Huberman Lab - Essentials: How to Defeat Jet Lag, Shift Work & Sleeplessness
Episode Date: December 5, 2024In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, I explore science-backed protocols to combat jet lag, manage shift work, and optimize sleep across different stages of life. I discuss “temperature minim...um” — a simple and reliable measurement that helps you quickly adjust to new time zones and counteract the negative effects of nocturnal shift work. I also provide actionable tools for regulating sleep and wake cycles in babies and new parents. The episode emphasizes the critical role of circadian rhythms, influenced by factors like light exposure, temperature regulation, and eating schedules. Practical tools include using light to shift your circadian clock, understanding the role of temperature in sleep, and adopting strategies to improve rest without medication. Whether you’re a shift worker, a parent of a newborn, or someone facing sleep challenges, this episode offers valuable guidance for enhancing recovery and overall well-being. Huberman Lab Essentials are short episodes (approximately 30 minutes) focused on essential science and protocol takeaways from past Huberman Lab episodes. Essentials will be released every Thursday, and our full-length episodes will still be released every Monday. Read the full show notes for this episode at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman AeroPress: https://aeropress.com/huberman ROKA: https://roka.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Introduction to Huberman Lab Essentials 00:00:45 Understanding Circadian Rhythms 00:02:32 Optimizing Light Exposure for Better Sleep 00:04:46 Tools: Combating Jet Lag 00:05:50 Sponsor: AeroPress 00:07:15 The Science of Jet Lag & Longevity 00:10:57 Temperature Minimum: Key to Circadian Adjustment 00:16:49 Sponsor: AG1 00:19:24 Melatonin: Uses & Misconceptions 00:23:23 Sponsor: ROKA 00:24:33 Shift Work: Managing Irregular Schedules 00:26:50 Sleep Strategies for Different Age Groups 00:29:15 Conclusion & Key Takeaways Disclaimer & Disclosures
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials,
where we revisit past episodes
for the most potent and actionable science-based tools
for mental health, physical health, and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology
at Stanford School of Medicine.
Today's podcast episode is about jet lag, shift work,
and we are going to discuss protocols
that are backed by science that can support particular tools
that you can use to combat things like jet lag,
offset some of the negative effects of shift work,
and make life easier for the new parent,
as well as for the newborn child, the adolescent,
anyone that wants to sleep better,
feel better when they're awake, et cetera.
Let's just take a step back for a moment
and remind everybody what we're talking about.
The circadian rhythm is a 24 hour rhythm
in all sorts of functions.
The most prominent one is a rhythm
in our feelings of wakefulness and sleepiness.
You also have a rhythm in sleepiness and wakefulness
that correlates with that.
We tend to be sleepy as our temperature is falling,
getting lower, and we tend to be more awake or waking
when our temperature is increasing.
We have a clock over the roof of our mouth,
a group of neurons called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
That clock generates a 24 hour rhythm
and that clock is entrained,
meaning it is matched to the external light dark cycle,
which is, no surprise, 24 hours.
Spinning the earth takes 24 hours.
So our cells, our organs, our wakefulness, our temperature,
but also our metabolism, our immune system, our organs, our wakefulness, our temperature, but also our metabolism, our immune system, our mood,
all of that is tethered to the outside light dark cycle.
And if we are living our life in a perfect way
where we wake up in the morning
and we view sunlight as it crosses the horizon,
and then by evening we catch a little sunlight,
and then at night we're in complete darkness.
We will be more or less perfectly matched
to the external or ambient light dark cycle.
Very few of us do that because of these things
that we call artificial lights
and this other thing that we call life demands.
So today we're going to talk about
when we get pulled away from that rhythm.
So what is the perfect day?
What does that look like
from a circadian sleep wakefulness standpoint?
You basically want to get as much light,
ideally sunlight, but as much light into your eyes
during the period of each 24 hour cycle
when you want to be awake, when you want to be alert.
And you want to get as little light into your eyes
at the times of that 24 hour cycle
when you want to be asleep or drowsy and falling asleep.
How much is enough?
Well, a good number to shoot for as a rule of thumb
is to try and get exposure to at least 100,000 lux
before 9 a.m., 10 a.m. maybe, but before 9 a.m.,
assuming you're waking up sometime between five and 8 a.m.
The mechanism of circadian clock setting
involves these neurons in your eye
that send electrical signals
to this clock above the roof of your mouth,
and that system sums, meaning it adds photons.
It's a very slow system.
So here we're talking about trying to get that
at least a hundred thousand photons, but not all at once.
So what do you do?
You go outside, going outside, even on a cloudy day,
could be 7,000, 10,000 lux.
It's really remarkable how bright it is,
meaning how much photon energy is coming through.
So try and get a hundred thousand lux before that 9 a.m.
Now, if you can't do that because you live
in an area of the world where it's just not bright enough.
Some people have sent me pictures from Northern England,
it's just not bright enough in winter.
Then sure, you can resort to using artificial lights
in order to get enough photons.
And I'm putting out this 100,000 lux number
as a target to get each day before 9 a.m.
You can in theory get it all from artificial lights,
but there are some special qualities about sunlight
that make sunlight the better stimulus.
Then I've recommended based on scientific literature
that you look at sunlight sometime around the time
when the sun is setting.
And the reason for that of course,
is because it adjusts down the sensitivity of your eyes,
because here's the diabolical thing.
While we need a lot of photon energy early in the day
to wake up our system and set our circadian clock
and prepare us for a good night's sleep
14 to 16 hours later,
it takes very little photon energy to reset
and shift our clock after 8 p.m.
And that's why you want to, as much as you safely can,
avoid bright light and even not so bright light
between the hours of 10 or 11 p.m. and 4 a.m.
So let's talk about shifting clocks
because for the jet lag person,
this ability to shift the clock
with light temperature exercise and food
is vitally important for getting onto the new local schedule.
And there's so much out there about jet lag.
Today, I'm going to dial it down
to one very specific parameter
that all of you can figure out
without any technology or devices
and can apply for when you travel for work or pleasure
or anytime you're jet lagged.
And I want to absolutely emphasize
that you don't have to travel to get jet lagged.
Many of you are jet lagged.
You're jet lagged because you're looking at your phone
in the middle of the night,
you're jet lagged because you're waking up
at different times a day,
you're jet lagged because your exercise is on a
chaotic regime some days at this time, some days at that time,
but there are some simple things that you can do.
So that's where we're headed.
I'd like to take a quick break
and acknowledge our sponsor, Aeropress.
Aeropress is personally my favorite way to brew coffee.
It's similar to a French press, but it's much better.
The Aeropress was designed in Palo Alto by Alan Adler,
a former teacher at Stanford in the engineering department.
Adler, who's a brilliant engineer and inventor,
developed a unique brewing process
that reduces the contact time
that the water has with the ground coffee,
leading to a rich full-bodied cup of coffee
without any acidity or bitterness every single time.
Best of all, the entire brewing process
takes less than one minute, and the cleanup is super easy.
Aeropress has just launched their new premium model
using the same patented design as the original model.
But this edition has a truly elevated look and feel.
It's handmade with double-walled glass
and stainless steel features.
It's incredibly well-built, it's super sturdy
and it looks like a work of art.
It's really nice.
I leave it out on the counter specifically for that reason.
I've been using my own Aeropress premium
for a few months now and I absolutely love it. With the counter specifically for that reason. I've been using my own Aeropress Premium for a few months now,
and I absolutely love it.
With the holidays coming up, I can't imagine a better gift
for any of the coffee lovers out there.
With over 55,000 five-star reviews,
Aeropress is the best reviewed coffee press in the world.
If you'd like to try Aeropress, you can go to aeropress.com slash Huberman.
That's A-E-R-O-P-R-E-S-S dot com slash Huberman
to get a free reusable metal filter with your Aeropress purchase. That's a-e-r-o-p-r-e-s-s.com slash Huberman
to get a free reusable metal filter
with your Aeropress purchase.
Aeropress ships to the USA, Canada,
and over 60 other countries around the world.
Again, that's aeropress.com slash Huberman.
Let's talk about what jet lag is.
There are quality peer-reviewed papers
showing that jet lag will shorten your life.
Jet lag is a serious thing.
Now, here's what's interesting.
Traveling westward on the globe is always easier
than traveling eastward, okay?
It's interesting because the effects of jet lag
on longevity have shown that traveling East
takes more years off your life than traveling West.
Now, here's what's interesting.
When we think about the effects of jet lag on longevity
or this idea that it can shorten our lives,
we have to ask ourselves why, why is that?
And it turns out there's a pretty simple explanation
for this.
We've talked before about the autonomic nervous system,
this set of neurons in our spinal cord and body and brain
that regulate our wakefulness and our sleepiness.
Turns out that human beings, and probably most species,
are better able to activate and stay alert
than they are to shut down their nervous system
and go to sleep on demand.
So if you really have to push
and you really have to stay awake, you can do it.
You can stay up later.
But falling asleep earlier is harder.
And that's why traveling East
has a number of different features associated with it
that because you're traveling East,
you're trying to go to bed earlier.
As a Californian, if I go to New York City,
I've got to get to bed three hours early
and wake up three hours earlier,
much harder than coming back to California
and just staying up a few more hours.
And this probably has roots in evolutionary adaptation
under conditions where we need to suddenly gather up and go
or forage for food or fight
or do any number of different things
that we can push ourselves through the release of adrenaline
and epinephrine to stay awake,
whereas being able to slow down and deliberately fall asleep
is actually much harder to do.
So there's an asymmetry to our autonomic nervous system
that plays out in the asymmetry of jet lag.
All right, well, let's think about travel and what happens.
Let's say you're not going eastward or westward,
but you're going north or south.
So if you go from, for instance,
Washington, DC to Santiago, Chile,
you're just going north and south.
You're not really moving into a different time zone.
You're not shifting.
So you will experience travel fatigue.
And it turns out that jet lag has two elements,
travel fatigue and time zone jet lag.
Time zone jet lag is simply the inability
of local sunlight and local darkness
to match to your internal rhythm,
this endogenous rhythm that you have.
So before we get too complicated
and too down in the weeds about this,
I want to just throw out a couple of important things.
First of all, some people suffer from jet lag a lot,
other people not so much.
Most people experience worse jet lag as they get older.
There are reasons for that because early in life,
patterns of melatonin release are very stable and flat
and very high actually in children.
Then it becomes cyclic during puberty,
meaning it comes on once every 24 hours
and turns off once every 24 hours.
And then as we get older, the cycles get more disrupted
and we become more vulnerable to even small changes
in schedule, et cetera,
meal times, right?
So jet lag gets worse as we age.
I want to make changing your internal rhythm really easy,
or at least as easy and as simple
as one could possibly make it, I believe.
What I want to talk about is perhaps
one of the most important things to know
about your body and brain,
which is called your temperature minimum.
Your temperature minimum is the point in every 24 hour cycle
when your temperature is lowest.
Now, how do you measure that without a thermometer?
It tends to fall 90 minutes to two hours
before your average waking time.
Temperature actually is the signal by which
this clock above the roof of your mouth entrains or collectively
pushes all the cells and tissues of our body
to be on the same schedule.
Temperature is the effector.
And once you hear that, there should be an immediate,
oh, of course, because how else would you get
all these different diverse cell types
to follow one pattern, right?
A pancreatic cell does something very different than a,
you know, a spleen cell or a neuron, right?
They're all doing different things at different rates.
So the temperature signal can go out
and then each one of those can interpret
the temperature signal as one unified
and consistent theme of their environment.
Here's the deal.
If you expose your eyes to bright light
in the four hours after your temperature minimum,
your circadian clock will shift
so that you will tend to get up earlier
and go to sleep earlier in the subsequent days.
Okay, so it's called a phase advance
if you'd like to read up on this further.
You advance your clock.
However, if you view bright light
in the four to six hours before your temperature minimum,
you will tend to phase delay your clock.
You will tend to wake up later and go to sleep later.
I tend to wake up at about 6 a.m.,
sometimes 6.30, sometimes 7.
It depends a lot on what I was doing the night before,
as I'm guessing it does for you.
But that means that my temperature minimum
is probably somewhere right around 4.30 a.m.,
which means that if I wake up at 4.30 a.m.
and I were to view bright light at 435 AM,
I'm going to advance my clock.
I'm going to want to go to bed earlier the subsequent night
and wake up earlier the subsequent morning.
And as I shift my wake up time,
my temperature minimum shifts too, right?
If I were to view bright light in the four to six hours
before 430 AM., guess what?
The next night I'm going to want to stay up later
and I'm going to want to wake up later
the subsequent morning.
Your temperature minimum is a reference point,
not a temperature reading.
Again, if you want to measure your temperature minimum
and figure out what it is, 98 point whatever,
a 96 point whatever, that's fine.
You can do that, but that information won't help you.
What you need to know is what time
your body temperature is lowest
and understand that in the four hours or so
just after that time,
viewing light will advance your clock
to make you want to get up earlier.
So now you can start to see and understand
the logic of this system.
You can now start to shift that temperature
according to your travel needs.
Here's one way in which you might do that.
Let's say I am going to travel to Europe,
which is nine hours ahead, typically, from California.
I would want to determine my temperature minimum,
which for me is about 4.30 a.m., maybe 5 a.m.,
and I would want to start getting up at about 5.30 AM
and getting some bright light exposure,
presumably from artificial sources,
because the sunlight isn't going to be out at that time.
Maybe even exercising as well,
maybe even eating a meal at that time.
You would want to start doing that
two or three days before travel.
Because once you land in, or I land in Europe,
chances are just viewing the sunrise or sunset in Europe
is not going to allow me to shift my circadian clock.
Some people say get sunlight in your eyes when you land,
but that's not going to work.
Because one of two things is likely to happen.
With a nine hour shift like that,
either I'm going to view sunlight
at a time that corresponds to the circadian dead zone,
the time in which my circadian clock can't be shifted,
or I'm going to end up viewing sunlight at a time
that corresponds to the four to six hour window
before my temperature minimum.
So it's going to shift me in exactly the opposite direction
that I want to go. So it's going to shift me in exactly the opposite direction that I want to go.
So it can be very, very challenging
for people to adjust to jet lag.
So you need to ask, am I traveling East
or am I traveling West?
Am I trying to advance my clock or delay my clock?
Remember, viewing light, exercise and eating
in the four to six hours before your temperature minimum
will delay your clock.
Eating, viewing sunlight
and exercising.
You don't have to do all three,
but some combination of those in the four to six hours
after your temperature minimum will advance your clock.
And this is a powerful mechanism
by which you can shift your clock anywhere
from one to three hours per day, which is remarkable.
That means your temperature minimum is going to shift out
as much as three hours,
which can make it such that you can travel
all the way to Europe.
And as long as you've prepared for a day or so
by doing what I described back home,
and then doing it when you arrive,
you can potentially accomplish the entire shift
within anywhere from 24 to 36 hours.
And so a lot of people are landing in Europe,
getting sunlight in their eyes
and throwing their clock out of whack
or not shifting their clock at all.
This brings me to the other thing
that's highly recommended.
And I've mentioned this before,
but you want to eat on the local meal schedule.
If it's in your practice to fast, fast, that's fine.
But when you eat, you want to eat within
the local schedule for alertness.
I'd like to take a quick break
and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1.
By now, many of you have heard me say
that if I could take just one supplement,
that supplement would be AG1.
The reason for that is AG1 is the highest quality
and most complete of the foundational
nutritional supplements available. What that means is that it contains not highest quality and most complete of the foundational nutritional supplements available.
What that means is that it contains
not just vitamins and minerals,
but also probiotics, prebiotics, and adaptogens
to cover any gaps you may have in your diet
and provide support for a demanding life.
For me, even if I eat mostly whole foods
and minimally processed foods,
which I do for most of my food intake,
it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits
and vegetables, vitamins and minerals, micronutrients and adaptogens from food alone.
For that reason, I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012. When I do that, it clearly bolsters
my energy, my immune system and my gut microbiome. These are all critical to brain function, mood,
physical performance and much more. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com
to claim their special offer. Right now, they're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2.
Again that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim that special offer.
Okay.
I talked about traveling eastward, but we haven't talked about traveling westward.
Let's say you're traveling from New York to California
or from Europe to California.
The challenge there tends to be,
how can you stay up late enough?
Now, some people are able to do this
because as I mentioned earlier,
the autonomic nervous system is asymmetrically wired
such that it's easier to stay up late later
than we would naturally want to
than it is to go to sleep earlier.
So let's say you land and it's 4 p.m. and you're just dying.
You're in California, you came from Europe, it's 4 p.m.
and you really, really want to go to sleep.
That's where the use of things like caffeine, exercise
and sunlight can shift you, right?
If it's after your temperature peak,
then viewing sunlight around 6 p.m. or 8 p.m.
or artificial light, if there's in sunlight,
will help shift you later, right?
It's going to delay your clock
and you're going to be able to stay up later.
The worst thing you can do is take a nap
that was intended to last 20 minutes or an hour.
I do this routinely and then wake up four hours later
or you wake up and it's midnight
and you can't fall back asleep.
You really want to avoid doing that.
So provided it's not excessive amounts,
stimulants like caffeine and coffee or tea
can really help you push past that afternoon barrier
and get you to sleep more like on the local schedule
and eating on the local schedule as well.
A number of people have asked about the use of melatonin
to induce sleepiness.
Melatonin is this hormone that's released
from the pineal gland.
Melatonin induces sleepiness.
Melatonin during development is also responsible
for timing the secretion of certain hormones
that are vitally important for puberty.
Does melatonin control the onset of puberty?
Not directly, but indirectly.
Melatonin inhibits something called
gonadotropin-releasing hormone,
which is a hormone that's released from your hypothalamus,
also roughly above the roof of your mouth and your brain.
Gonadotropin-releasing hormone is really interesting
because it stimulates the release of another hormone
called luteinizing hormone,
which in females causes estrogen to be released
within the ovaries, it's involved in reproductive cycles,
and in males stimulates testosterone
from the sertoli cells of the testes.
Melatonin is inhibitory to GNRH,
gonadotropin-releasing hormone,
and therefore is inhibitory to LH, luteinizing hormone, and therefore is inhibitory to GNRH, gonadotropin-releasing hormone, and therefore is inhibitory to LH, luteinizing hormone,
and therefore is inhibitory to testosterone and estrogen.
Just know two ways about it.
So melatonin is used widely for inducing sleepiness
when you want to fall asleep
in the new location that you've arrived.
Right, you can't fall asleep,
you take melatonin, it helps you fall asleep.
It does not help you stay asleep.
In addition to that, melatonin has you fall asleep. It does not help you stay asleep. In addition to that,
melatonin has been kind of touted
as the best way to shift your circadian clock.
I'm happy to go on record saying,
look, if you need melatonin,
you can work with a doctor
or somebody who really understands circadian
and sleep biology, go for it if that's your thing.
But I, as always on this podcast and elsewhere,
I have a bias toward behavioral things
that you can titrate and control,
like exposure to light, exercise, temperature, et cetera,
that have much bigger margins for safety
and certainly don't have these other endocrine effects
that we've been thinking about and talking about.
So if you want to take melatonin in the afternoon
in order to fall asleep or in the evening, be my guest.
That's up to you.
Again, you're responsible for your health, not me.
But for many people, melatonin is not going to be
the best solution.
The best solution is going to be to use light
and temperature and exercise on either side
of the temperature minimum to shift your clock,
both before your trip and when you land
in your new location and your clock starts to shift.
Okay, so now you know my opinions about melatonin,
feel free to filter them through your own opinions
and experiences with melatonin.
And now you also understand what your temperature minimum is
and how it represents an important landmark,
either side of which you can use light temperature
and exercise to shift your clock.
Just to remind you a little bit about temperature,
if you want to shift your clock,
you can take a hot shower
and then that will have a cooling effect
after the hot shower.
And if you were to get into a cold shower or an ice bath,
if you have access to one,
afterward there's going to be a thermogenic effect
of your body increasing temperature.
So you can start to play these games with timing
and hot and cold, with meals, whether or not you eat
or you don't eat, and with light exposure,
whether or not you view light or you don't view light.
So now you can start to see why understanding
the core mechanics of a system can really give you
the most flexibility.
And that really underscores the most important thing
is that when you understand mechanism,
it's not about being neurotically attached
to a specific protocol, it's the opposite.
It can give you great confidence and flexibility
in being able to shift your body rhythms however you want.
And when things get out of whack,
you can tuck them right back into place.
One thing that's common is that people need
to do a quick trip.
It's not always that you're going to go to, you know,
on vacation for two weeks or, you know,
work someplace else for weeks on end.
If your trip is 48 hours or less,
stay on your home schedule.
72, that's when you start running into trouble.
The transit time is also important,
but I would say if it's three days or less,
stay on your home schedule as much as you can.
I'd like to take a quick break
and thank one of our sponsors, Roka.
I'm excited to share that Roka and I have teamed up
to create a new style of red lens glasses.
These red lens glasses are meant to be worn in the evening
after the sun goes down.
They filter out short wavelength light
that comes from screens and from LED lights.
The sorts of LED lights that are most commonly used
as overhead and frankly, lamp lighting nowadays.
I want to emphasize Roka Red Lens glasses
are not traditional blue blockers.
They're not designed to be worn during the day
and to filter out blue light from screen light.
They're designed to prevent the full range of wavelengths
that suppress melatonin secretion at night
and that can alter your sleep.
So by wearing Roka Red Lens glasses,
they help you calm down and they improve your transition to sleep. Now I put wearing Roka Red Lens glasses, they help you calm down
and they improve your transition to sleep.
Now I put my Roka Red Lens glasses on
as soon as it gets dark outside
and I've noticed a much easier transition to sleep,
which makes sense based on everything we know
about how filtering out short wavelengths of light
can allow your brain to function correctly.
If you'd like to try Roka, go to roka.com,
that's R-O-K-A.com and enter the code Huberman
to save 20% off your first order.
Again, that's R-O-K-A.com
and enter the code Huberman at checkout.
So let's talk a little bit about a different form
of jet lag that requires no planes, no trains,
no automobiles, and that's shift work.
Shift work is becoming increasingly common.
Many of us are shift working even though we don't have to.
We're doing work in the middle of the night,
we are working on our computers at odd hours,
sleeping during the day.
Here's the deal with shift work.
If there's one rule of thumb for shift work,
it's that if at all possible,
you want to stay on the same schedule
for at least 14 days, including weekends.
Now that should immediately cue the non-shift workers
to the importance of not getting too far off track
on the weekend, even if you're not a shift worker.
So sleeping in on Sunday is not a good idea.
The most important thing about shift work
is to stay consistent with your schedule.
If you're going to work a shift where,
let's say you start at 4 p.m. and you end at 2 a.m.,
excuse me, then there's some important questions that arise.
For instance, should you see light during your shift?
Well, this is a matter of personal choice,
but ideally you want to view as much light as possible
and as safely possible when you need to be alert.
So that would mean from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m.
And then you would want to sleep.
So using light as a correlate of alertness
and using darkness as a correlate of sleepiness,
what this means is see as much light as you safely can
during the phase of your day when you want to be awake.
So let's say you go to sleep at,
you get home after this 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift,
you maybe eat something, you go to sleep,
and you wake up and it's noon or 1 p.m.
Should you get light in your eyes?
You guessed it.
You need to know your temperature minimum.
You need to know whether or not
your temperature is increasing or decreasing.
And now we can make this whole thing even simpler
and just say, if your temperature is decreasing,
avoid light.
If your temperature is increasing, get light. If your temperature is increasing, get light.
It's that simple.
I'm going to pause there,
and then I want to talk about kids and the elderly.
In other words, how do we control sleep and circadian rhythms
and wakefulness in babies, adolescents, teens, and aged folks?
All right, as I mentioned earlier, melatonin is not cyclic, it's not cycling in babies.
It's more phasic.
It's being released at a kind of a constant level.
And babies tend to be smaller than adults they are.
And so those concentrations of melatonin are very high.
As a baby grows,
those concentrations per unit volume are going to go down.
Babies are not born with a typical sleep wake cycle.
And now all the parents saying,
tell me something I didn't know.
Perhaps the most important thing
if you're having to map to a baby's schedule
in order to make sure that they're getting changings
and nursing, et cetera, at the appropriate times
is to try and maintain
if you can't sleep or you can't sleep continuously,
to try and maintain your autonomic nervous system
in a place where you're not going into heightened states
of alertness when you would ideally be sleeping.
Now, I realized that this could be translated
to try and stay calm while you're sleep deprived,
which is very hard for people to do,
but this is where the non-sleep deep rest protocol
surface again and can potentially be very beneficial
for people to be able to recover, not necessarily sleep,
but for them to maintain a certain amount
of autonomic regulation.
Last night, I woke up, I went to bed about 10.30,
I woke up at three in the morning,
I knew I wasn't feeling rested,
I did a NSDR protocol, I fell back asleep,
I woke up at 6.30.
You need to teach your brain and your nervous system
how to turn off your thoughts and go to sleep.
And ideally you do that without medication
unless there's a real need,
you do that through these behavioral protocols.
They work because they involve using the body
to shift the mind,
not trying to just turn off your thoughts
in the middle of the night.
Similar circumstances can arise
if you're taking care of a very sick loved one,
you're up all night,
try and stay calm using NSDR protocols.
I know it's harder to do than to say,
but those protocols are there, they're free.
There's research to support them.
Try and get sleep whenever you can,
but also try to get morning sunlight
and evening sunlight in your eyes if you can.
And if you can't get that, use artificial light, okay?
Once again, I've thrown a tremendous amount
of information at you.
I hope you will figure out your temperature minimum
and start working with that to access the sleep
and wakeful cycles that you want to access.
I hope that you'll explore NSDR.
You have now access to a lot of mechanism
about sleep and wakefulness.
I really believe that as we drill deeper and deeper
into these mechanisms and you start hearing some
of the same themes again and again,
you're going to start to develop an intuition and an understanding
of how these systems work in you
and your particular life circumstances.
So know your temperature minimum,
understand light in the early part of the day is valuable.
Light when you want to be awake,
provided it's not so bright, it's damaging,
it's great for you whether or not it comes
from screens or sunlight, but sunlight's better.
Avoid light in the four to six hours
before your temperature minimum
or else you're going to delay your clock,
unless you're traveling and that's what you want to do.
Okay, use temperature,
increase temperature to shift your clock,
decrease temperature to delay your clock.
Thanks so much for your time and attention.
I really appreciate it.
See you next time on the Huberman Lab Podcast.
And as always, thanks for your interest in science.