How to Exercise to Gain Energy & Avoid Burnout | Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | If you've ever heard that exercise can give you energy,
00:00:05.000 | this is the basis of that statement, right?
00:00:08.600 | Many people, in fact, myself for many years thought,
00:00:10.880 | okay, I definitely have to sleep well
00:00:12.840 | in order to have energy and focus.
00:00:14.520 | That's absolutely true, still true, will always be true.
00:00:17.360 | I should maybe have some caffeine, be hydrated,
00:00:19.680 | you know, well-nourished, all this stuff
00:00:21.440 | in order to have the energy to exercise.
00:00:24.220 | But it's also true that exercise gives us energy
00:00:27.400 | and this is how it gives us energy.
00:00:29.520 | When we move our body, the adrenals release adrenaline
00:00:32.920 | and the adrenaline acts through two different
00:00:35.320 | so-called parallel pathways within the body.
00:00:38.140 | But again, it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier.
00:00:40.180 | So then there's a series of what we call signaling relays
00:00:42.800 | or circuit relays up to the locus coeruleus
00:00:44.920 | and then a sort of analog, it's different,
00:00:47.360 | but an analog to epinephrine, norepinephrine
00:00:50.000 | is released within the brain.
00:00:51.360 | And lo and behold, we have elevated levels
00:00:53.240 | of both bodily energy and brain energy and focus
00:00:56.880 | that we can devote to that exercise,
00:00:58.640 | but also to the learning that comes after that exercise.
00:01:02.300 | So the next time you're feeling a little tired
00:01:03.840 | and you don't want to work out,
00:01:04.780 | remember, exercise gives you energy
00:01:07.160 | through the pathways that I just described.
00:01:09.500 | Now, anytime I talk about the adrenals,
00:01:11.360 | people start talking about adrenal burnout.
00:01:13.480 | They say, oh, you burn out your adrenals.
00:01:14.920 | You know, there are these crazy theories
00:01:16.200 | that you'll hear out there.
00:01:17.360 | You know, coffee burns out your adrenals, not true.
00:01:20.320 | You'll hear that if you exercise too much,
00:01:22.360 | it might burn out your energy or your adrenals.
00:01:24.800 | Look, you have enough capacity within your adrenals
00:01:27.200 | to survive relatively long famines,
00:01:30.400 | to survive long bouts of challenge,
00:01:33.440 | stress of many, many different kinds,
00:01:35.240 | short challenges, and so on.
00:01:37.080 | You're not gonna burn out your adrenals.
00:01:39.260 | There is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome,
00:01:42.040 | which is a real syndrome.
00:01:42.960 | There are diseases of the adrenals,
00:01:44.360 | but that's not what we're referring to here.
00:01:46.340 | You have plenty of adrenaline in your adrenals
00:01:48.800 | that you can deploy through movement, through exercise,
00:01:52.900 | to get the elevation and arousal attention and so forth
00:01:55.820 | that we've been talking about.
00:01:57.200 | In fact, there's a set of biological pathways
00:01:59.200 | that were just recently discovered
00:02:01.080 | that will allow you to understand how to use movement
00:02:03.600 | in order to engage your adrenals
00:02:05.760 | so that then those adrenals can release adrenaline,
00:02:08.720 | impact your vagus, impact the organs of your body,
00:02:11.200 | the locus coeruleus,
00:02:12.200 | and elevate your levels of attention and focus.
00:02:15.820 | And a lot of the core components of these pathways
00:02:18.520 | are highlighted in a paper that I absolutely love,
00:02:21.080 | another paper I absolutely love.
00:02:23.200 | This is from Peter Strick's Laboratory
00:02:24.640 | at University of Pittsburgh,
00:02:26.000 | which is entitled "The Mind-Body Problem,
00:02:29.100 | Circuits that Link the Cerebral Cortex
00:02:31.180 | to the Adrenal Medulla."
00:02:32.220 | What they discovered is that there are essentially
00:02:34.380 | three categories of brain areas,
00:02:36.760 | all of which communicate with the adrenals
00:02:38.740 | and can cause them to release adrenaline
00:02:41.100 | to create this elevation and arousal and attention.
00:02:43.860 | Those three brain areas include areas of the brain
00:02:47.580 | that are involved in thinking, what we call cognition,
00:02:50.500 | areas of the brain that are related
00:02:52.460 | to what are called affective states,
00:02:54.100 | which is just kind of a more general category
00:02:56.300 | that includes emotions.
00:02:57.740 | Okay, if you saw the Huberman Lab podcast episode
00:02:59.920 | that I did with Lisa Feldman Barrett,
00:03:01.780 | she explains beautifully the distinction
00:03:04.140 | between affective states and emotions,
00:03:06.300 | but these are brain areas that basically relate
00:03:08.420 | to what we are feeling or how we're perceiving
00:03:11.380 | our environment and how we're reacting to it,
00:03:13.300 | these sorts of things.
00:03:14.220 | And then there's a third category of brain areas
00:03:17.100 | that most robustly communicates with the adrenals.
00:03:20.060 | And these are a collection of brain areas
00:03:22.220 | that are all involved with movement
00:03:24.540 | of particular areas of our body.
00:03:27.060 | These areas are broadly referred to as the motor network.
00:03:29.800 | So these are areas of the so-called cerebral cortex,
00:03:32.180 | which are on the outer portion of the brain.
00:03:34.260 | And they send these wires down the spinal cord.
00:03:37.660 | There's a little relay in the spinal cord,
00:03:39.980 | it's called the IML.
00:03:41.480 | If you're interested in the anatomical details,
00:03:43.900 | I'll put the link to this paper in the show note captions.
00:03:47.300 | In any case, these brain areas that are involved
00:03:49.780 | in motor movement, send axons, those wires,
00:03:52.780 | down to the spinal cord.
00:03:54.280 | Then from the spinal cord, they send a relay out
00:03:58.300 | via what's called the cholinergic preganglionic neurons.
00:04:00.980 | Basically what ends up happening is that acetylcholine,
00:04:03.320 | which is a neuromodulator, is released from these neurons
00:04:06.700 | that originate in the spinal cord onto the adrenal medulla.
00:04:10.800 | And then the adrenal medulla, the so-called adrenals,
00:04:13.100 | same thing, adrenal medulla, adrenals, releases adrenaline.
00:04:16.500 | That creates these effects in the body, on the heart,
00:04:18.740 | the muscles and other tissues.
00:04:20.140 | And then as described before,
00:04:22.620 | that adrenaline also acts on the vagus,
00:04:24.360 | the vagus up to the NST, the locus coeruleus,
00:04:26.340 | and we have this elevation and alertness.
00:04:28.600 | So this paper and papers that came subsequent to it
00:04:32.540 | really explain how it is that the movement of our body,
00:04:35.900 | AKA exercise, allows us to have this elevation
00:04:39.880 | in arousal and alertness.
00:04:41.660 | It's a loop, okay?
00:04:42.960 | The adrenals release adrenaline.
00:04:44.660 | They do these things by these two parallel pathways
00:04:46.360 | I've been talking about.
00:04:47.580 | But your decision to engage these motor areas,
00:04:51.380 | to move particular areas of your body,
00:04:53.740 | is what deploys that adrenaline.
00:04:55.900 | Now you might be thinking, well, duh, okay?
00:04:58.300 | When I exercise, there's adrenaline release.
00:04:59.980 | In order to exercise, I need to move my body.
00:05:02.140 | And these brain areas control the movement of my body.
00:05:04.900 | But it's not a duh.
00:05:06.380 | It's actually very profound because it turns out
00:05:09.100 | that the specific brain areas
00:05:11.400 | that best activate the adrenals
00:05:13.740 | are the brain areas that control
00:05:15.820 | the muscles closest to the midline,
00:05:18.100 | the core musculature,
00:05:19.740 | and the brain areas that are involved
00:05:21.160 | in generating the sorts of movements
00:05:22.740 | that we would call compound movements,
00:05:24.900 | at least in the context of resistance training,
00:05:27.060 | or that are responsible for moving multiple joints
00:05:30.000 | at the same time.
00:05:31.540 | So what this means in the practical sense
00:05:33.420 | is if you are feeling sluggish, you want energy,
00:05:37.540 | or you're simply exercising,
00:05:39.820 | both for bodily effects and for brain effects,
00:05:41.740 | you need the deployment of adrenaline, of epinephrine.
00:05:44.380 | You need the deployment of norepinephrine in the brain.
00:05:47.300 | And by the way, anytime you have a deployment
00:05:49.360 | of norepinephrine in the brain,
00:05:50.900 | almost always there's a coordinated action
00:05:53.700 | of release of dopamine,
00:05:55.300 | which most people have heard of by now.
00:05:56.940 | Dopamine is involved in motivation
00:05:58.540 | as well as movement, et cetera.
00:06:00.500 | So the simple takeaway here is
00:06:03.400 | if you want to get the arousal that comes from exercise
00:06:06.600 | in order to use that arousal,
00:06:08.260 | to leverage it towards better cognition,
00:06:10.580 | brain health, et cetera,
00:06:12.220 | the key thing is to make sure
00:06:13.700 | that you're doing exercises that are compound exercises.
00:06:16.100 | So these would be the movements.
00:06:17.800 | You can look these up, just say compound exercises.
00:06:19.960 | You can put that anywhere,
00:06:20.800 | and you'll see that that includes things like squats,
00:06:23.380 | deadlifts, bench presses, dips, pull-ups, rows.
00:06:27.180 | And yes, of course, you want to train your whole body
00:06:28.980 | so that you have symmetry of a function of strength,
00:06:32.620 | and you want to offset any injuries
00:06:34.060 | and things of that sort, or aesthetic reasons, perhaps.
00:06:37.880 | But the idea here is if you want energy from exercise,
00:06:40.860 | you want focus, you need the deployment
00:06:42.580 | of the neurochemicals that we've been discussing,
00:06:44.220 | most notably epinephrine and norepinephrine.
00:06:46.660 | And through the identification of this motor network,
00:06:49.160 | as well as the affective and cognitive networks
00:06:51.460 | that converge on this area of the spinal cord
00:06:54.900 | and then send communication to the adrenal medulla,
00:06:58.800 | you can essentially control the levels of arousal
00:07:02.440 | that your body and brain produces.
00:07:05.160 | So in describing this,
00:07:06.300 | my hope is that you'll no longer think about exercise
00:07:08.380 | as just elevating your heart rate,
00:07:10.100 | or you no longer think about exercise
00:07:11.780 | just as moving your body,
00:07:12.860 | but rather that the movement of your body
00:07:14.640 | is creating specific neurochemical outcomes,
00:07:17.780 | both in the body and the brain that create the arousal
00:07:21.020 | that initiates the improvements in focus and attention
00:07:24.140 | that allow you to learn better,
00:07:25.660 | and that contribute generally to brain health and longevity.
00:07:28.720 | And by the way, for those of you that are interested
00:07:30.720 | in things like psychosomatic disorders,
00:07:33.780 | trauma, and how trauma can, quote-unquote,
00:07:35.900 | be stored in the body,
00:07:37.380 | not so much stored in the body,
00:07:38.620 | but how it can impact the body,
00:07:40.100 | and then how the body itself can impact the brain,
00:07:43.660 | this paper has also been used as support for the idea
00:07:46.400 | that indeed those affective areas, those emotional areas,
00:07:49.660 | those cognitive areas have a route
00:07:51.960 | by which they can communicate with the adrenal medulla
00:07:54.700 | to cause the release of adrenaline
00:07:56.220 | when we have specific thoughts.
00:07:57.860 | It was always known that if we have specific thoughts,
00:07:59.740 | it can, quote-unquote, stress us out,
00:08:01.180 | our heart rate can go up, et cetera.
00:08:02.900 | This paper also provides a reasonable anatomical substrate
00:08:06.680 | for that phenomenon.
00:08:08.020 | You know, I never want to make too much
00:08:09.220 | of any one single paper or finding,
00:08:11.620 | but I will say that after I read that paper
00:08:13.780 | from Strick and colleagues,
00:08:14.940 | and through some of the subsequent discussions
00:08:16.900 | about that paper that I overheard at meetings and so forth,
00:08:19.860 | it really made me think differently about exercise.
00:08:22.100 | And now, anytime that I'm feeling tired,
00:08:23.940 | provided that I'm not chronically sleep-deprived
00:08:26.600 | or something of that sort,
00:08:28.000 | I remind myself that if I start moving my body,
00:08:30.900 | in particular, if I engage core muscles,
00:08:33.020 | that was one of the key findings in that paper,
00:08:34.580 | that the areas of the brain that control the core muscles,
00:08:37.860 | as well as do compound movements,
00:08:39.660 | I move multiple joints, I start, you know,
00:08:41.980 | warming up in a way that includes some, you know,
00:08:44.020 | maybe even just air squats or some running in place
00:08:46.380 | or jumping jacks, things of that sort,
00:08:48.740 | that the increase in energy that I'm perceiving is real.
00:08:52.020 | It's based on the same neurochemical outputs
00:08:54.620 | that would occur had I gone into the gym
00:08:56.540 | or to the run or whatever workout with tons of energy,
00:08:59.660 | it would just have increased
00:09:00.740 | the level of adrenaline further.
00:09:02.500 | So this idea that we can actually control our body
00:09:05.180 | with our mind, and to some extent, our mind with our body,
00:09:08.460 | that's absolutely true.
00:09:10.180 | And this is one of the tools
00:09:11.100 | that I find particularly useful
00:09:13.100 | anytime I want to overcome that wall of kind of resistance
00:09:16.740 | to not doing the physical exercise
00:09:18.420 | that I know I and basically all of us should be doing.
00:09:21.360 | [upbeat music]
00:09:24.760 | [upbeat music]
00:09:27.340 | (upbeat music)