dopamine giving you more epinephrine,

00:35:56.820 | a bigger amplitude epinephrine release,

00:35:59.420 | and it gives you some sense of control.

00:36:02.120 | So here's a protocol that anyone can use

00:36:05.520 | if you want to increase levels of energy,

00:36:07.280 | if you suffer from low energy during the daytime

00:36:10.520 | or whenever it is that you'd like to be alert.

00:36:13.360 | Pick a practice that you can do fairly consistently,

00:36:16.360 | maybe every day,

00:36:17.660 | but maybe every third day or every fourth day.

00:36:20.280 | Maybe it's an ice bath or a cold bath.

00:36:22.760 | Maybe it's a cold shower.

00:36:24.260 | Maybe it's the cyclic inhale exhale breathing protocol

00:36:28.780 | I described, if that wasn't clear,

00:36:30.380 | and people always ask for a demo,

00:36:31.700 | I'm not going to do the whole thing right now,

00:36:33.440 | but I'm willing to do a few rounds of this

00:36:35.380 | or a few cycles, I should say.

00:36:36.780 | So it's inhale.

00:36:37.720 | I would do that more deeply,

00:36:40.940 | more like you do that 25, 30 times repeatedly,

00:36:45.880 | you will start to feel warm.

00:36:47.480 | People in the yoga community,

00:36:48.820 | they say you're generating heat.

00:36:49.960 | If you're not generating heat, releasing adrenaline.

00:36:52.600 | Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, 25 or 30 times,

00:36:56.900 | you will feel agitated and stressed.

00:36:59.600 | That's because you're releasing adrenaline in your body

00:37:02.260 | and that's because you're releasing norepinephrine

00:37:04.520 | in your brain and you'll be more alert.

00:37:07.800 | Then you can follow that 25 or 30 breath cycles

00:37:10.240 | with an exhale hold and hold your breath

00:37:13.160 | for 15 to 30 seconds.

00:37:14.820 | Always, always, always do this on dry land,

00:37:17.860 | never while driving, operating heavy machinery,

00:37:19.880 | all the standard safety protocols, never near water, please.

00:37:23.480 | People have passed out and died doing this

00:37:26.120 | with breath holds in water.

00:37:27.680 | There are several deaths associated with it.

00:37:29.680 | On land, it's probably safer, clear it with your doctor,

00:37:32.040 | but 25, 30 breaths, exhale, hold.

00:37:34.580 | 25, 30 breaths again, exhale, hold.

00:37:37.000 | 25, 30 breaths again, exhale, hold.

00:37:39.960 | And then if you like, you can do an inhale and hold

00:37:42.640 | if that's within your margins of safety.

00:37:45.300 | So if all these protocols,

00:37:47.960 | all these activities are just equivalent,

00:37:50.720 | they're just stress, then how do we make them good for us?

00:37:54.000 | How do we actually benefit from them?

00:37:55.920 | Now, of course, the cold itself

00:37:57.960 | can have some health promoting effects.

00:38:00.000 | It can increase brown fat thermogenesis and metabolism,

00:38:03.280 | high intensity interval training or other forms of exercise,

00:38:06.560 | of course has cardiovascular effects that can be good for us

00:38:10.640 | as does weight training, et cetera.

00:38:12.320 | But what we're talking about here

00:38:14.080 | are ways to increase energy and to teach our brain and body,

00:38:18.580 | to teach ourselves how to regulate the stress response.

00:38:22.080 | So in addition to the benefits of the actual practices,

00:38:25.480 | what we're talking about is building a system

00:38:28.940 | so that when you experience increases

00:38:31.920 | in epinephrine and cortisol from life events,

00:38:34.720 | you're able to better buffer those.

00:38:36.500 | And we are also talking about

00:38:38.320 | ways that you can increase energy overall,

00:38:41.120 | 'cause that's what today's episode is all about,

00:38:43.100 | energy and the immune system.

00:38:45.100 | And indeed, we will talk about

00:38:46.700 | how you can actually leverage specific protocols

00:38:49.080 | to increase your immune system on demand.

00:38:51.860 | There's great scientific data to support

00:38:54.340 | that one can do that.

00:38:56.340 | So there's a biological mechanism that's very important

00:39:00.620 | if you want to do those things,

00:39:02.180 | increase energy and your immune system on demand,

00:39:04.960 | learn to buffer stress on demand in real time.

00:39:08.660 | And it means taking these protocols,

00:39:12.180 | these practices, whether or not it's cold water

00:39:14.980 | or ice bath or exercise or any of those,

00:39:18.280 | and making one small but very powerful adjustment

00:39:22.580 | in how you perform them.

00:39:24.020 | But in order to make that adjustment,

00:39:25.760 | I can't just tell you the adjustment,

00:39:27.700 | I have to tell you the mechanism

00:39:29.180 | so that you know if you're doing it correctly or not.

00:39:31.740 | This is really a case where

00:39:33.020 | if you can understand a little bit of mechanism,

00:39:35.780 | you will be far better off than just adopting protocols.

00:39:41.820 | So if you take away nothing else from this episode,

00:39:46.140 | except what I'm about to tell you,

00:39:48.500 | please take away the information I'm about to tell you.

00:39:51.300 | Cortisol, as I mentioned, is released from the adrenals

00:39:55.860 | and it can bind to receptors.

00:39:57.660 | It can have action both in the body and in the brain.

00:40:01.060 | In fact, it can bind the so-called

00:40:02.620 | threat detection center in the brain,

00:40:04.680 | or one of them, which is the amygdala,

00:40:06.940 | also called the fear center.

00:40:09.460 | It can do that because cortisol can cross the blood

00:40:12.060 | brain barrier, it can be released in the body

00:40:13.880 | and cross this biological barrier.

00:40:16.100 | It's like a fence that keeps things out of the brain,

00:40:18.500 | but cortisol has passing rights, it can go through.

00:40:21.680 | Epinephrine cannot, epinephrine is polarized.

00:40:26.620 | The shape of it is such that it can't make it

00:40:30.380 | through the blood brain barrier.

00:40:32.500 | That's one of the reasons why it's released

00:40:34.700 | both from the adrenals in your body

00:40:36.900 | and released from this brainstem area, the locus coeruleus,

00:40:39.940 | in your brain.

00:40:40.780 | That's a powerful thing because what it means is that

00:40:46.480 | the body can enter states of readiness and alertness

00:40:50.860 | while the mind remains calm.

00:40:53.920 | That is biologically possible.

00:40:55.820 | It's not just a psychological trick.

00:40:57.860 | And there are ways that one can do that.

00:41:01.080 | So I'm presuming at this point that

00:41:03.860 | you're getting your morning light

00:41:05.020 | to time your cortisol increase.

00:41:07.420 | I'm presuming that you want more energy

00:41:09.980 | or that you want to increase your immune system's function

00:41:13.180 | and its ability to combat infections of various kinds.

00:41:16.820 | And what I'm suggesting is that you pick from the palette

00:41:20.300 | of exercises that are out there

00:41:24.180 | or tools that are out there to increase epinephrine.

00:41:26.980 | There are a lot of ways to do that.

00:41:28.900 | You can do that, as I mentioned, through cold water,

00:41:31.160 | through exercise, you can even do that

00:41:33.460 | by having confrontations with other people.

00:41:35.780 | At a biological level, it is identical.

00:41:39.360 | So if you like to go online and place the kind of comments

00:41:42.500 | that will read the kinds of things

00:41:44.180 | or look at the kinds of things that agitate you,

00:41:46.840 | you can, if you like, look at that as an opportunity.

00:41:49.260 | I'm not suggesting you do that.

00:41:50.540 | I'd like to see people taking care of themselves

00:41:52.800 | and each other in much less destructive ways, frankly.

00:41:56.140 | But the prerequisite here is getting an increase

00:42:01.380 | in adrenaline released from the body.

00:42:04.300 | Now, the simplest way to describe how to do that

00:42:07.860 | would be in the context of cold water

00:42:09.620 | or a breathing protocol,

00:42:10.940 | because then I don't have to deal

00:42:12.340 | with the unknown life circumstances that get you triggered,

00:42:15.880 | or I could tell you what gets me triggered,

00:42:17.820 | but I'm not going to.

00:42:19.060 | So let's presume cold water.

00:42:21.660 | So let's say you decide you're going to take a cold shower.

00:42:24.340 | You get into the cold shower, and if it's cold enough,

00:42:27.180 | that will be stressful.

00:42:28.100 | You will experience an increase in epinephrine.

00:42:31.360 | It will increase your alertness.

00:42:33.540 | Now, you're using this as a practice, as a tool to build,

00:42:37.280 | you could call it resilience,

00:42:38.380 | but the ability to stay calm in the mind

00:42:40.560 | while being stressed in the body, epinephrines in the body.

00:42:44.040 | And you do that by subjectively trying to calm yourself.

00:42:47.600 | Now, you can do that by telling yourself it's good for you,

00:42:50.080 | by emphasizing your exhales,

00:42:52.240 | anything that you can do to try and stay calm

00:42:54.880 | despite the fact that you are

00:42:56.000 | in a heightened state of alertness.

00:42:58.500 | You could do this with exercise, you could do this with music,

00:43:00.920 | pretty much anything that will give you

00:43:02.540 | a really heightened state of alertness

00:43:04.500 | offers you the opportunity to try and stay calm in the mind.

00:43:08.040 | What you're trying to do at a mechanistic level

00:43:10.500 | is to have adrenaline released from the adrenals,

00:43:15.220 | but not have adrenaline epinephrine released

00:43:18.100 | from the brainstem to the same degree.

00:43:20.540 | So you're not just trying to buffer this.

00:43:22.120 | You're not trying to say, "Oh, this is good for me.

00:43:23.400 | This is good for me. I'm going to grind this out."

00:43:24.940 | You're not trying to grind it out.

00:43:26.620 | You're trying to move through this calmly

00:43:29.920 | while maintaining alertness.

00:43:31.460 | You're not trying to zone out necessarily,

00:43:33.800 | although maybe that helps.

00:43:35.320 | You're not trying to distract yourself.

00:43:36.840 | What you're trying to do is shift cognitively

00:43:40.800 | your relationship to the somatic,

00:43:43.320 | to the body stress response.

00:43:45.600 | Now, I'm sure some of you out there are shouting,

00:43:47.040 | "Yeah, that's exactly like whatever, whatever, whatever."

00:43:49.840 | I agree.

00:43:50.680 | This is in many ways a self-directed

00:43:53.640 | kind of stress inoculation,

00:43:54.900 | but we're not talking about this as stress inoculation.

00:43:58.080 | We're talking about this as a way

00:43:59.820 | to increase energy and focus.

00:44:03.200 | And the reason is that epinephrine,

00:44:05.720 | when released in the body,

00:44:08.040 | has a profound effect on the immune system.

00:44:11.160 | And when released in the brain,

00:44:12.980 | has a profound effect on the ability

00:44:14.840 | to learn and remember information and to be alert.

00:44:18.360 | And so we're talking about splitting the location,

00:44:21.040 | separating the location from which

00:44:23.680 | you have epinephrine, adrenaline released, okay?

00:44:26.420 | So let's say you are doing this practice simply to wake up.

00:44:30.260 | Okay, cold shower, we'll do that.

00:44:31.720 | Exercise, we'll do that.

00:44:33.000 | The ability to stay calm in mind

00:44:36.180 | while having heightened levels of adrenaline

00:44:38.740 | and presumably cortisol as well in the body,

00:44:40.840 | but the cortisol is going to circulate everywhere.

00:44:43.480 | We'll talk a little bit about cortisol more in a moment.

00:44:46.160 | You could do that through some self-soothing, calming way.

00:44:50.760 | That's going to be highly individual.

00:44:53.080 | You do it by telling yourself you enjoy it, et cetera.

00:44:56.040 | But what you need to understand is that

00:44:57.820 | in the immediate period following that practice,

00:45:01.860 | your system, your entire brain and body are different.

00:45:05.500 | Your body is actually primed to resist infection

00:45:10.160 | when you have high levels of epinephrine in it

00:45:12.240 | for short periods of time.

00:45:13.800 | So the scientific study that explored

00:45:15.740 | how increasing adrenaline in the body

00:45:18.540 | can improve immune resistance is grounded

00:45:21.700 | in a well-known phenomenon that increases in stress

00:45:26.400 | actually protect you against infection in the short term.

00:45:31.040 | So I want to look at the classic data first,

00:45:33.760 | describe what was done,

00:45:34.920 | and then I want to talk about the more recent study,

00:45:37.100 | which is immediately actionable.

00:45:39.160 | There are classic set of studies

00:45:41.200 | that are really based mainly on the work

00:45:43.000 | of somebody named Bruce McEwen,

00:45:44.520 | who was at the Rockefeller University in New York.

00:45:47.760 | Bruce passed away a few years ago,

00:45:49.640 | but he had many decades of incredibly impactful work

00:45:53.820 | under his belt when he did.

00:45:55.340 | The work that I'm going to talk about next

00:45:59.180 | has been done in humans and has been done in animals

00:46:02.740 | and has really explored how inducing stress

00:46:06.560 | can enhance the function of the immune system

00:46:08.680 | in the short term.

00:46:09.640 | And when I mean short term, I mean about one to four days.

00:46:14.400 | I'm not going to go through all the details of the study,

00:46:16.440 | but essentially what they were doing

00:46:18.300 | was exposing subjects to some sort of infection,

00:46:22.920 | either bacterial or viral infection, and inducing stress.

00:46:27.140 | Sounds like a double whammy, right?

00:46:28.360 | You think that maybe getting a little electric foot shock

00:46:31.360 | or cold water exposure

00:46:33.360 | or something to increase your levels of stress

00:46:35.580 | in an adrenaline would just make

00:46:37.760 | the effects of the infection worse,

00:46:39.420 | but no, quite the opposite.

00:46:42.060 | Brief bouts of stress,

00:46:44.040 | which now you should be thinking about

00:46:45.640 | in terms of cortisol and epinephrine release,

00:46:48.220 | were actually able to increase immune system function.

00:46:51.880 | Now that shouldn't surprise you

00:46:55.120 | if you understand a little bit

00:46:56.520 | about how epinephrine works in the body and in the brain.

00:47:00.720 | It essentially is the signal

00:47:03.240 | by which the nervous system can inform immune organs,

00:47:06.840 | things like the spleen and other organs

00:47:08.700 | that make killer cells of various kinds,

00:47:10.900 | B cells and T cells,

00:47:12.640 | to go and combat infections, bacteria and viruses.

00:47:16.320 | How else would your immune system know

00:47:18.020 | that there was an infection?

00:47:19.380 | Your immune system can recognize foreign invaders,

00:47:22.040 | but the nervous system provides the signal,

00:47:25.280 | the sort of alarm signal that liberates the killer cells,

00:47:28.400 | that tells them there's a problem

00:47:30.060 | and to go seek out the problem, so to speak.

00:47:33.120 | So the duration here is really important

00:47:36.760 | because if stress stayed too high for too long,

00:47:39.760 | then yes, indeed, stress can hinder the immune response.

00:47:44.760 | But for a period of about one to four days,

00:47:47.320 | it actually can protect you

00:47:49.100 | by way of increasing the immune response.

00:47:52.280 | Now, I can say with certainty

00:47:54.960 | that that effect is governed by epinephrine,

00:47:58.400 | adrenaline released from the adrenals and not from the brain

00:48:02.260 | because they actually explored

00:48:04.380 | whether or not the effect exists

00:48:06.220 | in the presence of what's called an adrenalectomy

00:48:09.760 | or removing the adrenals.

00:48:12.260 | So I should just say without the adrenals,

00:48:13.840 | you don't get the effect.

00:48:14.760 | So we know that that effect

00:48:15.800 | comes from adrenaline in the body.

00:48:17.720 | What does that mean for you?

00:48:18.800 | That means if you want to increase your immune system

00:48:21.840 | in the short term,

00:48:22.820 | you want to increase your epinephrine in the short term.

00:48:27.080 | That's why short bouts of very intense exercise,

00:48:30.320 | probably no more than an hour per day,

00:48:32.400 | provided you're doing everything else right,

00:48:33.880 | sleeping and nutrition, et cetera,

00:48:36.100 | maybe even shorter bouts of intense exercise

00:48:38.800 | or exposure to cold water

00:48:41.160 | or the cyclic breathing that I talked about before,

00:48:44.680 | because they increase epinephrine,

00:48:46.740 | they will bolster the immune system.

00:48:49.140 | And we all hear these reports every once in a while.

00:48:51.960 | It seems to be the thing that every once in a while,

00:48:53.960 | there'll be an article about how coffee

00:48:55.720 | can improve your immune system or something like that.

00:48:57.600 | Indeed, caffeine can increase epinephrine

00:49:00.000 | and dopamine to some extent,

00:49:02.060 | but most people are drinking it chronically.

00:49:04.840 | So its effects are probably due to increases in epinephrine

00:49:09.080 | and probably whether or not something like coffee

00:49:11.520 | or other forms of caffeine can improve

00:49:13.320 | or degrade your immune system

00:49:14.800 | will probably depend on whether or not

00:49:16.500 | you're using it in a way that it increases your adrenaline

00:49:19.020 | as a spike that happens rarely.

00:49:21.520 | Once every two or three months,

00:49:23.960 | let's say you have an infection coming on.

00:49:25.400 | Yes, indeed, what these data probably mean

00:49:28.200 | is that drinking some hot caffeinated tea

00:49:30.920 | or some hot coffee even,

00:49:32.520 | provided you don't get dehydrated from it

00:49:35.500 | 'cause you're also drinking some water

00:49:37.120 | can probably improve your immune system function

00:49:39.340 | by way of increasing adrenaline release.

00:49:41.920 | But so can the breathing, so can cold exposure,

00:49:44.800 | so can exercise.

00:49:46.940 | The mechanism here is what's key.

00:49:48.640 | And I keep saying that because what it means is that

00:49:51.840 | you don't actually have to know the specific protocol.

00:49:54.600 | I'm not trying to say, do this particular protocol.

00:49:57.760 | You have to figure out,

00:49:59.120 | and it should be easy to figure out

00:50:00.520 | what short-term adrenaline increasing behavior

00:50:04.180 | you're willing to do on a regular basis every day

00:50:06.920 | or two or three times a week.

00:50:08.340 | Now you could say, well, I'm not sick.

00:50:10.400 | Should I be doing these things often?

00:50:13.420 | I would say two or three times a week at a minimum,

00:50:16.560 | if your goal is to keep your immune system tuned up

00:50:19.140 | and you are in the presence of a lot of children,

00:50:22.420 | for instance, which carry a lot of bugs

00:50:25.080 | because their immune system isn't developed,

00:50:26.960 | or you work in a healthcare setting,

00:50:30.160 | or you're simply somebody who's prone to get sick.

00:50:33.720 | I can just say anecdotally,

00:50:35.560 | I guess someone now calls this anecdata,

00:50:37.680 | which I don't like that phrase

00:50:39.040 | because it's sort of, I don't want anecdotal data

00:50:42.080 | to ever be misunderstood as anything but anecdotal data.

00:50:45.600 | Anecdotally, I can say that I've had instances

00:50:49.980 | where I've felt a throat tickle coming on

00:50:52.540 | or some sinus infection.

00:50:54.020 | I will do the cyclic breathing that I described before,

00:50:57.100 | 25, 30 breaths, exhale, hold, 25, 30 breaths, exhale, hold,

00:51:00.000 | 25, 30 breaths, exhale, hold, and then big inhale, hold.

00:51:02.880 | And most times I didn't get full-blown sick,

00:51:05.640 | but I also take other precautionary measures

00:51:07.720 | to get sleep, et cetera.

00:51:09.960 | So whether or not it was causal

00:51:12.080 | or whether or not it's just correlated, I don't know.

00:51:14.560 | However, there's a human study

00:51:16.440 | that I definitely want to point out to you

00:51:18.780 | because it was published more recently

00:51:21.200 | than the McEwen work.

00:51:22.160 | It was published in the "Proceedings

00:51:23.240 | of the National Academy of Sciences" for the USA

00:51:26.400 | because there are "Proceedings of the National Academy

00:51:28.120 | of Sciences" for many other countries as well.

00:51:30.440 | The title of the paper is "Voluntary Activation

00:51:32.740 | of the Sympathetic Nervous System."

00:51:34.240 | That's the system that causes fight or flight

00:51:36.200 | and AKA stress and causes release of adrenaline

00:51:39.480 | and attenuation of the innate immune response in humans.

00:51:43.640 | This is Cox, K-O-X et al, P-N-A-S,

00:51:48.200 | "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" 2014.

00:51:50.880 | And they incorporate the ever famous Wim Hof breathing.

00:51:53.900 | Wim Hof breathing is much like the breathing protocol

00:51:57.220 | that I've described several times now in this podcast.

00:52:00.160 | It's also called Tummo breathing.

00:52:02.200 | Other people from other cultures and communities

00:52:05.220 | have called it other things.

00:52:06.280 | The naming really isn't important.

00:52:08.440 | Although I do think Wim is a pioneer

00:52:10.040 | in trying to bring these practices

00:52:11.780 | to the general public more broadly

00:52:13.560 | and was involved in this study.

00:52:15.480 | The study was done in the Netherlands.

00:52:18.520 | It was communicated by Dr. Thomas Horvath at Yale.

00:52:22.760 | I mentioned all that.

00:52:24.200 | Horvath is a terrific scientist.

00:52:26.720 | I'm familiar with his work over many years.

00:52:29.360 | Here's what they did.

00:52:31.480 | They injected people with E. coli

00:52:36.480 | and they had groups that either did the sorts of breathing

00:52:40.740 | I've been describing that increase adrenaline release.

00:52:44.020 | Although I should say,

00:52:45.000 | I don't think you need that breathing

00:52:47.540 | to get adrenaline release.

00:52:48.620 | You could do it with cold exposure.

00:52:49.940 | You could do it with other things,

00:52:51.820 | high intensity interval training as well.

00:52:53.780 | And what they found was that the response to the E. coli

00:53:00.240 | was quite different in the people that had a protocol,

00:53:03.680 | in this case breathing, to increase adrenaline.

00:53:06.580 | So this is a remarkable study

00:53:09.540 | because what they found was that the fever, the vomiting,

00:53:12.040 | all the negative effects of E. coli,

00:53:15.920 | many of them and in some cases all of them

00:53:18.300 | were greatly attenuated

00:53:20.620 | by way of engaging the adrenaline system,

00:53:24.020 | in this case using breathing.

00:53:26.040 | They looked at inflammatory cytokines,

00:53:28.600 | things like IL-6, which I've mentioned many times

00:53:30.680 | on this podcast,

00:53:31.500 | the sort of classic inflammatory cytokine were reduced.

00:53:33.820 | Things like IL-10, which are anti-inflammatory,

00:53:36.460 | were increased.

00:53:37.340 | There were some inflammatory cytokines that were increased.

00:53:40.240 | What's the point here?

00:53:42.320 | The point is you can control your immune system

00:53:45.140 | by finding a way that you can increase adrenaline.

00:53:49.060 | And this runs counter to what we always hear,

00:53:51.580 | which is don't get too stressed or you will get sick.

00:53:54.740 | Learn to control adrenaline, turn it on and turn it off.

00:53:58.540 | Learn to control cortisol,

00:54:00.040 | turn it on with light in the morning, try and turn it off.

00:54:02.760 | And then when it spikes because of life events,

00:54:05.660 | learn to turn it off.

00:54:06.860 | Learning to turn on and off adrenaline, AKA epinephrine,

00:54:12.840 | and learning to turn on and off cortisol

00:54:16.560 | affords you the ability to turn on energy and focus

00:54:20.160 | in your immune system.

00:54:21.300 | That's the most important point from today's podcast

00:54:24.580 | and understanding that it doesn't matter

00:54:27.600 | what protocol you use.

00:54:28.980 | Maybe it's a cup of coffee and running up a hill

00:54:31.000 | five or six times.

00:54:31.960 | That will improve your immune system function

00:54:33.640 | if you get adrenaline in your system.

00:54:36.220 | You can use an ice bath, you can use a cold bath.

00:54:38.300 | It really doesn't matter.

00:54:40.440 | You can get into an argument,

00:54:41.440 | but I'm not suggesting you do that.

00:54:42.840 | It really doesn't matter.

00:54:44.480 | What's important is that you're able to then

00:54:46.120 | shut off that response.

00:54:48.000 | And there are ways to do that we will talk about,

00:54:49.700 | but I want to talk about some of the other benefits

00:54:51.640 | of epinephrine and cortisol that occur

00:54:55.520 | because of their actions on the brain,

00:54:57.520 | because these are many and they are powerful

00:55:00.100 | and they relate to energy, but also the ability to learn.

00:55:03.560 | If I haven't already convinced you that seeing light

00:55:05.960 | early in the day is good for timing your cortisol,

00:55:09.240 | I should also mention that another hormone

00:55:11.520 | that I discussed last episode, which is thyroid hormone,

00:55:15.260 | and is critical for setting your level of metabolism

00:55:18.560 | is controlled in part by these circadian mechanisms

00:55:23.560 | and cortisol itself.

00:55:27.380 | The short takeaway on this is that

00:55:29.860 | if you get your cortisol release early in the day,

00:55:33.360 | it will increase your energy throughout the day.

00:55:35.480 | It will also time your thyroid release properly.

00:55:39.580 | So there's yet another reason why you would want

00:55:42.880 | to get that light exposure early in the day.

00:55:45.280 | For me, that's a non-negotiable practice.

00:55:47.980 | If I'm on a plane, I'll try and get it any way I can.

00:55:51.040 | I'm not shining flashlights in my eyes yet,

00:55:53.700 | but I really try hard to get that light exposure

00:55:57.500 | from sunlight early in the day without fail.

00:56:01.420 | And the thyroid increase has to do with the fact

00:56:04.580 | that your circadian clock itself is regulated by cortisol

00:56:08.280 | and the circadian clock times the release

00:56:10.600 | of thyroid hormone.

00:56:11.920 | I don't want to go too far off in that direction,

00:56:14.720 | but there are a number of studies,

00:56:16.720 | Kalsbeek et al, K-A-L-S-B-E-E-K et al,

00:56:24.220 | 2012, if you want to look it up on PubMed,

00:56:26.900 | is a great one that describes how cortisol secretion

00:56:29.900 | begins to rise during sleep and peaks shortly after waking

00:56:34.380 | or immediately before.

00:56:36.560 | And that times a set of neurons in the circadian clock

00:56:41.560 | that then trigger the release of the releasing

00:56:45.640 | and stimulating hormones for thyroid.

00:56:47.900 | So a really important mechanism.

00:56:49.740 | And thyroid will also tend to correlate with energy,

00:56:53.180 | but mostly metabolism.

00:56:54.440 | Very important to have thyroid in check.

00:56:56.420 | Now let's talk about epinephrine and cortisol

00:56:58.400 | and learning and memory.

00:56:59.780 | Everyone has a story about being so stressed

00:57:03.720 | they couldn't remember something, sit down to an exam.

00:57:06.840 | I actually had this happen once,

00:57:08.220 | sat down to an exam and just blanked, just blanked.

00:57:12.340 | It only happened once, I don't know what happened.

00:57:14.960 | I don't think it was sleep deprivation,

00:57:16.320 | but I just completely blanked.

00:57:18.440 | And it was very hard for me to pull myself

00:57:20.920 | out of that ditch.

00:57:22.020 | I did manage to do it, but it was a scary experience.

00:57:25.200 | So I think most people think about stress

00:57:27.300 | and an inability to perform.

00:57:29.340 | However, most of the time increases in epinephrine

00:57:33.940 | provided they are not through the roof

00:57:36.980 | lead to improved performance.

00:57:39.060 | Now this has been shown over and over again

00:57:41.300 | on memory tests, on learning new information,

00:57:45.560 | on physical performance,

00:57:47.580 | that when blood levels of epinephrine are low,

00:57:51.420 | you don't perform very well.

00:57:52.920 | When blood levels of epinephrine are very high,

00:57:56.740 | up to about 1,500 to 1,700 picograms per mil,

00:58:01.220 | if anyone's out there who's actually measuring this stuff,

00:58:03.600 | but I doubt you are, performance goes way up.

00:58:07.580 | Performance gets better when you are alert

00:58:10.180 | and when you're a little bit stressed.

00:58:12.080 | Absolutely shown again and again and again.

00:58:16.300 | If you get too stressed, it's the mental side,

00:58:19.700 | it's the epinephrine in the brain

00:58:21.120 | that causes people to either focus

00:58:23.020 | on their somatic response too much,

00:58:24.560 | like they feel like they're sweating

00:58:25.740 | and they're focused on their bodily response

00:58:27.540 | and they're not focused on what it is they're trying to do

00:58:29.340 | or say or perform, et cetera, or learn.

00:58:32.480 | But epinephrine is a nootropic.

00:58:36.140 | It is a smart drug that we all make internally

00:58:39.500 | and cortisol is as well.

00:58:42.060 | Now here's the twist.

00:58:43.600 | That does not mean that you want epinephrine high

00:58:49.180 | during the exam necessarily.

00:58:51.620 | Memory and learning and performance are actually favored,

00:58:58.580 | they are enhanced by epinephrine increases

00:59:02.180 | immediately after learning.

00:59:04.780 | And that's something that's rarely discussed.

00:59:06.960 | The timing is vital.

00:59:08.760 | So if you learn some information, you have a conversation,

00:59:11.780 | you're trying to learn a new language, a new motor skill,

00:59:15.060 | whatever it is that you're trying to learn,

00:59:18.020 | the increase in epinephrine that occurs just afterward

00:59:22.500 | is what's going to consolidate the information.

00:59:25.500 | It's going to ensure that the proper circuits

00:59:27.700 | and mechanisms in the brain for neuroplasticity

00:59:29.940 | are engaged during sleep later that night or the next night,

00:59:32.460 | which is when the real rewiring occurs.

00:59:34.580 | And you might say, that's crazy, why would that happen?

00:59:37.380 | Well, we have to remember none of these mechanisms evolved

00:59:40.940 | for us to do what we want

00:59:42.740 | and learn what we want necessarily,

00:59:44.260 | although they will allow us to do that.

00:59:46.940 | We've experienced this before.

00:59:49.140 | We might have gotten up, gone outside, get in our car,

00:59:53.060 | drive to work or to somebody's house.

00:59:54.980 | You're not thinking about much at all.

00:59:56.500 | And then all of a sudden you see an accident on the road.

00:59:59.160 | Your alertness is primed

01:00:01.540 | if it happens to be a particularly gory accident,

01:00:04.700 | there's going to be a lot of sensory information there.

01:00:08.080 | All of a sudden adrenaline epinephrine

01:00:09.760 | is released into your brain and body.

01:00:12.180 | Guess what?

01:00:13.100 | Not only will you not forget that event,

01:00:15.780 | but you will remember everything that led up to that event,

01:00:18.620 | which has an adaptive function

01:00:20.980 | because your brain and body's primary concern is safety.

01:00:25.300 | This is the neurobiological explanation

01:00:27.300 | for Maslow's hierarchy of needs is safety first.

01:00:30.860 | And so you have heightened awareness and alertness

01:00:32.880 | for everything that preceded

01:00:34.500 | that spike in adrenaline and cortisol.

01:00:39.020 | So the way to think about this is

01:00:41.220 | if you need to learn something better,

01:00:44.140 | if you're taking Adderall or you're taking

01:00:46.100 | a lot of coffee beforehand,

01:00:47.520 | you're actually driving the process in the wrong direction.

01:00:51.480 | You're increasing epinephrine for learning, sure,

01:00:54.000 | but past a certain point,

01:00:54.980 | you're actually degrading learning and performance.

01:00:57.860 | The time to do that is toward the end

01:01:00.500 | or immediately after the learning,

01:01:02.400 | because this mechanism is not simply devoted

01:01:05.160 | to negative events like a car crash or a trauma.

01:01:08.940 | It works to make sure that the hippocampus

01:01:11.460 | that encodes memories as part of the memory encoding

01:01:14.940 | mechanisms is primed that it's told

01:01:18.880 | what you just experienced is important.

01:01:20.620 | You're going to need that information later.

01:01:23.500 | And so I've talked many times before

01:01:25.200 | about using non-sleep deep rest, NSDR,

01:01:28.820 | or ensuring good night's sleep after learning.

01:01:31.420 | But what we're also talking about is

01:01:33.860 | as the learning event tapers off,

01:01:36.320 | as you're exiting that to make sure

01:01:38.660 | that your epinephrine levels are not tapering off as well.

01:01:41.760 | And this may be one of the reasons why the 90 minute cycle,

01:01:45.180 | the so-called ultradian cycle for learning works

01:01:47.580 | because it takes a few minutes

01:01:48.540 | to get into rhythm of learning.

01:01:50.420 | You can maintain that alertness for about 90 minutes.

01:01:53.780 | It's no coincidence that these podcasts

01:01:55.980 | are typically about 90 minutes long.

01:01:58.860 | And as you exit that 90 minutes,

01:02:02.380 | you're going to start to feel fatigued.

01:02:05.080 | You're not going to be able to continue

01:02:06.460 | to secrete epinephrine at the same level.

01:02:08.920 | So I'm not telling you that at the end of this podcast,

01:02:11.200 | you should give yourself a foot shock

01:02:13.060 | or that you should jump into an ice bath.

01:02:14.780 | Although I will say if you were to increase your epinephrine

01:02:17.420 | at the end of this episode by breathing

01:02:19.220 | or by way of cold shower,

01:02:21.020 | I'm willing to bet based on numerous published studies

01:02:25.140 | that the memory for the information would be enhanced

01:02:29.180 | because of this retroactive effect

01:02:31.860 | of epinephrine and cortisol.

01:02:34.340 | Put simply, you can remember things better

01:02:37.040 | if you increase your alertness,

01:02:39.020 | AKA your level of epinephrine and cortisol

01:02:41.940 | after, immediately after something that you want to learn.

01:02:46.060 | So I'm reminded by people here at the Huberman Lab Podcast

01:02:48.820 | that the optimal strategy therefore

01:02:51.020 | would be a 90 minute session of focus or learning,

01:02:55.660 | then immediately after cold shower or tumor type breathing

01:03:00.660 | or ice bath or something of that sort,

01:03:02.920 | maybe a hard run or hit training

01:03:04.960 | if you can't get access to the other things,

01:03:07.120 | and then shower up and do a non-sleep deep rest

01:03:11.220 | and then get a good night's sleep.

01:03:12.340 | Those would be the optimal tools

01:03:15.360 | and the organization of tools for enhanced learning.

01:03:18.700 | And of course you could use caffeine

01:03:20.360 | to prime the whole process by drinking the caffeine

01:03:23.640 | towards the tail of the learning episode,

01:03:25.400 | which is counterintuitive at least to me.

01:03:27.880 | I should mention since many of you use caffeine

01:03:30.580 | and I use caffeine, I do drink coffee,

01:03:32.420 | I love mushroom coffee, I love mate,

01:03:35.540 | I drink caffeine in various forms,

01:03:37.740 | that there was a study that came out recently

01:03:41.300 | that is relevant to our discussion about energy

01:03:44.300 | and alertness and learning.

01:03:47.140 | And the study came out just recently in March, 2021,

01:03:51.400 | it's Maghalas et al, so M-A-G-A-L-H-A-E-S,

01:03:56.400 | and it was published in Molecular Psychiatry,

01:04:00.420 | which is a fine journal, a peer-reviewed journal.

01:04:02.580 | And the title pretty much gives it away.

01:04:05.700 | Habitual coffee drinkers display a distinct pattern

01:04:09.120 | of brain functional connectivity.

01:04:11.800 | Chronically drinking coffee changes brain connectivity.

01:04:15.000 | And it does it in a number of ways,

01:04:16.820 | but the key takeaways from this study

01:04:19.380 | as it relates to sort of what the circuits do

01:04:22.820 | as opposed to me just listing off a bunch of brain circuits,

01:04:25.220 | which is kind of meaningless in this conversation,

01:04:28.220 | is that people who drank coffee habitually every day

01:04:33.220 | had changes in their brain circuitry

01:04:35.340 | such that there was a shift or a bias toward anxiety,

01:04:40.340 | even when they don't ingest caffeine.

01:04:43.680 | So a lot of times we think, oh,

01:04:44.800 | caffeine increases your levels of anxiety.

01:04:47.340 | And indeed it appears it does if you use it chronically,

01:04:50.560 | but not just to caffeine.

01:04:53.840 | It doesn't just raise your baseline of anxiety

01:04:56.100 | because of what's circulating in your bloodstream.

01:04:57.900 | It actually increases connectivity

01:04:59.580 | between the brain areas that relate to anxiety.

01:05:02.820 | Now that could be a good thing or a bad thing,

01:05:04.380 | depending on how you look at it.

01:05:05.540 | For people that are prone to chronic panic attacks

01:05:10.200 | or anxiety attacks, that's not going to be good.

01:05:12.260 | Some people might use caffeine in healthy ways.

01:05:14.860 | I believe I do in order to just increase

01:05:17.180 | overall levels of alertness.

01:05:18.360 | Although now not only am I going to start delaying

01:05:20.700 | my caffeine intake till two hours after I wake up

01:05:23.580 | for reasons I've talked about in previous episodes,

01:05:27.100 | but I'm also going to start drinking it later

01:05:29.700 | in learning and focus sessions

01:05:32.600 | as a way to enhance plasticity around those learning

01:05:35.340 | and focus sessions not before.

01:05:37.580 | So interesting study, feel free to, it's free online.

01:05:40.500 | You can access the full paper online.

01:05:42.140 | We will put a link as well.

01:05:43.940 | I want to mention this issue of nootropic,

01:05:46.020 | so-called smart drugs,

01:05:47.060 | which is not a topic that I particularly enjoy

01:05:50.340 | because I don't like the name.

01:05:51.460 | I don't like the idea of a nootropic

01:05:52.880 | because what is a smart drug?

01:05:54.260 | Well, there's different kinds of smart.

01:05:56.860 | There's creativity, there's task switching,

01:06:00.000 | there's strategy building, there's strategy implementation.

01:06:02.860 | And most of the nootropics that are out there

01:06:05.580 | are just cocktails of a bunch of different things

01:06:07.420 | that aren't tailored to the individual at all.

01:06:09.540 | They all seem to have some caffeine

01:06:12.340 | or some cholinergic stimulation, et cetera.

01:06:14.620 | But there's an important way to frame this

01:06:16.060 | in light of today's conversation.

01:06:17.940 | Nootropics generally fall into two categories.

01:06:19.860 | One category are nootropics that increase blood glucose.

01:06:24.860 | So these are compounds that people take.

01:06:26.820 | They increase blood glucose,

01:06:27.920 | and increasing blood glucose will improve performance

01:06:32.060 | and can enhance learning in some situations.

01:06:34.620 | I'm not suggesting people take these things,

01:06:36.020 | but here's just a list of a few of those.

01:06:38.000 | Some of them are legal, some of them are gray market,

01:06:40.220 | some of them are illegal.

01:06:41.480 | Paracetams, oxiracetams, the aniracetams, all the tams, okay?

01:06:48.300 | Elevate blood glucose, that's how they work.

01:06:52.040 | The neural effects that you hear are secondary or tertiary

01:06:55.060 | to the fact that they just increase blood glucose.

01:06:57.280 | We know that because if you block the blood glucose effect,

01:06:59.500 | you block the nootropic effect, okay?

01:07:02.660 | Others include, and definitely don't take these please,

01:07:05.660 | amphetamine, cocaine.

01:07:07.720 | Those will increase learning in the short term

01:07:10.380 | in particular dosages,

01:07:12.100 | but because they increase blood glucose.

01:07:15.020 | And then of course, things like painful stimuli or stress

01:07:19.060 | will improve learning by way of increasing blood glucose.

01:07:22.860 | Now, stress and epinephrine that's associated with it

01:07:26.420 | not only improve performance during the learning bout,

01:07:31.320 | but as I mentioned before,

01:07:32.460 | having epinephrine come up afterward

01:07:34.680 | will increase the retention of that information

01:07:36.800 | in the long-term.

01:07:37.980 | And then of course, there's a whole category

01:07:39.760 | of nootropics that don't impact blood glucose

01:07:44.220 | that work by increasing the cholinergic system activity.

01:07:47.540 | And these are things like choline, lecithin, fazostigmine,

01:07:51.180 | that's a prescription drug, phosphodiesterine.

01:07:55.080 | So there are ways to increase energy

01:07:57.500 | that don't require increasing blood glucose.

01:08:00.000 | And this is vitally important.

01:08:02.460 | The reason we're talking about epinephrine and cortisol

01:08:04.820 | for increasing energy and immune system function

01:08:07.160 | is because they are largely independent of blood glucose.

01:08:11.220 | Of course, they interact with that system,

01:08:13.380 | but we heard so much growing up, you need to eat for energy,

01:08:17.020 | but the energy that we're talking about today

01:08:19.640 | is actually a much more powerful one

01:08:21.140 | than the one that you derive from food.

01:08:22.840 | It's, we could call it neural energy.

01:08:25.040 | It's neurotransmitters that create alertness and focus

01:08:28.040 | and the willingness and the ability to move

01:08:30.580 | and the willingness and ability for immune system

01:08:33.140 | to move in response to intruders.

01:08:35.560 | So I think we all too often think about food as energy,

01:08:39.680 | which is great because it is,

01:08:42.620 | but there are other sources of energy that are neural

01:08:45.900 | and they relate to these hormone systems,

01:08:47.860 | cortisol and epinephrine.

01:08:49.020 | And that's what we're focused on today.

01:08:51.720 | So up until now, we've been talking about increasing energy

01:08:55.080 | and increasing the immune system

01:08:57.060 | by way of cortisol and epinephrine,

01:08:59.620 | but I'd be totally remiss if I didn't cover

01:09:02.500 | how cortisol and epinephrine, if chronically elevated

01:09:07.360 | or if elevated too high,

01:09:09.120 | can have a lot of detrimental effects.

01:09:12.620 | These are the things we normally hear about.

01:09:14.580 | I'm going to describe some of those things,

01:09:17.000 | but I'm also going to talk about ways to ameliorate them,

01:09:20.740 | ways that you can adjust the cortisol levels

01:09:23.700 | even if you're stressed,

01:09:24.700 | ways that you can adjust epinephrine levels

01:09:26.600 | even if you're stressed

01:09:27.880 | so that they have less of a negative impact.

01:09:30.280 | I don't have to list off all the ways

01:09:33.540 | that stress is terrible and chronic stress is terrible.

01:09:36.540 | I think you know, insomnia,

01:09:39.300 | your immune system over time will get battered

01:09:41.580 | and you won't be able to fight infection off as well, right?

01:09:44.660 | You don't want to be stressed for too long.

01:09:47.580 | You can start laying down the sort of classic pattern

01:09:50.920 | of cortisol-induced body fat.

01:09:52.800 | In fact, there's a whole literature related to comfort foods

01:09:57.620 | and why we want to consume comfort foods

01:10:00.740 | under conditions of chronic stress.

01:10:03.220 | And it's quite interesting actually

01:10:04.840 | because it reveals something

01:10:05.800 | about the biology of chronic stress

01:10:07.540 | that's informative for how to prevent it

01:10:10.740 | or to down-regulate chronic stress once it's occurred.

01:10:15.060 | So let's talk for a second about comfort foods.

01:10:17.580 | And the work that I'm going to refer to

01:10:19.360 | is work that was done by a very impressive scientist

01:10:22.240 | by the name of Mary Dalman.

01:10:24.420 | Her work goes back decades.

01:10:26.800 | She was at University of California, San Francisco.

01:10:29.500 | And she asked this question

01:10:31.820 | that on the face of it seems kind of obvious,

01:10:33.620 | but for which there was no mechanism known

01:10:35.940 | until Mary and her lab personnel came along.

01:10:39.880 | And the question was, why do we seek high fat

01:10:42.820 | and/or high sugar foods when we are stressed for a while?

01:10:46.760 | Why would that be?

01:10:48.460 | And the reason is that the so-called glucocorticoids,

01:10:52.400 | of which cortisol is a glucocorticoid,

01:10:54.480 | is caused, as we've mentioned before,

01:10:58.140 | by releasing hormones from the brain

01:10:59.560 | and ACTH from the pituitary, et cetera.

01:11:02.220 | But normally, high levels of glucocorticoid

01:11:05.200 | shut off the releasing hormones in the brain

01:11:08.760 | and in the pituitary.

01:11:10.520 | They shut down in a so-called negative feedback loop.

01:11:13.700 | So just like if testosterone or estrogen get too high,

01:11:17.700 | that's read out, or that is seen, so to speak,

01:11:22.040 | by neurons in the pituitary and brain,

01:11:23.960 | and then we shut down our production

01:11:26.620 | of estrogen and testosterone.

01:11:31.380 | If cortisol levels get too high,

01:11:32.980 | if there's too much cortisol floating around

01:11:34.380 | in our bloodstream, there's a negative feedback loop,

01:11:36.740 | and the brain and pituitary shut down CRH and ACTH,

01:11:40.660 | which would otherwise stimulate more cortisol.

01:11:42.700 | So cortisol levels go down.

01:11:44.480 | So it's a beautiful negative feedback loop.

01:11:47.340 | Chronic stress, however,

01:11:49.060 | stress that lasts more than four to seven days,

01:11:53.100 | and there's a way to think about

01:11:54.680 | what chronic stress really is in an actionable way,

01:11:57.680 | causes changes in the feedback loop

01:12:01.240 | between the adrenals and the brain and the pituitary.

01:12:06.700 | Such that now the brain and the pituitary

01:12:08.620 | respond to high levels of glucocorticoids, cortisol,

01:12:11.340 | by releasing more of them.

01:12:12.740 | It becomes a positive feedback loop, and that's bad.

01:12:16.180 | It actually gets right down to levels of gene regulation

01:12:19.780 | and transcription and translation,

01:12:21.620 | and so you really don't want chronic stress

01:12:23.780 | because it's a cascade of stress equals more stress

01:12:27.620 | equals more stress.

01:12:28.460 | So this is why it's very important

01:12:29.700 | to learn to turn off the stress response.

01:12:32.500 | You don't want it elevated for too long.

01:12:34.900 | So there's one study that Dalman and her colleagues did

01:12:37.500 | where they stimulate chronic stress

01:12:39.320 | by increasing corticosteron, cortisol,

01:12:43.000 | and they found that subjects

01:12:44.900 | would increase their consumption of sugar and fat.

01:12:48.780 | In fact, they would even eat lard.

01:12:50.460 | It would just, it sounds disgusting,

01:12:52.560 | but they were willing to just eat more fat and more sugar,

01:12:55.420 | and that led to all sorts of things like type 2 diabetes,

01:12:58.300 | that led to dysfunction in the adrenal output, et cetera.

01:13:03.420 | And so the real key is to learn

01:13:05.420 | to shut off the stress response

01:13:07.580 | because the interesting thing is is that Dalman and colleagues

01:13:10.100 | and some studies that followed up on their work

01:13:12.380 | found that if the system was kicked into motion for too long,

01:13:17.380 | then there was a tremendous shift overall towards anxiety

01:13:22.200 | because it turns out that body fat itself

01:13:24.460 | receives neural innervation.

01:13:26.140 | It received, neurons actually talk to body fat.

01:13:28.420 | So now you have body fat releasing certain hormones.

01:13:32.160 | You've got the adrenals releasing cortisol,

01:13:35.140 | and all of that is feeding back to the brain

01:13:37.080 | to make you want more sugar and fatty foods.

01:13:40.180 | So that's how the so-called comfort foods work.

01:13:43.220 | And you should watch yourself

01:13:44.820 | next time you experience stress.

01:13:46.420 | If it's a short-term bout of stress,

01:13:48.020 | typically it blocks hunger.

01:13:50.820 | If it's a longer bout of stress,

01:13:52.780 | typically it triggers hunger,

01:13:54.440 | in particular for these so-called comfort foods,

01:13:56.060 | sugary and fatty foods.

01:13:57.700 | And it's kind of interesting how short-term stress

01:14:00.860 | can actually block hunger.

01:14:03.460 | It does that by activating or interacting

01:14:07.760 | with a system called the bombicin system.

01:14:10.960 | Bombicin is a peptide hormone.

01:14:14.040 | It was actually, I think it was named

01:14:16.140 | after some sort of reptile or amphibian, excuse me,

01:14:18.880 | some sort of toad.

01:14:20.120 | I think it was initially sequenced from the toad

01:14:24.020 | before it was later discovered in humans.

01:14:25.860 | And I think the toad's Latin name is Bombina bombina

01:14:29.300 | or something of that sort.

01:14:30.380 | And so they decided to call this thing bombicin,

01:14:32.840 | but it reduces eating and stress liberates bombicin

01:14:37.420 | and makes you want to eat less.

01:14:38.740 | But chronic stress causes all these positive feedback

01:14:41.980 | changes, which are not positive.

01:14:43.800 | They're positive, I'm calling them positive

01:14:45.860 | because they amplify the stress response over and over,

01:14:48.500 | not because they are good for you.

01:14:51.400 | So short-term stress, great.

01:14:54.340 | Long-term stress, really, really bad.

01:14:56.660 | Other bad effects of stress that we can talk about,

01:14:59.340 | and I won't list off too many more of these

01:15:00.940 | because you know so many of them, you hear about them,

01:15:03.020 | you really want to know how to control them, I'm guessing,

01:15:05.260 | is that yes, indeed, stress can make you go gray.

01:15:08.520 | The rates at which people go gray, meaning gray hair,

01:15:13.540 | some cases gray body hair as well,

01:15:15.320 | depend on some genetic factors.

01:15:18.500 | There are a couple of ways that we can go gray.

01:15:22.260 | There's actually a stem cell,

01:15:24.380 | what they call niche in every follicle.

01:15:26.180 | So you have stem cells in the follicle

01:15:27.500 | that can produce more and more of the given hair cell.

01:15:30.020 | And they're actually peroxide groups.

01:15:32.100 | You know, we hear about bleaching hair with peroxide,

01:15:33.900 | at least in the '80s, that was a thing,

01:15:35.440 | but you can use hydrogen peroxide to bleach things,

01:15:37.780 | and you can produce your own peroxide in the hair follicle

01:15:41.820 | that will cause the hairs to go gray.

01:15:43.980 | In addition, pigmentation of hair,

01:15:46.840 | just like pigmentation of skin,

01:15:48.300 | is controlled by melanocytes.

01:15:51.580 | Our old friends, the melanocytes.

01:15:52.960 | And I say old friends because on previous episodes,

01:15:54.860 | I talked about why sunlight and getting ample sunlight

01:15:58.020 | can increase levels of certain things

01:16:01.500 | like melanocyte-stimulating hormone, which reduce hunger,

01:16:04.220 | it can improve testosterone and estrogen levels,

01:16:07.100 | and all the reasons for that.

01:16:08.560 | Well, it turns out that activation

01:16:11.740 | of the so-called sympathetic nervous system,

01:16:13.940 | which is really just another name for the system

01:16:16.500 | that liberates adrenaline from the adrenals

01:16:19.880 | and epinephrine in the brain,

01:16:22.100 | drives depletion of melanocytes in hair stem cells.

01:16:26.780 | So indeed, there's a rate of aging

01:16:28.620 | that we will undergo based on our genetics,

01:16:30.900 | but stress will make us go gray.

01:16:33.100 | And the paper that you should look to

01:16:34.980 | if you want to read more about this came out very recently.

01:16:37.220 | This is Zang et al., Z-H-A-N-G, et al., "Nature,"

01:16:42.060 | fabulous journal, definitely one of the apex journals, 2020.

01:16:46.300 | So this paper showed that the activation of stress

01:16:51.540 | in various forms will deplete these melanocyte stem cells.

01:16:54.620 | You do not have to worry about an ice bath

01:16:57.460 | or hard exercise or breathing,

01:16:59.000 | increasing your levels of stress

01:17:00.460 | to the point where it's going to make you go gray.

01:17:01.900 | We're talking again about chronic stress.

01:17:04.820 | And if you want to offset the stress effects

01:17:08.520 | on graying of hair, you can do that

01:17:13.100 | by either having a practice that helps you regulate stress

01:17:16.880 | on a consistent basis,

01:17:17.980 | so something like non-sleep deep breaths or meditation.

01:17:21.140 | If you can get access to massages or vacations,

01:17:23.700 | those are great, but having a practice

01:17:25.780 | to keep stress clamped so that it's not chronically elevated,

01:17:29.060 | that will be great.

01:17:31.000 | As well, this is another case where sunlight,

01:17:34.020 | we know, stimulates melanocytes,

01:17:36.740 | not just in skin, but in hair.

01:17:39.100 | And so getting ample sunlight,

01:17:40.900 | having a practice to regulate stress

01:17:43.260 | will offset the stress-induced graying of hairs

01:17:48.060 | by way of stress-induced depletion of melanocytes.

01:17:53.060 | And if melanocyte sounds a lot like melanin, you're right.

01:17:55.700 | That's because anything involved with pigmentation

01:17:57.640 | in the brain and body generally has melano

01:18:01.300 | in the front of the word in some way or another.

01:18:03.920 | So if chronic stress is so bad

01:18:05.640 | because of its effects on epinephrine and cortisol

01:18:09.300 | being elevated for too long,

01:18:11.780 | then the question becomes, of course,

01:18:13.800 | well, what's chronic stress?

01:18:15.940 | How do I know the difference between chronic and acute stress

01:18:18.880 | and how do I keep chronic stress at bay

01:18:22.440 | because of all these negative effects?

01:18:23.740 | And I didn't even list out the number of other ones,

01:18:25.760 | the effects on depression,

01:18:27.800 | which certainly has a correlate with elevated cortisol.

01:18:31.180 | Thyroid hormone associated with low thyroid hormone

01:18:36.420 | is associated with depression, mistimed thyroid.

01:18:40.220 | Once again, getting your light and your feeding

01:18:45.240 | and your exercise and your sleep on a consistent schedule

01:18:50.220 | or consistent-ish is going to be the most powerful thing

01:18:53.520 | you can do in order to buffer yourself

01:18:55.860 | against negative effects on mental health

01:18:58.780 | and physical health for that matter.

01:19:01.200 | There are things that one can take,

01:19:02.900 | supplements, prescription drugs, et cetera.

01:19:06.300 | Some of you out there may have or may know people

01:19:08.820 | that have Cushing's, which is chronically elevated cortisol.

01:19:11.180 | There are prescription drugs that we will talk about

01:19:13.300 | that can be used.

01:19:14.980 | But most people are dealing with a situation

01:19:16.980 | where life gets stressful, then less stressful,

01:19:20.040 | stressful, then less stressful.

01:19:21.300 | I would say based on the data from McEwen and others,

01:19:26.380 | Bob Sapolsky's lab over many years,

01:19:28.800 | I would say any stress that lasts more than a day

01:19:33.140 | or two days or three days

01:19:34.420 | is starting to become chronic stress.

01:19:37.200 | There's really no strict cutoff

01:19:38.640 | because we're not measuring everybody's cortisol

01:19:40.740 | from moment to moment.

01:19:41.580 | My lab has done experiments

01:19:42.960 | where we measure stress in people over time.

01:19:45.040 | People vary tremendously in their ability

01:19:47.060 | to have a really hard day and then fall deeply asleep.

01:19:49.500 | That's going to be the ultimate reset

01:19:51.500 | is the ability to sleep well,

01:19:53.540 | more or less undisturbed each night,

01:19:55.120 | although one or two wake-ups during the night

01:19:56.960 | probably not going to be too detrimental

01:19:58.980 | provided they're not too long

01:20:00.620 | and you're not viewing light

01:20:02.160 | during those wake-ups or your phone.

01:20:04.260 | But the things that you can take

01:20:06.020 | if you feel like you're chronically stressed

01:20:07.680 | and you're veering toward

01:20:08.800 | some of the negative effects of stress are many.

01:20:12.380 | There are some simple things that people can do

01:20:16.520 | in terms of supplementation.

01:20:18.660 | All supplements, of course,

01:20:20.060 | have to be checked out for their safety margins for you

01:20:22.960 | because it's going to differ from person to person.

01:20:24.640 | You're responsible for making sure they're safe for you

01:20:27.320 | if you decide to use them.

01:20:28.680 | One of the most common ones is ashwagandha

01:20:32.500 | and it has a powerful anxiolytic anxiety effect.

01:20:37.100 | You're welcome to go to examine.com and for zero cost,

01:20:40.740 | you can see their so-called human effect matrix.

01:20:43.880 | Ashwagandha has many uses.

01:20:46.100 | It's been used to enhance power output in athletes.

01:20:50.860 | It has been shown to modestly increase testosterone.

01:20:54.700 | It has been shown to modestly adjust things

01:20:56.940 | like low-density lipoprotein cholesterol,

01:20:59.060 | the so-called bad cholesterol in quotes.

01:21:01.820 | It has a profound effect on anxiety.

01:21:03.820 | That's been shown in nine studies,

01:21:05.440 | nine peer-reviewed independent studies,

01:21:07.260 | I mean, funded by organizations that have no vested interest

01:21:11.460 | in the answer.

01:21:12.980 | It has a very strong effect on cortisol itself.

01:21:17.080 | How strong?

01:21:17.940 | The decrease in cortisol noted in humans is 14.5 to 27.9%

01:21:22.940 | reduction in otherwise healthy but stressed humans.

01:21:27.780 | That's great, six studies.

01:21:29.560 | So that's, and it mentions this is significantly larger

01:21:32.460 | than many other supplements.

01:21:33.780 | Now, some people will say that taking ashwagandha

01:21:37.060 | chronically may not be good.

01:21:39.300 | If you've heard about that,

01:21:40.540 | or you can point to specific studies

01:21:43.460 | that indicate exactly why it's not good,

01:21:46.180 | please put it in the comment section or let me know.

01:21:49.240 | In the comment section on YouTube would be best.

01:21:52.220 | The studies that I'm referring to did explore both genders.

01:21:56.640 | The number of subjects was reasonably high, 64 or more.

01:22:00.460 | One to six months studies,

01:22:02.380 | so these were long-term studies, that's great.

01:22:04.140 | You'd like to see that, not just an acute study.

01:22:07.020 | So males and females, lots of different ages,

01:22:10.940 | a weight, excuse me, overweight and non-overweight.

01:22:14.540 | They did blood draws of cortisol,

01:22:16.140 | which is going to end as well as saliva tests.

01:22:18.220 | Saliva is actually the best way to measure free cortisol.

01:22:21.380 | You can also measure it from earwax, it turns out,

01:22:23.300 | which sounds pretty gross and kind of is,

01:22:26.540 | but nonetheless, that's where cortisol will accumulate

01:22:29.300 | in earwax and in saliva, the free cortisol.

01:22:32.980 | But that's six very quality studies,

01:22:36.580 | independently supported,

01:22:39.060 | that all point to these very significant,

01:22:42.100 | 14.5 to 27.9% reductions in otherwise healthy adults.

01:22:45.840 | So if you're somebody who is dealing with chronic stress,

01:22:48.020 | it's a stressful period in your life,

01:22:49.700 | and you want to stave off the negative effects of stress,

01:22:53.580 | well then, ashwagandha may,

01:22:56.060 | I want to highlight may be right for you.

01:22:57.700 | It also does tend to lower total cortisol,

01:23:00.180 | which is interesting.

01:23:01.240 | Can lower depression to a somewhat minimal degree.

01:23:06.500 | And can lower, as I mentioned before,

01:23:08.220 | things like low-density lipoprotein.

01:23:10.420 | So that, I think ashwagandha comes through

01:23:13.340 | as kind of the heavy hitter in this department.

01:23:17.380 | Now, what's interesting also is the other effects

01:23:19.860 | of ashwagandha that are downstream

01:23:22.060 | of reducing chronic stress and cortisol,

01:23:23.900 | 'cause cortisol has so many effects.

01:23:25.340 | They're receptors for cortisol all over the body and brain.

01:23:28.460 | And so I'll just list these off quickly.

01:23:30.480 | I'm not going to list off each study

01:23:31.980 | or talk about how many subjects in detail.

01:23:33.820 | Again, you can go to examine.com if you want

01:23:36.020 | and just put in ashwagandha.

01:23:37.500 | C-reactive protein, which is a marker

01:23:40.140 | of all sorts of negative health effects.

01:23:45.040 | Cardiovascular health, even macular degeneration

01:23:47.900 | is notably reduced.

01:23:49.700 | Heart palpitations, notably reduced.

01:23:52.140 | Serum T3 and T4, our old friends for the thyroid hormones

01:23:55.380 | from a previous episode are increased.

01:23:57.360 | Symptoms of OCD decreased,

01:24:00.800 | both the obsessions and the compulsions, right?

01:24:03.500 | Obsessions are of the mind, compulsions are of behavior.

01:24:06.800 | So there are a lot of things that are downstream

01:24:09.900 | of reducing cortisol.

01:24:11.540 | Lowered heart rate, lowered rates of insomnia,

01:24:16.180 | slightly improved memory.

01:24:18.120 | Why that would be, I don't know,

01:24:19.420 | because cortisol in the short term can increase memory.

01:24:21.700 | I'm guessing it's from increased sleep.

01:24:23.940 | Decreased pain, increased quality,

01:24:26.140 | decreased reaction times, things of that sort.

01:24:29.060 | So the list goes on and on.

01:24:30.540 | But all of those things stem downstream of decreased cortisol

01:24:34.620 | So if one were to decide to take ashwagandha

01:24:37.200 | in order to reduce cortisol,

01:24:39.180 | given that you want cortisol early in the day

01:24:41.260 | to have energy throughout the day,

01:24:43.380 | the time to take it is probably later in the day

01:24:45.660 | or in the evening.

01:24:46.980 | I've never heard of it preventing sleep

01:24:48.900 | or causing insomnia of any kind.

01:24:51.180 | That certainly wasn't listed as one of the major effects

01:24:53.920 | on examine.com.

01:24:55.540 | I will take ashwagandha from time to time

01:24:57.420 | if I'm chronically stressed or if I'm not sleeping as well

01:25:00.360 | as I ought to.

01:25:01.200 | You might think that with all my knowledge about sleep

01:25:03.140 | and sleep protocols that I would sleep perfectly every night

01:25:05.300 | but unfortunately I have a dog that has a canine form

01:25:09.420 | of sundowners, of dementia.

01:25:11.180 | So he's up much of the night these days.

01:25:13.500 | And so there's no way I'm getting a solid night

01:25:15.660 | of sleep lately.

01:25:17.140 | And so I will supplement with ashwagandha

01:25:19.340 | and typically I'll take it before sleep

01:25:20.980 | and maybe also with my last meal of the day

01:25:23.620 | which is at least two hours before I go to sleep.

01:25:26.700 | Again, you have to decide if it's right for you.

01:25:29.320 | The dosages can vary tremendously.

01:25:31.940 | I would just go by what's on the bottle

01:25:34.540 | from a reputable brand.

01:25:35.660 | I would also check out examine.com

01:25:37.620 | because it mentions a range of dosages

01:25:40.300 | that people have used

01:25:41.180 | and in various studies to different effects.

01:25:43.980 | Now, there is something out there that some of you

01:25:46.060 | may actually be taking or ingesting

01:25:47.680 | that can increase cortisol and not so incidentally

01:25:51.180 | can decrease estrogen and testosterone.

01:25:53.980 | Because remember cortisol is made

01:25:56.360 | from the cholesterol molecule.

01:25:57.780 | So is estrogen and testosterone.

01:26:00.260 | So are estrogen and testosterone, excuse me.

01:26:02.900 | And it's competitive.

01:26:05.560 | So you're either making more cortisol

01:26:07.400 | or you're making more of the sex steroid hormones,

01:26:10.160 | estrogen and testosterone.

01:26:12.700 | Believe it or not licorice,

01:26:14.540 | which I always thought of as a candy,

01:26:16.200 | but licorice contains a substance that I can't pronounce.

01:26:21.000 | G-L-Y-C-Y-R-R-H-I-Z-I-N glycericizin,

01:26:27.600 | which is of the glabrous species of plant.

01:26:32.600 | Actually, because of its chemistry,

01:26:35.640 | this 18 beta hydroxyceridic acid,

01:26:39.200 | you don't need to know all that licorice, black licorice,

01:26:41.960 | contains a substance that increases cortisol.

01:26:45.960 | And its increase is not huge, but is significant.

01:26:50.020 | This has been looked at in females age 18 to 29,

01:26:54.720 | males and females age 18 to 29, people age 30.

01:26:58.880 | These are separate studies

01:26:59.880 | where I'm listing off the different ages, ages 30 to 64.

01:27:03.280 | Turns out that you can see pretty substantial increases

01:27:06.680 | in serum cortisol and decreases in testosterone and estrogen.

01:27:11.680 | So that was complete news to me.

01:27:14.460 | Also increases in blood pressure

01:27:16.120 | that are pretty substantial,

01:27:17.400 | that's going to be downstream of cortisol.

01:27:19.780 | Increasing cortisol is increased blood pressure

01:27:21.780 | in order to engage the stress response

01:27:24.360 | that's part of this stress response.

01:27:25.880 | Increased hormones of other kinds

01:27:28.640 | that are associated with stress.

01:27:29.760 | So who knew?

01:27:30.740 | I didn't know, maybe you knew previously,

01:27:33.040 | if you did forgive me,

01:27:33.880 | but licorice and some of the compounds in black licorice

01:27:36.260 | can actually increase stress,

01:27:37.600 | probably not the thing to be ingesting

01:27:40.120 | during periods of chronic stress.

01:27:42.320 | Whether or not anyone has had positive effects

01:27:44.820 | of using it to increase cortisol in other contexts,

01:27:47.580 | let me know.

01:27:48.500 | But very interesting that the chemistry of licorice

01:27:51.600 | increases stress hormones

01:27:53.760 | and therefore you would probably want to,

01:27:56.220 | almost certainly we want to avoid it

01:27:58.380 | in conditions of chronic stress.

01:28:00.500 | Also, if you're trying to optimize testosterone and estrogen,

01:28:02.840 | licorice seems like a bad idea.

01:28:05.240 | I suppose one instance where you might want to use licorice

01:28:07.780 | would be if you're traveling

01:28:08.920 | and you're trying to wake up at a particular location,

01:28:13.420 | because licorice has these effects on cortisol

01:28:15.720 | and cortisol is associated with the waking phenomenon

01:28:19.480 | and alertness and energy,

01:28:21.080 | you could use it in that regard.

01:28:23.640 | However, I would be careful to time it

01:28:25.520 | so that you're not getting two cortisol increases

01:28:27.600 | throughout the day, two peaks.

01:28:29.360 | So you're going to want to make sure

01:28:30.840 | that you're doing all the other things correct for jet lag

01:28:34.280 | and adjusting to jet lag.

01:28:35.760 | And if you want to know what those things are,

01:28:37.720 | including timing your feeding, using temperature,

01:28:40.380 | using exercise, using light to adjust to jet lag

01:28:42.840 | more quickly, please see the episode that we did

01:28:45.360 | on jet lag and shift work,

01:28:46.980 | where I cover all those protocols in detail.

01:28:49.340 | The other compound that I think deserves attention

01:28:52.200 | is apigenin, A-P-I-G-E-N-I-N, apigenin,

01:28:57.000 | which is what's found in chamomile.

01:29:01.260 | Apigenin I've talked about previously,

01:29:03.720 | it has various effects.

01:29:05.140 | One is it is a mild anti-estrogen

01:29:08.540 | that's been shown in various studies,

01:29:10.240 | and it does have a bit of an anxiolytic effect

01:29:12.780 | of reducing anxiety.

01:29:14.300 | I take it before bedtime, 50 milligrams.

01:29:17.120 | Again, you have to decide or figure out

01:29:19.200 | if that's safe for you or not.

01:29:20.340 | I'm not suggesting you take it.

01:29:22.160 | The major source of action is to calm the nervous system,

01:29:26.400 | and it does that primarily by adjusting things

01:29:29.340 | like GABA and chloride channels,

01:29:30.680 | but also has a mild effect in reducing cortisol.

01:29:33.700 | So Ashwagandha and apigenin together

01:29:36.360 | sort of I would consider the most potent

01:29:39.380 | commercial compounds that are in supplement

01:29:42.700 | non-prescription form that one could use

01:29:45.900 | if they were interested in reducing chronic stress,

01:29:48.340 | especially late in the day by way of reducing cortisol

01:29:51.580 | late in the day.

01:29:52.860 | So you're probably getting the impression

01:29:54.240 | that cortisol and epinephrine

01:29:55.660 | are a bit of a double-edged sword.

01:29:57.180 | You want them elevated, but not for too long or too much.

01:30:00.220 | You don't want them up for days and days and days,

01:30:03.820 | but you do want to have a practice

01:30:05.940 | in order to increase them in the short term.

01:30:08.900 | So we should talk about protocols

01:30:12.580 | that can set a foundation of cortisol and epinephrine

01:30:17.580 | that is headed towards optimal.

01:30:19.680 | Optimization is always going to be a series

01:30:22.080 | of regular practices that you do every day.

01:30:24.080 | So sleeping at certain times, light at specific times,

01:30:26.760 | food at specific times, certain foods, et cetera.

01:30:28.780 | And that's highly individual, but there are some universals.

01:30:31.080 | And we've covered a number of those in the discussion today.

01:30:34.680 | Meal timing, meal schedules has a profound effect

01:30:38.980 | on energy levels.

01:30:40.920 | And as I mentioned before,

01:30:42.080 | the energy I'm referring to is not glucose energy.

01:30:45.740 | It's not burning carbs while running or ketones.

01:30:48.600 | What I'm talking about is neural energy,

01:30:50.360 | epinephrine and cortisol.

01:30:51.920 | Fasting and timing one's eating

01:30:55.900 | are two sides of the same coin.

01:30:57.840 | So even if you're on a kind of standard three meal a day

01:31:00.880 | with a couple of snacks in between diet

01:31:03.500 | or nutrition regimen, you are fasting

01:31:05.540 | whenever you're asleep or you're not ingesting any calories.

01:31:07.980 | So unless you're hooked up to an IV of glucose,

01:31:10.160 | you are fasting while you're sleeping.

01:31:12.080 | There are several different kinds of fasting

01:31:14.060 | that can relate to epinephrine and cortisol.

01:31:16.260 | I will do an entire episode on optimizing food intake

01:31:20.100 | for performance in the sports context.

01:31:23.580 | That's coming up.

01:31:24.660 | But in the meantime, I'd like to just talk about fasting

01:31:28.640 | as a source of epinephrine.

01:31:31.960 | Anytime when our blood glucose is low,

01:31:33.980 | cortisol and epinephrine are going to go up.

01:31:36.220 | If we fast for too long, that is stress.

01:31:39.700 | There's no way around that.

01:31:40.620 | Now that doesn't mean

01:31:41.460 | it doesn't have other beneficial effects.

01:31:44.560 | Running a marathon is stress,

01:31:46.340 | but it can also have positive effects if that's your thing.

01:31:49.800 | So stress has been demonized as a term,

01:31:52.840 | but we want to think about stress mechanistically

01:31:55.720 | as epinephrine and cortisol.

01:31:57.360 | And then if we do that,

01:31:58.800 | we can think about how to regulate its timing.

01:32:01.420 | So anytime we have an eaten for four to six hours,

01:32:05.040 | levels of epinephrine and cortisol

01:32:06.420 | are going to go up pretty substantially.

01:32:08.480 | There's an exception to that,

01:32:09.680 | which is if you are used to eating on the clock

01:32:12.560 | every two hours or every hour,

01:32:14.640 | being half hour late or being even 10 minutes late

01:32:17.560 | on that schedule will induce stress.

01:32:19.180 | Most of that psychological stress,

01:32:20.700 | but also the release of things like ghrelin

01:32:22.320 | that are going to make you hungry

01:32:23.240 | 'cause they're on that eating clock.

01:32:25.340 | So one thing that many people do to great benefit

01:32:30.100 | is they follow a so-called circadian eating schedule.

01:32:33.480 | They eat only when the sun is up,

01:32:35.640 | they stop when the sun is down, more or less.

01:32:39.460 | The other way to think about this

01:32:40.480 | is they stop eating a couple hours before sleep

01:32:42.680 | and they eat more or less upon waking,

01:32:44.420 | assuming that they're waking up more or less

01:32:46.720 | around the time that the sun rises,

01:32:48.720 | maybe plus or minus two hours.

01:32:50.440 | Okay, so sort of typical schedule.

01:32:52.800 | Now let's say you decide to do what I do,

01:32:55.700 | which is I skip breakfast.

01:32:56.920 | I drink water, I delay my caffeine

01:32:58.680 | for 90 minutes to two hours, and then I drink my caffeine.

01:33:01.460 | And then my first meal is typically around lunchtime,

01:33:04.080 | 11, 30 or 12.

01:33:05.200 | And yes, occasionally I throw back some almonds or walnuts

01:33:08.360 | or something earlier in the day.

01:33:09.920 | But I do do that from time to time if I get hungry enough

01:33:14.520 | or if I just happen to see them.

01:33:15.860 | I'm kind of a drive-by eater.

01:33:17.300 | If I see blueberries or nuts or something,

01:33:19.080 | I just kind of pick them up and put them in my mouth.

01:33:21.040 | I try and not do that off other people's plates,

01:33:23.360 | but I just have that habit of doing that from time to time.

01:33:26.320 | But typically I don't eat until about noon.

01:33:29.160 | So I've got a cortisol increase.

01:33:30.880 | I've got my sunlight in the morning.

01:33:32.160 | So I'm getting a big pulse in energy early in the day.

01:33:34.960 | And yes, there's a little bit of agitation.

01:33:36.400 | I am hungry sometimes early in the day, sometimes no.

01:33:39.360 | But my ghrelin system is used to

01:33:41.640 | kicking in right around noon.

01:33:44.020 | At the point where I eat,

01:33:45.440 | as long as I don't eat carbohydrate, in my case,

01:33:49.140 | I know that my epinephrine levels

01:33:50.600 | are going to stay pretty high.

01:33:51.760 | So for me, it's usually meat and salad

01:33:54.220 | or something of that sort or fish and salad.

01:33:56.680 | I don't particularly like eating fish because of the taste,

01:34:00.900 | but I'm essentially low carb or keto-ish throughout the day.

01:34:03.760 | So I'm probably in a slightly elevated state

01:34:07.320 | of epinephrine and cortisol throughout the day.

01:34:09.480 | Some of you are fasting even longer.

01:34:11.020 | You're pushing out till 4 p.m. or 8 p.m.

01:34:13.120 | or maybe you're even fasting around the clock.

01:34:15.500 | Anytime you're fasting,

01:34:16.860 | you're increasing epinephrine and cortisol release.

01:34:19.880 | You can do all the meditation in the world

01:34:21.700 | to keep your mind calm,

01:34:23.180 | but you are closer to that edge of stress.

01:34:26.440 | And you're closer to that edge of peak stress.

01:34:29.500 | So that's something that's just important to understand.

01:34:32.440 | The description about comfort foods and cortisol

01:34:34.600 | was one of kind of an extreme case

01:34:37.020 | where cortisol systems kick over to a positive feedback loop,

01:34:40.120 | but we all eat to suppress cortisol and epinephrine.

01:34:44.160 | When we're hungry, cortisol and epinephrine

01:34:46.040 | create an agitation so we go seek food.

01:34:48.320 | When we ingest food,

01:34:50.440 | typically if it includes carbohydrate,

01:34:52.000 | there's a blunting of cortisol,

01:34:53.320 | there's a blunting of epinephrine in the bloodstream.

01:34:55.240 | If you've ever had too much coffee to drink

01:34:57.280 | and you go and have a couple of pieces of bread,

01:34:59.400 | you will feel that you might describe it

01:35:02.320 | as the caffeine getting soaked up out of your system,

01:35:04.480 | but what you're doing is you're elevating blood glucose,

01:35:06.700 | which is more or less saturating

01:35:09.280 | the effect of caffeine in your system.

01:35:10.820 | Not completely, but it's going to have that effect.

01:35:14.520 | If you're very stressed and you sit down to eat something,

01:35:16.440 | it will calm you down.

01:35:18.020 | Yes, because some of the blood that goes to your stomach,

01:35:20.040 | but more so because of these effects

01:35:21.440 | in blunting cortisol and epinephrine.

01:35:23.280 | So the important point here is that if you want to be alert,

01:35:27.200 | you can do that by way of not eating.

01:35:30.200 | Of course, please ingest fluids.

01:35:31.880 | I know some people water fast out there.

01:35:33.760 | I am yet to see good science on water fasting

01:35:36.360 | and why that can stimulate stem cells.

01:35:38.060 | Or people love the idea of after the Nobel Prize

01:35:40.900 | was given for autophagy and this idea

01:35:42.880 | that our cells clean up debris and senescent cells.

01:35:45.320 | Yes, that's true.

01:35:46.420 | But the idea that water fasting is going to promote that,

01:35:49.680 | I find rather amusing.

01:35:50.820 | Please send me the data if you know some great study

01:35:53.080 | in a decent journal,

01:35:53.960 | but pretty much this is something I hear about.

01:35:56.280 | I don't think water fasting is a good idea,

01:35:58.660 | nor should you be drinking so much water

01:36:00.900 | that you kill yourself.

01:36:01.740 | You can actually drink enough water that you die.

01:36:04.900 | So I think ingesting water in healthy amounts

01:36:07.480 | is a good thing, stay hydrated.

01:36:08.920 | But if you want to be alert, stay hydrated.

01:36:12.080 | Caffeine may or may not be in your regimen,

01:36:14.280 | but fasting will make sure that your levels of energy

01:36:18.720 | are up and you will be primed very well

01:36:21.800 | for doing a protocol of the sort that we talked about

01:36:24.440 | earlier in this episode of breathing or cold exposure

01:36:27.360 | or exercise to get that increase

01:36:29.460 | in the immune system function.

01:36:31.060 | And if you do that after learning,

01:36:32.900 | after trying to learn something,

01:36:34.440 | it will increase learning

01:36:35.660 | for that particular set of information,

01:36:38.480 | whether or not it's motor or language

01:36:39.900 | or whatever it happens to be, mathematics, programming.

01:36:43.440 | So fasting is a tool for many reasons,

01:36:47.740 | can increase growth hormone, et cetera.

01:36:49.700 | But today I'm talking about fasting as a tool

01:36:52.520 | to bias your system toward more epinephrine

01:36:55.920 | adrenaline release and toward more cortisol release,

01:36:58.560 | but still low enough that it's not chronic stress,

01:37:01.880 | that it's not causing negative health effects.

01:37:04.160 | But please know that if life is very, very stressful,

01:37:08.320 | if you're experiencing lots of stressors

01:37:10.980 | and you're chronically fasting,

01:37:13.480 | you are positioning yourself toward a greater likelihood

01:37:17.240 | of being chronically stressed in the ways that are negative.

01:37:20.800 | Negative effects on the reproductive axis,

01:37:22.520 | lower testosterone and estrogen,

01:37:23.880 | negative effects on your hair will turn gray.

01:37:27.400 | There's reasons for that.

01:37:28.600 | Your sleep will suffer, your immune system will suffer.

01:37:31.840 | So I think while it's nuanced,

01:37:34.840 | our discussion today about epinephrine and cortisol,

01:37:39.820 | increasing energy and immunity

01:37:42.440 | are designed to help you understand

01:37:46.560 | when you should be doing certain things,

01:37:48.220 | when you should throttle back,

01:37:49.680 | when you might want to kick up your adrenaline a bit.

01:37:52.160 | If you're suffering from low energy

01:37:54.320 | because you're just kind of feeling down

01:37:56.580 | and a little bit under-activated,

01:37:58.880 | well, then the practices of ice baths

01:38:00.840 | and intense breathing, et cetera,

01:38:02.520 | could be very beneficial, so might fasting.

01:38:05.900 | But if you're feeling exhausted and burnt out,

01:38:10.020 | so drained and stressed,

01:38:11.960 | well, then fasting or doing a lot of cold exposure

01:38:16.160 | or doing a lot of intense exercise

01:38:17.880 | is driving you further and further into chronic stress.

01:38:20.940 | So because I don't have a saliva test or a blood test

01:38:24.860 | or God forbid an earwax test to measure your cortisol

01:38:27.520 | as we're engaging in this discussion together,

01:38:30.860 | you have to gauge for yourself

01:38:33.440 | whether or not you are in a state of under-activated

01:38:36.740 | and need more epinephrine and cortisol,

01:38:38.940 | or whether or not you are over-activated

01:38:43.600 | in terms of cortisol and epinephrine,

01:38:45.120 | and you need ways to buffer those, ashwagandha.

01:38:48.320 | Maybe it should be a warm mellow bath, not an ice bath.

01:38:51.080 | So one has to learn how to regulate these hormones

01:38:53.920 | with behavior, with nutrition, perhaps with supplementation.

01:38:56.960 | And then of course there are prescription drugs.

01:38:58.740 | And I always leave these to the end

01:39:01.100 | because A, I'm not a medical doctor,

01:39:02.840 | I'm not prescribing anything, I'm a professor,

01:39:04.760 | I'm professing a number of things that you can decide

01:39:06.800 | for yourselves what to do with or not.

01:39:09.500 | But of course there are prescription drugs

01:39:11.820 | that can increase cortisol or decrease cortisol

01:39:15.120 | in cases like Cushing syndrome,

01:39:16.700 | which if you have that diagnosed,

01:39:18.980 | you should talk to a physician.

01:39:20.660 | You should talk ideally to a endocrinologist,

01:39:23.580 | but to a physician of some sort, board certified physician.

01:39:27.720 | There are drugs that can be used to treat injury

01:39:31.780 | like corticosterones that you can inject

01:39:33.700 | to reduce inflammation and injury, but they are cortisol.

01:39:36.660 | So they're going to bias you towards more stress

01:39:38.600 | in other domains.

01:39:39.440 | Remember cortisol can cross the blood-brain barrier

01:39:41.920 | so you're going to be more prone to psychological stress.

01:39:44.440 | I also want to mention again

01:39:45.760 | that I think there's great benefit to having a practice

01:39:48.040 | that perhaps you do every other day, but if you can't,

01:39:49.960 | maybe every third day or every other day

01:39:53.000 | of deliberately increasing your adrenaline in your body

01:39:56.280 | while learning to stay calm in the mind

01:39:58.500 | so that you learn to separate the brain-body experience.

01:40:01.460 | We hear so much about how beneficial it is

01:40:04.100 | to unify the brain and body

01:40:05.660 | that we're all out of touch with our brain and bodies.

01:40:07.580 | I particularly dislike claims like that

01:40:11.660 | or statements like that because there's great power

01:40:14.960 | as we learned today in having your body activated

01:40:18.500 | by some sort of stimulus, cold water

01:40:21.060 | or even psychological stress,

01:40:22.780 | but learning to stay calm in your mind.

01:40:24.980 | I should just remind you that most of the negative effects

01:40:28.580 | on your life and on the lives of others are due to people,

01:40:32.760 | perhaps you, I hope not, being unable to regulate their mind

01:40:36.860 | when they have high levels of adrenaline in their body,

01:40:39.000 | either 'cause they read something in a text

01:40:40.600 | or a comment section.

01:40:42.200 | Of course, that never happens to me,

01:40:44.020 | but it may happen to you, of course it happens to me,

01:40:47.760 | but the idea is to stay calm in your mind

01:40:49.920 | so that then you can regulate your action, right?

01:40:52.460 | And so I think that there are these practices

01:40:55.100 | that one can develop over time

01:40:57.360 | that are really straightforward and zero cost, right?

01:41:01.220 | You could find any number of ways

01:41:03.320 | to increase your adrenaline and stay calm.

01:41:06.080 | And we tend to focus on things like exercise

01:41:09.020 | as the way that we get our energy up.

01:41:10.740 | But today, again, I'm talking about

01:41:13.060 | deliberately increasing adrenaline

01:41:15.160 | while staying calm mentally,

01:41:17.380 | because that has great utility

01:41:18.920 | when the adrenaline hits through unwanted events,

01:41:23.880 | through things that we didn't seek out.

01:41:25.960 | So the ability to regulate adrenaline and cortisol

01:41:30.000 | is about inducing them deliberately

01:41:32.600 | when you want to push back on infection,

01:41:35.240 | potential infection from bacteria or viruses.

01:41:37.860 | It's about pulling back on adrenaline and cortisol

01:41:40.800 | maybe through the use of supplementation,

01:41:42.400 | but certainly through proper use of light and sleep

01:41:45.700 | and mental tools that we talked about as well.

01:41:48.160 | When they are chronically elevated.

01:41:50.840 | It's about training your system,

01:41:52.720 | not just to be unified at brain and body,

01:41:54.900 | which sounds great until you're stressed

01:41:57.080 | and then that's terrible.

01:41:58.240 | It's really about having a deliberate dissociation

01:42:01.360 | between the adrenaline response from the adrenals

01:42:03.880 | and the adrenaline response from the brainstem.

01:42:06.600 | So once again, we've covered a ton of material.

01:42:10.320 | I hope right now you're thinking,

01:42:12.660 | okay, am I in a state of chronic stress?

01:42:15.260 | Am I underactivated?

01:42:16.400 | Or could I afford to increase my levels

01:42:19.080 | of adrenaline and cortisol to improve my relationship

01:42:21.720 | to my immune system and to energy, neural energy?

01:42:26.080 | If you like the information that you heard today

01:42:29.400 | and you want to remember it,

01:42:30.760 | well then at the end of this episode,

01:42:33.520 | perhaps you go do something

01:42:34.600 | to increase your level of adrenaline.

01:42:36.880 | And now you know what some of those things are

01:42:38.200 | because it will help you retain the information.

01:42:40.020 | Or you could apply that to anything else

01:42:41.440 | that you learn or experience, of course.

01:42:44.020 | And I hope that you'll think about some of the ways

01:42:47.460 | in which cortisol and adrenaline are not good or bad,

01:42:51.820 | that stress isn't good or bad,

01:42:53.020 | but short-term stress is healthy.

01:42:54.900 | Alertness and energy is healthy,

01:42:56.320 | even if it puts you at the edge of agitation.

01:42:58.780 | That's an opportunity to learn

01:43:00.340 | how to control these hormones better.

01:43:02.300 | And I hope that if you're in a state of chronic stress,

01:43:04.460 | that you'll do things to start tamping down

01:43:07.040 | some of that stress and that you realize

01:43:09.860 | that your nervous system and your hormone system are linked,

01:43:13.040 | but they're linked in ways that you can control,

01:43:14.900 | that we don't have to be slaves to our hormones,

01:43:17.120 | and certainly not the hormones that cause us stress.

01:43:19.380 | We can learn to control those

01:43:20.780 | both to the benefit of our body and benefit of mind.

01:43:24.260 | If you're learning from this podcast

01:43:25.900 | and you like the information that you're learning,

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01:43:37.060 | Now, we release them every Monday morning,

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01:44:04.440 | as well as suggestions for future episodes.

01:44:06.740 | We do read all the comments,

01:44:08.500 | and I know many of you are anxiously awaiting

01:44:10.760 | particular topics and episodes,

01:44:13.000 | and we will eventually get to them all.

01:44:14.800 | I'm not going anywhere.

01:44:16.360 | And we do want to be thorough about every topic.

01:44:19.140 | Today, we rounded out the discussion about hormones.

01:44:22.880 | We aren't going to continue with that topic any longer.

01:44:25.040 | We are moving to a new topic segment

01:44:27.180 | for an entire month or so.

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01:44:53.000 | I should mention that I will be answering some questions

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01:45:23.560 | I covered a lot of different types of tools today,

01:45:25.520 | behavioral tools, et cetera, but I did mention supplements.

01:45:28.860 | For those of you that are interested in supplements,

01:45:30.960 | we've partnered with Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E,

01:45:34.440 | because we believe them to have the highest levels

01:45:36.720 | of stringency and quality in terms of supplement production,

01:45:40.360 | in terms of amounts of supplements

01:45:41.900 | in their different formulations, et cetera.

01:45:44.900 | If you want to check out the supplements that I take

01:45:47.660 | and you want to get a discount on Thorne supplements,

01:45:50.160 | you can go to Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E.com/u/huberman,

01:45:55.160 | and you can get 20% off any of the supplements that I take

01:46:00.220 | or any of the supplements that Thorne sells for that matter.

01:46:03.800 | That's Thorne.com/u/huberman

01:46:07.200 | to get 20% off anything that Thorne makes.

01:46:09.920 | Thank you for joining me

01:46:11.280 | for what I hope was an informative discussion

01:46:13.960 | and an actionable discussion about how to increase energy

01:46:17.440 | and the immune system by way of cortisol

01:46:20.200 | and adrenaline epinephrine.

01:46:22.600 | I really appreciate your willingness to learn new topics

01:46:25.920 | as well as to embrace and think about new tools

01:46:28.240 | and whether or not they're right for you.

01:46:30.120 | And as always, thank you for your interest in science.

01:46:33.020 | (upbeat music)

01:46:35.600 | (upbeat music)

Using Cortisol & Adrenaline to Boost Our Energy & Immune System Function

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