My DAILY HACKS To Improve Sleep, Destroy Laziness & LIVE LONGER! | Andrew Huberman & Mark Hyman

if you're waking up at 3 or 4 a.m chances are you are running out of melatonin so you're saying those blue blocker things that doesn't work and so it's not just a matter of giving it the right things for many people it's going to be about repairing this system getting quality sufficient sleep on a regular basis is without question the foundation of mental and health and probably physical health as well you already know this is so huge this is such a huge idea so sleep is divided into multiple stages but it's a state of inaction no surprise there we're not walking around unless we're sleepwalkers and it's divided mainly into two general states one is the early part of the night when we are mostly in slow wave sleep and our body is repairing itself that's mainly growth hormone is released that's a state in which our dreams tend to have very little emotional load and it's mostly about motor learning physical repair of the body etc and then the second half of the night where we are in so-called rem sleep rapid eye movement sleep is the other major state uh where the dream content tends to have a lot of emotional richness the dreams are very intense and we know that we don't release the molecule epinephrine adrenaline during rem sleep and it's sort of like a built-in every night therapy exposure exposure therapy the argument we got into with somebody a few days ago the challenge that we're going through in a relationship an old thing wound or or shameful thing gets worked out slowly over time in sleep and we are confront we're basically confronted with stuff in sleep in this rem sleep and we don't release the molecules that allow us to act on that uh if you ever wake up from one of these dreams it you immediately get a surge of adrenaline and it's very intense right so it's kind of like built-in exposure that's right and then we you know we we wake up and we don't have a language for waking states the same way we do for sleeping states so then we wake up and we don't have a language to explain the states that we go through in waking the same way we do for sleep but there are two general features of states that i think are really powerful as an anchor point for thinking about states of mind and emotions etc and those are the ones that are regulated by the so-called autonomic nervous system and the name is a real misnomer because it's the system in our body it's sort of like a seesaw that takes us between different levels of alertness and calmness some people talk about these in terms of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system but we can just discard with the nomenclature for now sympathetic means more alertness parasympathetic means more calmness essentially yeah and it's sort of like a seesaw and so the way to imagine this is that throughout your day you have varying levels of alertness and calmness now if you are very alert extremely alert we call that panic or anxiety but with that also comes something beneficial which is focus so we know that without alertness there's no focus and then there are states of deep calmness sometimes we think of that as fatigue you know it could be fatigue at its extreme but it could also be a nice feeling of tranquility yeah and infil in states of calmness the mind and the way that thoughts are organized and feelings are organized is that there tends to be less linear structure we can actually there's more creativity in calm states than there is in hyper-focused states hyper-focused alert states are great for implementing a strategy you already understand running from a tiger like running from a tiger or performing surgery or uh your kid comes to you and has a problem and to them you can see that it's huge but you know how to navigate this problem because you have the perspective of having been a 14 year old before yeah so you say okay here's what we're going to do who talked to who who said this you know so there's nothing really creative about that situation it's just kind of an implementation what you already know so this we don't again we don't have a language to talk about what creativity really is at a neuroscience level we can start to approach it or what focus is or what stress is but if we all could understand that there is an undeniable truth about our nervous system which is that our states of alertness and calmness set us up to be better or worse for certain kinds of events so for instance if you want to sit down and do focused work if you're too calm too sleepy that's not good your mind will drift similarly if you want to relax and have a meal if you're too stressed if you're too alert that's not good for all sorts of reasons as we know as well so one of the things my lab has really been focused on is to try and figure out what are the levers what are the entry points for people to be able to deliberately adjust their level of alertness and calmness in this kind of see-saw-like fashion and then to just elaborate on the seesaw analogy a little bit try and imagine oneself not as the seesaw but you're a person on the seesaw so you're right all day long basically you're moving back and forth you're kind of surfing the seesaw between alertness and calmness and one of the places where we see pathology acute stress turns to chronic stress or acute stress turns to chronic fatigue is when the hinge on the seesaw gets too tight and the thing gets locked at one side yeah okay and a lot of people are locked in the stress state locked in the stress state we're locked in thank god there's too many people i see walking around too calm and relaxed right because the hardest thing to do is it's an active process to be in the to surf the seesaw yeah this is what we you know the reason just a simple seesaw doesn't work as an analogy is because it's an active process you're literally making adjustments all the time surfing exactly and what happens in sleep is it's as if we get to climb off the seesaw and relax for the night and then get back on there and and we're able to surf the seesaw again so we know there are a couple sort of foundational truths that can emerge from this model of how the brain works and how the mind works which is that if we don't sleep the hinge gets very loose on the seesaw like stress stress stress stress exhaustion stress stress exhausted it kind of bangs back and forth and it gets harder to surf this seesaw and so sleep is sort of the foundational element of all waking states we often think about sleep is its kind of own thing but sleep is the thing that allows you to deliberately access waking states in a in a really um directed way we're gonna get really deep into this yeah so that's the way i i think about it and you know all of this um serves as an entry point to discussions about plasticity etc but one thing to emphasize is that the seesaw and surfing the seesaw is not a brain thing it's not a body thing it's a brain body thing or more appropriately as you said a body brain thing it's a it's a it's a loop so we can't say that our states of alertness are because of what's going on in our head because we've also got adrenal glands that are releasing adrenaline we can't say that states of calmness are just about relaxing the mind because it also involves turning off a number of systems in the body and the nervous system is really what is responsible for that and so what's exciting is that there are now entry points where one can adjust the level of alertness or calmness yeah that one can get better at surfing the seesaw as i'm referring to i've never really described like that but i think that's a very good description of something i've learned to do to actually manage my brain and my physical states and and i've developed all sorts of techniques over the years that work for me and they're different for different people but you know for example if i'm like working on a project i'm just foggy and stuck i'll like take a steam and i'll jump in an ice bath that will change my state right well the adrenaline from the ice bath will definitely put you into more alert yeah i meditate or i'll do yoga or i'll get a massage or i'll go sit by a river or there there are mechanisms that i've learned that are there are ways to change my my state uh and it and it's it's and then even using food to change your brain states and using supplements and using all kinds of hacks essentially to regulate the thing that we feel like we can't regulate because a lot of us feel powerless at the effect of our minds and the effects of our cognitive states and we don't realize that there are all sorts of doorways that we can use to actually enter different brain and mind states by certain techniques whether it's breathing or you know hot and cold therapy or all the things that i mentioned so from your experience you know how do people start to learn those things and what are the what are the most important things you come across that are important for helping people to regulate that process that seesaw where they they're surfing instead of getting stuck yeah so that there are approaches that are going to work very quickly and there are approaches that are going to be slower and you might say well i just want the fast ones but the the sort of health of the seesaw if you will uh the integrity of the seesaw and the ability to surf it relies mainly on a couple of foundational elements and these are going to be slow acting systems in the body that that i don't want to bring in too many analogies but the way i think about it is like if your your well-being um if you will it's sort of like a boat on the shore and the tide has to be in for the boat to get off the shore and so there are things that you can do on a regular basis that establish a basic ability to operate the seesaw to surf the season and certainly sleep is going to be the number one variable it's amazing many people don't understand that yeah it's it's it's a non-negotiable thing i think that many people are afraid to acknowledge it because people have now ex once you really appreciate how vital sleep is and how great life can be if you're getting good sleep and how terrible it it is for our health both both immediate and long term if you're not i think then it creates its own set sleep anxiety and so one of the things that i've been very active at for sure yeah where you think and to be fair you know the body and brain are resilient if you don't get a good night's sleep every once in a while it's fine you can manage that certainly new parents do just fine over time although it's challenging but there are a few things that um really help with sleep so in terms of and there are a lot of causes of insomnia and things so all so they're the basics like avoiding caffeine in the afternoon if you're caffeine sensitive etc um but one of them is to start to understand that this state of sleep is not something that you should be able to drop into unless you do a couple of other things properly and based on the research done um in part by my my lab but mainly a guy out at the national institutes of mental health named samuel hattar he's the director of their chronobiology unit he's done these beautiful studies showing that light exposure early in the day getting bright light exposure ideally from sunlight within an hour ideally within 30 minutes of waking up is vitally important for getting sleep later that night and the reason is is it basically once every 24 hours you're going to have a spike in cortisol it's non-negotiable it's built into your genome it's going to happen so do people in like arizona sleep better than people in seattle well they do actually and a lot of a lot of people in seattle need light light boxes because if you live in an area where you can't get sunlight first thing in the day feel free to flip on artificial lights but you want basically the rule is you want as much bright ideally natural but if you can't get natural artificial light would be fine early in the day and what that does is it basically times this cortisol spike to wake you up that spike in cortisol isn't to stress you out it's to wake you up and then it sets a timer on your melatonin release so 14 to 16 hours after your bright light exposure you're going to get a pulse of melatonin which is the hormone of course that promotes sleepiness and puts you to sleep independent of any supplementation of of melatonin light inhibits melatonin through a direct pathway through the eyes to the to the brain stem and then up to the pineal it's a well-established pathway so the the number one thing is get bright light exposure to your eyes so no sunglasses eyeglasses or contacts are fine early in the day how long well it depends on how bright so anywhere from two minutes to ten minutes ideally you're not looking at your phone during that time ideally it's sunlight but if you wake up before you you know flip on a bunch of artificial lights and then get outside once the sunlight is outside taking a walk you're not looking at the sun right you're not looking directly into the sun you don't want to burn your retinas out indirect exposure is fine but there's a class of neurons called the melanopsin ganglion cells that reset your circadian clock and time things nicely they time the cores all the time the melatonin so that's the number one thing for i wouldn't just say for sleep but also for optimizing levels of alertness throughout the day the other thing is that you really want to avoid bright light between the hours of 11 pm to 4am if you're on a standard schedule shift workers is totally different the reason is sammer's lab and a guy named david berson at brown university have shown that bright artificial light of any color blue blockers or no if there's bright artificial light it's activates a pathway in the brain involving this brain structure called the habenula was that when i was an undergraduate actually someone asked in neuroanatomy what's the habenula do no one knew the habenula is involved actually in generating our feelings of disappointment it suppresses dopamine release for several days afterward now if you have to go to the bathroom or you have to pull an emergency trip to the supermarket or something in the middle of the night you don't have to worry about crushing your dopamine long term it's a chronic thing but you really want to dim the lights in the evening starting at about 10 p.m so you're saying those blue blocker things that doesn't work well the blue blockers will work but if the lights are bright enough it doesn't matter what wavelength they are and this i is because these melanopsin cells these neurons in the eye they do respond best to blue light but they're very broad spectrum the wavelengths that they will respond to you can shine bright red light on one of these cells and it will signal to the brain time to wake up amazing so it's really key to just dim things down and i always say blue blockers are terrific but you don't want to wear them during the morning and early part of the day because blue light is the optimal stimulus for this wake-up signal so we took the blue blocker thing is great in principle but people kind of took it too far so bright light when you want to be awake and alert and dim light when you want to be asleep so like so so how many hours before bed because you know people are up on the on their tvs and their screens yeah computers and phones and yeah so the subtle things that people can do or to start dimming the lights in the evening right about the time the sun goes down is when you want to say oh the sun is going down outside and if it's overcast it's getting dark well that's a time to dim the lights in your home the other thing is because of where these neurons are situated in the eye overhead lights will activate this wake-up signal much more readily than lights down low so the scandinavians have it right in the evening you want desk lamps most people aren't going to have floor lighting in their house desk lamps in early in the day and throughout the day that's when you would want overhead lights so um those two things are going to be very beneficial a lot of bright light overhead light throughout the day ideally from sunlight and then in the evening avoid bright lights of any color any kind between 11 pm and 4am don't get neurotic about it but many people find that just making these changes you don't have to like be off from like six o'clock at night no no no no and there's there's actually uh the third tool which is also grounded in really nice work a paper published in scientific report shows that if you get some sunlight in your eyes in the evening right about the time of sunset if you can't get it from the actual sunset just go outside you don't have to see the sun setting you just need the light the ambient light the outdoor light in the morning is sufficient there's so many photons out there even on a cloudy day you'd be amazed in the evening if you see or get outside and get some sunlight where you get some light in your eyes that has an effect of lowering the sensitivity of the of the retina of the the neural part of the eye and provides you a kind of insurance it offsets a little bit of the late night bright light exposure i call it sort of your your netflix inoculation right it kind of protects you against some of the the ill effects now if someone's schedule is really messed up i mean they're not sleeping they're really screwed up there's a study out of the university of colorado that showed that um this is a little extreme but going camping for two days reset these melatonin and cortisol rhythms for two weeks it's pretty incredible it's really incredible i notice when i go camping or i go out in the wilderness or far away from technology i just sleep way better yeah and we had we had a storm my house last summer and we got power out for four or five days and we just had candles at night and it was unbelievable i loved it and it felt so good to not have all that bright light at night and to go to sleep and sleep better and deeper yeah you really reset and you mentioned i'm glad you mentioned candlelight candlelight in the evening is fine actually not to turn people into geeky scientists but there's a great app i have no relationship to it it's but it's completely free it's called a light meter and you can run this experiment you can download the app you go outside on an overcast day in boston in january and press the little button on light meter in the morning and it will show you that even though you don't see the sun it looks like dense cloud cover it'll be something like 5000 lux of of light you'll go inside you'll point the thing at a really bright artificial light and it'll say 300 lux wow close the window to the outside and it reduces it by about 50 fold so you don't want to do this through a window or a car window and then you say well wait you just said that there's very little light intensity coming from artificial lights why is it so bad at night i should be able to you know turn on every light in the house and it won't reset ah but the clock and your eye get more sensitive as the day progresses so you have to control it at both ends and candlelight is fine dim light in the evening is fine but throughout the day you really want to try and get some bright light exposure and for many people that are whose schedules are just really screwed up anchoring to these two or three things of bright light exposure and avoiding bright light in the evening hours between 11 p.m and 4 a.m often not always can really reset people's ability and once you're sleeping well everything else gets better so that was kind of the the first question you had the other one is that um i'd be remiss if i didn't mention there are things that people can take i'm sure you're familiar with with several of these as well obviously well we have a doctor right here so talk to a doctor obviously i'm not a physician i don't i'm a professor but um so don't prescribe anything but the three things that have have made a tremendously different profession that's right that's what i usually say profess lots of things um the three things that i've certainly benefited from and i know a number of other people have and for which there's really good research um are apogenin a-p-i-g-e-n-i-n which is um it's very inexpensive it's chamomile extract and it basically turns on a chloride channel mechanism in the brain it turns off thinking it's kind of the equivalent of an alcoholic drink it just turns off thinking you could still drive on this stuff but it makes people drowsy you drink chamomile tea or you have to take a concentrated um some people get that benefit from chamomile tea other people like the epigenetic and the other ones are the magnesium the magnesium and magnesium 3 and 8 and by glycinate in particular 3 and 8 spelled t-h-r-e-o-n-a-t-e and by glycinate i won't spell out but sort of just as it sounds those cross the blood brain barrier more readily because you're ingesting this obviously into the gut and then that magnesium needs to get into the brain and basically the magnesium seems to act as a precursor to gaba the inhibitory neurotransmitter and so for people who have a hard time turning off their thoughts that can be very beneficial so there's the kind of light which is a kind of ancient mechanism by regulating alertness and getting into sleep and then there's the modern thing which is supplements and there's something sort of in between worth mentioning which is um there's a great tool that was developed by my colleague who's our associate chair of psychiatry at stanford his name is david spiegel he's actually a clinical hypnotist he's done a lot of work on pain management and even breast cancer outcomes from hypnosis and he's developed a free app that's on apple and on android called reverie r-e-v-e-r-i it's a 15-minute hypnosis that you do in waking which trains the brain to sleep better and i think that a lot of people hear hypnosis and get a little bit freaked out but there are a lot of clinical data showing that this can help people to learn to turn off their thoughts and to relax and go to sleep and there's some other nice um hypnosis scripts in there as well it's david's voice and he kind of walks you through it so those are aside from the supplements the light and the hypnosis are free resources that i think most everyone could benefit from if i wake up in the middle of the night oftentimes i will do one of these hypnosis scripts and just one other thing about sleep a lot of people wake up at 3 or 4 a.m and can't fall back asleep okay i never understood why that was and then i talked to the folks in the sleep lab at stanford and i talked to the chronic here's probably the reason yeah there's an asymmetry in this seesaw that we all equipped with internally which is that we can all push on and stay awake more easily than we can just force ourselves to sleep right that's true right right at some point we fall asleep but if you're waking up at 3 or 4 a.m unless you're drinking too many fluids and that's the reason why chances are you are running out of melatonin at that point it's the levels of melatonin in your blood are dropping and what it means is you stayed up too late and you probably are one of these people that should be going to bed at 8 30 and waking up about 3 30 or 4 a.m and people don't like that answer because they think no but i want to be the person that goes to bed at 11 and you know there are ways to shift your circadian rhythm that we could talk about but try and go to bed one hour earlier and chances are you will wake up feeling better at 3 or 4 a.m now it's not exactly a solution but if you're in an argument with your spouse or something about going to bed at you know at one hour or the next you know you can leverage biology or cite this discussion so wow so we really have um this sleep epidemic problem and people are struggling with figuring out how to deal with it and your lab and you have worked really a lot on how do we navigate the landscape of sleep because as we're having this conversation whatever i ask you keep coming back to sleep which is fascinating to me as a foundation and we always think diet's the foundation exercise foundation meditation but sleep is sort of that neglected fourth leg of the of the table well and it's the thing that we've been encouraged to push through and i mean there are some elements i mean that we could get down into the the uh fine science of it you know we sleep in 90-minute cycles ultradian cycles better to wake up after six hours than seven right you know for most people for sake of alertness so waking up at the end of one of these 90-minute cycles you're going to feel more alert than you would say if you slept into seven hours would mean you were about you know you weren't complete through your last altradian cycle but sleeping at 7 30 would be even better if you can you know so getting the right amount of sleep is it it's a process that you want to master on average right you know the one occasional all-nighter you'll be okay you drink coffee too late you'll be fine but on average you want to be sleeping most people it's going to be anywhere from five to eight hours a night naps in the afternoon seem to be okay the hypnosis script and the other things will really help people get centered around this i think that the the idea of breaking up one sleep there were these crazy sleep cycles that were promoted the not to be confused with hubermann they called it the uberman schedule i just want to be very clear not huberman's schedule um there there was a study that came out recently that showed that it's incredibly detrimental to all sorts of inflammatory cytokine markers oh no to try and sleep two hours wake up sleep two hours wake up sleep around the clock there are people that they found they could compress their total sleep time this was kind of a silicon valley thing like trying to master one you know you you just you have these human bodies you gotta actually yeah you can't conquer that but but i think sleep is vitally important then i i think um i do think that foundational diet diet and supplementation and and from the literature i've seen i'd love your thoughts on this that the literature that impresses me the most in terms of diet and the brain and brain states are the studies that look at epa essential fatty acids and the gut microbiome those are the two things that to me it's like it's undeniable i don't understand how anyone nowadays could even question the idea that getting proper lipid intake you know essentially brain is fast yeah these omega-3s are so important i mean in a double several double-blind placebo-controlled studies that i've read it appears that getting a thousand milligrams or more per day of epa so not just taking a thousand milligrams of fish oil but making sure that you're getting above that threshold of a thousand milligrams of epa from quality sources compares just with similar effect as ssris antidepre prescription antidepressants but without the side effects right which is incredible and that if you are taking ssris it allows you to take a much lower dose yeah to still be effective to me like incredible data and then the other one is that um getting ferment ingesting fermented foods one or two servings a day sauerkraut for the brain yeah sauerkraut for the brain or whatever given culture because that what i learned and and this is very new and emerging data there's a guy at duke he's incredible he was a nutritionist but then he has phd nutrition excuse me and now he's a neuroscientist um his name is diego borges not to be confused with the argentine writer borges he's ecuadorian and he found that there's a there are neurons in our gut of the vagus nerve so these are neurons that live in the gut into endothelium and they sense three things they fire electrical signals to the dopamine centers of the brain in response to fatty acids right there when fats are you know meats and things are broken down in the fatty acids amino acids of other kinds so from protein and sugar sure and what and so these neurons can easily be tricked into signaling the brain to release more dopamine and because dopamine is really the molecule of craving into craving more of whatever activated those neurons and so if you give these neurons enough epa or enough amino acids so protein and essential fatty acids the dopamine centers of the brain are just firing like clockwork which is going to enhance mood motivation energy i mean dopamine in proper amounts is a beautiful thing too high obviously you don't want but you're not going to get it too high people don't get addicted to chicken breasts but they get addicted to sugar right and i think that's i actually think that's because they're they are these neurons seem to be responding best to particular amino acids they seem to want glutamine of all things they seem to want the omega-3s and what's interesting is that even if they numb the taste so that people can't taste sugar if people ingest sugar these neurons are receptors in your gut right and they crave more sugar even if they can't taste the sugar so i always thought that the dopamine release to sweet things was because it tastes so good but the borges lab results and some other work on dopamine more generally from my colleague anna lemke at stanford shows that dopamine isn't so much about pleasure we all including myself we're taught it's about pleasure dopamine is about craving more of whatever it is triggered dopamine release yeah whether it's heroin or cocaine right sugar or sugar and so and so these neurons that that trigger dopamine release they are powerfully affected by uh by these quality omega-3s and by amino acids and then what's really interesting is that they trigger the release of dopamine but then you say well okay that should be pretty simple we should like you said people don't get addicted to chicken breasts and i wonder whether or not that's either because omega-3s are too low so these neurons are not the full concept of these neurons is inactive or it could be that for some reason that the other things that people are ingesting has messed up these neurons and so the whole brain body relationship is disrupted and it's uh i guess robert lustig is his name at ucsf yeah yeah and others are now showing that some of the emulsifiers and foods and other things like that what they do to the gut endothelium i never really understood how the gut brain thing works but what i realize is is that these microbiota they don't care about us what they do is they they're trying to find conditions in the gut where the mucus is at ph of the mucus is just right and that if people ingest emulsifiers and sugars what happens is these neurons and borgeslav has shown this that these these neurons that are in the gut endothelium and can sense amino acids and can sense essential fatty acids they actually start to retract their processes into the deeper layers of the gut in other words if you ingest the wrong things pretty soon the neurons in the gut remodel neuro the bad kind of neural plasticity and you lose your gut brain sensing system wow and so it's not just a matter of giving it the right things it's really about re for many people it's going to be about repairing this system and and allowing the this portion of our nervous system to to grow back now the nice thing about peripheral neurons is that they grow back so any way i got to unpack that because what you said was just so profound right there basically you're talking about uncoupling the the natural ability of our body to sense its environment and to self-regulate in the right way to create health when we eat processed food that contains ingredients that screw up the gut microbiome or the lining and the all of a sudden that the brain in the gut or whatever you want to call it the neurons in the gut start to change as a result of the crappy food we're eating and make us less able to seek out and want the foods that are good for us and tend to make us seek out and want the foods that are bad for us exactly that is a massive like brain state shift for me because i never really understood you know the mechanics of how that happens but it's clearly true when people are eating bad foods they want more bad foods and they keep eating more and more of them and there are many reasons for that but the gut story is just fascinating yeah these neurons uh and really uh you know i tip my hat to the borges slab it it's it's cool you know science as you know can get really entrenched and that someone comes from a completely different perspective of you know his background in nutrition and he described um it actually is a it's a relevant story here he had a friend who was she was very overweight and she ended up having a um a gastric bypass surgery and she lost a lot of weight and her diabetes went away and but she also started craving runny eggs you know easy over runny eggs but previously just the thought of runny eggs made her nauseous made her want to vomit and he heard that story and he realized that cravings themselves are modified by the conditions of the god how could this be so he started exploring what are these neurons in the gut who are they what brain areas are they talking to it's very clear that these neurons they innervate the gut they're part of the vagus nerve connect to the brain areas that release dopamine and create craving and so the health of these neurons in your gut is strongly going to impact what you want and so what's so what i love about the literature and i i haven't had anything to do with the research i'm describing but but i've spent a lot of time with that work what i love about the the work that he's doing and others are doing is that it really points to a the brain body connection is mediated by neurons b that what we crave and what we seek really can change i think that a lot of people that are having a hard time shifting towards a healthier eating or healthier relationship to light as we talked about a few moments ago it starts becoming reflexive because not just because it's better for us but because our nervous system actually remodels itself in ways where the good stimulus starts to evoke dopamine release yeah i find that for so true if i if i go off track i just want more of the bad stuff if i stay on track i want more of the good stuff like i naturally will crave the things that are good for me but i think what's happened through through our radical dietary changes is we've gotten so far away from our natural sort of ability to seek out things that nourish us and and we've lost that animals have that they're not going to be running around eating things they're going to make them sick and gain weight and cause damage their gut microbiome or whatever that but they're not thinking about their body naturally will seek out oh i want this plant because it's got this nutrition in or this one has this phytochemical they're not thinking that but their body is telling them where to go where to look and what to eat we've sort of really decoupled our ability to be in touch with our natural healthy cravings and it been hijacked by the food industry to desire all these foods that are driving us into worse and more states of dysfunction poor health and poor brain states and poor brain function yeah it's it's interesting because the discussion about light and discussion about food are remarkably similar from the perspective of these neurons in our eye they don't think they'll respond to light at 1am when you're watching netflix just as well as they'll respond to sunlight because of their sensitivity at that time of night they don't care they don't they don't they'll work for you or they'll work against you they don't have a mind of their own they're just cells these cells in your gut are the same and so i think that what's exciting as more and more of the neuroscience and emerges and these other fields like nutrition start to really infiltrate neuroscience in a positive way we're starting to realize that giving the brain and the body the proper stimulus and there is a proper stimulus there is a right time of day to get sunlight and light in your eyes and there's a wrong time of day yeah there's a right time of there's a right set of nutrients amino acids and fatty acids are what your body really craves but we've been giving it decoys right sugar is a decoy it really is a decoy these neurons unfortunately respond to sugar connect to the dopamine centers of the brain and as i mentioned before even if we don't taste the sugars they're triggering these these mechanisms so i think that neurons are are both beautiful and and remarkable but they're also dumb they'll they'll send these signals to your brain to a variety of things that you give it so you want to know what is the proper input like what do i need to give these neurons when do i want need to give it sunlight or or amino acids essential fatty acids because that's really what we crave there's no essential carbohydrate and i'm not an anti-carbohydrate person i eat starches i actually find them very useful for falling asleep at night yes they really help well it's not only what to eat it's what to eat when right right we we totally flipped in this country we eat all of our sugar and starch and carbs in the morning not so much at night yeah i tend to do it the opposite all fast in the early part of the day and then i eat meat and vegetables throughout the day and then starches at night that's just what works from a neurotransmitter perspective to be alert and then asleep the other thing i realized the other day is that it's weird because really healthy clean proteins taste better than dirty proteins but really healthy clean carbohydrates it takes they don't taste they're not as intuitively tasty as like chips and things like that well i feel like a really good i eat meat so a really good steak tastes delicious a lousy steak or like beef jerky is never as good as a steak yeah whereas a bowl of white rice is like maybe it's just the way i cook it is not as tasty as as a bag of potato chips right for me i'd much rather eat a sweet potato okay and a bag of potato chips yeah i probably need to up my culinary game like i mean you know that yeah i mean it's interesting you know we we think um you know we sort of willfully want this or that food you know i'm i'm wanting this but it's actually our brains are sort of taken over because we've not been treating them properly and we're craving all the wrong things and we're not craving the right things yeah absolutely and i've said it before like when i walk by for example like a starbucks display and i see all the muffins and or anywhere you know like any and a croissant it just doesn't look like food to me yeah that's so that's a lot like why would i eat that rock that stuff has lost its appeal to me as well one thing that's that's relevant here that i think actually is useful knowledge um my cup and my colleague anna lemke who's a psychiatrist studies dopamine and craving she explained something to me that it it makes sense when you hear it but um it's not intuitive before that which is if you've ever tasted like a delicious piece of chocolate or you've had a delicious experience i'll let people use their own mind to that or something really really wonderful that you love the sensation in your mind is not one of pleasure believe it or not what is it it's a sensation of craving more and you can do this if you're a chocolate lover i don't want to send people onto chocolate no i can eat too much chocolate there's a point in which i'm like i'm going for this sure but absolutely there's a point where you hit a threshold but dopamine we know this from animal studies in human studies what dope and this is one of the reasons it can create addictions in its extreme form is that pleasure and pain have this reciprocal relationship and when you eat something that tastes really delicious if you just insert your mind into the process for a second unless you're being very mindful and really kind of doing the buddhist thing of really just tasting it yeah the way dopamine release works is it makes you think about the next bite and this is true imagine any experience oftentimes it's not just about the presence of the thing you're in unless you've done a lot of conscious work around experiencing pleasure and all it's like immediate container right and this is what i mean this is why people gamble this is why people eat more sugar this is why people get addicted to anything and so i i mentioned it because when the first time i heard it i thought no that's not true i really love this experience or this thing but then i started to pay attention start to realize that oftentimes our mind goes to yes and more please yes and more please as opposed to just in and that's dopamine release in full form and so dopamine releases a little bit of like a jet pack that gets attached to us that puts us toward a destination and dopamine isn't bad but i think once people understand the nature of craving they can be in a position to to maneuver around it better so you're so you're speaking really about you know how do we play with our brains in a different way than we thought about and you talk about this idea of neuroplasticity which i'd like to sort of jump into a little bit you know the the brain we what i learned in medical school was that you were born with a certain number of brain cells and that's all you get and if you used up too many in college by staying up all night or doing drugs or partying too hard well tough you know that's all you got but it turns out that's just not true that's not that that we have tremendous ability to restore brain function to bring back uh you know all sorts of things at any age that we just didn't think possible i mean i just you know had a patient who you know was a 70th year old guy who had a stroke and was paralyzed on one side and you know traditional care is like you know just do rehab and take your blood thinners and cross your fingers and you know hope for the best and i'm like hell no we know a lot about how to optimize brain function so i put him on a ketogenic diet which helps the brain repair and heal i had him do hyperbaric oxygen therapy i had him do iv nutritional therapies like nad which helps the tissues and cells in the brain repair it helps the energy cycle i had him take a number of supplements and help with inflammation mitochondria and i had him do exercise the whole whole cocktail of things because it's not any one thing that's going to make a difference i even had to do sort of derivatives of stem cells and things like exosomes and it's unbelievable to see how much he's been able to recover and repair from what we would have thought in medical school when i was going to medical school was a permanent disability and now he's not disabled he's walking he's using his body he's doing things he's come back he's done 100 yet but it just compared to what we imagined was possible we're seeing things we never thought possible like whether it's reversing alzheimer's or autism strokes trauma brain trauma even even things like depression anxiety you know ptsd we're seeing all sorts of doorways into repairing that the you know psychedelic therapies that are being used now mdma therapies for trauma and for ptsd are changing the way we think about accessing the brain it's like how does that even make sense that you take you know one therapy of psilocybin and all of a sudden lifelong symptoms are gone of depression it's wild right it's pretty wild we don't we just like oh you need 30 years of therapy and psychoanalysis five times a week and nope just you know go on this seven hour journey with a therapist in a guided experience and something shifts in your brain yeah the data coming out of hopkins is real and that is are really impressive i think i think we we're going to look back the work of matthew johnson and some of the other groups in the uk and the maps groups and i know less about the maps groups been and i think we're going to realize that um yeah they they are true pioneers and and it's a topic for another discussion perhaps but what they've had to go through in order to bring credibility to this uh area has been really uh really incredible um yeah so neuroplasticity is real uh the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience for better or for worse i think that most of the discussion about plasticity is going to be um what i call adapt we don't have to get too much lingo but adaptive plasticity is the stuff we want and plasticity after a head injury or um from chronic illness is the kind of plasticity we don't want um no but if we say plasticity it's almost always neuroplasticity of the type we want i think the the way to think about neuroplasticity is that early in life we our brain is extremely plastic our brain is basically designed to wire itself up from about birth until age 25 which is not to say we don't need guidance from parents and peers etc but that the brain is trying to create a map of its experience so that it can move forward from that point there are areas of the brain that are not very plastic and we should all be grateful for that areas like the areas of the brain that control your heartbeat your respiration to make sure your gut continues to churn food along like you know all the kind of basic stuff the housekeeping stuff but the rest of it we're discovering is extremely plastic and from age zero until age 25 just mere passive experience exposure to things your brain will change creates a map for better for worse now if people have traumas in that time you know conditioning you know there are ways to undo that and that all starts usually around age 25 people uh you know maybe earlier but you know the skills you learn how to walk etc all that's laid down early in life but from 25 on you know i want to draw a distinction because from 25 on or so 25 or so until uh the end of life the brain is still very plastic but the the requirements for changing the brain shift radically yeah they just yeah so the the way to think about this is that the brain the adult brain has no reason to change unless it has a shift internally that says what you're about to experience or what you just experienced is meaningful enough that you got to do something you got to change okay now the negative stuff is always provides the most salient examples of like a car crash you'll never forget that uh where i was when 9 11 when i first learned about 911 when the shuttle exploded you know one trial learning immediate brain change is always going to happen for negative events more readily than it is for positive events i'm sorry that's just the way we're wired there's an asymmetry there it's designed to keep us safe keep us out of danger and we should be grateful for that so but adding new skills changing our emotionality um even changing personality it seems to some degree can be accomplished if certain chemicals are liberated into the brain and or body and the chemicals that cue the nervous system aha i need to change something basically fall into two categories and they are adrenaline epinephrine and acetylcholine so acetylcholine we could start with that acetylcholine is released from multiple sites within the brain it's actually the neurotransmitter that allows us to it's responsible for nerve muscle communication memory memory it there are two main sites in the brain that release acetylcholine one is in the back of the brain in the brain stem and it triggers alertness and it also acts as sort of a spotlight on certain areas of the brain saying ah whatever's active right now i'm going to mark that for change later i'm going to make those connections stronger you know it's just the nature of the sort of like a sprinkler system it's more general but it's kind of in the vicinity of of you know i want to learn um well you just mentioned that you learn chinese so let's say uh i don't speak any second language really um so let's say i wanted to learn um mandarin so if i were to go in and try and learn manta it'd be very very challenging for me so i need to focus we know that early in life you can assimilate new knowledge without having to focus too much yeah which is amazing which is amazing but that's because the whole brain is basically bathing in acetylcholine um it's you know it little kids youth is lost three or four-year-old kids speaking three languages i'm like what the heck exactly so younger people always ask me what should i do if i'm not 25 year old here's what you should do don't even check with your parents learn a second or third language you'll thank me later learn a musical instrument you'll thank me later for many reasons i didn't do either of these two things by the way and develop good habits around health and nutrition and learning and you're basically you're pretty much home free okay you know so those are the things that you're good and you have this gift of plasticity it's just uh etc so as an adult you need acetylcholine released also from this area of the forebrain called nucleus basalis there's a connection a collection excuse me of neurons in the basal forebrain that when those become activated essentially anything that you experience in the time window around that can be rewired these are incredible experiments that were done by mike merzinick at ucsf and colleagues where they would stimulate nucleus basalis and then provide some sensory experience and the brain would just remap within seconds now the problem is getting basalis to release acetylcholine is changing how do we do that yeah so it comes from powers of focus you have to be able to contract your visual window or your auditory window whatever your attentional window is you have to be able to bring a lot of focus to that learning event or life event and now if you think about negative life events you can realize why we learn them so readily because they bring about our entire focus right i'll never forget seeing those planes hit the towers in new york so i wasn't focused on anything else i can see it in my mind's eye now still right and i probably don't have all the all the details right but that's the level of focus you need to bring to something that you want to learn as an adult now there are things that can facilitate as we call it cholinergic transmission first of all there needs to be a baseline level of alertness and that level of alertness is going to come from epinephrine from adrenaline so there is no learning without a sense of agitation and focus i think most people think oh i'm just going to calmly go into this and i'm going to learn mandarin or whatever no it actually requires us a little bit of that leaning forward in the chair this is now your your agitation and you're right and your your knee bumping mark makes sense because you are that guy and you're rich with knowledge you know so that's why that's what medical goals are that's epinephrine that's epinephrine that's epinephrine and so you set the stage for that by your word getting good sleep and by being excited and motivated you know the phenomena of meeting someone and then you forget their name a second later you are focused on something else we all do it i'm terrible about that too but when you meet somebody that you're very interested in let's be honest you don't forget their name no it just locks in and you never forget you never forget the details and so focus and agitation and alertness they they work together because when acetylcholine and epinephrine are liberated in the brain and body together it basically signals to the nervous system okay i need to rewire things so that i don't have to deploy all these resources in the future so so if we want to improve our brain function improve our learning our memory alertness attention that's what people care about um and we want to enhance the neuroplasticity what are the top things that we should be doing okay so get the foundational stuff right sleep sleep get your nutrition right and for there are many things and you speak to this in much more um detail and and uh sophistication than i ever could but i think i think um yes so follow you know get get sleep right get your nutrition right get your relationship to stress right we can talk about that maybe at the end but but basically you need cholinergic transmission and and the thing you need sufficient choline available and we know that choline is going to come from meat sources nut sources now eggs certain fish um sardines sardines so these you need choline available now you can't ju just ingest those things and expect to get smarter people always say tell me what to eat to get smarter because you're going to give it a long way you have to engage in those focused learning how many friends do you have bad breath but otherwise you have to engage in those focused learning ballots you have to decide what it is that you want to learn what you want to change and do that now for some people they'd say well i don't want to learn another language i just want to feel happier but that's actually as we know a process as well that's going to be a process of leaning into some gratitude practice or some um maybe if what makes you happy is a physical activity it's going to be bringing the the greatest amount of of attention and alertness to that practice as you possibly can and there's a lot of literature now pointing the fact that what we sometimes call flow or flow states or getting lost in the beauty of some experience or often involves a bit of challenge it involves a sense of of focus and your focus will drift and continually bringing that back now from a supplementation side the data on alpha gpc are pretty impressive in to my mind it's glycerophosphocholine which is a derivative of calling for people yeah you know people i mean again i'm not a physician so i can't prescribe anything but the data on anywhere from 300 to 900 milligrams of alpha gpc before a learning bout it's clear that cognitive function goes up it's clear that people remember more it's clear that people retain more of that information so there's the encoding part which is the part in which you're packing in the new knowledge and that requires high levels of alertness and focus and if it that's can be supported by this nutritional perhaps supplementation background and then there's a second step and the second step is the one that in recent years we've learned the most about which is that just having this heightened level of focus and attention to what you're trying to learn or change is just the first step the second thing is to actually turn off focus and put the brain into a state where it can rewire more rapidly and there's a beautiful study that was published in cell reports there's a fine journal last year showing that if people go into a kind of a pseudo nap or they intentionally move away from any kind of focus for 20 minutes or so after an intense learning bout that the brain rewires more quickly and there are heightened levels of retention the brain just rewires in these states of relaxation so it's just sort of like physical fitness you don't actually get better during the effort you get better during the recovery that must be why i did some good neuroscience because i was reading that kendall book and i remember being in the library in medical school and i would like to read everything and i would like go exactly put my head on the book exactly and then wake up and keep reading oh okay that book is a beast no disrespect to eric because i think that's a beautiful book but there's now a shorter one a shorter one called principles of neurobiology by by somebody else that is a little bit but it's still pretty intense i love that favorite book in medical school yeah it's a beautiful book too it's a big it's a um can hold a door open it's so big but um so you need these bouts of relaxation afterwards those can come from naps and now for people that want to kind of accelerate the process they they're like wait i don't want to do the stimulus and then the relaxation i want to accelerate there is a way that you can learn more quickly and that brings us back to hypnosis hypnosis is a very odd state of mind because it's a state of mind where you both have heightened states of focus and relaxation at the same time it's what i call an atypical state you know normally we're either very alert or very calm right a nap is very calm focused learning is very alert stress is very alert obviously sleep is very calm but in hypnosis the whole purpose is to bring the brain and and body into a state of deep relaxation while maintaining awareness i think deep forms of meditation do this also um and if you can you you can leverage those states as a way to accelerate plasticity so meditation so meditation the revery app for hypnosis is great medi some people including myself um have trouble with meditation because the mind tends to drift sometimes hearing a script or something that can keep you oriented towards something a metronome or a hypnosis script can be useful so yeah and this all might sound like a ton of hard work but actually the best learning bouts are going to be anywhere from about 30 minutes to 90 minutes you don't really want to hammer on something five six hours a day medical school medical i teach medical students medical school is like the worst form of learning and i and but it's interesting because i look at the way medical students who have phenomenal minds obviously have so much respect for physicians they the way that you guys learn was essentially to come in there and say what do i i'm going to extract the critical knowledge so it's like these spotlights that come on when something's really important it's not 90 minutes of of content blitz it's like you guys learn how to really extract the right information i i not intentionally but i think i kind of bio-hacked my way through medical school because i lived four miles away from the campus and i didn't have a car and so i would run to school every morning it was four miles and any weather right now because where was it and in ottawa which by the way i ran to my nutritional bio you know my my biochemistry exam my first year was 37 degrees below zero without the windshield vector wow i literally had canadians racked up i got there my eyelids requested shot so i was kind of alert when i got to school yeah and then i would kind of stretch and do a little yoga in the back and then i would run home and i would i really hyper focus all day in class and i made sure i was sitting in the front i was fidgeting all the time so i was probably stimulating my whatever huh yeah you're driving i did not leave that classroom until i understood everything and then i would run four miles back home i'd do an hour of yoga make myself a healthy dinner and then i would sit in the chair for four hours until 11 and just go to bed and i would do that day after day so you just described the perfect neuroplasticity regimen really i did i have like i majored in buddhism and i graduated like the top of my class and i just you know it was kind of a joke because i really wasn't into science at all when i was in college toggling back and forth between these highly alert states and these deeply relaxed states is the the the secret sauce if you will of neuroplasticity as an adult but what you're talking about is is i would call it inner size right like we know how to exercise but we don't know how to access these different techniques that help our brain function better yeah and it's just a shame because most of us are not connecting what we eat how we feel our sleep how we feel whether we're exercising around how we feel and my daughter you know came to visit me and she was really going crazy just studying and medic for medical school she was in pre-med and you know she sort of was older student and kovit was very isolating with you know you know a social contact and she all she was sleep and and all she did was study and she got into medical school that's great oh she's going to become a physician yeah but but she um she really neglected the self-care and got super physiologically depressed yeah and what was sort of amazing was sort of identified what was going on with her and she didn't even make the connection and then within a few days of just changing her diet exercising she literally transformed her her whole mood and well-being and the depression just went away yeah we we reward performance and productivity and there will always be people that are willing to burn their themselves including their health on the altar of whatever it is they're trying to do and it and it shifts it shifts the culture i mean it's um i i don't follow tennis but we saw this recent thing a woman who is top tennis player um forgive me for not um remember her name yeah she stepped away from the tournament you know citing that she needed to take care of herself i think it's great i think that um you know self-care of course can be taken too far in the other direction too we have to appreciate and understand that any learning any competition anything like that is going to involve some adrenaline release in our body but i think if we could all become better at surfing the seesaw so to speak then it becomes an issue of okay there's a 30-minute break between classes are you talking about the exam with your friends or are you relaxing under a tree and resetting your mind that's a that's a that's a key question um are you the person who shows up to the conference and is um you know at every talk feeling like you need to be at every talk and you're going out for dinner and drinks and then expected to be in the front row the next morning and performing you know when you start looking at things from optim when you start looking at your life whatever that life happens to be from what's going to optimize my performance which includes relationships of course as well then the whole game changes because it really becomes an issue of how good are any one of us are each of us at regulating the seesaw and if you are spending too much time at one end of the seesaw you're headed for trouble that's just the way that's just the way it is now sleep most of us probably don't get enough sleep but i think that can be overdone too i think that many people feel exhausted because the systems for engagement of the mind and engagement of the body are also a bit atrophied yeah and that's the thing we don't we don't learn those skills and tools you wanna know my secrets for living a long and happy and healthy life well all i have to do is check out my weekly newsletter mark's picks where i share my favorite tips for health longevity well-being and lots more check it out and the link below and so so how do people start to begin to learn those tools to enhance their neuroplasticity to do the things we talked a few of the practical suggestions about sleep but is there a way because you know one of the things that terrifies me is the effect of technology on the brain yeah and i just came back from a week a vacation in mexico and we were off grit like phone cell phone computer nothing worse and we were in nature uh didn't even know what time was didn't watch and my sense of well-being my happiness my focus was so different and you talk about this this phenomena of a digital concussion from phones computers social media and i felt that like you literally your brain hurts add like we the incidence of diagnosable eight add adhd is going up in adults and in kids i think well there's ideal and then there's there's reasonable and practical right i mean i do think vacations and resets are are great i think just like going camping can reset your your circadian clocks and melatonin and cortisol i think from a very practical low or no cost perspective one of the things that one can do is ask okay if attention and focus are required for neuroplasticity throughout the lifespan what can i do to increase my levels of attention and focus and there's some interesting data on this first of all learn to read one chapter of a book without your phone in the room just a physical book not an audio book necessarily learn to read one chapter of a book per day can it be a kindle book or it could be a kindle book sure the ability you know written word and handwriting and reading are baked into our dna it's just there's no question i mean look sure we were drawing on cave walls a long time ago but we were drawing on cave walls and when we evolved language there are areas of the brain responsible for speech and language and for digesting speech and language and producing speech and language of course so this is something i struggle with and as much as anybody but if you're not a reader still do it learning to read one chapter of a book and your mind will drift people will go wait this isn't engaging or my mind drifted or something and that's revealing to you your powers of attention of deliberate attention it's revealing your ability to engage nucleus basalis so if you want to take a test of how well or poorly you can pay attention well you know tr read one chapter of a book per day so that that's a a wonderful practice that will improve the circuits for attention so this is one of the cool things about neuroplasticity is it's not just about learning the information it's about learning and teaching the circuits for attention to get better at attention so you can get better at attention as an action step and that will allow you to learn more things so if you want to lift weights you have to start a little bit and keep going so you want every one chapter then you can read a book that's right and pretty soon what's really interesting about the relationship between acetylcholine and epinephrine is pretty soon it starts to recruit the dopamine system it starts feeling good to move through that agitation you start realizing okay i'm doing this i'm doing this and then your mind will flip off and you'll go back to reading and this sort of thing it really works for me is when i have a deadline deadline so deadlines are great like i can write a book in three weeks right and the reason deadlines are so effective is because they deploy epinephrine when you when they're it's baked into your psyche that there are some social pressures of being you want to perform well you want to know the material you don't you don't want to um make mistakes etc so adrenaline is released and once adrenaline is released then acetylcholine naturally will follow you tighten your focus so reading one chapter of a book whatever that happens to be per day is absolutely critical to maintaining one's ability to focus and therefore one's ability to engage neuroplasticity you'll also read a chapter read a chapter we talked about all the the foundational stuff of sleep and microbiome and all that earlier yeah the other one is to really respect these 90-minute learning cycles don't try and throw yourself into a deep immersion of four hours of learning of something ratchet up to being able to do 90 minutes of focused work so write an ideal goal would be two 90-minute blocks of learning per day but that's a lot so if you're somebody who wants to keep your brain sharp read a chapter a day and then decide what it is that you want to learn curiosity what's that old saying i think it was um is it dorothy parker you know that the anecdote for boredom is curiosity there's no anecdote for curiosity or something like that right right the best way to engage the mind is to actually be curious about something so simply saying i want to keep my brain young that's a terrific mindset but then the question is what is it that you really want to know so if it's about fitness or if it's about health or it's about language or uh learning something that if it's murder mysteries even it's something that engages your mind i would hope it wouldn't be something you know morbid or something like that but something that engages your mind that's going to be important to do for 90 minutes and ideally two 90-minute learning cycles per day and you might say well i don't have time for that that's actually you people are wasting far more time than that yeah now in terms of the so those are some do's and then of course if you really want to move things into the optimization realm it is true i don't want people just relying on pharmacology but it is true that if you take 300 milligrams or 600 milligrams which is a lot actually of of the alpha gpc you will be like a laser for those 90 minutes you'll feel really focused now a lot of people nowadays are taking adderall modafinil things like that i personally i mean that you're the physician but i personally find that relying on what are essentially amphetamines in order to tighten the focus of the mind is a very slippery slope because what it does is it tightens up that hinge on that seesaw on the alertness side and then there's a crash to the other side and you know there are clinical uses obviously but i don't think those are the best way to go in terms of nootropics drugs that make us smarter the only thing that really speaks to improved brain function for learning that i've seen besides the foundational stuff are alpha gpc and creatine creatine has a gives the brain a boost it seems because it increases the the availability of lactate which the brain can use as fuel some people of course like the ketone thing or ketogenic diet for focus the other thing is that fasting in ketosis will increase focus yeah if you're somebody who's falling asleep while trying to learn and you're sleeping enough at night chances are you're not releasing enough acetylcholine and epinephrine into your system and fasted states promote that and ketogenic states promote that carbohydrates flip on the other switch which is for serotonin and for sleepiness so if you're falling asleep we were all taught that you have to eat a good breakfast and you need food for energy you actually i realize you don't really need food for energy no you need food for food you need neurotransmitters for for focus and energy right and so eating to supplement to support those um there are other things that if it's a physical skill that you're trying to learn as opposed to just a mental skill then there's a whole kingdom of things that are fun for instance if it's a physical skill you want to generate as many repetitions as you safely can per unit time so if you say i'm going to learn dance you want a ball machine if you're playing tennis exactly you literally want to generate repetitions and in particular you want to generate failures every time you you give a bad serve playing tennis oh yeah that activates the circuits for focus and alertness for the next yeah it's true that's right so when you're losing that's right so so that and a lot of people don't like failures and so they back away from it so remember the nervous system will only change if you give it a reason to do that and the other one that's kind of an interesting twist on this is the way the nervous system is wired is it wants to pass off all of its work to circuits that are reflexive as much as it can you don't think about walking anymore because you learned how to walk but when you were learning you were very focused on sure one of the things that can set the stage for more plasticity overall is when you disrupt the vestibular or the balance system it does appear that whenever we are physically off balance the brain is primed to pay attention and the mil the chemical milieu is such that it can actually rewire itself faster and whereas i think the 90s and 2000s brought out a lot of important work on saying hey er exercise of aerobic type or maybe even weight training can create um neuroplasticity it was that was great but it wasn't directed enough it didn't say well what kind of exercise yeah and what will get me even more plasticity and so there are some basal things about heart rate and blood flow etc but anything that involves balance or coordination it's incredible how fast the brain can learn so things like dance martial arts a real sport not just exercising and i'm not no disrespect to the the expert i'm more of a just an exerciser than a sport guy um but if you're 40 50 60 80 whatever learning a new physical skill we know is tremendously powerful for opening up neuroplasticity broadly so some people will even leverage this where after they finish some physical skill learning or something they might take a 20-minute nap and then they might read yeah they might try something so when we see these people i've been learning surfing i'm like 60 years old perfect so i'm like yeah exactly exactly i learned started learning tennis when i was 45 and it's really a challenge because it's not automatic and i have to really focus and be present well these and these individual cases are are not necessarily the place to hang our hat completely but for instance the great physicist richard feynman he was well known for learning bongo drums in the sick when he was in well it was in the 60s but in his 60s then he became a quite accomplished painter later in life and you know his whole thing was approach all of these things from a standpoint of play with intense focus and i think the play element is key because the play element keeps the agitation in check so that when you're stepping on your partner's feet trying to learn how to dance or you're failing miserably it it can frustration is a real thing and so i think that the element of playfulness some people call it beginner's mind but i think that should be the anchor point to return to and people that maintain curiosity or i should say that cultivate curiosity and that cultivate a sense of play and willingness to take on new vestibular experiences of all things they show very they show remarkable plasticity into their late life and i think that it all comes back to this thing that the brain won't change unless something changes in the weather of the brain the overall milieu has to say oh wait everything that's about to happen is different yeah otherwise why would it change so this whole conversation is so great because it really is pointing out the fact that we have the ability to change our brains at any time in any age absolutely and that there are pathways and doorways and techniques and tools that help us do that and if we do that we're going to be happier healthier enjoy life more you'll be able to do whatever we want and actually be able to actually maybe even live longer absolutely and the and the well the system around emotionality also has neuroplasticity again unless it's these very deep structures controlling really what we call vegetative functions like how much saliva we make or something the and even those right the pavlovian thing can change but for instance people who are depressed right they need they need various forms of help but the self-directed help that can be useful is when people pay more attention even if it's just a subtle or tiny shard of their experience when they pay more attention to something that brings them a sense of happiness or gratitude or well-being those circuits can rewire the circuits for emotionality can shift and change and the studies of personality across the lifespan have shown that we are not necessarily the same people we were in our 20s as we are in our 30s the old version of it was that we're all basically the same person just kind of aging out and then fading out but that's it's very clear that the we've been endowed with this amazing capacity for self-reflection and if we can leverage the right tools so meaning focus and alertness and attention followed by rest on a repeated basis these neural circuits rewire and that's true for the neural circuits in our head and it's true for the neural circuits in our body this seems like just the beginning of the conversation coming to the end this is such an inspiring conversation because it's empowering and empowering us with the knowledge that we can actually change our brains your gut and the health of your microbiome has a huge impact whoa on your sleep quality so your poop and sleep are connected what a concept in a way okay don't do the two together no that's not you know that's cool it's gonna blow people's mind and even my mind tell us how the microbiome and your gut affects your sleep and what you can

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 67,768

Keywords: Mark Hyman, Mark Hyman interview, Mark Hyman live longer, Mark Hyman diet, how to live longer, how to age in reverse, nutrition tips, healthy foods, health tips, health theory, fasting tips, how to never get sick again, prevent disease, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation, andrew huberman interview, andrew huberman speech, andrew huberman sleep, andrew huberman food, andrew huberman brain health

Id: 4aLjJM2HFXs

Length: 75min 3sec (4503 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 14 2021