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 This is episode number 1204 with neuroscientist Andrew Huberman.
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Welcome to the School of Greatness.
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My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur.
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And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.
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Thanks for spending some time with me today.
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Now let the class begin.
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 Welcome back, my friend.
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My guest today is neuroscientist Andrew Huberman.
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And Andrew is a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford, as well as Andrew runs Stanford's lab that primarily studies brain states such as fear, courage, anxiety, and how we can better move into and out of them through practices like visual cues, breathwork, movement,
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 and supplementation.
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It's always a pleasure to have Andrew back on the show and you guys have shown so much support in the past when we have him on so we wanted to bring him back for some incredible things we break down today.
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So make sure to check out our previous episodes in the show notes to learn more about Andrew and everything he's up to as well.
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 But today in this episode, we discuss why we experience brain fog and the best morning and night routines to get rid of it.
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The 90 minute focus hack that you need to try, how to manage your dopamine levels to stay motivated, how the gap effect
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 can hugely benefit your ability to accelerate your learning, how drugs and alcohol affect your brain and body, and so much more.
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This will be a powerful one for so many.
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So if you're enjoying this, please copy and paste this link and share it to your friends, text people, post it on social media, and make sure to tag me and Andrew Huberman over on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, as well, when you share it.
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 And a quick reminder, if you have not subscribed to the School of Greatness, now is your time to go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify, click the subscribe button and leave us a review.
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That really helps us spread the message to more people over on those ecosystems.
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And I want to give a shout out to today's fan of the week from Slasher, who said, I'm a daily listener of the show and I've yet to find an episode I don't enjoy.
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From finance to health.
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 I always have a new skill to add to my life and I truly feel like Lewis and his guests are helping me become the person I've always wanted to be.
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So Slasher, thank you so much for being a part of this and thank you for leaving the review and being the fan of the week this week.
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And if you want a chance to be shouted out on the podcast, just head over to Apple Podcasts, leave us a review for your chance to be shouted out on the podcast in the future.
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Okay.
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In just a moment, the one and only Andrew Huberman.
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Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness.
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We've got the man, Andrew Huberman, in the house, my man.
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Good to see you, brother.
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Great to see you.
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It's great to be back.
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You're becoming our resident neuroscientist.
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You're the one we've had on a couple times now.
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It's the third time on.
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I'm so excited.
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Yesterday, I woke up.
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 with brain fog.
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And I usually don't have brain fog.
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I was telling you about this a little bit for a second.
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And I went into my Spanish lesson, which I told you before that I'm in Spanish classes.
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And I was just like, it was hurting me.
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Like every minute I felt like I'm struggling.
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I felt like I wasn't recalling.
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I wasn't receiving the information.
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I couldn't conjugate the stuff I was trying to do.
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And I was just like, I'm not in a good space.
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I need to stop.
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Like 20 minutes in, I was just like, let's call it a day.
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 I'm curious, where does brain fog come from?
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And how can we make sure that we have great morning routines to support us so that we don't have brain fog at all in the morning or later in the afternoon?
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Great question.
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Well, there are a lot of sources of brain fog.
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The most obvious one would be a poor night's sleep.
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And sleep, of course, being the most fundamental layer of mental and physical health.
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 You don't sleep well for one night, you're probably okay.
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For two nights, you start to fall apart.
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Three, four nights, you're really a degraded version of yourself in every aspect.
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Emotionality is off, ability to do most anything is off, hormones start suffering.
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So sleep is fundamental.
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But assuming that you slept well,
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 There are a number of things.
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One is your breathing patterns.
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We often get into discussions of breathing, but this is a slightly different one than we've had in the past.
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A lot of people have sleep apnea.
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They are not getting enough oxygen during their sleep, or they are mouth breathing during sleep.
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 These days, it's become popular in some circles to take a little bit of medical tape and tape the mouth shut and to learn to be a nasal breather.
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And there is excellent evidence now that being a nasal breather, most of the time, as long as you're not speaking or eating or exercising hard enough that you would need to breathe through your mouth, that it's beneficial to be a nasal breather for a couple of reasons.
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First of all, if you are deliberately nasal breathing during the day,
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 The tendency is that you will nasal breathe at night, which tends to lead to less sleep apnea, less mouth breathing during the middle of the night.
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 and less brain fog.
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Why brain fog?
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Well, during sleep, a number of restorative processes occur, but if you're not getting enough oxygen into the system, the brain is literally becoming hypoxic, and a lot of the cleaning out mechanisms, the lymphatic system, et cetera, as they're called, don't get an opportunity to function as well as they ought to.
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So you wake up in the morning, you slept your normal six to eight hours, but you're feeling kind of groggy and out of it.
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 And of course, there could be other reasons that you're experiencing brain fog.
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Maybe, you know, for people that drink alcohol the night before, maybe they had alcohol, for people that maybe they ate a meal that was too large before sleep, maybe any number of reasons, right?
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But getting adequate oxygenation of the brain during sleep is key.
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 So learn to be a nasal breather.
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And for those of you out there that say, well, I have a deviated septum.
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A lot of people think they have deviated septums.
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The problem is they're not nasal breathing enough.
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The sinuses actually can learn to dilate if you nasal breathe.
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Exercising while nasal breathing will kind of depend on the sport.
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Like if you box, oftentimes there's the need to do a shh, or, you know, kind of like exhale on impact type thing.
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So I don't think anyone should tamper with their normal
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 breathing patterns as it relates to sport or singing or some activity.
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But what I'm talking about is when you're just standing around, when you're walking down the street, any low-level activity, you're working at your desk, you should be nasal breathing and breathing regularly.
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That will reduce brain fog in many cases, absolutely.
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It's interesting, when I went to India to study meditation, I guess it was five years ago now,
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 I learned that the monks breathe through, they keep their mouth shut all day long.
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You know, their mouth is shut, they breathe through the nose, unless they're eating or they're having a conversation, their mouths are shut.
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And they seem to always just be very relaxed and, you know, sharp and with it, they probably get great sleep.
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And it's interesting, as you were saying these symptoms, breathing through the mouth, poor sleep, I realized two days before this brain fog day,
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 Was in Vegas at the Canelo fight and I stayed up really late.
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It was daylight savings, but I stayed up way past the time Was on an early flight back.
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I just didn't get a lot of sleep in 24 hours before then.
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I Had a good night's sleep the next night, but the next day so two days after the poor sleep and for the last month I've been breathing through my mouth because I had I
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 a surgery where I had three implants where missing teeth are.
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So I had three titanium rods and a bone graft.
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So I couldn't keep my mouth shut.
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I had to keep it open and breathe because it was just painful.
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So maybe those combinations of poor sleep a couple nights before and breathing through the mouth is what caused it, which makes sense to me.
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 It seems very likely, and in Vegas, you've got the air conditioning, so you're breathing a lot of dry air in the middle of the night.
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The other thing is about the immune system.
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We hear about the gut microbiome, and indeed, we have a lot of microbiota that live in our gut.
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You can have healthy or unhealthy microbiota.
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It's an essential part of our biology.
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 you know, supports the nervous system, the immune system, and all of that.
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But if you think about the gut, the gut is obviously, when we think about the gut, we think about the stomach, but of course it runs all the way up to the mouth and nose.
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We have a microbiome, we have a nasal microbiome, a mouth microbiome, we have a urethral microbiome, and in women there's a vaginal microbiome.
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And the microbiome are these bacteria that maintain a,
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 a healthy condition of the mucosal lining.
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So without doing a whole lecture on an immune system, your primary barrier to infections of all kinds, bacteria, viruses, and parasites is your skin.
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If you have a cut in your skin, you're more susceptible, right?
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But these are your entry points.
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 You actually have an ocular microbiome too.
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Ears too, but it's mainly eyes, nose, and mouth are the primary sites of entry for infection.
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And the nose has a filter where the mouth is just like you're sucking it in.
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That's right, so the nose actually is better at scrubbing or filtering out bacteria, viruses, and we'll leave parasites aside for the moment, but then is the mouth.
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 And so being a nasal breather actually is better in terms of combating different types of infections, all kinds of infections.
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And there's a wonderful book about this that was written by a couple of my colleagues at Stanford.
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If people want to do a deep dive, the book is called Jaws, A Hidden Epidemic.
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 And the authors are Paul Ehrlich and Sandra Kahn.
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And it has a forward by Jared Diamond and an intro by Robert Sapolsky.
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So some serious heavy hitters on this book.
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And it talks about how nasal breathing, deliberately nasal breathing during the day leads to better sleeping at night, leads to better jaw structure.
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It actually creates more space for the tongue on the roof of the mouth and the teeth.
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They have some beautiful and not so beautiful images of twins that were raised apart.
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 One was a nasal breather and chewed a lot of hard food.
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So a lot of using of the jaw to chew your food, you know, really gnawing on food is actually good for the jaw.
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Whereas the twin in these twin studies went off to cultures or areas of the world where they were eating a lot of soft foods.
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 There are examples, for instance, of kids that had allergies to a pet hamster.
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There's one example.
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And the change in this kid's face, he went from having a very attractive face to a extended, you know, the eyes tend to droop.
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Right, because the sinuses are all changing shape.
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Now, the beauty of this system is that when you switch to becoming a nasal breather, the entire structure of the face and jaws change and the eyes become less droopy.
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This book documents all this.
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 Wait, so you can reverse it too?
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It's reversible.
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Come on.
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It is reversible.
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Wow.
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It involves a little bit of work.
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One of the things that you can do that's kind of fun and a little challenging is just on your jogs or on the treadmill or any kind of low level cardio besides swimming, just nasal breathing.
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Only go as hard as you can still maintain nasal breathing.
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It's very hard for the first few sessions, but by the second week or third week, you actually discover that you have a greater capacity.
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 to exercise.
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My friend Brian McKenzie, who's done a lot of work on this, he works with elite performers in terms of
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 singers, opera singers, but also athletes.
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And he's done a lot in terms of using nasal breathing during exercise.
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But the point is that if you deliberately nasal breathe, even when emailing or texting, you also avoid what's called email apnea or what we should call now text apnea.
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They've done studies where people are texting and they're holding their breath.
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So you're cutting off oxygen supply.
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So I think the important thing to bring us back to brain fog is that you want to get oxygen into the system.
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And ideally you're bringing that oxygen into the system mainly through your nose.
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 and not through your mouth.
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It doesn't mean that breathing through your mouth is a terrible thing to do, it just means that most of the time you want to be breathing deeply and rather slowly through the nose, maybe anywhere from four or five breaths per minute.
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Don't hold me too close to that number, but you want to be breathing slowly and deeply through your nose most of the time.
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 So it's probably the 80-20 rule, right?
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Where you're speaking and eating 20% of your day.
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Yeah, if you're sprinting, you're gonna huff and puff through your mouth.
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If you're weightlifting or doing martial arts, you're doing anything that requires breathing through your mouth in order to perform better, then just obviously do that.
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The rest of your resting time, try to breathe through your nose as much as possible.
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That's right.
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And while you sleep.
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 That's right, and it also helps with ear infections and things of that sort, because the whole system, when you hear ear, nose, and throat, you have ear, nose, and throat doctors, ENTs, it's because the whole system of drainage from the ears, nose, and throat, they run together like a bunch of little rivers that all drain to the same location.
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The microbiome of the nose stays healthier if you're a nasal breather.
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The mouth is a terrible filter for viruses, meaning things can get in and cause problems.
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Most of the time, an illness starts with a throat tickle.
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 Like something's happening back there.
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Like a little cough or something, right?
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Yeah, it's that little itch and that's the uh-oh.
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What is that tickle?
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It's irritation of the mucosal lining and there are neurons that sit right below there that are now getting exposed because the mucosal lining is getting worn away or the chemistry of the mucosal lining is changing.
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What's the best way to reverse that when you start to feel the tickle in your throat?
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Ah, there we can look to our good friend.
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Well, a couple things.
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 slow down whatever you're doing obviously if you can get some if you can get a nice hot shower a bath or sauna and then
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 get into bed and get 10 hours of sleep, that would be ideal.
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But if you're at the Canelo fight and you've got that, our friend Wim Hof practices something called tumo breathing, it's sometimes called, and that goes by other names as well.
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And there's a beautiful study that was published in the Journal of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, this is peer-reviewed work, showing that if you take two groups of people, you inject them both with E. coli, a bacteria which makes you very, very sick,
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 but one group does a simple meditation, and another group does breathing of the sort that I'll describe in a moment, that Wim and Tummo type breathers, and other people have talked about, actually for centuries.
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What it involves is hyper-oxygenating the system so that you release adrenaline from the adrenal glands, which sit right about your kidneys,
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 And adrenaline is the trigger for a number of different immune system cell types to combat infection.
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And what they found was if people do a particular style of breathing prior to the injection of E. coli, they are able to greatly avoid fever.
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 They reduce the amount of inflammatory cytokines, things like IL-6, interleukin-6, et cetera, and increase anti-inflammatory cytokines, like interleukin-10.
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It's a really wonderful study.
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The pattern of breathing is really simple.
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I do it anytime I'm starting to feel a little worn out, or like I might be catching something, or if I was on a plane and someone around me seemed like they weren't doing so well, or I just am feeling a little worn out.
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 And forgive me, because there's no other way to do it, but just to do it, but it involves 25 deep breaths in through the nose, in this case, out through the mouth.
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Okay, so this is a case where breathing through the mouth is appropriate.
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So in through the nose, out through the mouth.
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Then at the end of that, exhaling all your air, holding your breath for 15 to 60 seconds.
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Don't fight the impulse to breathe when you feel the impulse to breathe.
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Breathe in and then hold your breath.
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 for as long as you can until you feel the impulse to breathe.
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Obviously, don't do this in your water.
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Believe it or not, a few people have actually died doing this because they did it in a bathtub or before diving underwater.
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So please don't do that.
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But it basically, I won't do all 25, but it goes something like this.
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 So big, deep breaths, right?
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And I can already feel I'm kind of heating up.
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That's the release of adrenaline.
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You're hyper-oxygenating, you're releasing adrenaline.
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Adrenaline is the signal for the immune system to deploy these killer cells and these cells that go and combat infection.
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And we don't often think about the fact that stress actually is the go signal for the immune system.
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We always hear stress depletes your immune system.
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And that's true if you remain chronically stressed.
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 But humans are phenomenally good at combating stressors.
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And then they stop, they relax, and boom, they get sick because the adrenaline signal drops.
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The other way you could do this would be to do an ice bath or really cold shower.
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You get the adrenaline release.
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That's basically the effect of the ice bath or cold shower.
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It's the adrenaline release.
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Some people,
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 will do well by doing a short HIIT workout, a high-intensity interval training workout, because again, it's adrenaline.
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So not a depleting workout, but 12 minutes of sprint, walk, sprint, walk.
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My sprints are very different than your sprints, because you actually sprint.
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 in not in my best, best dream, but thank you for that.
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Not in my best, best dream, but thank you for that.
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So this is something that I occasionally do if I'm traveling or I'm just feeling kind of worn down, I'll do maybe two or three rounds of what I just described.
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And it all boils down to adrenaline release.
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That bolus, as we call it, a shot of adrenaline to your system,
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 signals the immune system to turn on.
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To defend itself against getting sick.
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That's right.
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And this is why people who have ever taken care of a sick child or a sick relative, you can go, go, go.
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You don't eat, you don't sleep, there's no self-care and you're not getting sick.
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Now, of course, if you're exposed to enough viral load or you're exposed to enough of a bacteria,
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 it might get you, but this is the sort of thing I would do if I was feeling a little bit of a throat tickle, a little rundown, but then I would also do the shower, make sure you get some decent food and get a good night's sleep.
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So what's the routine then, the ultimate morning and evening routine to set your brain and your mind up for optimal performance and not getting brain fog?
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 Okay, I will describe that by listing out the protocol first, and then I'll give some of the scientific mechanisms second.
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Because in the past, what I've tended to do is give the mechanism and then give the protocols.
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I know some people, it's like, you know, enough of these academic guys will just give me the, just tell me what to do.
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But if people want the mechanism, I'd be happy to flesh that out.
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 I should say that what I will mention is not everything I do.
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So for instance, I get up and like most humans, I use the restroom and I have a glass of water.
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I do those things.
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So I'm not listing every right foot, left foot step through the morning, but the things that are geared towards getting the mind into a proper place.
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For me, I'll describe it as my routine.
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I generally get up somewhere between
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 5.30 and seven in the morning, depending on when I went to sleep.
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I'm not super regular about when I go to sleep, but generally that's between 10.30 and midnight.
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I try and avoid that midnight hour, but it happens.
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So I get up.
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 Obviously I use the restroom, I drink some water.
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I do think that hydrating is very important.
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So I'll drink some water.
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And then the fundamental layer of health is to set your circadian rhythm.
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The simplest way to do that is to go outside for 10 minutes and get some bright light in your eyes.
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 I'll just list off some of the things that people always ask.
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What if you wake up before the sun rises?
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Well, simple rule, if you want to be awake, turn on as many bright lights in your house as possible, but then when the sun goes out, comes out, excuse me, get outside and see some sunlight.
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 You do not have to look directly into the sun, but you do want to get outside out of shade cover if you can.
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Don't wear sunglasses if you can do that safely.
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Don't try and do this through a window.
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Don't try and negotiate with me on this point.
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SPEAKER_00
People are like, what about a window?
0
SPEAKER_00
Well, the filtration of the important wavelengths of light through the window is just too high, and so it would take hours for you to set your circadian clock that way.
0
SPEAKER_01
 As you can tell by this episode, we can always count on Andrew for science-backed tips and advice on how to optimize ourselves.
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And after this conversation, I was so inspired myself to actively seek out a product that will help improve my day-to-day life.
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And today's sponsor is Endel, an award-winning app that harnesses the power of sound to improve your focus, sleep, and overall mental health.
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That's E-N-D-E-L dot I-O slash Lewis.
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 You want to do this because once every 24 hours, you're going to get a peak in cortisol, which is a healthy peak.
0
SPEAKER_00
You want that peak to happen early in the day because it sets up alertness for the remainder of the day.
0
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There are really nice studies done by my colleagues in Stanford psychiatry and biology department showing that if that cortisol peak starts to drift too late in the day, you start seeing signs of depression.
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It's actually a well-known marker of depression.
0
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 So you want that cortisol, almost stressed out, kind of, ah, the day's beginning, I have a lot to do feeling.
0
SPEAKER_00
That's a healthy thing.
0
SPEAKER_00
You want that happening early in the day.
0
SPEAKER_00
The sunlight will wake you up.
0
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And what's really cool is that over time, you'll start to notice the sunlight waking you up more and more.
0
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The system becomes tuned up.
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If you miss a day, it's not the end of the world.
0
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 because it's a, as we call it, a slow integrating system, but don't miss more than one day.
0
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And if you live in an area where it's very cloudy outside, just know that the sunlight, the photons coming through that cloud cover are brighter than your brightest indoor lights.
0
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Now, if you live in a very dark region of the world or it's unsafe or purely impractical to get outside in the morning,
0
SPEAKER_00
 then it might make sense to get a sunrise simulator or one of these lights, but they tend to be very expensive.
0
SPEAKER_00
What I recommend people use instead is just a ring light, a ring blue light.
0
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This is a case where you can blast your system.
0
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So get that morning light.
0
SPEAKER_00
It sets a number of things in motion, such as your melatonin rhythm to happen 16 hours later to help you fall asleep.
0
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I would say this is the fundamental
0
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 step of any good morning, and if you don't do this enough, you are messing yourself up in a number of ways.
0
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Does this mess with digestion also?
0
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so every cell in your body has a 24-hour clock.
0
SPEAKER_00
All those clocks need to be aligned to the same time, so imagine a clock shop with lots of different clocks, and you don't want them alarming off at different times.
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This sunlight viewing or bright light viewing early in the day, I would say within 30 to 60 minutes of waking up,
0
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 for about 10 minutes, or if it's very cloudy, maybe 30 minutes or so.
0
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That activates a particular type of neuron in the eye called the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cell, if people wanna look that up.
0
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Signals to the circadian clock, which is right above the roof of your mouth, but that is the master circadian clock that then releases a bunch of signals into your body.
0
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This all happens very fast.
0
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And every cell in your body gets tuned to the exact same time reference point so that your system can work as a nice concert of cells as opposed to out of whack.
0
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 Your gut has a clock, your liver has a clock, your heart cells have a clock, every skin cell has a clock, and for those that are not incentivized enough by the cortisol stuff and all the other things, actually the replenishment of stem cells in the skin, hair, and nails
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 is activated by the system.
0
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So hair grows more readily, skin turns over, and nails grow more quickly because you have stem cells, literally cells that release more cells that become new hair cells or new skin cells and new.
0
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 that make up the nails.
0
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So skin, hair, and nails also benefit, and it has to be light exposure to the eyes.
0
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When we talk about all these things like the gut and the skin, et cetera, it's tempting to say, oh, it's sunlight on the skin.
0
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No, it's actually only can be signaled through the eyes because the clock lives deep in the brain, that master clock, and you need the signal to get to that master clock.
0
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 So don't wear sunglasses.
0
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If you can avoid wearing sunglasses safely, there are people, for instance, who have macular degeneration, who have to avoid bright lights, and they know this because their ophthalmologist tells them.
0
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If you wear corrective lenses, contacts, even if it has UV filtration, that's fine.
0
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In fact,
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 If you think about what an eyeglass or a contact lens does is it focuses light onto the eye, actually onto the retina on the back of the eye, whereas looking through a window filters it.
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It blocks a certain amount of light coming in, even if it's a very clear window.
0
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So go outside if you wear glasses, fine.
0
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If you wear contacts, fine.
0
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 and if you can get out on a porch and be east-facing in the morning when the sun comes up, great.
0
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You don't need to see the sun cross the horizon, but ideally you see the sun when it's at what we call low solar angle, it's not directly overhead.
0
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If you wait two or three hours after waking up to get bright light in your eyes, you are setting yourself up for a complicated sleep-wake cycle that leads to a lot of what we call insomnia.
0
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 So this is important to do in the first 60 minutes of waking up.
0
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Get outside, 10 minutes.
0
SPEAKER_01
You don't have to be in the sun, but you want to be able to look and see the sun, right?
0
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
0
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Is it okay to be in the shade or you want the sunlight hitting your skin also?
0
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It depends on how bright it is.
0
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So for instance, this morning I woke up because of where I live, there's a lot of tree cover, but I saw that the sun was, there were a lot of shadows, but it was casting a nice patch of light.
0
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 in the street right in front of my house.
0
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So I'm the weirdo that walked out there with my coffee.
0
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Actually, I delay my coffee.
0
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It was with my water in the morning.
0
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I'll talk about why I delay coffee.
0
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And I'm leaning against a tree, I confess.
0
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I was text messaging for part of that.
0
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Forgive me, I'm human.
0
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 and catching the sunlight coming in through my eyes for a few minutes, I allow myself to blink, obviously, I'm not scared.
0
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So you won't look directly at the sun?
0
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You don't wanna look directly, there's a safety mechanism.
0
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I guess if it's a lower horizon.
0
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It's not that intense.
0
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We have a built-in safety mechanism, which is if you need to blink and close your eyes, close your eyes.
0
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But yeah, I've got sunlight in my eyes, I get the weird looks from my neighbors, but they know me, and they do it too, sometimes they'll join me.
0
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Animals will naturally do this, they'll migrate to the sun.
0
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 So then I go inside.
0
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It's 10 minutes or so.
0
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It seems like a long time, but it is so beneficial.
0
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And then inside, if I want to be awake, I try and turn on as many bright lights as I can.
0
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One of the big mistakes that we've made in the last few years as a culture is assuming that blue light is bad.
0
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During the day, lots of blue light is great because that's the best signal for these cells that wake up your system.
0
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It activates all sorts of important hormone pathways and wakefulness pathways.
2
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 than the other.
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I could list off a number of things, but we have a baseline level of dopamine.
2
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Nicotine, for instance, increases that by about 50%.
2
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It gives you more dopamine.
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Dopamine is released.
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You have two major dopamine pathways in the brain.
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There's one related to movement, one related to reward, broadly speaking.
2
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There are others, but broadly speaking, the so-called mesolimbic reward pathway.
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 And then the other one, we don't have to throw out names, but then we'll just confuse people.
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But so you have these reward pathways and dopamine is involved in movement.
2
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So nicotine, about a 50% increase.
2
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 Cocaine, 100% increase, a doubling.
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Methamphetamine, 1,000 or even 1,000 fold increase.
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So huge increase in dopamine.
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So addictive, but what happens after that big dopamine increase is that the baseline levels of dopamine go below what they were before.
2
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How low that drop is below baseline is proportional to how big the increase was before.
2
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That's why it's so addictive to stay on these things.
2
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That's right.
2
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 Well, and that's why if you're getting lots of little dopamine hits from things, as we call them, you're going to feel kind of depressed, and those things don't feel as rewarding anymore.
2
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Okay, now eventually the system can reset if you don't indulge.
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Let me give an example.
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This is a true story example.
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Out of respect for the individual, I don't want to reveal his name, but
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 In talking about dopamine, someone I know has a child.
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The kid is in his 20s.
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He was a decent student, excellent athlete, really charming, nice kid.
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I've known him since he was little.
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And he reached a point where his friends had graduated high school, he went to community college, and he kind of fizzed out of that.
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He wasn't into that.
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You know, this resonated with my earlier story.
2
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He was working a job, but then he wasn't feeling like working.
2
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And
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 He was convinced he had ADHD and he was depressed and he started taking off down the path of medication, which by the way, have helped many, many people.
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Most of the medications for ADHD, by the way, are
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 drugs that increase dopamine.
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Because dopamine increases focus, it increases motivation, and it increases drive, essentially, the willingness to get into action in pursuit of goals, just like the rats that have dopamine or the humans that have dopamine pursue, the ones that have depleted dopamine do not.
2
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So this guy, who is a real story, was struggling in a major way.
2
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So about three months ago,
2
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 He was watching a lot of videos online.
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He was texting a lot.
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He was mainly playing video games.
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Video games, video games, video games.
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But he wasn't really enjoying them as much anymore.
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And one thing you see with people with ADHD is they actually can focus if they're really interested in something.
2
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Why?
2
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Because their dopamine levels are elevated and they're able to focus.
2
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 He heard about the dopamine system, and Ana's work, and I talked to him, and he decided to do what some people call dopamine fast, but for him that meant no video games, and he did two weeks of no screens, which at first I think was agonizing for him.
2
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It's now three months later, it's a little less than three months later, I actually talked to his parent today, working full-time, off all ADHD meds.
2
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 has a girlfriend, I don't know if that's related or not, probably because he's got his life together a little bit more, which is an attractive feature, as opposed to someone who's spiraling out, doing nothing, living at home, which frankly is an unattractive feature, regardless of boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever.
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He's very focused on his work, he's excited by things, and he allows himself a short period of time each day where he plays video games, and he enjoys them again like never before.
2
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 There is a simple explanation for this, which is that his dopamine system is reset.
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When you're constantly pursuing things, eating highly palatable foods, engaging in very stimulating anything, any behavior that's very stimulating, there's a drop below baseline and it takes an increasingly great stimulus, high threshold stimulus in order to excite you.
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So if people are feeling bored, unmotivated,
2
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 unstimulated most of the time, it's because they are overindulging in things that keep pounding this dopamine system, but the baseline of dopamine is going down, down, down, down, down.
2
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Now, there are a few hacks that can actually help, and Ana talks about some of these in her book.
2
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The main thing is to, if someone is engaging in any truly addictive behavior or substance,
2
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 or a behavior that just doesn't feel like it's that great, but you're finding yourself doing it compulsively.
2
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Like, wow, what are some examples?
2
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Texting, Instagram.
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I limit my Instagram time to two hours per day, which itself just sounds like a lot.
2
SPEAKER_01
I'm a grown adult, and I spend two hours on it, but I do a lot of work there, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
I'm trying to put out content that's educational.
2
SPEAKER_01
But sometimes I think to myself, like, I'm a grown man.
2
SPEAKER_01
I'm spending two hours a day on Instagram.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, that's a lot of where we spend our time now.
2
SPEAKER_01
 But if you allow yourself four hours a day on social media, you'll probably find that you're scrolling, you're not even sure what you're looking for.
2
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Like, what am I doing?
2
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I just wasted this time.
2
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Exactly, and what you're looking for is something to jolt that baseline.
2
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So you wanna limit those behaviors, or in some cases, if it gets really severe like it was for this individual, you want to eliminate.
2
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Completely, for 30, 60 days.
2
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Ideally, it's 30 days.
2
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Now, this is the same prescriptive that they give alcoholics, heroin addicts, et cetera.
2
SPEAKER_01
 But some of those drugs, of course, have actual withdrawal symptoms that can be problematic.
2
SPEAKER_01
These days, I'm not a pot smoker, I've never liked drugs or alcohol, I kind of lucked out that way, and I'm not trying to demonize, I'm not passing judgment, but cannabis, for instance, is pretty prominent use, and a lot of people, the idea of 30 days without that is, I think,
2
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 probably say they could do it, but it would be very challenging for them.
2
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But, and I'm not here to tell people what to do, right, and there's about drugs, alcohol, or anything, but the idea is 30 days of no interaction with that thing, person, behavior, I mean, all sorts of things, so that you can enjoy other things.
2
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I like to say, you know, addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure, and if I may, enlightenment is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure.
2
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All of that hinges on this dopamine system.
2
SPEAKER_01
 So you have to be very judicious in your interactions with things that deliver pleasure, or else they will soon not deliver pleasure, and they will diminish your pleasure for everything else that you interact with.
2
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So the way to think about this is just to set up constraints.
2
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And as I'm stealing Anna's words left and right, forgive me, Anna, she has many more important things to say, and she says them much more eloquently than I, but she says, you know, we don't give our kids chocolate cake for breakfast.
2
SPEAKER_01
 but we sort of understand that dessert comes at a certain time of day.
2
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 and after completing certain things.
2
SPEAKER_01
But we, for some reason, we just allow ourselves to just dive into this immense dopamine sensory landscape of social media.
2
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Because social media isn't just comments.
2
SPEAKER_01
You and me say, oh, like Lewis put something up.
2
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There's that, that stuff's great.
2
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But then there's also a lot of violent stuff, politically intense stuff.
2
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There's a lot of friction, there's a lot of joy.
2
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I mean, you're essentially going to the dopamine carnival.
2
SPEAKER_01
 And so you need to restrict the amount of time.
2
SPEAKER_01
And especially if you're somebody who wants to get work done and your work is not the social media, and I'm pointing at social media, but this could be anything.
2
SPEAKER_01
 anything that you enjoy, food for instance.
2
SPEAKER_01
You don't wanna overindulge in highly palatable foods.
2
SPEAKER_01
It's just bad for us.
2
SPEAKER_01
We know this for a number of reasons.
2
SPEAKER_01
So the key is to take this dopamine system and set it up for you to be able to be motivated and focused.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the way to do that is to make the experiences around that thing that you want to be motivated to do a little less or a lot less exciting.
2
SPEAKER_01
 What do you mean?
2
SPEAKER_01
This is why I don't listen to music these days or check text messages while I'm in the gym.
2
SPEAKER_01
And sometimes I'll listen to a book or a podcast, but I really try and just be, just work out, including while I'm running.
2
SPEAKER_01
Why?
2
SPEAKER_01
Because these days we are layering in dopamine.
2
SPEAKER_01
We're getting dopamine from the energy drink we're drinking.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
2
SPEAKER_01
Big increase in dopamine.
2
SPEAKER_01
I forget the actual numbers, but I think it's 1.8 times increase and some of them have
2
SPEAKER_01
 l-tyrosine which is a dopamine precursor some of them have caffeine which also increases dopamine and upregulate dopamine receptors so you're getting it from the energy drink plus it's the video game you're playing plus you're with your friends it's just a dopamine soup which sounds great except that other things that you do afterwards are going to seem under stimulating and you're gonna think I can't focus on this yeah
2
SPEAKER_01
 So I also kind of wonder whether or not you were having trouble focusing in your class, because the Canelo fight was that awesome.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was insane.
2
SPEAKER_00
It was.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, he's amazing.
2
SPEAKER_01
He's amazing.
2
SPEAKER_01
I am a boxing fan.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was crazy.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if you had to build a boxer, you'd build him like that.
2
SPEAKER_01
Just his head, his shape, the right hook.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it was just like...
2
SPEAKER_00
 The roar of the crowd and just the energy, it was amazing.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that's great.
2
SPEAKER_01
There's a beautiful story unfolding there with him.
2
SPEAKER_01
So that could be it too.
2
SPEAKER_01
There's kind of a letdown.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I think it may be helpful for people to understand that the postpartum depression that people feel after a big celebration,
2
SPEAKER_01
 That's real.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if you just wait a little while, that system will reset.
2
SPEAKER_01
You don't have to necessarily wait 30 days, but if you just had a great party, you should expect that there'll be a long tail of joy, but then you might feel a little low, a little underwhelmed.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if you're gonna sit down and try and do work and you're finding yourself not that focused, you might want to think about some of the behaviors that led up to that work.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I really try to get into my work in a focused way by making the period right before, it's a little boring,
2
SPEAKER_01
 Frankly, going outside, getting some sunlight, drinking my mate, it sounds like a pretty boring life, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
It's not like blasting a bunch of music and getting really amped up.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I'm able to get a nice peak of dopamine during that work about, and I think that's a functional dopamine increase.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then afterwards, yes, indeed, there's a drop.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now there's some other hacks that Anna's talked about.
2
SPEAKER_01
And again, we can look to our friend Wim Hof.
2
SPEAKER_01
Other people have done this, although this was happening long before Wim.
2
SPEAKER_01
 There's a beautiful study published in the European Journal of Physiology showing that getting into cold water, so this could be cold shower, could be ice bath, could be any number of different plunge type things or an ocean or whatever that people want to use, for anywhere from three to six minutes,
2
SPEAKER_01
 creates a 2.5x increase in dopamine that lasts many hours.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it's a unique stimulus, because it's not like a spike and then it drops.
2
SPEAKER_01
It's like a long arc increasing your baseline dopamine.
2
SPEAKER_01
Increases alertness, feelings of well-being.
2
SPEAKER_01
They did blood draws in this study, so these are real data.
2
SPEAKER_01
It wasn't conjecture, they really know this.
2
SPEAKER_01
 And there are some cases of people who were full-blown addicts or people who are struggling with ADHD who start doing regular cold water exposure, you know, three to six times a week, three to six minutes at a time, and discover that, wow, they actually can focus because they're getting that dopamine increase.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
 This stuff is fascinating, man.
2
SPEAKER_01
It's really interesting, I think, to me, because dopamine, you know, coming up in neuroscience, I've been in the game a long time now, almost, you know, gosh, almost 30 years, but dopamine was always thought of as pleasure.
2
SPEAKER_01
 But it's confusing because it's associated with pleasure, but it's not the actual experience of pleasure.
2
SPEAKER_01
And immediately after sex, immediately after any powerful experience that's very pleasureful, dopamine system crashes down.
2
SPEAKER_01
 What happens to the body when dopamine crashes?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, there's an interesting thing that happens because there's a hormone called prolactin, which is actually involved in milk letdown for nursing, but is also increased in both men and women in the anticipation of childbirth.
2
SPEAKER_01
This is actually responsible for the so-called dad bod.
2
SPEAKER_01
 Prolactin lays down body fat stores, tends to make people a little more sedentary, and this has been shown in humans and in animals.
2
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It tends to reduce libido and sex drive.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so if you think about,
2
SPEAKER_01
 Dopamine is a currency of motivation that biology has used for hundreds of thousands of years.
2
SPEAKER_01
So whether or not we think about currencies like dollars or euros or Bitcoins or Ethereum, all of those actually relate to dopamine.
2
SPEAKER_01
Dopamine is the fundamental currency that we're all working for.
2
SPEAKER_01
And dopamine has this quality of making us focused on things outside our immediate experience.
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 This is why people are on cocaine or methamphetamine, which is a really extreme version of dopamine increase.
2
SPEAKER_01
They tend to be all about plans and action.
2
SPEAKER_01
They're not sitting there thinking about how wonderful they feel in their own body.
2
SPEAKER_01
Whereas drugs like cannabis and psilocybin and drugs, these are not drugs that I recommend people use recreationally.
2
SPEAKER_01
I'm not passing judgment, but I just want to be clear about what I'm saying and not saying, that any drugs that increase
2
SPEAKER_01
 Serotonin tend to make people kind of still focused on their internal landscape, their thinking, it's kind of an internal reflection thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
So the serotonin system and the dopamine system are kind of antagonistic to one another.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the prolactin system is associated with the serotonin system.
2
SPEAKER_01
So prolactin is kind of about,
2
SPEAKER_01
 It's a mellowing out.
2
SPEAKER_01
And just to nail the point, there are many people in the world who suffer from schizophrenia, 1% of the world's population, a huge number.
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A very sad thing, psychosis, hearing things, et cetera.
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And most of the drugs designed to treat schizophrenic psychosis are drugs that reduce dopamine.
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SPEAKER_01
 And oftentimes you'll see people on the street who are taking these drugs, and they'll be writhing like this with their face.
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Sometimes men will have gynecomastia, they'll have breast development, because these drugs block dopamine, increase prolactin, and disrupt the motor pathways that are associated with movement.
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 I say this for two reasons.
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One is it illustrates the relationship between prolactin, dopamine, movement, et cetera.
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But the other is to hopefully invoke a little bit of empathy for people that oftentimes we will see people who, if they're shouting and acting crazy, that's probably an unmedicated person who's bipolar or has schizophrenia.
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SPEAKER_01
 But if you see someone in their catatonic or they are writhing and acting very strange, that's a person who's, we don't know for sure, but very likely is actively trying to treat their own psychosis to eliminate the voices and things of that sort.
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SPEAKER_01
So I say that because I, you know, we have a big homeless population issue in California and elsewhere too.
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And oftentimes we see people acting crazy and we think, oh, they're crazy.
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 We make this disparaging judgment, and everyone's prone to doing it, of course, but they're crazy.
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SPEAKER_01
But oftentimes, those crazy movements and the things they're doing are the reflection of drugs that block the dopamine system.
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SPEAKER_01
I don't mean to make it dark, but I think that 1% of the world's population is a huge number, and a lot of people suffering from these things.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now, I wanna bring it home with this idea about
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SPEAKER_00
 drugs, specifically smoking alcohol and let's say marijuana, I guess the most commonly used drugs by most people, how much did those three substances affect dopamine and motivation and focus?
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SPEAKER_00
And how do they affect the brain chemically?
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SPEAKER_00
If you're using them on a consistent basis, let's say every week you're using one of these, does it affect the brain that much?
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SPEAKER_00
 Does it not really affect the brain in terms of focus motivation and dopamine?
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SPEAKER_01
Okay with the caveats excellent question by the way And I think actually in a fundamentally important question because we live in a in a world of substances I mean everyone we all have to eat we all have to hydrate many.
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SPEAKER_01
I'm drinking caffeine right now as I mentioned drugs and
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SPEAKER_01
 and alcohol have never been my thing.
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SPEAKER_01
I was part of an MDMA clinical trial.
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I did two of those sessions.
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SPEAKER_01
That's a drug, right?
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SPEAKER_01
But it was part of a medically supervised clinical trial.
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SPEAKER_01
But I'm not a person who uses recreational drugs.
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SPEAKER_01
And so I wanna just also set up the caveat that I have no judgment whatsoever.
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I think if people are informed, they can make better decisions for themselves.
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SPEAKER_01
Okay.
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SPEAKER_00
I'm curious more about the scientific data.
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SPEAKER_00
Sure.
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SPEAKER_00
People are gonna use it whether they know about it or not.
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SPEAKER_00
Just know what you're doing.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, just know what you're doing.
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SPEAKER_01
Okay, let's take nicotine first.
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SPEAKER_01
 I have a colleague, not at Stanford, who has a Nobel Prize, who chews Nicorette.
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SPEAKER_01
Why?
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SPEAKER_01
I asked him why, and he said, well, for years he was a smoker, and it allowed him to focus.
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SPEAKER_01
And then he realized that lung cancer is something he doesn't want, so he switched, he quit, and he couldn't focus as well, so he started chewing Nicorette.
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SPEAKER_01
That's right.
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Constantly throughout the day.
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SPEAKER_01
 Nicorette stimulates acetylcholine receptors called nicotine receptors, and they are located in multiple places in the brain and body, but they are highly enriched in an area of the forebrain called nucleus basalis that increases focus and the ability to focus.
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SPEAKER_01
So nicotine increases focus.
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SPEAKER_01
I won't lie, it does.
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SPEAKER_01
 it's the smoking part that can mess you up.
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SPEAKER_01
And nowadays I see a lot of people vaping.
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SPEAKER_01
That seems to be a big thing.
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SPEAKER_01
And that's a big concern with kids.
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SPEAKER_01
And again, now I'm sounding, I'm not a parent and I'm sounding like a parent.
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SPEAKER_01
But you know, I think the- What does vaping do to the brain though?
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SPEAKER_01
Well, they're becoming highly addicted to nicotine stimulation.
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SPEAKER_01
And it's very, very hard to quit nicotine stimulation because the level of pleasure and focus that you get from nicotine stimulation is significant.
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SPEAKER_01
 You get a dopamine increase and the nicotine increase, and that makes you feel motivated and focused.
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SPEAKER_01
It's like the perfect storm of chemicals to allow you to do really focused work.
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SPEAKER_01
And so nicotine, and because it increases dopamine and acetylcholine, is this magic elixir for motivation and focus.
2
SPEAKER_01
 but it's potentially addictive and hazardous in some cases.
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SPEAKER_01
I actually have several friends that dip Nicorette all day long.
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SPEAKER_01
Some people feel sick doing it, some people love it.
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SPEAKER_01
I should mention some safer alternatives, perhaps.
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SPEAKER_01
 This isn't really about supplements, but there is something called Alpha-GPC, which I occasionally take 300 milligrams of Alpha-GPC to do a work about.
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SPEAKER_01
It does increase focus because it increases acetylcholine release.
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SPEAKER_01
There is some evidence that Alpha-GPC at, I think, 600 to 900 milligrams per day can offset some of the
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SPEAKER_01
 mental decline associated with Alzheimer's and aging.
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SPEAKER_01
But this is an over-the-counter thing people have to check with their doctor.
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SPEAKER_01
Okay, so that's nicotine, that's how that works.
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SPEAKER_01
But that's why people smoke, that's why they take Nicorette, that's why people are vaping, and that's why people are taking Alpha-GPC.
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SPEAKER_01
And nowadays the whole business of nootropics,
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SPEAKER_01
 is, you know, smart drugs are mainly geared towards, mainly consist of things that have caffeine to increase adrenaline for alertness and dopamine for motivation and things that increase acetylcholine and things like alpha-GPC.
2
SPEAKER_01
 Okay, then there's alcohol, and alcohol is more of a sedative.
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SPEAKER_01
Alcohol's main effect is to reduce the amount of activity in the forebrain, which is involved in planning and inhibiting.
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SPEAKER_01
It's involved in the no-gos, right?
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SPEAKER_01
It's also involved in the sense of self and your self-image, who you think you are in the world.
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SPEAKER_01
It's kind of interesting.
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SPEAKER_01
So when people have a drink or two, they feel less inhibited.
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SPEAKER_01
They also, at least at the early stages of drinking, they tend to feel more confident.
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SPEAKER_01
 they tend to continue drinking, then they tend to lose their self-image, they forget who they are, they can even go blackout drunk.
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SPEAKER_01
And the downstream chemicals are interesting for a small, maybe 8% of the population.
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SPEAKER_01
 Alcohol causes a huge dopamine increase.
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SPEAKER_01
These are the people that from the first drink, they discover that they are an alcoholic or very prone to alcoholism.
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SPEAKER_01
I've known people like this, then these are the people that can drink like nobody else.
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SPEAKER_01
It's not just a tolerance, it's that dopamine system kicking in.
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SPEAKER_01
Whereas for most people, it's more of a sedative, it works through the so-called GABA system, and it's more of just kind of a tranquilizer to shut everything down.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
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SPEAKER_01
But it doesn't help you focus.
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SPEAKER_01
 No, so a lot of people self-medicate by, so being alert is a prerequisite to being focused, but being too alert makes it hard to focus, because then your spotlights are going all over the place.
2
SPEAKER_01
Some people use alcohol as a way to reduce that level of alertness slightly and get into kind of a groove where they can focus a little better than they would otherwise.
2
SPEAKER_01
 Ideally, you would know how to do that without the alcohol, but a lot of people use alcohol for that reason.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, I'm always, I'm going to make some enemies here, but I have family members who will say, I need a drink.
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SPEAKER_01
 You know, people will say, I need a drink.
2
SPEAKER_01
That is a sign of somebody that can't regulate their nervous system, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Like, I need a cup of coffee, and I'm not being disparaging of these statements, I've said I need a cup of coffee, but what you're really saying is that your system requires this chemical to get a lift.
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SPEAKER_01
It's not a crime for most people, but if you need a drink in order to relax,
2
SPEAKER_01
 In my mind, you don't actually have control over your nervous system.
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SPEAKER_01
That's, you know, no judgment, but it would be wise to try and develop some behavioral tools that could perhaps work alongside your pharmacology, if that's what you want, if you still want to pursue pharmacology.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then there's cannabis, there's marijuana.
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SPEAKER_01
And there, we have to divide nowadays among CBD versus THC, and, you know,
2
SPEAKER_01
 the potency of a lot of edibles and people smoking cannabis, the potency has gone way, way up.
2
SPEAKER_01
So there's big dopamine increases, big serotonin increases, which is the kind of mellowing effect or the lack of anxiety.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then of course, there's this huge array of strains now where
2
SPEAKER_01
 Um, like I, anytime I tell a pot, a really seasoned pot smoker that I don't like cannabis, I just don't, you know, I admittedly, I tried it many years ago.
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SPEAKER_01
I did inhale and I didn't like it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Um, and so I didn't do it again.
2
SPEAKER_01
And, but.
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SPEAKER_01
 I'm told that there are now many different strains, some of which have a certain type of psychoactive effects and make people focused and alert, others that make them more sleepy.
2
SPEAKER_01
There's a huge array of effects.
2
SPEAKER_01
Dopamine, serotonin, and what's called the cannabinoid system.
2
SPEAKER_01
And this is interesting, the cannabinoid receptors are actually named because they bind cannabis.
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SPEAKER_01
 are in the hippocampus and other areas of the body.
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SPEAKER_01
They're involved in pain modulation.
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SPEAKER_01
Not surprisingly, a lot of people will smoke cannabis for chronic pain or for glaucoma because it reduces eye pressure.
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SPEAKER_01
It's a disease of pressure in the eye.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it's involved in learning, memory, and forgetting.
2
SPEAKER_01
 And that's right.
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SPEAKER_01
So.
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SPEAKER_00
When it's involved in forgetting.
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SPEAKER_00
That's right.
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SPEAKER_01
Not remembering.
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SPEAKER_01
Correct.
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SPEAKER_01
So stimulation of the of the cannabinoid system makes you more prone to forget things.
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SPEAKER_01
And let's just put it this way.
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SPEAKER_01
Pot smokers are not they're not savants when it comes to remembering things.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if they are, it's fair to say that they would be better at remembering things if they didn't use cannabis.
2
SPEAKER_01
Interesting.
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SPEAKER_01
But again, I want to be clear what my stance is on this, because
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SPEAKER_01
 I know that many people derive great benefit from some of these things.
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SPEAKER_01
And provided it's done legally, age appropriate, et cetera, again, no judgment.
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SPEAKER_01
I think that there are people who derive benefit.
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SPEAKER_01
It's a question of context.
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SPEAKER_01
And the one context that we know this is very problematic, all of this is problematic, is in the developing brain.
2
SPEAKER_01
 Because up until about age 25, the amount of neuroplasticity that you can get from any single event, chemical or behavioral or otherwise, is very robust.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so if people are growing up using a lot of a particular drug,
2
SPEAKER_01
 then the brain is reshaping and those dopamine circuits are reshaping and those serotonin circuits are reshaping according to that chemical environment.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I think it's important to know that.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so for some people, for instance, who relied heavily on ADHD drugs, Ritalin and Adderall, during childhood, it's very hard for them to come off as adults.
2
SPEAKER_01
And again, there are drugs like modafinil, armodafinil,
2
SPEAKER_01
 Ritalin, Adderall, that have helped millions of people.
2
SPEAKER_01
And there are also millions of people who are relying on these compounds who probably don't need them, but they aren't aware of some of the other protocols and approaches.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it's sort of a situation whereby the pharmacology is very potent, it's available, and so people go to the lowest hanging fruit.
2
SPEAKER_00
 You're a wealth of information.
2
SPEAKER_00
Hubermanlab.com, the podcast, Huberman Lab.
2
SPEAKER_00
If you guys want a weekly dose of neuroscience and information on optimizing the body, the brain, sleep, all these different things, you got one of the top podcasts in the world, YouTube channel, Instagram channel.
2
SPEAKER_00
 It's all at Huberman Lab everywhere.
2
SPEAKER_00
I highly recommend you subscribe.
2
SPEAKER_00
I'm trying to get you to do a book soon.
2
SPEAKER_00
I keep saying it, I don't know if there's a book in the works, but hopefully.
2
SPEAKER_01
Did my editor ask you?
2
SPEAKER_01
I finished the book and then I have not sent the book back to the publisher.
2
SPEAKER_01
Eventually there will be a book or books, plural.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes, multiple, we need multiple.
2
SPEAKER_01
 I just I as you probably notice, you know, I'm not very succinct and so for me It's just been great fun.
2
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, I owe you a great deal of thanks, you know to join the ranks of the podcast because you you've been a tremendous inspiration and
2
SPEAKER_01
 and source of support in having me on several times and getting the word out there.
2
SPEAKER_01
Podcasting is one form, books are another, and one of these days I'll get my act together and finish this.
2
SPEAKER_00
They're coming, but Huberman Lab in the meantime is an amazing show, YouTube channel, Instagram, we do Instagram Lives that are very informative.
2
SPEAKER_00
You break down all the science, which I love.
2
SPEAKER_00
 So people need to go check you out there.
2
SPEAKER_00
We're gonna do a part two We're to come back and talk about sleep and all things sleep here So make sure you guys are coming back for that and we drop that I want to ask you the three truths again in your definition of greatness and see if it's changed They're always the hardest question up here.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I'm curious if you if it's the same thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh my okay well if I migrate off those
2
SPEAKER_01
 If it's different, that's great.
2
SPEAKER_00
I guess it means there was neuroplasticity.
2
SPEAKER_00
There you go, yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
So three truths, if this was your last day and we didn't have access to any of your information, what would you say are those three truths that you would share with the world?
2
SPEAKER_00
Three lessons you've learned that you would share with the world?
2
SPEAKER_01
 believer in what the oracle said, which is know thyself.
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SPEAKER_01
I think it's very important for all of us to repeatedly take stock of where our strengths are, where our weaknesses are, where we find meaning and purpose, and where we find joy, and to take stock of those.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it's a simple exercise.
2
SPEAKER_01
You just take a walk or write it down.
2
SPEAKER_01
 and be as honest with yourself as one can be, and to try and lean into the strengths and try and make up some of the deficiencies, which we all have, I certainly do.
2
SPEAKER_01
Many, many deficiencies, as the people in my life will tell you.
2
SPEAKER_01
 But I think it's a very important exercise.
2
SPEAKER_01
That's probably the first one.
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SPEAKER_01
The second one is take care of your physiology.
2
SPEAKER_01
I believe in psychology.
2
SPEAKER_01
We are psychological animals.
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We are storytellers.
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But if your physiology isn't where it needs to be, if the foundation is troubled, it's gonna be very hard to navigate your mental states.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I've often said, and I'll say it again, that if you can't control the mind with the mind,
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SPEAKER_01
 you want to look to the body to control the mind.
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SPEAKER_01
So if you're having a hard time controlling your thoughts, your feelings and emotions, you're feeling triggered, you're feeling like everything's