Huberman Lab - LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

Recently I had the pleasure of hosting a live event in Brisbane, Australia. This event was part of a lecture series called The Brain Body Contract. My favorite part of the evening was the question and answer period, where I had the opportunity to answer questions from the attendees of each event. Included here is the Q&A from our event at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre. Sign up to get notified about future events: https://www.hubermanlab.com/events Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman Resources Mentioned Huberman Lab Non-Sleep Deep Rest Protocols Huberman Lab Guest Series with Dr. Matt Walker Huberman Lab Guest Series with Dr. Paul Conti Huberman Lab Guest Series with Dr. Andy Galpin Dr. Becky Kennedy: Protocols for Excellent Parenting & Improving Relationships of All Kinds Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 00:31 Sponsors: AG1 & Eight Sleep 03:48 Nicotine Discussion 07:42 ADHD Management: Tools & Medications 12:43 Sleep Deprivation & Recovery 18:54 Understanding & Addressing Burnout 22:12 Daily Nutrition & Eating Habits 24:40 Understanding Food & Neural Pathways 26:21 The Benefits of Elimination Diets 27:21 Intermittent Fasting & Personal Diet Choices 28:23 Top Health & Fitness Recommendations 30:50 The Value of Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR) 33:08 Testosterone Replacement Therapy Insights 38:02 Breathing Techniques for Stress & Focus 41:46 Morning Sunlight & Circadian Rhythms 43:18 Parenting Tips for a Healthy Start 49:03 Final Thoughts & Gratitude Disclaimer

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Recently, the Huberman Lab Podcast hosted a live event at the Great Hall in Brisbane, Australia.

The event was called the Brain-Body Contract and featured a lecture, followed by a question and answer session with the audience. We wanted to make the question and answer session available to everyone, regardless if you could attend. I also would like to thank the sponsors for the event. They are 8Sleep and AG1. 8Sleep makes smart mattress covers

with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep is the critical foundation for mental health, physical health, and performance. Now one of the key things to getting the best possible night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually needs to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and alert, your body temperature actually

has to increase by about one to three degrees. Eight Sleep mattress covers make it extremely easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment and thereby to control your core body temperature so that you fall and stay deeply asleep and wake up feeling your absolute best. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for about three years now, and it has completely transformed the quality of my sleep for the better. Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of pod cover, the Pod 4 Ultra. The Pod 4 cover has improved cooling and heating capacity, higher fidelity sleep tracking technology, and the Pod 4 cover has snoring detection

that will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve airflow and stop your snoring. If you'd like to try an Eight Sleep mattress cover, you can go to eightsleep.com slash Huberman to save $350 off their Pod 4 Ultra. Eightsleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Huberman. The other live event sponsor, AG1, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens and other critical micronutrients.

I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012. So I'm delighted that they decided to sponsor the live event. I started taking AG1 and I still take AG1 once or twice a day because it gives me vitamins and minerals that I might not be getting enough of from whole foods that I eat, as well as adaptogens and micronutrients. And those adaptogens and micronutrients are really critical

because even though I strive to eat most of my foods from unprocessed or minimally processed whole foods, it's often hard to do so, especially when I'm traveling and especially when I'm busy. So by drinking a packet of AG1 in the morning, and oftentimes also again in the afternoon or evening, I'm ensuring that I'm getting everything I need. I'm covering all of my foundational nutritional needs.

And I, like so many other people that take AG1 regularly, just report feeling better. And that shouldn't be surprising because it supports gut health. And of course, gut health supports immune system health and brain health. And it's supporting a ton of different cellular and organ processes that all interact with one another.

So while certain supplements are really directed towards one specific outcome, like sleeping better or being more alert, AG1 really is foundational nutritional support. It's really designed to support all of the systems of your brain and body that relate to mental health and physical health. If you'd like to try AG1,

you can go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs with your order, plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman. And now for the live event at the Great Hall in Brisbane, Australia. What are my thoughts on nicotine? Nicotine causes cancer when it's consumed in the form of smoking, vaping, dipping, or snuffing, so don't do that.

There's a debate now about vaping. Is it bad? Is it good? It's bad. It is. Is it worse for Is it good? It's bad. It is. Is it worse for you than smoking? Probably not. Is it better? Probably, slightly. You know what's better? Just not doing it. But if you need to do it and you have to pick, you know, I suppose, you know, I'm not gonna tell you what to do, but I think that vaping has allowed a good number of people to smoke less.

I'll acknowledge that. And it's also clear it's not good for you. So if you're going to do something that's bad for you, do a bunch of things to offset the thing that's bad for you. That's always my advice. But now in terms of nicotine itself, nicotine doesn't cause cancer. The mode of consumption causes cancer. That's important. Nicotine binds to so-called nicotinic acetylcholine

receptors. So these exist naturally in your body and on your muscles. They're the way that actually your nerves control contraction of your muscles. So the consumption of nicotine, let's just say, I don't know about down here, but in Europe it's becoming fairly common. And in the Middle East, also for people

to take little pouches of nicotine can be absorbed sublingually or through the gum. Gets into the bloodstream. And it is truly a cognitive enhancer. It's a cognitive enhancer, not gonna lie to you. It will raise attention, focus, cognitive performance. This is well established. The problem is it also raises blood pressure

and causes vasoconstriction. This is well established. So, you have to ask yourself, is it worth it? Do I do it sometimes? Do I do it often? Do I choose to not do it at all? I don't think the young brain should be consuming nicotine even in these non-cancer-causing forms like pouches for a variety of reasons, but mostly because the brain is so plastic

at a young age anyway. But actually I'm familiar with the use of nicotine for offsetting certain neurologic diseases. When I was visiting Columbia Medical University in New York City some years ago, I was in the office of a Nobel Prize winner. Won't tell you who it was necessarily and he proceeded to consume no fewer than six pieces of Nicorette gum in our half-hour meeting. I was like whoa. At the time he was in his late 70s he's now in his 80s and I was like hey listen

what's the deal with the nicotine and he said oh well it offsets Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. I said really? He said yeah you can increase cognitive function I used to smoke but I want to get cancer so I just chew a lot and a lot of NicRat. I said, okay, really? He said, yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of NicRat. It can increase the amount of acetylcholine activation through the binding of these nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, might even maintain some dopaminergic neurons, which are the neurons

that one tends to lose with age and is rampant in diseases like Parkinson's, I thought, whoa, okay, so there's something there. The fact of the matter is that nicotine can enhance focus, alertness, and learning, but it does have those other issues. So you want to be considerate of those other other issues and not become dependent on it. My experience is that people who taste the nicotine focus from a Zin patch are those people who are buying those things pretty regularly. I know somebody that went from one Zin patch twice a week to a canister a morning in about a month because the effect will wear off if you keep consuming it every day.

You have to consume more and more. So take that into consideration. Probably best to avoid unless you really need the boost and you can afford the increase in blood pressure. That would be my suggestion. I've never taken nicotine and I don't smoke. What's the best you can do for managing ADHD if not taking medication? Okay, so we did two episodes of the Huber can do for managing ADHD if not taking medication?

Okay, so we did two episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast on ADHD. The first was on behavioral, nutritional, and supplement-based tools. Fifty percent of the comments were like, thank you so much. This is very helpful. Can't wait to try some of this stuff. The other were like, you're evil. You are trying to persuade people to not take pharmaceuticals, which is not true. I'm interested in all of it.

I just covered that stuff in the first episode. And then the second one we did on ADHD was about things like Vyvanse, Adderall, Ritalin, et cetera, most of which, by the way, are amphetamines. Are we putting our kids on speed? Yes. Yeah, they're amphetamines. But I don't think that we should walk away from those things in every case.

They do have real clinical value in many cases. And their clinical value comes from the fact that one, not all, but one of the major effects of amphetamines is that it can increase dopaminergic and noragenergic, meaning dopamine and norepinephrine release in the brain, which can increase attention and focus, which is actually beneficial in some cases for the brain to learn to focus,

to get neuroplasticity of those very circuits. So it's a consideration, then 50% of the comments of that second episode were why don't you talk about the behavioral tools, the supplement-based tools, and the nutrition tools, and everyone else said thank you for talking about the prescription drugs. So the point being several-fold. One is that certainly a combination of behavioral,

nutritional, supplement-based, and prescription tools is viable for most every situation, and it's worth thinking about all of those when considering a treatment for ADHD. And I think we really need to get out of these silos of thinking, you know, like big pharma is evil. Listen, there are drugs that can help people. Is it evil?

I don't know. Is it going away? No. Okay, is there value there? Sometimes. Is it over prescribed? Sometimes. Okay, is there value there? Sometimes. Is it over prescribed? Sometimes. What about nutritional tools?

Well, in some cases it can really help. In other cases, one still needs prescription drug tools. In some cases, doing behavioral, nutritional, or supplement-based tools can allow one to take lower doses of pharmaceuticals, if that's your goal. I think it really needs to be tailored to the individual. What I would like to see is more of a tailoring

to the individual than the simple write a script, send people off, or tell people that it's all bad if it comes out of a prescription drug label format. Now it is very clear that the original dosing schedule for things like Adderall VVive-Ants, et cetera, was during the weekdays but not the weekends, that somehow has moved to no weekends off. So there's been a lot of changing in the dosing schedules. And the way these drugs are taken, are we creating a dependency on these drugs is always

a big question. And the answer seems to be a sort of. Very few people for whom these drugs work decide to come off them. There's nothing magical about turning 25, after which you don't need these enhancements, but sometimes people don't need them or need as much of them,

because the neural circuits can be built up. One thing that I would like to see more of is attention to the behavioral tools for ADHD, not the least of which is what's being carried out in many schools and clinics in China where people are being encouraged, children are being encouraged to teach themselves how to maintain visual focus on a target some distance away from them, which then allows them to maintain cognitive focus when they move to their work. The relationship between visual focus, as we've talked about a bunch of times tonight,

in the case of the cuttlefish, et cetera, and cognitive focus is an intimate one, such that if you expect yourself to focus, you can't really expect yourself to drop into focus as an immediate state, so it's not a square wave function. You don't just sit down and drop into a state of focus. We're so attracted to these notions of focus and we have these concepts like flow.

And by the way, I'm not disparaging those concepts. I know Steven Kotler, I have respect for him in his books about flow. But from a neuropsychiatric, neuropsychological standpoint, what we can really say about flow is that backwards spells wolf. We don't really know that much about it. And so I think that if you expect yourself to focus, you need to give yourself some warmup

time to focus. Don't assume that you have attention issues if you sit down and it takes five or ten minutes to drop into a state of focus, just like you wouldn't expect yourself to go out for a hard run without some sort of warmup jog beforehand. So the behavioral tools such as focusing on a visual target are underexplored, at least in most countries, but in China and elsewhere they are being explored pretty extensively. So I would encourage a full exploration of all the tools.

In this case it says not taking medication, then obviously heavier reliance on the behavioral tools is going to be helpful. While I'm getting more sleep now, I neglected sleep for many years. Me too. And at least 15 years of getting just five or so. Am I doomed or can I offset this past damage? You can offset the past damage.

One of the things that's really wonderful about the brain and body is that it can compensate. You know, there's certain things that I get asked a lot. I don't know why I get this question a lot, but people say, you know, I smoked meth for years and then, can I get my neurons back? And I'm like, well, you know, it's neurotoxic, but the fact that you're asking the question is reassuring, you know, so don't start. But if you did, you know, I mean, you can always do better than you're doing and you certainly can do better than you did in your past or at least that's what they tell me. So really when it comes to sleep

deprivation you know I spent many all-nighters I wouldn't talk about sleep so much if I didn't have challenges with sleep I mean for a long time I slept like a bulldog I sleep anywhere anytime. By the. By the way, folks, if you ever walk down the street and you see a bulldog and you stop, you'll notice they always stop. They always seem so friendly, they always stop. They always stop and they look up at you and you pet them and you're like,

the reason they seem to like you so much is because they love to stop. I own one, they're all about the stopping. It's not you,'re all about the stopping. It's all it's not you. It's about the stopping. Anyway, the the goal is not necessarily to sleep as much as a bulldog. Actually, it's the only animal, so you can't help myself, it's the only animal for which there's a genetically induced apnea. Their brachycephalocrin, which means they have a short snout, they have all those folds.

You know why the folds are there? The folds are there because they have a genetic mutation, they bread out the pain receptors in the face because they used to have them, they would bull bait, they'd bite on the face of the bull, they'd kill all the pain, they bread out the pain receptors, give them a floppy face, short snout. Hrrr, hrrr, hrrr.

English Bulldog, thank you for the specificity a biologist loves the specificity the Frenchies are pretty cool the Frenchies are pretty cool they have a little more kick in them right the Bulldogs a little less and Costello was a Bulldog Mastiff so he was more or less like a sea turtle you know just slow movement stopping and he's going forward and you can move aside or, in fact, Costello was so mellow that when he would lie down on the floor, I had one of those, you know, kind of robot vacuums things we called a Roomba in our country, it would come up to his face and he would just, and it would bounce off his nose and he wouldn't even take the opportunity to blink. The bulldog is

sort of the essence of economy of effort and actually if you look at people people resemble different dog breeds. I spent a lot of time thinking about this. Some dogs and some people have a bit more kind of reverberation in them. They've got a higher RPM all the time, all the time, all the time, and then they're the Bulldogs, right? Rick Rubin, right? They're these people that are just more still, and we look at these people that are more still and think, well, it probably isn't that much going on in there, but now we know from the Rick thing and the Carl thing that they're

thinking a lot. But in the case of Costello, they don't get much done. You know, maybe Costello wanted to get things done, but if he woke up on New Year's Day and said, all right, 50 rabbits this year, he never actually achieved that. But listen, the point is some of us sleep like bulldogs. Some of us tend to go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night. I'm one of those people. Go to sleep four hours, wake up. I hate it. But I figured out that non-sleep deep breaths or yoga nidra has taught me how to fall back asleep really quickly and I can recover some sleep by having gotten through non-sleep deep breaths. Some people are waking up in the middle of the night because they don't

have their sleep timing right. We have a series on sleep coming out soon with the great Matt Walker. We recorded a six episode series with Matt and he talks about something I take no credit for this. This is Matt's acronym QQRT, quality, quantity, regularity, and timing. You want to pay attention to the amount of sleep. Some people need six, some people need eight.

If you only got seven for years and you're reading that you need eight or else you'll get dementia, please don't worry about it. It is simply not the case. Some people need six, some people need eight. If you only got seven for years and you're reading that you need eight or else you'll get dementia, please don't worry about it. It is simply not the case. Some people need less, some people need more. This varies across the lifespan. Then there's the quality.

How much of that sleep is continuous? Did you drink caffeine in the afternoon or alcohol in the evening, in which case the quality will be diminished. The regularity is very interesting. Going to sleep more or less, five nights a week at least, going to sleep more or less at the same time every night, plus or minus an hour. It's fine on the weekends. I'm not just saying that so you don't all leave at once or a third of you leave. Some people do best by going to bed at

8 or 9 p.m. and waking up at 3 or 4 in the morning and that's where you would feel best. In fact if you're somebody that wakes up at 3 or 4 in the morning you might be going to sleep too late and you have this intrinsic chronotype, as it's called, and you can shift your clock a bit later. But most people wanna go to bed sometime between 10 p.m. and midnight, wake up sometime between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m.,

and there's great variation there too. But, you know, QQRT. So think about the quality, the quantity, the regularity, and the timing. Once you dial those in, everything is much, much better. So much so that even if you're not getting enough sleep, as long as you're going to bed at more or less the same time each night, you'll fare better. So if you didn't do any of this stuff for years, like I didn't when I was in graduate school, et cetera, don't despair, don't despair.

It's very clear that the brain can recover and I wouldn't waste a single moment thinking about what you didn't do. Also, my time machine's broken, your time machine's broken. I realize that doesn't create a lot of comfort, but it's unlikely that you did substantial damage. Unlikely you did substantial damage unless you did that your whole life

and we're talking about a conversation that's happening lately in life, but even then, more sleep would be better. Do you believe in burnout? If so, what would be a recommendation protocol to relinquish burnout once it's already occurred? This is a very interesting question. We don't quite know what burnout is,

and it can come from a combination of things. And typically burnout comes not during the stress period, but several months afterwards. You know, the adrenals, you know, these two little nuggets above our kidneys and our lower back, are capable of driving so much neural energy in us that we can do all sorts of things for a very long time, even in the absence of food, as long as we have water and salt. You know, the adrenals, because they kick out adrenaline and cortisol, and by the way are involved in salt appetite,

there's a reason for that, because you need that. The adrenals can keep us going and there is no such thing as true adrenal burnout because the adrenals don't burn out you've got enough adrenaline in your adrenals for two lifetimes but there is an adrenal insufficiency syndrome so that's a real thing it's rare but it exists but burnout seems to be in in my mind, more related to psychological burnout. And I'm not a psychologist, but I'm a fan of the poet David White,

and he has this beautiful poem that is either entitled or somehow includes the word wholeheartedness. I think that where we recover ourselves is by relating to and engaging with things and people that we wholeheartedly enjoy even if that is simply relaxation or gardening or drawing or maybe just doing nothing for a bit. I think burnout is very real and I think burnout as pushed through the filter of what we've been talking about earlier in the evening is when we are not getting periodic experiences,

if you will, of delight or excitement or a sense of meaning. And here we're starting to drift into kind of abstract. Not everyone gets to do a job that they delight in. Certainly there were years where I didn't delight in the sorts of things I had to do for certain jobs. But finding some areas of life that create those neural energy states that carry forward, that wick out into other aspects of what we're doing.

And I don't know if I made this point clear enough earlier, but those moments of really feeling excited about something in a way that really lights you up in particular are not just about that moment and seeking out more of those moments, but in the way that really lights you up in particular are not just about that moment and seeking out more of those moments but in the way that it lifts our nervous system the way it carries us forward and allows us to do the other things that we have to do which frankly sometimes can be not as exciting or even drudgery so if you've burnt out I know the feeling. I have burnt out before. And I encourage a combination of rest,

but also exploration of things that can evoke that kind of internal excitement or sense of meaning. And one has to be a bit of a forager in order to do that, try new things, and that can be difficult. But burnout is real, and I encourage you to take it seriously, because unfortunately, typically. But burnout is real, and I encourage you to take it seriously because unfortunately, typically what follows burnout is depression, and then things can really run ashore.

What types of food do you try to eat every day and why? Oh, I love to eat. I do, I love to eat. I even like the mere act of chewing so much. So, it just, yeah. That's why I buy those Persian cucumbers. You just munch on those things all the time. I tend to eat according to how alert or asleep I want to be.

It violates a few kind of popular thoughts about nutrition, but that's what I do. Generally for me, I like water, caffeine, and early in the day, and then eat sometime around 11 or noon, I'm not really strict about these things. If I'm hungry, I'll have a plate of eggs in the morning or something, or a handful of macadamias. By the way, the macadamias down in Australia are awesome.

They're so good. In the States, they like confuse them with all these palm kernel oils and stuff, and so when I first tasted the ones and they always taste good but they're I'm not like gonna get into the seed oil debate. I think of better ways to hang myself like with this microphone cord it's less like you know I don't I guess I do sort of avoid the seed oils but you know I feel best I love them oh the macadamias see told you always find my way, the macadamias. See, told you, always find my way back. The macadamias down here taste as if they've been infused with all sorts of stuff, but then you look at the

packaging and it's just like macadamias and salt. I don't know what is so good. The coffee down here is amazing. I don't know why it tastes so good. So good. The produce. I mean, basically I eat like you guys. Gals. That's what I do. That's what I do. I basically eat meat and eggs and fruit and vegetables. And I do like rice and oatmeal, and there are people on social media that tell you oatmeal's gonna kill you.

And I'm like, if oatmeal were gonna kill me, I'd be dead. I eat so much oatmeal, but that's not to say that some people feel better if they don't eat oatmeal. I kind of find the nutrition debates to be kind of funny. They're so non-scientific, they're funny. But I also know that, and here I have a theory, that when you eat most of your foods from unprocessed or minimally processed sources,

something magical happens. Not only are you, let's say, eating healthier foods, quote unquote, but we should define healthier. Foods for which their macronutrients, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, also in calories, tend to be matched pretty well with high micronutrient content, something that doesn't exist in highly processed foods, right? But probably also better for the planet, which is great. The planet's important. We want to keep that around.

But the other thing is that neurally when you eat foods as their main ingredients, which does not say you can't have a soup or a stew or a salad every once in a while, but closer to their original form, and I do cook my meat unlike other people on the internet. There's the guy eating chicken raw for like 28 days. I was in the barber shop the other day. They're like, what about the raw chicken guy?

And I was like, not a good idea. So when you eat foods in their kind of basic state, the brain can associate the taste with the macronutrient and amino acid content and micronutrient content. And we know that the gut is sensing a lot of that unconsciously. Subconsciously we know this through neural pathways. Beautiful work being done by people here in Australia and in the States and elsewhere. About the signaling for the gut is actually tasting the food or it's measuring the amount

of amino acids, fatty acids, et cetera. And so when you eat foods in their kind of more original form, non-processed or minimally processed, it's clear that the brain starts to develop a more specific intuition or appetite for what you need. You start to know, oh, like I need some fat, or I need some protein, or I'm craving.

You start to crave the things according to what's actually in them, and highly processed foods and rich combinations of foods don't allow you to do that. So, and that hasn't really been explored. There's a little bit of work that's coming out on this by Dana Small at Yale and Kevin Hall, elsewhere, you know, but it's sort of starting to get there. So this is why I believe when people go on these elimination diets where they say, like, I'm only eating meat, like the lion diet or whatever, like Costello, meat only. And many of those people, quote unquote, feel better,

I think, because they're starting to form a relationship with the nutrient content of the food, the caloric content, and the taste in a way that after that they see a cracker and they're like, no. You know, they can kind of reset the neural circuits around appetite and all of this stuff. But for me, because I'm an omnivore, like a normal person, and sorry, no disrespect to the carnivores,

I just kinda like the blood drinking, like liver chomping, like come on. Like the, I'm gonna catch a bullet, or like a, you know, someone's gonna throw a bone at me. So I fear them more than I fear the vegans. It'll just be like a bunch of you know, the vegans will attack you online but in person they'll just like hit you with a parsley. So it's not as you know, the um, I'm gonna get myself in trouble. I'm an omnivore like most people and the and so for me between 11 a.m. and 8 p.m.

is typically one eat but sometimes I eat at 9. I didn't eat before this because I don't like to eat right before I do this sort of thing so I'll eat a meal before I go to sleep tonight. I'm not super strict about this stuff. I'm not super super strict but in general it's some sort of intermittent-ish fasting thing and it tends to be meat and fish and eggs and a little Parmesan cheese and coffee and oranges and cucumbers and lettuce and and and food like food and pasta and and I I suppose that having done that for so many years I do you know adjust it like if I do a hard resistance training workout I'll eat a few more starchy carbohydrates to replenish glycogen but but I tend to

avoid extremes with all that stuff and I love a great slice of pizza and I've sort of lost my taste for sweets, but occasionally I'll do that and I love vegetables like croissants and things of that sort. But you know, all kidding aside, you know, I do try and eat pretty healthy every day. With a ton of info out there about health and wellness, Andrew, I love the way, Nikhil, what are your top health and fitness style recommendations for someone who has a busy lifestyle?

This is a great question, and you know, I get accused a lot, I get accused a lot of a lot of things, but you know, one of them is, well, no one can do all this stuff, but we talked about that earlier. We do the best with what we have and the time we have. Try and get some bright sunlight, even through cloud cover, especially through cloud cover every day. I try and dim the lights or, you know, get under a red light. Not red

light panel necessarily, but just put in like red party light. You know, I've done that this whole trip when you traveled in the evening, just, it's just a red light panel necessarily, but just put in like red party light. You know, I've done that this whole trip when you traveled in the evening, just it's just a red light bulb. There's just not fancy, so the red light bulb screws in this little pedestal, turn that on, all the other lights go off, and then makes for a nice easy taper into sleep because it, you know, the blue the blue and bright fluorescent lights, the short wavelength light really is activating for the nervous system, especially late in the day. So light is a big one for me. Try and get a few walks in.

I think if you were going to exercise just two days a week, it's very clear that those two days per week should include some resistance training, exercise, and then maybe follow up with some easy cardiovascular training or something like that. Hopefully one could get out in about maybe three days or exercise, sometimes not outside. One can only exercise indoors about maybe three days or exercise, sometimes not outside, one can only exercise indoors, maybe three days per week. So I

don't think it takes a ton of time necessarily, but that might even be excessive. So with busy lifestyle, I think it's those little carve-outs of five or ten minute walk. When we had Andy Galpin on the podcast and did a series, and by the way Andy's launching his own podcast through our podcast channel, which is Psych-Com, which Rob and I started. He's got the Perform podcast with Andy Galpin. He talked a little bit about these exercise snacks.

These are actually pretty cool in the sense that if you just take 60 seconds and do like a near all out, run up the stairs but be careful, or jumping jacks for a minute as fast as you can, that raises heart rate in a way and adjusts your physiology in a way that really does carry over to better performance including even things like VO2 max in other endeavors.

So it's probably not the case that that's all you should do but even small bouts of exercise can be very, very valuable. So that's reassuring. And then I am a huge fan of non-sleep deep-breaths, aka yoga nidra, which means yoga sleep, which is just lying there as we talked about before, but it's slightly different than what we were talking about for creativity. Lying there and deliberately inducing, using your mind to deeply relax the different muscles of your body, stay calm, long exhale, breathing, this kind of thing. There's a 10-minute NSDR with my voice on YouTube that you can simply find at zero cost.

There are many with other voices, female voices, et cetera, that you can find on YouTube as well. And if you don't like those, we're soon to release on our Heroin Lab clips channel a number of different meditations and NSDRs, again, all zero cost of 10 minute, 20 minute, 30 minute. I would say that for limiting stress, improving sleep, and restoring mental and physical vigor, NSDR is perhaps the best tool out there. And again, I didn't create it.

I simply took Yoganidra. I started calling it NSDR. And by the way, I was aware that I was going to upset some people when I did that. I was not trying to appropriate anything, I promise. The problem was I would talk about Yoganidra and studies of Yoganidra showing that it replenishes dopamine and the basal ganglia can restore mental and physical vigor. And then people would back away from me slowly like, yoga, I don't wanna do yoga. And I'm like, no, no, this is yoga sleep. You don't actually move.

And they're like, well, that sounds pretty different. And I'm like, I know it sounds different. I would go on and on and then I decided to call it non-sleep deep rest. And when you call something what it is or what it can accomplish, you move away from nomenclature. And I have very mixed feelings about renaming things, but I figure as long as I don't call it like the Huberman protocol,

at least I'm distancing myself from it, and it's a zero-cost protocol. So non-sleep deep rest is valuable for restoring mental and physical vigor. It can potentially help offset sleep that you didn't get. It can help you fall back asleep at night. If you do it in the middle of the night, it can help you get better at falling asleep

if you do it during the day. I did it for 20 minutes just prior to coming out here. I always do that prior to any event or thing that requires a lot of focus and this kind of thing. Otherwise, the jokes I tell are really just not okay. And so I do think it's quite valuable and it's something to explore. At what age would you consider testosterone replacement therapy? Well, one of the risk versus benefits is starting it

sooner rather than later. We got shouts. Well, so one of the major effects of testosterone replacement therapy is spontaneous shouting out in crowds. Just kidding. You know, there have been a number of studies of testosterone in males and females. By the way females have more testosterone than they do estrogen, you know that, right? Per deciliter of blood, higher testosterone than estrogen. Just on average, on average, they tend to have lower testosterone than men per deciliter of blood. So it's important in both males and females.

I think you're referring, James, to the use of so-called TRT in males, but I'll touch on it in females as well, because low-dose TRT therapy, oops, sorry, I just did that. I get in trouble in lab, if you say PCR reaction, ATM machine, is there a name for that? Okay, the T at the end of TRT is therapy, testosterone replacement therapy. Testosterone replacement therapy technically means that someone's levels prior to that therapy fall outside the reference range, so lower than 300

nanograms per deciliter typically, or some other array of symptoms, and they replace it, replacement therapy. Many, many people nowadays, in my opinion, far too many and too young, take what I call testosterone augmentation therapy, where their levels are within normal range and then they take it to get out of range. And look, there's nothing wrong with that.

I'm not gonna tell you what to do. I'm not a cop. You do what you wanna do. There are a couple things. TRT or TAT, augmentation, and here we're just setting aside high dose steroid use because that's just a whole other biz. And frankly, the bodybuilders will get upset,

but I'll get away from you because you'll be waddling and I'll be running. That's just like a whole other business. So testosterone replacement therapy is widely used nowadays. I think far too young. Basically it will lower your sperm count dramatically if you're a male, so if you want children, you want to conceive children, you will need to offset that by taking something like human chorionic gonadotropin HCG,

which is available synthetically. They used to sell it in the form of pregnant women's urine. There was a black market for it. We could really go off into the sticks with this question. In my opinion, if you want to explore this, I would say first, get your behaviors right. Sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress control, training. Get that right.

Don't train too hard or too long. Get that right. Then there are certain hard or too long, get that right. Then there are certain supplements, and we've talked about this on the podcast, some are debated a little bit more than others, things like zinc, Tongali, et cetera, that can probably provide a boost beyond normal without shutting down the gonads.

And then, and only then, if you feel you really wanna do this and it's in line with your ethics, or I don't know if you're playing a drug-tested sport, etc., then just minimal effective dose. And then if you want to have kids someday or if you don't know if you want to have kids someday, make sure you're taking the appropriate things to offset that. That's basically what I would say. And the major effect of testosterone in men and women is not libido per se and it's not aggression per se. It tends to make people more like them. If you're a jerk

you become more of a jerk. If you're calm you become more calm. If you're kind you can, I don't know if you become kinder, but there actually have been studies of altruistic behavior and administration of testosterone by nasal spray or other means and frankly people will become more out they'll become competitively altruistic. I think the major effect also could be described as it makes effort feel good. So we could go on and on about this. I'll just toss in that nowadays there's a lot of excitement about peptides. I'm going to do an episode about peptides. A lot of the young people I run into here and in the States

are like, what are your thoughts on BPC157? What do you think about this peptide or that peptide? Peptides are simply small protein amino acid chains. So there are lots of things called peptides, but typically these are things that increase growth hormone. Keep in mind that anything that increases growth hormone will increase the growth of any and all tissues. So if you have a small tumor that you're not aware of,

that will grow also. So just keep in mind if you're gonna tickle these pathways, you're playing with some serious biology, but there are safe ways to do it. Sorry, you said what are the benefits of starting it sooner rather than later, start it later. What are the physiological and practical differences between breathing techniques akin to Wim Hof and the physiological sign relation stress focus, etc.

Okay, we can make this pretty straightforward. First of all, I know Wim. We go way back to 2015. I went over to the Pyrenees and visited him and hung out and then brought him to the States. And you know Wim Hof breathing is tummo breathing, but in science speak we call it cyclic hyperventilation. It's just cyclic hyperventilation. So if you inhale vigorously and long, your heart rate goes up. If you exhale vigorously and long, heart rate goes down through a process

called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Volume of the heart changes when you breathe in versus breathe out. Speed at which blood moves through the heart changes when you breathe in versus breathe out. Speed at which blood moves through the heart changes as the blood gets bigger or smaller according to inhales and exhales. And basically the net effect is inhale, heart speeds up a little bit, exhale,

heart slows down a little bit. So if you do Wim Hof, aka tummo breathing, and you inhale vigorously, and let it fall out of your mouth and then you're gonna increase heart rate, increase autonomic activation, etc. If you do a pattern of breathing like inhale, inhale, long exhale, inhale, inhale, long exhale, cyclic sighing, over time you're gonna slow the heart rate down and you're gonna calm down that's just how it works so when I hear about box breathing or now you hear

about box breathing okay it's relatively equal ratios of inhale exhale so a little bit of pause in there that's the box inhale hold exhale hold inhale hold exhale hold of varying durations depending on your so-called carbon dioxide tolerance. But at the end of the day, you're maintaining kind of even heart rate when you do big cyclic hyperventilation, aka Wim Hof Tummo breathing, you're increasing heart rate in autonomic arousal, release of adrenaline, do cyclic sighing, a lot of exhales, the opposite is true. Okay, so that should give you a framework for thinking about breathing and how to apply different breathing techniques and get us away from some of the naming of things, but I'm not trying to take anything away from so-called Wim Hof

breathing. By the way, if you're going to do Wim Hof breathing, be very, very careful to not do cyclic hyperventilation or Wim Hof breathing, and then do breath holds, and don't do breath holds and don't do that anywhere near water. There have been cases of people drowning, dying from combining cyclic hyperventilation and breath holds with water because it changes the threshold for shallow water blockout. When you exhale a lot or when you hyperventilate, you remove a lot of carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide is the stimulus to gasp. So what will happen is indeed if you do you're blowing off a lot of carbon dioxide and then you go

right that's a whim exhale and then you hold and you go underwater. Yeah you'll hold your breath longer than you normally would but instead of feeling that impulse to breathe like the gas reflex and you shoot for the surface, you'll just black done. So it's a serious thing and you want to be really careful to not combine cyclic hyperventilation and breath holds and especially both with cold water, frankly any water exposure. I always say don't do Wim Hof Tummo or cyclic hyperventilation breathing even standing or seated in a puddle. Okay. So in response

to stress it's really if you want to be more alert, increase the vigor and duration of your inhales. If you want to be more calm, increase the duration of your exhales. Would you recommend that be more calm, increase the duration of your exhales. Would you recommend that children also get morning sunlight? Yes. And your pets, too. Unless they're nocturnal pets, right? For anyone that had the not-so-smart idea of getting a hamster, you realize they're nocturnal, right? They're gonna run all night long on the wheel. In fact, rodents like to run on wheels so much that Hoppy Hofstra at Harvard has shown that if you put

a little running wheel, like you know little wheels that the mice like to run in there, in a field, animals will run to the wheel and run in the field. It tells you everything you need to know about rodents. But really, children need that. But obviously, babies have sensitive eyes. We all can potentially hurt ourselves with sunlight. And down here, the UV index is very high.

When the sun is low in the sky, so-called low solar angle sunlight, in the morning and in the evening, the UV index, and mostly because of atmospheric interference, but some other things as well, it's not as damaging to the eyes. That's why it's easier to watch a sunrise or a sun closer to the horizon than it is to, please don't stare at the sun in any case, but an overhead sun. So I think it's really important for circadian rhythms.

But of course, kids need their sleep. So if they're going to sleep in a little bit, that's fine. Just get them outside afterwards. It's the staying inside and staying on a phone that's problematic and then leaving that room at noon really shift your circadian rhythm in unhealthy ways and that's true for children, perhaps especially true for children. As a father, what can I be doing to give my children the best start in life? What a great question. I hope my parents asked that.

They abandoned me at the pet store. No, I'm kidding. They didn't abandon me. They didn't abandon me at the pet store. If they did, I didn't notice. I was among my friends, the fishes and the birds. I think this question probably should be, I'm gonna edit, and just say what can we all be doing to give our children the best start in life, and what does that mean for those of us that have already started in life? So first of all, we have an episode of the Huberman Lab podcast with an absolutely magnificent guest Dr. Becky Kennedy coming out on, I guess it would be Tuesday down here, so this coming week, all about this. And you know, we could talk about things for learning, encourage them to play an instrument.

I would think that we perhaps should teach kids some tools to modulate their stress in real time, like physiological size, I don't see why not. I certainly wish I had tools to regulate my stress when I was younger. They didn't teach us that stuff. They didn't know it or the knowledge was there, but as I mentioned earlier, they didn't teach us that stuff. They taught us all sorts of stuff in high school, health and stuff.

I mean, they taught us that drunk driving's bad. They taught us it just takes one sperm one time. They taught us all sorts of stuff, but they didn't teach us the this business of physiological size or stress thresholds or about the interior mid-singulate cortex because a lot of that stuff wasn't known or just wasn't discussed. So I think some tools to control one's inner landscape, play music, I certainly am going to encourage the exploration of these energy states that, you know, letting kids explore. I mean, they need rules and regulation and boundaries, of course, but there's this concept

of impingement that I find very interesting that the classic psychologists used to talk about, you know, when we and when a kid says they like something or don't like things, like yes, they need to be doing certain things for their normal life progression, but kids are very good sensors of what works for them and what doesn't work for them. We don't wanna impinge on, certainly their healthy loves and desires, things that don't endanger them, right? Things that really reflect their unique loves and desires.

Don't force them to play Suzuki violin if they wanna play the drums, right? Let them bang on stuff. And let the kids that wanna play Suzuki violin do that. Don't make them play the drums. So these impingements actually I think are problematic. They lead to a lot of confusion and if anything else, you know, they take us away from that unique wiring to our own unique expression. Becky Kennedy does describe a few key principles of parenting that I think are really interesting that extend to all kinds of relationships. She talks about the main role of parenting and to some extent all relationships is to create

boundaries and to make kids feel safe. Seems pretty good to me. The other kind of short list of two things that she describes how to do this in ways that are highly actionable is that every child, I found this really interesting, every child wants to feel real, like they wanna feel like they're real, like they're seen, they exist,

and they want to feel safe. And so that one of the things that really rung in my ears and still does from that episode recording, again out this week, is that when a kid or an adult says something about how they feel, that perhaps one of the best responses we can give them is, you know, I believe you.

Like, you're not saying that, like, you don't want to go to school, don't go to school, right? We're not saying you don't enjoy doing something, don't do it, or you want like a fifth serving of candy. Like, you could say, like, I believe you, you know, no. You know, and so I think that a lot of it is, we get confused with terms like validation and listening. I mean, what I like so much about what Becky offers,

and I do hope to do a child development series in the not too distant future. What I like so much about what Becky offers is that, it boils down to simple concepts, like we wanna be real, which I guess is kind of an analog for seen, and we want to feel safe. Not unlike when we did the podcast series on mental health

with Dr. Paul Conti, he said, you know, it's really about mental health is really about agency and gratitude. But there are a lot of things that siphon up into those feelings or those moments of, or that state of agency and gratitude. So I would say that's perhaps the most important thing is, you know, boundaries make kids feel safe and then make them feel real, like their feelings and what their reporting matters.

And then of course the impingement thing becomes a little bit complicated because they do need boundaries. So we have to constrain their wishes sometimes and their behavior, but we don't want to do it in a way that takes them away from that unique wiring that makes them who they are, so they can become the characters and people and professionals and creatives and scientists and poets and just good people, everyday good people. So that's the best answer I can provide at this time. They're not gonna give me another question. But I can keep going just briefly, if I may,

by just first of all saying that, again, I'm very, very grateful for the opportunity to convene with all of you here tonight. I realize it was me speaking and you listening, except for the guy on testosterone. And I certainly, you know, I can't really express enough in words what the podcast means to me. It's a bizarre thing. It's completely transformed my life. It's made it incredible. I never dreamed of anything like this.

But for me, it's really not about hearing my own voice. It's this compulsion that came in at an early age, and it's really my wish, frankly, that the tools, the protocols, the knowledge, whatever it inspires you to do or to think, we don't have to agree on everything. I would hope we don't agree on everything. The ways we disagree with me and with each other

and with others that we start maybe thinking about ourselves through a lens of science and think about health and really try and meet those discussions with the kind of benevolence and curiosity and vigor, good argument every once in a while, it's healthy too, that it really deserves. I think we're in a very interesting and kind of sometimes scary time. I often feel scared, frankly, because of what I see and even my own position in this whole landscape. I sometimes think like, I

feel like a lot of times things are just kind of hanging on by a thread, but I actually have a lot of optimism. I think our species is very smart. I think that we've managed to navigate tricky places before. I think our species is very smart. I think that we've managed to navigate tricky places before and I think that through the learning and teaching of things that work for us, that we learn from this, these kinds of things and from each other, that pretty soon we're going to start to fill in the gaps between the silos that are the yogic traditions, the chiropractic massage, health and fitness, traditional medicine, non-traditional

medicine, functional medicine. I mean I really encourage all of you to try and you know stand back from it all and try and identify the common themes that may exist across these things and really try and identify some of the the links and points of convergence more than the differences and and at the very least to explore things if you don't like them, you know, that's great. And if you do, to pass them on to other people, especially the behavioral tools that we all harbor within us

that I think can really enhance our mental health and vigor, our physical health, and hopefully our longevity too. So I could go on and on, but I really just want to say thank you so much for coming out tonight. This is our last night in Australia, and I'm certainly going to miss being here, and we intend to come back again soon. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast, paying attention to and tuning into the podcast,

and for being willing to learn. You're all amazing students, and you're also amazing teachers. I learned from you all in comments and feedback. So if you have that, please keep that coming. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science. Actually, I've never done this before, but because it's my last night here, I've always seen people do this and I've never done it, but I'm going to do it. Can we get the house lights up?

I want to get one of these. I'm going to do this as a video and you don't have to do it. Your faces will show up, but don't worry, we won't. It will go on the internet, but this is not for me. I just want to, I just wanna, I'm gonna send my mother this. Okay, there we go. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. That's on you. That's on you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.