Fitness Improvement Requires Stress & Cortisol | Dr. Andy Galpin & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | What I think it can be useful for people to understand is that many things will spike
00:00:06.200 | cortisol throughout the day, stress, cold water, exercise, but the idea is that it comes
00:00:10.800 | down to baseline or near baseline rather quickly.
00:00:15.060 | One of the worst situations as you pointed out is when the highest level of cortisol
00:00:20.340 | is consistently shifted to the afternoon period.
00:00:22.940 | In fact, that's a pretty reliable signature of certain forms of depression.
00:00:28.040 | This is work by my colleague David Spiegel at Stanford Psychiatry and the great Bob Sapolsky,
00:00:33.920 | Robert Sapolsky of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, Behave, et cetera, and Fame, lots of popular
00:00:40.320 | books there.
00:00:42.320 | I think that if people are trying to regulate their cortisol and they just understand that
00:00:47.600 | basic contour that the baseline should rise pretty quickly after one rises in the morning,
00:00:54.440 | so it's easy to remember, rise, rise, rise out of bed and rise cortisol with light, bright
00:00:59.720 | light, with exercise, with caffeine, these things will all increase cortisol.
00:01:04.000 | And then across the day, it's normal for cortisol to spike, but then to use some of the down
00:01:07.480 | regulation methods that you described, in particular the breathing methods and exercise
00:01:11.880 | itself, as the case may be.
00:01:13.920 | But then to really pay attention to how much psychological and physical stress is occurring
00:01:18.680 | in the six hours or so or eight hours prior to sleep, does that seem like a good broad
00:01:23.600 | contour of how to have a healthy pattern of cortisol release?
00:01:26.800 | Because you actually want the cortisol to reduce inflammation and initiate or participate
00:01:31.120 | in the recovery process.
00:01:32.120 | You will not see any progress from exercise training without a large spike in cortisol.
00:01:39.060 | It is critically important when we think of phrases like cortisol, inflammation, stress,
00:01:45.400 | this is not bad.
00:01:47.320 | Physiology is not personified, right?
00:01:50.000 | Things don't hate you in the body, right?
00:01:51.760 | It's all, it's not good and bad.
00:01:53.440 | They just are.
00:01:54.760 | The more you try to suppress cortisol, the more you suppress adaptation.
00:01:59.520 | What you want is exactly what you mentioned, large spikes met with large quick recovery.
00:02:05.720 | And you want to do that throughout the day and get that hormetic stressor.
00:02:08.080 | This is, so going back to your ashwagandha and rhodiola issue, I think it would be very
00:02:12.640 | short-sighted for people to do that as this is a prophylactic.
00:02:17.720 | If you blunt cortisol, you're going to cause immunosuppressant.
00:02:20.640 | - Especially early in the day.
00:02:22.400 | - Totally.
00:02:23.400 | - Taking ashwagandha before going to train is counterproductive.
00:02:26.320 | - Yeah.
00:02:27.320 | We do not just, this is not a baseline part of our foundational package, right?
00:02:30.680 | If you go look at the athlete foundations or the athlete resilience protocols I've put
00:02:35.600 | together, you're not going to see these things in there for that specific reason.
00:02:39.800 | Any form of cortisol regulation needs to be done strategically.
00:02:43.740 | If you are excessively high and we're bringing you back down to normative values at the right
00:02:46.960 | time, then great.
00:02:47.960 | If you're normal though, then taking you down lower than that is actually problematic.
00:02:53.200 | The same thing is actually true since we're here for oxidative stress, foreign information,
00:02:59.240 | antioxidant use.
00:03:00.640 | We mentioned I think earlier about taking vitamin C and vitamin E post-exercise will
00:03:04.160 | actually blunt adaptations or at least it has the potential to do so.
00:03:08.540 | Same thing, right?
00:03:09.540 | If you're modulating this response just because and you have not done so because of actually
00:03:16.640 | biological testing that indicated you needed to do such, then you actually may be making
00:03:20.920 | things worse.
00:03:22.920 | We see this constantly with people who take a number of supplements and substances for
00:03:28.520 | sleep and then they wake up the next morning groggy and your cortisol is suppressed.
00:03:34.280 | Okay, great.
00:03:35.280 | Then they take something for stimulation and then the rest of the day they're trying to
00:03:38.560 | reduce.
00:03:39.560 | Then you're in this nasty cycle.
00:03:40.560 | Instead of just getting out of the way and letting cortisol do what it's supposed to
00:03:44.320 | do and then making sure again you're teaching it.
00:03:47.360 | So this is actually a coachable response.
00:03:49.080 | You can coach your own body to go down in the later part of the day and go up in the
00:03:55.000 | earlier part of the day.
00:03:57.000 | You want to make sure that you are driving that train with intent and so again to reiterate,
00:04:02.500 | if you don't need that, you shouldn't do it.
00:04:05.920 | If you don't need to lower cortisol, you shouldn't walk around doing it.
00:04:09.480 | You're just going to suppress the state even far and this is what's needed.
00:04:13.320 | This is needed for anabolic response, so you're not going to grow muscle if cortisol is not
00:04:16.880 | spiked.
00:04:17.880 | It's going to compromise it rather.
00:04:19.200 | So you want to be intentional with these practices, especially in the form of supplementation.
00:04:25.640 | Be very, very intentional.
00:04:27.840 | I've heard it said that carbohydrates, in particular starchy carbohydrates, can inhibit
00:04:34.680 | cortisol and this could be through the tryptophan amino acid related pathway.
00:04:43.240 | It ratchets up to serotonin release.
00:04:46.820 | Probably some other things too.
00:04:47.820 | I mean the idea that carbohydrates just stimulate serotonin is a little bit overly simplistic.
00:04:52.960 | >>COREY: No, those cellular mechanisms, AMPK going up and immediately turning on there,
00:04:56.720 | yeah.
00:04:57.720 | >>AJ: Right.
00:04:58.720 | So I think we've all experienced this.
00:05:01.280 | We're stressed.
00:05:02.280 | We're stressed.
00:05:03.280 | It doesn't necessarily even have to be highly processed, fatty carbohydrates like potato
00:05:10.080 | chips and dip or these kinds of things.
00:05:13.340 | It can also be a bowl of rice, a bowl of oatmeal, a bowl of pasta, which here I'm not trying
00:05:18.400 | to demonize carbohydrates.
00:05:20.600 | I do ingest carbohydrates minimally or non-processed carbohydrates most of the time, but not all
00:05:26.640 | the time.
00:05:28.560 | They have a fairly potent effect on lowering stress and perceived stress and even quality
00:05:35.040 | of sleep, which is not to say that somebody has to load up on them like crazy unless their
00:05:39.480 | glycogen is really depleted.
00:05:40.800 | We talked a lot about this in the endurance episode.
00:05:42.720 | I know we'll touch on it more in the nutrition supplementation episode.
00:05:46.600 | But in thinking about the relationship between carbohydrates and cortisol and what we've
00:05:51.800 | just been talking about in terms of cortisol as being vitally important for the adaptation
00:05:57.760 | trigger or triggering adaptation, it's probably a better way to put it, but that it can blunt
00:06:02.840 | cortisol taken post-training or maybe in the evening before sleep.
00:06:09.000 | What are some of the basic ways that one can think about and maybe use carbohydrates in
00:06:14.120 | specific ways in order to, let's say, control cortisol rather than quash cortisol?
00:06:21.100 | You actually have alluded to it a number of times already.
00:06:24.720 | We oftentimes will give people a lot of carbohydrates at night for some of these reasons.
00:06:32.480 | You're going to feel fantastic.
00:06:34.120 | A lot of people it helps you sleep, both get to sleep and stay asleep, sleep quality.
00:06:39.200 | You talked about specifically, remember, think about it this way, cortisol at its core is
00:06:44.380 | an energy signaling molecule.
00:06:46.360 | It says we are in the need for energy.
00:06:50.160 | Great.
00:06:52.560 | Epinephrine is the same way.
00:06:53.560 | You'll start seeing, for example, cortisol will liberate free fatty acids, put them in
00:06:57.800 | the bloodstream, get you prepared to do something.
00:07:00.320 | The problem is if it's continually elevated throughout the day with no down regulation,
00:07:04.320 | we start running into issues, right?
00:07:05.840 | So again, this is the differentiation between, "Oh, my cortisol is slightly elevated all
00:07:09.680 | day," versus, "I had a really big spike after training, I had a really big spike after a
00:07:15.480 | breath protocol, et cetera, and then it went back down."
00:07:18.400 | So that being said, if you then ingest carbohydrates, it is quick to see the signal, we have nutrients,
00:07:24.840 | we have energy, again, specifically carbohydrates, therefore cortisol can sort of go back down.
00:07:29.240 | You don't need to be liberating free fatty acids and preparing the need for fuel.
00:07:32.960 | So you can help yourself go to sleep for many, as you pointed out, many mechanisms actually
00:07:37.120 | of why carbohydrates will help you sleep at night for some, not all people, but some.
00:07:42.180 | That would be one of the relationships it has with cortisol.
00:07:45.200 | [music]