The Science of Stress, Calm and Sleep with Andrew Huberman

thank you for joining us for our talk the science of stress calm and sleep with professor andrew huberman my name is emily casperson and i'm senior manager at the stanford alumni association andrew huberman is a neuroscientist and associate professor in the departments of neurobiology and ophthalmology at the stanford university school of medicine his lab's work focuses on the influence of vision and respiration on internal states such as stress focus sleep and creativity they are also working on tools and clinical trials to halt and reverse vision loss in humans suffering from glaucoma and other visual system diseases professor hubermann teaches neuroanatomy neural development regeneration and plasticity to medical students graduates and undergraduates at stanford welcome professor hubermann thank you so much for having me today and for everyone for being here today i'm going to be talking to all of you about the science of stress calm and sleep and i think these are very important topics that not just in 2020 but long before 2020 and going forward are extremely important for a variety of reasons they are fundamental to our mental and physical health and they are at the core of a lot of suffering when these three things are not managed properly the good news is that science has provided a lot of insights into how we can manage stress manage calm as funny as that may sound and better control our sleep so today i'm going to talk to you about these themes and these topics we're going to cover some of the science as well as get into some practical tools because i'm told that there's a lot of interest in practical tools which makes sense and as we go forward it will be wonderful to keep in mind would be three things as we think about the science of stress calm and sleep what i'd love for you to begin to appreciate is that there are mechanisms that are built into the body both to induce stress and to turn it off both to create calm and prevent calm as well as to promote sleep and make sleep more difficult to achieve so today what i'm going to do is i'm going to attempt to define the logic of stress the biological logic behind stress the the logic behind calm why it exists and how it exists when it exists and sleep what's the logic there because inside of that logic lie the tools to be able to control our sense of stress calm and sleep i want everybody to take away some of the naturally occurring mechanisms that give rise to these three critical states of being and then ultimately what my lab is interested in and what the lab of my collaborators is interested in is the testing of tools in terms of their scientific basis using rigorous scientific experimentation and then the deployment of the tools and the deployment part is really up to you you can choose whether or not to deploy some of the tools that i'll share today but information alone should be helpful in steering you towards particular tools and then it's your implementation of those tools that will determine whether or not they're of use and i do believe they can be of use so i'm going to talk about some new data some unpublished data as well as some literature and really textbook knowledge that lies at the core of these three things we call stress calm and sleep i want to emphasize right away that even though that first slide said hubermann lab that this is really a joint effort of two labs which is my lab in the department of neurobiology and ophthalmology and dr david spiegel our associate chair of psychiatry and psychiatry behavioral sciences dr jamie zeitzer also in psychiatric and behavioral sciences an expert in sleep and then dr melissa omez gary hall manuela coron and eric neary who unfortunately i didn't have a photo of so i like to acknowledge people at the beginning i'm going to mention these people's names these are these fake their faces and everyone has played a critical role in the design and collection of the data that you're about to see actually i'll just say if there's anything you don't like blame me there's anything you like credit the rest of them but it is a collaborative effort so let's get everybody on the same page which is we really need to think about the nervous system when we're thinking about stress calm and sleep and many of us think about the brain which is the organ contained within our skull but the nervous system is this marvelous system of the body that links the brain with the body and it also links the body with the brain it's really a bi-directional two-way highway now that's hard to get into a lot of detail about but i'm going to attempt to just cover everything that the nervous system does in a few simple points our nervous system including our brain creates our sensations meaning the evidence from the outside world touch smell sound taste etc that's literally physical evidence that's converted by our nervous system into electrical signals and chemicals that the rest of the brain and body can understand that's what the nervous system does as well as perceptions the ones that we're paying attention to feelings or emotions our thoughts which are discussion in of themselves and our actions our ability to move our limbs or to stay stable and still it also controls our housekeeping functions as i like to call them our heartbeat our respiration our digestion the things that you don't have to think about that they'll just happen on their own without you having to put any effort the nervous system does all of that but perhaps one of the most important things that our nervous system does is to control our level of what we call arousal which is our level of alertness versus our level of calmness and this is extremely important because our level of alertness and our level of calmness determine what we can sense how we think what we perceive how we act and it they tend to control whether or not we are biased more for action or inaction for perceiving things or not perceiving things for our ability to see and hear nuance or our ability to chunk things and lump things into big categories so without going into a lot of detail for sake of time the nervous system is this marvelous system of the body that connects everything the brain to the body and the body back to the brain in fact every organ in your body is innervated or receives connections from your nervous system and also informs the brain about its particular status as an example that's that's particularly salient in 2020 your immune system is activated not because an immune organ just decides to be activated but because the nervous system instructs it to in fact states of stress when we tend to be really amped up and worried about things actually promotes the activity of the immune system such that it becomes at least transiently better at combating infection so many of you are probably familiar with the experience of working very hard maybe studying very hard or raising children and then you stop to rest and then you get sick that's actually a turning off of the nervous system innervation of those immune organs that deploy those bacteria and virus fighting cells so stress isn't always bad but chronic stress is not good and so we're going to talk about that and at the root of everything i'm going to talk about today is this notion of alertness versus calmness i'll sometimes call it autonomic arousal but i may refer to it more as the alertness system versus the just to put us all on the same page and make the language a little bit simple the arousal continuum is something that we should all think about so down in the lower right corner is coma nobody wants to be in a coma but that is a state of deep deep calmness to the point where action isn't impossible voluntary action is impossible then we have deep sleep and as we start to ascend the arousal continuum we are all familiar with states of being drowsy of being alert maybe not super alert like first thing in the morning being alert but calm highly alert where you're really vigilant stressed is a state of of heightened alertness very stressed and panic now from a laboratory and scientific perspective we take the view that all of these things are interesting but it's really the fact that they all lie along a continuum that points to a particular biological system that governs these states and the transitions between these states now why would we care about that why should you care about that well these three states at the top states of panic states of being very stressed or states of being stressed are not optimal for most activities and sense of well-being they are not great for human interactions they're not great for performing work yes they are great if you're running to catch a plane that's leaving or you need to deploy a lot of resources in your body and move very quickly but they feel unpleasant they bias us toward impulsive action not thoughtful nuanced action and actions include things that we say they can impair immunity if those if we're in those states for too long and across every mental and physical health problem from alzheimer's to childhood disorders of neurology etc stress leads to poor mental and physical outcomes it's just been shown across the board and so an ability to take ourselves out of these states is really about reducing our overall level of arousal reducing our level of alertness and entering states of more calm now at the other end of the continuum is the state of sleep which we all know is extremely vital for mental and physical well-being some of us can do better with less sleep than others there's a lot of genetic variation however all of us are familiar with the fact that we think better and feel better when we are well rested well rested meaning that we are getting deep sleep on a regular basis it's important for wound healing for cancer treatments for cognitive ability and many people don't realize this but neuroplasticity the ability of the nervous system to change in response to experience in ways that we want occurs during sleep the triggers for learning occur when we're shutting when we're performing some new motor skill when we're experiencing something in life but the actual rewiring of our nervous system that changes the fire together wire together to use the words of my colleague carla schatz that occurs both in the waking state when you're learning something but the reinforcement of those fired together now wiring together occurs during sleep that's when the changes occur in the brain so sleep is vitally important it's also hard to will yourself into sleep so we need to think about that if we're going to think about how to better access sleep and then a state that my laboratory in david's laboratory is very interested in as well is this state that i like to call alert and calm where you're alert but you're relaxed and that is optimal for most all waking activities so these three states stress alert and calm and deep sleep are vitally important for us to understand what's going on in our nervous system that's controlling what's going on here we've heard of adrenaline and being you know people talk about adrenal burnout or being over-activated or anxiety or trauma but they all hinge on this system or this continuum of arousal so what controls our level of alertness and calmness i'm going to get into a little bit of scientific detail and then i'm going to get into some data that's actionable now first of all the system that governs this balance between alertness and calmness is called the autonomic nervous system but the name is unfortunate because today we're going to talk a lot about how one can control this system of alertness and calmness it and yet autonomic makes it sound as if it's not under our conscious control there are aspects of our alertness and calmness that are under our direct conscious control it controls our housekeeping functions like heart rate digestion etc it regulates our level of arousal our level of what we'll call alertness versus calmness our ability to ascend or descend along the continuum that you saw in the previous slide now alertness is the job of the so-called sympathetic nervous system and the name there too is very unfortunate i didn't name it so but i apologize on behalf of whoever did but simpa means together and you'll see this red bar down the middle of the spinal cord in this image of this human body the neurons the nerve cells that control our level of alertness largely reside from about our neck to the to our navel and the simpa part is because when we see something like a fraudulent credit card charge or a news article that we don't like or the news at all these days it seems our body deploys chemicals in our brain and at this point between our neck and our navel all at once together simpa in order to activate our body and bias us towards movement agitation and tunnel vision and i'll describe the tunnel vision in a moment now the system that controls calmness is a set of neurons nerve cells that reside in the neck area and in the pelvis and groin area and those are para meaning near the sympathetic nervous system so it's called the parasympathetic nervous system now i'm going to discard with sympathetic and parasympathetic for sake of ease largely i'm just going to refer to them as the alertness system and the calmness system but out of respect for those with a medical background and science background and for those of you who just simply want to know if you want to learn more about these they're the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system now you know why they're called those things these two systems and their balance are vitally important because they dictate which things we can sense perceive feel think and what we can do and what we can't do in sleep there are certain things we can't do we can't think in stress the same is true when we're alert and calm we can think about certain things but we are in a less advantageous position to react to certain things than when we're stressed sometimes so we're going to go through all of this in what i hope is simple detail and that will segue into the tools so a simple way to think about this is the sympathetic nervous system when it's more active than the parasympathetic nervous system we tend to feel things like panic stress and alertness when the parasympathetic nervous system is more active we tend to feel kind of drowsy and if it were to be much more active than the sympathetic nervous system then we would be asleep and then when we have balance between this alertness system the sympathetic system and the parasympathetic system excuse me we are alert and calm okay so you can think of it like a seesaw it's not about one system or the other being on or off they're always in a dynamic balance more or less like a seesaw just to really illustrate how much what this system can do and how powerfully it controls our life experience how we see and thus react to the world hinges on our level of alertness versus calmness here's a little video of a household kitty cat this is not a laboratory animal is a household animal just looking around and when it sees something this is a looping video that it likes its pupils dilate and this actually happens to you and to me and to all of us as our level of alertness goes up simply because we see something that is salient toss or feels like it has some importance for whatever reason positive or negative and just to illustrate what that does to our world view literally in a stress situation you can see this on the left our pupil dilates there are some changes to the optics of the eye such that we see a tree in this forest as the only thing in that forest everything else becomes blurry literally like portrait mode on your phone when we're calm the people dot the people constrict excuse me there's some changes in the optics of the eye and we can see the full picture this is also true for our auditory system we tend to have tunnel vision when we are stressed and we have tunnel hearing when we're relaxed we're in a position to take in more information and for reasons that we don't have time to get into now we actually can process information much faster in the calm state provided we're not too calm because in most cases bigger neurons which can transmit information more quickly for biophysical reasons become the ones that are active in the calm state so we're actually diminished in a number of ways when we're stressed except that we can see individual things hear individual things much better but our whole world view has changed as the arousal continue when we become more alert as we descend we actually bring in more information at least in terms of the total space that we're in we're bringing in more information so to transition to tools for combating stress because that's really a lot of what my laboratory in david's laboratory is about we want to ground those tools in a scientific framework for us it can't be about what feels good or what seems like it might be good it has to be something that is anchored in the biological mechanisms that control the ascent and descent along this arousal continuum so there are a couple of requirements we're looking for tools to combat stress which means we're looking for tools that decrease sympathetic activation or alertness sounds straightforward and increase parasympathetic activation or calmness or both what we want what we started off doing a few years ago when my lab first started working on this about five years ago were tools that allow real-time adjustment to the autonomic nervous system voluntary adjustment in real time because a lot of tools that are out there like meditation a massage a vacation um they're not available to us under conditions of acute stress when we want to bring our level of stress down as well as we wanted to discover and develop tools that allow us to decrease the threshold for sympathetic activation sort of tighten the hinge on that seesaw in that alert and calm state and allow it to push ourselves into sleep when we need to sleep and of course still allow us to access the stress response if we need to for instance dodge a car that is veered into the opposing lane or something we want our stress response to work but we don't want to be locked in the stress response so we asked how is our nervous system wired for these processes normally to occur rather than pick a favorite wellness uh you know practice or something or a retreat center we decided to say well how does the nervous system normally allow us to ascend and descend this ah this arousal continuum what are the mechanisms and it turns out that you do this every day from the time you're born until the time you die every day as the earth spins once on its 20 every 24 hours on its axis part of that time you're in sunlight and part of that time you're in the darkness we have major phases of alertness and calmness that we call sleep that are regulated by light received by the eye so there's a direct relationship a fundamental relationship between the visual system and our level of alertness and our level of calmness it's very simple because we have thick skulls and because every cell in our body needs light information but light can't get to the cells directly we view light at particular times of day it comes into our eye and a particular category of cells in the eye doesn't matter what they're called but if you want to know for the aficionados they are the melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive ganglion cells perceive light at particular times of day and translate that into a signal that's hormonal and neural that causes us to be alert at particular phases of the 24-hour cycle and to be calm and asleep at other phases and a diagram of how this works in a very simple form is from a review by sato and co-workers which shows that as we wake the light received by our eyes translates into a signal that's endocrine hormonal and cortisol is the signal we hear about cortisol being bad but it's actually you want cortisol to peak early in the day and then across the day you might get little blips of cortisol this might be that fraudulent credit card charge this might be a news um a news headline that you don't particularly like um this might be uh you realize you're late to something and this might be uh or thinking about all these things that happened before or what's gonna happen tomorrow but nonetheless cortisol despite these little spikes it's designed to be high in the morning and low at night and melatonin which makes us sleepy it's another hormone it's designed to be higher at night and come up about 12 to 16 hours after this light is perceived by the eyes now you're not conscious of this but this is a way in which your visual system provides the most fundamental level of instruction about when you should be alert or when you should be asleep and that translates to some specific science back practices that we should all be doing and i'm guessing that very few of you are doing all of them and probably are violating a few of them in ways that actually make this simple diagram of cortisol early then low in the afternoon and melatonin low early and then on and high late during the day which is optimal for wakefulness during the day plenty of energy but not too much and sleepiness at night and falling asleep easily is governed by light of a particular quality and timing so here's a image of stanford campus that's hoover tower of course you all recognize that and you'll notice that the contrast between blue and yellow light at sunrise and sunset what we call look what the nerdy phrase for that is low solar angle when the sun is low in the sky has a particular pattern of contrast between yellows and blues that recent data from the night slab at university of washington should tell us as the yellows are getting brighter and the blues are getting dimmer signals to the brain a wake-up signal and there's a lot that we could talk about to go into this but what this translates to is a simple practice that is vital for controlling the autonomic nervous system for health both mental and physical health so the behavioral practice and this is extracted from dozens now of scientific papers in humans and laboratory animals is to view sunlight soon after wakings or perry sunrise you don't actually need to see the sun rise but you're not hopefully waiting until the sun is overhead because when the sun is overhead you're not going to get the yellow blue contrast that triggers the particular neurons in the eye that cause this wake-up signal and this cortisol increase early in the day and that wake-up signal times the onset of the melatonin signal so it also tells you when you're gonna get sleepy late at night or later at night so you wanna see the sun for about one to ten minutes not through a window but outside you don't have to stare at the sun please don't stare directly at the sun if ever it's painful to look at a light of any kind it's too bright please don't damage your retina but light to your peripheral vision or incoming through the eyes is the primary signal by which you wake up your nervous system properly hormonally neurally and set a forward a cascade of health-promoting timing of neurotransmitters and neuromodulators and hormones it also occurs on overcast days it doesn't have to be one of these beautiful sunrises behind hoover tower the more overcast it is however the more exposure you need to that light and in some cases like scandinavia in the depths of winter some people need to resort to artificial lights that do this now i'm not aware of any artificial lights that trigger the yellow blue contrast because those are recent data many of them rely simply on blue light we're going to talk more about blue light the other thing that's vitally important to not str causing your whole nervous system to be stressed is to not have it be awake at the wrong times the best way to have your nervous system alert at the wrong times is to trigger the activation of the sympathetic nervous system between 11 pm and 4am and the best way to do that is to view bright light so in other words avoid bright lights especially bright overhead lights from 11 pm to 4am a lot of people are obsessed with blue light as this culprit but jamie's i'd serve from the sleep lab and i talk about this a lot zimmer hatar the national institute of mental health runs the chronobiology unit talk about this a lot the location of the lights is just as important you want them low in your visual field because overhead lights are what trigger the wake up signal to the brain and blue light during the day is actually good for your circadian system because it's going to wake up your your circadian system it's blue light at night that's a problem and so there's a lot of confusion people are thinking that blue light is just across the board bad and the data just don't support that you want blue yellow contrast in blue light early in the day and you want to avoid it later in the day in the evening now there is a way around this although it's only partial which is viewing low solar angle light in the evening as the sun is setting has been shown in laboratory studies to partially offset the negative effects of nighttime light light inhibits melatonin which prevents sleepiness or has us wake up a few hours into sleep if we view bright light late viewing that setting sun provides an additional time cue that allows you to better transition into sleep even if you're looking at screens in the evening you do not need to live in a cave from 11 pm to 4 am never compromise safety if you have to work during those hours we can talk about shift work in a separate discussion but obviously if you have to get up and use the restroom or you need to do something for safety reasons then you want to get light regardless of of whether or not you're getting right line your eyes it's always safety first of course but these three points are vital to setting the overall level of stress and calm in your system across the 24-hour day so if you're viewing bright lights or you're using overhead bright lights late in the day or you're on a screen or tablet it should be very dim in the evening and ideally you're keeping it dark dark provided it's safe candlelight doesn't seem is very low light levels the the the eye the kind of stinger excuse me in this is that early in the day you need a lot of light to wake up your system and late in the day it takes very little light to inhibit melatonin and so you need to keep it extra dark or dim in the evening and nighttime and extra bright during the day people with the macular degeneration should avoid bright lights in general and should be a little more cautious about bright light exposure happy to have another edition about that jamie zeitzer i thought i thought i'd share a little bit of data's lab has shown a direct relationship this was also done with chuck sciences lab but a direct relationship between the amount of light and the drowsiness so the brighter the light at least up into a point ten thousand looks the more alert you're going to be during the day and the dimmer the light the less alert you're going to be during the day so some people wake up alert and then find themselves drowsy throughout the day you might not be getting enough light according to these data jamie's lab has also done some really interesting work recently showing that brief flashes of bright light before teenagers wake up so literally going in their room and flashing some bright light in their eyes even though their eyes are closed it goes through the eyelids has two effects one it causes them to go to bed earlier the following night and two it causes them to get 45 minutes more of deep quality sleep which we know is vital for learning so this is a little bit diabolical but for parents you can actually go in and turn on the lights before your kids get up as long as they're not hiding under the covers the entire time if they pull the covers over the head it only takes a a minute or so then you can turn the lights off and then allow them to wake up if you do that you will secretly shift them whether or not they're aware of it or not is up to you toward going to bed earlier waking up earlier and yet getting more deep sleep that's vital to immune function learning and all the other things we described earlier if they don't like that you can blame jaime and colleagues but i think it's a you know given how sleep deprived everyone is and given how kids and all of us really are under the covers looking at phones and tablets this could be a useful practice the lights do not have to be strobe bright but they should be relatively bright and now you know that overhead lights would be more efficient than say low dim lights like a desk lamp so even for a few minutes and then turned off afterwards the plot here shows that it really is an effect of light and not something like cognitive behavioral therapy the change in total sleep time tst is what shifted here so you're seeing a big significant increase in total sleep time you could also do this on yourself with a timed light so while you're asleep you could pulse yourself with light this is something that i i do a lot of public education on social media and some lectures here at stanford i don't think i've ever really talked about how we breathe controls our heart rate we want to learn to move up and down that continuum where we are in control so we already talked about the use of light in the visual system how can we control our level of alertness using breathing this is a beautiful mri not from my lab of the diaphragm the skeletal muscle that lies below our heart and moves our lungs so it's a very direct and simple and important relationship between how we breathe and our level of alertness and calmness and it doesn't involve anything esoteric it doesn't involve any kind of breath work per se but if you watch the diaphragm the diaphragm moves up and down and what this means and the those with the medical background will appreciate this when we inhale our diaphragm moves down because the lungs expand which creates more space for our heart blood flows a little bit more slowly through the heart and then the brain sends a signal to speed up our heart rate the simple way to translate this is if you want your heart rate to increase if you want to be more alert you should inhale more and longer than you exhale now that immediately says that for somebody that's stressed the last thing you want to tell them is to take a deep breath the other thing you don't want to tell them is to calm down because it's very hard to to control the mind with the mind what we're about to talk about is using the mind to control the body and then the body to control the mind and then to take control of the reciprocal relationship between the two so if you want to be more alert inhale more than you exhale both deeper and longer for this simple and basic relationship between the movement the diaphragm the lungs the heart and neural signals from the brain the opposite is also true when we exhale our diaphragm moves up in our body cavity that creates less space for the heart blood flows more quickly through the heart and the brain sends a signal to slow down heart rate so if you want to relax extend your exhales relative to your inhales and make the exhales it's sort of hard to think about making exhales deeper but extend them for those of you that want to know this is called respiratory sinus arrhythmia rhythmic always sounds bad but heart rate variability is good heart rate variability signals to us that that seesaw isn't locked in one position for too much of the waking day so this is breathing control of heart rate variability the other thing that is a very useful tool besides just remembering inhales to make me more alert and exhales make me calmer is this notion of physiological size this is a phenomenon that was discovered in the 30s but has received a lot of experimental attention in recent years by my colleague mark krasnow here at stanford as well as jack feldman's group at ucla and their former student kevin yackle now at ucsf physiological sides are a pattern of breathing that all animals including humans engage in spontaneously when carbon dioxide gets too high in our system are triggered to breathe and a big aspect of the stress response is not getting enough oxygen and having too much carbon dioxide buildup in our bloodstream and lungs so there's a pattern of breathing that we all do in sleep and in conditions of claustrophobia that looks like this it's inhale inhale then exhale inhale inhale then exhale and what this does is it maximally inflates these little sacks in the lungs our lungs aren't too big bags of air our lungs are actually millions of little sacs that allow us a big increase in the surface area of our lungs you'll see the blood vessels innervate these little sacs and when we do a double inhale followed by an exhale we maximally offload the carbon dioxide now this isn't some hack or trick animals and we do this in sleep we do it in classical phobic environments and you'll see that children and adults do this after sobbing when they need to catch their breath the double inhale reinflates the collapsed what they're called aviolae of the lungs like you would blow up a balloon in a kid's party you're gonna give one bull push and then another one to maximally inhale them and then off float the carbon dioxide our lab is starting to explore this with david spiegel's lab what i can say is that to my knowledge this is the fastest way to de-stress oneself using a purely mechanical non-cognitive tool and as far as i know it's faster than any cognitive tool although some people are very good at calming themselves a double inhale followed by exhale for the reasons described here can offload carbon dioxide you just repeat it two or three times and then you find that the the level of arousal will quickly drop for a lot of reasons carbon dioxide off flowed etc so inhale inhale xl equals maximum offload of co2 now in the final few minutes i want to talk about this quest that we're on in my laboratory and in this collaboration with david spiegel and jamie zeitzer and melissa gomez who's a postdoc in my lab gary manuela eric the whole team are interested in what's the ultimate stress reduction practice what's the ultimate way to buffer the stress response and that has a couple requirements it needs to be physiologically grounded it needs to have some basis in science it needs to be something people can deploy quickly it should be cost free it should be something that has minimal side effects if any and in principle it should also allow us not just to respond to stress in real time but to lower the probability that we're going to engage in stress the probability that stress is going to overtake our thinking in our mind dilate our pupils etc so we've been exploring this experimentally in a rigorous test of 125 subjects that are now out there in the world they're wearing um they're called whoop bands they've been generous and donating to us uh monitors that allow us to measure heart rate variability breathing sleep duration and quality etc and each person in a different group is assigned to a different group for 28 days and then swap to a different group where they perform a particular type of meditation or breath work and we want to compare to meditation specifically because i have no beef against meditation but it's very hard for us to know if someone is meditating a particular way whereas with breathing it's very mechanical we can assess whether or not they're performing a protocol or not and how often they do it and as opposed to meditation which you know once people close their eyes and sit down they're sort of in that space we don't know exactly what's happening unless we put them into a scanner or use other fancy equipment so we're interested in meditation versus specific breathing protocols i just want to mention this is a somewhat complicated graph but what we're quite happy about is that when we've assessed the subjects in this study almost all of them say that it's very easy to do this protocol which is only five minutes a day of a particular either meditation or breathing practice i'll talk about each one and i'll share some data only one um a very small percentage said that a particular breathing protocol slow breathing was very difficult for them a few said it was neither easy nor difficult some many said it was somewhat easy but most people said it was very easy to do this so five minutes a day the goal is to reset or establish your relationship to autonomic arousal such that when stressors come in because we can't control people's life events throughout their day and their life as those stressful events come in they're able to better buffer the stress response they're able to feel more in control of their physiology etc we are looking at subjective outcomes as well these are very early preliminary data first of all meditation when we look at average heart rate and this is one particular subject very preliminary data yellow is before red is turing and blue is after the particular meditation protocol which is five minutes a day of mindfulness meditation eyes closed sort of typical sitting third eye meditation if you will we find is that their heart rate is quite variable there's across 20 28 days there's a slight drop during the meditation but it rebounds back to where it was prior to meditation when they exit the meditation we have a pattern of cyclic or physiological sign also called slow breathing so this is people doing double inhale exhale double inhale exhale for five minutes a day of dedicated practice which we track and this is very interesting because you'll notice that the pattern of heart rate is very rhythmic both entering and during and after the cyclic physiological sign aka slow breathing protocol as far as we know this protocol has never been explored in humans in a rigorous controlled study before although you heard the basis for looking at this pattern of breathing in its way in the previous slides so it's very interesting because it looks a lot like heart rate variability we haven't mapped this exactly to all the features that are going on with them physiologically and subjectively in terms of how much they perceive life stress those data are still being analyzed but this is a very different pattern of heart rate based on a change in the pattern of breathing for five minutes a day and this is strikingly different we also have a protocol that involves deliberate hyperventilation hyperventilation excuse me which is inhale exhale inhale exhale inhale exhale very rapidly hyperventilating and then emptying the lungs discarding all the carbon dioxide and sitting with lungs empty for a brief period of time and then repeating for five minutes a day so you'll notice that the heart rate shoots up dramatically during this hyperventilation which it shouldn't surprise you now right because you know that a lot of inhales are going to promote faster heart rate and then afterward there's a decrease and what's striking here is how regular this is across 28 days how tight the data are how these dots overlay one another so tightly is very interesting and we're we're exploring whether or not this allows people to buffer the stress response this is sort of self-induced stress inoculation to steal the words or borrow i should say of my colleague david spiegel it's not just about the state you're in it's about how you got there and whether or not you had anything to do with it so when people self-induce stress it can teach them to teach themselves and their nervous system is really what we're referring to to be comfortable in uncomfortable states we hear about resilience grit and mental toughness but what is that really well we hear about being comfortable waiting uncomfortable what is that really for us as biologists we think of that in terms of this continuum of autonomic arousal deliberately walking up the staircase and knowing that you can deliberately walk down so to speak and then we also have a category of what's called box breathing which involves inhale hold exhale hold for five minute duration and that seems to lead to increases surprisingly at least in this to us in this subject in heart rate but then no decrease in average heart rate post protocol so we're exploring these protocols we're looking at we're trying to find the minimal effective dose just five minutes a day of something that's purely mechanical a lot of people struggle with meditation because they don't know if they're doing it correctly they don't know if they're accessing the states that they should be and one of the great joys of being at stanford for me and in partnering with david's group and with jamie zeitzer is that we're looking at how this also impacts sleep we're looking at how it impacts uh psychiatric illness and pain we're looking at how it manages performance it can impact performance in the cognitive realm and the physical realm it you know it radiates out into a number of different measures and dimensions that we'd like to get to but right now the question is what is the minimal effective and maximal impact protocol that we can provide people and also the variability across people can be very important some people may not like to be in this state of heightened heart rate so much so that it might be better for them to engage in say this pattern of breathing or this pattern of breathing for five minutes a day so we'd like to create a suite of tools that are cost-free very accessible you can imagine anyone who can breathe would do this we might even you know be able to induce it using some mechanical devices and technology but this is really using the technology of the diaphragm heart breathing nervous system relationship that we were all endowed with from birth there's no neuroplasticity required and that brings me to the final point which is that there's a state here that is not described in the previous slides and that includes both a state of deep relaxation and alertness and that state we know of alertness followed by deep sleep is optimal for neuroplasticity neuroplasticity changing our the way our nervous system works in the long term so that it's reflexive and we don't have to think about doing all these things learning all these things you did this when you were a child you learned how to walk you had to spend a lot of time thinking about it but then once you know how to walk the nervous system passes that off to reflexive behavior we'd love stress buffering the stress response to be that as well there's a state that david's lab has studied for a long time which is a state of hypnosis which is sort of a unique combination of alert and asleep it's a narrowing of context but in a sort of relaxed drowsy state within which data from david's lab have shown again and again in very controlled studies allows us to self-direct our plasticity toward particular outcomes reduced pain inc he says um they've done beautiful studies for instance on pain management in cancer and regulate cancer outcomes and anxiety and so hypnosis we don't think of and it's not studied in his lab or in our lab as something that is you know stage hypnosis with a pendant and getting people to engage in behaviors they don't want it's all about directing the nervous system toward heightened more rapid plasticity so that they more readily engage in behaviors they do want like reduced anxiety and things like smoking cessation the ability to quit certain behaviors so rewiring the nervous system fast by accessing this odd combination of alertness and calmness at the same time and david has protocols and i'm going to share with you some of those i just want to share with you hypnosis has been shown to be in this incredible way powerful way to promote state changes in neuroplasticity if you look at these anxiety scores in standard this attention condition these are control conditions and then hypnosis as the procedure goes on this was published in lancet now 20 years ago and they've done many other studies david's lab is found and our lab is very interested in doing these sorts of studies as well we have been looking at hypnosis a little bit in a virtual reality context but its ability to self-teach calmness and ability to buffer the stress response simply through what one hears on an audio script so reprogramming or neuroplasticity of deliberate reprogramming of one's nervous system to be better to stress less or to feel less chronic pain and what's interesting about this is that it's not some you know mystical thing when you think hypnosis just we think sort of mystical uh shrouded techniques it's really about rewiring the brain by accessing alertness and calmness we think in at the same time so speeding up that process of fire together wired together by bringing those two events firing together and the wiring together in closer proximity not having an event in a wakefulness and then waiting for sleep but bringing those together in the same unit of time now there's much more to say about that and david um describes it much more eloquently than i do but if you're interested in scripts for hypnosis david has provided this free resource at reveriehealth.com where you can go and access scripts for anxiety pain management and other things and you can just sign up there there's an alexa app there's some other formats as well it's a very powerful again cost-free approach to rewiring the nervous system to serve the states of stress mitigation calm and accessing sleep better so i've been talking now about the science of stress calm and sleep again our goal has been to define the logic and the logic that we place behind it is this arousal continuum this parasympathetic sympathetic thing or alertness calmness and think about the the access points vision and light and breathing the movement of the diaphragm deliberate movement of the diaphragm as ways to control the autonomic what has been previously called the autonomic or automatic nervous system but it really is under conscious control now not all aspects of it are you can't just consciously control your spleen or your digestion with your mind unless you have a certain thought pattern that indirectly biases you towards good digestion or poor digestion we're talking about direct neural relationships between organs of the body like the diaphragm that moves the lungs and allows us to breathe in certain ways and control our heart rate and things like when we view light and we when we avoid light how we breathe whether or not it's cyclic double you know inhale exhale inhale exhale or double inhale followed by exhales in the case of the physiological size so more important than any one technique or tool that i've described today is for all of you to try and integrate a logic of how you're breathing which is available to you at any point as long as you're awake and your vision and your relationship to light is allowing you to ascend and descend that continuum at will or whether or not your relationship to light and lighting whether or not your relationship to your breathing is forcing you up to one end or the other end in an inconvenient way whether or not it's locking that seesaw at one end or the other and again there's no judgment this is science we're not saying stress is bad or sleep is good although sleep is vital and limiting the amount of stress is important what we're talking about here is a mechanism that's grounded in neurons hormones neurotransmitters and for which we're trying to unpack the logic so we want to understand these naturally occurring mechanisms and we're testing the tools you're welcome to deploy the tools that i've talked about today i know we're going to talk about questions or take questions in a few moments i will be happy to talk about some of our work from our virtual reality as well as those questions come in irrelevant there's a whole set of other studies looking at breathing and vision that melis in my lab has been doing looking at having changes in people with generalized anxiety for instance and thinking about brain areas and mitigation for generalized anxiety i'm going to close there but not close out entirely because i'm available for questions in the remaining time thanks so much for your time and attention there have been a whole number of people who've been interested and if your research has looked into how diet um has an impact and relates to sleep and stress and in a diet that is as broad a scope as not just the food but you know alcohol and cannabis and that type of thing have you looked into that sure um and forgive me for going over i promised i would track time and i i didn't i was in a um contracted view based on autonomic arousal um and excitement about the material so forgive me in any event um okay so i'm not an expert in this but there's some logic that we can use that i think is i know is grounded in the scientific literature but i want to be very clear i'm not making nutrition recommendations for anybody but here's the um here's the idea mechanisms of autonomic arousal were designed not to protect us from tigers and predators you've heard that before it was designed to mobilize us anytime we need to pursue something and that could be water or food one way i can create agitation is simply by making someone or myself very thirsty i'm gonna be laser focused on trying to get water now conditions of fasting a lot of people these days are excited about intermittent fasting there's some studies pro there's some studies against we have experts at stanford um work on these issues as well as um as others when we are in a fasted state we tend to have more alertness than we are when we're fed and that's why the parasympathetic nervous system is also called the rest and digest system now it doesn't matter what you eat if your gut is full of food if i eat nine ribeye well that would be well eight ribeye steaks let's say um or eight pounds of broccoli and my gut is fully distended a lot of blood is gonna be diverted there and away from the other tissues of the body including my brain and i'm gonna be sleepy regardless of what i eat so it's volume of food there's a blood sugar relationship and then there's timing of food intake i will say this regular relatively not neurotically controlled but regular meal timing even if you're intermittent fasting so for instance if you're a lunch and dinner person or a breakfast dinner person or breakfast lunch and dinner or whatever it is though those mechanisms that govern our alertness are tied to our food intake light is the most powerful zeitgeist we call it time keeper but the timing of food intake exercise and light combine to tell our autonomic nervous system when we should be awake and alert a simple way to do this is if you have trouble waking up early light in your eyes early during the day exercise early in the day and believe it or not food intake early in the day will in a short period of time shift your autonomic nervous system towards early wake-up time whether or not it's pleasant to do those things that time of day or not likewise doing those later in the day will shift you towards later but basically when blood sugar is low we tend to secrete molecules in our in our brain and bloodstream that promote agitation wakefulness and the pursuit of food but that can be diverted that alertness and attention can be diverted to cognitive things some people work better fasted some people can't work at all when they're when they're not fed so um it's highly individual but there's a kind of a core logic which is the hungrier you are the more you're alert you're going to be and able to focus but at some point that focus will become all about food another question that people have been having is uh putting in the uh here is about melatonin and supplements for sleep and how you know the useful that is written for general health sure so melatonin is a naturally secreted hormone from the pineal it's secreted in darkness it's inhibited by light um i'm not i always say this i'm not a medical doctor so i don't prescribe anything including supplements i'm a professor so i profess all sorts of things and i'm comfortable talking about what i do in my knowledge of the field and a resource that i think will be useful to people many people take melatonin melatonin has two primary roles one is to promote sleepiness in people of all ages in children melatonin is chronically high it's not regulated by light in the same way and melatonins one of its major roles in development is to inhibit the onset of puberty so there's a question out there and a lot of good reviews and a lot of debate as to whether or not supplementing melatonin for too often or too long especially in children is a good or bad idea now their melatonin is already high but if you're taking it as an adult you're taking truly supraphysiological levels when you take that three milligram tablet of melatonin it is astronomically high jamie zeitzer has more to say about this than i do and is more of an expert on this there are supplements before we talk about anything related to food or supplements my bias and my lab's focus is always to think about behavioral tools the do's and don'ts of behavior then to think about things like nutrition timing and content then to think about supplementation then prescription drugs and then there's this whole new world opening a brain machine interface you know binaural beats and the you know and things you put up a rad eye that people wear and plug in and these kinds of things so there are tools that would allow one to access sleep more readily which generally center around long exhale breathing for reasons that now should be obvious and clear to you there's a practice that my lab has been studying which is in the outside world outside the laboratory is called yoga nidra nidra you can find scripts for those online there are hypnosis scripts for improved sleep at reverie from david's lab that almost all are anchored around ex long exhale breathing and some other things body scan the idea is to turn off the forebrain to turn off the analysis of duration path and outcome what what's what how long are things going to last what's going to happen and what path should i take to get a particular you need to shut off thinking that's hard to turn off thinking using thinking it doesn't really work so again it's using breathing there are supplements that now people are excited about i'm again i'm not suggesting these that are different than melatonin that are made mainly of the magnesium threonate and theanine category that promote gaba release three and eight because the transporters for magnesium three and eight are a little bit different than the others i highly recommend everyone should talk to their doctor before considering or taking anything especially with kids contraindications are a real thing but there's a website called examine.com i have no relationship to them that is a not-for-profit website that lists out all supplements and links to pubmed articles and what's called the human uh effect matrix where it describes that the summary takeaway of all those stud of all the studies done for instance magnesium 3 and 8 it will tell you about its effect on sleepiness it'll also tell you about its effect on cardiovascular function so before you take anything you should do diligence and go there and talk to your physician but you know i'd be lying if i said there aren't compounds available including prescription drugs that can help enhance the transition of sleep and depth of sleep but that's a much bigger discussion than i think we have time to get into right now so be smart about it and behavior tools are at least for many people sufficient and we're looking at that in the study with david we are measuring sleep duration and sleep quality using this whoop band technology that they've generously provided us for that study then another question about you know how how how do things like wim hof breathing and cold exposure um which get you into a high state of arousal lead to being more calm throughout the day i'm mildly amused that wim hof breathing has made it so much into the um common view now for those of you don't know wim hof aka the iceman is this guy who's used cold exposure and breathing to push his physiology to do extreme things like go up everest and shorts and bare feet etc that the popularity of wim hof breathing is a recent thing mainly due to his um presence on social media wim off breathing is what was classically called tumor breathing it's been practiced by tibetan monks and people for ages there's a great book out by james nestor called breath the new science of a lost art actually describes a lot of studies at stanford um in that book that's a popular book not a scientific book here's the deal with wim hof aka tumo ak kundalini super oxygenation the names are don't matter they all involve hyperventilation deliberate hyperventilation followed by exhales or inhales and breath holds we included one of those plots in this in what i showed you they all have the same effect which is to deploy adrenaline and it's a self-induced kind of stress inoculation you're getting comfortable with adrenaline circulating in your body there are a lot of claims out there thus far as unsubstantiated by hard science about what bees do that's one of the reasons we're still we're studying this there is however one study in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences showing that this superventilation protocol aka wim hof breathing tumor breathing can be useful they injected this was done in a controlled way believe it or not injected subjects with e coli this is not something you want to go do and they were able to combat infection better than those that did simple meditation by activating the stress response so earlier i said that the stress response can counteract certain forms of infection by deploying more of those immune cells that go in and eat up um foreign invaders to the to the uh to the body i will say this the super oxygenation wim hop ring is very intense for those of you that are panic attack prone or anxiety prone it you really have to be cautious in approaching that some people find it very unpleasant cold exposure i'm just gonna briefly mention since you asked there are two excuse me two major things to think about cold exposure ice baths cold showers etc are another way of inducing this adrenaline response many people find it unpleasant many people find it pleasant it has two major effects one is metabolic the cold stimulates what's called brown adipose tissue between the scapulae increases metabolism and that's and it can either serve to allow you to stress inoculate by resisting the shiver response so you're learning to not shiver and not stress in a stressful stimulus you're learning to descend the staircase even though your external world is cold right ice bath or cold shower but there was a paper published in nature this last year showing that the shiver response in cold liberates a molecule from the muscle that's shivering called sukinate that molecule travels to brown fat and stimulates the brown fat to increase metabolism so the shiver is actually the the sort of foundational source of the metabolic effect so you have to ask yourself are you using cold showers to enhance metabolism or are using it to learn to buffer the stress response thank you that's great um so we're reaching the end of our time so i have a final question for you um several of um our alumni have asked about how to learn more about uh sleep and stress um do you have any books or websites or um that you would suggest uh and this would be a great time for you to share about your youtube channel but yes so um thanks so much for the interest we these 125 subjects that we're looking at now and analyzing their data they're a mixture of stanford students that were enrolled last spring um as well as people out in the world that are not associated with stanford we are going to announce more studies of this kind where you don't have to come to the laboratory because of the complications nowadays with travel and the pandemic etc where we ship you technology and data are pinged back to us etc i announced that sort of thing as well as do regular neuroscience tutorials of this the sort you heard today and other things everything from sleep and dreaming we talk about autism i invite other experts on other professors at stanford and from elsewhere at hubermann lab all one word all lowercase that's on instagram i'm not very pres present on twitter um so but i have an account there but mainly at instagram and then i have a youtube channel that starting january i'll be posting long-form content very similar to the type you described today where i can provide visuals etc and that's under my name andrew huberman you can just search channels in youtube and you'll find it so huberman lab on instagram as well where you can find more resources here these announcements reverie.com is david's website for hypnosis but i i can't um encourage you enough to at least just check out those uh those scripts for you and your loved ones if you're interested in that resource it is a free resource but huberman lab and then if you would like to know more about the science you want to download the peer-reviewed papers you want to really dig into the every graph and every plot figure out where you know what was behind all the stuff i talked to about today just hubermanlab.com all the pdfs of our papers are available for free download you don't have to subscribe to any of the journals and um i think that should be uh an adequate um number of uh vectors for people to follow andrew thank you again so much for joining us today and sharing your expertise and giving us practical information that we can apply to our daily lives to um make it better we just it's been fantastic so thank you so much thanks so much for hosting me and for everyone coming on board and especially to emily for your help in preparing all this and to stanford for being so supportive of public education efforts

Channel: Stanford Alumni

Views: 193,248

Keywords: Stanford, Alumni, Association, University, SAA, Huberman, sleep, science, alumni ed

Id: Ft9N2-CEPzc

Length: 60min 20sec (3620 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 24 2020