The Megyn Kelly Show - Andrew Huberman on Practical Wellness Tips, the Danger of "If Only" Thinking, and the Important "Protocols" For Life | Ep. 1392

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

Megyn Kelly is joined by Dr. Andrew Huberman, author of “Protocols,” to discuss the importance of getting bright light in the morning and darkness at night for improving sleep, how light affects the brain and body, a surprising technique for falling back asleep, the simple and natural ways to help your sleep, finding balance with health and wellness, avoiding an unhealthy obsession with self-improvement, how to stay focused and keep the brain active, why completely shutting off your brain is not actually what you want to do, the science behind why making mistakes and learning from failure is so important, and the way mistakes and learning can help the brain, why ruminating in the past is so counterproductive, actionable ways to live in the present, why ruminating in the past is destructive but you can use it to fuel your current life, the mindset shared by high performers, how his parents’ divorce and experiences growing up influenced the direction of his life, the mentors who shaped him, what ultimately led him to his work today, and more.  More from Huberman: https://www.hubermanlab.com/protocols-book  Herald Group: Learn more at https://GuardYourCard.comQuo: Make this the season where no opportunity slips away. Try QUO for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to https://www.Quo.com/MK Tax Relief Advocates: End your tax nightmare today by visiting us online at https://TRA.com or call 800-583-6515The Wellness Company: Be prepared for late-night health emergencies by ordering your prescription Medical Emergency Kit at https://UrgentCareKit.com/MK and saving $45 with promo code MK today.  Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East. Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show. We've got a first-time guest on the show today, Dr. Andrew Huberman. He's a neuroscientist, Stanford professor, and host of the hugely popular Huberman Lab podcast. He has published more than 75 peer-reviewed articles in top scientific journals and delivered more than 100 invited research and keynote seminars around the world. He's had a fascinating life and provided guidance on how to live better to millions of fans and followers, but he's never written a book until now. His new book is called Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body. And it's available right now for pre-order. It's out later this month. And it is a guide to improving brain function, enhancing mood and energy,

optimizing bodily health and physical performance, and rewiring your nervous system to learn new. skills and behaviors even that could positively transform your life. Our sponsor, the Electronic Payments Coalition, says Washington politicians are always getting in your wallet and that now they're messing with your credit card. They say your credit card and the security it offers are under attack and that Senator's Dick Durbin and Roger Marshall want to change the nation's payment system to benefit corporate megastores like Walmart and Target at the expense of everyday Americans.

credit cards can keep your payments secure and provide rewards that families use and rely on to help make everyday purchases more affordable. The Electronic Payments Coalition says the Durban Marshall mandates would let corporate megastores cut corners on credit card processing, routing transactions over cheaper, untested networks, with weaker security and fewer protections. Find out more at guardyourcard.com and consider telling Congress to guard your card. Andrew, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Great, great to finally meet you. Yeah, it's the same. It's a pleasure. I'm a big fan, and I've learned a lot from you over the years just from clips and from your show. So this is a thrill. And I'm loving the chance to get to talk to you about you before we kick off the health and other advice. So you're a California boy. I am. Right? I grew up in California. I am. And it seems like from the book, you had sort of an idyllic first 14 years. and the family had dinner together every night, and that's so important to one's mental health and well-being.

And then something happened in your family that gets downplayed by a lot of people is really not that relevant to a child's mental health, but it is relevant, and it was life-changing for you, and that was your parents' divorce. Yeah, I did have a quite idyllic life. My dad's a scientist. My mom's a writer, and along with my sister,

we had dinner together every night, night. In my home, there wasn't a lot of discussion about sports, but I certainly got to hear a lot about the luminaries of science and ideas from my dad. We always shared that. My mom has a real love of literature, obviously, and I have a close relationship with my sister, and everything was pretty fantastic. And then, you know, I was born in 1975, so divorce wasn't as common back when. But when I, about at age 14, they separated and got divorced. So this happens a lot now, is, as we know, unfortunately. Look, I love my parents. Everyone did the best they could with what they had, but it was a high conflict situation. And, you know, as things played out, I found myself

disengaging from academics, disengaging from kind of standard social milieu of school. I went to a very, very good public school in South Palo Alto. Keep in mind at this time, Palo Alto wasn't the Palo Alto that it is now of, you know, of dot com and tech fame. But most of the kids there were the children of academics or engineers or something like that. And we were, we were well enough off. I wouldn't say we were like at the high end of the wealth scale or low end. We were, you know, the focus in our house was on love and ideas. But what happened was in response to that. And I regret this. And I encourage all kids of divorced parents, high or low conflict situations to, you know, keep studying, keep doing your homework and stay engaged in school,

sports and activities. What happened for me was I ended up organizing my life around basically skateboarding and hanging out with skateboarders because back in the late 80s and early 90s, that's where all the feral kids went. And I talk about this a little bit at the beginning of the book, even though it's not the main focus of the book, what was really great was in that community, there were a bunch of kids whose parents were not engaged in their lives much, right? That was the unifying theme. That's why we skateboarded, because, you didn't need your parents to come to baseball or soccer practice. But there's a ton of creativity.

A lot of those people went on to create big brands like DC. I knew those kids that started DC that started all these big brands. And some kids got sponsored and turned pro. Others got really into drugs and alcohol and destroyed their lives. And so, you know, it was a very interesting time for me being completely free, getting exposed to a lot of things way too early, in my opinion, looking back. a lot of exposure to violence, drugs, and sex that frankly, as a 14-year-old, you know, I shouldn't have been exposed to.

But I was witness to a ton of great skateboarding. I unfortunately was not a great skateboarder. But fortunately, by virtue of getting injured a lot, I started foraging for other things to do. And eventually, mainly because of a high school girlfriend who went off to college and I didn't want to be away from her, I found my way back to academics. And somewhere along the way, I took a course in neuroscience. at the time there wasn't a field of neuroscience, but it was one truly amazing teacher,

his name was Harry Carlyle, who taught me about brain function and taught me about these neurochemicals in the brain that controlled things like anxiety, depression, addiction. And I had witnessed a lot of that, and I thought to myself, this is the coolest thing ever, especially when I learned about neuroplasticity, which is, you know, this organ that we have in our head

is unlike all the other organs of the body in that it can deliberately change itself. we can learn new things. We can have a new emotional relationship to things. And so as my life went on, I pursued a career in science, eventually became a tenured professor at Stanford, ran a research lab for a long time. I still teach at Stanford and fell in love with all of that.

But it was really this kind of merge of the hard things that I had seen and experienced, plus the understanding that there's this incredible organ in our brains that we don't really understand that much about, at least not back then, but now we understand enough to make really great choices, including to, you know, I think, you know, even though the discussion about things like psychedelics and things of that sort are very interesting for therapeutic purposes, that I think because the young brain is so plastic, that all kids would benefit from, frankly, staying away from that. This isn't an anti-drug campaign that I'm on, but, you know, the developing brain is so fragile

and so susceptible to it's both chemical and environmental inputs. And I will stand on firm ground and say that while I understand that in some cases, it may be necessary that having two parents at home and them getting along and working through things together, I love my parents. I don't hold any grudge whatsoever. But I think it's clear now from the data that's enormously helpful to a child's development. So no regrets. It all worked out for me, but there was a high friction road along the way. And I think science, an amazing teacher, and then others who came along, plus the love of science and a care for the world that my father and mother put into me. So I'm grateful to them too. I love them, pray for them and with them. And life is good. So I only look back with fondness, but it was rocky. Yeah, I mean, my own take on it, and having read the book is, I don't think you'd be doing what you're doing if you hadn't gone through that trauma, that traumatic period and been exposed to as many stressors as you were.

Clearly, it lit something inside of you that needed addressing, needed healing, needed some sort of attention. And like most people who have had some trauma in their past, whether you've made progress on it or not, I think most of us spend the rest of our lives in some way trying to, to solve it, address it, heal it, or make it better for others who we can see coming up behind us who have similar issues. So, I mean, I would argue that this book Protocols is a direct result of all that you went through. And thank you and thanks to your parents in a way, because as a result, we have such good advice in here. I do want to spend one minute on this was such a sad thing. So you mentioned Professor Carlyle, who became such a mentor to you. And this was an important person in your life and ultimately he he dies by suicide yeah so i you know uh i don't want give people

the impression that that the book is entirely dark it's a story about lightness and what you can do to better your your your abilities in sleep and stress mitigation all these things but i touch on the the science of grief and and how to get through things in a healthy way and mental health um and you know along my path what i saw was was the following. A lot of the kids I grew up with and with this amazing community of skateboarders, I saw some flourish. I saw others succumb to addiction.

I saw some succumb to mental health issues. And as I went into science, I incorrectly thought, oh, you know, what's going to happen is the scientists are all going to be super healthy, right? These are people who understand the brain. And as a consequence of understanding the brain and biology, I naively thought that they would be immune to a lot of the problems that this other community had. And I found quite the opposite.

So there were three things that happened along the way for me that really motivated me further to write the book protocols, to have a podcast where we talk about health, where I teach about what we do and don't know about the brain and how people can benefit. And the first one really was these childhood, these observations from my teen years. The next observation was that this guy, Harry Carlyle, who understood mental health, depression, disease, suicidality as chemical issues for whatever reason, I eventually was able to fill in some of the pieces, took his own life in a pretty dramatic fashion. And that told me something, right? I was close friends with his wife and I knew his family. It told me that knowledge alone doesn't save us. Knowledge is important.

It's as we say in science, necessary, but not sufficient. You know, and then what happened was I went off to graduate school and had an amazing time in graduate school. Everyone says, oh, you know, you finish graduate school and you're aged and you're tired. I was so full of life in graduate school. And after, I loved my graduate advisor. She was like a mother to me. Her name was Barbara Chapman.

And then she, I know her family and kids. Her daughter is a neuroscientist now. And she died of cancer at 50. And I thought, oh, my goodness, she had the BRCA mutation. So she had a genetic susceptibility. And I thought, my goodness. And then I became a postdoc at Stanford. And my postdoc advisor, the first day of my faculty appointment, had a heart attack across

the table for me at dinner. He survived that. It turns out he had pancreatic cancer. he was dead roughly a year later. I ended up writing his obituary for nature. We were very, very close. And I thought to myself, this is crazy, right? Like either the joke in my field,

the kind of morbid joke is you don't want me to work for you, obviously, because the odds are, you know, it didn't work out so well for these people. But the serious aspect of is at one point I thought, what's going on here? What's going on? And I also noticed in my field of neuroscience, people doing tremendously well.

I know Nobel Prize winners, members of the National Academy, my closest childhood friend is now the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. He's doing phenomenally well in life and including family. And I thought to myself, what's happening here?

And I realized, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, scientists, doctors, parents, kids, nobody knows the manual, the rulebook for how to control their stress. Nobody knows the playbook for how to take care of their health. And we're supposed to be all about health.

And we're supposed to eat right, sleep right, et cetera. But like I'm watching my colleagues get sick. I'm seeing them. They look badly out of shape. And I understand they're time limited. But they're talking about back pain. They're talking about their kid has anxiety. There's a colleague became addicted.

This very famous person in my field became addicted to painkillers and then eventually died. No one talked about it. And I'm thinking myself, we're not talking about this stuff. We need to talk about it. In fact, this last year, one of the luminaries in our field, it's still gets me, who was a real pioneer in transcranial magnetic stimulation therapies for depression and also psychedelic therapies, the studies of these took his own life. My dear friend and colleague Nolan Williams,

who's helped the veterans community tremendously. So I realized at some point people don't know how to take care of themselves. They don't even know what self-care is. It sounds very selfish and in some versions of it it can be. So what are we supposed to do? So in 2020, with the with the with the world on lockdown and everyone kind of been battling each other. I thought, look, I'm not a virologist. I'm just going to stay out of that whole thing. It's a, it's a, it's a hornet's nest for an academic like me. But here's what I will do. I'm going to go online and I'm going to start talking about ways to improve your sleep. My lab had worked on a number of things, including eye diseases and trying to cure blindness, glaucoma. We'd worked on brain development. And I'd worked on stress mitigation

in humans. And I knew that there were simple tools that people could apply to learn to shut their brain off at the end of the day and get great sleep to have more energy elevated mood and focus throughout the day i knew the literature quite well because i teach it and i done research on it and published on on some of it on how you can modify your brain in adaptive ways and how you can start to unpeel some of the emotional load of traumatic experiences and i thought the world needs this so i'm going to just start blabbing about it into the camera and i teamed up interestingly i teamed up with a guy who had a little bit of a background in media. His name is Rob Moore,

and we started this little production company in my closet with my bulldog, Costello, snoring in the background. And I grabbed some skateboarders. My friend Mike Blayback is now a famous action sport photographer. He came up through skateboarding, had his own challenges with alcohol and drugs, got clean, got lean and healthy.

He's a family man, he's got two kids, he's doing great. I grabbed two skateboard filmers, because skateboarders, mind you, the ones that made it through the shoot of all the troubling stuff. They are the original do-it-yourself, film or editors. We all carried around cameras when we were kids long before smartphones, and they are phenomenal at making movies.

So we're a small pack of guys, and we did it the same way you'd start a skateboarding company. Find a space, film people doing what they love, put it out into the world, and I just started giving away tools to the world on sleep, on stress mitigation, on neuroplasticity, on personal development. And I would have guests on, but I would also do these solo episodes

where I would explain here. Here's what the real story on dopamine is. It's not about pleasure. It's about motivation. Here's how you can leverage that to your advantage to stay motivated but not burn out and so on. And then eventually I realized that the world needed that information

in a different form so that the book is sort of a lookup table. It tells a story you could go linearly through it. Yeah. But it's kind of a lookup table. Yes, you can just navigate straight to it. You can go to that chapter and so on. So that's really the purpose behind what I do. do. Yeah. The, again, the book is called Protocols by Andrew Huberman available for pre-order right now.

Let's spend some time on sleep because I've seen so many clips of you talking about sleep, and I can tell you, this is definitely an issue for me and a lot of my viewers of a certain age, women in particular, but a lot of guys out there too, got a lot of truckers who listen to this show on Sirius XM, who are not well-rested and are not getting the appropriate. amount of sleep. And I have to say, the more time you spend talking about how you need to sleep, the harder it can be to sleep, because then you're in your bed at night, like, I'm supposed to be asleep, but I can't fall asleep. And it's amazing to me that you argue that it begins when you wake up. Your good night's sleep begins the moment you wake up. And whenever I hear this next

part, because I've heard you say this over the years, I think Andrew Huberman is, you're not from the Northeast and does not live in the Northeast. And now, understanding that you're a California boy, it's starting to come into full focus for me. Because you want us to get up, go outside within the first 30 minutes or so, and stare at the sun for, you know, 10 minutes maybe. And we do mean like at the sun or like right next to the sun, not like the fully bright sun, but you say that's not really the sun you're getting in the morning when it first rises anyway. But explain why this is important. and explain how this is supposed to work for those of us in places like Connecticut when it's minus 15 and awful when you wake up. Fair, fair play. You know, I've largely lived west of Interstate 5,

which cuts down through the center of California. So all fair. So here's the thing. I'm going to We too, we also want to live right the rest of the country, the people of Minnesota, the people in Washington. Yeah, you guys are having a couple other other advantages that we can talk about. So it all evens out. Here's the deal. To really master your sleep and get great sleep, but also to have elevated daytime mood, focus, et cetera, you really want to master the first hour of your day and the last hour of your day. Unfortunately, I'm not going to tell you that you need to do a bunch of things in each of those hours that require finances or require, lot of energy. Here's the theme, which is we know is conducive to better mental health and physical

health and longevity. You want bright mornings and days and dark nights. Now, if you're going to tell me, well, there's not a lot of sunlight out here, but here's the deal. When you wake up in the morning, you wake up because of a rise in a hormone called cortisol and because of a rise in body temperature. Most people think of cortisol as a stress hormone and they think, oh, that's bad. I don't want high cortisol. You want your morning cortisol high. I'll repeat that. You want your morning cortisol high. It is not a stress hormone. It is the hormone of energy and to mobilize energy in your body and get you moving into the day. And if you get your morning cortisol high, it helps ensure that your nighttime cortisol is low. And when your nighttime cortisol is low,

it's easy to fall and stay asleep and you get great sleep. Your metabolic health will be better. The hormone melatonin goes up, which makes you sleepy. You want morning cortisol high, nighttime cortisol low. So the best way to kind of book, so think about bookending your days. I don't care what time you wake up. If it's 4 a.m. or it's 10 a.m. We can talk about what to do if the sun isn't out yet. But within the first hour of waking up, ideally within the first 30 minutes, you're going to get up. Most people use the restroom. I suggest you hydrate, drink a little bit of water. And if the sun is up, and by the way, you don't need to be able to see the sun, It can be completely overcast.

But if there's daylight coming through the clouds, which there is, even in the depths of winter in Boston, it's much brighter at 7 a.m., for instance, in Boston in the middle of winter than it was at midnight the night before. There's a lot of what we call photons or light energy coming through those clouds. You go outside. You could even stand on a balcony. Best not to do it through a window. But if you have to, you go out on a balcony or outside, you look in the direction of the sun. If you can't see the sun because there's a building in the way, that's fine. Take off any hat you might be wearing because the sun's coming in from the top.

You want to get to your eyes. Don't wear sunglasses. Not sunglasses at this time. Eye glasses and contacts are fine. And you can have your coffee there. You can do your morning prayer or meditation there. You can bring your dog. You can bring a friend.

You can be completely alone. And even if you just grab one minute of daylight, it's going to benefit you. Why? Because there's this critical window within the first hour of waking where if you get bright light in your eyes from daylight, from sunlight, it amplifies that cortisol peak, which makes it much lower before sleep, which makes it far easier to fall asleep at night. In addition, most people want less stress in their life, not more. If you spike your cortisol that way first thing in the morning, any stress you have during the day will lead to a more transient, a briefer

increase in stress hormones. You are better at dealing with stress when you do this. And there are a number of biochemical reasons for this. These are not psychological phenomena. These are pure physiology. This isn't about mindset. So can you just explain what am I looking? You know, because they say you're not supposed to look directly into the sun, but am I supposed to be looking directly into the sun at this?

Great question. So as somebody who worked on blinding the diseases of the eye for many years, I want to encourage people, you can look in the direction of the sun, but blink as needed to protect your eyes. If it's really bright for you and you're blinking, great. The blink reflex is there to protect your eyes. Never force yourself to look at any light, sunlight or otherwise, that's painful to look at. So you can just look in the direction of the sun. You could even keep your eyes closed.

Believe it or not, the photon energy goes through your eyelids. But you look kind of off to the side of the sun. If it's in the middle of winter, the sun is easy to look at because it's behind so many clouds. When the sun is low in the sky, such around sunrise or sunset, and keep in mind, I'm not saying you need to see the sun cross the horizon. If you wake up at 9 a.m. and the sun's already up. you miss sunrise it's rising but when it's low in the sky you'll notice something about the sun if it's not a cloudy day which is it looks a bit more yellow orange red than at other times now of course

the light coming from the sun is the same all times of day but when the sun is low in the sky there's an atmospheric phenomenon called relay scattering where the the UV which are damaging rays for the most part are get scattered and so those aren't reaching your eyes so you see the what are called the longer wavelengths of light it looks a bit more like candlelight and bright, but more like candlelight. So when the sun is low in the sky, you don't have to worry about UV damage to your skin. You don't have to worry about damage to your eyes or getting cataract. When the sun is overhead, that's when you really need to be careful about too much UV exposure. We know that UV exposure. So in the perfect, in the perfect Huberman

protocol, I'm out. I'm looking up. I'm maybe just to the right of the sun, not directly into the sun. I don't have sunglasses on. And how, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, And how long do I need to stand there looking? And is it non-st, do I need to be looking nonstop? Or can I, like, look around at the dogs and the, you know. Look around. How does the, you go? Those photons are bouncing off of surfaces.

They're getting reflected. If you take a walk, if there's any green space around, see, this is where the East Coast, you have an advantage, you know, except in some cities, you often have a lot more green because you get a lot more rain, right? The Oregonians really benefit here, too. We're so lucky. really beneficial wavelengths of light are bouncing off greenery. You know, if you were, that long wavelength light that bounces off greenery is tremendously

good for our mitochondria. It actually can go into and through our body. This is a separate story that I cover in the book. It can actually lower blood glucose. Believe it or not, your blood sugar management is much better when you're out in daylight than when you eat indoors. This was shown by my colleague Glenn Jeffrey at University of College London. They shined a red light, which approximates sunlight on people's

backs while they did a glucose tolerance test, it blunts glucose levels by nearly, it's somewhere between 20 and 30 percent, which is remarkable. How could that be? The light actually goes into the body, through the body, and the mitochondria, the energy factories in our cells actually start using more ATP. Metabolism goes up, which is remarkable. Now, here's the interest. Just so I'm clear, you have to be exposing your skin in that moment. Like, it doesn't count when, you know, you're skiing and you're completely covered head to toe with that that the light needs to hit your actual body skin a t-shirt. They've shown it can go through a t-shirt or even a shirt like the one I'm wearing, you know, a thin enough shirt, a thick jacket, it won't go through. So you get outside, you take your,

any brimmed hat off, you look in the direction of the sun. Yes, if you need to text someone, that's fine. You walk, you take a call, you talk to somebody. It's, you know, it's especially nice to get five minutes or so, I suggest doing a 10 breath meditation, you know, just focusing on 10 breaths or do your morning prayers. That's a big practice for me. And then get into the day and you've done it. You've spiked that cortisol. Look, even better would be if you can get some exercise in the first hours of the day because, you know, everyone's so afraid of cortisol, but everyone's told to exercise a moderate to high intensity exercise session, cardiovascular training or resistance training, will triple your cortisol level, but transiently. That's a great thing.

early in the day and it sets you up for great sleep at night. If you have to exercise later in the day, that's fine and we can talk about that. But in that case, you'd want to, one of the things that really leads to better sleep, as long as we're here, we might as well just kind of throw in a few things that lead to better sleep. If you're having a hard time calming your system down at the end of the day, two things really help. One, you need to lower your core body temperature. That's actually how you fall asleep. The one excellent way to do that is to take a hot shower or bath. You say, wait, I'm heating up my skin. How is that going to make me cooler? Well, your brain has a little thermostat region called the medial preoptic nucleus.

And when, just like a thermostat, when the surface of the skin heats up, the brain says, oh, we need to lower a core body temperature and your body temperature starts falling when you get out of that shower or bath. If you don't have access to a shower bath, even a warm compress to the face will accomplish this. Very easy, essentially costs nothing. and it will facilitate the transition to sleep. The other thing that is... And this is probably a bigger thing, but I'll let you finish your point, but can you, after this, talk about staying asleep?

Yes. Yeah, so one of the key things to falling asleep and to stress mitigation, you'll notice I'm trying to fire hose tools at people that they can use any time, right? Yes, we want them. These are all, and I'll just point out, like, I didn't discover these tools.

I've published on some of them as tools in my laboratory, but I want to really point out something important in the backdrop here is these mechanisms are hardwired into all of us. We're born with them. We're going to die with them. So there's no real learning except how to activate these circuits. Hence, a user manual for the brain and body, right, an operating manual. So the idea here is you have these cells in your eye. They're called melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive retinal gangling cells.

That's just nerd speak for the cells in your eye that, actually know that morning sunlight is hitting them. It's different than other forms of light. Your phone won't do it. A computer won't do it. An indoor light, unless it's a 10,000 luxe artificial light, we'll talk about that in a minute, won't accomplish this.

We have these cells for the very purpose of waking us up in the morning, for telling the brain and body it's morning. That circuit gets activated. Boom, you just go into your day. You don't have to think about it anymore. There's another feature to the way that we are hardwired. which is we have a little collection of neurons in our brain that communicate with our body in the following way. When you are feeling too alert, could be stress, could be panic, could be public

speaking, could be a hard conversation, could be anticipation of a medical outcome, or you're having trouble falling asleep or getting back to sleep. What you need to do is do a long, deliberate exhale, just like that. If you want to make it even more effective, you do two exhales through your nose to maximally inflate your lungs and then you exhale. What am I talking about here? This is not breath work. This is a collection of specific neurons that were discovered by my friend and colleague Jack Feldman at UCLA that lead to a slowing of heart rate in a good way. Everyone's heard of the vagus nerve now. It's this nerve nerves in the body, collect sensory information from the body, telling the brain what's going on in the body. We're not even thinking about it. But there's another part of

the vagus nerve, which goes from brain to the sino-atrial node of the heart. And it controls something called respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which sounds bad. People hear arrhythmia, and that sounds bad. But when you do a deliberate exhale, your heart rate slows down. So if you want to calm down really fast, the fastest way to do that is not self-talk. It's not meditation, because you don't have time to run off and meditate. It's not a drink. Even that will take longer. We can talk about alcohol later. It is to do a deliberate exhale. You're too amped up. You want to calm down. Long, deliberate exhale. There's a specific pathway that slows the heart rate down. These days, in the fitness circles, you're hearing more about heart rate variability, a stress monitor,

like a whoop band, or anything that measures HRV, it's measuring how often your brain sends this break signal to your heart rate. That's what HRV is. In fact, if you do a few deliberate exhales during the day, just a few times, you're walking out of the restroom, going back to work, you're sitting down to your desk, whatever, you're driving, picking up the kids, you do one long, deliberate exhale. Your HRV gets higher at night in sleep, which is great for you, and during the day, you want high HRV.

It shows that your nervous system can calm your heart rate down, slow it down. And this is a well, you know, I could get into the mechanism, the diaphragm, you know, moves up, the heart gets a little smaller, blood moves faster, the brain so's, uh-oh, blood's moving faster through that smaller volume of the heart, slow heart rate down. When we inhale, heart rate speeds up, and everyone's told, oh, you're stressed, take a deep breath. That increases your heart rate. So, you know, circa 2019, 2020, I'm thinking myself, everyone's stressed, everyone's saying, take a deep breath. That's not going to work. That's going to send you in the opposite direction, Okay. Humans inhale actively and passively exhale. We do this all day long. We let the air fall out. When we actively exhale, it activates this circuit that's just sitting there waiting for you to calm yourself down and you actively exhale. The reason exercise increases HRV has a lot to do with how much exhaling you do during exercise. So in that last hour of the day, here's what I'd love for people to do. I understand people watch Netflix. They're

listening to podcast, they're watching TV, they want to know the verdict on this new case. I get it. I totally get it. I'm human too. Just do this for me. Try and make the first hour of your day as bright as possible that day. If all you can do is flip on all the lights in your house first thing in the morning, that's it. Can't get outside. It's too cold. You don't want to do it. Fine. Just make it bright. Make as bright as you can. Even better for people in the Northeast would be to get, and I don't have any relationship to the companies that sell these. But for about $100, you can get a $10,000 Lux artificial light. It looks like a TV screen. You put it in the kitchen. or the bathroom, you flip it on,

go about your morning, you don't have to stare at it, or you get outside, get some light in your eyes. Do that, and if you can, we can talk about exercise in the early part of the day, great, first three hours or so.

And then in the last hour of your day, think I'm going to try and heat up the surface of my body to cool down internally so I can fall asleep better. So hot compress to the face for 10 seconds, maybe a hot shower, hot bath, okay, if you have time.

Dim the light. If you can't dim the lights, try not use overhead lights because the eyes, the cells in the eyes that carry this information about waking up to the brain, they view the upper visual feel. That's how they're placed so they can see the sky. So do like the Scandinavians and use desk lamps or a floor lamp, okay? Dim those lights. Dim your screen. And if you're still feeling too ramped up and you can't sleep, do some long exhales, just a few long exhales. This whole thing will have an outsized positive effect on people's sleep, daytime mood focus, and alertness.

And there's a beautiful study out of the UK Biobank of more than 80,000 subjects, which shows that even if people just make their nights darker, for instance, maybe an eye mask while you sleep, don't have an eye mask, grab a soft t-shirt, throw it over your eyes and when you go to sleep. Even just making your sleep environment darker has a significant positive effect on reducing symptoms. of depression, OCD, mania, dementia, and on and on. Better to make mornings bright and dark nights. But if you look at the way humans have been trending for the last few years, we have days that are too dim and nights that are too bright. And if you think, well, no, actually my work environment's pretty bright. Just putting people near a window or having people look out a window a few times during

the daytime has significant improvements on metabolic. health, longevity, mood. It's not that we should be living out of doors. No one's going to do that, right? People want, we evolved all these ways to live indoors, and they're great, frankly. But brighter mornings, darker night, even in these subtle ways, will help tremendously. Now, there are some people for whom all of that, they'll do all of that and they'll say, I still wake up at two or three in the morning and I can't get back to sleep. And for that, I'm going to offer you a really weird trick. But the reason I'm willing to do this, even as a scientist, is A, there's a scientific basis for it. And B, it works. And it's the following. We know this is a wild trick, but this will get

you back to sleep. It's wild. I know, it's really wild. Well, three. I saw you do it. I know. I have tried it a few times. I know. It looks crazy, but you'll thank you'll thank me later, folks. I promise. And also, what's fun about these things is, like, these are in you, right? This isn't something you have to go purchase, right? You know, I'll be happy if people purchase the book, but frankly, the reason I go on podcasts like this is all the time and is because I just want people to have these tools. I mean, I wish I had known as a kid, as an adult, I can calm myself down fast for a tense moment, just doing a deliberate exhale or even better, a double inhale, long exhale. I can get better sleep because I had sleep issues starting basically in high school in

college. I'd wake, I'd fall asleep, but I'd wake up in the middle of the night. I mean, when we're sleeping well, life is so much better. Getting over traumas, recovery from addiction, dealing with difficult circumstances, but also our ability to do all the things that we know we're supposed to do, like exercise and earn a living and do all those things that we're stri-all-all-strivings get so much easier. So these are the tools I wish I had, but they weren't out there. So the thing that you can do to fall back asleep, I'll just give you the science very briefly first. Anyone that's ever had a kid or held a kid knows that if you rock the kid back and forth and you walk, they fall asleep.

Turns out there's a scientific study of the exact rate of rocking and walking that's ideal for putting babies to sleep. Turns out in adults, believe it or not, scientists are so weird, they did a study using a slow rocking bed and it puts people to sleep. I want one. I know. I'm like, I want one too. but for most people it's not practical and then there was this woman who actually was in she wasn't at stanford but francine shapiro who developed this thing called EMDR which is a trauma treatment where people recount a story while moving their eyes from side to side sounded pretty wacky people made up silly theories that oh that's mimicking rapid eye movement sleep no nothing of the sort turns out

based on now three or four really solid publications that when the eyes are moving from side side to side, for whatever reason, it quiets the activity of this brain region called the amygdala, which is involved in stress, threat detection, and fear, as it's commonly referred to, the fear center. The critical thing for falling asleep is that you be not stressed, but also that you forget about your body position. So it turns out that this rocking motion or the movement of the eyes both suppresses areas of the brain that are involved in threat detection and anxiety and stress, but they also help you forget what's called proprioception, your knowledge of where your limbs are, and that is a requirement for falling asleep.

So there are two things that have happened in the following year. First of all, a group of brilliant scientists at MIT came up with a sleep mask that they're developing now. I have no relationship to this company, but I've tried this mask that creates a very specific eye movement pattern by low-level electrical stimulation that causes you to fall asleep. And I've done it. You fall asleep almost immediately. But the eye movement pattern

is something that you can create yourself. So you close your eyes, you're in bed, you're wide awake. This happened to me last night. I woke up, went to sleep around 10 o'clock, woke up at 3.30, boom, wide awake. I was having some intense dream about some meaningless thing, like so many dreams.

And I thought, I'm wide awake. What do I do? Keep my eyes closed. So under the eyelids, you move your eyes slowly to the left, then to the right, then up, then down. Try and move them counterclockwise, clockwise. I know it sounds crazy. Still with eyes closed.

Kind of point them towards your nose. It's not really crossing your eyes. And then you do a long exhale. When people do this, the typical reaction I get because people write to me is, next thing I know, it was morning. I know that sounds wild. And listen, I wouldn't put this out into the world at this scale if I wasn't confident that doing that one to three times for most people is sufficient for them to get back to sleep. Now, if you're intensely ruminating on something really troubling, you're going to need to do something else.

But very, very often that will do the trick. And these eye masks that are now being developed are just trying to recapitulate that eye movement pattern. That's crazy. All I can think of is the movie The Jerk, you know, where you puts the sunglasses on or the eyeglasses and they've got something. And next thing you know, everybody who tries him is cross-eyed. I hope the masks don't have any weird side effects. But what I just described is entirely safe. Why does it, why does it shut down your proprioception, your knowledge of body position?

I can't help myself, but tell people why. The mechanism is important here because otherwise it becomes a hack, right? And a hack is something that's designed to overcome a problem. Like if these glasses break and I put a paper clip in the corner to fix them, that's a hack. It's not what the paperclip was designed for. It's not a really good solution. It's a temporary solution. The reason this is not a hack, this is grounded in your physiology.

Your eyes have many connections to the brain. Some are designed to tell your brain when it's daytime. Others are designed to let you see colors and shapes and movement of objects like cars. But there's another circuit that goes from your eyes to deep brainstrival. structures that then connects to what's called your mini brain, a little brain in the back of your brain, literally. It looks like another brain called the cerebellum. Most people think of the cerebellum as a balance structure. It's critical for balance. It's also critical for learning. But the cerebellum is also critical for taking your eye movements, understanding where your eyes are, and adjusting

your body position accordingly. When you walk through any environment, office, outdoors, whatever, you don't experience the world as blurry, but if I took a picture on my phone and moved my phone, it would be blurry. How is that? The cerebellum takes your eye position and sends the eyes a message to offset any slip in the visual world. So you see the world as stable as you move your head around.

Amazing. When you move your eyes the way I described under the eyelids, it confuses the cerebellum. There's a map of your body in the cerebellum, and the cerebellum doesn't know how to deal with these, weird eye movements, side to side, round and up and down. And all of a sudden, that

proprioceptive mechanism is shut down. And that's the second step in being able to fall asleep. So lowering your core body temperature, keeping the room cool helps too. Some long exhale breathing before sleep. If you wake up in the middle of the night, keep the room dark.

Yes, get up and use the restroom if you need to. I highly recommend you not look at your phone if you can avoid it. But when you're ready to go back to sleep, do these eye movement. you will find almost certainly that you'll fall back asleep much more easily. And I get thousands of notes every day. Let me hit you with a couple of quick ones, a couple quick ones.

When you say double inhale, can you show us what that is? Is that regular inhales or something else? The two inhales through the nose, the second inhale will be shorter because your lungs are already mostly full and then the exhale through the mouth. This is the fastest way to bring your heart rate down and de-stress in real time. Okay, so unless you're underwater, I can't see a circumstance where you couldn't do this. So you do it the following way until lungs are empty. So it was a long inhale filling your lungs, then one extra.

When you don't think you have extra room, you do one extra. And then a slow exhale through the mouth. Inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth. The reason for that second inhale is important. Your lungs are not just two big bags of air. They have hundreds of millions of little sacks that, actually fill with air. And those little sacks are kind of moist in the middle. And like if you're ever trying to blow up a balloon at a kid's party, sometimes it's easy to blow up the balloon. But

if there are those little water balloons, sometimes what you find is, you know, if you want to put air into a water balloon so you can tie it, right, because you filled it too much, you have to get sometimes two pushes, two exhales, right? So in order to maximally inflate those little sacks, you get that big first inhale and that'll inflate most of them. But then there are a bunch of of them they're collapsed and kind of sticking together from surface tension you do that second inhale they open up they don't burst but they open up great now you can offload more air on the exhale and by and there's a story here also about oxygen coming in and you're offloading carbon dioxide a lot of our stress is about too much carbon dioxide in the blood you know the brain has a set of neurons

again this neuroscience thing is incredible right it's like you have a set of neurons They don't tell you when to breathe because you need more oxygen. They tell you when to breathe when carbon dioxide gets too high. Many people have what's called sleep apnea. They're not getting enough oxygen during sleep or they have daytime apnea. And so they're not getting enough oxygen and there's carbon dioxide levels are too high. There are three reasons why you want to offload carbon dioxide. You need it, but you don't want too much of it building up in your system.

First of all, sleep apnea, snoring, et cetera, severe cardiovascular. and basically brain health issues come from that. Get your snoring fixed. Get that deviated septum fixed. Get the CPAP if you have to. Well, I had friends who had their uvulas cut out and it stopped their snoring. But they said it was very painful.

That's, yeah. I don't know how that works. If that's what it takes, provided it's done by a good surgeon, you know, do that. For some people that are overweight or even the guys who like to lift weights and they have these giant necks, That's actually can create sleep apnea. You don't want to be overly muscled or too much body, but you don't want overly anything,

really. But apnea is bad because of the buildup of carbon dioxide in sleep can, it won't cause dementia, but it certainly predisposes you to it and to heart attack and so forth. But a lot of people during the daytime, they're walking around mouth breathing. As much as you can, only breathe through your mouth when eating or speaking. Now, if you're exercising hard, great to breathe through your mouth. That's fine. But do you like the mouth tape that people are using?

I don't because I have this mustache beard thing and it never stays on. Oh, yeah. So what I do is when I do my low level cardiovascular exercise, like walking, unless I'm on a call or if I'm doing a easy cardiovascular exercise, I restrict myself to nasal breathing. It actually sets you up to be a nasal breather in sleep. You kind of start defaulting to nasal breathing. But if I'm running harder or exercising harder, I definitely breathe through my mouth. The carbon dioxide thing is real in the sense that when you're stressed, there's a buildup of carbon dioxide, which is that's what stimulates the gas reflex.

That's what makes you feel anxious and you can't shut your thoughts down. If you've ever been swimming and, you know, when kids can be so cruel, right, you're swimming, I grew up with a pack of wild heathens and they were just so they were good kids. But, you know, occasionally you'd be swimming. Learned about some of them in the book. Exactly. And you try and come up out of the water. protocols by Dr. Andrew Huberman. You can pre-order yours now.

Go ahead. Keep going. Yeah, you know, you're coming up out of the water and that mean kid holds your head right as you're trying to come up. Listen, you had enough air a moment before that. But that split second is terrifying because you, I can't, your brain knows it needs oxygen. So you have a gas reflex that's looking for oxygen.

There's an oxygen hunger, a breath hunger. When you do this double inhale, long exhale, you reset the carbon dioxide oxygen. oxygen ratios. And it's a wonderful state to be in because you're alert but calm. So let's say you're studying. You're just maybe a good thing to do at any point during the day. Like while you're just sitting there, if you're listening to this program, you could be doing a few of them. Just a couple, you know, one even just deliberate long exhale or the double inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth. The beauty of this, again, is your HRV increases. You become more of a nasal

breather in sleep. Your sleep is deeper. You have less apnea. You'll kind of notice that today, a lot of the things we move from cortisol to light to breathing, a lot of these things are about being alert when you want to be alert, but not too alert, and being asleep when you want to be asleep. In fact, I would argue that as a human, if you can master the ability to be alert but calm by using these tools, long exhales if you need them, bright light to be more alert, if you can learn to turn your brain off and go to sleep, you're going to be a very effective professional, parent, partner, friend,

and your relationship to yourself gets way better because so many of the woes of the world have to do with an inability to self-regulate in order to get sleep. Then self-regulation becomes even harder. Or I'm a big caffeine drinker. Let me just continue my couple questions on this because number of hours people obsessed

seven or eight. A lot of people can't get that. What's the bare minimum per night? Like, people really should be striving for. Okay. So new parents, caretakers, and people who are in very stressful times in their life, I will tell you this. I'm not recommending it. But if you can get that first four hours of sleep, ideally you'd get more, but you will get some growth hormone release, some bodily repair. You can carry on for better, worse, for quite a long while with four to five hours, but you're not setting yourself up for health in the long run. But I say this because I want to be sensitive to the fact that some people are taking care of a sick relative. Some people are in a very stressful life situation where they're raising young kids. You will survive.

I know. And then you're like, you're going to get dementia. You'll survive. You'll survive. You're going to survive. It's a very unfortunate message. You'll survive. Once the kids are sleeping better, you'll sleep better. Like, you will survive. You can, you'll be okay. You don't want to do this for decades on end or even for, you know, five years on end, but you will be okay. For most people, they need somewhere between seven and eight. I feel pretty darn good at six. Developing kids probably need eight or nine. When you're battling an illness, nine or ten is not abnormal and is healthy. But if you only need six hours and you feel great on six, God bless you. Keep going with... Don't stress.

Do not stress that you need to get more sleep than you need. One thing that's critical, however, is if you are having trouble with sleep and you're napping in the daytime, you need to stop napping. When you get sleepy because of the buildup of a molecule called adenosine, and when you nap, you shave off some of that adenosine from your brain and body, which is good. You come out more alert. But at night, you want to create the real fatigue at the end of your day so that you're tired. That's why exercise is great. That's why napping in the daytime is bad for people who have trouble sleeping.

I have a whole section in the book, believe it or not, on napping. At one point I thought to myself, I'm teaching people out a nap. This is crazy. But if you need a nap, 20 minutes should really be the limit so that you don't cause sleep inertia, which is the tiredness coming out of the nap, but also that you're not eroding your nighttime sleep. There's also, and I put some reference to this in the book, even just sitting down and quietly doing a few exhales and just closing your eyes, not looking at your phone for, believe it or not, make it 60 seconds, three minutes, you'll come out of that feeling some

renewed vigor. The problem is nowadays, I'm a big consumer of media. I love media. But every moment is filled with more information coming in. So I'm talking about things that take on the order of minutes across the entire day, costs nothing. Think about the last time you called a business and no one picked up. What did you do? You called the next one on the list. Customers do the exact same thing when they are reaching out to you, which is why I want to tell you about Quo, spelled QUO. It's the business phone system built so that you never miss a call. Quo brings all calls, texts, and voicemails into one organized hub so anyone on the team can view full conversation histories and respond quickly. Setup takes just minutes on any device. Keep existing

business numbers and add team members seamlessly with zero IT hassles. Plus, Quo Quo's optional built-in AI agent will handle your after-hours calls by answering questions and booking appointments, ensuring no lead ever slips away. It also integrates directly with everyday tools like HubSpot to save time. Trusted by over 90,000 businesses, Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2. Keep every connection alive and look professional every day. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free plus get 20% off off your first six months when you go to quo.com slash mk. That's QUO.com slash mk. I take it from this discussion you are against falling asleep to an audio book or a

podcast. Yes and no. So after now, you know, six years of doing public health science education, I've come to the place where I, you know, I was a years ago, I took kids backpacking in Yosemite. That was my summer job. And you learned something working with teenagers, which is be a channel, not a damn. And it turns out that you want to do the same with adults. If listening to a podcast or having the news on helps you fall asleep, I actually suggest you keep doing it.

I do. Okay. But if you're waking up four hours later and having a hard time getting back to sleep, you might want to think about how the light from the screen or that noise might be impacting you. Pete, you know, this whole thing of listening to stuff out of interest is one thing. But when we're listening to podcasts while we sleep or we are leaving the TV on, I think it reflects a much bigger. I was asked myself as a scientist, why are people doing this?

And I think they're doing it because it's hard to turn our thoughts off. You know, one of the practices I talk about, and I'm happy to share now, I talk about in the book, I'm happy to share now, is this practice of non-sleep deep rest, which sounds like meditation, sounds like a nap, but it's not. You know, one of the great super skills in life that I wish I had had years ago is the following. Some people have what's called, can really, we call it low activation energy, meaning they have a lot of get up and go. You say, let's do this. They get up and do it. They go, go. They're ambitious.

They're doing sports. They're doing this. Those people tend to be the same people that have a hard time turning their mind off. Other people have the motivation issue. I don't have an issue with sleep. I just like, I have an issue with motivation. Procrastination is an issue, right? that's what they say people who are getting after it they're exercising etc they're thinking about

business family they want to man they the woes of the world or even just the small things are are you know circulating in their head need to learn to get the mind out of thinking and doing and planning and spend a few minutes in order to fall asleep in just pure sensation and there's a practice that was actually developed in india thousands of years ago called yoga nidra which means yoga, sleep. It involves no movement where you do, this won't come as a surprise now. I call it non-sleep deep rest, but you take a few minutes during the day and you could do it sitting or lying down and you close your eyes. You do a few long exhales to slow your heart rate down. And instead of meditating by trying to maintain focus on, you know, between your forehead

or instead of trying to clear your mind, that's almost impossible to do, right? Clear your mind? No, impossible. It's like the don't think of the elephant. You know, you can't not think of it. Instead, you migrate your thoughts like a spotlight around your body, your feet, the other foot, your knee, the other knee, your heart, your body. And what you're doing there is you're occupying just enough of the brain's attention that it makes it very easy to do. You're not trying to turn off your thoughts, but what ends up happening is you stop thinking and planning and you start just going into pure sensation. And when you do that, the brain goes into, we now know from really good science, goes into this kind of liminal state between a sleep and awake, and little pockets of the brain

start mimicking sleep. Three things happen when you come out of this practice. And it could be five minutes, could be 10 minutes, could be 20. There are a lot of these non-sleep deep breasts scripts out on the internet now, some with my voice, some with much more pleasant voices, and so on. They're all zero cost. And you emerge from it feeling mentally and physically restored. that's interesting.

Learning of physical information, cognitive information is enhanced in people that do this. You could do this once a week, three times a week, or daily. It takes very little time. And people's ability to fall asleep gets better. People recover from traumatic experiences better. What's going on here? What is going on? What's going on is threefold.

First of all, we now know that in these states of deep relaxation that are not meditation and are not a nap. There's a clear out of debris from the brain. This is called glymphatic clearance. We don't have time to go into the mechanisms, but there's a clearance of all the stuff of cellar metabolism in the brain. Ammonia, carbon dioxide, cellar debris. The ability to clear that stuff out has been shown

to offset the development of dementia, reduces the likelihood of dementia, helps you maintain brain function. In addition, and some people will just, I usually find that people, this is the one that really gets people. If you've ever had a poor night's sleep, you know those bags under your eyes? Not yours, but I'm speaking metaphorically here. You certainly don't have this.

Whatever you're doing, you're doing all the right things, clearly. But when we've all had experience of- If I do, we have the wrong lighting in here. Well, I don't believe that. But in any case, if you've ever had one poor night's sleep, you look in the mirror and you go, oh, my God, what is that? Have you ever wondered why then two days later after you've slept well? You're back to great.

What happened? turns out it's the buildup of glimph, this lymphatic fluid under the eyes, and in the eyes, you can even see in somebody that hasn't slept well. Their eyes don't quite look right. There's actually lymphatic, lymphatic clearance from the eyes. So these practices of deep relaxation, as well as sleep where the majority of this clearance of this waste product and the glymphatic clearance occurs, you can build in these micropractices throughout the day or just one minute or five minutes of doing this and you're offsetting dementia, you come out of it mentally and physically restored, you don't have the sleep inertia, the groginess of a nap, and we're finding that people

learn faster. It's great for stress mitigation. I mean, there's myriad benefits. Again, which is called protocols, you write about, you can listen to a scripted NSDR session, non-sleep, deep rest, scripted. So where can we find that? What's that? Is that like on YouTube? Yeah, you can find these on YouTube, Apple, Spotify. You can download them completely free. Download them to your phone so you don't even any Wi-Fi connection. You can be on the plane or wherever. You put a bunch of them that I really like.

You go to Hubermanlab.com slash n-S-D-R. Or you could simply do a web search and just put n-S-DR. For a really pleasant woman's voice, my friend Kelly Boys, B-O-Y-S, does wonderful NSDRs. She's in the waking-up app also. There's some with my voice. You can find some. There's a guy named Liam Gillen, who has this. My sister really likes his Irish voice.

I think she has a bit of a crush on him, if I'm honest. Sorry to my sister. But she loves his voice. She's like, he has the best voice. She does Liam's. And these are so simple. They cost nothing. And by the way, the reason I renamed Yoganidra NSDR and put these scripts out into the world is

I intentionally took away all the intentions, the mysticism. I want to acknowledge the people that initially developed yoga nidra. But when people hear yoga nidra and then they hear they have to do intentions, that takes it. I'm not sure my truckers are into it. Exactly. That takes away from the practice. And it's sort of like the word hypnosis.

I have a colleague at Stanford who does medical hypnosis, incredible success rates at a smoking cessation, pain modulation, even outcomes from cancer treatment. But I always tell them, you need to read. brand this thing because in his hands, hypnosis is rapid brain plasticity, rewiring of the brain. But people hear hypnosis and they think stage hypnosis and people squawking like chickens. So what I'm talking about here, whether it's cortisol or darkness, light, breathing, exhales, non-sleep deep breaths, I really want to emphasize what I'm talking about is taking your God-given physiology, okay, the cells and circuits in your brain and body that you were

endowed with and just putting them to their best use for your health. That's the whole story. In the book I get into, I do talk about supplements and pharmaceuticals. I talk about nicotine, both benefits and risks. I talk about how one can, if you like to have a drink or two, how you can do that and not disrupt your sleep or health as much. At least eight to 10 hours before you go to bed. Ten hours. You're in favor of the Dardy is basically what we're learning. This is the college terms for the day party. I think you got to keep that shit well away from The time is go, you go to bed. I don't drink.

I did it in my past. I don't drink now. But I understand people like, there are people like alcohol. Have your glass of wine. But then do a couple of things, simple things like I just described, to get your sleep, to keep your sleep good or great. We actually don't know whether the negative effects of alcohol, I'm going to talking about low amounts of alcohol, could very well be due to the disruption that alcohol has on sleep.

So do a few other things. And look, if you go out and have. a bunch of drinks with your friends and you're safe about it, you're non-alcoholic and you're of age, like, you're going to be okay. You're going to be okay. I think that some people have taken my podcast in my book to mean that like everything has to be very rigid. I start off the book by saying, listen, true optimization is about accepting who you are and what you are and are not going to do and then trying to get the most vigor and enjoyment out of life and most life while also having the occasional sleepless night, sometimes due to crisis, sometimes due to,

a celebration. That's life. This is a remind me something recently having on X. You may have seen it. You know, Brian Johnson, the don't die guy, who's been on this show. He posted, and he knows he's going to get hit for these things. So I kind of admire his honesty. But he posted, last night, I had dinner at a restaurant. I asked for caffeine-free coffee. I'm convinced they brought me caffeinated. The sleep protocol was off. I could not do my morning dunk session, which I think, think is related to basketball. I think he means actual dunking. Although I don't know with Brian Johnson, you never know. They had to cancel it because my whole evening and day were

disrupted. And the responses were so funny. One of them was basically, um, Michael Jordan once had 10 beers and then played a game in which he scored 50 points. And then went on to do a round of golf at which he was like X under par. It's like, we have weakened ourselves. And this is a man-to-man situation to the point beyond shame. You should be able to have one night of a cup of coffee and not post about it and the whole next day's activities are off. Like, come on. We actually are somewhat resilient. Yes.

So a couple of brief points about that. I know, Brian. So, yes, X is an environment where you don't want to show weakness. Um, you, uh, most certainly if you're going to make exercise claims, you need to put videos. And if you put videos, um, don't confuse, uh, you know, you have to, you have to use proper form and full, full range of motion or the guys are going to hammer you, right? Like it's a very, and there should be a third party in your life, someone who doesn't love or work for you, who approves of said video before it gets posted. So Brian's, you know, when Brian put that out there,

I think there's three phenomenon going on. One is, um, uh, you know, I look at Brian's content, I think he's mostly generating entertainment content for people. I mean, his takeaways about sleep, I think, are very valid. But it's more of a caricature of longevity, in my opinion. If I'm honest, I think that, you know, most people are not going to do all the things he's doing. And then he has this chronic chronic disease, which kind of undercut the story. But anyway, listen, I think it's great that he's out there, just like I think it's great that Matt Cabraline's out there and Eric Topol.

you need, this is one thing that people really need to understand about health and longevity in the online communities. In science, in medicine, and I observed this in the world of skateboarding and action sports, you need a community that represent the sort of different extremes, right? In skateboarding, we have our Tony Hawk, we had my friend Danny Way, who jumped the great wall of China. You need the variety of characters, right? And in science, you see this too. I don't have time to go into it now, but I can, grew up in science and you get a lot of characters and you need the battles, you need all that. But at the end of the day, people are after truth. And some things end up being more for entertainment purposes. And the take up and that's fine. And if it gets people paying attention to the space,

so be it. Right. Okay, let me keep it going. I have a question for you as a neuroscientist about OCD because I, maybe it's just my anecdotal impression, but I feel like it's growing. I feel like I don't know a mom or dad that doesn't have a kid with this or that isn't doing it themselves. I've got a little bit of this in my own life, not like hand washing, but just like repetitive movements or counting in my own head. And yet I don't think of myself as an anxious person. I don't feel any active anxiety pretty much ever. But I do have a tinge of this. So is that a neuroscientist thing and might some of these techniques?

Because you're big into stress management in the book. There are tons of tools for stress management. And I don't know how you'd classify that. Is that stress? What is that? Yeah, a great question. So whether we're talking about ADHD or OCD, we need to separate the sort of the semblance of those things that many, many, many people have in as normal versus the full-blown pathology.

So the clinical definition of OCD is when the compulsion, the behavior actually doesn't suppress the obsession, it makes it worse. So people who have true OCD, they feel like they need to wash their hands. They wash their hands and then they feel like they need to do it more. They feel like they need to count. They count, then they feel like they need to do it more. And it's maddening. It is a, it is a, they are stricken.

And they'll do it until their hands are raw. They'll pull, there's the hair pulling version of it. There's some very, very severe manifestations of this. But OCD in that form is just an extreme version of something that many, many people have. Just like, I'll give it. another example, if you go to a bridge and you think, oh my gosh, like, what's keeping me from jumping off? Or people have thoughts and they go, oh, my goodness, like, why did I have that thought? That's actually a healthy reflection of your ability to suppress action and thoughts, right? You're not

going to act on those things. It's perfectly normal. Now, when we're tired, when we are stressed, symptoms of OCD and people that don't have full-blown clinical OCD can worsen. Now, I know these days, for understandable reason, there's a lot of concern about SSRIs. And I agree that when you look at the data, it's clear that many, many, too many adults and children were medicated with SSRIs. But I will say, in fairness to the scientific literature, SSRIs have greatly helped people with severe OCD. OCD, we know, is associated with an overgrowth of a particular brain area in what's called a circuit called the basal ganglia. It's involved in action and suppressing action. and a brilliant scientist at NIH named Judith Rappaport discovered this years ago.

Remember, prior to the 90s, like when I started learning about neuroscience, I claim no discovery here, but it was thought that this was all psychological or like bad parenting or, you know, or trauma-based, of which it can be, but we know this is a brain issue. So those drugs in the proper hands and proper dosages can really help people, as can behavioral treatments. Okay. In people like you, I'm assuming you don't have full-blown clinical OCD, basically. on what you told me or people who say, I can't pay a tent. I just like when I, well, I noticed like when I was practicing law where I was working all

the time and not getting a lot of sleep, whenever I was walking on the streets of New York, I was counting my steps or when I'd go up or down a staircase, I would count the number of stairs. Like little things where just pop up here or there in your day where you're, then you're like, why am I counting? What am I doing, right? Something like that. It's a great question. So, and then, you know, in some cultures, they worry beads, right?

where people are constantly moving the beads in their hands to sort of dispel some of the energy. I will venture a guess here, an educated guess, that you have a lot of energy. You're a focused person. You're always looking for ways that you can do better and be better and so on. And people like that, when there's not a task right in front of them, tend to have a lot of energy pouring into the system. The same way that I've always had Bulldog Mastiff Muts. and they love to run, then they're lazy, but if you don't give them enough exercise,

they start gnawing on their paw. They start, they need to chew. We all have our chew, right? A bulldog needs to gnaw, a retriever needs to retrieve, a rat terrier needs to look for things. And as humans, we have these tendencies where our brain circuits become, thankfully, asymmetric towards learning, teaching, communicating.

Look, you're in front of the public eye, virtually every single day. And it's high stakes, right? And so your system learns to relax in that. You are a high-level professional athlete, thinker, communicator, learn, or doer. And so when you're walking down the street, it's hard to just switch brain modes to, oh, I'm just walking down the street. Now I'm just going to be in my most chill form.

And so the brain starts looking for things to do. Count. Think about things. Sometimes listening to a podcast or a book can help. it's very hard to turn the brain off. And it's actually not advantageous for you to walk out of a meeting or this podcast, walk to lunch. And during that walk to lunch, you're just completely decompressed. And then you eat your lunch and then you come back and you snap back on.

The brain doesn't work in what we call step wave function, it's square wave functions. You don't go from asleep, awake, awake to a sleep. There are these transition states. So when you're walking down the street and you're thinking, I'm kind of obsessing about that, why? Well, there's some carryover from the previous thing. Just like if you were, you know, waking up, you don't immediately feel wide awake and ready to go about your day. There's some, you know, there's some shifting of circuits. And actually, in the final chapter of the book, I talk about tools for tasks switching.

You know, many people find that they can't focus. But actually, their challenges in dropping the mindset from the previous thing to be able to focus. For you and me who do public facing work, it's a requirement, right? Our phones aren't out. You know, we have to be locked in, but I bet within 10 minutes of ending this, like one of us will pick up our phone, most likely. And so that's normal. It's healthy, but don't expect your brain to shut off completely.

And I'll just weave one other thing in here. Many people are having attention issues these days. There's a study that was done recently that shows that if your phone is upside down on the table in front of you or it's in your bag under your chair, completely turned off, you have a harder time focusing compared to if it's in a different room. But it turns out you can focus if it's on the table or it's underneath your chair.

The problem is it takes more mental resources and you give up what is essentially intelligence, cognitive flexibility and creativity. So there's a cost. But more importantly, if you're used to looking at your phone every three minutes or so, when your phone is not there,

every three minutes or so or less, your brain gets distracted. with no distraction. The brain learns these rhythms of the sun comes up in the morning. It goes down at night. I'm alert in the morning because I got my morning sunlight or one of these 10,000 lux lights. I dim the lights. This is something we call entrainment. And the beauty of this is that if you take everything we've talked about and you do it for a couple of days, the bright lights and the bright mornings, darker nights, you try and limit your phone for just fight the impulse, just every other time to reach for just for an extra 10 seconds. What happens is you naturally start to feel more alert

when you wake up in the morning even before you got the light in your eyes. I always get the question, how come I wake up one minute before my alarm clock? Guess why? Because that rise in cortisol is what wakes you up and that is entrained to your alarm clock. Now you can entrain it to sunlight also and guess what? On the day when you miss it because it's really dreary out in the northeast, you'll still feel plenty alert. And at night... I'm going to start texting you pictures of me in January outside.

Great. Saying, damn that, Andrew Huberman. Listen, I will be happy to gift you a 10,000 Lux Artificial Light. I send them to people who say, I'm just not going to go outside. I'm just not going to go outside. I'm not going to do it. Just flip on all the screens,

some music or just wake yourself up. You will find that bookending your day in this way and just understanding a bit about my brain is doing something normal and healthy here. I'm counting things. I have a little bit of a superstitious streak. I get it. And it's our brain's attempt to have some control,

but also just to take this attention, this energy that we have and put it someplace. And dogs need it, humans need it. We need more focus and we need deeper sleep and brighter days and all of that. But I also want to emphasize, we need to be human. You need to enjoy your life, right?

I think people saw the Brian thing and they I think he did do it more for entertainment purposes. And we said we're out. And it's like, look, most people sleep to prepare for the next day. Clearly he spends his days preparing to sleep. It's just an inversion of the life design. But most people are not going to do that. So he's going to live forever for what? Yeah.

That's not living. Thank God at least he has a girlfriend now, the girl who's been helping him do his online posts. So that's a plus for Brian. Let me ask you a question about on the question. of light, the issue of light. Expose your skin and eyes to long wavelength light. And you say it can be red light near infrared and infrared. Now, I feel like I've heard you talk about this, but I can't remember these specifics because red light is becoming more and more popular. Like women are doing it, red light therapy on their face for, you know, even skin tone and so on. Some men are doing

infrared or, you know, saunas. What is the story with your eyes, exposing your eyes to red light or infrared light? Yeah. So the best, zero cost, but perfect source of long wavelength light, meaning red light and infrared light. Infrared light is the warmth,

the warmth from the sun is sunlight, right? God built us the perfect light device for our mitochondria, for our skin, for our hormone health, et cetera. There's only one problem. You can't do it on your schedule. You have to do it on the sun's schedule because what you want is the long wavelength light. So these are the yellows, oranges, reds, and then outpass red is infrared, right? We can't see it, but we can feel it.

That's the stuff that's great for our mitochondria and that my colleague, Glenn Jeffrey, University College London, and I've known him for decades, did these studies. As I mentioned earlier, shine. You get that light on your skin or you even. through a T-shirt or light shirt and your metabolism is improved. But it also turns out that if you're 40 or older, if you get this long wavelength light on your skin or ideally in your eyes, you can do that from the morning sunlight viewing or afternoon sunlight viewing, sunset viewing, you help repair the cells in the back of the eyes called the photoreceptors.

These are the cells that take photons of light, convert them into electrical energy, that allows you to see. And you can offset what he showed in that study was that you can offset some of the age-related vision loss. You also offset myopia, which is nearsightedness. Now, I had to start wearing readers recently because of writing this book, because I was spending so much time up close to a screen,

when you look at things too close up for, and you don't see horizons very much, you're not looking at a distance very much, the eyeball lengthens. And the visual image lands in front of the light-sensing portion of the eye, not on it. That's what corrective lenses do. They bring the light point to focus onto the right location. There is a true epidemic of myopia, of near-sightedness. And the data on kids and their

data emerging on adults too is that if kids just take their tablets, computers outside, if you get outside more, you offset this. So the long wavelength light turns out to be the key. sunlight is full spectrum you have uv short wavelength medium and long wavelength and the balance is key you don't want too much uv because it can indeed damage your skin there's a lot of debate nowadays about how much sunlight you need some uv for vitamin d production and for mood and health but you don't want to get a sunburn and indeed it can cause accelerated aging the skin if you're getting too much uv we could talk about that if you like but getting some long wavelength light from sunlight or and or i would say you could get a red light, like a red light LED device. You could use a red incandescent light. We don't have a lot of

farmers out. But don't put goggles on? You could put so, so in the evening, I will put on short wavelength blocking glasses. They look red tinted, but that's to block the short wavelengths. But when you're out during the day, you're getting a lot of long wavelength light penetrating the skin. It's benefiting you and it's benefiting your eyes. But the study showed this offset of age-related vision loss is when people get enough long wavelength light. And if you're indoors, he's in England. So that study was done where people are spending a lot of time indoors. They're under LED lights, which we all use now, because they're more energy efficient, candlelight will do it. So if you like candles in the evening or if you have a fire in the fireplace, or here's a cool trick, the farmers taught me this.

They have an inexpensive solution to all this. You get what they call it a pig light. It's a red incandescent bulb. and it supplies long wavelength light. Farmers knew this. It's very interesting, actually, as I've written this book. So you don't have to stare at the bulb. You just have to be near it. It fills the room.

And the beauty of long wavelength light is that it bounces off surfaces all over. So you don't have to be looking right at it. If you can get outside in a green space, if I were to give you infrared glass goggles, like the special operators wear, you would notice that everything green was glowing white. And that's because the long wavelength light

is bouncing off it. It's getting reflected down on you. There's wonderful work showing that recovery from surgery, recovery from illness, staving off illness, including upper respiratory infections, skin health, eye health, longevity is get that long wavelength light. The key is to not get too much UV because that can be damaging. So that's why sunlight can be a little tricky. Yeah, but infrared saunas are great if you can afford one. An infrared incandescent light is great. an LED panel. They tend to be pretty expensive. But the incandescent lights are not terribly expensive.

And as I've talked to more and more farmers, they laugh, right? They're like, I get up with the sun. I go outside. I'm carrying stuff. I'm doing work. I'm drinking my coffee. Then I have breakfast afterwards. I might catch a quick nap in the afternoon,

but I have to go out in the evening, take the animals in, take care of things. I'm not suggesting we go back to living that way, but they nailed it. They nailed it. It wasn't so bad. They nailed all the light, like dark stuff. It's funny, though, when you mentioned the candlelight, in law school, we had to sit alphabetically.

So the guy next to me on the one side was named Andy Kelly. And Andy Kelly was starting to lose his close-up vision, you know, from all the reading in law school and so on. And he told me at the time that he reversed it by staring at candlelight. And I remember being like, really? Is that even possible? And he swore it was possible. And here I am sitting across from Huberon in hearing. Yeah, it's possible.

I mean, I think the highly processed food conversation for the next two years, you're going to hear two things I anticipate will be really big in the health space. Cortisol will no longer be seen as this stress hormone. It will be seen as the thing to leverage high morning, low at night. I hope to play a role in that. The other thing that you're going to hear quite a lot about is how all these LED lights, which are incredibly energy efficient. I mean, how often do you have to change a light bulb nowadays, hardly ever? The problem is they're short wave length shifted. it's not the blue light, it's that there isn't enough long wavelength light.

So we're going to hear about supplementing with long wavelength light. That does not mean you have to buy a red light panel. Candlelight, fireplace, get outside when the sun is low in the sky, either near sunrise or near sunset. Get that long wavelength light immensely beneficial, also for mental health and for physical health. It's so interesting that so many of the things we're talking about in health are about undoing the damage from the lifestyle and technologies that we've built. But there's also just a lot of, you know, this notion that, oh, we used to be scared of saber-toothed tigers, and that's why we stress. No, I mean, 10,000 years ago, I guarantee that people were concerned about their loved ones when they went off to hunt or gather. Relationships had issues.

Kids got sick. Stress has always been a part of life. The key is to teach yourself how to de-stress, to get great sleep, turn your mind off, get focused and alert. And I'm a consumer of caffeine. and if you want, we could talk about nicotine. But these are just skills that take minutes, if that, to learn because they work the first time and every time. You notice there's no learning curve in anything I'm saying.

I'm not saying, listen, if you go outside for three days in a row, then these cells will learn it's morning. No, the first time you do it, it works. We've all heard those radio ads about owing money to the IRS. They try to scare you and push you into calling out of fear. But tax relief advocates takes a different approach. If you owe the IRS 5,000, 50,000, or even 500,000, TRA has real solutions to fix your tax problem. Don't lose hope.

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only on the Megan Kelly Channel, SiriusXM 111 and on the Sirius XM app. The book spends a fair amount of time talking about focus, motivation, and learning. Chapter 6, you go deep on that. So if you need better focus in your life, if you need motivation. But the learning thing was interesting to me.

Protocol 3, I wanted to talk about, embrace errors. There's a whole long bit in the book about embracing errors, saying they embrace the fact that errors are an essential, trigger for learning. Errors that come from genuine attempts to learn something are the signal for plasticity to occur. This is true for all forms of skill development, cognitive, motor,

musical, mathematical, et cetera. So whether you're learning a sport, a musical instrument, or history, or news, for that matter, making errors in the process of learning is critical. So can you expand on that? Yes. So if I could put a banner across the sky, I would want people to understand the following message. The agitation you feel from not being able to do something through a genuine attempt, so not throwaway errors, that agitation is the reflection of the release of certain molecules, we call them neuromodulators in the brain and body, that tell your nervous system you need to change to close the gap between what you're trying to do and what you currently can do. We don't tell kids this.

We don't tell adults this. And so we think the friction that comes from the attempt to learn that that somehow is signaling that we're in the wrong place. No, if you think about it logically, if your nervous system could do something, if your brain could do it, if your body could do it, why would it change? It wouldn't. And we've been so captivated by this concept of flow, which is a big thing. beautiful concept. But this idea of, you know, forgetting ourselves and just being able to do the skill. I mean, this is unfortunately the consequence of science fiction and movies where somebody gets the sword. They drink the drink. They are wake up and, you know, they get hit by lightning

and now they have superpowers. Like, damn that Harry Potter, right? You know, like, no, that's not how it works. That's this thing called fantasy. The way it works is that you know nothing. You know nothing. you go from unskilled to skilled, skill to mastery, mastery, to virtuosity. How do you do that? You make genuine attempts to do something. In order to do that, you have to be alert and focused. So you have to learn to focus. And I talk about that in that chapter.

Then you can't do it. That's the signal your nervous system needs to change. You get some rest from sleep or non-sleep deep rest, ideally both. And you come back a day or two later and you can sort of do the thing. Huh, amazing. We all know this to be true, but it turns out the errors of the signal to your nervous system that needs to change. But your nervous system doesn't know error. It knows that it's, your nervous system speaks to the neurons speak to each other in electricity and chemicals. So agitation and that low level stress. So alert but calm, but a little bit stressed, that signals it's time to

change. Here's the best way to think about it. If you've ever played that game, hot hands, where your hands are on top of someone else's hands and the person underneath is going to flip their hands over and hit your hands. That's the level of attention and kind of alertness that you need to learn. That just, to me, describes it perfectly. So you're not stressed, but you're not too relaxed either. So you have to be wrapped with attention and looking for something, ready for something, trying to throw the dart to the bullseye,

trying to, you know, hit the, you know, sink the ball, trying to learn the language. So you have to pay attention. There's only so much you can do in a given learning. I call them learning bouts because it should feel like a fight with yourself. And if you're too stressed, you can't do it. Now, there's even studies that show that if you take a drug like propranol, beta blocker, conventional beta blocker, after you try to learn something, you don't learn it.

Because the adrenaline, the adrenaline in your body and norapinephrine in your brain are two of the key neuromodulators for learning. This is why, unfortunately, traumatic experiences and fortunately are one trial learning. If you step off the curb and a car almost hits you, okay, you can probably go about your day, okay, but you have a changed relationship to that location. Okay. And what happened was there was a lot of adrenaline and trauma comes about when there's so much adrenaline that it grabs memories that are unassociated with the event. So now the sound of cars just gets you ramped up. Doesn't matter if the car is driving away from you. The walking out on the street gets you ramped up. And then the process is of also of plasticity where you have to

unlearn it triggering. You have to unlearn the emotion. So now we every form of trauma therapy, whether it's, you know, EMDR or its talk therapy is about getting you into a calmer emotional state while recounting the event. You're not going to forget the thing. It's about peeling off the emotional load. So when you want to learn something, what I call self-directed adaptive plasticity, a bunch of words,

but to distinguish it from bad plasticity because brain damage is a form of plasticity, but it's not one you want. But when you're trying to learn something, you have to be alert so you can be focused. I talk about ways to do that. Should you or should you not use caffeine or nicotine? Should you or should you not take a cold shower first?

Well, the best way to get alert is to have a good night, sleep the night before. But caffeine helps too, hydration helps too. And if you really care about something, that helps too, right? Even kids with severe ADHD can concentrate on their favorite video game. We know this. They don't have a focus issue. They have a focus on things they don't like issue.

Adults as well. This is important. And then you focus and then you have to try and do something. I'm trying, I'm trying. And people, I hear it all the time. I'm not good at that. I'm not good at that. Why?

I don't know. It stresses me out. Great. now's the opportunity to learn. One of the reasons why exercise helps your brain. There are many reasons. Helps with better oxygenation of the brain, better sleep, et cetera. But one of the reasons that you learn so much better in the four or five hours after exercise is that it makes you more alert because you have epinephrine and norephenephrine circulating in your brain and body. So a lot of the positive effects of exercise are, it's true, I should say, that yes, exercise makes your brain better. But really,

it should be exercise gives you the opportunity to learn you don't get smarter by exercising anyone that's known like a pure jock can attest to that that's a joke against my jock friends but the but anyone that just exercises isn't getting smarter that's not true it makes you the opportunity to learn because you come out of that exercise provided you didn't exhaust yourself we're not talking two hours of squats or something you come out of that exercise and you feel different you why what is that dopamine epinephrine norephyne the so-called catacolamines that cocktail of neurochemicals primes you for learning so 2026 27 come out of exercise maybe you read for a moment maybe you sit and do some emotional learning you know some people are trying to be a better spouse they're trying to be better to themselves

and this sounds so silly right but to sit there and think you know i'm going to try and be a little bit kinder to myself today or to other people it sounds really squishy right but if you're in a certain state of mind, it actually works. It carries over. But just telling yourself, I'm going to be a nicer person is like saying, you know, I'm going to be kinder to myself. That's about as effective as telling yourself, you know, I'm going to learn fluent Japanese by saying I'm going to learn fluent Japanese. No, it's the state that you're in when you set that intention to learn. It's the state that you're in when you arrive at the learning. And so we can all learn new things. It's just a function. of being alert, being focused, and getting into that agitation, and then going and doing

something else, and you'll come back better. You will, you will master that skill over time. Well, you write about personal growth in the book, and I was actually just talking about this with my audience. I've mentioned it many times. People generally know it. But I was saying, and this is in your book as well, you, like, in my view, the less time spent thinking about the past the better. I just, I try to stay away from it. And I've had a great life. It's not because I had a ton of trauma. I had some things, but I definitely don't ruminate on them. And when I start going to them, I try to get myself off of them and I can pretty quickly. I just find no good comes from it. And I'm trying to teach my kids that same skill. Like there's really no point in just

ruminating or going back or reliving some unfortunate moment. The less time spent thinking about it, the better, and kind of the same about the future. Like some, some planning is required to exist on this earth and make something out of yourself. You know, you have to figure out if you want to take a big vacation in June and it's December, you might need to buy an airline ticket and so on. But the best thing for happiness is to be in the present. And they say that all the time now. And it is harder, it's easier said than done. But you've got some tips in the book, which I thought were quite clever. Again, the book is called Protocols by Andrew Huberman right here. You can get it on pre-order right now. It's coming out soon. And I thought these were clever, like questions that you

can ask about your environment that will bring you right into the room unavoidably. Yeah, the past. Okay, two most dangerous words in the English language are if only. I stand by that. I didn't say that. Someone once said that to me. You cannot live in if only. that that that that is death that that is spiritual death that's uh so that i'll just leave there as a to me a hard truth i will say i'll put it a different way as my as my dear friend always says the past is like your ass behind you so um being the data that's a good one the the data definitely say large-scale data sets definitely say that being present um correlates with happiness. And that's true, even if you're in unpleasant, present circumstances.

So you're with someone who's sick in the hospital. Interesting. Try not to distract yourself, but you need to sleep to be a great caretaker. So I have to, I'm going to put two caveats and then total agreement. The first caveat is there's a section in the book, when I talk about data from this guy named James Pennebaker, who developed a tool called expressive writing, where if you're having, if there's something in the back of your mind that you can't shake, an experience you cannot shake, a time when you experience shame or a trauma, there are now tens of thousands of quality studies showing that if you take 15 minutes, but just 15, not more, and you write about that four days in a row, by the end of the fourth day, you will have significantly

offloaded a lot of the emotional load of that thing. So I want to be fair to that. So if there's something that, like, I use the term sometimes that, you know, there are these past experiences that are kind of like barbed wire. Like, they're painful to get off and they're painful to stay on. I mean, you know, so that Pennebaker exercise costs nothing. You can tear up the paper afterwards. Actually, it suggests you do, but you do it four days in a row.

You will feel significantly better. Say the data. Pretty incredible. Writing does seem to be important. the handwriting it out set a timer do it you will come out of that first session not feeling great but you'll move about your day symptoms of health immune system function improves they've done all the measures of biology and psychology that one would want to see and it's really impressive okay so that that aside the other thing is i'll just mention a saying i didn't come up with but that i love

is and it's harsh but the difference between winners and losers is the following Losers take things that happen to them, happen to them, or that they did, that they wish they hadn't done. And they take the negative feelings around those things and they use it for self or outward destruction. Winners, I think we would all agree, take the hard things that happen to them as well as the gifts they've been given. They think about them as much as they need to, but then they transmute that, those experiences, maybe years of experience into things that are good for them and for the world. Period. End of story.

I know it's harsh, winners and losers. But let's face it, most of the bad stuff in the world is because people are taking bad stuff that happen to them and doing bad stuff. They feel justified in doing it. There's some full-blown psychosis type stuff. But let me just interject quickly.

Last week we watched the Novak Djokovic documentary, The Wolf of Winter. He's impressive. Which is, I think, on Netflix right now. And of course, he's like, he's the goat, and that's saying something in the world of tennis, because there are others who are just right there with him. But he's got the most wins when it comes to grand slams, which is how they measure it. So the movie, it's two hours long, is very good. But Djokovic is a controversial

guy, or was very controversial when he started in the tennis world because he was less mature. He did some mocking of other players. He suddenly got injured in matches that he was losing when he was younger. And this turned a lot of people on him. And for years, he was booed. He was never the favorite. They created a rivalry and tennis between Federer and Nadal. Jokovic wasn't part of it, even though he was up and coming and then very much was in it with those two.

But would be the lesser than he has a line in his documentary. Table for three, please. But they weren't giving this to him because he was never the favorite. And what Djokovic talked about was there's something in Serbian culture called Init that makes you thrive on that. And people who aren't Serbian or don't have that natural mindset couldn't understand that all those booze and treating him like a second-class citizen and making him feel like odd man out,

even when he was number one in the world, only fueled him to win more. And in fact, he's somebody who kind of needs it in order to win. So all of his detractors were inadvertently helping him. Now it's changed. he's beloved and he's matured and he's totally likable in this documentary entirely. But in any event, when you talk about that, that's what I'm thinking of, somebody who takes what could be traumatizing for someone else, being openly booed by the entire stadium at the

Australian Open, which you've won something like 16 times and where you should be a king, because you leave after getting seriously hurt. This is later in his career. Openly booed? What? you could be talking about that as your trauma on a self-help show. Instead, it's fuel for him and it's a positive. So this is what you're talking about. Look, it goes back to the beginning of our conversation. The biggest mistake I made in life,

the biggest mistake, and I own it completely, even though I was only 14, was taking the circumstances of my family life at the time and not continuing to apply myself. in certain areas of life I should have. You know, you could say, well, you're only 14. Okay, fine. And it all worked out. But it was a moment, and I talk about this in the book, it was, you know, a moment. It was a physical altercation when I was, you know, first year away at school that made me

realize if I don't take the hard things that have happened and do something with my life, no one's going to care and I won't have any self-respect. The story of a hard childhood is. something that we can all, like, we feel compassion for. But I realized, I was like, I'm going to be like a genuine loser. I was like, I'm going to be a genuine loser. It doesn't matter what else I do unless I actually turn my life into something worthwhile. And I started developing agency. I started running. I started exercising. I started studying. And I had to fasten myself to a chair with a timer. I had to, I mean, I will say, and I know people work, I worked like a maniac.

And I still work very, very hard. And so I have great respect for anyone that can take hardship or shame. And I've had other things like my advisor's dying and mistakes I've made. There's this transmutation, we call it. You take the negative energy and you have to like pretzel twisted into this expression that is good for you and for the world or at least not destructive. I mean, I think this is why Jochovic or like David Goggins, you know, we love these people because they're doing it.

We can feel David's pain. I mean, I've sat down with David. I knew him before he had a book and got famous, and he was the exact same guy. We actually had a meeting in San Jose. This is a wild story. And we finished up this meeting. It was private meeting wasn't being recorded.

And he said, I'm going to run to the airport. He meant run to the airport. He put on his back. He ran like 16 miles to San Jose airport. No book, no fame, no nothing, no cameras. And I was like, luggage? He just, he just like rucked his backpack.

It was incredible. And I thought, that's where our, you know, I don't see him that much, but, you know, because he's off on his own running. But I've got a bunch of Goggin stories from before he got famous and he was the same guy. He's in a battle with himself, the self-hate voice. He came on my podcast. Every day he hears, you're a piece of garbage. That came from the outside, but eventually he internalized.

And when you realize that it's all in your head, you realize that you can and need to flip the flip the script. And there's nothing more beautiful about humans than our ability to do this. And for people who don't have intense hardship, because a lot of times now, kids will come to you and be like, I don't have the trauma story. I'm like, great. Well, don't get soft. You know, like, you didn't have that.

And a lot of wealthy parents approach me. What do I do? My kid is like a total loser. Or my kid doesn't want to work because they got all this dopamine. They got everything they wanted with no effort. dopamine and rewards without effort first destroy a human it just destroys a human it's like giving your dog a treat just for being cute you get a you get an unhealthy dog that dies early fact the dogs have we all have this sometimes it's more latent that in others than in others but we have this

desire to work we want that friction and overcome that that's what makes us feel so alive and that we have capacity and then of course peace and joy and meaning it doesn't have to all be about the grind. But, you know, everyone will tell you that the peace and meaning and love and connection, that's all much better on a backdrop of hard work. I, you know, end of story. So I don't believe in focusing on the past, but I do believe in transmuting your past into goodness for you and for others. And I believe that if something, if you're really stuck, you really stuck, you need to get off the barbed wire. And that Pennebaker writing exercise costs nothing has been shown to be very effective. And the idea is that you do it and then you move on.

It's not that you do it every day. You do it and then you move on. The other piece, I'm sorry. I just want to raise what you wrote in Chapter 7 because you give people this actual tool writing, if your thoughts are elsewhere, retether them to the present, ask questions anchored in your current surroundings. This is such a good tool. Like I've never heard somebody do this before because They just say, be in the present, be in the present, be in the moment, which is very hard for somebody who's a worrier or an obsessor about the past. And you suggest ask questions like, how cold or warm is it in this room? What does it smell like?

How many people in line in front of me are on their phone, et cetera, but something you say, I realize this is trivial, but it returns your perceptions to the present because they can only be answered right here and now. I love this. Yeah, so that came about because, you know, somewhere around 2015, I, look, I was about to get tenure at Stanford. My life was great, but I noticed I had accumulated a lot of stress, and I started studying stress and stress mitigation.

And I found no one could give me a real-time tool for de-stressing fast. Then I discovered the physiological sigh. It had been around since the 30s. But I was hearing all about grit, resilience, and mental toughness, and no one was telling me How? Just all these amazing stories of people being gritty. I'm like, how do you do it? I'm a scientist. I want to know about cells, circuits, mechanisms, and protocols. So then I was seeing the bumper stickers, be here now. Beautiful quote from Ram Dass, where you hear your life is what your thoughts make it, which by the way came first from the Bible, but then you find in every philosopher said that.

But then like, how do you do that? Be present. I mean, there's nothing squishier to me than be present. How? Great. Tell me how. And you can tell, like, you can tell, like, I get a little irritated by, I don't, I really don't like hippie wellness. I have friends that listen to The Grateful Dead and, you know, I like a few of their songs, but so I'm not like beating up on hippies. I just, I don't like these terms like calm down or, you know, or just take a deep breath. No, it turns out it's all wrong. So the be present thing, I thought, I'm a neuroscientist.

What do I know for sure? I know that we can be planning. A lot of the brain's function is to predict things. Thank goodness. We can remember things great, unless we're focused on negative things from the past, as you pointed out, that are keeping us from moving forward in life or self-damaging or harming others. That's not good. Also, focusing on your trauma all the time is not solving it. It's amplifying those circuits, so you need to move past it.

And then I started exploring the neuroscience of perception and what brings the brain from a state of thinking and planning and remembering things of past. so stuck in the past or the future to being right in the present. And it turns out you have to just get into sensation. And you need to get into perceptions and asking questions. The brain loves questions. Questions help shift the brain from one state to another. So if I could just look at the data and I looked at the data on how to get present, it turns out you have people pay attention to seemingly trivial things.

Like, how cold am I? What does it feel like? The contact of my legs to the chair I'm sitting on, something I wasn't. thinking about. All of a sudden, it's not about what you're focusing on. It's now what you're not focusing on. And once you're in the present, then the brain can more easily shift to the positive things that you can do to have some agency over your current conditions. We hear a lot about agency. This is so good. This is very helpful. Yeah. So like when you're feeling like you don't have control or you're like, you can go online and watch something and says, if you're on X, it's all about

agency, right? It's kind of like it's all about agency. On Instagram, not anymore, but it's about more entertainment and victim stuff. Who's the victim? I'm the victim. They're the victim. Who's the victim? No, he's the aggressive. Mine is on cute hair tricks, but okay.

Or that. Like, I like the bulldog stuff. And there's other stuff too. But I'm sort of, I'm kind of talking at the extremes. But how do you have agency? Well, you have to get present because you can't have agency over the past. You sure can't have agency over the future unless you take care of the right now. How do you do that?

And it's interesting because kids learn this very fast if you teach them. I've taught many kids, the physiological sigh, and when they're stressed to just focus on what's around them. And they learn it so fast. But as adults, we have these well-charted reflexes to, gosh, I'm thinking about that thing again. I can't stop thinking about that thing. And then people think that they're ruminating and indeed they're ruminating. Then they wonder if it's trauma. And it might be.

I mean, there are real traumas that need to be overcome. I talk about that in the book. But just the simple thing of saying, you know, how cold or warm is this thing I'm holding that shifts the brain in the direction you want to go? That's not where you want to stop, but it brings you back to the presence so you can continue forward in the present. This is, and so there's a lot of discussion in Manhattan for 17 years. You really don't want to stop on what does it smell like in here.

Right, right. So that's really about brain states. That will bring you right into the room. Exactly, right. So it's about brain states. It's about understanding that the brain doesn't go from sleep to awake, from stress to calm, is that you need to do things to bridge these states to get from one state to another. And you have that power in your mind and body. And so I try and provide tools that

represent the fastest and most seamless path to those that doesn't require any learning. And all you learn how to do them, but there's no, it's not like you need to master the skill. You have the skill. You just haven't exercised it before. Yeah, you probably weren't asking the right questions. Now, because you've mentioned a couple times. Can you tell us about the physiological sigh? The physiological side. So that's the double inhale long exhale. So that's the and then the exhale through the mouth. Okay. And our study on that a few years back, we had people do that repeatedly show that if you were to repeat that and compare to say a meditation practice or to box breathing, which is inhale, hold, exhale,

hold, or to a meditation practice, what you would find is they all have some benefit. But the physiological cycle sigh allows you to calm down the fastest and it improves your sleep, it improves your mood, and it improves resting heart rate, heart rate variability. It just has so many positive effects and it's so simple and it costs nothing. And if you don't remember to do it every day, you just do it every once in a while. And I know it, I know, no, no. I have neurosurgeon friends who use it. I have tier one operator friends who use it. I know eight-year-old kids who use it. moms, you know, like even my dog does it, but they do it reflexively.

If you watch your dog before they go down to sleep, they do a double inhale. Yeah, you write this in the book. Long exhale, and it's to balance their carbon dioxide oxygen ratios. Dogs are so smart because they don't worry about stuff. Not mine, but most. Yeah, it's wonderful to see that others have that in their pets. Let's talk about nicotine and caffeine,

because especially nicotine is all the rage right now, the little packs that people put in their mouth, What's the story with nicotine? Okay. Well, 90% of the world uses caffeine every single day, and they're not going to quit. And I love caffeine. The data say it can offset dementia. If you don't like caffeine...

And you say to take it before exercise or drink it, whatever... Yeah, you drink your barameati, which is what I like, or coffee I like as well. People have different caffeine tolerances. I will say, if you don't like caffeine, don't go drink it to try and offset dementia. You'll be fine. But if you do like caffeine, you don't have to... worry. I don't recommend drinking caffeine too late in the day because it can mess up your sleep, but I love a 2 p.m. espresso. I love it, I have to say. So, and I drink it and I sleep fine.

Nicotine is a special one because humans throughout history, ever since they discovered nicotine, have found a way to get it into their systems. Then they discover it causes cancer. They find a new way. They create vaping. Then they find out that vaping isn't good for you. It's not as bad as smoking, but it's still terrible, causes all sorts of lung issues. So then now oral nicotine is all the rage. Here's the deal. I'll tell you the positive first. Nicotine, there is some evidence, some evidence,

that it may help offset Parkinson's and dementia before it forms. Okay, why? It increases acetylcholine, which is one of the major neuromodulators that's depleted in many forms of dementia, and it increases dopamine. and movement and Parkinson's and dopamine, that whole story is about loss of dopamine urgic neurons. Most treatments for Parkinson's are about increasing dopamine.

So the problem is that nicotine is extremely habit-forming slash-addicting. Okay. It's an amazing stimulant because it makes you alert, but it also makes you feel calm. It puts you in that perfect state for learning and for most daytime activities. But it also raises blood pressure. which in particular for men, can cause cardiovascular issues and sexual health issues because it's a blood flow inhibitor, right?

So nicotine can cause problems if taken in excess. But the big problem is that now people take one, you know, let's say a three to six or even eight milligram pouch of nicotine. And they feel great. And then they're doing two a day, then three a day. And then pretty soon you need an entire canister every few days just to be normal. Same thing with caffeine. Most people are drinking caffeine and using nicotine just to be at their normal level of alertness. So if you really want to use nicotine as a cognitive enhancer, as a healthy person, you use

it very occasionally. Three to six milligrams, maybe two to three times a week maximum, one pouch. But most people don't do that. They're quickly into multiple pouches per day. So it's sort of, when I say it's a cognitive enhancer, that's with occasional use. And the same goes for caffeine. You need to be alert to get focused. Most people need caffeine just to be alert.

So you don't get any learning benefit or cognitive benefit from caffeine. You're just getting yourself into that plane of alertness that allows you to function. But I love caffeine so much. I love Yerbaimate. I love coffee. And you're not going to take it away from me. And I just love it. And so I like to acknowledge that some people really like their nicotine.

But if you're going to use nicotine, make sure you check your blood pressure. and ideally you're exercising too. I will say a lot of the guys that I know, it does seem to be mostly guys. I went out to, I won't mention which, but a big military school on the East Coast. And I did an informal poll

of how many of the 4,000 students use nicotine and about two-thirds of the hands in the room went up. And then when I spoke to the sports teams, it was like almost all of them are using nicotine. But there are athletes, they're young, they're running around. Do I suggest it? Not really.

But if you're doing that, as opposed to smoking cigarettes or vaping, great. Definitely be safer for you than alcohol. And I'm not a big fan of cannabis. Some people can do it without issues, but it does predispose to psychosis in some people. It's a whole story into itself. This gets very political.

I'm happy to talk about it. But I did a podcast showing that there are strong data showing that THC, especially in young males, can predispose them to permanent psychosis, these very strong THC products. Not all, but a lot of them. And I got vehemently, attacked by the left. They were like misinformation. What are you doing? I'm like, listen, I gave the

balanced picture. I don't tell people what to do, but know what you're doing. Heard from many parents and people like my kid is schizophrenic because of, and this is real, right? Then there were some movements on the right. The administration was trying to actually make some of the laws around cannabis a little bit more liberal. And then all of a sudden, the left started attacking cannabis. And so I started realizing, like, I don't get political, but I realize, okay, most media, I know you don't do this, but most media, they actually are not reporting the issue from a place of heart and understanding of data. They're just kind of going, it's like my team, your team's stuff. So the data are this. Some people can use cannabis, no problem. It nukes your deep, or your rapid eye movement sleep. That's not good. But some people can do it. No problem. The edible is not a problem for them. Other people, it causes apathy. psychotic issues, one or the other, or in some cases, both. And so you just need to be very careful. And I will tell you, I've only had the experience of being male, and I will tell you, young males should not use cannabis. You want to develop your life. You want to be ambitious,

as ambitious as you can while being a kind person and taking care of yourself. Cannabis, except for extremely talented creatives, is a motivation success inhibitor. I don't know the data. I don't know the data for females as well because we don't have a lot of female specific data on it. So that's why I just sort of mentioned that. But I will tell you when young guys are like, how do you feel about THC? I'm like, I love it when my competitors take THC in anything. You better hope that all your competitors take THC because it's a complete killer. I think many of mine do.

And then I will say someone will come along every once in a while and they'll say, I know this athlete who uses cannabis and they're a super athlete. My grandfather smoked and drank every day and lived to be 102. To those stories, I always say, yeah, well, you know, yesterday, and this is a true story, I sat down with somebody whose dad did everything right and got a glioma. So you're always, and died, so you're always going to have these margin cases at the extremes where someone does everything right and still get sick and dies. And someone does everything wrong and still lives a long, healthy life.

But most people are not at those extremes. And so if you're going to use the excuse, like, I'm going to do everything wrong and be okay, forget it. The data say that's very unlikely. Or if you say, I'm going to do everything right and I'm certain that I'm going to live to be 150, well, that's not true either. That's not true either. And so what you want to do is most things right most of the time and avoid the pitfalls that could cause psychosis or drunk driving. I mean, we sort of know this.

It's logic. but the health messaging has gotten very contaminated by the political sphere in a way that I think has hurt a lot of people. I just want people to have the information. No, I laugh because my nana, God love her, my mom's mom lived to be 101, and she ate at least in the last 30 years of her life. She ate nothing but processed foods. She never saw exercise in any way, shape, or form. She walked a little bit around her senior citizens complex that she lived in, lived on her own until she was 100 and a half. Amazing.

This is your grandmother? And yeah, my nana, she was stressed out, all the things that we're not supposed to do. But that's, of course, the exception, not the rule. We can't go by that. I thought the exercise and the eating advice in the book was very sound and it was right along the lines of what you're saying. Nothing extreme, you know, a normal sort of natural foods diet, less processed, the better. And exercise, yes, weight training, cardiovascular, as well as walking.

you know, a few times a week, in addition to like cardiovascular training, all good. But we only have a couple of minutes left. Can you just hit so for the quick learners or the people who just want to get like a quick highlight, what are the top three things you want them to take away when it comes to their wellness and what they can learn from your experience? Bright mornings that involve light, ideally from sunlight or artificial lights, some movement, some movement, some hydration. I'm a big proponent of prayer, meditation,

things that orient you to what's really important. For me, that's prayer in the morning and before going to sleep at night. These things have an outsized positive effect on your health and your mood and your ability to focus all day long. The second thing would be do a long exhale, or ideally two inhales through your nose,

a long exhale through your mouth, anytime you feel stressed, or even a couple times throughout the day, you'll improve your heart rate variability, your resting heart rate, you'll find that you actually can handle stress very well. You'll lower your baseline levels of stress and you'll feel more control over your mind and body in a way that carries over to everything. That tool works anywhere and everywhere unless you're underwater. And then darken your sleeping environment, cool it down, and do some long exhale breathing before sleep. And those three things, and of course you still need to do

some exercise. Try and walk a bunch and lift some heavy objects now and again, heavy for you. Get your heart rate up doing some exercise. Don't eat too much process for this kind of thing. The things we all know. But if you do those three things, you will find that everything gets better right away. Daytime energy, ability to mitigate stress, learning presence with emotional presence and physical presence with people you love, your ability to just enjoy life a bit more, to pivot your brain state and to reset in that magical phase of our 24-hour cycle, sleep, that no one seems to get away with outdoing for very long, those things, you'll look better, you'll feel better, you will be healthier, you will live longer.

And it sounds like good old-fashioned advice, because I'm saying sleep, right, exercise, don't stress, social connection, but what no one, I, you know, with humility aside and humbly, I'll say also no one ever told us how it's like we're told what not to do so I'm not going to bark at you to not drink or not do this or not I'm going to tell you do those things and also learn to enjoy them they're for you and there's so you can show up better for yourself and other people in life learn to enjoy them they're your god given circuits and molecules like we all have them and put them to use and if you miss a couple days no big deal get get right back on it they take seconds to minutes They cost nothing.

They're available to you in some form every single day. And I mean, there's over 1,200 references in the book that support what I'm saying. I'm not coming up with this stuff. I'm not naming it after me. These are not the Huberman protocols. This is your body, your physiology, your brain, your mind, and you deserve to get the best from them. And that's my deep, deep wish for people. I've seen it.

I've experienced how they can help. I've seen how it can help others. I just want those for the world. I really, really do. You got to get the book now. It's going to sell out. It's called Protocols by Andrew Huberman, an operating manual for the human body. Don't wait. It's going to hit the stores soon, but you want to get it now because it'll sell out and then you won't have it. It's a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on. I hope I get to talk to you again.

Yeah, thanks so much for hosting me, forgive me that in my excitement, various times I inadvertently spoke over you. I'm a big fan, and I really appreciate the opportunity. to connect to your audience and really enjoyed your questions. Indeed, I learned a lot during this conversation. So thank you. Oh, the pleasure is ours. All the best to you and good luck with the book. Thank you very much. See you again. Bye for now. Wow. What a guy. So interesting. The book is big, but it's an easy read and you can go, you know, chapter to chapter like he was saying, just pick the one on whatever, sleep, nutrition, et cetera, whatever interests you. And actually really genuinely will make a great gift as we go, my God, into the Christmas season. I mean, that's what's next here. As we say goodbye to the 80-degree

days. Thank you all so much for listening. Don't forget to go out and buy protocols today. Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.