Optimize Your Learning & Creativity With Science-Based Tools

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

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

00:00:04.920 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.920 | My name is Andrew Huberman

00:00:10.880 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.920 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.980 | This podcast is separate

00:00:17.120 | from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:00:19.400 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:00:21.440 | to bring you zero cost to consumer information

00:00:23.400 | about science and science-related tools.

00:00:26.280 | In keeping with that theme,

00:00:27.440 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

00:00:30.400 | Our first sponsor is InsideTracker.

00:00:32.960 | InsideTracker analyzes data from your blood and DNA

00:00:36.260 | to help you better understand your body

00:00:38.160 | and health and health needs.

00:00:40.600 | I've been getting my blood tested for many years now

00:00:43.160 | because it just turns out that many of the things

00:00:46.240 | that are important to our health and wellbeing

00:00:47.940 | can only be detected in a blood test or a DNA test.

00:00:51.720 | InsideTracker makes that really easy.

00:00:53.900 | They can come to your house to take those samples

00:00:55.720 | if you like, or you can go to a nearby clinic as well.

00:00:59.840 | The major problem with most blood tests and DNA tests

00:01:02.880 | is that it's very hard to make sense

00:01:04.460 | of the information you get.

00:01:05.720 | You get a lot of numbers related to metabolic factors,

00:01:08.280 | endocrine factors, et cetera.

00:01:10.180 | InsideTracker makes it very easy to decipher

00:01:12.920 | what those levels in your blood and DNA mean

00:01:16.840 | and what to do about them.

00:01:18.560 | They have a very easy to use dashboard

00:01:20.560 | that if you go to it, it can inform about lifestyle choices

00:01:23.600 | such as adding or subtracting certain forms of exercise

00:01:26.720 | or nutrition, other things relate to supplementation.

00:01:30.200 | It's a really powerful and easy to use program.

00:01:33.140 | If you wanna try InsideTracker,

00:01:35.320 | you can go to insidetracker.com/huberman

00:01:38.500 | and put Huberman at checkout

00:01:39.960 | to get 25% off any of their programs.

00:01:42.680 | That's insidetracker.com/huberman

00:01:45.400 | and put Huberman at checkout.

00:01:46.920 | The second sponsor of today's podcast is Athletic Greens.

00:01:51.880 | Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin mineral

00:01:54.640 | probiotic drink.

00:01:56.280 | I've been using Athletic Greens since 2012

00:01:59.320 | and so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast.

00:02:01.920 | I started using Athletic Greens

00:02:03.520 | and I still use Athletic Greens

00:02:05.720 | because I find it very complicated and almost dizzying

00:02:09.360 | to figure out which vitamins and minerals I need to take

00:02:11.620 | in order to just cover my nutritional basis.

00:02:14.540 | Taking Athletic Greens makes that very easy.

00:02:16.840 | It also tastes very good.

00:02:18.220 | I mix mine with water, a little bit of lemon juice

00:02:20.880 | and I really like it, so I drink it once or twice a day.

00:02:23.880 | The probiotics that are in Athletic Greens

00:02:25.940 | are also important to me

00:02:27.480 | because there are a lot of data now showing

00:02:29.440 | that the gut microbiome, which is supported by probiotics,

00:02:33.080 | is important for things like the gut brain access,

00:02:35.600 | mood, endocrine factors, metabolism,

00:02:38.540 | many, many biological functions.

00:02:40.600 | And so by taking Athletic Greens,

00:02:42.260 | I get the vitamins, the minerals and the probiotics

00:02:44.280 | all in one easy to consume, great tasting drink.

00:02:48.380 | If you wanna try Athletic Greens,

00:02:49.920 | you can go to athleticgreens.com/huberman.

00:02:53.120 | And if you do that,

00:02:54.000 | you'll also get a one-year supply of liquid vitamin D3K2.

00:02:59.000 | There are a lot of data now as well

00:03:01.040 | showing that vitamin D3 is important for immune function,

00:03:04.400 | for mood, endocrine factors,

00:03:06.460 | as well as other systems in the brain and body.

00:03:09.680 | That's athleticgreens.com/huberman.

00:03:12.020 | And I should also mention, if you do that,

00:03:13.620 | you won't just get the vitamin D3K2, your supply,

00:03:16.520 | you'll also get five free travel packs of Athletic Greens.

00:03:20.680 | Mixing up powders when one is on the road,

00:03:22.500 | either in the car or in a hotel or on the plane, et cetera,

00:03:25.800 | can be kind of messy.

00:03:26.640 | These little travel packs make it really clean and easy.

00:03:29.160 | So once again, if you go to athleticgreens.com/huberman,

00:03:32.280 | you'll get the special offer of your Athletic Greens,

00:03:34.640 | but you'll also get the year supply of vitamin D3K2

00:03:38.220 | and the five free travel packs.

00:03:40.440 | The third sponsor of today's podcast is Made For.

00:03:43.460 | Made For is a behavioral science company

00:03:45.320 | that makes attaining positive changes and growth mindset

00:03:48.860 | easy through a simple set of steps and a monthly program.

00:03:53.080 | The company was founded by former Navy Seal,

00:03:55.000 | Patrick Dossett and Tom's founder, Blake Mycoskie.

00:03:58.620 | I'm the head of their scientific advisory board.

00:04:00.720 | And the other members of the advisory board

00:04:02.600 | include people like the director of the Chronobiology Unit

00:04:05.240 | at the National Institutes of Mental Health,

00:04:07.240 | members of Harvard Medical School,

00:04:08.920 | and many other people who are serious about taking science

00:04:11.680 | and developing protocols that can be applied

00:04:14.440 | towards positive habits and growth mindset.

00:04:17.580 | If you want to check out Made For,

00:04:19.260 | you can go to getmadefor.com.

00:04:21.360 | And if you purchase any of their products

00:04:23.360 | and put Huberman at checkout,

00:04:25.160 | you'll get 20% off their program.

00:04:27.020 | In addition to that, we do a monthly Zoom call

00:04:30.100 | where the members of Made For get on

00:04:31.920 | and Patrick and myself, sometimes Blake as well,

00:04:35.720 | discuss the Made For program and the personal goals

00:04:38.520 | and things that people are trying to achieve

00:04:40.400 | with the program.

00:04:41.240 | So it's a dialogue back and forth on Zoom call once a month.

00:04:44.320 | Once again, that's getmadefor.com,

00:04:46.280 | put in Huberman at checkout,

00:04:47.680 | and you'll be able to get the 20% off

00:04:49.680 | as well as access the monthly Zoom calls with us.

00:04:52.960 | Let's talk about neuroplasticity.

00:04:55.520 | More specifically, let's talk about

00:04:57.660 | how we can optimize our brains.

00:05:00.840 | Neuroplasticity is this incredible feature

00:05:03.540 | of our nervous system that allows it to change itself

00:05:06.760 | even in ways that we consciously decide.

00:05:10.320 | That's an incredible property.

00:05:12.040 | Our liver can't decide to just change itself.

00:05:14.880 | Our spleen can't decide to just change itself

00:05:17.680 | through conscious thought

00:05:19.080 | or through feedback from another person.

00:05:22.240 | The cells in those tissues can make changes, sure,

00:05:25.180 | but it's our nervous system

00:05:26.880 | that harbors this incredible ability

00:05:29.360 | to direct its own changes in ways that we believe

00:05:34.360 | or we're told will serve us better.

00:05:37.720 | Now, today's a really special episode

00:05:39.480 | because while we are going to talk about science,

00:05:42.800 | and as always, we will delve into mechanism,

00:05:45.560 | today's episode is really geared toward

00:05:48.520 | answering your most common questions

00:05:50.720 | about how to leverage neuroplasticity.

00:05:53.440 | The previous episodes were about focus

00:05:55.880 | and how to achieve focus for sake of plasticity

00:05:58.880 | as well as the last episode,

00:06:00.180 | which is what are some of the portals into plasticity

00:06:03.100 | that relate to movement,

00:06:04.200 | how behavior can activate plasticity

00:06:06.560 | as well as how to activate plasticity for behavior itself,

00:06:10.080 | how to get better at learning certain movements.

00:06:12.920 | Today's podcast is really directed

00:06:15.160 | toward answering your most common questions

00:06:17.960 | and the bigger theme

00:06:19.400 | of how does one go about optimizing their brain

00:06:22.240 | or even think about optimizing the brain?

00:06:24.500 | What is this thing that we're calling optimizing the brain?

00:06:27.840 | In doing so, I'm also going to share

00:06:29.360 | some of my typical routines and tools.

00:06:32.600 | I don't share these because I think that they are

00:06:34.140 | the only ones that are available out there.

00:06:35.860 | Certainly they're not,

00:06:36.980 | nor do I share them because I think that everyone

00:06:38.720 | should do them just 'cause I do them, certainly not.

00:06:42.000 | I share them because many of you

00:06:44.140 | have asked for very concrete examples of what I do and when

00:06:48.700 | and so I'll share those with you

00:06:50.020 | and you can decide whether or not

00:06:51.040 | those protocols are for you or not.

00:06:53.520 | Everybody's different, but there are some common features

00:06:56.780 | of how we are all put together

00:06:58.980 | at the level of the nervous system and body

00:07:01.220 | that direct us toward particular practices,

00:07:04.220 | particular routines that can be especially powerful

00:07:07.020 | for neuroplasticity.

00:07:08.960 | So I wanna open up the discussion today

00:07:12.160 | by emphasizing something that's fundamentally important,

00:07:15.660 | which is that plasticity is not the goal.

00:07:19.300 | Plasticity is never the goal.

00:07:21.700 | Plasticity is simply a state or a capacity

00:07:25.640 | for our nervous system to change.

00:07:27.600 | And so nothing makes me more frustrated perhaps

00:07:30.900 | than when I hear, oh, you know, this pill, this potion,

00:07:34.300 | this practice, it gives you plasticity.

00:07:38.320 | Plasticity is just change.

00:07:40.520 | The real question is what are you trying to change

00:07:42.740 | and specifically what end goal are you trying to achieve?

00:07:46.700 | Specific end goals might be extremely specific,

00:07:50.500 | like you want to learn how to speak a particular language

00:07:53.600 | or you want to learn a new motor skill

00:07:55.840 | or you want to get very good at calculus

00:07:58.060 | or you'd like to forget the bad emotions related

00:08:01.140 | to a particular human being or experience

00:08:04.500 | or it can be more general,

00:08:05.740 | like you'd like to be more creative.

00:08:08.260 | We'll actually talk about creativity today.

00:08:11.340 | Or you would like to achieve more focus

00:08:13.460 | or you'd like to be less stressed.

00:08:15.240 | So it's very important that you understand that plasticity

00:08:19.740 | and achieving plasticity is the first step

00:08:23.660 | in what we call optimizing your brain.

00:08:26.360 | You don't want your brain to be plastic all the time.

00:08:28.560 | In fact, one of the major questions,

00:08:30.900 | one of the major unsolved mysteries of neuroscience

00:08:33.320 | is how each and every one of us wakes up every day

00:08:36.280 | and knows who we are.

00:08:38.560 | Why should that be?

00:08:39.980 | Well, the brain is plastic.

00:08:41.700 | It has a capacity to change throughout the lifespan,

00:08:44.060 | but it's not so plastic

00:08:45.600 | that every night when we go to sleep or in our waking

00:08:48.660 | that the connections get reconfigured so much so

00:08:50.820 | that we forget who we are or how to walk or how to eat.

00:08:55.040 | It's a good thing that we don't have

00:08:57.180 | such robust plasticity or ongoing plasticity

00:09:00.140 | that we have to restructure ourselves each day.

00:09:02.220 | It's part of what gives our life continuity.

00:09:04.460 | So remember, plasticity is not and is never the goal.

00:09:08.300 | The goal is to figure out how to access plasticity

00:09:12.520 | and then to direct that plasticity

00:09:14.820 | toward particular goals or changes

00:09:17.800 | that you would like to achieve.

00:09:19.500 | And I should just mention, there's no rule that in life

00:09:23.400 | you have to leverage this incredible thing

00:09:25.420 | called neuroplasticity.

00:09:26.540 | No one said you had to do that.

00:09:28.120 | This podcast and this episode is particularly for people

00:09:31.380 | who are either happy or unhappy with where they're at

00:09:35.020 | with a particular aspect of their life

00:09:37.020 | and they want to shift it in some positive way.

00:09:39.820 | And many of you listening might say,

00:09:40.940 | well, wouldn't everyone want to do that?

00:09:42.340 | Well, actually there are a certain number of people

00:09:44.220 | that are pretty good where they're at

00:09:45.420 | and they don't want to change and that's terrific.

00:09:47.120 | And I tip my hat to them and I think that's wonderful.

00:09:50.960 | If ever they decide that they want to leverage

00:09:52.840 | these plasticity mechanisms,

00:09:54.280 | they can at any stage throughout the lifespan.

00:09:57.100 | Let's start by talking about the different systems

00:10:01.740 | within the nervous system that are available for plasticity.

00:10:05.700 | And in doing so, I'll frame them in the context

00:10:07.980 | of what I do on a daily basis, on a weekly basis

00:10:11.780 | and on a yearly basis.

00:10:13.320 | First of all, there are several forms of plasticity.

00:10:18.660 | They have names like long-term potentiation,

00:10:21.180 | long-term depression, which has nothing to do

00:10:23.260 | with emotional depression, by the way,

00:10:24.780 | and things like spike timing dependent plasticity.

00:10:27.940 | Those names are used to describe cellular phenomenon,

00:10:32.140 | the actual ways that the synapses,

00:10:33.820 | the connections between neurons change.

00:10:36.060 | I'll mention those things and I'll give a little more meat

00:10:38.100 | as to what they are as I mentioned them.

00:10:41.020 | But that's probably not the best way to think

00:10:43.500 | about plasticity in terms of optimizing your brain.

00:10:46.580 | The best way to think about it is in terms of short-term,

00:10:49.780 | medium-term and long-term plasticity.

00:10:53.320 | Short-term plasticity is any kind of shift

00:10:56.380 | that you want to achieve in the moment or in the day,

00:11:00.460 | but that you don't necessarily wanna hold on to forever.

00:11:03.300 | And I'd say, well, what kinds of things are those?

00:11:05.280 | Well, for instance, short-term plasticity might be,

00:11:08.360 | you wake up earlier than you would like to catch a flight,

00:11:11.860 | you're not feeling particularly alert

00:11:14.420 | and you want to use a protocol

00:11:16.900 | or you decide to use a protocol,

00:11:18.500 | which could be coffee or it could be a certain form

00:11:20.760 | of breathing or it could be some other tool

00:11:22.640 | to become more alert at a time of day

00:11:24.260 | when normally you aren't that alert.

00:11:26.060 | But your expectation is that when you return home,

00:11:29.600 | you will discard with the need to do that at 5.30 AM

00:11:33.260 | because you'll be asleep at 5.30 AM.

00:11:35.000 | So there's short-term plasticity, behavioral plasticity.

00:11:38.260 | Then there's medium-term plasticity,

00:11:40.180 | which are changes that you might wanna make.

00:11:42.180 | I call this with respect and a little bit of humor

00:11:47.020 | or at least my kind of humor.

00:11:48.260 | I call this the undergraduate pre-med phenomenon.

00:11:53.260 | For those of you that have worked with pre-meds

00:11:55.820 | and have tremendous respect for medical students and pre-meds

00:11:59.260 | there is a kind of a stereotype,

00:12:02.140 | which I don't necessarily agree with,

00:12:04.580 | but the stereotype is that they wanna know

00:12:06.420 | what they need to know for sake of the exam,

00:12:08.060 | but they don't really wanna know, they just want the A.

00:12:10.300 | And I don't think that's always true.

00:12:11.700 | I've worked with a number of different pre-meds

00:12:13.720 | over the years and there are many of them

00:12:16.000 | that are absolutely passionate about the knowledge itself.

00:12:20.900 | And they also wanted the A.

00:12:22.440 | But the pre-med phenomenon as it's discussed

00:12:24.600 | among professors and TAs is that you've got these students,

00:12:28.280 | they just wanna know what they need to know

00:12:29.700 | so they can get the A, right?

00:12:31.040 | It's medium-term plasticity.

00:12:32.480 | They don't actually want it to be embedded

00:12:33.880 | in their memory too long

00:12:35.360 | or else they would actually care about the information.

00:12:37.240 | So that's medium-term information.

00:12:39.400 | And sometimes that's useful, for instance,

00:12:41.140 | if you go on vacation to Costa Rica

00:12:43.640 | and you don't know your way around Costa Rica,

00:12:45.640 | you wanna learn the different town and the routes there,

00:12:48.020 | but you don't have any intention of going back.

00:12:50.040 | It's just medium-term.

00:12:50.920 | You wanna just program it in for sake of your time there

00:12:53.160 | and then you wanna discard it.

00:12:54.780 | Most of the time when we think about

00:12:56.360 | or talk about optimizing the brain,

00:12:57.740 | we're talking about long-term plasticity.

00:13:00.120 | We're talking about the kinds of changes

00:13:01.840 | that people wanna make

00:13:02.680 | so that their brain reflexively works differently.

00:13:06.640 | This is what a child does

00:13:07.880 | when it goes from not knowing how to walk

00:13:09.720 | to knowing how to walk.

00:13:10.720 | It doesn't have to think about it

00:13:12.080 | after it learns how to walk, it becomes reflexive.

00:13:15.200 | Long-term plasticity is almost always the big goal.

00:13:19.500 | It's I wanna know how to speak that language.

00:13:21.280 | I wanna be able to do that skill.

00:13:23.060 | I wanna be able to feel this way

00:13:24.720 | without having to put much work into it.

00:13:26.920 | And there are tools and protocols

00:13:28.280 | that one can do to achieve that.

00:13:29.600 | And we are going to talk about those.

00:13:31.080 | We've talked about a few of them in previous episodes,

00:13:33.020 | but I will revisit those protocols today.

00:13:35.380 | I'm gonna frame all this in the context of the daily life,

00:13:41.080 | the weekly life, and the yearly life.

00:13:44.680 | And that's because neural plasticity

00:13:47.060 | and optimizing your brain rides on a deeper foundation

00:13:52.060 | of this thing that governs plasticity

00:13:56.680 | and in fact governs all our life called autonomic arousal,

00:14:00.080 | which is that we're asleep for part of the 24 hour cycle

00:14:02.680 | and we are awake almost always.

00:14:04.360 | If we push ourselves and stay awake, we're okay.

00:14:06.700 | We can do that for a night or two,

00:14:08.160 | but almost always we are asleep for a portion of it

00:14:10.400 | and we are awake for a portion of it.

00:14:13.200 | I've said it before, but I'll say it again.

00:14:14.800 | The trigger for plasticity and learning

00:14:16.680 | occurs during high focus, high alertness states,

00:14:19.780 | not while you're asleep.

00:14:21.580 | And the focus and alertness are both key

00:14:23.600 | because of the neurochemicals associated with those states.

00:14:26.660 | But the actual rewiring

00:14:29.160 | and the reconfiguration of the brain connections

00:14:31.520 | happens during non-sleep deep rest,

00:14:33.640 | which we'll talk more about as always, and deep sleep.

00:14:37.880 | So you trigger the change and in sleep you get the change.

00:14:41.160 | So some of the things that we'll talk about today

00:14:44.220 | about optimizing the brain are centered around not sleep,

00:14:47.920 | but around the autonomic arousal system.

00:14:50.600 | We have this system of neurons in our brain and body

00:14:53.280 | that's just incredible that wake us up and make us alert.

00:14:57.860 | And when we're not accessing that system well,

00:15:00.560 | we cannot access plasticity, we cannot optimize our brain.

00:15:04.220 | Likewise, if we cannot sleep well and we can't rest well,

00:15:08.180 | we will not access plasticity and rewire our brain

00:15:11.780 | because that's when the actual configuration

00:15:13.660 | between the connections occurs.

00:15:15.520 | So to set this in context, I wake up each day

00:15:20.260 | and I'll be totally honest,

00:15:22.940 | I usually don't feel like bouncing right out of bed.

00:15:26.120 | I usually don't feel completely rested.

00:15:28.820 | And that's not because I don't get enough sleep.

00:15:31.040 | It's probably because I'm not terrific

00:15:33.080 | about timing my sleep so well.

00:15:35.340 | Now this month isn't about sleep,

00:15:36.840 | that was the previous month, but I really wanna emphasize

00:15:39.120 | a few points.

00:15:39.960 | I wake up generally more tired and groggy than I would like

00:15:46.020 | because I tend to go to sleep too late.

00:15:48.340 | It's just something that I do.

00:15:49.960 | I not tend to get up early either because I set an alarm,

00:15:52.920 | because I have things to do or because I naturally wake up

00:15:55.820 | early because of the light coming in and so forth.

00:15:58.740 | Well, what that tells me is that I'm probably somebody

00:16:02.280 | who's natural circadian rhythm.

00:16:05.100 | You may have heard of chronotypes.

00:16:06.320 | These are genetically programmed things,

00:16:08.040 | but chronotype is shorter than 24 hours.

00:16:10.600 | It means that the cycle of waking and alertness for me

00:16:12.920 | is probably shorter than 24 hours,

00:16:15.780 | which means that getting some light in the late afternoon

00:16:18.440 | will help me shift and make my cycle a little bit longer.

00:16:21.860 | It will phase delay me.

00:16:23.000 | If that doesn't make any sense, see a previous episode.

00:16:25.000 | But what it really means is getting some light

00:16:26.560 | in the afternoon will allow me to stay up

00:16:28.220 | a little bit later.

00:16:29.800 | But what it means is that I'm not really matching

00:16:33.800 | my hardwired needs of going to bed

00:16:38.400 | probably at 8.30 or nine and waking up at 4 a.m.

00:16:42.000 | I tend to go to sleep around 10.30, 11,

00:16:44.200 | lately around 11.30 or 12, and then I wake up at six.

00:16:46.920 | And so of course I'm going to feel groggy.

00:16:48.740 | So neuroplasticity will allow me to optimize my wakefulness,

00:16:52.900 | but I have to do something in order to access that.

00:16:56.080 | And some of you may already be anticipating

00:16:58.080 | what I'm about to say, which is, oh no,

00:16:59.800 | he's going to tell us to get sunlight in our eyes

00:17:01.680 | in the first 30 minutes of the day.

00:17:03.400 | I am going to tell you to do that,

00:17:04.640 | but I'm going to also tell you two things

00:17:06.400 | that I have not discussed before,

00:17:08.780 | which relate to the plasticity

00:17:11.200 | between the melanopsin cells, these sunlight detecting,

00:17:14.680 | bright light detecting cells in our eye

00:17:16.400 | and the circadian clock.

00:17:18.160 | I've never said this before in this podcast,

00:17:19.920 | but it turns out that the connections

00:17:21.720 | between these melanopsin cells and the circadian clock

00:17:24.840 | are plastic throughout the lifespan.

00:17:27.620 | There's a massive configuration of the connections there

00:17:30.260 | and a cell type called the astrocytes,

00:17:32.040 | which are a glial cell,

00:17:33.600 | are actively removing and reinforcing connections

00:17:37.080 | between the eye and that clock every day.

00:17:40.440 | Now, this is incredible because other aspects of your brain

00:17:42.820 | that, for instance, represent you knowing who you are

00:17:46.920 | when you wake up in the morning or what your name is,

00:17:49.520 | assuming that you're old enough

00:17:50.420 | that you've already learned your name,

00:17:52.120 | one of the first things kids learn,

00:17:53.660 | it's something we rarely ever forget.

00:17:55.520 | Those connections are changing all the time

00:18:00.280 | every 24 hour cycle.

00:18:01.480 | So there's an opportunity for short-term plasticity.

00:18:04.240 | So that's why I view sunlight first thing in the day,

00:18:06.000 | it helps me wake up.

00:18:07.320 | The other thing that I do is that there's a circuit

00:18:10.580 | that exists between the circadian clock and our adrenals

00:18:13.520 | that I've talked about before

00:18:14.700 | that triggers the release of cortisol

00:18:16.400 | first thing in the morning that wakes us up,

00:18:18.600 | especially when we view light.

00:18:20.400 | So if you're groggy in the morning,

00:18:21.720 | that's why viewing light is helpful.

00:18:23.800 | But the interesting thing is if you start viewing light

00:18:27.080 | frequently in the morning,

00:18:28.780 | then those connections between the melanopsin cells

00:18:31.980 | and the circadian clock become primed or potentiated,

00:18:36.340 | we would say, they become stronger

00:18:38.020 | for the anticipation of light.

00:18:39.780 | And you naturally start waking up earlier,

00:18:42.000 | feeling more alert.

00:18:43.460 | So what this says is, and what I do

00:18:46.020 | is I get that regular light

00:18:47.380 | because I know that some mornings

00:18:48.780 | I'm just not going to feel very alert,

00:18:50.240 | I'll feel especially tired.

00:18:51.900 | And I might not be able to access sunlight

00:18:53.700 | because it's really overcast or I'm traveling

00:18:55.460 | or some other feature, but the system is plastic

00:18:57.580 | so it shifted in the right direction.

00:18:59.900 | Now it will shift back

00:19:01.380 | because it's short-term plasticity

00:19:02.740 | after about two, three days.

00:19:03.880 | So you want to try and get the sunlight exposure

00:19:05.580 | on a regular basis.

00:19:07.060 | The other thing that I do is I delay my intake of caffeine

00:19:11.060 | for the first two hours that I'm awake.

00:19:12.980 | Now, this can be very painful for people,

00:19:15.820 | but earlier we talked about the adenosine system

00:19:19.360 | and how the accumulation of adenosine makes us sleepy

00:19:22.700 | and caffeine suppresses adenosine, it makes us feel alert.

00:19:27.540 | But we know that if you ingest caffeine

00:19:30.740 | immediately on waking,

00:19:32.620 | the signal to the adrenals to release cortisol,

00:19:35.740 | which is a healthy release of cortisol

00:19:38.060 | and the suppression of adenosine

00:19:40.060 | that happens as we come out of sleep

00:19:43.060 | and in deep sleep, the suppression of adenosine.

00:19:46.180 | If you ingest caffeine too early,

00:19:48.380 | there's a mechanism by which the adenosine

00:19:50.640 | competes for the receptors, et cetera,

00:19:53.060 | so that you have a mid-morning crash.

00:19:55.780 | Because if caffeine, the way it works is if caffeine

00:19:59.220 | is occupying the adenosine receptor,

00:20:01.340 | then the natural endogenous mechanisms

00:20:04.680 | for suppressing adenosine

00:20:06.740 | are not actually going to have their actions.

00:20:08.860 | So the brain to adrenal axis is subject to plasticity also.

00:20:13.580 | And so by delaying caffeine

00:20:15.280 | until about two hours after waking,

00:20:17.580 | I'm able to capture and reinforce to potentiate

00:20:21.340 | the neural circuit that exists between the circadian clock

00:20:24.100 | and the cortisol release in the adrenals,

00:20:26.260 | as well as leave those adenosine receptors unoccupied

00:20:30.660 | so that I can then use the caffeine to get a natural lift

00:20:34.600 | in alertness and focus two hours later,

00:20:36.740 | as opposed to using it just to wake myself up

00:20:39.940 | out of sleepiness.

00:20:41.380 | So while I'm sure there are some eye rolls out there

00:20:43.860 | and some yawns about,

00:20:45.380 | "Oh no, it's the sunlight in the morning thing again,"

00:20:47.580 | it's a powerful tool for readjusting these circuits,

00:20:50.780 | so the short-term plasticity.

00:20:52.340 | And the reason for delaying caffeine

00:20:54.180 | for the first two hours of the day,

00:20:55.460 | even if it's painful to do for the first couple of days,

00:20:58.020 | is that then you naturally start to wake up

00:21:01.380 | more readily in the morning without caffeine

00:21:03.760 | because the adenosine is suppressed

00:21:06.840 | and you don't have these competing,

00:21:09.380 | it's called a competing antagonist

00:21:11.700 | for the adenosine receptor.

00:21:15.040 | So I wake up, I get sunlight in my eyes.

00:21:17.480 | Lately, because I wake up very early,

00:21:19.060 | I do use a bright light to stimulate alertness.

00:21:23.540 | It's not actually designed for that purpose,

00:21:25.300 | it's just a light board that has about 900 lux.

00:21:27.700 | And then I delay caffeine.

00:21:30.180 | Some of you have asked,

00:21:31.820 | and again, I'm not saying that anyone has to do this,

00:21:34.780 | what exactly do you drink?

00:21:35.980 | I'm a big believer in black coffee.

00:21:37.940 | I just happen to like black coffee.

00:21:39.500 | People have asked me about,

00:21:40.780 | and I don't wanna name brand names here,

00:21:42.140 | about this type of coffee or that type of coffee

00:21:45.620 | mixed with these other kinds of things.

00:21:48.100 | Will that increase focus?

00:21:49.960 | You know, I'm gonna talk today a lot

00:21:51.900 | about the use of diet and fasting and timing of foods

00:21:55.260 | and certain kinds of foods.

00:21:56.580 | But to be honest, black coffee is just a simple choice

00:21:59.560 | that's always worked for me.

00:22:00.880 | I also make sure I hydrate first thing in the morning.

00:22:03.180 | There's plenty of data now showing

00:22:05.260 | that even a slight increase in dehydration,

00:22:08.480 | meaning just when you're lacking water,

00:22:10.340 | can make people have headaches,

00:22:12.260 | it can provide some additional photophobia.

00:22:14.740 | For those of you that are migraine prone,

00:22:16.820 | bright light can trigger migraines.

00:22:18.400 | That's no surprise to those of you

00:22:19.640 | that get headaches and migraines.

00:22:20.820 | But dehydration can compound the vulnerability

00:22:25.260 | to migraine and headache.

00:22:26.320 | So I drink water, I drink black coffee, or I drink mate,

00:22:28.940 | which is just because I have Argentine lineage,

00:22:31.420 | which is just a high caffeine drink

00:22:33.780 | first thing in the morning.

00:22:34.620 | But I delay it until two hours after I wake up.

00:22:38.060 | And that's because I want the circuits

00:22:41.140 | between my eye and my circadian clock and my adrenals

00:22:44.700 | to be functioning in a particular way

00:22:46.840 | so that then later the caffeine is an addition,

00:22:49.220 | it adds more alertness.

00:22:50.960 | Now, this is a discussion about how to optimize your brain.

00:22:54.280 | Many people who wake up quickly

00:22:56.540 | and just naturally feel like bouncing out of bed,

00:22:59.100 | I envy these people,

00:23:00.920 | they will do just fine by going into a learning bout

00:23:05.060 | or taking care of whatever it is

00:23:07.180 | that they need to take care of.

00:23:08.140 | Sometimes that's kind of more mundane tasks

00:23:10.380 | like email and whatnot.

00:23:12.980 | Here's more or less a rule about how the brain functions

00:23:17.520 | vis-a-vis focus, learning, and creativity.

00:23:20.860 | And I'm gonna discuss this much more in future episodes.

00:23:24.580 | Generally, states of high alertness,

00:23:27.260 | when we're very, very alert,

00:23:29.060 | are great for strategy implementation,

00:23:32.360 | when we already know how to do something.

00:23:34.780 | And it's just simply a matter of plugging

00:23:38.380 | the correct elements into the correct boxes.

00:23:41.100 | Things I've talked before about duration, path, and outcome

00:23:44.900 | as the three things that the deliberate conscious brain

00:23:47.740 | is trying to figure out in order to perform certain tasks,

00:23:51.020 | even cognitive tasks.

00:23:52.900 | This is the sort of thing that we are very good at

00:23:56.100 | when we're well-rested and we're focused.

00:23:58.720 | And our autonomic arousal, or our alertness rather,

00:24:01.480 | as it is at a high level.

00:24:03.420 | If you are somebody who is hitting that alertness

00:24:06.420 | phase of your day very early, right after you wake up,

00:24:09.580 | that's a great time to move right into things that,

00:24:13.220 | at least the research says,

00:24:14.760 | you already know, have the strategy

00:24:16.660 | and you just wanna implement the strategy.

00:24:19.100 | This is where I fundamentally depart from the idea that,

00:24:21.800 | oh, you know, you have to do the hardest

00:24:23.420 | or most critical tasks throughout the day.

00:24:24.940 | Sometimes the hardest and most critical tasks

00:24:27.260 | are tasks that require creativity.

00:24:29.480 | And as we'll soon talk about,

00:24:31.600 | creativity and tasks related to it,

00:24:35.040 | oftentimes come to us best,

00:24:38.260 | or the brain is best at achieving those,

00:24:40.220 | when we're in states of calm or even slightly drowsy,

00:24:44.380 | which is something that's interesting and we'll get into.

00:24:47.060 | But for me, for instance, I get up,

00:24:48.960 | I'm not terribly alert first thing.

00:24:51.220 | And so I try and just get my brain

00:24:53.380 | and my thoughts organized.

00:24:54.900 | It's not a time for me to be responding

00:24:56.960 | in a very linear fashion to emails

00:24:58.980 | or carrying out calculations.

00:25:01.020 | That comes about two hours later.

00:25:02.580 | And I think many people out there will relate,

00:25:04.740 | mid-morning is when we tend to,

00:25:06.700 | when many people tend to achieve their peak

00:25:08.640 | in alertness and focus.

00:25:10.440 | Now, many times I get the question,

00:25:14.200 | and this is what I'm about to say is directly related

00:25:16.740 | to the hundreds of questions I got about this.

00:25:19.780 | Should I use background music in order to learn?

00:25:23.080 | Should I have, you know, construction next door?

00:25:26.300 | Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

00:25:27.820 | Is it better to be in complete silence, et cetera?

00:25:30.260 | Now this will vary.

00:25:31.180 | Some people can tolerate their own noise

00:25:33.460 | within their head much better than others.

00:25:34.980 | Other people find that having some background noise

00:25:37.540 | helps cancel that out.

00:25:39.860 | But there's a simple rule of thumb that one can use

00:25:42.700 | because at least my experience is that sometimes

00:25:45.860 | background music, background noise is very helpful

00:25:48.540 | for allowing me to focus.

00:25:50.140 | And other times it's very distracting.

00:25:52.700 | So what actually governs that?

00:25:54.820 | Well, we have to ask ourselves,

00:25:57.220 | what is at the source of the lack of focus?

00:26:01.500 | If our lack of focus is because our autonomic arousal,

00:26:04.620 | our alertness is very, very high.

00:26:06.540 | We had a little too much coffee or if there is such a thing,

00:26:09.400 | slept a little too long or we're really stressed

00:26:11.440 | or really activated and we can't seem to focus.

00:26:15.260 | In that case, eliminating background noise

00:26:18.900 | and really just trying to get silence

00:26:21.160 | so that we can quiet some of that autonomic arousal

00:26:25.020 | is going to be best for learning and for implementation

00:26:29.420 | of things we already know how to do

00:26:31.340 | for any kind of focus linear task,

00:26:33.920 | which basically learning is a focus linear task

00:26:36.840 | is that you're just not necessarily performing it well

00:26:38.960 | all the time.

00:26:39.800 | Last time we talked about making errors.

00:26:41.160 | So as a rule of thumb, if you're feeling too keyed up,

00:26:44.620 | then silence and quiet is going to be helpful.

00:26:47.440 | In fact, if you're very keyed up,

00:26:49.240 | a particular circuit related to the basal ganglia

00:26:53.720 | starts getting triggered more easily.

00:26:55.720 | And this circuit I'm going to talk about in depth,

00:26:57.680 | but it's called the go/no-go circuit.

00:27:00.400 | We have circuits that connect our forebrain

00:27:02.780 | to our structure in our brain called the basal ganglia,

00:27:05.220 | which is actually a collection of structures.

00:27:07.280 | And the forebrain, which is involved in rational thought

00:27:10.800 | and thinking and planning and action

00:27:12.280 | is always trying to plan what should I do

00:27:15.080 | and then implement that action.

00:27:16.560 | And the basal ganglia are intimately involved

00:27:18.880 | in that discussion.

00:27:19.700 | There's a reciprocal loop of communication

00:27:22.240 | between basal ganglia and cortex.

00:27:24.400 | The basal ganglia has one set of connections to the cortex

00:27:28.180 | and the cortex back to the basal ganglia

00:27:30.280 | that facilitates go, it facilitates action.

00:27:35.220 | And the molecule, the neuromodulator dopamine

00:27:37.920 | triggers the activation of go.

00:27:40.820 | It tends to make us want to do more things.

00:27:43.320 | It tends to make us bias toward action

00:27:46.420 | by the way that dopamine binds

00:27:48.320 | to something called the D1 receptors,

00:27:50.020 | just a particular type of dopamine receptor

00:27:52.140 | for those of you that want to know.

00:27:54.400 | The no-go pathway, the pathway in the basal ganglia

00:27:58.600 | and cortex that suppresses action

00:28:00.940 | involves dopamine binding to this other receptor

00:28:04.920 | called the D2 receptor.

00:28:06.840 | Now D1, D2 receptors, you can't just consciously decide,

00:28:09.580 | oh, I only want my D1 receptors

00:28:11.200 | and my D2 receptors to be active.

00:28:13.520 | You have to think about which sorts of states of mind

00:28:18.440 | and body facilitate go and which ones facilitate no-go.

00:28:23.440 | Now this is critically important

00:28:26.560 | because doing focused work, accessing plasticity

00:28:29.920 | and learning involve doing certain things

00:28:33.540 | and not doing others.

00:28:35.700 | So here's how it works

00:28:36.680 | and here's how I apply it on a daily basis.

00:28:39.220 | Because I tend to be most alert

00:28:42.260 | first thing mid morning or so,

00:28:45.520 | and then I generally will have my caffeine mid morning,

00:28:47.720 | my peak of alertness in the early part of the day

00:28:52.540 | is occurring for me sometime between 9.30 and 11 a.m.

00:28:55.620 | That's just me, other people might experience that

00:28:57.660 | immediately after rolling out of bed.

00:28:59.160 | They might be wide awake and ready to go,

00:29:01.440 | which case they should be cautious

00:29:02.800 | about throwing caffeine into the mix

00:29:04.180 | because then it's gonna make them very, very alert.

00:29:06.940 | There are three sort of levels of autonomic arousal,

00:29:11.540 | of alertness that bias us more toward go, no-go or both.

00:29:16.540 | And this relates to a question that I've gotten now

00:29:21.860 | hundreds of times from you

00:29:23.960 | in the comment section for this podcast,

00:29:26.420 | which is, is it better for me to listen to music

00:29:29.400 | in the background while I work and learn

00:29:31.820 | or should I have complete silence?

00:29:34.260 | And the answer is it depends,

00:29:37.260 | but it doesn't depend randomly on who you are

00:29:40.140 | or even necessarily time of day.

00:29:42.260 | It depends on your overall level of autonomic arousal.

00:29:47.160 | And it depends because autonomic arousal,

00:29:50.080 | level of alertness biases the extent to which

00:29:52.980 | we are more prone to goes, to action or to no-goes,

00:29:57.980 | to suppress action.

00:30:00.280 | And dopamine is this molecule that's swimming around

00:30:02.880 | and it's going to bias one or the other responses.

00:30:05.140 | So here's how it works.

00:30:05.980 | Let's say I'm very alert.

00:30:07.760 | Maybe I got a particularly good night's sleep

00:30:09.400 | the night before, I had a little too much coffee

00:30:12.300 | and I'm gonna sit down to some work.

00:30:14.740 | The thing to know and what I always tell myself

00:30:17.500 | is when I'm very alert, I am very prone to go to action,

00:30:22.840 | but I'm also prone to not no-go, right?

00:30:27.840 | I'm not gonna be very good at suppressing action.

00:30:30.440 | So those are two different things.

00:30:31.600 | Being biased toward action and being biased

00:30:33.920 | towards suppressing action are two different things, okay?

00:30:37.520 | So those are push-pull.

00:30:39.440 | Toward action, suppress action.

00:30:41.920 | So when you're very alert,

00:30:43.640 | the tendency is for everything to be a stimulus.

00:30:46.320 | This is why when people say,

00:30:47.400 | well, should I just take a drug

00:30:49.840 | that will increase my level of epinephrine and alertness,

00:30:52.200 | will that help me learn better?

00:30:53.200 | No, because it will make you do things,

00:30:55.720 | but it will also make you less good

00:30:57.640 | at suppressing actions that you need to suppress.

00:31:00.720 | So if I'm very alert, particularly alert for me,

00:31:04.120 | and I recognize what that state is, of course,

00:31:06.360 | 'cause everyone will be different.

00:31:07.400 | I know what it is for me.

00:31:08.940 | Then I want silence for learning.

00:31:11.640 | I want to shut down my internet, which I do.

00:31:13.960 | I sometimes use a program

00:31:15.920 | that I believe is a free program called Freedom,

00:31:18.580 | where it actually locks you out of the internet

00:31:22.100 | for a particular time.

00:31:23.340 | They're not a sponsor of the podcast.

00:31:24.540 | I just happen to use it.

00:31:26.540 | There's another version of Freedom

00:31:27.800 | where you go to the wireless thing and you turn it off.

00:31:30.440 | You disconnect from the wireless.

00:31:31.760 | That's the other one,

00:31:32.600 | although many people have a hard time not reactivating it.

00:31:36.140 | So I'm trying to shut down the go pathway

00:31:39.340 | towards distraction.

00:31:41.380 | And the other thing that I'll do

00:31:43.040 | is I'll generally turn off my phone,

00:31:45.180 | put the phone outside in the car,

00:31:46.620 | or in really extreme cases,

00:31:47.980 | I'll throw it up on the roof,

00:31:49.460 | which is hard for me to retrieve

00:31:51.340 | so that I can't get to it.

00:31:52.560 | So if I'm very alert,

00:31:54.000 | I'm aware that I will have a bias toward action.

00:31:57.960 | It will be hard for me to suppress non-action,

00:32:00.620 | but that it's very non-specific

00:32:03.280 | because the next kind of level down of alertness

00:32:06.920 | or autonomic arousal is clear, calm, and focused,

00:32:10.160 | where we have that kind of sweet spot

00:32:12.460 | between our willingness to pursue action.

00:32:16.620 | We're in a mode of go, and it's not always physical action,

00:32:19.100 | but it can be pursuing hard bouts of learning,

00:32:21.980 | but that our ability to suppress is also very good.

00:32:26.380 | And this is because,

00:32:27.340 | and I don't want to get into too many details,

00:32:29.120 | because of the way that dopamine competes

00:32:31.260 | for these dopamine one receptors in the go pathway

00:32:33.580 | and dopamine two receptors in the no-go pathway,

00:32:36.020 | they're always in this kind of push-pull.

00:32:39.080 | And so there is a sweet spot,

00:32:40.500 | and that sweet spot isn't flow

00:32:42.500 | where it is in some sort of state

00:32:44.180 | where all of a sudden things come naturally to us.

00:32:46.180 | The state that we're trying to achieve

00:32:47.660 | that's optimal for learning is one in which

00:32:49.860 | we have the energy and focus to pursue,

00:32:52.180 | but we also have the energy and focus to suppress action.

00:32:55.340 | So the basal ganglia are kind of working

00:32:57.020 | in a perfect kind of sing-songy manner

00:33:00.100 | through this parallel pathway.

00:33:01.860 | Now, as we get tired,

00:33:03.180 | or as we round out an ultradian cycle of about 90 minutes,

00:33:06.700 | what happens is our fatigue,

00:33:09.400 | even if it's not a physical fatigue

00:33:10.800 | that makes us want to go to sleep,

00:33:12.420 | but our mental fatigue starts to accumulate

00:33:14.600 | because these pathways of go, no-go

00:33:17.140 | are actually very metabolically consuming.

00:33:20.100 | So what I recognize is that as I start to falter,

00:33:23.820 | I have a harder time engaging and going,

00:33:26.860 | I also know, or going toward the goal rather,

00:33:30.300 | I also know that my reflex toward actions

00:33:35.300 | that are unrelated to the learning

00:33:36.700 | are also going to start increasing

00:33:38.080 | because I'm not going to be able to suppress action

00:33:42.820 | and activate the no-go pathway.

00:33:44.380 | So if this all sounds like a mouthful,

00:33:45.920 | let's make it very simple for you.

00:33:47.440 | When you are very alert,

00:33:49.180 | the best situation for learning is going to be silence.

00:33:52.740 | It's going to be complete quiet.

00:33:55.140 | If you are low arousal and you're tired

00:33:58.020 | and you're kind of sleepy,

00:33:59.220 | a lot of people find that having some background chatter

00:34:02.060 | and some background noise

00:34:03.740 | can help elevate their level of autonomic arousal.

00:34:06.260 | And that's because our auditory system and our visual system

00:34:09.660 | are linked and are part of really

00:34:11.420 | what's called the salience network,

00:34:13.140 | which is that we're always scanning

00:34:14.360 | our environment for things.

00:34:15.860 | And when we have a lot of things in our environment to scan,

00:34:19.220 | generally our level of alertness goes up.

00:34:21.700 | This is why environments that are very stark

00:34:24.740 | or have very little or very few objects in them

00:34:27.880 | tend to make us feel kind of calm

00:34:29.700 | because our salience network kind of shuts off.

00:34:31.940 | A lot of people don't like that.

00:34:33.080 | They'll go to a meditation retreat

00:34:35.380 | or they'll go into an environment

00:34:36.880 | where there's very little clutter, especially city people,

00:34:39.220 | and all of a sudden they start feeling

00:34:40.900 | really, really anxious.

00:34:42.300 | And that's because their internal level

00:34:44.140 | of autonomic arousal is really high

00:34:45.740 | and it's not being occupied

00:34:46.980 | by all this stuff to pay attention to.

00:34:48.580 | And so their salience network starts to turn inward.

00:34:50.980 | They move from exteroception to interoception.

00:34:54.080 | They're not looking outside themselves.

00:34:55.740 | They're looking inside themselves

00:34:56.820 | and there's a lot of noise in there.

00:34:58.780 | So as a rule of thumb,

00:35:01.220 | if you tend to be kind of on the high level of alertness

00:35:04.720 | and kind of anxiety,

00:35:06.540 | and I'm not talking about clinical levels of anxiety,

00:35:08.740 | but you tend to be pretty high energy,

00:35:11.380 | well then you are definitely going to benefit more

00:35:14.560 | in a learning bout from learning to go

00:35:17.200 | as well as activate the no-go pathway.

00:35:20.140 | And that requires a lot of energy.

00:35:21.700 | And when you have a lot of distractions in your environment,

00:35:24.300 | there's a high probability

00:35:25.700 | that you're going to be distracted from the learning.

00:35:28.020 | Now, some people are just naturally more calm.

00:35:30.360 | They're like my bulldog Costello, who's exceedingly calm.

00:35:33.560 | They're pretty mellow.

00:35:34.580 | They're kind of clear, calm, and focused all of the time.

00:35:37.460 | And those people actually are going to be less flappable.

00:35:40.980 | They're not going to be yanked around by background noise

00:35:43.980 | or they're not going to be around bothered

00:35:46.100 | from their learning or from their studying

00:35:47.940 | by a clanging of a pot from somebody in the kitchen.

00:35:50.980 | So each one of us generally tends to ride up and down

00:35:54.020 | this autonomic ladder, so to speak,

00:35:57.500 | at different times of day.

00:35:58.500 | For most people, three hours after waking,

00:36:01.920 | those three hours, not three hours on the mark,

00:36:04.420 | but that three hour bin,

00:36:05.620 | tends to be the period in which

00:36:07.060 | they're most alert throughout the day.

00:36:08.520 | Except I'll tell you later about a unique time

00:36:11.100 | right before sleep in which you're also very, very alert,

00:36:14.020 | naturally.

00:36:15.380 | So that morning three hours is quite vital.

00:36:18.640 | Now, many of you might ask about exercise

00:36:21.660 | and when to exercise.

00:36:23.220 | I think I may have mentioned this

00:36:24.380 | on a previous podcast episode,

00:36:25.820 | but the research shows that at least for performance,

00:36:28.780 | afternoon exercise might be better

00:36:30.560 | in terms of avoiding injury, et cetera.

00:36:32.140 | But in terms of rising body temperatures,

00:36:34.340 | and matching body temperature to mental alertness, et cetera,

00:36:38.620 | it's pretty clear that exercising early in the day

00:36:42.000 | not only biases us towards waking up earlier,

00:36:44.780 | but that it also triggers the release of things

00:36:47.220 | like epinephrine and other neuromodulators

00:36:50.200 | that lend itself to a situation

00:36:53.540 | where we have heightened levels of arousal

00:36:56.360 | and mental acuity in the late morning

00:36:58.880 | and even into the afternoon.

00:37:00.540 | This can be very good

00:37:01.820 | because if you want to restrict most of your focus learning

00:37:04.700 | to the early part of the day,

00:37:05.860 | exercising early in the day does set a neurochemical context

00:37:09.960 | or milieu for go.

00:37:11.680 | It tends to trigger activation of the go pathway.

00:37:14.620 | And so for those of you like myself,

00:37:16.380 | who have a hard time kind of engaging

00:37:17.940 | and getting into action early in the day,

00:37:19.780 | early morning exercise within an hour of waking

00:37:22.420 | and certainly no later than three hours after waking

00:37:25.440 | will give you quote unquote more energy throughout the day.

00:37:28.860 | It will make you feel more biased for action.

00:37:31.220 | You won't feel as lethargic.

00:37:32.820 | So in kind of reviewing what I've said up until now,

00:37:35.840 | I do the morning light thing,

00:37:37.520 | I delay my caffeine two hours after waking

00:37:40.520 | and then I generally try and get exercise in the first hour

00:37:44.900 | or ideally within the first three hours of waking up

00:37:47.440 | and then I'll move into a focused learning bout.

00:37:49.980 | Now, some of you wrote to me and said,

00:37:52.520 | if I exercise early in the day,

00:37:53.780 | then I feel a crash afterwards.

00:37:55.380 | If that exercise is very, very intense,

00:37:57.420 | so you're depleting all your glycogen,

00:37:59.060 | so you're doing heavy deadlifts, et cetera,

00:38:01.060 | chances are after you eat, you will start to feel a crash.

00:38:04.700 | So this relates to timing of nutrition

00:38:06.800 | and in just as a general rule of thumb,

00:38:09.180 | fasted states and low carbohydrate states,

00:38:12.540 | I'm not talking about a keto diet around the clock

00:38:15.540 | or all week, but fasted states

00:38:18.600 | and low carbohydrate states lend themselves to alertness

00:38:22.300 | and that's because carbohydrates are rich in tryptophan

00:38:25.740 | and they tend to lend themselves to sleepiness.

00:38:28.860 | Of course, ingesting large amounts of any kind of food,

00:38:31.700 | any substance that fills your gut will divert blood

00:38:35.260 | to your gut, so if you eat a lot of food,

00:38:37.460 | regardless of whether or not

00:38:38.300 | it's a lot of carbohydrate or not,

00:38:39.780 | you're going to generally feel more sleepy.

00:38:42.260 | Now, many people, including everyone,

00:38:45.200 | use food to modulate their levels of autonomic arousal

00:38:49.580 | and typically eating shifts us more towards a state of calm

00:38:53.220 | and fasting shifts us more toward a state of alertness

00:38:55.900 | and these are hardwired circuits

00:38:57.420 | that relate to the need and desire to find food,

00:38:59.660 | which requires action or the so-called rest and digest system

00:39:03.480 | which diverts our resources and our energy towards digestion

00:39:06.960 | and makes us feel calm.

00:39:08.320 | So I personally rely on water, mate and black coffee

00:39:13.320 | first thing in the day in order to exercise

00:39:16.180 | and get into the first round of work.

00:39:19.140 | If I find that I'm too alert

00:39:20.740 | and then I generally will tend to eat

00:39:23.760 | and kind of bring down my level of alertness

00:39:26.060 | and we'll continue working.

00:39:27.460 | Now, this isn't a strict thing

00:39:28.700 | and since people ask me what I do

00:39:31.300 | and I'm not dictating that people follow it exactly,

00:39:33.860 | of course, or even generally,

00:39:35.340 | but I'll just tell you what I do.

00:39:36.580 | It is possible if you're drinking black coffee

00:39:39.200 | and you're, or mate, and you're ingesting a lot of water

00:39:42.220 | that you're going to dehydrate yourself somewhat

00:39:44.340 | because of excretion of sodium.

00:39:46.560 | Provided you don't have hypertension,

00:39:47.960 | salt is a really good thing.

00:39:49.620 | A lot of people think that they are low on blood sugar

00:39:52.120 | because they're shaky and they can't think

00:39:53.820 | or they have a headache when actually they're low in sodium.

00:39:56.620 | And especially if you're drinking a lot of caffeine.

00:39:59.140 | So I'm a big believer in salt.

00:40:00.640 | So I drink salt water first thing in the morning

00:40:02.800 | because I drink black coffee

00:40:03.920 | and that keeps my levels of alertness really good.

00:40:05.940 | I always thought that I had messed up blood sugar.

00:40:08.220 | I had shaky hands and I didn't know what was going on.

00:40:11.320 | I'd drink a little bit of coffee and feel too amped up.

00:40:13.660 | It turns out that it was a sodium issue.

00:40:16.060 | And if I just drank water with a little bit of sea salt

00:40:19.120 | and or even just a general table, typical table salt,

00:40:22.100 | then I felt rock solid in terms of my blood sugar.

00:40:24.860 | Now, again, I'm not a physician, I'm a professor

00:40:27.660 | so I don't prescribe anything, but I profess lots of things.

00:40:30.600 | So I don't want people who have diabetes

00:40:32.600 | or blood sugar issues to go off the rails.

00:40:34.840 | You're responsible for your health, not me.

00:40:37.060 | But it's an interesting parameter to think about

00:40:39.320 | and experiment with provided that your doctor says it's okay

00:40:42.340 | because I think a lot of people

00:40:44.440 | probably ingest too much sodium

00:40:45.660 | but a lot of people might be sodium deficient

00:40:47.400 | in particular the people that are fasting.

00:40:50.260 | I typically eat my first meal right around midday.

00:40:54.900 | Whether or not I've exercised or not.

00:40:56.720 | And the food content there is actually quite important to me.

00:41:00.940 | I don't know why this is.

00:41:02.580 | I don't have a scientific mechanism for this

00:41:05.060 | but if I eat hot food for lunch, I get sleepy after lunch.

00:41:08.020 | So I generally don't eat hot food for lunch.

00:41:10.380 | I might have a little bit of soup or something like that.

00:41:12.220 | But in general, I rely on a low carbohydrate meal.

00:41:15.840 | I'll eat meat or salad or some variation of that

00:41:18.060 | and nuts and fats and things like that

00:41:20.660 | because of the choline content for focus

00:41:22.960 | because the protein's good in my belief

00:41:25.460 | and because I believe in eating fruits and vegetables

00:41:27.620 | I do that too.

00:41:28.460 | If I've exercised very hard early in the day

00:41:30.820 | I do ingest starches like oatmeal or rice

00:41:33.500 | and fruit and things like that.

00:41:34.820 | Now, why am I telling you all this?

00:41:36.040 | Because hundreds, if not a thousand people ask me

00:41:39.940 | is fasting good for focus?

00:41:41.980 | And indeed fasting will increase alertness

00:41:44.900 | but if you're so hungry or preoccupied with food

00:41:47.660 | that you can't focus,

00:41:48.880 | well then it's not gonna be good for learning.

00:41:50.380 | It's only gonna be good for agitation.

00:41:53.060 | Now, I'm just gonna continue to march through my day.

00:41:57.460 | And this is of course what I experienced.

00:42:00.260 | Some people are quite different

00:42:01.740 | but what I find is around two or 3 p.m.

00:42:04.500 | I start getting a little groggy, a little bit sleepy.

00:42:07.540 | I will tend to shift my work

00:42:10.020 | from work that requires a lot of duration path outcome

00:42:13.340 | really careful analysis and activation of the no-go pathway

00:42:17.500 | meaning I'm trying to suppress the impulse

00:42:19.500 | to look at my phone or answer email or do other things.

00:42:21.900 | This is why I haven't emailed you back

00:42:23.340 | until three in the afternoon, by the way

00:42:25.360 | or responded to your text messages

00:42:26.800 | whoever you are out there.

00:42:28.080 | Around early afternoon

00:42:31.520 | I find I can do kind of typical more mundane tasks

00:42:35.500 | because those tasks require less cognitive load

00:42:40.500 | and they can be done more or less in and out of sequence.

00:42:45.600 | I can answer a couple of email here

00:42:47.000 | maybe answer that email there.

00:42:48.500 | I don't have to do it in pure linear fashion.

00:42:51.000 | Any kind of linear work or learning work

00:42:53.320 | is going to take a lot of focus.

00:42:54.840 | And then typically around 4 p.m. or so, I do two things.

00:42:59.840 | Sometimes a little earlier, sometimes a little later

00:43:01.520 | but I do two things.

00:43:03.260 | One is I make sure I hydrate

00:43:05.460 | because if you're exercising and you're eating

00:43:07.500 | you need to digest that food, et cetera.

00:43:09.700 | I make sure I hydrate so I drink water.

00:43:11.680 | I try and refrain from drinking coffee in the afternoon.

00:43:14.200 | This is a new thing for me.

00:43:15.400 | I sometimes do it, but I try and refrain from that.

00:43:18.800 | And then I always do a non-sleep deep rest protocol

00:43:22.800 | sometime in the afternoon.

00:43:23.900 | This is sometimes a 10 minute yoga nidra type protocol

00:43:26.880 | or a 30 minute yoga nidra type protocol.

00:43:29.720 | These are protocols that I have no relationship to

00:43:31.720 | no business relationship to whatsoever.

00:43:33.560 | I've been doing them for years now.

00:43:35.520 | They involve listening to a script.

00:43:37.600 | We'll provide the links again

00:43:38.980 | although we've provided them before

00:43:41.560 | or I'll do a hypnosis protocol from Reverie Health

00:43:44.960 | which is my colleague David Spiegel's website

00:43:48.120 | that has these free hypnosis apps

00:43:50.440 | or scripts that you can listen to.

00:43:52.920 | And those take me into a state of really deep rest

00:43:56.540 | sometimes so much so that I fall asleep.

00:43:58.520 | And I always set an alarm

00:43:59.600 | so that I don't sleep for longer than 90 minutes.

00:44:01.480 | But typically this goes for about 30 minutes.

00:44:03.600 | And I do that because for me by about 4.30 in the afternoon

00:44:07.760 | I'm capable of doing basically nothing.

00:44:10.280 | I am just a complete Costello.

00:44:12.740 | I can't think, I can't do, I can't respond to email.

00:44:17.320 | I've just completely trough my ability to function.

00:44:21.440 | I personally find it a mistake to at that point

00:44:24.960 | down a double espresso and charge really hard.

00:44:28.200 | It just doesn't work for me.

00:44:29.300 | I end up really disrupting my sleep schedule.

00:44:31.380 | I end up disrupting a lot of different things.

00:44:33.080 | So for me, I do the non-sleep deep rest protocol.

00:44:36.400 | It really helps me later when I need to fall asleep.

00:44:39.200 | It helps with all sorts of things as I mentioned before

00:44:42.320 | but I usually emerge from that a little groggy

00:44:45.600 | or feeling like I have another whole day second wind.

00:44:49.940 | Like I could just work, work, work, work, work.

00:44:51.760 | And then I'll do a second bout of learning.

00:44:55.400 | I'll do some sort of work

00:44:56.760 | that either involves linear analysis of something.

00:45:00.360 | So maybe numerical work or I'm trying to learn something.

00:45:04.680 | I generally try and really use those bouts

00:45:07.800 | of 90 minute focused energy after the non-sleep deep rest.

00:45:10.920 | And as I mentioned in previous episodes

00:45:12.480 | there's a lot of evidence

00:45:14.000 | that these non-sleep deep rest protocols

00:45:15.840 | can enhance and accelerate plasticity.

00:45:18.120 | The most, I think, recent and striking one

00:45:22.440 | is the study that we referenced last time

00:45:24.680 | in the caption notes was the Cell Press article,

00:45:27.680 | Cell Reports, great journal was showing

00:45:30.360 | that these 20 minute kind of shallow naps

00:45:33.960 | and non-sleep deep rest

00:45:35.000 | can facilitate sensory motor learning.

00:45:37.540 | So then I'll go into another learning bout

00:45:38.920 | that's caffeine free.

00:45:40.280 | This learning bout is very different than the morning one.

00:45:43.280 | This is a work bout or learning bout

00:45:45.060 | that's more in the clear common focus regime

00:45:47.400 | because I've come out of this non-sleep deep rest.

00:45:50.180 | I'm not ingesting caffeine

00:45:51.640 | because I want to make sure

00:45:52.480 | that I can sleep later that night really well.

00:45:54.960 | And this tends to be more when I do creative type work.

00:45:59.080 | Now, creativity is a topic

00:46:00.480 | that we're going to spend the entire month on

00:46:02.960 | coming up soon.

00:46:04.200 | But creativity is a very interesting state of mind

00:46:07.280 | in which we're taking existing elements,

00:46:09.920 | things that we already know

00:46:12.200 | and rearranging them in ways that are novel.

00:46:15.840 | And I'd say, well, duh, that's what creativity is.

00:46:19.240 | But creativity has two parts.

00:46:21.300 | It has a creative discovery mode

00:46:25.020 | where you're kind of shuffling things around

00:46:26.720 | in a very relaxed way

00:46:27.920 | and kind of being playful

00:46:28.960 | or exploring different configurations.

00:46:31.600 | And then creativity also has

00:46:33.880 | an absolutely linear implementation mode

00:46:36.840 | in which you take the idea or the design you've come up with

00:46:40.160 | and you create something very robust and concrete.

00:46:43.600 | And so creativity is really a two-part thing.

00:46:46.460 | And the first part

00:46:48.040 | of actively exploring different configurations,

00:46:50.880 | sometimes in a playful way,

00:46:52.560 | sometimes in a way that's almost random

00:46:56.200 | and just kind of exploring,

00:46:58.320 | that state is definitely facilitated

00:47:02.320 | by being relaxed and almost sleepy.

00:47:06.200 | That is not a state that I personally can access

00:47:08.440 | very well early in the day.

00:47:09.680 | I've tried to access it coming out of sleep

00:47:11.560 | because one would say,

00:47:12.500 | well, you're still sleepy early in the day.

00:47:13.900 | And it just doesn't work.

00:47:14.740 | Most of what I write down,

00:47:15.760 | most of what I do is complete garbage.

00:47:18.000 | And so what I found is there's this block

00:47:20.120 | in the afternoon of about 90 minutes

00:47:21.840 | where I can do creative type writing

00:47:24.540 | or creative type imagination of scientific ideas

00:47:29.360 | or experiments we might want to do.

00:47:30.720 | Science might not seem like a creative endeavor

00:47:32.560 | to many of you, but it is.

00:47:33.600 | It has a lot of imagining what if this,

00:47:36.480 | or we could combine that

00:47:37.660 | and thinking of novel concepts or ways of arranging things.

00:47:40.920 | So when you find yourself

00:47:42.240 | in that kind of clear, calm, and focused mode,

00:47:44.480 | creative works tend to come about very well

00:47:47.440 | in those regimes.

00:47:48.980 | Now, I know that a lot of people out there

00:47:50.380 | rely on substances to access creative states.

00:47:53.940 | I'm not a marijuana user.

00:47:55.400 | It's just not the drug for me for a variety of reasons.

00:47:59.000 | I'm not a drinker.

00:48:00.440 | It's not the substance for me for a variety of reasons.

00:48:03.560 | I'm not a cop.

00:48:05.460 | I'm not out here to tell people what they should do

00:48:07.160 | or shouldn't do.

00:48:08.140 | The problem with using substances to access creativity

00:48:11.740 | is that generally the substances that relax people

00:48:15.860 | will allow them to get into that creative brainstorming mode

00:48:19.780 | but not so good at the linear implementation mode.

00:48:23.780 | The other day, I was remarking with a friend

00:48:28.460 | that there are some ads, some advertisements

00:48:30.880 | that I've seen over the years that are just incredible.

00:48:34.860 | I'll just tell you what they are

00:48:35.780 | so that it's not cryptic or anything.

00:48:36.940 | I'm revealing my taste here.

00:48:37.980 | There's a particular perfume ad that Spike Jones made

00:48:42.300 | that is just amazing.

00:48:44.060 | I'll put a link to it 'cause it's just so cool

00:48:46.660 | and it's just so, and it has an,

00:48:48.940 | I don't want to give away the end,

00:48:49.900 | but it has a feature of it

00:48:50.900 | that is particularly interesting to me as a neuroscientist.

00:48:54.740 | And it's just so cool.

00:48:56.340 | 'Cause I grew up in the skateboarding thing,

00:48:57.740 | I knew a little bit about Spike's movies and skateboarding,

00:48:59.780 | and he's, of course, made a lot of very impressive,

00:49:02.220 | popular movies as well, full-length features.

00:49:05.200 | I don't know him personally, so this isn't a plug,

00:49:07.860 | not that he needs my endorsement for anything at all.

00:49:10.340 | But the amazing thing about this advertisement

00:49:14.760 | is it's a kind of, it's a collection of things

00:49:17.300 | that you would never really think would be combined,

00:49:19.880 | and it involves different speeds of motion

00:49:22.120 | and all sorts of effects.

00:49:23.580 | I mean, it's like a real classic,

00:49:24.880 | like Spike Jones kind of delivery.

00:49:26.960 | But what's incredible is when you think about

00:49:30.460 | not just the fact that someone had to imagine that,

00:49:32.840 | but to actually implement the steps in order to create that,

00:49:37.060 | when you see this, you'll realize that was a ton of work.

00:49:39.780 | You can't just put that together randomly.

00:49:41.500 | And so a lot of people, not Spike, clearly,

00:49:45.400 | but a lot of people who have an incredible mind for ideas

00:49:50.400 | and novel arrangements of things,

00:49:53.440 | they are great at accessing that state,

00:49:55.360 | but not so good at accessing the implementation state.

00:49:58.060 | And then it's also true that a lot of people,

00:50:00.900 | and some who tend to fall on what we would call

00:50:03.000 | the kind of like more Asperger's

00:50:05.000 | or autism end of the spectrum,

00:50:06.740 | are very good at linear implementation.

00:50:09.140 | Now, I'm not talking about all forms of autism, of course.

00:50:11.200 | I'm sensitive to the fact that there are many forms

00:50:13.120 | on the spectrum.

00:50:14.260 | But some people are very good at linear implementation,

00:50:17.740 | and that's a separate state from a creative state.

00:50:22.200 | So that afternoon block is when I try and access

00:50:25.320 | the freer kind of looser mindset

00:50:27.980 | that's associated with the fatigue

00:50:29.300 | that comes later in the afternoon.

00:50:31.000 | And for some of you, that state that favors creativity

00:50:36.140 | and creative learning might be better in the morning.

00:50:39.040 | I don't know.

00:50:39.880 | You're going to have to decide.

00:50:40.700 | For some of you, you're going to be late shifted.

00:50:42.700 | Some of you are going to be morning shifted.

00:50:44.340 | But where we have alertness,

00:50:45.740 | generally we are good at linear implementation.

00:50:47.860 | We're good at activating the no-go pathway

00:50:50.100 | and suppressing action.

00:50:51.220 | And we are good at pursuing particular goals

00:50:54.660 | and strategy implementation.

00:50:56.820 | And where we tend to be more relaxed,

00:50:58.980 | and we tend to be almost in a kind of sleepy mode.

00:51:01.080 | So for me coming out of one of these non-sleep

00:51:02.820 | deep rest modes or sleep,

00:51:04.800 | that's when we tend to be better at novel configurations

00:51:08.700 | of existing elements, which is creativity.

00:51:11.140 | And this brings about a question that I get all the time,

00:51:15.260 | which is what about psychedelics?

00:51:18.200 | So I am going to talk to some experts on psychedelics.

00:51:22.480 | I hope to bring some of them in.

00:51:24.500 | Actually speaking of people coming in

00:51:26.140 | or creatures coming in,

00:51:28.320 | a creature that's definitely not on psychedelics

00:51:30.200 | who doesn't need any is Costello, and he just arrived.

00:51:33.220 | He seems to be in a sleepy state most all the time.

00:51:35.760 | Hey buddy, how you doing?

00:51:37.760 | You come in?

00:51:38.980 | Yeah, he's working on his 15th sleep deep rest episode

00:51:43.580 | of the day, which is generally followed

00:51:45.300 | by a 10 to 12 hour deep rest episodes,

00:51:48.580 | almost exclusively comprised of REM.

00:51:51.340 | And I know this 'cause his eyes are open

00:51:52.920 | 'cause they're so droopy, he can't close them all away.

00:51:54.620 | And his eyes are going like this

00:51:56.380 | and he's going down for the count.

00:51:58.120 | So yeah, nice and big yawn.

00:52:01.580 | Okay, so psychedelics.

00:52:04.500 | First of all, I want to be very clear.

00:52:06.260 | I am neither a proponent nor am I somebody

00:52:09.620 | who rejects the potential role of psychedelics.

00:52:13.180 | I do, however, think that psychedelics

00:52:15.900 | can be particularly hazardous

00:52:18.140 | for people who have preexisting psychological issues

00:52:21.260 | and are not working with a board-certified psychiatrist

00:52:25.040 | or physician, as well as for essentially all kids.

00:52:29.680 | I think that the young brain is basically

00:52:32.020 | in its own psychedelic state and just naturally.

00:52:34.760 | And all kidding aside, I think that the young brain

00:52:38.860 | is so subject to neuroplasticity that drugs

00:52:43.060 | which like psychedelics, which are very powerful,

00:52:45.860 | can be detrimental to the developing brain.

00:52:48.220 | That's just my stance.

00:52:49.300 | If anyone disagrees with me,

00:52:50.660 | I'd be happy to chat with you about it

00:52:52.700 | in a polite and discourse.

00:52:55.480 | I'll be happy to listen as well as tell you

00:52:57.120 | more why I believe that based on the data.

00:52:59.640 | I'm mentioning psychedelics because many of you asked.

00:53:03.760 | Here's the deal with psychedelics.

00:53:05.920 | At least here's how they work.

00:53:07.820 | In a nutshell, psychedelics were thought

00:53:12.400 | to unleash sensory processing and to make it less filtered.

00:53:16.560 | We have a lot of different inputs from our eyes,

00:53:18.300 | from our ears, from our nose, from our taste, et cetera,

00:53:20.200 | that are coming in all the time in parallel.

00:53:22.120 | And we have mechanisms that suppress some of those

00:53:25.140 | and allow us to only focus on things

00:53:26.740 | that are happening visually.

00:53:28.120 | Generally, we don't have synesthesia

00:53:29.880 | unless some of us happen to have synesthesia.

00:53:32.040 | We don't blend what we see with what we hear

00:53:34.460 | in a way that is confusing to us.

00:53:37.280 | We know what's making sounds

00:53:38.540 | and we know what is a visual stimulus.

00:53:42.660 | On psychedelics, people report being able to smell colors

00:53:46.220 | or to hear trees, et cetera.

00:53:49.800 | And that's because there's a lot of sensory blending.

00:53:51.860 | However, that's led to the misconception

00:53:54.440 | that sensory blending itself is a creative process.

00:53:58.080 | There's nothing creative about sensory blending.

00:54:01.060 | The essence of a creative process

00:54:05.580 | is that some novel configuration of elements,

00:54:08.980 | whether or not it's notes on a piano

00:54:11.040 | or whether or not it's words on a page,

00:54:12.400 | whether or not it's numbers or whether or not it's movement,

00:54:15.040 | that some way in which those are configured in some new way

00:54:20.840 | that the algorithm, the way in which they are configured

00:54:25.040 | makes sense to the observer.

00:54:27.260 | And this is a key thing.

00:54:28.500 | It seems to me

00:54:29.340 | that when people report their psychedelic experiences,

00:54:31.780 | it makes a lot more sense to the person who experiences it

00:54:34.520 | than to the observer.

00:54:35.880 | And so creative works by definition

00:54:40.260 | are new ways of configuring things that lend themselves

00:54:43.640 | to a bigger or greater or deeper or novel understanding

00:54:47.920 | on the part of the observer.

00:54:49.820 | And just sensory blending is not gonna accomplish that.

00:54:52.900 | Now, it is true.

00:54:53.760 | And there's a great review in the journal Cell,

00:54:55.940 | excellent journal, about how psychedelics work.

00:54:58.260 | And it turns out they don't just work

00:55:00.920 | by allowing for more sensory blending.

00:55:03.840 | They do, because of the way that they activate

00:55:06.560 | certain serotonin receptors, et cetera,

00:55:08.420 | they do lend themselves to more lateral connectivity

00:55:11.640 | between different brain areas, more novel associations.

00:55:14.920 | So in principle, in principle, I should say,

00:55:17.720 | not necessarily in practice, but in principle,

00:55:20.020 | they do allow different areas of the brain,

00:55:22.900 | maybe even the two sides of the brain,

00:55:24.340 | to communicate more broadly than they would normally.

00:55:27.660 | So that has certain elements that speak to creativity,

00:55:31.840 | but it can't simply be the case

00:55:33.940 | that psychedelics are the portal to creativity

00:55:37.500 | because creativity, as I mentioned before,

00:55:39.760 | involves not just novel associations

00:55:42.740 | and a breaking of kind of space-time rules.

00:55:45.360 | It also involves reconfiguring things

00:55:48.380 | such that the new space-time rule that one comes up with

00:55:52.080 | is interesting, stimulating, and kind of, in many cases,

00:55:55.740 | delightful to the observer.

00:55:58.100 | And that's why many claims that psychedelics open plasticity

00:56:03.100 | or they increase creativity,

00:56:06.220 | that's not sufficient for me personally.

00:56:08.660 | I'm curious about,

00:56:09.720 | does it not just open the creative thinking process,

00:56:13.040 | this novel configuration process,

00:56:14.640 | but does it also lend itself

00:56:16.820 | to the implementation of creative works?

00:56:19.020 | And the answer is no.

00:56:21.220 | In most cases,

00:56:22.300 | it has nothing to do with creative implementation.

00:56:25.620 | Now, I think that there may come a time,

00:56:29.220 | and certainly there are clinical trials

00:56:30.520 | that are happening now,

00:56:31.580 | where psychedelics are leveraged

00:56:32.940 | toward particular clinical goals.

00:56:34.920 | And I want to tip my hat to the work at Johns Hopkins

00:56:37.720 | that's happening now,

00:56:38.940 | which really lends itself to the idea,

00:56:42.480 | the early preliminary data

00:56:43.700 | and some of the papers that are coming out of there

00:56:45.140 | are really fantastic,

00:56:46.500 | showing that there may be some excellent roles

00:56:50.500 | for certain psychedelics in certain clinical contexts.

00:56:53.160 | These are clinical studies done with a psychiatrist present

00:56:55.940 | that is authorized to do that,

00:56:58.400 | that can help people through depression, trauma, et cetera.

00:57:01.000 | And we're going to spend a lot of time talking about that,

00:57:03.580 | including with some of those folks running those studies.

00:57:06.360 | So we can look forward to that.

00:57:07.860 | So all of this is to say that no,

00:57:10.440 | I don't take psychedelics to access creative states.

00:57:13.400 | That's not where I think the major role,

00:57:16.840 | the important role of psychedelics might show up

00:57:19.280 | if it's going to for humanity.

00:57:20.720 | I think that it may have these important roles

00:57:23.460 | in the clinical context,

00:57:24.760 | provided it's done legally and safely.

00:57:27.380 | I think that the creative process being a two-stage process

00:57:31.900 | means that I am personally best served

00:57:34.900 | by having this period of nonlinear exploration of concepts,

00:57:39.460 | whatever it is I happen to be working on in the afternoon,

00:57:42.660 | but then I'll actually shelve that work.

00:57:44.960 | I'll just set it aside and then I'll revisit it the next day

00:57:48.140 | or even the next day to see whether or not

00:57:50.860 | that the work itself is ready

00:57:53.500 | for deliberate linear implementation,

00:57:55.560 | which I would want to do

00:57:56.400 | during one of these highly focused states.

00:57:58.500 | So the long and short way of saying this

00:58:01.180 | is that when we're very alert,

00:58:02.580 | do linear type of operations.

00:58:04.620 | When we tend to be more sleepy and more relaxed,

00:58:07.340 | that's when creative works can first be conceived,

00:58:11.100 | but their implementation requires high levels of alertness.

00:58:15.420 | Now that gets us more to the kind of late afternoon evening.

00:58:20.320 | Now I am, as I've mentioned before,

00:58:22.380 | I'm a proponent of getting sunlight in the evening as well.

00:58:26.100 | This is a critical thing that I have not mentioned before.

00:58:30.420 | Here's how it works.

00:58:32.140 | Many people now have heard me say

00:58:33.740 | getting light early in the day is important,

00:58:35.900 | but that will advance one's clock.

00:58:38.680 | It'll make you want to get up earlier the next day.

00:58:41.520 | By getting light in the evening,

00:58:43.020 | it accomplishes two things for me.

00:58:44.600 | First of all, it makes sure that I don't get up too early,

00:58:47.400 | that I'm not waking up at three or four in the morning

00:58:49.420 | because it's going to shift my clock.

00:58:52.120 | It's going to delay it a little bit.

00:58:53.880 | And so this is really important.

00:58:55.860 | If you want to keep your schedule on a normal routine

00:58:59.800 | on a regular 24 hour cycle

00:59:02.320 | and not have your circadian rhythms of sleep and wakefulness

00:59:04.760 | drifting all over the place,

00:59:05.940 | and you want some predictability

00:59:07.240 | to how your mind is going to work

00:59:08.760 | in order to optimize learning and performance,

00:59:11.020 | well, then you need to get morning light and evening light.

00:59:13.300 | The morning light is going to advance my clock,

00:59:15.140 | make my system want to get up earlier,

00:59:16.900 | and the evening light is going to delay my clock

00:59:19.360 | a little bit so that on average,

00:59:20.640 | it kind of bookends my circadian mechanisms,

00:59:23.260 | and I'll basically want to go to sleep

00:59:25.260 | at more or less the same time each night

00:59:26.780 | and wake up more or less at the same time each morning.

00:59:30.200 | That's how it works.

00:59:31.400 | And that's a hardwired mechanism.

00:59:34.000 | That's not some subjective thing that I tell myself.

00:59:36.500 | That's a hardwired mechanism.

00:59:38.720 | So that gets us to the evening.

00:59:41.100 | And generally in the evening,

00:59:42.340 | I'll get that light by going outside,

00:59:44.040 | or sometimes I'll do it

00:59:44.980 | by turning up artificial lights brightly,

00:59:47.120 | and then I'll start to dim them for the evening,

00:59:48.980 | 'cause as I've mentioned many times before,

00:59:50.540 | and I'm not going to belabor the point,

00:59:52.160 | you want to minimize your light exposure,

00:59:54.360 | especially overhead bright light exposure,

00:59:56.280 | regardless of whether or not it's blue light or not,

00:59:58.560 | in the evening from about 10 p.m. to 4 a.m.

01:00:01.080 | Some of you asked, "Wait, I thought it was 11 p.m. to 4 a.m."

01:00:04.560 | Well, it is, but 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. is even better.

01:00:07.740 | It's just that when I originally said 10 p.m. to 4 a.m.,

01:00:11.960 | people were like, "That's impossible

01:00:13.240 | for most people to adhere to."

01:00:14.580 | So for me, it screens off, it's dim lights,

01:00:18.660 | and that's what favors falling asleep

01:00:21.000 | in a good night's sleep for me.

01:00:23.180 | Since we were talking about food earlier,

01:00:24.660 | I'll just revisit a little bit of what I said before.

01:00:27.180 | My evening meal tends to be more carbohydrate rich,

01:00:30.780 | if I have proteins, it'll be like eggs, fish,

01:00:33.240 | or chicken, or something of that sort, or no protein,

01:00:35.840 | and I eat high carbohydrates.

01:00:37.760 | So I'm not one of these people that's keto,

01:00:40.080 | or high meat only, or anything like that.

01:00:43.120 | Remember, fasting in low carbohydrate states

01:00:45.420 | facilitate alertness.

01:00:47.540 | Carbohydrate rich foods facilitate calmness and sleepiness.

01:00:51.440 | They stimulate the release of tryptophan

01:00:53.160 | and the transition to sleep.

01:00:55.120 | So that's why I do them late in the day.

01:00:56.540 | Also, if you've exercised early in the day,

01:00:59.300 | especially if it's weight-bearing exercise,

01:01:01.060 | or everything's weight-bearing exercise,

01:01:02.620 | I suppose, unless you're an astronaut, and you're in space.

01:01:05.680 | But if you're early in the day exercising with weights,

01:01:08.420 | or you're doing a long run, or something, sooner or later,

01:01:10.900 | you need to replenish glycogen.

01:01:12.740 | And I realize that the ketonistas out there are gonna say,

01:01:15.700 | well, you know, gluconeogenesis will allow you

01:01:18.380 | to replenish glycogen, et cetera.

01:01:20.220 | I'm just gonna call out the lie right now,

01:01:24.140 | because I feel like doing it,

01:01:25.380 | and 'cause I think it just hasn't been stated,

01:01:27.820 | which is that not everybody, but a lot of the people

01:01:32.160 | that are proponents of high-meat keto diets, fine.

01:01:36.800 | That's fine if that's what they wanna do.

01:01:39.340 | And as you recall, I do relatively ketogenic diet

01:01:42.980 | during the day for alertness or fasting.

01:01:46.060 | But a lot of those people can replenish glycogen really well

01:01:50.340 | without ingesting carbohydrates, so-called gluconeogenesis,

01:01:53.420 | and enhanced protein synthesis,

01:01:55.580 | because they are hormone-enhanced.

01:01:57.800 | And it's just, I've been around a while.

01:02:00.820 | I know what this looks like.

01:02:01.940 | They're either thyroid-enhanced or hormone-enhanced,

01:02:04.380 | and I don't pass any judgment.

01:02:06.140 | But when you look at people who look amazing on keto

01:02:09.220 | and are able to have a lot of energy

01:02:11.020 | and replenish their glycogen on keto,

01:02:13.660 | they are, in many cases, not all,

01:02:18.420 | but in many cases, they're hormone-enhanced.

01:02:20.320 | They're taking exogenous hormones

01:02:22.400 | that allow them to synthesize and repair muscle

01:02:26.380 | in ways that people who aren't taking

01:02:28.080 | those exogenous hormones can't.

01:02:29.520 | This is not just true of the men, by the way.

01:02:31.460 | This is also true of the women.

01:02:32.760 | And this is a whole discussion unto itself,

01:02:34.340 | probably not directly related to this month of the podcast.

01:02:37.660 | So I don't mind that people do this,

01:02:40.900 | but one problem is when people are following

01:02:43.700 | ketogenic diets all the way through to sleep

01:02:45.700 | and they have trouble with sleep,

01:02:46.780 | or they're doing long bouts of fasting

01:02:48.300 | and they're having trouble falling asleep,

01:02:50.100 | that makes sense.

01:02:50.940 | It's because their autonomic arousal

01:02:52.340 | is tilted towards epinephrine release,

01:02:54.860 | norepinephrine release, and dopamine release.

01:02:57.180 | So they have a lot of energy,

01:02:58.200 | but they have a hard time calming down

01:02:59.620 | and getting into deep sleep.

01:03:01.420 | I tend to achieve that state using carbohydrates,

01:03:04.180 | and it also replenishes glycogen.

01:03:06.340 | So again, you know, I'm not trying to draw any fire,

01:03:08.960 | but if I do, I'd be happy to have a conversation

01:03:12.500 | about all that.

01:03:13.960 | Again, no judgment, but I think that most people out there

01:03:16.600 | are not aware of some of the other variables.

01:03:19.420 | Remember, good science is about isolating variables.

01:03:21.720 | And so oftentimes what we're seeing in social media

01:03:24.620 | is we're getting presented single variables

01:03:27.020 | and we're not seeing the full context

01:03:28.540 | of the other variables that are being manipulated.

01:03:31.120 | So I eat pasta and rice and vegetables

01:03:34.260 | and things like that in the evening.

01:03:35.320 | Also, I just find maybe I'm becoming one of the last people

01:03:39.060 | that does that, although I hope not.

01:03:40.780 | I hope there are others out there like me,

01:03:42.760 | but I just, from all the literature speaks to the fact

01:03:46.100 | that carbohydrates not only do that,

01:03:48.020 | but they also help maintain

01:03:49.060 | healthy thyroid function, et cetera.

01:03:51.060 | So that's my bias, that's what I do.

01:03:52.820 | I do avoid caffeine and whatnot in the evening.

01:03:55.740 | I do take supplements and I'll be happy at some point

01:03:58.220 | to put out the complete list of supplements

01:03:59.920 | that I take out there.

01:04:01.940 | But in general, these are the core things that I do

01:04:05.140 | and they relate to a lot of the questions

01:04:06.820 | that you've been asking over time.

01:04:09.180 | The next piece of scientific data that I'm going to describe

01:04:11.980 | is a very important piece of scientific data

01:04:14.520 | for sake of understanding how to optimize your brain

01:04:16.780 | and access sleep.

01:04:17.900 | It also can help and avoid a lot of anxiety issues.

01:04:22.220 | And these relate to data from Charles Zeisler,

01:04:25.740 | doctor, he's an MD,

01:04:27.140 | Chuck Zeisler's lab at Harvard Medical School.

01:04:29.340 | He's run a sleep lab out of Harvard Medical School

01:04:31.420 | for a long time now, does very impressive work.

01:04:34.360 | And what he's shown is that the peak output

01:04:37.840 | of the circadian clock for wakefulness,

01:04:40.500 | in other words, the peak of our wakefulness

01:04:42.600 | and the suppression of the sleep signal

01:04:45.920 | actually happens very late in the day.

01:04:49.100 | So we have this trough of activity

01:04:52.360 | and body temperature is lowest right before waking.

01:04:55.460 | Then as we wake up, our body temperature goes up

01:04:57.720 | and into the afternoon, it continues to go up, up, up, up, up

01:05:00.120 | and then it tends to fall in the evening

01:05:02.260 | and towards bedtime.

01:05:03.940 | But there's a brief blip of release of peptides

01:05:08.760 | and other substances from the sleep centers in the brain

01:05:13.020 | and the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

01:05:14.880 | The sleep center is this preoptic area

01:05:17.520 | that if you want to look that up,

01:05:19.080 | this preoptic area not far from the circadian clock

01:05:21.520 | that signals the peak of alertness and wakefulness

01:05:23.780 | about an hour before bedtime.

01:05:26.940 | You say, "Whoa, that's really weird."

01:05:28.340 | But a lot of people get into bed,

01:05:29.860 | they're ready to go to sleep and they're wide awake

01:05:32.680 | and they think this is an unnatural thing

01:05:34.260 | or there's something wrong with them.

01:05:36.260 | And actually it's not.

01:05:37.780 | This, it's believed, I don't know,

01:05:40.780 | again, I wasn't consulted at the design phase,

01:05:42.900 | but this is, it's believed is a signal

01:05:46.340 | that is helpful to human beings

01:05:47.920 | to start gathering up resources

01:05:50.320 | and securing themselves for a night's sleep

01:05:52.380 | during which we historically were very vulnerable

01:05:55.200 | to attack from other humans and from animals and so forth.

01:05:58.860 | And so that desire to run around and clean the kitchen

01:06:02.140 | or organize things or just a general feeling

01:06:04.140 | of internal anxiety late in the evening,

01:06:06.860 | that's a natural blip that naturally passes

01:06:09.940 | after about 45 to 60 minutes.

01:06:12.360 | Now that's often the time when people start stressing

01:06:15.260 | about the fact that they have something to do the next day

01:06:17.120 | and they worry about not being able to sleep

01:06:18.640 | and it can cascade into a whole set of things.

01:06:20.820 | So another thing that I do throughout my day

01:06:23.260 | is I know that early day I'm gonna be alert,

01:06:26.240 | afternoon I'm gonna be kind of sleepy.

01:06:27.880 | And then as the evening comes around,

01:06:30.120 | in addition to doing all the other things I'm doing,

01:06:32.480 | I anticipate a peak in alertness and activity

01:06:37.240 | and I don't worry about it.

01:06:38.840 | I use that perhaps to get organized for the next day.

01:06:41.080 | But basically I just go through,

01:06:42.960 | if I'm gonna do anything, it's gonna be very mundane tasks

01:06:45.260 | like cleaning or things that require almost zero effort.

01:06:48.560 | And that probably speaks to my cleaning abilities too.

01:06:51.680 | But the fact of the matter is

01:06:53.620 | we don't just go drift off into sleep.

01:06:56.680 | There's this blip of alertness right before sleep

01:06:58.680 | that I hope just cognitively knowing about

01:07:00.620 | will be helpful to people.

01:07:02.400 | And that raises yet another theme

01:07:04.980 | that I think is going to be very important,

01:07:07.300 | which is physiological mechanisms

01:07:11.540 | like these changes in alertness or using breathing tools,

01:07:15.440 | something we'll talk about in future episodes,

01:07:17.260 | to shift our levels of autonomic arousal.

01:07:20.460 | Those are concrete biological phenomenon.

01:07:24.240 | So is fasting.

01:07:25.520 | Fasting will increase alertness that way.

01:07:27.020 | So is caffeine.

01:07:28.280 | Not everybody's susceptible to caffeine

01:07:30.040 | to the same degree or others,

01:07:31.280 | but it's a physiological mechanisms.

01:07:33.360 | We know the receptors, we know the ligands as they're called,

01:07:35.760 | which bind to the receptors.

01:07:37.180 | We know the mechanisms.

01:07:38.380 | They involve cortisol and epinephrine.

01:07:40.920 | Those are the sorts of things

01:07:42.140 | that I personally try and leverage

01:07:44.400 | toward my learning and optimization of my brain

01:07:47.320 | and my activity.

01:07:48.820 | Doing physical activity early in the day, for instance,

01:07:51.560 | tends to give us a longer duration wake-up signal

01:07:54.480 | and tends to accelerate waking up early in the day.

01:07:57.140 | That's why working out late in the day

01:07:58.480 | can sometimes cause people to have trouble falling asleep.

01:08:01.760 | It will also phase delay you,

01:08:03.080 | make it so that you want to wake up later the next day.

01:08:05.440 | It's not just 'cause you're tired,

01:08:06.500 | it's 'cause you shifted your clock

01:08:07.700 | with activity and temperature.

01:08:09.200 | Many people ask me about subjective tools for plasticity.

01:08:14.200 | What about visualization?

01:08:16.480 | Can we just imagine doing a particular activity?

01:08:19.720 | Will that help us get better at that activity?

01:08:23.500 | There are some evidence that visualization can do that.

01:08:26.120 | It's true, but here's the important distinction,

01:08:30.240 | and here's why I personally don't do

01:08:31.720 | much deliberate visualization.

01:08:33.900 | First of all, I get my best ability

01:08:37.820 | or achieve my best ability to visualize things

01:08:39.880 | when I'm in kind of a sleepy state.

01:08:41.520 | I don't know why, but that's when I'm able

01:08:43.160 | to direct my brain towards internal visualization

01:08:46.560 | with my eyes closed.

01:08:47.520 | And generally I fall asleep and I can't remember anything

01:08:50.040 | that I was thinking about before.

01:08:51.680 | Some people, and these are work that was done many years ago

01:08:54.840 | by Roger Shepherd and by others.

01:08:56.880 | Roger was at Stanford, and other labs have done this too,

01:08:59.720 | of course, of rotating objects physically in their mind

01:09:03.640 | as a way of improving or looking at the speed

01:09:06.780 | of spatial calculations and so forth.

01:09:10.840 | Some people are very good at visualization.

01:09:14.000 | They can close their eyes and they can just see objects

01:09:15.980 | and rotate them deliberately, et cetera.

01:09:17.920 | A lot of people like me, when we start doing that,

01:09:21.520 | our mind drifts too easily.

01:09:23.440 | But I like to think I'm a reasonably focused person

01:09:25.920 | in the waking state.

01:09:28.600 | So visualization has, it's interesting

01:09:31.600 | 'cause I think people are very attracted to the idea

01:09:34.140 | that they can just think about something

01:09:35.540 | and then get better at it that way.

01:09:37.080 | And it's probably true if you can be very linear

01:09:41.040 | in the way that you visualize things.

01:09:43.640 | So I wanna repeat that.

01:09:44.460 | I think visualization does have certain power

01:09:47.040 | if you can remain very linear and deliberate and focused

01:09:50.920 | in the visualization.

01:09:52.440 | But many people like myself who are challenged

01:09:55.200 | with maintaining that linear focus with eyes closed

01:09:59.320 | and in visualization,

01:10:01.080 | they don't get much out of visualization.

01:10:03.440 | And I think the data on performance really supports that.

01:10:06.520 | Now, there are examples where, for instance,

01:10:09.000 | people will injure one limb

01:10:10.480 | and then they will exercise the intact limb

01:10:13.600 | or the non-injured limb rather,

01:10:15.600 | and they will visualize the opposite limb.

01:10:17.720 | Sometimes there's even the use of mirror boxes

01:10:19.640 | so that let's say my left limb is injured.

01:10:22.000 | I'm maintaining activity with my right limb,

01:10:25.100 | but I'm using a mirror box

01:10:26.200 | so it looks like my left limb is working well.

01:10:28.480 | Yes, there's some top-down or feedback mechanisms

01:10:32.120 | that support the idea that the injured limb

01:10:34.360 | can rehabilitate more quickly, et cetera.

01:10:36.960 | But those are fairly elaborate schemes.

01:10:39.700 | These aren't the kinds of,

01:10:40.540 | I don't have mirror boxes around my house.

01:10:42.520 | I think these are specialized circumstances.

01:10:45.880 | They're a little bit like the examples

01:10:48.360 | that we see in the news where, oh, so-and-so has a stroke

01:10:51.280 | and then spontaneously speaks a new language.

01:10:53.560 | I don't know what the answer to that is.

01:10:57.480 | It shows that the brain has associative networks

01:11:00.180 | that are typically suppressed and those can be unleashed.

01:11:02.960 | But you certainly don't want to go out

01:11:04.220 | and give yourself a stroke deliberately

01:11:05.500 | to try and unmask some skill

01:11:07.060 | because there's no concrete way to go about that

01:11:11.880 | in a way that you could really know

01:11:13.160 | that you were going to offset

01:11:14.020 | the detrimental effects of the stroke.

01:11:16.360 | In fact, I think it'd be a terrible idea.

01:11:18.300 | So I think what I'm trying to describe is how a typical,

01:11:22.320 | I don't know if I'm typical or normal.

01:11:24.320 | I mean, I've been told otherwise is certainly not normal.

01:11:28.040 | But in terms of the way that I structure my day,

01:11:30.880 | I think that's normal.

01:11:32.640 | That's pretty normal.

01:11:33.660 | I tend to wake up right around, I don't know,

01:11:35.800 | somewhere between 5.30 and 7 a.m.

01:11:38.000 | depending on what I've been doing the night before.

01:11:39.500 | I tend to go to sleep somewhere around 10.30, 11.

01:11:41.760 | I tend to have one bout in the morning

01:11:43.540 | where I can do really focused, hard work.

01:11:45.880 | And I can really activate the go pathway

01:11:48.920 | while also activating the no-go pathway

01:11:51.240 | so that I can really stay focused,

01:11:52.680 | but I rely on some tools.

01:11:54.120 | I have a period in the afternoon where I get sleepy

01:11:56.400 | and kind of out of it like I think most people.

01:11:58.520 | And I tend to come out of that

01:12:01.200 | recognizing the opportunity of that slightly sleepy state

01:12:04.000 | for creative work and for thinking about things

01:12:06.480 | in novel ways.

01:12:07.920 | I get light a couple times a day.

01:12:09.720 | I eat low carb during the day and I eat,

01:12:11.800 | I don't say high, but higher carb.

01:12:14.000 | I eat starches in the evening so in a way I can sleep.

01:12:19.000 | And then I really anticipate that late afternoon

01:12:23.040 | peak and alertness, excuse me, late night peak

01:12:26.360 | and alertness that many people confuse for insomnia

01:12:30.440 | or challenges when actually they're really quite normal

01:12:33.760 | in their circadian cycle.

01:12:35.600 | And then I fall asleep and if all goes well,

01:12:39.720 | I stay asleep for four or five hours.

01:12:42.000 | Typically it's three or four and then I wake up.

01:12:44.280 | I think I'm like most people,

01:12:45.340 | I wake up during the middle of the night.

01:12:47.140 | Now, one thing that I don't think has been discussed a lot,

01:12:49.500 | but that one of my colleagues at the Stanford Sleep Lab

01:12:52.200 | tells me is that every hour and a half or so we all wake up.

01:12:56.120 | Some of you even look around, believe it or not,

01:12:58.280 | and go right back to sleep and you don't recognize it.

01:13:01.160 | Waking up periodically during sleep is the norm.

01:13:04.160 | It is not abnormal.

01:13:05.200 | I don't know why this has been discussed more prominently.

01:13:08.360 | I tend to wake up and if there's a bright light

01:13:10.780 | coming through the blinds or if there's some noise upstairs,

01:13:14.200 | if Costello's snoring particularly loud, I might get up.

01:13:17.360 | I might go use the restroom.

01:13:19.480 | I might pick up a book and read under low light or something

01:13:24.060 | and then I generally fall back asleep

01:13:25.800 | and wake up, typical time for me again,

01:13:28.320 | 5.30 to 7 a.m. in the morning.

01:13:30.640 | This waking up in the middle of the night thing,

01:13:32.600 | as I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast episode today

01:13:35.360 | is not necessarily abnormal.

01:13:37.040 | What it probably reflects is that the real time,

01:13:41.520 | meaning the time that I should go to sleep

01:13:43.600 | is probably closer to eight o'clock.

01:13:45.240 | The word midnight was literally supposed to mean midnight.

01:13:48.560 | We, many, meaning all of us,

01:13:51.080 | were meant to go to sleep and wake up with the rise,

01:13:53.760 | you know, with the setting and rising of the sun.

01:13:56.360 | And we know this because this beautiful study

01:13:59.360 | from University of Colorado

01:14:00.920 | where they took people out into the wilderness

01:14:03.460 | to reset their circadian clocks

01:14:05.040 | by way of, you know, measured by way of melatonin

01:14:08.200 | and cortisol and they had them,

01:14:10.660 | they were completely out of whack

01:14:11.900 | from interacting with screens

01:14:13.200 | and staying up too late, et cetera.

01:14:14.400 | And they basically had them view the sunrise

01:14:16.800 | and view the sunset each evening.

01:14:18.160 | And almost all of them, not all of the students,

01:14:20.840 | but all of them got onto a schedule

01:14:23.080 | where they naturally wanted to go to sleep at sunset

01:14:26.040 | and wake up around sunrise or just before sunrise,

01:14:28.720 | even when they were brought back

01:14:30.000 | into a normal artificial light setting.

01:14:33.080 | So I think that's the natural pattern

01:14:34.720 | and we've just deviated from it with artificial lights.

01:14:37.160 | So waking up at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. doesn't necessarily mean

01:14:40.520 | that there's something screwed up about you

01:14:42.840 | or that, you know, you have anxiety or something,

01:14:45.640 | although you might.

01:14:46.840 | The, what it likely means is that you were supposed

01:14:48.960 | to go to bed much earlier.

01:14:50.260 | And because of this asymmetry

01:14:51.720 | in the autonomic nervous system

01:14:53.040 | where it's much easier for us to push

01:14:55.960 | and to delay our sleep time

01:14:57.720 | than it is to accelerate our wake-up time.

01:15:00.040 | In other words, it's easier to stay up

01:15:03.040 | and hang out at the party,

01:15:04.120 | even if you don't wanna be there,

01:15:05.180 | than it is to wake up when you're exhausted

01:15:07.060 | and you're fast asleep.

01:15:08.200 | Most people are pushing through

01:15:11.440 | into the late hours of the evening and night

01:15:13.680 | and going to bed much later

01:15:14.760 | than they naturally would want to.

01:15:16.600 | And so I personally don't want to go to bed at 8 p.m.

01:15:19.360 | A lot of good things happen between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.

01:15:24.180 | And so I wanna enjoy those

01:15:25.880 | and I push through the evening hours.

01:15:28.360 | But as a consequence, I'm running out of melatonin.

01:15:31.160 | My melatonin release has basically subsided

01:15:34.120 | by about 3 or 4 a.m.

01:15:35.180 | And so it makes sense that I would wake up.

01:15:37.260 | I don't take melatonin

01:15:38.320 | for reasons discussed in previous episodes.

01:15:41.140 | I do rely on things like magnesium glycinate

01:15:44.120 | or magnesium threonate, things like theanine.

01:15:47.080 | I'm not saying any of you need to take those.

01:15:48.880 | That's just what I happen to take

01:15:50.160 | in order to facilitate my sleep

01:15:51.600 | and it's been of great benefit to me.

01:15:53.760 | If I wake up in the middle of the night

01:15:56.140 | and I'm anxious for whatever reason and my mind is looping,

01:15:59.040 | I have a couple rules.

01:16:00.320 | One is I don't trust anything I think about

01:16:03.880 | when I wake up in the middle of the night, any of it.

01:16:05.840 | Unless I've had a magnificent dream

01:16:07.260 | and I wanna write it down,

01:16:08.320 | I'll do that every once in a while.

01:16:09.920 | Typically when I go back and read it,

01:16:11.220 | it's not at all magnificent.

01:16:13.140 | I can't ever remember coming up with anything

01:16:16.960 | really fantastic in one of my dreams

01:16:19.040 | that stuck with me or that I implemented.

01:16:22.000 | I don't really trust the kind of thinking that happens

01:16:24.060 | in those wee hours of the circadian cycle for me.

01:16:27.040 | There's just nothing either for me terribly creative

01:16:30.400 | or worth linear implementation at that time.

01:16:33.420 | But one thing that has been very helpful

01:16:35.480 | is to sometimes do one of these

01:16:37.240 | non-sleep deep rest protocols

01:16:38.960 | as a way to go back into sleep.

01:16:40.960 | So a hypnosis app by,

01:16:43.340 | or some of the scripts by Michael Sealy

01:16:44.920 | that I've mentioned before,

01:16:46.300 | or the Reverie Health or a Yoga Nidra protocol.

01:16:50.400 | Those for me have been very useful

01:16:52.800 | at helping me turn off kind of looping thinking

01:16:55.660 | in the middle of the night and fall back asleep.

01:16:58.320 | In reviewing my schedule for you,

01:17:01.140 | just as a context for how to implement

01:17:03.260 | certain types of tools for optimizing learning,

01:17:06.640 | realize that it gives the impression

01:17:08.440 | that there's a 90 minute bout of learning and work

01:17:10.760 | in the morning and then a 90 minute bout

01:17:12.960 | of creative type work in the afternoon and that's it.

01:17:15.680 | There are a lot of hours in between, of course,

01:17:17.400 | and I just want to be very clear.

01:17:19.140 | Those hours for me are occupied by pretty,

01:17:21.700 | not mundane tasks, but things that are kind of random.

01:17:25.840 | Those are things like email or attending to Zoom meetings

01:17:29.000 | or meeting with colleagues and students

01:17:31.680 | and things of that sort.

01:17:34.080 | I sometimes will read just for sake of my own enrichment.

01:17:37.120 | I mentioned those two 90 minute bouts

01:17:38.960 | because those are the two 90 minute bouts

01:17:40.900 | where I'm trying to expand on the mental capacities

01:17:44.640 | that I already have.

01:17:46.000 | They're really where I'm trying to stretch and grow

01:17:48.280 | what I'm able to do on a regular basis reflexively.

01:17:51.040 | So I want to emphasize that.

01:17:52.160 | The whole day doesn't just consist

01:17:54.000 | of those two 90 minute bouts.

01:17:56.080 | That's not the way my schedule works

01:17:57.440 | and that's not the way my lifestyle is arranged,

01:17:59.120 | which is fortunate 'cause I enjoy

01:18:00.320 | all those other things as well.

01:18:01.640 | And so for many of you out there who are in school

01:18:04.000 | or who have family demands or other demands,

01:18:06.280 | the key is to slot in those brain optimization segments

01:18:09.680 | of about 90 minutes, one or two or maybe more per day,

01:18:13.280 | you're trying to slot those in wherever you can

01:18:15.560 | amidst your other obligations

01:18:18.240 | and things that you need to do.

01:18:19.860 | But you want to do that in an intelligent way

01:18:22.440 | that's anchored to your biology

01:18:24.360 | and then you want to do a number of things

01:18:25.800 | which I've talked about today

01:18:26.880 | in order to optimize those sessions

01:18:28.840 | to get the most out of them.

01:18:30.240 | So as we round up, I acknowledge that once again,

01:18:34.780 | I've covered a huge range of topics

01:18:37.080 | related to how to optimize learning and brain change

01:18:41.280 | and essentially mental performance.

01:18:43.840 | And I've set that in the context

01:18:45.560 | of some biological mechanism

01:18:47.040 | like the basal ganglia, go/no-go pathways,

01:18:49.340 | the circadian autonomic system

01:18:51.760 | and some of the relationship between food and fasting

01:18:55.920 | and particular types of food in alertness or sleepiness,

01:18:59.060 | how linear focus and strategy implementation

01:19:03.000 | is best served by high alert states, although not too alert,

01:19:06.440 | and how creative states,

01:19:07.920 | at least the first phase of creativity,

01:19:09.880 | which is the creative arrangement kind of brainstorming stage

01:19:14.200 | is supported by states of kind of relaxation

01:19:17.360 | or even slightly sleepy,

01:19:18.720 | but the creative implementation

01:19:20.120 | is a very linear and focused and deliberate process,

01:19:22.820 | much like the highly focused state that I described.

01:19:26.840 | I described how I do these things

01:19:28.560 | just to give you a context.

01:19:29.880 | A lot of you asked for what I do

01:19:31.900 | in order to set it within a context,

01:19:33.400 | but by no means are these rigid times

01:19:35.420 | and ways of doing things.

01:19:36.640 | But I think it's fair to say that

01:19:39.080 | what I do has a circadian logic.

01:19:41.640 | It also has grounding in biological mechanisms.

01:19:45.180 | They're very concrete that we know the cells and mechanisms

01:19:48.440 | and neurotransmitters.

01:19:49.760 | And then some of them are a little bit headed out

01:19:51.920 | into the what we would call kind of emerging

01:19:55.820 | or I don't want to say cutting edge,

01:19:58.600 | but maybe a front edge of what neuroscience

01:20:00.520 | is starting to understand about creativity and so forth.

01:20:03.240 | Those are areas that are just now coming to some clarity

01:20:07.760 | and there's certainly still a lot more work to do.

01:20:10.160 | A lot of different ways to arrange one's routine,

01:20:12.900 | but hopefully the tools and practices that I described

01:20:15.800 | will be useful to you.

01:20:17.800 | I want to mention that a lot of people ask me

01:20:20.000 | about specific tools and practices.

01:20:23.420 | They ask me about Wim Hof breathing, about ice baths.

01:20:25.840 | I've talked a little bit about ice baths before,

01:20:27.960 | I think in cold exposure,

01:20:29.440 | about binaural beats and things of those sort.

01:20:32.240 | I think the way to look at any tool

01:20:35.440 | to modulate or measure the nervous system

01:20:37.960 | is ask whether or not it's going to move you up or down

01:20:41.960 | the state of autonomic arousal,

01:20:43.760 | whether or not it's gonna make you more alert or more calm,

01:20:46.180 | more focused or less focused.

01:20:47.760 | That's kind of the two axes here

01:20:49.480 | is that we need to think about.

01:20:51.200 | Sometimes you want to be more alert than you are.

01:20:53.220 | And indeed things like cold showers, ice baths,

01:20:56.320 | super oxygenation, Wim Hof type breathing

01:20:58.180 | will bring your level of alertness up.

01:21:00.400 | There's some cautionary notes associated with each of those.

01:21:02.520 | You need to read and understand those cautionary notes

01:21:04.960 | for yourself, everybody's different.

01:21:06.820 | And some of those carry certain dangers

01:21:09.680 | under certain conditions.

01:21:11.120 | Others have huge margins for safety.

01:21:13.120 | An ice bath generally wakes you up.

01:21:17.200 | A warmer hot bath generally calms you down, right?

01:21:20.080 | Binaural beats, there aren't a lot of data

01:21:22.800 | in quality peer reviewed journals.

01:21:24.320 | I did put in the effort to go search it out.

01:21:26.120 | There are a few.

01:21:27.960 | Binaural beats are listening to frequencies of sound

01:21:31.320 | that slightly differ or offset for the two ears.

01:21:35.180 | It has been shown can shift the brain

01:21:37.080 | into particular states.

01:21:38.200 | You'll notice today I didn't really talk about alpha

01:21:40.240 | or theta or gamma rhythms.

01:21:41.920 | I personally in reviewing the literature,

01:21:45.200 | I don't think it's fair to say that alpha states

01:21:47.280 | are great for X and theta states are great for Y.

01:21:50.640 | And besides most of us aren't walking around our homes

01:21:52.640 | and our workplaces geared up to EEG machines

01:21:54.900 | or with wires down below our skull.

01:21:56.240 | So we don't know when we're in those states anyway.

01:21:58.760 | I think the subjective reading of whether or not one

01:22:02.560 | is alert or calm and whether or not that alertness

01:22:06.520 | or calmness matches the goal or that thing

01:22:09.560 | that we're trying to achieve in terms of learning,

01:22:11.780 | including sleep, is the most valuable internal tool

01:22:16.680 | and recognition that we can all have.

01:22:18.220 | In other words, if I want to be very alert

01:22:20.040 | and I need to be very alert and I'm exhausted,

01:22:22.180 | there might be tools that I should use to wake up.

01:22:24.440 | It might also speak to the fact that I might not have slept

01:22:27.040 | as well as I could ever should have the night before.

01:22:29.240 | So it's really about a match between where we are

01:22:32.120 | on that autonomic arousal scale

01:22:33.840 | and what we're trying to achieve.

01:22:36.320 | And indeed, there are going to be a lot of tools,

01:22:38.400 | including supplements and other prescription drugs

01:22:40.720 | and things that can help move us along

01:22:42.500 | that autonomic continuum toward more alertness

01:22:45.820 | or toward more calmness.

01:22:47.600 | But ultimately, it's about tailoring that alertness

01:22:50.680 | and calmness to the specific types of learning

01:22:53.040 | and activities that you are going to do and perform.

01:22:55.940 | And it's reciprocal, meaning some of those activities

01:22:59.540 | like exercise early in the day will increase your level

01:23:02.200 | of autonomic arousal and alertness.

01:23:04.440 | Certain foods will tend to wake you up.

01:23:07.300 | Certain foods will tend to make you more sleepy.

01:23:09.340 | And the volume of food and the timing of food

01:23:11.720 | is a factor also.

01:23:12.940 | So it's a huge parameter space.

01:23:14.720 | It's a huge set of variables.

01:23:16.220 | The impacts, whether or not we're feeling well,

01:23:18.140 | performing well, learning great or not learning great.

01:23:21.040 | And the key thing is to become an observer

01:23:24.100 | of your own system and what works for you.

01:23:26.500 | And to recognize that there are two bins of tools

01:23:29.900 | for optimizing learning and brain performance.

01:23:33.140 | One are tools that are really anchored

01:23:35.400 | in biological mechanism.

01:23:36.720 | And we are certain of what those are.

01:23:38.600 | And I've talked about some of those.

01:23:39.600 | The other, the more subjective tools.

01:23:41.140 | For some of you, visualization might work terrifically well.

01:23:45.060 | For some of you, one song might really wake you up

01:23:47.580 | because of the associations you have with it.

01:23:49.680 | And for me, it might repel me from the room

01:23:53.280 | 'cause I don't like it or it might put me to sleep.

01:23:55.960 | But of course, volume is kind of a universal.

01:23:58.740 | Loud music tends to wake people up.

01:24:00.340 | Soft music doesn't tend to wake them up quite as much.

01:24:03.400 | So part of today is really getting you to think about

01:24:07.080 | in a scientific way, in a structured way,

01:24:09.620 | about the non-negotiable elements,

01:24:13.560 | which are that you're going to have a period

01:24:15.340 | of every 24 hour cycle when you tend to be more awake

01:24:17.620 | and a period when you tend to be more asleep

01:24:19.280 | and how to leverage those

01:24:20.560 | so you're not fighting an uphill battle

01:24:22.400 | to wake up when you actually would want to be

01:24:26.060 | and should be sleepy and not trying to go to sleep

01:24:29.360 | when you are naturally going to be most awake.

01:24:32.960 | So a lot of it is really anchors back

01:24:34.660 | to those core mechanisms of biology.

01:24:36.600 | And then you start layering on the different protocols

01:24:38.680 | of food and supplementation, et cetera.

01:24:40.880 | And I think it's important to recognize

01:24:42.520 | that some people are just more go, go, go, go, go

01:24:46.040 | and no go.

01:24:46.880 | And some people are just calmer

01:24:50.120 | and have a harder time getting into action and an activity.

01:24:52.800 | It's just the way that we're wired.

01:24:54.340 | Some of us have autonomic nervous systems

01:24:56.020 | that are more geared towards parasympathetic calm states.

01:24:59.320 | One of the reasons I love bulldogs, not just my bulldog,

01:25:02.520 | is that they are very calm animals.

01:25:04.460 | In fact, they make no spontaneous movements

01:25:06.920 | unless there's something to respond to.

01:25:08.960 | And I find that incredibly relaxing.

01:25:11.140 | Other animals like pit bulls,

01:25:12.680 | who I also really like and enjoy and other species,

01:25:15.020 | their tail's always wagging

01:25:16.260 | and that they're always in a position

01:25:17.800 | to make a movement at any second

01:25:19.800 | 'cause they tend to ride

01:25:20.680 | at pretty high levels of autonomic arousal.

01:25:22.960 | They pop up really quickly

01:25:24.600 | when you say it's time to go for a walk.

01:25:26.480 | Costello does it one limb at a time

01:25:30.000 | and sometimes he just goes back to sleep.

01:25:31.900 | And so there are people like that too.

01:25:34.280 | And so you have to know where you are

01:25:35.980 | and what particular goals you're trying to pursue.

01:25:38.520 | As a final closure to this,

01:25:42.280 | I want to emphasize that today, as always,

01:25:45.280 | I've strived to be accurate.

01:25:47.020 | I'm sure if I made mistakes, some of you will point it out

01:25:49.200 | and I appreciate that and I'll post a correction

01:25:52.200 | if we agree that I indeed misspoke or missighted something.

01:25:56.220 | But by no means was I exhaustive.

01:25:59.920 | I mean, I might've exhausted some of you,

01:26:01.480 | but the information wasn't exhaustive.

01:26:03.680 | Meaning there's no way that I could cover

01:26:05.960 | all the ways in which we optimize

01:26:08.600 | or can optimize learning and performance.

01:26:11.040 | I think we've touched on a number of them

01:26:12.680 | that I hope that you'll find value in

01:26:15.120 | and that you'll explore in your own lives.

01:26:18.520 | We are continuing with this theme

01:26:19.880 | because that's what we do for this podcast.

01:26:21.800 | We stay on one theme for an entire month.

01:26:24.020 | For the next episode,

01:26:25.280 | we're going to explore two very essential aspects

01:26:29.040 | of neuroplasticity that actually relate to learning,

01:26:32.220 | which are pain, pain management, and neural regeneration.

01:26:37.220 | And for those of you that don't have injuries

01:26:40.600 | or don't suffer from chronic pain,

01:26:42.680 | the discussion is still going to be a very important one

01:26:45.440 | because it's not just going to be about pain

01:26:47.400 | that you're trying to get rid of.

01:26:48.440 | It's also going to be about how certain sensory experiences

01:26:51.520 | within the pain network can become amplified,

01:26:55.060 | as well as how we can use top-down modulation.

01:26:57.600 | We can use our mind to suppress the pain response.

01:27:01.520 | We're also going to talk about

01:27:02.360 | some of the hardwired mechanisms that are bottom-up,

01:27:05.320 | that exist in our periphery, in our body, to control pain.

01:27:09.160 | And we're also going to discuss

01:27:10.720 | a number of interesting interactions

01:27:12.280 | between the pain system and the learning system.

01:27:15.020 | So again, if you're not interested in pain per se,

01:27:19.180 | it still is going to be a very valid conversation

01:27:22.100 | for sake of understanding how to optimize brain performance.

01:27:25.300 | And neural regeneration goes hand in hand

01:27:27.500 | with that discussion.

01:27:28.920 | So I hope you'll join us for that.

01:27:30.620 | I suppose I'd be remiss if I didn't mention

01:27:33.800 | that Costello has been snoring extremely loudly today.

01:27:37.500 | You know, a good long walk this morning,

01:27:39.760 | which means up the driveway, down the driveway.

01:27:41.740 | He's an old dog.

01:27:42.860 | So if you've been hearing him in the background

01:27:44.560 | and it's been distracting, now you know why.

01:27:46.800 | It probably relates to where you were

01:27:49.120 | on your level of autonomic arousal.

01:27:51.220 | And I'll leave it to you to answer

01:27:52.640 | that question for yourself.

01:27:54.840 | Many of you continue to graciously ask

01:27:57.400 | how you can help support the podcast.

01:27:59.440 | We really appreciate the question.

01:28:01.380 | The best way is to subscribe wherever it is

01:28:03.660 | you happen to be listening or watching.

01:28:05.220 | So for those of you that it's YouTube,

01:28:07.320 | please subscribe to the YouTube channel.

01:28:09.440 | If it's Apple, subscribe to the podcast on Apple,

01:28:12.160 | or if it's Spotify, subscribe there.

01:28:13.700 | Maybe you subscribe to all three.

01:28:15.500 | If you have comments and feedback for us,

01:28:17.320 | suggestions for future podcast episodes or topics to cover,

01:28:20.940 | please place those in the comment section on YouTube.

01:28:24.400 | Apple also provides a section

01:28:26.020 | where you can give us a rating.

01:28:27.960 | We would love it if you give us a five-star rating

01:28:29.560 | or whatever it is that you feel that we deserve.

01:28:32.060 | And in general, if you could tell people about the podcast,

01:28:35.960 | we hope that you would tell them

01:28:37.260 | because you think the information

01:28:38.420 | would be of use to them, of course.

01:28:39.920 | Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your coworkers,

01:28:42.840 | because as we expand the podcast,

01:28:44.940 | the support for the podcast just grows along with it.

01:28:47.520 | So that's a terrific way to support us.

01:28:49.560 | As always, check out our sponsors,

01:28:51.360 | which were mentioned at the beginning.

01:28:53.240 | And in addition to that, we've now set up a Patreon account.

01:28:56.320 | Some of you asked specifically

01:28:57.920 | how you can help support the podcast,

01:28:59.400 | but you weren't interested in our sponsors

01:29:01.620 | or you were already engaged with our sponsors.

01:29:03.920 | So we have a Patreon account.

01:29:05.640 | You can find it at patreon.com/andrewhuberman.

01:29:10.480 | Finally, in previous episodes today and in future episodes,

01:29:14.960 | I mentioned supplements.

01:29:16.480 | Supplements are one way, certainly not the only way,

01:29:19.600 | but they're one way in which we can modulate

01:29:22.280 | our nervous system for sake of better sleep,

01:29:25.160 | learning, alertness, and several other things as well.

01:29:28.940 | If you're interested in supplements,

01:29:30.320 | we've partnered with Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E,

01:29:33.960 | because Thorne supplements have very high stringency

01:29:36.800 | in terms of what's in the bottle,

01:29:38.880 | the amounts of the substances that are in each capsule

01:29:41.320 | or pill, et cetera.

01:29:43.180 | And they have partnered with other groups

01:29:45.560 | such as the Mayo Clinic, all the major sports teams.

01:29:47.960 | So there's very high rigor associated with Thorne,

01:29:50.000 | which is why we've decided to partner with them.

01:29:52.160 | If you'd like to check out Thorne supplements

01:29:53.840 | and see the supplements that I take,

01:29:55.520 | you can go to thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E,

01:29:58.520 | .com/u/huberman, and you'll see a list

01:30:02.440 | of some of the supplements that I take.

01:30:04.660 | As well, you'll get 20% off

01:30:07.160 | any of the supplements listed there,

01:30:09.120 | as well as anywhere else on the Thorne website.

01:30:10.980 | So that's thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E, .com/u/huberman

01:30:15.980 | for 20% off any Thorne supplements.

01:30:19.880 | Last but not least, on behalf of me and Costello,

01:30:23.920 | I want to thank you for your time and attention today.

01:30:26.280 | And as always, thank you for your interest in science.

01:30:29.520 | [upbeat music]

01:30:32.100 | (upbeat music)

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