"DO THIS Everyday To Master Your Sleep & Be More FOCUSED" | Andrew Huberman & Lewis Howes

until you are sleeping long enough and deeply enough eighty percent of the nights of your life you are functioning sub-optimally there are a number of risks to not getting enough sleep i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness really please welcome sleep is something that i feel like when i grew up i was told sleep when you're dead you know the athlete the business mentality was like broke people you know sleep a lot you know those who are making money or going out and working burning the midnight oil but then later in my 30s i realized how important sleep was for me to recover to remember to have emotional regulation throughout the day and not be reactive and defensive so can we break this down and your thoughts about sleep and how you frame this some of the the research and the science that you've studied around this and what we should be thinking about around sleep sure so sleep is the fundamental layer of mental and physical health if there's one thing that we should all be doing is working toward sleeping long enough and deeply enough eighty percent of the time okay i think that eighty percent is a good goal yeah because things happen yeah right you're gonna travel kids happen the weekend you're going out or whatever yeah yeah until you are sleeping long enough and deeply enough eighty percent of the nights of your life you are functioning suboptimally and what are what what's the biggest risk then if we're not getting enough sleep okay so there are a number of risks to not getting enough sleep deficits and learning deficits in the immune system reduction in testosterone and estrogen in both men and women so disruption of hormones disruption of gut microbiome increased cancer risk there are a bunch of things the severity of those things depends on a lot of other things too prior health other health conditions context age occupation you know if you're not getting enough sleep and you're a high-rise construction worker differently if you're an office worker okay so um we need to sleep enough now what's enough sleep this is an interesting question enough sleep has been argued at six hours other people it's seven hours other people it's eight hours it's basically waking up without an alarm clock and feeling rested insomnia is actually a medical term nowadays and insomnia is essentially diagnosed as falling asleep during the middle of the day due to lack of sleep at nighttime wow okay but many people who are having trouble sleeping at night are not falling asleep during the middle of the day they're dealing with grogginess or crankiness or other effects of having fragmented sleep what are the what are the main causes of not being able to fall asleep is it rumination is it traumas that you're holding on to is it arguments is it self-doubt or insecurities is it your nap too much is it the foods you ate too late like what would you say are the main causes of not being able to fall asleep yeah all of the above but the the primary one is a failure to turn off your thoughts okay and i think that might provide a good anchor point for us to talk about some protocols really a excellent night's sleep begins in the morning i talked about this on the previous episode so i won't go into detail but everyone should get as much bright light in their eyes ideally from sunlight first thing in the morning 10 to 30 minutes outside depending on how bright it is eyeglasses or contact lenses are fine don't wear sunglasses if you can do it safely if you wake up before the sun rises turn on bright lights then go outside once the sun rises if you have no access to sunlight use a daytime simulator or similar like a ring light and get that light in your eyes okay so that's all of that in a compact form caffeine you can inhibit falling asleep with caffeine you have to figure out when your threshold is for me i can drink caffeine up until about three even four o'clock in the afternoon and sleep like a baby and still sleep well yes and matt walker our good friend matt walker would say that my sleep isn't as good as as it would be had i cut caffeine out earlier by like 11 or 12 yeah a.m right and and i i want to acknowledge you know matt is the michael jordan of sleep science and so i'm not going to you're the lebron james well no no and i didn't fail thank you for the the compliment but uh but no i'm not um i know a lot of the science and the protocols but but that's matt's wheelhouse and so um if he says something it's true and if i say something and and our opinions conflict it's likely to be something that the data are still emerging or in in that case default to matt being correct because i yeah just out of uh due respect for his expertise so caffeine you know for some people they can have a two o'clock espresso 2 pm espresso some people it's 4 pm some people can drink caffeine at 8 pm and fall asleep but there i would say it's problematic because you're disrupting the architecture of sleep and the brain waves associated with sleep the chemicals and so forth so get that morning light cut your caffeine off at the time that allows you to fall asleep that morning light also sets the timer on your melatonin rhythm so you have this gland in your brain called the pineal gland that pineal is the source of melatonin melatonin makes you sleepy but it does not keep you asleep okay melatonin starts to rise in the late evening and continues into the night and then eventually tapers off this is naturally occurring melatonin release not supplemented in melatonin release the fastest way to slam melatonin into the pavement and eliminate it in your system is to look at bright light for i hate to tell you this even a few seconds so you mean at night at night is typically when melatonin rises it's when it's released in the bloodstream and when it has this effect of making us sleepy it does a number of other things you want more melatonin at night is right right you do and if you wake up in the middle of the night or it's eight o'clock and you decide you want to go to bed at nine or it's nine o'clock you want to go to bed at 10 you go into the bathroom and you flip on the bright lights your melatonin levels just got crushed down so having lights on is the worst thing you can do yes and it doesn't matter if it's blue light red light purple light green light bright lights inhibit melatonin very acutely and therefore you want to avoid exposure to bright lights at night if your goal is to be asleep so the simple rule that governs all this stuff is when you want to be alert get bright light in your eyes ideally from sunlight so that's true in the morning and throughout the day and when you want to be sleepy or asleep avoid bright light in your eyes now many home environments don't allow you to have zero lights and that's not actually necessary you can just dim the lights in the evening ideally you also avoid overhead lights because the neurons in the eye that trigger this melatonin suppression uh and so forth they reside in an area of the eye that views upper visual space so you could have desk lamps or um and just dim those down if you're gonna work on a screen dim it way down will blue blockers help yes but if the light is bright enough they it's still gonna go you're still gonna inhibit melatonin so how bad is watching tv at night uh if the tv isn't too bright and it's farther away farther away yeah and you're and maybe you wear blue blockers yeah and or or i mean some people are go take this to the extreme they wear sunglasses i think that's a little extreme now candlelight and moonlight surprisingly doesn't seem to block melatonin now maybe a really bright moonlit night full moon can you know the lunacy associated with the full moon might actually be due to a uh suppression of melatonin and an increase in alertness so those are the things as it relates to light yes then there's this issue of people who have trouble staying asleep so they can fall asleep fine but they wake up at two or three in the morning i happen to do this if i go to bed around 10 30 i tend to wake up around three and i use the restroom yeah i tend to drink a lot of fluids and i have to use the restroom this is true at every age this is not just some aging related thing um that's fine i just keep the lights dim right and you use the bathroom and then you go back to all back to sleep very normal very healthy one of the best things i ever did for my sleep was to keep my phone out of the room so that when i woke up at three in the morning i just didn't start scrolling the the newspapers is typically what i read online gotcha and then you're just waking up your brain not just by the light but by the content and you know you're activating it again so yeah exactly and sometimes there's a comment and they're like why is it you know your thinking is not very good in the middle of the night the other thing is you want to keep the room cool so in order to fall asleep your body has to undergo a drop of in temperature of one to three degrees there are a couple ways to accomplish this one is keeping the room cool the other is to um and that's ideal actually because you can put a hand or a or a foot out we actually lose a lot of our heat through what's called our glabrous skin so the palms of our hands the bottoms of the feet i always put my feet out of the sheets and just let them feel the cool air that's right and that's a great way to cool off your core body temperature you're probably doing that unconsciously in your sleep as well if the room were too warm the only way for you to cool off would be for you to put your hand in a bucket of cold water and generally people don't have that accessible and then you're going to go pee if you're doing that too right exactly and then of course there are all these products nowadays of you know things that cover yeah that cover that cool the bed um i'm supposed to try one of these soon i haven't tried one yet i tend to just keep the room cool yeah and what do you keep it out i keep it around 67 65. uh that's a little cooler than what i do i put it at about 67 68 okay um but i tend to wake up hot in the middle of the night like throw the comforter off um and go put some cold water on my face wow um so don't obsess over waking up too much and if you do try and stay away from screens or if um you know some people will read a book dim light again yeah uh and then falling back asleep some people are waking up at two or three because they are going to bed too late their melatonin has run out so imagine that you're that you're naturally somebody who should go to bed early around nine but we all have this ability to push forward and stay awake if we have to much easier to stay awake than to force yourself to go to sleep right now it's very hard to force yourself to go to sleep so let's say your system you start releasing melatonin around 9 p.m but you stay up until 11 then you get into bed you fall asleep around 11 30 and at three in the morning you suddenly wake up well that's because your melatonin tapered off and there's a wakefulness that's occurring and so ideally you would start going to bed earlier now there's a lot of discussion out there about so-called chronotypes so night owls morning people me people that follow a more typical schedule typical will be going to sleep somewhere between 10 30 and 11 30 waking up somewhere between 6 30 and 8. then there are the people that like to go to bed at 2 a.m sleep till 10 and then there are people that like to go to bed at 8 and wake up at 4. huge variation out there it tends to change across the lifetime yeah your season of life for years that's right and adolescents and teenagers tend to stay up later and want to sleep in and there's actually some evidence that they can learn better if they are allowed to to use that schedule but most schools won't adhere to that schedule you gotta wake up at six and go to school at eight or whatever yeah once you enter adult life you're generally somebody who's gonna have to learn how to go to bed early and wake up or early or at least wake up early now naps you should feel comfortable the data say naps you should feel comfortable napping for 90 minutes or less at any point throughout the day as long as it doesn't interfere with your nighttime sleep so some people like me i love naps but it doesn't interfere with my nighttime skin it doesn't does not so you can take a 60 minute nap generally at 20 to 45 minutes and then you you fully fall asleep or you're kind of like awake and just resting yeah i can fall asleep anywhere anytime and i can fall asleep at a gun range yeah it's um it's in can you sleep sitting up to like this oh yeah playing that's like anything anywhere it is although it it it could reflect that i'm pushing my system a little too hard oh um but it's it is a it is useful at times it's incredible right right on a plane or anywhere leaning against uh oh my god yeah and the subway station and anywhere yeah if i need to sleep i'm going down that's incredible yeah so the um the other thing is that during sleep a number of things happen and we can talk about slow wave sleep and rem sleep but one of the most important physiological functions of sleep is to clear out some of the cellular debris that accumulates throughout the day the cellular debris creates cognitive deficits it actually may be related to the aggregation of proteins and things that relate to dementia on alzheimer's it's the so-called glymphatic system the lymphatic system is a system of moving through immune cells and clearing out of debris from the body the glymphatic system is a kind of a equivalent system that exists in the brain that involves so-called glial cells which are support cells but also do many things actively they're not just doing support the lymphatic system is like a washout of the brain's debris and that system seems to function best when feet are slightly elevated above the brain there's some interesting data from university of south carolina coming out now that show that if you can get your ankles elevated a little bit higher than your chin that's great so when you're sleeping while you're sleeping what's it do for you it increases the glymphatic clearance and there's some data that it can improve function of the brain the studies that are happening now that i'm aware of i'm in touch with that group are mainly geared towards people that have had head injuries so concussion and tbi of various kinds but they also are seeing interesting effects in typical folks that don't have um any traumatic brain injury so i put a pillow underneath my ankles when i fall asleep and to get a little bit of that elevation and then during the day if ever you can't get a nap or you are going to get a nap put your ankles up on the couch and lie down on the floor that that itself can um get some of the clearance of the glimpse and that helps you sleep better it helps you just clean out the system it helps your brain function better when you wake up from sleep interesting yeah that that's what the data are starting to show i you know some of the things i i described like the light viewing is baked into the neuroscience literature hundreds of papers yes published papers some of things like the glymphatic system it's kind of cutting edge it's it's on the way but because the safety margins of raising your your ankles are are so it's a large i mean there's nothing dangerous about that sure um how long you need to do it for to get the benefits oh i think these are immediate benefits two minutes or ten minutes you're doing this the whole night that you're asleep your ankles are elevated if you wake up and you happen to kick the pillow out it's not the end of the world but but the idea is that you don't want to be sleeping with your head above your ankles either there is some evidence that when people travel on planes and they're sleeping in chairs that that's not equivalent to the kind of sleep they'd get when they're lying flat independent of all the other things that are happening and we know this because there are great sleep labs at stanford uh school of medicine at u-pen back east and elsewhere where people actually go into a clinic and sleep either you know upright or or at different tracks and they're looking at all this at the at the level of data okay so here's one for you what's the best uh position to sleep on your back on your side on your stomach ah great question and it really truly depends and it probably depends on how hot you run so i tend to run really warm a lot of the cooling of the body occurs from the palms and bottoms of the feet but also from the upper back and scapulae because we accumulate what's called brown fat there it's not the blubbery fat that's under the skin it's like a furnace actually you can increase the density of brown fat by going into cold water repeatedly for you know one to three minutes several times each week yes it means your furnace actually burns hotter it allows you to be in cold temperatures more comfortably some really beautiful data just published on this so i don't like to sleep on my back because i start heating up sweating that's right so i tend to sleep on my side i sleep in that what is that um it's like soldier position yeah yeah yeah but then again there's some people that have shoulder issues and then they can't do that i'm relatively flexible through my shoulders not super flexible so i can do that it really depends now of course if you're sleeping on your stomach how do you elevate your ankles you know it starts becoming a little bit um you know we are not just science experiments and so you have to you have to assume that you're not going to get everything exactly right but keeping the room cool keeping the cool being under a warm enough blanket but then extending a hand or an ankle out so that you could cool off during the middle of the night that's going to be good keep the room dark although complete pitch black doesn't seem to be as good as having a little bit of light somewhere in the room but you don't want a bright blue light or red light anywhere in the room that's going to wake you up some people like me have very thin eyelids exceedingly thin eyelids some people have very thick eyelids so some people are more bothered by a light in the room than others it really is so you have to just tune things to your particular environment i'm curious about the neuroscience before you go to sleep how do we set our minds up to you were saying before about a lot of people it's hard for them to sleep because they can't shut their mind off right is there something we should be thinking before we shut it off to set our sleep up for success mentally and then to really build into the next day where we wake up feeling like clear-minded and without this brain fog where we have more motivation where we have more you know energy and excitement towards the next day and then doing that in a pattern every night is there any science around that is it like listening to a hypnosis that could be very helpful which will help you clean clean out whatever is going on through the day and get clear and ready for the next day but also fall asleep so you're not thinking about it you know is there anything that can help you have better dreams so that you sleep better like what have you found there in the neuroscience yeah so the uh so glad you asked this question there's some really interesting data from a guy named chuck charles zeissler who's at harvard meds and beautiful studies on sleep in humans for many decades and a really fantastic physician and researcher and they should observe something interesting which is that about 90 minutes or so before your natural bedtime there's a spike in alertness planning and almost anxiety that that all people undergo and it's a normal healthy pattern the idea and it's just so story because we don't really know i nor chuck zeisler nor anyone else was consulted at the design phase as we say but we assumed this was this came about because prior to going to sleep we need to shore up everything for safety we need to you know lock things down make sure everything is in its place because we are very vulnerable in sleep nowadays this would might manifest as you know you're you need to go to bed at 10 30 because you have to get up at six etc and then right around 8 30 or 9 you start finding yourself running around doing various things many people worry about that and they think oh i'm really stressed because i actually need to go to sleep and here i am wide awake it tends to subside very quickly so just the knowledge that that's a normal healthy spike in alertness and activity i think can help a number of people i want to make sure i mention that yeah the other thing is preparing the mind as you said turning thoughts off turning thoughts off as a skill we've talked before uh gosh almost a year or more uh now uh ago about yoga nidra yes which is uh there are many many yoga nidra scripts available on youtube free of cost the ones i particularly like are the ones by kamini desai k a m i n i d e s a comedy decide i just really like her voice i don't know comedy never met her these are free scripts they're uh yoga nidra scripts that last about 20 minutes they involve some breathing some meditation type stuff they but they teach you to turn your thoughts off which is really wonderful because a lot of people they just get stuck in this rumination now is there an ideal protocol prior to sleep it depends because some people find they have their greatest clarity after the kids are asleep and they're sitting there so i wouldn't say don't work or do work you know you do want to avoid strong stimuli before sleep so do you really want to watch uh you know politically charged or a violent movie right before sleep well that depends on how triggered you tend to be by politics or violence some people aren't triggered other people are yeah but you know that aside you you don't want to go to bed either too hungry or too full because that can inhibit your sleep so for most people that's going to be finishing your last bite of food about two hours before bedtime but i confess there are days when i work or work work and you know arrive at a place a hotel order some food and just you know eat a massive meal and then pass out right again 80 20. try and get it right 80 of the time what's what what's harmful of being too hungry or being too full before you go to bed you'll have trouble falling asleep and awake and you'll wake up in the middle both extremes both extremes and i i'm not a nutritionist or nutrition expert but what i found works for me personally is i tend to i fast until about noon ish each day and then my lunch is low carb so i tend to eat you know some grass-fed meat some some veggies maybe some starches if i trained and a piece of fruit if i didn't i don't and then i also have an afternoon snack but then in the evening my meals tend to be relatively low in meat and protein because and higher in starches which activate the tryptophan system and the serotonin system which makes it easier to fall asleep you can repack glycogen during the night so you can do muscular work the next day training of any kind but also thinking your brain uses glucose so at night i tend to eat pastas and vegetables and rice and um risottos and things like that not in huge volumes but i tend to eat less protein it's not that i don't eat any but i don't tend to eat big steaks right before going to sleep again 80 20 80 of the time so foods certain foods stimulate the neurotransmitter pathways like serotonin that facilitate the transition to sleep now what could you take well that's it some people will drink chamomile tea chamomile tea is enriched in something called apogenin apogenin is i take it in supplement 450 milligrams of apigenin but it's really just chamomile extract and it tends to make you a little drowsy and many people experience excellent sleep when they take apogenin and normally they struggle with it again with supplements i don't have a relationship to an apogenin company or anything like that i want to be clear and also supplements check with your doctor of course all that but the one thing i don't recommend is that people take melatonin don't take melatonin i am not a fan of melatonin for the following reasons first of all melatonin does many more things besides just cause the transition to sleep it also is involved in regulating some of the other hormones like testosterone estrogen and so on most of those studies are animal studies but some of the data on humans indicate that as well in kids melatonin is one of the hormones responsible for suppressing puberty and then melatonin rhythms change and then puberty happens so yeah if your kid has already been taking melatonin uh i wouldn't be alarmed but just be aware and if you talk to your physician most physicians aren't really aware of this i would talk to an endocrinologist frankly also most math um matt walker would also um support this statement because i'm lifting it from him so um which is that most melatonin supplements contain anywhere from 15 percent of what's listed on the bottle so 300 of what's listed on the bottle the regulation of supplements is is an issue even from a trusted brand if you were to take say three milligrams or six milligrams of melatonin it's a pretty standard dose out there you are taking supraphysiological levels of melatonin your system does not see those levels of melatonin so chamomile tea is okay chemical t or apogenin um it's a little hard to find but apogenin is a great it's chamomile extract essentially there are a few other things again margins for safety will depend magnesium three and eight which is t h r e o n a t e three and eight um you know 140 to milligrams or so of magnesium three and eight again you could just shop for cost i don't want to name brands even though sure my podcast is associated with one i don't want this to become about that the magnesium three and eight many people take in 30 to 60 minutes before sleep with apogenin many people find great benefit yes i am not a fan of taking serotonin or serotonin precursors 5-htp um l-tryptophan prior to sleep for the following reason the architecture of sleep as matt probably discussed here i need to watch that episode um he's so good uh includes a lot of slow wave sleep early in the night repair and recovery of motor circuits in the brain and muscular tissue and connective tissue that might have been worked with or damaged during the day and the second half of sleep tends to be enriched in so-called rem sleep rapid eye movements sleep more dreams that are very intense etc right that architecture is exquisitely controlled by levels of serotonin at one point and not having serotonin and others having acetylcholine release being very tuned to particular times in the night when you start messing with the serotonin system you disrupt that so my experience with 5htp i took it to go to sleep or l-tryptophan as i fall asleep like i got clubbed over the head by a grizzly bear and then i wake up an hour and a half later and i cannot fall asleep for me for two days wow very intense now i'm pretty sensitive to these things but that's why i'm not a fan of those and i rely on magnesium three and eight apogenin and some people also take theanine but for the time being i think magnesium three and eight and epigenin or chamomile are great if people don't want to take supplements chamomile tea is a terrific mild sedative just kind of turn off some of that thing relax okay and what about working out in sleep okay so you work out in the morning afternoon night how does that affect the sleep when you work out and how you work out yeah well i want to be um fair to the fact that people have different schedules and different constraints and that work you know getting that hundred and 50 to 180 minutes of zone two cardio per week is essential people should be doing some resistance training regardless of of goals or um in order to maintain muscle because it's so important to avoid injury and maintain metabolism etc so you need to get it in somehow but you then have to ask yourself what's happening around that workout so are you going into a brightly lit gym at 11 o'clock at night and blasting music and are you drinking three espresso or an energy drink before you go you're going to be awake you're not a hard time going to sleep it's not just the workout it's the context around the world yes my preference is always to work out as early in the day as possible that's my preference i don't always accomplish that we people should also know that if you work out at the same time for three or four days your body builds in an anticipatory circuit you will feel an energy increase a few minutes before that workout so if you are working out at 10 pm at night and you're finding it hard to go to sleep if you can shift that workout earlier in the day you will soon become a morning person you won't it might not be this as natural as somebody who naturally wakes up at 4 30 or 5 in the morning but let's say you're you want to get on an earlier schedule you want to get that morning light but also force yourself to work out in the morning and then by the second or third day of doing that you will start to feel more alert as you arrive to the workout because there are these anticipatory circuits that's cool working out late at night some people say cardio okay but not weight some people say i think it's highly individual and i don't think there's ever been a really good study addressing that regularity is key i think for me the best times to work out are three hours after waking up 11 hours after waking up just based on body temperature rhythms or immediately like get up and just put the shoes on and just go and i don't tend to do that last thing very often these days i tend to wake up and move through the morning a little bit like a lazy bear yeah sunlight and being awake for my caffeine caffeine but every time i do that early morning workout i feel much better and more alert all day and i fall asleep probably and i fall asleep much more easily and there the other thing you can do to fall asleep is this might seem a little counterintuitive i said that you need to lower your body temperature by one to three degrees you can take a hot shower or do a sauna which you would think well heats you up but when you actually heat the surface of the body your brain cools off your core body temperature unless you stay in that heat for a very long time so you take a brief um you know i want to say how long people should want to get in the sauna or whatnot and then or a hot shower and then you know maybe rinse off with some cool water for not cold but cool water lukewarm water for 10 seconds and dry off and get into bed your body temperature will drop if you get into an ice bath or a cold shower stay awake you are it's very jolting so i don't recommend people do that late in the day unless they want to be awake for some reason at night but the other thing is when this is a little counterintuitive but my colleague at stanford craig heller works on thermal regulation if you are want to cool down and you put a cold towel or ice around your neck you're cooling the surface of the body just like you would put a cold pack on a thermostat what's going to happen your brain's going to start to heat you up so i would avoid cold exposure right before sleep especially if it's very stimulating like to the point cold enough that you get that adrenaline bump so cold air is is key to drop the the temperature down keeping the room cool cool yeah but you don't have an ice box where you're shivering exactly the acute cold exposure as we call it of an ice bath or something rather a sauna or a lot of people don't have access to sauna maybe have a warm or hot shower before sleep but people tend to be very specific about this too some people like to shower in the morning some people in the evening i like to shower whenever i have an opportunity to shower right you know generally i try and shower after i work out because if i don't everyone suffers but the um but i think that the if people don't have access to a sauna that that hot shower or warm shower before sleep can be very beneficial because the body will actually start to dump heat and cool off as you get into bed gotcha and then in terms of the actual architecture of sleep and dreams with dreams you know that dreams in the beginning of the night tend to be kind of mundane and seem kind of ordinary and the dreams toward morning tend to be more intense this is the you wake up and you remember like what just happened that's right not what happened in hours before right and the the early part of the night in very broad strokes the early part of the night tends to be when we release growth hormone when we tend to um repair motor circuits and and damaged tissues and there's a real lack of emotional context to those dreams now the dreams toward mourning tend to have much more emotional enrichment and be very intense um often if people visual see visual hallucinations that's in the so-called rem sleep dreams why is that it's interesting the uh great question well two things you're also paralyzed during rem sleep you're eight you can breathe but you cannot move and there's this interesting thing that happens in sleep where when we are in rem rapid eye movement sleep we have high degree of emotionality of dreams but we are unable to release adrenaline this is very much like trauma treatment where there's a desensitization you're coupling an intense experience to an inability for your body to move or to have a reaction to that now if you suddenly wake up which i often do you'll notice that the adrenaline kicks in but this is kind of like therapy in your sleep or trauma release in your sleep and if you deprive people selectively of this rapid eye movement sleep a number of bad things happen but one of the primary things that happens that's bad is that when you don't get enough rem sleep you are more emotionally labile during the day little things bother you more you're more irritable yeah anytime i see a comment on on instagram to me or anyone else and someone seems like kind of prickly i always just think to myself i'm not getting enough room to sleep yeah or i tell myself yeah because i want to have some empathy for them they're just not neurologically up to snuff you meaning they're not working as well as they could now there are other reasons why people can be combative but i think lack of rem sleep is one of the main reasons that we feel irritable easily set off um there are a number of very powerful things that happen in rem sleep that we should all be seeking so if you wake up in the middle of the night you really do want to try and get back to sleep and then as the night goes on you're spending more a greater poor proportion excuse me of your sleep in that rapid eye movement sleep and those are when you have your very rich dreams and when you wake up oftentimes spending some time with a pad and paper maybe while you're getting your afternoon your outdoor sunlight um is a great thing because you'll remember components of your dreams the meaning of dreams has had uh you know has been debated for thousands of years i would say and i think you i think matt would agree matt walker would agree that some dreams do have tremendous significance others do not um there seems to be a very powerful effect of having a dream that makes people want to tell someone else their dream i think we just have to need to want to put structure on something that seems very unstructured it is a way in a sense when we're dreaming we're we're crazy like space and time are completely fluid everything's anything could happen and when we have a dream that feels powerful to us i think we we understandably want to put some sort of interpretation meaning behind it yeah i've had great insights through dreams i've also had a lot of dreams that got me nothing i wake up in the middle of the night and i tend to write things down that come to mind i achieved my greatest clarity for kind of psychological and relational things when i wake up first you know immediately i'll i'll have a solution in my head or i'll think i'm you know the other day this happened i've been as we were talking about before the recording i've been working through a very complex set of of personal interactions and these are these are not traumatic or anything like that but i've been working with somebody to try and resolve a really hard problem that we have and we are both committed to solving this problem and i'll chip away at this and chip away at this and they are much smarter than i am um uh so i'm struggling and then i will go to sleep and i'll wake up at three in the morning and boom the answer at least to whatever it is that i'm trying to resolve is right there and i think it's because in sleep you're trying you're getting those repeats of the different circuits they're prac you're rehearsing things you learn during the day you're dumping the emotional load through this trauma release type mechanism of rem sleep and then answers just kind of geyser up to the top but again i'm i'm speculating what we do know at the neural level is that there's a replay of the neurons that were active during the day in sleep but at much more rapid rates stuff a lot of stuff we won't remember that's what you're saying much of sleep is there much of the dreaming and sleep is designed to get you to forget things that are meaningless what is happening to the brain as you're sleeping is it just connecting neurons is it flushing is it you know creating these images for you to remember what's like the what's the actual mechanics of it yeah so several things are happening one is this glymphatic washout there's this literally like a spin cycle on the brain of dumping all that that's junk and that's why it's like elevated right so how you want your sleep that's why you want your feet elevated the lymphatic washout is one the other is adenosine this molecule that accumulates the longer that we are awake that actually gets reduced during sleep so that we can wake up feeling rested in other words if you've been up for a day and a half you've got tons of adenosine in your system caffeine of any kind is an end blocks adenosine function i want to be careful because it's not actually an antagonist it's a competitive agonist for the aficionados but you're basically reducing adenosine function with caffeine when you sleep you reduce adenosine which is why i delay my caffeine 90 to 120 minutes after waking up yeah so you've got adenosine getting pushed back down you've got the glymphatic system wash out you have reordering of neurons and creation of new connections so that what you couldn't do previously you can do the next day and the next day you're learning the trigger for learning occurs during wakefulness through focused alert motivated states the actual rewiring of neurons meaning the changes in the connections occurs during sleep in particular deep sleep so a lot's happening in there and during rapid eye movement sleep the brain is incredibly metabolically active right it's just that the body is paralyzed and some people experience this invasion of that sleep paralysis into into the wakeful period it's really scary i've had this happen you wake up and you're still totally paralyzed and you jolt out terrified you can't move i feel like i'm screaming but nothing's coming out it's really terrifying terrifying terrible it's called what sleep paralysis uh yes essentially but that's an invasion of of sleep paralysis into the waking yeah it's like a wake paralysis yeah and i know you're not a pot smoker but many pot smokers uh experience that more often than non-possible for reasons that probably relate to the serotonin system and the so-called atonia the inability to move interesting so there's that uh what else happens during sleep well there's all sorts of interesting resetting of the digestive system the microbiome are your muscles growing or muscle growth probably occurs throughout the 24 hour cycle but a lot of repair of muscles and triggering a muscle growth probably occurred during sure i he's passed now um he was 11 years old when i had to put him down but i had this bulldog costello he was a 90 pound english bulldog mastiff when he was a puppy i would take a picture of him and then the next day i'd take a picture of it when he was larger the next day well they're just growing at such a tremendous rate right and that's growth hormone and during puberty sometimes kids will be kind of locked up during sleep you'll go in and see a kid sleeping they'll be in some weird position they'll get growing pains because actually the bones it's a lot to orchestrate the growth of the bones and the connective tissue and the brain and all that it's not always perfect and so sometimes there's a few days where things are a little out i remember for months my knees would hurt when i was a teenager yeah and kids my dad used to come in and push my knees down because he was worried that something was going on that's the growing you're growing you're growing and you're growing bones are like spreading right right they're psychological growing pains and they're physical and in your case there was a lot of growing a lot of physical i'm not i'm not short i'm i'm six one but you're six four yeah you're you're you're you're attacking six five minutes so yeah um wow so the there's a lot of stuff going on in sleep now you're burning a lot of fat too and during sleep yeah a lot of metabolism is happening during sleep there's a beautiful paper that just came out gosh uh i forget all the micro details so i'm only going to say a little bit about it but a lot of the the removal of fat from the body from when we burn fat is actually done through the breath we exhale get there's a carbon dioxide component it's interesting it's a sweat in the breath right and then what just uh not so much not so much fecal elimination but more uh that you're breathing out breathing burns more fat than well no no sorry elimination of fat from the body if it's going to occur because i have to be careful because the nutrition crowd online that they have claws pitchforks and and they like come out to you and they're and they're ready fire aim type trigger you said this exactly so i want to be very clear i believe in calories in calories out yes as a basic principle there you know there are people out there arguing different but basically if you ingest more calories than you burn you're gonna gain weight and if you keep the molar less equal you're gonna maintain and if you burn more than you ingest you're gonna lose weight okay whether or not you lose from muscle fat or other body compartments is a different story but the utilization of fat as an energy source and the elimination of adipose tissue of body fat eventually boils down to something where you yes indeed you are exhaling the the eventual molecules okay but yeah among other there are some other routes as well i mean how much fat are we exhaling a week well it depends on whether or not you're in a caloric deficit or not if we're in a deficit are we then we're exhaling that fat essentially well but it's been broken down into a number of different metabolic components that's crazy it's really wild to think about well if you think yeah and you might think well why not just remove it through the digestive tract but it's part of a whole lipolysis meaning the utilization of fat for energy lipolysis cycle and an energy cycle you know if those of you that um uh enjoyed or suffered through college or high school you know the krebs cycle and atp and atp production and the mitochondrion cells and so forth that was a whole business there but um so in sleep this paper shows that you know each stage of sleep is actually associated with a different mode of energy utilization and carbon dioxide offloading and so forth or in the last episode we talked about ideally you're you are nose breathing during sleep you are not mouth breathing so some people actually will take shut their mouth with a little bit of medical tape huge benefits to that for getting enhanced oxygenation of the brain and body you do not want to have sleep apnea sleep apnea is associated with sexual side effects in men and women it's associated with cardiac arrest it's associated with a number of bad things a lot of people who are carrying a lot of extra weight who sleep on their back or even just who are carrying a lot of extra weight unfortunately there have a build up of carbon dioxide in their system at night especially if their mouth breathing and they wake up not feeling rested um in all individuals regardless of of um you know phenotype as we say um their genotypes and their phenotypes regardless of phenotype the kind of droopiness and the bagging of the eyes that can occur from sleep apnea and the effects on so get become a nose breather we talked about that in the last episode how to become a nose breather but you want a nose breathe during sleep if you can yes and your partner will thank you too because you're not snoring as much um are you do you knows breathing asleep i think i do yeah i think i do uh i i'm told i snore a little bit from time to time right and you know a lot of people even people who aren't carrying a lot of fat but people are carrying a lot of muscle who sleep on their back oftentimes they are they're kind of suffocating during sleep every time i hear about a a bodybuilder or a very large athlete dying it's almost always a heart attack during sleep they're on their back and or their side but there's there's fixating and the relate there's a beautiful relationship between breathing and heart rate very simply when you inhale your heart rate goes up and when you exhale your heart rate goes down wow this has to do with the movement of the diaphragm and the change of the shape of the heart and signals from the brain i won't go into all that but when you inhale your heart rate speeds up and when you exhale it slows down and that's respiratory sinus arrhythmia for the for the aficionados so you know you want to create an environment around your sleep where it's dim lights in the evening you've had your meal maybe a couple of chamomile tea towards sleep maybe use supplements maybe you don't you wake up get sunlight in your eyes this is the kind of landscape you want to create sure cool room you want to avoid very stimulating stuff conversations and activity you know right before sleep yeah now some stimulating activities before sleep we won't go into details have a rebound effect afterwards matthew walker's actually talked about this how certain types of activities cause a rebound in relax you know they're very sexual activities yes i'm causing i'm not i'm not trying to be vague here yes i'm just what does that do for sleep if you have uh sexual activities before sleep so sexual activity includes a it's really remarkable at the level of autonomic nervous system so sexual activity involves an increase at first in the so-called parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system the relaxation system but then it involves increases in the sympathetic arm of the of the of the autonomic nervous system and orgasm in men and women is actually purely driven by the sympathetic nervous system the stress system huh and then the postcoital period is when the parasympathetic nervous system kicks back on and there's a deep relaxation so is it good to have sexual activity before bed or or not that good according to the architecture of what i just described yes um yes it's good yes it's good yes it's good um yes it's good it helps people sleep and mat actually when matt walker came on my podcast we talked a little bit about some of the data on this now even um then you know so there are all sorts of questions about this that are now coming out now the the the interesting thing about studying sex in the laboratory is very hard to do right i mean there are ethical reasons there are complicated reasons good studies have to be done in laboratories or by self-report and with self-report people lie right right make up stories in one direction or the other they're doing more of what they would like to be they're either reporting more or what they'd like to be reporting of or less of what they would like to be reporting less of but doing those sorts of studies in the laboratory is very difficult there are sleep laboratories but it's not often that couples are coming in and staying in those sleep laboratories together although that does happen from time to time but yes after sex there's a rebound in the parasympathetic nervous system which is a deeply relaxing component of the nervous system and wow the the reasons for that aren't clear i mean one idea is that it's designed to put people in close proximity not just run off and look for another mate immediately and to smell each other and pair bond through some of the pheromonal systems um yeah yeah yes very powerful um an interesting form of a pre-sleep uh you know um biology for sure and one that let's be fair as we were talking about during the break every species has two main goals to protect its young and to make more of itself and while not all sex is designed for reproduction or used for reproduction i mean the the whole architecture of the reproductive access as we say from brain down to genitals is designed for that arc of parasympathetic sympathetic and then parasympathetic that's interesting yeah oh and the duration of that varies between individuals okay yeah you got to go at least 10 minutes to get the full effects i'm not setting the parameters that people should or should not follow that is not my domain uh this is powerful stuff man i'm so i'm so grateful for your wisdom as always um hubermann lab make sure you guys check out the podcast one of the top podcasts in the world right now it's incredible people love the science they love the neuroscience what you're teaching over there you got a lot of great stuff about brain states around fear courage anxiety calm how we can better move into and out of them through visual cues breath work movement supplementation and all sorts of great stuff amazing research uh hubermannlab.com huberman lab everywhere on social media you go live on instagram you post on the podcast every week youtube lots of great stuff we were talking about this before and i think this could be a good segue about sex at night i want to do a whole another episode on relationships and neuroscience around relationships and intimacy i think a fascinating conversation marriage relationships stating all that so if you guys want that conversation from andrew then leave a hashtag in the comments below relationships and we'll see on youtube if how many people want to really see that information and if you're on the podcast just dm us or post us over on instagram and tag us both if you want to learn more about the science and neuroscience behind relationships intimacy all that stuff i think it'd be fascinating have you done an episode on this yet i have not and i think that's powerful there's a lot of really great biology both about sex and reproduction and about relationships um parent child couple relationships um the biology of breakups is really oh that'd be huge um and there's some really interesting data on uh you know how relationships change over time according to changes in biology in individuals because we all change over time and not necessarily for the worse the data just to throw out a little teaser you know there's this idea that testosterone levels drop with age the data on this say that there are there are people uh in their 70s who maintain testosterone levels and those men and women both have testosterone that serve similar roles in both although different at the level of the body but at the level of the brain is what i'm referring to um that mimic the the levels that were present in their 20s and so yeah so it has a lot to do with how people sleep probably sleep how they uh certainly um their behavior but also um there's a strong psychological component related to self-image that's super interesting so we can talk about that as well dude this is fascinating i'm so pumped for this um yeah keep this information for the next time oh yeah i won't put it out there my man thank you thanks so much thanks brother i appreciate you lewis if you enjoyed that interview then i know you'll love what we have coming up right now the famous story about jim carrey where he said he would drive up mulholland drive here in los angeles pretty much every day or once a week and visualize himself acting in the main movies the blockbuster hits when he was a like a stand-up comic on like open mic night type of stuff right he would visualize it and he would sit there and he'd feel the feeling as if he's on the set with the big actors as he's receiving the checks and he would write himself a check i think it was for ten million dollars or five million dollars and he would imagine this happening him receiving it and then he would go do his work throughout the day and and take action on it and he always tells a story or it's famous story that he said you know this is what i would do i'd visualize this i think about it i wrote a check to myself years before it actually happened but then it came to me and this idea of thinking again in you mentioned the idea of like neediness in a sense of like if someone's like too needy then they're not gonna get it people are gonna be rejecting that neediness but when someone's comfortable in their own skin it's almost like everyone comes to them or things like they already have it like they already have it and they talk about this in the law of attraction uh community about when you're chasing something or you're saying you don't have it you're like needing something you're saying you don't have it but when you become comfortable with where you are things start to attract to you and you have energy and you're like a magnet as opposed to an opposite magnet resisting these things that you need and want pursuit is very taxing and the reason is there's a biochemical reason for this is it's like wandering in the desert not knowing if there's water at all that's really depleting i mean epinephrine is in the brain and it's a it's chemical equivalent in the body is adrenaline those are the same thing and if you're constantly in pursuit right you're just pursuing external goals external well as external goals it will wear your nervous system down you'll be exhausted and you will one will eventually run around you'll become mentally depressed the key is to figure out what are the rewards that you can acquire along the way internally remember it's subjective there can also be external rewards because many things have milestones you know a series a or a series b for a company then the ipo later reaching a million users or doing this yeah we have engagements before we have weddings typically right yeah um there are those rare instances where people just go and get married but typically there's a lot of build up that is designed you know that fortunately you know provides these uh reward mechanisms so the key thing is that you can't just be all gas pedal all the time without rewarding yourself however the reward that dopamine is so powerful because it actually as i mentioned before it actually is the chemical substrate for epinephrine it creates a reservoir of more energy and again i'm not talking about caloric energy or glycogen mind it's it's it's mental energy it's the it's the desire to push on it's the desire to keep going so we need some consistent dopamine hits throughout the days or our months to give us more energy to pursue that's right but we don't want to be over pursued because then we'll burn out that's right and so everyone has to find where that sweet spot is that kind of you know on the freeway driving where it's really smooth and seamless where you're not on the accelerator the whole time where you're in a gear that's appropriate and you know we're talking now in terms of sort of um you know neuroscience lends on these things but the key is always going to be practices it's going to be just as early we're talking about bringing stress levels up or down depending on you know alertness levels up or down depending on the kind of stress you're experiencing the reward system is great because when you let's say you're a person that can very easily access this dopamine reward so you're always excited you know people say hey let's do this and your your mantras let's go and you just kind of go what we call in science very low activation energy you just go that's great those people do run the risk of burnout although there are these people that we occasionally encounter that just seem to have boundless energy for everything and they tend to get a lot more done because they have a lot more internal reward and you'll notice they're getting rewards from all the little things and it's a hundred percent subjective it's like hearing funny jokes all day long you can just keep going and suddenly the beginning of relationships when people fall in love you know it's a real thing but it is associated with with a big flood of dopamine in the system makes everything seem exciting and possible and new and i think that we also know other people that they have a very hard time accessing this dopamine system and they either place it under the complete control of external things so they're miserable until they get the payoff and then sometimes they're even miserable again or they really just don't they haven't learned the skills of how to access it so how do we trick our mind to find rewards in subjective things that aren't actually physically coming to us okay so um i'll tell a brief anecdote about an experiment that's really important this was done many years ago in a psychology department i think it was done at bing nursery school at stanford but i could be wrong about that so i don't want to state that as absolute fact but the experiment nonetheless was done where they looked at kids in schools these are kids about nursery school age or maybe a little bit older and they looked at what they did during recess and they they found that some kids really like to draw and so these kids would naturally just orient towards the crayons and pens and draw and then for a short while they rewarded the kids for drawing those same kids they would give them a gold star or a little sticker or something that was special and made them feel special so they were giving them an external reward then they removed the reward and what they found is those kids drew at a much lower frequency they somehow lost the intrinsic pleasure of drawing huh because they were used to getting an extrinsic suddenly an ex they associated the drawing they thought they they weren't conscious but they their nervous system said oh i guess i was doing it for the reward now there's less reward and without going into a lot of details there's a very solid scientific phenomenon called reward prediction error which says that if you get less dopamine at the end than you anticipated it's a letdown if you get more at the end then it feels great now what this all translates to is once again learning how to attach internal rewards to the process of whatever it is that you want to do in order to get you to the thing you really want and so the the short answer in this actually i was asked this question recently someone said okay how can i ensure that once i succeed this was somebody who is doing very well in their pursuit of a goal and they were getting close and they said how can i be sure that when i get to the win that i don't lose the ability to keep working because i really want this paper i'm not satisfied right and i say well there's two ways one is make sure that that reward really bask in it really appreciate what you've done and what's come to you and but and here's a very important but is but take that feeling of being saturated with dopamine the huge win and attach it to the effort process that got you there so when you're thinking this took me five years to accomplish this thing but reminding yourself of every day week year all the little things you did on a daily basis to get you there not we're here right that's right if you think that you sort of us let's say super bowl win the party at the end is going to be great or i have to imagine it's really going to be great but that at that moment people the winners anyway their system is flooded with dopamine flooded with dopamine and there's an opportunity because dopamine we haven't talked about this but dopamine is a signal to the brain that it should rewire so that in the future it has a higher probability of getting back to that experience this is how animals learn how to find water and food this is at the basis of so many reward pursuits and so if you attach all that plasticity all that brain rewiring to the celebration and only to the celebration you actually can erase a lot of the valuable content that your brain you know skills that your brain acquired in route to that goal so it's almost like that whole night after you celebrate and maybe the next few days really reflect on the years it took to get you there that's right we tend to so over emphasize the winds it's the things of movies right i mean there's some movies that are really good like rocky the first rocky where he didn't actually win he loses and it was but so many people i think one academy award for best picture right so many people associate that film with with the striving process the reward was really true his joy at the end of that was really called it was interesting he called it to his family to his to the process right it was really a movie that captured that in its best form when it's just about the win what you you lose this amazing opportunity to attach the dopamine to everything that came before it now in addition to that there's one other way to do it nobody likes this one but it works which is also when you get there give away the gold star give give it away and really so you don't fixate on the gold medal all the time and really high performers there are a few people whose names unfortunately i can't mention that i know who have done incredibly well in the silicon valley world and some of them have given away a substantial portion of what they have and everyone thought oh they want a simpler life and this that no actually they were just setting themselves up for the next big win and they've gone on to do this two or three times now really so they keep moving the carrot out in front of them but they also are somehow intuitively understanding this process that what got them there was not the last you know one yard into the end zone was the ten years of the journey necessary but not sufficient right but everything that came up until then is so important so when we have dopamine in our system and when we've taken control of that process we want to make sure that we capture everything that led up to that and it's it's vitally important in these big kind of we're talking in these big milestones type of examples but this can be done across the day it can be you know i'm going to get to noon just really being the most reflective person i can with my child and not just doing that as a sheer effort like i really don't want to do it but doing it and thinking this is going to be a lot of work and when i get there i'm going to take a couple minutes to just register everything that i managed to control all the things i managed to not do that would have been destructive and so dopamine turns out to be i would argue one of the most if not the most powerful neurochemicals in our system there's a great book called the molecule of more i didn't write it i wish i had um that gets into this whole description which is quite accurate about how dopamine isn't just about reward at the end it's really the molecule of motivation it's what propels us forward it's an incredible read really a lot of real world examples very accessible book and it really points to how so much of what we're about is the pursuit of these external goals but that if we can learn to control these things internally that's when things become kind of limitless you know this word that everybody wants to access everyone wants to know what's the pill that's going to make me limitless what's the technology it we actually have the chemical inside us the key is to learn to regulate it and the subjective part the example of good joke bad joke is the best example i can give that you have to decide for you what lets you access them and obviously those things should be things that are not destructive to you or to other people because that will take you down a bad path it also we have to understand that dopamine can be attached to the trivial to trivial anything i could attach it to picking up and putting down this cap for my water bottle but the point is that if that's not attached to some other thing it doesn't really work yeah so i know that you know this is a little bit less concrete than like two inhales in an exhale i like that but but this is the way i think um i'm certain this is the way that the mind can be trained we can train our mind to be in pursuit and in regular winds regular winds and this is why i think there's a lot of interest these days in like habits and habit formation because when you move that horizon in close and you complete something small it's not about what you completed it's the fact that you complete it mm-hmm you're engaging in your bed it could be writing a page like a little hash flipped open with dopamine got deployed it's like people who are like list crosser offers yeah um they're engaging this process so i think what i'm describing again is not completely new people will look to different examples of their life or other people's lives and say oh right that's that that's that but that's exactly the point i think that's the real utility of of a discussion like about neuroscience like this which is that once you understand the mechanisms you can start asking yourself where does this work for me where does it not work for me and how can i maneuver this in healthy ways i'm curious as we're getting to the the beginning of the year and a lot of people set goals for the year for themselves or if they're ending a career exiting a business getting out of a relationship they'll usually set some new type of goal for themselves so whether it's the beginning of the year or you're just in transition you want to set new goals what do you think is based on neuroscience is the best way to set a a year-long goal for yourself should we have 20 massive goals should this be one big goal should we have three key goals and how do we create the goal to where it drives us to perform at our optimal best and get closest to that goal if not accomplish it and what should we be thinking about throughout the year in order to accomplish the goal yeah well i can give an opinion on this but it's just my opinion um i mean i break up my life into these 12-week site you know i think it's because i've always done 12-week training cycles it's like an athlete it's a season 12-week training cycles um just seems manageable somehow with the understanding that there will be setbacks and things of that sort i think that certain goals are goals of practices that we've already mastered so you know you're trying to next level what you've already accomplished and so those goals are going to require a lot less limbic friction if you will and you already know how to access the rewards you actually can predict the rewards and when they come you actually know what the rewards are you've really clearly defined them those are goals that i think we're sort of on autopilot with and i think everyone should probably check in at the end of the year and say you know my if i'm going to continue along that trajectory it might make sense for me to set some really concrete goals sometimes those are quarterly financial quarters or academic quarters if that's what the landscapes are in but i think that um that doesn't require a lot of us except more of the same right but those are nonetheless growth goals and there's a and there's a little bit more friction there because it's very challenging it takes more effort to lean in because you when you don't already know how to do something it's a very different goal pursuit right sort of like so if i already have my business and i've been running it for a few years you know certain practices of how to get to where you've been that's right and you're thinking how do i double my business that's right it's different than i'm trying to learn a whole new skill goal right you already know how to forage for water as opposed to you're some young calf or some animal that needs to learn how to walk right so you so i think you know one big goal of the sort that um you know we don't actually have the skill set yet we're not even aware that of what we need in order to accomplish it per year seems like a pretty good goal to me so learning entirely new language or an entirely new physical skill but with any long-term goal the problem is remember don't focus on the destination that's right well so you have to move the horizon in but you have to remember there's that one little pitfall that cul-de-sac that i described where you'll tell people this year i'm going to do blank and if they reward you enough you might not do it remember if you get enough dopamine it's amazing i'm so happy you're doing that congratulations and you say i know i can do it and then you don't you sort of lose the incentive to do it so some a lot's been made out of making uh goals public is it is it better to make them public or not well so this is this is a question i don't know i think that in my case it has um for me telling people several people that i'm going to do something because i will work very hard to avoid um but i tend to do that with things i really want to do anyway but there's a strong fear element like i'm afraid to do this or i'm i'm kind of anxious about doing this so i'll tell people and then i'm like okay now i'm committed yeah you gotta do this you gotta do it now and i tell people that i'm certain they're gonna give me a hard time yeah that's just my name right um and i'm not trying to prove them wrong i'm just trying to make sure that they don't have any ground to stand on yeah and that's how i do it i think for some people the continuation of what they're already doing if it's feeling like a lot of work it's feeling exceedingly challenging and like oh my god another year of this another five years of that i think that's when you have to move the horizon in really close i think a lot of people right now are feeling back on their heels because 2020 was such a trying year for a lot of people so everyone many people are recalibrating what's possible although many people are feeling expansion and they're really going to go forward full steam so i think continuing in pursuits that we already have some degree of mastery over and thinking about where could i notch that up another two or three percent i think that's incredibly valuable i think that provides a lot of value to the individual to their families and to society really because a two percent improvement of like what you're already doing is going to have an outsized effect on what other people receive right even though for you you've been down that road many times but taking on a new pursuit in parallel to that means really getting excited about the possibility you give the jim carrey example about the possibility and starting to imagine what that would actually be like to be well let's say fluent in spanish and you can just do this reflexively without having to try that's totally within your reach and i think there it makes sense to really think about the end point quite a lot as a way to get over those barriers of sure of fear because when you already know how to do something there's no fear barrier yeah it's just an energy barrier all trauma anxiety fears they all map back to stress in some way now you can have stress without trauma you can have anxiety without trauma but you can't really have trauma without stress and anxiety so even though there aren't really strict definitions of the boundaries between trauma and stress and fear i think it's fair to say that trauma is a fear and or stress response that's happening at the wrong times right it's sort of carrying over from an experience it's making life uncomfortable or in some cases exceedingly challenging for example so um someone has a you know sexual assault um somebody sees a car accident or is in a car accident um veterans come back from overseas there's kind of first person trauma where something happens to somebody and then there's a third person trauma where somebody sees something terrible happen there's grief and so there are a lot of categories and so we don't want to complicate the the landscape and the answer but i think it's important for people to understand that the stress response is at the core of all of this and when we talk about stress i think it's also important that we divide that into two kinds of stress because it defines the two approaches that people can take to combat stress fear anxiety what are the two types of stress okay the two types of stress are we the one is the one we're almost all familiar with because when we hear stress we think pupils dilating hand shaking heart beating oh my goodness oh my goodness you're really upset you're stuck in traffic something is really bothering you you're angry you're having the fight-or-flight response that you know that phrase gets thrown around a lot and then that those circumstances it's very important that people take control of their mind and their body in a way that allows themselves to calm down to reduce the so-called stress response and we can talk about tools to do that that are very concrete and that are very reliable there's another side of the stress response so what would that stress be called what's that type of stress ah so um unfortunately there's no name for this this is one of the important things maybe we'll figure it out today maybe your audience will figure it out yeah they're a smart bunch and they're living this stuff too so um unfortunately there isn't a word for this but um what is this one type of strength there's one type of stress which is you're you're too activated you're too alert you're too agitated and you want to be less alert less activated and less agitated the alert stress that's right we could call it the alert stress hyper alerts hyper allergies let's just do that for sake of conversation today and we are by no means a nomenclature committee so we can always revise later yeah there's another side of stress which is when there are a lot of things happening in the world pandemics you can't work because they've shut there's another shutdown or there's strife in your life or things are really challenging and you're feeling exhausted and you can't get mobilized and alert enough and this has never really been cleanly laid out for people that and what i call the whole process is one of limbic friction okay so the limbic system are these areas deep in the brain limbic literally means edge they're near the edge of the brain and when we're stressed there's a lot of activity in these brain regions and then we've got this our forebrain our prefrontal cortex for the aficionados and when we're in a thinking and calm and deliberate and rational manner when we can control our body and our mind it's called top-down processing we're we're controlling ourselves but there's a lot of friction with that limbic pathway i promise i'll get to the practices so when there's this friction we can call it limbic friction for sake of discussion there you can't control all those impulses and all that anxiety or fatigue for too long and in fact as you get more tired or if someone has frontal damage if they have brain damage to the frontal lobes what you find is they become more impulsive when they feel like sleeping they just sleep even if it's socially inappropriate when they feel like yelling or screaming or swearing they just they just do that and so there's two kinds of limbic friction one is when we're too activated and we want to calm down and we're trying to say calm down don't sit don't say the thing that you know you shouldn't say don't do the thing you don't you know you shouldn't do and then there's the other kind of limbic friction which is the world is happening really fast and we feel buried we're overwhelmed and we need to get more activated we need more energy we need more energy we need to be able to lean into life and we're feeling overwhelmed what's that called well we we should come up with a name now so that would be um exhaustion and stress or overwhelm stress or overwhelm stress or now a lot of people start giving these names to things that sound almost like clinical syndromes which sometimes they are but they'll say things like adrenal burnout which actually doesn't exist fatigue now there is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome which is a real medical condition where people can't actually produce enough adrenaline but most of us have enough adrenaline in our bodies to last 200 years two lifetimes so the adrenals don't really burn out what happens is people are so over activated they're in this alertness hyper alert stress for so long that eventually they kind of crash into the over fatigue stress okay so one turns into the other one right so the first thing for anyone trying to navigate stress and then we'll talk about trauma is to understand in what kind of stress they're dealing with are you exhausted and having a hard time getting your energy up or is your energy too high and you're having a hard time getting your energy down because the solutions to those are often quite different so on the previous time we met we talked about a tool for calming the body very quickly which is this double inhale long exhale typically the inhales are done through the nose the exhale through the mouth so the physiological sigh which was discovered by scientists in the 30s and then jack feldman's group at ucla has really identified the underlying brain circuits and then my lab is now looking at this stuff in humans in a kind of more clinical setting that double inhale followed by an exhale we know is the fastest real-time tool for taking one's state of alertness down the hyper alert stress right you're not going to crash into sleep but you're going from hype you're not feeling good you're too agitated you want to calm down and what's interesting about that tool is it speaks to a principle which is it's very hard to control the mind with the mind so when you're stressed just telling yourself don't stress don't stress don't stress calm down calm down rarely works it also really works to tell someone else to calm down to relax hey relax yeah usually it has the opposite effect don't tell me to relax and it can be damaging for relationships if you've ever you know someone's really stressed and you tell them to relax sometimes it actually can create more friction and they don't share support what should they do in that moment they should look to the body the nervous system includes the brain but also all the connections to the body and back again and so the when you can't control your mind you want to do something purely mechanical like the physiological side because that you know once you take control of the body in that way then the mind starts to fall under the umbrella of this top down control again top down control is what children and puppies don't have you know if if we had also yeah i've got a 10 year old bulldog his name is costello he barely does anything now because he's costello but he but when he was a puppy everything was a stimulus he would walk over pick up a cord and chew on it then he'd drop it and he pivots something else and it's because they have they literally have no prefrontal cortex wired into this limbic system they don't have the suppression so there's no friction the limbic system just does whatever it wants and actually in humans with frontal temporal dementia and in certain people who have frontal temporal brain damage they become very impulsive my dad went through i don't know if i talked about this the last time but my dad had a uh a traumatic car accident 15 years ago it was 15 years ago a couple months ago where a car went on top of his car and went through the windshield and the bumper hit him in his head pretty much split open his head his girlfriend at the time was holding his head together went to the hospital airlifted in a helicopter was in a coma for three months and it's been a 15-year journey where we had to teach him re-teach him how to write how to talk how to walk like everything where it was almost like he was my father in his body but his mind was having to relearn like a child and even today when i see him visit him he'll he'll swear just compulsively he'll he'll do things that maybe aren't appropriate because he probably doesn't have the i don't know you can probably tell me better as a neuroscientist but what happens when someone has brain damage especially in the front uh frontal cortex what what happens to the brain yeah so these top when i say top down control there's literally a set of wires we call them axons from the prefrontal cortex that suppresses these impulsive behaviors in the limbic system and when there's damage it's essentially removing that break and you know in adults uh older adults especially because their behaviors aren't quite as um you know because they're older they aren't necessarily going to walk over and punch people or scream out explicatives and these kinds of things um fortunately although sometimes you see that sometimes you see that sadly but those circuits aren't functioning well and in young children if you ever go to a classroom i guess now kids are home a lot but in a typical kindergarten classroom what you'll notice is that some of the kids can sit very still and other kids are rocking back and forth they're moving around a ton and the teacher is constantly trying to people i was one of those kids trying to corral the children and children mature at different rates and what's what you're seeing there is the different maturation of their frontal cortex when you see a child that's very deliberate and can really control their speech and their behavior you're looking at a child that has a lot of top down control the frontal cortex is really engaged now is that genetic is that probably a mixture it's probably a mixture of environmental influences and genetic like most things yeah i'm not trying to just hedge here sure i think um you know but like for instance i have a niece who um is adopted and um she's very deliberate and very calm and so we you know we wonder you know what what you know is this genetic is it nature nurture you know there's probably some genetic bias and then there's probably also um a lot of environmental influences i mean a lot of what we're taught in school and at home because a lot of kids are homeschooled now is about what not to do right you know sit still don't say this don't say that you know we get the plea say please and thank you you know sit up straight you don't do your dishes kind of stuff but a lot of the the don't language is designed to around these things of top down control we've set up a lot of important social constraints right we've all felt this as adults too in two ways it becomes really extreme when we can't control that limbic system one is when we're when we're very fatigued when we're fatigued or we're sick or we're in pain physical pain chances are when something bothers us we're closer to that threshold of saying the thing that we wish we're on our patients exactly no patient that's right so how do we learn to have patients when we are hyper alert or overwhelm exhausted stress okay so when we're in hyper alert there's a mechanism associated with that that makes our internal world measure time differently what happens under those conditions is you feel like the external world is moving very slowly i think i might have mentioned this in the our previous meeting but when you're really stressed on the hyper alert side it seems like the world is going very slowly you're going to just knowing that and knowing that it's likely that you're going to feel impatient and if the world is moving much too slow sort of like if you're you're trying to get someplace on time and the person in front of you doesn't know where you're going i was the guy not knowing where i was going this morning and so and we can't see each other in cars so you think what is this person doing oh my goodness and they're just looking for the right turn yeah yeah so there's that and then when we are fatigued it seems like the world is going really fast okay and so for people who are exhausted everything feels overwhelming now of course the rate that things are actually moving in the world is the same but the perception is that it's just too much and we can't cope so we talked about a tool to calm oneself the reason i like the physiological side is we are all equipped with the pathway if people want to know if there's some medically oriented folks out there if you want to teach this to other folks there's a nerve called the phrenic nerve phr enic that goes from the brain down to the diaphragm that controls that and then controls the lungs and so when you decide okay i'm going to use the psi the physiological side to calm myself in a way you're engaging top down control because you're you're taking control of your internal landscape rather than trying to take control of your thinking which is very hard you can't fix your mind with your mind sometimes trying to control the mind with the mind is like trying to grab fog it's just going to keep moving right if you've ever tried to grab or smoke it just moves it's vapors you're never going to grab it the key is to is to is to take control of the system by taking control of a real physical entity this phrenic nerve and the reason i describe this stuff is not to put a lot of unnecessary detail but i think when people realize this isn't something that you build up over time and then are able to do that you literally have a wire set of wires that goes down to your diaphragm this muscle in your abdomen that can move your lungs and then as you blow off carbon dioxide when you do that exhale you your brain starts to calm down and then your mind the top down control the cortex can start taking control of the limbic system again it's like you're it's almost like you're losing control of the automobile and you're trying to steer but really there's another lever that if you just pull it then the state the steering wheel will stabilize for you so that's the way to think about the physiological side on the other side of things when you're feeling overwhelmed and fatigued there are two ways to approach that first is the kind of foundation of fatigue which is almost always poor sleep and scheduling of sleep this is something that doesn't get discussed a lot and i don't think i've discussed this on any podcast previously but you know getting better at sleeping is a whole set of practices but sleep is a slow tool it's not a real-time tool because if you're feeling exhausted and you have to get up and have your day deal with children deal with work deal with life we can talk about how to get better at sleeping but in real time what you want to do is you want to bring more alertness into the system focus focus and alertness the way to do that is to take advantage of a very well-established medical fact all medical students learn this all mbs know this which is that there's a direct relationship between how you breathe and your heart rate and so i'll give a little bit of the background and then i'll give this specific character just so that people understand where this is coming from so when we inhale when we inhale it almost feels like everything's moving up but actually what happens is our diaphragm moves down okay so when we inherit our diaphragm moves down when that happens our heart literally gets a little bit bigger the volume of the heart gets a little bit bigger which means that whatever blood in there is moving per unit time a little bit slower and there's a set of neurons in the heart called the sinoatrial node that sends a signal to the brain and says hey blood flow is slowing down and the brain sends a signal back to the heart and says okay let's speed up and speeds up the heart rate so the short concise way to put it is when you inhale more vigorously or longer you're speeding up your heart rate this is this actually there's a name for it in the medical community but the important thing to understand is as you inhale you're sending a neural signal to your heart to speed up and when you exhale the diaphragm moves up the heart gets a little bit smaller literally because there's less space there then there's a signal sent to the brain and the brain sends a signal back and says slow down the heart rate and so this is happening quickly so if you inhale it's speeding up that's right if you exhale it's slowing down that's right so if you want to become more alert you actually can just simply make your inhales a little bit more vigorous or a little bit longer than your exhale so let's say you get up in the morning or longer inhale uh shorter exhale that's right not to speed up your heart rate and to be more alert not longer exhale double intake right shorter longer or more vigorous inhales will speed up your heart rate and make you more alert longer or more vigorous or more vigorous exhales will slow down your heart rate and make you less alert wow and there's this has a name which is as you know it's a certain kind of arrhythmia but that makes it sound bad this is actually what's happening all the time this is the basis of heart rate variability when people talk about heart rate variability is good you know that you don't want your heart rate to be one level all day high or low a lot of people don't realize that they think oh i got a nice slow heart rate you think all day long when you're asleep that's right well slow heart rate is better than high heart artificially hot you know sorry excessively high heart rate but you don't want your heart rate to be like this you want your heart rate to go through these fluctuations heart rate variability is good why because heart rate variability reflects the activation of what's typically called the parasympathetic nervous system which is the brain's ability to slow down and calm the nervous system so when your heart rate is going like this it means that your heart rate is speeding up and then your brain is slowing it down your heart rate is speeding it up and your brain is slowing down and that's what's happening all day long as you're moving through things in a kind of calm alert way but when you get that troubling text message or you see a post or a comment and you go and all of a sudden your heart rate just goes and you feel like you immediately want to respond or you're going to say the thing that maybe you shouldn't say you're going to do the thing that maybe you shouldn't do or you just want to be thought more thoughtful and more targeted in your response the key is to slow down the heart rate by making your exhales longer or more vigorous so it could simply be and then shorter inhales longer exhales or do the physiological sigh or if you wake up in the morning and you're experiencing the other kind of stress which is you look at yourself the world is overwhelming me my life is over i don't know what i'm going to do i don't even know what sequence i'm going to do things in you're just discombobulated and a lot of people struggle with this the key is to do a few breaths even while you're getting out of bed and preparing your morning coffee or water or whatever it is and just start breathing in a way that's inhale emphasized which sounds weird but basically what you're doing is you're speeding up your heart rate at some point usually within only two or three of those breaths you're gonna feel more alert and then you can just go back to breathing normally so you don't have to do this for hours you do this for a few moments or minutes that's right and and while i'm a fan of breath work as its own thing because breathwork can teach you how to operate these levers in your brain and body so to speak breath work is a dedicated practice that you do away from these stressful events whereas learning to control your heart rate and thereby your mind using your breathing so it goes breathing heart rate mind in that sequence so if your mind isn't where you want it to be don't start with the mind start with your breathing then which will control your heart rate which will then allow you to control your mind so don't don't think your way out of a moment of stress feel breathe your way out of this moment of stress that's right and and one of the things and i'm i'm certain they're going to be people out there listening to this saying wait a second the yo the yogis and the yogurt community has been talking about this for centuries what are you doing you know this is just a re recasting of what we already know i agree i agree within the science community these things have been given crazy names like arrhythmias and heart rate variability and um the diaphragm and the phrenic nerve and so the the language of science has known all about this for many centuries also but it's been shrouded by language and the yogic community has known about this for a long time but it's been shrouded by language so by bringing this discussion forth i just want to be clear that i i'm not trying to reinvent the wheel or pretend that i invented the wheel by any stretch i'm trying to say that we all have these circuits these levers in our body that we can that we can pull and push and people learn how to do this intuitively but we're never really taught the underlying mechanisms and i do believe that one and yoga's not big on mechanisms they're very good on naming and on you know yogis in different areas of the world when they say something they usually know what the other one is talking about scientists do as well but mechanism if people can just understand a little bit about why the heart slows down when you exhale more than you inhale or why the heart speeds up when you inhale more than you exhale i do believe that having that knowledge in the mind allows people in a moment of stress to say oh i understand what's happening to me and therefore i should go to this particular tool you know i i do understand that one doesn't need to understand how an engine works in order to drive a car but you do need to know how the control panels work right right this is why we send people to driving so yeah and why we don't that 10 year olds drive um although i'm sure there's some yeah on a farm somewhere yeah well actually there was this one news thing i don't know if you've seen this where a state trooper pulls or a chp or somebody pulls over a car that's kind of weaving through the lanes on and they pull over and i think the kid was six years old oh my goodness should get onto the freeway oh and he was driving the left-hand lane and his driving was pretty bad but he was below the that's crazy well that just tells you that the young mind is eager to steer things and press pedals and things of that sort of explore we are definitely not recommending but this is very different than driving a car in the sense that all the panels and all the controls are there we have we're all most people are taught how to drive a car most people are not taught how to drive their nervous system and so a lot of what i'm talking about here is just one language one version of the language of how to drive and control your nervousness and you can't drive your nervous system with thoughts and controlling your mind alone you have to connect the whole vehicle is what i'm hearing you can't just steer thoughts you need to also use the brakes or also use different levers which is the entire car that's right it's it's very hard to control the mind with the mind it can be done there are people that are get better at that right maybe it's like practice over time using i say when in moments of stress either excessively alert stress or excessively fatigued stress look to the body because there are mechanisms that have been built into the body for hundreds of thousands of years designed to do this now the reason i can say that is that the physiological side the double inhale exhale is controlled by a specific set of neurons in the brain stem that jack feldman's lab discovered when children or adults have been sobbing very hard or when they're out of air in a claustrophobic environment they naturally do that to reopen these little sacks in their lungs now inhale emphasized breathing can be practiced in a way sort of away from stress in a kind of offline approach that can be beneficial for raising what we call stress threshold so there's a whole other way to look at stress which is to say how do i get calmer in the mind when my body is freaking out you don't even have to ask about a lifetime of short sleep we can ask about these really you know one week of short sleep or even one night of one hour of lost sleep and i think that's how fragile our brains and our bodies are to this thing called a lack of sleep and you could then ask well

Channel: Lewis Howes

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Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, andrew huberman, andrew huberman sleep, andrew huberman dopamine, andrew huberman interview, andrew huberman depression, andrew huberman adhd

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Length: 94min 21sec (5661 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 14 2022