The Rich Roll Podcast - Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman On Changing Your Biology With Behavior

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

How does behavior affect your biology? What does neuroscience say about hypnosis, breath work, and meditation? Are behavioral tools more powerful than pharmaceuticals in changing your state and focus? Today we dig into these big questions and more with neuroplasticity overlord Dr. Andrew Huberman, back for a second, highly anticipated return to the show. Given that Dr. Huberman’s first appearance on the podcast (RRP #533) has amassed over 10 million views on YouTube alone, chances are you’re already familiar with this tenured professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he runs The Huberman Lab, which studies neural regeneration, neuroplasticity, and brain states such as stress, focus, fear, and optimal performance. Subsequent to our first podcast in January of 2021, Andrew launched The Huberman Lab Podcast, which has quickly become a sensation. Within a year of launch, it has ascended to one of the top, most listened to podcasts in the world. Today we pick up where we last left off, diving deep into a wide array of fascinating topics brimming with actionable takeaways, including: the emerging field of mind-body neuroscience; the neuroscience of ADHD, focus, hypnosis, and processing trauma; how to leverage light, temperature, breath, and sleep to better control your biology; several behavioral tools for achieving optimal performance states; how to cultivate learning states and the power of something called gap effects; and many other fascinating topics To read more, click here. You can also watch it all go down on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Andrew is a passionate man with an incredible facility for communicating complex scientific topics in a uniquely compelling and understanding way. For those keen on understanding how to better control your mind, neurochemistry, and all told biology—consider this episode appointment listening. SCIENCE! Peace + Plants, Rich

My belief is that if you give people a minimum of required nomenclature, that they can digest pretty much anything, if possible, and wherever it's not hazardous, to start with behavioral tools. If you read enough books about people who have embarked on certain kinds of journeys and made certain choices, that at some point you might interject some of their personality and their responses and subconsciously start making decisions. And that without even realizing it, you're starting to make better choices on your own behalf.

And then at some point you move from the interject to a recognition that, wait, it was me. You know, we hear so much today about the negativity that's out there and how to navigate the onslaught of negative news and negative interactions online. And for that reason, I really make an effort to really focus on the kind of the bright shining lights

out there, because I do think that the information that we consume sets the internal context of our subconscious and sets the internal context for what we decide to do consciously. And in many ways, it's sort of like garbage in, garbage out. And if it's positive stories and inspiration in, that's how you're basically gonna react in the world. The Rich Roll Podcast.

Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. Today's guest, back for a second, highly anticipated return to the show is Stanford neuroscientist, Dr. Andrew Huberman. Andrew's first appearance is by far the most watched and listened to episode in the history of the podcast with, as of the date of this recording, 9.9 million views on YouTube alone,

which is just absolutely wild. For those unfamiliar, Dr. Huberman is a neuroscientist and tenured professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he runs the Huberman Lab, which studies neural regeneration, neuroplasticity, and brain states such as stress, focus, fear, and optimal performance. Andrew consistently publishes his original research findings

in top peer reviewed journals like Nature, Cell, Neuron, and Current Biology. His work has been featured in major publications, including Science Magazine, Discover Magazine, Scientific American, Time, and the New York Times. And he is a regular member of several National Institutes of Health review panels and is a fellow of the McKnight Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts. Subsequent to our first podcast, Andrew launched the Huberman Lab podcast in January of 2021, which has quickly become a sensation.

Within a mere year of launching it, it has already ascended to becoming one of the top most listened to podcasts in the world. I'll get into the specific topics of today's conversation, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well

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And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more.

Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery

to find the best treatment option for you or a loved one again go to recovery.com okay so in this conversation we discuss many things we talk about mind-body neuroscience. We discuss the neuroscience of ADHD and focus. We talk about hypnosis and how to properly process trauma. We also discuss how to leverage light, temperature, breath, and sleep to better control your biology, as well as tools for achieving optimal performance states. In addition, we talk about learning states and the power of something called gap effects,

which is absolutely fascinating and many other topics. Andrew is a passionate man. He has this incredible facility for communicating complex scientific topics in a uniquely compelling and understandable way. And this conversation, for those keen on understanding how to better control our minds, our neurochemistry and all told our biology

is just straight up appointment listening. Final announcement before we get into it, Andrew is gonna be hosting two live events this May, one in Seattle on May 17 and one in Portland on May 18. Ticket pre-sales open on Tuesday, March 8, which Andrew will share on his social media at Huberman Lab and on his website, hubermanlab.com, with a password. And general ticket sales open on Friday, March 11. These are going to sell out fast, so grab them quick. And you can find more information on all of this in the show notes. Okay, here we go.

Round two with Dr. Andrew Huberman. Good to see you, man. Great to be back. Great to have you back. It's been quite a journey that you've been on. I can't wait to get into it and get into some really interesting terrain that you've been looking at and studying.

But before we do that, let's just recap for a moment. The first time you came on the podcast, which I guess was, that was about a year and a half ago, right? I think it was July 2020. July 2020, right? So that podcast ended up becoming the most popular podcast in the history of this show.

As of today, I think we're at 9.9 million views on YouTube, which is insane. So thank you for that and sharing your wisdom. But what's really cool is that at that moment in time, you hadn't even launched the Huberman Lab podcast. You end up starting the show in January of 2021. And within ostensibly a year, it's become one of the biggest podcasts in the world.

Each episode, this sort of self-contained masterclass on some facet of neuroscience or related scientific terrain and have kind of become like a social media internet superstar. It's crazy, right? Like how does this feel? Totally unintended, but how does it feel? Well, I'm not big on mission statements, but if I had to pick one and the thing that's nearest and dearest to my heart is to try and share the beauty and utility of biology. That's what got me into science in the first place. And I love learning and I love sharing what I learn.

And ever since I was a little kid, I've felt this compulsion to share, you know, what I learn. So in the sense that it gives me an avenue to do that and that people are receptive and hopefully learning from it and enjoying it, it feels great. Yeah. It was not planned at all, you know, 2020, because of the events in the world, it started going on podcasts.

I was fortunate to you and Lex Friedman and Joe Rogan and others to give me that opportunity. And then the plan was to write a book at some point about the work in my laboratory and related themes. But one way or another, I ended up in the podcast realm. Lex Friedman suggested I start a podcast. And he said, I think you should start a podcast, but whatever you do,

don't make it just you talking at the camera. So I followed the first part of the advice. We do have guests on, and those are actually my favorite episodes when I can host guests. It gives me an opportunity to showcase amazing colleagues that for the most part, probably wouldn't get the opportunity to share

at that scale. So that's wonderful, probably wouldn't get the opportunity to share at that scale. So that's wonderful. And also they get the opportunity to get feedback from the world and the encouragement, because it can be a bit of a lonely road doing science. So overall, it feels wonderful. I'm just, I feel very gratified that people enjoy it

and I'm having fun. Well, it's well earned and deserved, and it's actually quite heartwarming to see so many people just gravitate towards and embrace hard science in this way. The idea that millions of people across the world would hit pause on their life and basically listen to what is for the most part, like a lecture, right?

In the way that you would lecture your students at Stanford on pretty challenging topics and do it in a way that you would lecture your students at Stanford on pretty challenging topics and do it in a way where I think your gift really is as a communicator to take these very complicated subjects and figure out how to communicate the essence of them in a way that is understandable to the average person without kind of pandering or condescending to them. Yeah, well, my belief is that if you give people

a minimum of required nomenclature that they can digest pretty much anything. And the podcast weaves back and forth between hardcore scientific mechanism, and then we'll zoom out and talk about daily relevance or lifetime relevance. We definitely talk about protocols and things of that sort. So sometimes I use an interest in some wellness

or health related tool as a way to teach mechanism. And sometimes I do the opposite. And so I'm trying to weave back and forth in a way that makes it accessible regardless of background. And I have to say one of the most gratifying things has been when I hear from people in the clinical fields, psychologists or even yoga teachers or athletes or coaches and school teachers, and maybe even tools they're already using, suddenly they feel like they can equip those with some mechanism

that can recruit some additional students or attention. So there are a lot of different ways to frame science and mechanism. But my belief is, I think it was Max Dilbrook that said, assume zero knowledge and infinite intelligence or something like that. I probably misquoted and misattributed so someone can correct me. But I do believe that if you give people the basics that they can digest pretty much anything. Yeah. The core of the show is still you talking to the mic or the camera. How long does it take you to prepare for these episodes? Because they're so fleshed out, like clearly there's a ton of work and research

and preparation that goes into this. Yeah, well, it depends on the topic. So if it's something a little bit more neurosciency, then less time. But we've covered topics as far out as trauma and fear and things of that sort, which my lab works on related themes, but I'm not a clinician.

So typically the process is, we know what episode we're gonna plan for. And then what I will typically do is reach out to a few colleagues at Stanford and elsewhere. I believe in the power of the telephone. So I cold call people, I track them down, I get them on the phone, try and figure out who the key players in the area are

and then read papers related to their work and other really important labs and clinics in that realm. And then I dive into textbooks. So my house is filling up with textbooks and I'm really big on textbooks because it's hard to track PubMed and the evolution of a field. But in textbooks, you get the kind of center of mass of something. And then of course I spend time on PubMed. And then I usually try and circle back to those colleagues, make sure that everything I'm going to bring about is, you know, bolted down as well as it can. And then where there's a place to speculate, I'll, you know, comfortably speculate and I'll highlight that at speculation. So the short answer is it takes anywhere from, you know, six to 24 working hours to prepare.

And then I take walks and I rehearse it in my head. And then I sit down and I make my poor podcast producer listen to the whole thing. And sometimes a recording can take two hours for an one and a half hour episode. Sometimes it can take six and a half hours. That all scales with how well rested I am the night before. There's a very clear correlation with how well rested I am

and how well I can structure things. Yeah, for sure. But it's a labor of love. I really truly enjoy it. Well, it sure. But it's a labor of love. I really truly enjoy it. Well, it's good. It's a gift to humanity. So I'm really glad that you're doing it. And there's a lot of topics that I wanna cover today.

There's a million different threads that we could pull. I sort of honed in on a couple that I hope you can indulge me on. The first thing that I'd like to get into is around focus, improving focus, and perhaps even ADHD. And the reason I want to begin with this is because it's sort of on my mind. I recently had Johan Hari on the podcast who wrote this book, Stolen Focus, which is all about our declining ability to sustain attention, what the causes of that are from technology and our mobile devices to, you know, stress, sleep, exercise,

connection with nature, connection to other people and the like. But let's kind of approach this from a neuroscience perspective. Like how are you thinking about this from a mechanistic point of view? Yeah. So a lot of people are struggling with focus. And I'll just point out that there is a fair amount of clinically diagnosed ADHD out there. I think the current numbers are somewhere between 10 and 11% of young folks are now diagnosed with ADHD. And I think that's probably accurate. I don't know whether or not the numbers are going up

with social media. There's a lot of speculation about whether or not things like ADHD and eating disorders are increasing with social media or whether know, there's a lot of speculation about whether or not things like ADHD and eating disorders are increasing with social media or whether or not they've been constant and our ability to detect them is just getting better. So that's an ongoing debate, but the numbers are about 10 to 11%. First of all, a couple sort of myths

or pseudo myths to eliminate. The first thing is that we are very good at splitting our attention. Humans can multitask. All old world primates have what's called covert attention. I can look at you and have a conversation with you and I can attend to the glass that's just to the right of my right hand.

So I can split my attention into two cones. I can also bring one of those cones of attention internally. So I can pay attention to maybe how fast my heart is beating right now while I'm talking to you. So it's a complete myth that we can't multitask. We absolutely can multitask. It's much harder to split our attention into three cones of attention or four cones of attention. But one thing that's very clear, it's very well grounded in neuroscience and this concept of

covert attention is that it has utility, right? Covert attention has been thought to be useful in the context of monitoring social circumstances. So the typical neuroscience lecture form of this is that monkeys in a big troop would need to pay attention to who the dominant and subordinate males and females are and govern their behavior accordingly. In other words, pay attention to what's going on around you,

not just to what you want to do and how the person or monkey in front of you is behaving. And humans do this too. The common example that's used in neuroscience lectures is a couple on a date out to dinner and someone's attending to somebody else in the corner that might've been a better date or something or paying attention to that conversation.

Right. Yeah, it's totally possible. So we can split our attention. But there's gotta be a distinction between what your primary focus is lasered in on versus whatever that kind of background multitask is, right? Like you couldn't like write two essays, with each hand at the same time.

That's right. And so that highlights a really important point, which is that you can wait these cones of attention and you can bring them together. So the best way to think about them as two spotlights, and you can bring both spotlights to one common area of focus and get a deeper depth of focus, if you will, and deeper depth sort of redundant there,

but you can get a more heightened state of attention or focus by bringing those together. Likewise, if I close my eyes and focus entirely on my internal state, something we called interoception to distinguish it from exteroception, which is the view of the outside world, you can pay attention to your heartbeat, to your breathing. You know, this is common to many meditative practices.

So we can split this thing that we call focus or attention, and we can weight this thing that we call focus and attention. Now in ADHD, one of the less appreciated aspects of the clinical phenotype, meaning that the sorts of symptoms that show up, it's thought that people with, it's commonly thought that people with ADHD cannot focus,

but that's simply not true. If they are engaged in something they really care about or like, they can focus very intensely. And that is because much of focus relates to the dopamine system, this neuromodulator slash neurotransmitter that I know you had on a Lemke, my colleague on here,

plays it, the neuromodulator dopamine plays a very active role in motivation, craving, and pursuit. It's commonly thought that it's only associated with reward and feel good type of behaviors or phenomenon, but it's actually associated with pursuit of things that at least we think are gonna make us feel good in the short term. So it's a kind of a generic currency

for pursuit and motivation. When we focus and when we're excited about something, there is a lot of activity in these so-called dopaminergic circuits. And so it's not a surprise then that many of the prescription medications for ADHD are medications that amplify the amount of dopamine that's available in the brain

through one mechanism or another. So these would be your Ritalin, your Adderalls. And then nowadays there's also a lot of prescribing of things like Modafinil, which is yet another category of drugs used to treat ADHD, slightly different. And then in the kind of supplementation world, people delve into things like L-tyrosine,

which is the precursor to dopamine. So there are a variety of ways to access the dopamine system, but the way that the dopamine system was designed to enhance focus is that when you are excited about something or you really want to attend to something, it literally brings about a narrowing of the aperture of your visual window and your auditory window so that you attend to this particular location in space. And then events within that location in space for what you see and what you hear, movements of whatever you're attending to, become extremely important and extremely relevant.

And so it just highlights this larger theme of how the brain attends and unattends, which is that we have an aperture or a window on our focus. And dopamine seems to narrow that. Literally any drug, like any stimulant, like cocaine or amphetamine at the extreme, but even caffeine will dilate the pupils, causing that, you causing that somewhat paradoxically

causes a narrowing of the visual window and your ability to focus is enhanced. And that brings about perhaps the most important point, which is that for most people, provided that they are sighted, provided they can see, mental focus follows visual focus. And for that reason,

there's a lot of exciting research being done in classrooms and in clinical settings, training children and to some extent adults, but training children to anchor their visual focus to maybe a crosshatch or a fixation point and just learn how to keep their visual attention on a narrow aperture. It's essentially training these,

it turns out to be four brain circuits. So the front of the brain right behind the forehead and some of these dopamine circuits deeper in the brain, it's training those to engage whenever the person deliberately wants to engage them. So for most people, they hear this and they go, oh, of course, mental focus follows visual focus. And yet, if you think about the way our world

is arranged now with your phone calling you over to this location and your computer calling you to that location and whatever's happening in your immediate environment calling to that location and things that are happening within your body, it makes perfect sense if you only have two cones of attention and they're moving around like those lights that used to be used to advertise some event in a city, shining up in the sky, moving all over the place, you realize that, oh, it makes perfect sense why focus is hard.

We are now realizing that we need to train up focus. And whereas in the past, when we weren't so inundated with devices and distraction, that was probably easier to do. We didn't need such rigid blinders. But in fact, we do need blinders. And many people actually benefit from things like putting on a hoodie or wearing a hat,

actually limiting their visual window and restricting their visual window can be very helpful for people to learn how to use a visual focus to anchor cognitive focus. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I'm just thinking about, like, let me throw this at you. If I'm sitting down and I'm trying to write,

I have to, I can't focus on two things. I have to focus on that one specific thing. My vision is, you know, laser focused on that one thing. And I become very intolerant to any kind of external stimuli. Like I feel very fragile, like a notification can throw me off and there's the switch cost effect of that. that versus let's say I'm out on my bike on a training ride and I'm listening to an audio book or a podcast. I can do both of those things simultaneously. And I would contend,

and I'm interested in your perspective on this. I would contend that my memory retention of what I'm listening to is actually better when I'm out doing that, even though I'm focused on the exertion of running on a trail, riding my bike, something about the elevated heart rate and the kind of controlled labored breath. For some reason, like that's a better combination

than if I was just driving around in my car trying to listen to it. Yeah, it's exactly right. I mean, what we're really getting to here is this notion of brain states. And I imagine this is something we might get into repeated times throughout our conversation, which is that just as in sleep, we have states of mind that relate to dreaming

or slow wave sleep or rapid eye movement sleep. In our waking states, in our waking period, I should say, we transition through various states. And for some of us, there are conditions in which we have so much activation in our body, what we call autonomic arousal, but so much energy, basically,

that just sitting down to write at the computer, you would think, oh, well, this is very hard. It should anchor all of my attention and energy into this narrow cone of attention. But the fact that you also have to sit still, the fact that there's actually not just what's right in front of you, but there's also the internal dialogue

that you're carrying about what's gonna happen with this passage. Is this any good? What's someone gonna think? Is a notification gonna go off in a moment? There are multiple scripts running. And that's why we distinguish between this exteroception, which is the perception of things in the outside world, exteroception, which is the perception of things in the outside world and interoception,

which is our perception of things within the confines of our skin. And when we sit down to write, we might think that it's just one thing in front of us, but actually we're paying attention to internal events and dialogues as well. So we're splitting our attention in multiple ways. When I can only speculate, but I can imagine that when you're out for a ride, a good amount of that audit excess autonomic arousal is consumed by the peddling and the breathing that puts your brain into a kind of a rhythmic state. And we know that breathing, we know based on a lot of good data that breathing sets a condition in the brain for certain brain states to arise. And this is very easily experienced where if you slow down

your breathing and commit to doing maybe two or three breaths per minute, you'll notice that your brain and your entire body will shift into probably a more relaxed state for most people. And if you were to commit to doing 15 or 30 breaths per minute, your brain and body would shift into a more aroused state. So over time, I think almost everybody figures out

the things they need to do, how much coffee, how much movement, whether or not you work before or after your ride, what sorts of information you consume and what types of work one does in order to try and optimize this process. But a lot of what my laboratory is doing at Stanford and what other laboratories are doing elsewhere is to try and figure out what are these brain states?

How do we define them? What really is a state of focus? And how do we arrive at a state of focus if we're tired? How do we arrive at a state of focus if we are kind of over agitated? And so beneath all brain states, including our ability to focus is this, I like to visualize as sort of a seesaw

of autonomic arousal. We can either be relaxed and alert, which is kind of the optimal state for most things besides sleep. We can be very alert, we can be panicked, or we can be very, very calm, or we can be asleep. So, you know, on one end, you have calming type experiences or states,

and on the other end, you have kind of amplified states. If you are feeling really upset about something, it's gonna be hard for you to focus whether or not it's at the computer or whether or not it's out on your ride while listening to this podcast or whatever it happens to be. So I think that, again, I can only speculate, but I have to imagine that your ability to comprehend things and remember things when you're out on these rides is based on a number of things. It's the familiarity with the process. You're obviously very familiar with the bike.

It's also probably a subconscious familiarity with a certain pace of riding that allows your brain to access the state in which you can digest information through audio. I should say one kind of interesting set of studies that's emerging now, and I can't really report back on the data yet simply because we don't know,

is that some people who have trouble with attention, especially while reading, are finding it very beneficial to listen to audio books while actually reading the book. And I swear this is not an attempt to get people to both purchase the audio book and the written book. I don't even have a book to promote at this point. So that's not the purpose in this, but we definitely are a species that likes to combine our audio and visual worlds. In fact, the maps of our visual world and the maps of our audio world or audition really, and the maps of our motor world are in perfect register such that if we hear a sound off to our right, we turn to the right, not to the left. If we hear something right in front of us, meaning it arrives at the two ears

at the exact same time and what we call the interaural time difference is zero. Well, then we look straight ahead. And so it makes sense that when we can bring the audio world and the visual world into alignment, our focus is always going to be greatest under those conditions. Some people learn better through their visual field than their auditory field, right? Like I know if I'm reading a book,

I'm in a better position to retain that information. Like when I recall something that I've read in a book, I see it on the page. And when I hear it, it's much more elusive. And I would assume that some people are the opposite of that. Yeah, some people are much more auditory in nature. Most people are primarily visual.

There's an interesting study that was published recently, just came out and that shows that actually memory and recall for material that's consumed on a phone is much lower than on the written page. And there's an interesting reason that they give for this. You know, there could be a lot of reasons. I just want to point that out, but they monitored breathing and they monitored heart rate and they monitored some other physiological

signals while people were either reading on a smartphone or reading paper. And what they found was that breathing was essentially normal or equivalent in both conditions, meaning people breathe the same way, whether or not they're reading on their smartphone or reading from a written page. But there was a particular category of breath that was abolished by reading on the smartphone. And this is what is referred to as physiological size. I talk a lot about physiological size on the podcast

and my lab works on them. This is a spontaneous innate pattern of breathing that's governed by a little subset of neurons in the brainstem. For those of you who wanna know, this is a brainstem area called the parafacial nucleus discovered by Jack Feldman at UCLA, who's the world expert in the neural mechanisms for those of you who want to know, this is a brainstem area called the parafacial nucleus discovered by Jack Feldman at UCLA, who's the kind of world expert

in the neural mechanisms of respiration. And this little collection of neurons, probably only a hundred neurons or so, make sure that every three to five minutes, you do what's called a physiological sigh, which is a very deep breath, sometimes followed by another short inhale. So, and then a long exhale. And the double deep breath or the very deep breath sometimes followed by another short inhale. So, and then a long exhale and the double deep breath

or the very deep breath, re-inflates the little sacks in the lungs. Your lungs aren't just two big bags of air. They actually have hundreds of millions of little sacks that we call the avioli of the lungs. And when you don't do these physiological size, so in the second or third minute after not having done a physiological sigh,

these little sacks collapse and they're kind of moist on the inside. So you can imagine trying to blow open a balloon that's moist on the inside. You need a little bit of added air pressure. And so the sighs reinflate those, and then on the exhale, allow you to offload carbon dioxide.

Now this happens even during sleep, every three to five minutes. And I've talked a lot about physiological sighs as what I think is really a terrific real-time tool for reducing anxiety and calming oneself down. Indeed, it works very well. We have a study that's out for review now. It's a collaborative work with David Spiegel in psychiatry,

but it points out that these physiological sighs can be used, double inhale through the nose, long exhale through the mouth to calm down. And it works very well because you offload carbon dioxide. Now in this study about smartphone reading versus reading on paper, what they found is that people stop engaging in physiological size during anytime they're reading

on the smartphone. Now it wasn't a perfect study because they probably also should have had a tablet and a laptop condition. So it's not clear whether or not it's due only to the reduced aperture of the visual window that you're narrowing your attention. And there's this sort of app, almost like an apnea,

a kind of starving of yourself for oxygen when you do this, but it's very clear. I mean, it's abundantly clear that two things, one is nasal breathing and that the other is getting sufficient oxygen to the brain is important for comprehension. So the takeaway from this is if ever possible, try and read from a written page

and if you, or from a book or a piece of paper. And if you can't do that, then try and access whatever you're learning from as large a screen as you can manage in that particular environment. And I do realize when people are commuting, and sometimes I'm guilty of looking at my phone and trying to read papers and passages on my phone.

But it's interesting because this study highlights the linkage between this visual attention, our respiration, and the fact that our body and our brain have these innate mechanisms for making sure that we're getting sufficient oxygen, we're getting sufficient blood flow to the brain areas that are required for learning. And so again, I don't want to de-emphasize the fact

that there is a lot of legitimate, clinically diagnosed ADHD out there. But for a lot of people that are struggling with attention or they feel like they just can't focus, I think we all owe it to ourselves to ask, well, what kind of environment am I creating for myself that is depriving me of this focus? And what simple things can I do to try and enhance my ability of focus? Because I'm personally of the belief that if possible and wherever it's not hazardous to start with behavioral tools, right? Before ever moving to supplementation or prescription drugs,

unless there's a real dire need, I would think that behavioral tools should be the most valuable for the simple reason that when you engage in a behavior over and over again, you get neuroplasticity, your brain circuits change and get better. Simply taking a drug or a supplement of any kind, although they can have their value,

isn't going to rewire your brain in the ways that you want. You are essentially dependent on that chemistry in order to access the state that you want. Right, and the behavioral tools are gonna range from breath, light exposure, nutrition, sleep, mindfulness, temperature, all of these things that are becoming more and more part and parcel of the neuroscience toolbox, right?

Like this field, which originated, you know, from this perspective of let's understand the brain has by necessity broadened to this mind body study and trying to understand human biology more holistically. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm delighted that that's happening. And I wanna point out that oftentimes in the journey of teaching some of these tools

and sharing some of the science around breath work, or which is really respiration science for in the academic terms, or about the role of temperature or light, people will quite understandably respond, well, wait, this has been known about for thousands of years. Getting light in your eyes in the morning is useful, these sorts of things, breathing in this way.

And I completely acknowledge that. And my stance is that the communities that have talked about these things for a number of years, as well as the scientific community, are both guilty of the same thing, which is hiding and disguising things in very complicated language. And so my goal is not to say, oh, you know,

science is discovering these things. Many of these things were discovered before, but rather to put a language to them that is neither cloaked in mysticism, nor is cloaked in scientific jargon. That's really a key goal, because I think that we should all acknowledge that many of these practices are quite useful

and we weren't really taught them in school. And also mysticism is often a barrier to a lot of these things becoming accessible. So my hope is that the scientists and the people from various communities will sort of join hands in trying to propagate these tools. So yes, it's also amusing and exciting to me. I mean, Stanford, there's my group

in neurobiology and ophthalmology. There's David Spiegel's laboratory that works on clinical applications of hypnosis and mind-body in the context of psychiatry. So trauma, pain management, and a huge number of other things, OCD, ADHD, and Allie Crum's work over in psychology, looking at belief effects and mind-body. She actually runs the mind-body lab at Stanford, does incredible work. We can say that a few topics in particular that were considered pretty fringy about 10 years ago, I would say breath work was fringy

by the scientific community. Breath work, the use of temperature to access different bodily and brain states, the gut microbiome, and the fact that things like fiber and fermented foods could be useful to us, I think would have been kind of like scoffed at and kind of choked off as a, you know, like, what is that a few years ago? And then of course, there's a lot of excitement about psychedelics, a somewhat

controversial area, but now we can say that at Stanford, Harvard, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and many other schools, there are hundreds of laboratories working on these topics, trying to figure out mechanism, trying to figure out clinical applications. And so it always raises this question of what's considered fringe now, it's very likely in 10 years is going to be a major focus of laboratories. And I also just want to give a kind of a shout out to the National Institutes of Health. We've has had an eye institute, a cancer institute, institutes for immunology. There is now an Institute for Complementary Health and Medicine, NCCIH. And they put a significant amount of tax dollars

to the study of the exact sort of things we're discussing here. Yeah, it's fascinating. So many of these traditions emanate from the traditions of yoga or Chinese medicine and are now getting validated through mechanistic study. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Sorry to interrupt.

I neglected to say Chufu Ma's lab at Harvard Medical School is looking at the mechanisms underlying acupuncture and has incredible studies published in really top tier journals, finding that stimulation at one side in the body can invoke heightened levels of inflammation, which I think most people would wanna know about. I'm sure that the Chinese have known about this for eons

and yet stimulation elsewhere can dramatically reduce inflammation, but they're defining the mechanisms by which this happens, release of epinephrine, adrenaline from the adrenals, or suppression of dopamine release from one site in the body or from the brain. And so by understanding mechanism, I think that the scientific community

is going to be in a very good place to improve on existing protocols, validate many existing protocols. And also there's a whole other reason for us to be excited about this kind of thing happening, which is that right now, if you want your insurance to cover some of the things that we're talking about,

which can be very effective, you're gonna have a hard time convincing an insurance company that they should support $100 a week respiration training or something if you don't already have a serious clinically diagnosed apnea or some other lung disorder. In the near future, there'll be mechanism scientific reports to point to in clinical trials that,

my hope is that insurance will start covering a lot of these behavioral practices that are powerful, not just because they work, but because they reshape the nervous system so that eventually you don't have to rely on them as heavily, which is the opposite of a lot of prescription drugs out there. And I'm in full support of prescription drugs

that can remedy, you know, I mean, people in suicidal depression often need these things. People with really bad cases of ADHD or OCD, they sometimes really do need medication. But for many people out there, the way that they're struggling can be remedied with behavioral tools.

So I'm just delighted that places like Stanford are so supportive and other top institutions are really getting behind this. In the COVID area where everybody was kind of forced to, you know, retreat to their homes, I know that your lab at Stanford used that as an opportunity to start conducting studies and using the fact that everybody was at home as actually kind of an advantage in, you know, studying some of the things that you're interested in. So talk a little bit about that that everybody was at home as actually kind of an advantage

in studying some of the things that you're interested in. So talk a little bit about that and kind of what has you excited right now among the things that you're looking at. Yeah, so COVID presented a lot of challenges and a lot of opportunities for science. We were already set up and doing experiments on humans in our lab, bringing them in, putting them in virtual reality, scaring them, essentially,

looking at people who had anxiety or clinically diagnosed anxiety and exploring how breathing and vision impact those states of mind. Going down underwater with Mueller and swimming with the sharks. Right, which for some people was simply not scary in our laboratory,

but we always find people's pain point one way or the other. And that work was published. And I think laid down some of the groundwork for, what is the physiological signature for what we call anxiety or fear? That hadn't really been addressed in a realistic-ish format because it's been hard to study in the lab

and virtual reality allowed that to happen. Then the pandemic hits and my lab had teamed up with our associate chair of psychiatry, Dr. David Spiegel, who's the world expert in the clinical applications of hypnosis. I know hypnosis gets a little bit of a funny rap because people think of it as stage hypnosis, but really self-hypnosis,

very strongly clinically backed studies from his lab showing what brain areas are activated and deactivated under conditions of hypnosis. And I wanted to join arms with David because he has a real interest in mind-body and non-invasive tools for shaping the mind to improve clinical syndromes, but also for things like focus and things like enhancing sleep and so on. So what we did when the pandemic hit was we got permission from our other colleague, Ali Crum in psychology, to equip a number of undergraduates, but also people in the outside world with a whoop bands

to evaluate things like heart rate, heart rate variability, their sleep, et cetera. And then we were in constant communication with them as they were binned into groups. We had one group do a particular type of breathing each day for five minutes a day. Another group, different five-minute breathwork pattern, different five-minute breathwork pattern.

And then the fourth group did mindfulness meditation of a kind of traditional sort, which is just really passively breathing however you're breathing, but paying attention to that breathing. The other breathwork, without getting into too much detail, really centered on whether or not inhales were more emphasized than exhales.

So one condition was cyclic sighing of the sort that I talked about before. So two inhales followed by an exhale, two inhales followed by an exhale, but for five minutes, which is a pretty long time to engage in that pattern, but it's still a manageable period of time. The other group did something

that was sort of akin to Wim Hof breathing, which we call cyclic hyperventilation. So deliberately for five minutes, really taking their body and brain into a heightened state of arousal with some limited breath holds every so often. And then we had another group that did the sort of traditional box breathing,

inhale, hold, exhale, hold for equivalent amounts of time. And the basic takeaway from this study was that the cyclic sighing led to a more dramatic calming both within the breath work session, but also the ability to regulate one's state cyclic sighing led to a more dramatic calming, both within the breathwork session, but also the ability to regulate one state away from the breathwork session. So people reported heightened sense of wellbeing, reduced anxiety, improved sleep,

lower resting heart rate overall. And the reason we were able to get all those data is because we were accessing them all the time, 24 hours a day. So COVID shut down our ability to bring people into the laboratory at that time, but it opened up the opportunity for us to, first of all, study a much larger demographic than we would have otherwise,

not just Stanford students, not just people in the Bay area, but people all over the US. For right now, it's just been the US, not outside the US. We also could monitor people, different ages, different backgrounds, oftentimes harder to get to come to Stanford directly in person, but we could do that at scale at a distance. And then of course, to monitor their data 24 hours a day. And Whoop was very generous in allowing us access to the raw data. So we weren't reliant on just the sweep scores within Whoop.

We could get everything we wanted out of those data. And so for us, it represented a really powerful data set. And we're also delighted because NCCIH, which is this complimentary health division of NIH, they did not fund this study, but they paid careful attention to the fact that we and others started to do this. And now NIH is starting to have specific calls to action

for funding science that's done in the real world and analyzed in labs at universities. And of course there are limitations to doing things this way, but I found this to be incredibly interesting, fun and informative. And it really says to me that if you were going to do a breath work practice,

first of all, you don't need more than five minutes per day. If you were going to select one breath work practice, cyclic sighing, this double inhales followed by exhales for five minutes per day. If you were going to select one breath work practice, cyclic sighing, this double inhales followed by exhales for five minutes a day, seems to have the greatest positive effect on the greatest number of parameters. And of course there are other, box breathing is still useful, meditation is still useful.

We certainly found positive effects of those practices, but it really points out the fact that some of these innate patterns of breathing, like cyclic sighing that we do naturally every five minutes or so, can be sort of hijacked, if you will, and brought into a more condensed form for five minutes a day.

And I think five minutes a day is a pretty reasonable amount of time to ask of oneself to do breath work. And I should say, it didn't matter if people did it early in the day or later in the day, but the consistency was important. And how significant was the state change of that type of breath work versus baseline

and also in comparison to the other varieties? Yeah, great question. So during the actual breath work session, every group and including the meditation group experienced a dramatic shift in their state. For the cyclic hyperventilation group, they actually were ramped up more autonomic arousal. You could think of that as more stress,

but as David Spiegel says, it's not just the state you're in, it's how you got there and whether or not you had anything to do with it. So when you are self-directing an increase in autonomic arousal, like getting into an ice bath or charging up a hill or breathing really fast,

when you're doing that deliberately and you want to, you generally associate that with a positive shift in increased autonomic arousal. When somebody else triggers that in you, or when an event in the world triggers that in you, then you generally say, well, that was really stressful, which really speaks to the power of the prefrontal cortex, our mind in interpreting these bodily states

that are exactly the same. But to answer your question, you know, we always have this cutoff of P less than 0.05 statistically significant differences. So they could not be attributed to chance. The cyclic sign condition did lead to, I would say a near doubling of the positive effects compared to the others,

but all four groups displayed positive shifts compared to what was at baseline essentially.. Now, it's very hard to have a pure control condition in something like this, because if you tell people just sit quietly for five minutes, it is its own sort of form of mindfulness and stillness. So control conditions in these sorts of studies are a little bit complicated. Our next step is to get people into brain scanners to really understand what is changing at the neural level in the short term and the long term. And that's actually where Spiegel's group has done this incredible work on hypnosis,

showing that when people go into states of self-hypnosis, there are signature shifts in what they call the default mode network, how the brain is idling, the different brain areas that are active and the ability to control context, which has a lot to do with focus. And we could talk about hypnosis if you like,

although he'd be better suited to- Yeah, no, that was my next thing. I wanna better understand the Spiegel version of hypnosis versus the spinning pinwheel version that we all conjure in our minds. Like explain what that is and how that's becoming this tool for scientific study. Yeah, well, so this is David Spiegel's work and he's an interesting story. becoming this tool for scientific study.

Yeah, so this is David Spiegel's work and he's an interesting story. His father was actually a psychiatrist and hypnotist and his father learned about hypnosis and incorporated it into his psychiatric practice based on a mentor that he had. So this is often how things are handed down in medicine. So David learned it from his father and I should say that the effects of clinical hypnosis are very robust. Incredible success with things like smoking cessation, incredible success with pain reduction,

50 to 80% reductions in chronic pain, outcomes in cancer even probably due to the negative effects of chronic stress on cancer outcomes by reducing stress, trauma, and so forth. So basically what Spiegel and his father developed was a assay, sort of what we call a curbside assay for determining whether or not someone has a high, medium, or low degree of hypnotizability. And this brings us back to the visual system. The neurons in the brainstem that control eye movements,

they have a relationship either to the aspect of the nervous system that's associated with alertness or with calmness. And not surprisingly, when people look up, when the eyes are directed upward, that's actually in the neural pathways associated with alertness. When they look downward or close their eyelids,

those are associated with the neural pathways associated with calmness and sleep, which is kind of a duh when you hear it. So like when you get tired, you kind of put your chin down and you close your eyes. When you're wide awake, you tend to be eyes up and eyes really wide. Recalling of course that your eyes

are the two pieces of your brain that happen to be outside your cranial vault and the only two pieces of your brain outside your cranial vault. So when you see eyes, those are two pieces of brain, which is just to underscore why they're so powerfully reflective of what's going on deeper in the brain. So the people can look this up online.

It sounds a little wacky, but there's something called the Spiegel eye roll test, which is not the, you know, teen eye roll of the, you know, that's usually associated with a different kind of sigh. I'm familiar with that one. We've all done it or experienced it. So basically you can assess how hypnotizable somebody is by having them look up.

I can actually do this with you right now. And again, I'm not, I'm hijacking David's tool. So you can look up towards the ceiling and then while maintaining upward gaze, slowly close your eyelids. Okay, so you were able to just shut your eyelids down and you can open your eyes now. And so what I observed was as soon as you brought

your eyelids down, your eyes also moved towards me and your eyelids shut. Now I'm very hypnotizable. And there's a little bit of a bias demonstration because I'm trying to illustrate the differences, but I fall at the very far end of the scale on high hypnotizability, where when I look up and then I don't want to go into hypnosis

and then I close my eyes, the whites of my eyes should still be exposed for a second before I'll do it again. In other words, you're able to maintain your pupils focused upward as you're closing your eyes. And the reason this test was developed to be clear, because I realized this is probably all sounding a little bit wacko to people.

The reason that this was developed is that there's a known role of particular cranial nerves, okay, three, four, and seven, as well as some other cranial nerves. One set of cranial nerves directs the eyes upward and is associated with alertness. The other set of cranial nerves directs the eyes downwards, associated with closing of the eyelid.

So these are two competing circuits. People who are very capable of being hypnotized tend to be able to maintain activation of both circuits simultaneously, which will make sense for what I'm gonna say next, which is that hypnosis is really a state of deep calm, yet high degree of focused and limited context. So remember that autonomic seesaw

that we're either asleep or panicked, drowsy or alert. And in a waking state like you or I are in now, probably more towards alert but calm, kind of the seesaw is even. So this is almost an unusual bending of the seesaw in a way that you're both very relaxed and very alert and context is limited by whatever the hypnotist says.

Now, in clinical hypnosis, the goal is to get the person to self-direct their own mental changes. Whereas in stage hypnosis, the goal is to get the person to self-direct their own mental changes. Whereas in stage hypnosis, the goal is exactly the same, bring people into a state of very calm, but narrow context and increased focus. But the hypnotist is interested in directing the person's actions and states.

So that's the key distinction. And I think that clinical hypnotists like Spiegel and others who are also board certified physicians and psychiatrists, but I think that clinical hypnotists like Spiegel and others who are also board certified physicians and psychiatrists, but I think all clinical hypnotists, they look at stage hypnosis as kind of the, they don't like it so much because it detracts from the power of this thing that we call hypnosis and people get distracted by the fact that people can be inspired to do things that they wouldn't

otherwise. So in a clinical hypnosis session, Spiegel or someone else would bring you in, you do this test, you would probably fall into the category of low to moderate hypnotizability. That might rule you out, but for most people, they're going to be moderate to high levels of hypnotizability. And then there would be some discussion while you were in this state of hypnosis where the clinician would encourage you to think about certain aspects of whatever it is that you're dealing with. So maybe it was problems with focus and they would have you visualize two spotlights

and bringing them together. Maybe it would be to focus on something that really bothers you quite a lot and the bodily sensations, and then to dissociate those bodily sensations. And the degree of clinic or the degree of positive clinical outcomes using hypnosis, again, are just remarkable.

If people wanna try this, there is an app I can mention with that Spiegel has developed on the basis of the clinical data and a lot of scientific studies exploring the brain areas that are activated. It's called Reveri, R-E-V-E-R-I. I should mention it does now sit behind a paywall, but I think you get a seven day free trial.

And it's right now only available for Apple, but I'm told that they're gonna have it for Android as well. And there are other clinical tools for hypnosis. I've personally found hypnosis to be very valuable for enhancing my ability to get into sleep. And for any time that I'm dealing with a problem that I can't seem to solve simply by talking, running, and a couple of good nights sleep,

or any kind of cathartic behavior that I might attempt. So there's a lot there, and there's a lot more to be said about that. And maybe Spiegel should step in at some point and join the conversation. But I think that hypnosis is really a wonderful example of how vision can allow one to assess whether or not the brain can shift state easily or not.

It certainly involves narrowing of visual fields in order to anchor focus. And there's also a respiration component. Almost always in hypnosis, the hypnotist will encourage the person to take a deep breath as they close their eyes and to then imagine floating and being in a state of calm. And the bigger theme here, perhaps the most important theme,

is that neuroplasticity, the brain and nervous system's ability to change in response to experience, really is a two-part process. The first part of that process always involves focus and attention. Especially as an adult, you simply cannot learn unless you are focused on what you want to learn. We know this. As a kid, there's a bit more passive learning, but as an adult, unless it's a negative event, which tends to automatically recruit your focus, right? The hot stove, the horrible experience, the car crash,

the trauma of any kind, which immediately grabs all your attention, you have to direct your attention. And then the second part of neuroplasticity, because it is indeed a process, is periods of deep rest. It is during periods of sleep and what we call non-sleep deep rest that the neural circuits themselves change and rewire. Hypnosis seems to incorporate both the focus and the relaxation in a way that accelerates neuroplasticity.

And so while it might seem kind of mystical or wacky or crazy, it makes perfect sense as to why this would be. It grabs both states of autonomic arousal, high degree of focus and arousal and high degree of relaxation, and it compacts them into a single routine. But in the context of a clinical hypnosis session,

the kind of direction that's being given the patient is to disassociate with the neural groove or whatever. Like, let's say they're trying to quit smoking. Like, what is the process of untangling that knot so that you can create this new behavior pattern? Okay, yeah, very astute of you because it highlights a conundrum that the field of neuroscience and psychiatry

and psychology has, and indeed that all of wellness and high performance has, which is, you know, on the one hand, you could imagine that the way to shift one's brain and body around a traumatic event or some challenge would be to really fully embody all the emotions and bodily sensations of that thing. And then over time, desensitize yourself. So that's one form of gradual dissociation

from at least the emotional component of something. You could also imagine that the goal is to split those off at the outset. And I'll just mention, we hear nowadays a lot about a FDA approved therapy, which is ketamine therapy. Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic. It's being used to treat depression and trauma. This is kept in emergency rooms now.

This is in widespread use. Work from my colleague, Carl Dyseroth's lab at Stanford has shown the precise neural networks in the brain that are activated by ketamine in an animal model, but also in humans. And it's very clear that it causes this dissociative state. It actually uncouples brain areas that normally would be coupled.

And so you think, well, that's weird. I thought that in order to heal trauma, you're supposed to go into the trauma and then reduce the amount of emotion. But in these ketamine induced states, people actively report things like I was watching myself, third person in myself go through the experience, which is exactly what you hear about people

who went through a trauma, horrible sexual, things like sexual trauma, like rapes. People say I was floating above my body and could see it happening as somebody else. And yet the therapy for a lot of these, many of the therapies designed to treat trauma are exactly the sort of dissociative process that is occurring during the trauma.

So I don't have an answer as to why those treatments can work, despite embodying the same kind of approach that happened during the trauma. What does seem to be the case is that accessing the state of mind that was occurring during the trauma or during anxiety or insomnia or pain,

and then third personing that experience and being able to imagine a different bodily or mental response seems to be the common theme through all treatments for trauma, fear, anxiety, et cetera. And the additional requirement, however, is that it's not sufficient to just cognitively rehearse it. There needs to be a shift in bodily state. And almost always what threads through all these therapies

like ketamine therapy or any kind of even cathartic therapy is that at some point the patient or the person needs to access a state of self-directed deep calm. And so there are versions of hypnosis. For instance, if you're dealing with a particular problem, you imagine the problem on our left screen, this is under hypnosis and a left panel. And then you write out in your mind,

the possible alternate responses on the right panel. You grow the size of that and reduce the size of the other. Might sound like, well, why would that work? But under conditions where the total context of the mind is set to that process, and you're not even aware of anything else going on in the room, that seems to accelerate the neuroplasticity

and allows people to actually do that in real life out of hypnosis. It's super fascinating. I mean, it's crazy to me to hear about the therapeutic applications of ketamine because my association with that is being in treatment with people that use that. Like I knew one guy who jumped off his roof on ketamine.

Like that drug is no joke. And it's cool that they're finding these ways of applying it in a context like this, but yeah, like buyer beware, I suppose too. These are controlled environments, obviously. Absolutely, and even though they are controversial, one can't help but notice the work of, for instance, Matthew Johnson,

who's at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and he's looking at macro dose psilocybin for the treatment of trauma and depression. And I've talked to Matt directly and I said, what is the key element of a successful therapeutic session? Because he was telling me, one person is having one experience, another person is having another experience.

So there's nothing to anchor this. And he said, it's the quote unquote, letting go and allowing their autonomic arousal to be taken over by something else. And I thought, well, the data are pretty impressive, but that's the exact opposite of what we're talking about in terms of ketamine type therapies. I think hypnosis kind of resides in the middle

in that it involves going into the state that creates the anxiety, trauma, or pain, and then actively dissociating from that state in a way that you were actively replace it with another state. Psychedelic therapies are still very poorly understood. You know, one of the things that I think is important to emphasize is we always hear such and such

opens plasticity, such and such, you know, plasticity is a process like digestion or something like that. You don't necessarily want to open plasticity because all sorts of things can happen in there. And I'm aware of people that have benefited tremendously from psychedelic therapies. I'm also aware of people that have suffered tremendously from psychedelic therapies. And I have a colleague at Stanford also in psychiatry, whose name is Nolan Williams. He does transcranial magnetic stimulation. He's an expert and a

researcher and clinician in understanding depression and tools to explore that. And he has studies that he's performing now, looking at people, the brains of people who have undergone different forms of psychedelic therapies with no bias whatsoever as to whether or not they're beneficial or not, but really to highlight the individual differences before, not during, but then after the psychedelic therapies. And so I think there's still a lot to be learned. I mean, we are, you know, as much as we understand mechanisms and brain areas,

and there's some successes out there and some failures out there in psychiatry and neuroscience, I mean, we're still groping around in the dark, more or less in terms of figuring out like what these compounds do. And a big effort in large part led by a group up at UC Davis, some people are gonna be dismayed by this, but a big effort is being made to take these drug compounds,

remove the hallucinogenic components from them and ask whether or not there are other aspects to their biology that have nothing to do with hallucinating or the letting go or the other aspects of psychedelic journeys in order to figure out whether or not something else in those compounds is allowing the brain to readjust itself. Yeah, interesting.

Right, because there are a lot of variables in a psychedelic journey. It's not necessarily the case that the hallucination or the disruption of time and space is the thing that's rewiring the brain. So there's a lot to be learned. Take the fun out of it. Yeah, for some people.

Although I do think it will make it more accessible for people who are averse to the idea of losing control. And so, I'm excited by all these things. I certainly don't wanna encourage kind of maverick use of these things. Many of them are still scheduled drugs so they can land you in jail. I think hypnosis, at least for me,

lands in a category of interesting and intriguing for people to explore. It's certainly non-invasive. You would definitely want to work with somebody very, very good who also has some clinical training in dealing with trauma, who also has some clinical training in dealing with whatever it is that people are dealing with,

because there's been success with eating disorders, which are very, very challenging in the apps, even with medication, those can be very, very challenging. ADHD and some of the other clinical syndromes. Well, the broadening of neuroscience to kind of include psychiatry and psychology, I think is super interesting. And this idea of how we're approaching

the processing of things like trauma through dissociative practices is super interesting because we've always thought of dealing with our past through a kind of talk therapy modality, which by definition requires that we confront some aspect of our past or something that we've repressed. And of course, that's gonna bring up

all types of powerful feelings and you have to feel those feelings, but you also have to understand that feelings are not facts and the only way to kind of get to the other side and kind of withdraw the charge that those past events have on how you think about yourself and behave in the world is to create that disassociation, right? So how does that, like, let's talk,

let's just kind of like focus on trauma right now because I think it's super important. You know, everybody has their past trauma and those traumas are very powerful as predictors of current and future behavior. Yeah, I mean, if ever there was a phenomenon in life that I'm struck by is it's trauma. And it's incredible to me how we experience these things

for some people more than others, right? To some extent, everyone has trauma to some extent. I think we need to be fair and say that some people have a tremendous amount of trauma and other people less, but that there's some consistent themes that the psychoanalysts actually had right, which is that for many people, there's this, what the analysts would call a repetition compulsion, right?

Somebody experiences something really terrible as a child. And then as an adult, they find themselves seeking out similar types of situations. And it's just the most illogical thing one can imagine. And the analysts would say, well, this is a reparative wish and attempt to throw oneself back subconsciously, throw oneself back into these scenarios to get a different outcome.

Right, so for example, if you had a deadbeat dad, you're gonna, you're a young woman, you're gonna search out, you're gonna seek out like a boyfriend who has those same behavior patterns. Or the exact opposite. Which defies logic. Yeah, in one case, it's the exact opposite, in which case we might say,

well, that's a more functional step. In the other case, it's, yeah, it's this repetition compulsion, making the same mistakes despite knowing better, right? And not necessarily from this standpoint of addiction, where there are some deeper dopamine circuits driving that. So, you know, trauma is fascinating in that way. I mean, what do we know about trauma?

And again, I'm borrowing from some of my conversations with David Spiegel and with Anna Lembke, who I know you've had on the podcast. It's very clear that relief from trauma in some way or another almost always involves going, deliberately bringing oneself back into the state of mind and body that occurred during the trauma.

As horrible as that might seem, avoiding that seems to be an issue. And then gradually or hopefully quickly, but in some cases, gradually desensitizing oneself to that experience as not just a overwhelming, horrible experience, but a sad, but no longer overwhelming experience

so that they can gain some sort of ability to think inside of the memory and to parse what happened. One resounding theme that I've collected in talking to trauma therapists and exploring a lot of the therapies for trauma is that oftentimes trauma involves a deep confusion for whatever reason, a deep confusion about who was responsible.

And this is something that's somewhat complicated and can be troubling to think about, but people will experience a trauma, a car crash, a sexual assault, a devastating financial loss can also be a trauma. And then somehow in one's mind, it's not clear whether or not that was something that happened to them or that they created for themselves.

Now, the typical script of this was people talking about, oh, you know, I shouldn't have been out that late or dressed that way or acted that way, but it's actually can be much more subtle and diabolical than that. It can be that it can start to route into people's own percept of self. Like maybe I'm not worthy of being happy.

And therefore the fact that this happened makes total sense. People create these crazy scripts and crazy because they don't match any real world facts, but they do match a lot of internal structure. And so it becomes very complex to unpack all this. But what we know for sure is that accessing the state of mind and body that resembles the state of mind and body during the trauma is the first step in moving trauma

out of the body, so-called trauma release. Now, almost always that has to be done in concert with a really well-trained physician or clinician, because that can be overwhelming, certainly the first time. There's also some evidence based on some decent studies that show that deliberately accessing states of high autonomic arousal that are independent from the trauma. So things like ice baths, things like hard exercise,

things like very, very intense experiences separate from the traumatic memory can be useful in allowing people to attain comfort at high levels of autonomic arousal, right? I mean, you're trying to essentially say, go back to this place and work it through, try and get some space or some distance from the emotion. And yet for some people,

just an elevation in heart rate is overwhelming for them. And so they're not even gonna set foot on the first step up the mountain when in fact, that's exactly what they need to do. So there's now a kind of movement in psychiatry and psychology to bring in more of these, I guess you could call them somatic approaches, but to my mind, they're really physiological approaches.

They're really approaches that teach people how to be tolerant of high levels of autonomic arousal. And so that's something that we're starting to see a shift in. The other thing I should just acknowledge is that until the psychoanalysts, the cognitive behavioral therapists, the neuroscientists, and the psychiatrists join arms, we are going to go around and around and around this merry-go-round of not knowing how to deal with trauma and feelings, right? I mean, we're all told to feel our feelings, but not trust them as facts. And yet here, I'm telling you that most successful trauma therapies involve getting right up close to that event, really letting it

almost overtake oneself, and then start to create these gaps. And these gaps that I'm referring to are real gaps in neural circuitry. The work from Spiegel and many others has shown, and the work doing brain imaging under conditions of ketamine and other types of pharmacologic therapies have shown there are active associations normally between the prefrontal cortex, which is thinking, planning, and reasoning, the insula, which is an area of the brain

that monitors how we feel internally, and then some of these areas like the anterior cingulate cortex, which are involved in kind of self-monitoring and figuring out how much of what I'm experiencing is coming from thoughts and things within and from things in my environment. And under conditions of extreme autonomic arousal

and somewhat counter to under conditions of deep relaxation, those neural circuits are able to rearrange themselves. And when one emerges from those treatments, the default network then is one of perspective. It's one of saying, ah, this is something that happened, but it was not my fault, or this is something that happened and indeed it set me up

for a number of positive opportunities in my life. All those sorts of stories that we hear about all the time. So if this is sounding a little bit abstract, I'm trying my best to put some structure on it, but where there's a lack of structure, I'll kind of wriggle out of that by saying that, there is no clear answer as to where trauma

is represented in the nervous system. Many people talk about trauma being manifest as physical symptoms in their body. And that used to be considered kind of, you know, pseudoscience, it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense. After all the nervous system is the brain, the eyes and the spinal cord for central nervous system.

And then every organ in your body is innervated by nerve cells, neurons in the peripheral nervous system. So the manifestation of things in the body and in the brain shouldn't surprise anybody. And I think one of the great expansions of neuroscience in the last few years is that whereas five, 10 years ago, you would find very few grants funding work in laboratories and laboratories working on elements

of the nervous system in the body, very, very few, maybe 98% of the focus was on things within the brain, memory, consciousness, vision, hearing, et cetera. Now an enormous number of laboratories are moving into this mind-body relationship, but they don't call it that. They call it the peripheral nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, right?

They call it the gut-brain axis. So we have fancy names to disguise the fact that we're studying mind and body. Right, God forbid. God forbid. Anybody, God forbid. God forbid. Anybody find out. What's interesting about the trauma discussion is, when I think about it,

I think of trauma being just an extreme example of not just, you know, something that, you know, happened to you, but a story we tell about who we are. Like we were talking about this the other day, like we all walk around looping some narrative in our minds about who we are, what we're capable of, what happened to us, why we are the way we are.

And I think we cause ourselves a lot of suffering and undue pain as a result of narratives that are really detached from reality, whether positive or negative. Like they take on a life of their own and they're very real to us. And yet if you put them under the microscope and deconstruct them,

they actually generally don't hold up. So from a neurobiology point of view, how do you think about this? And how can you talk about empowering people to deconstruct those narratives and hopefully create healthier versions of them? Yeah, well, the stability of self is a very mysterious, but very pervasive theme in neuroscience.

I mean, you wake up every day and depending on how you feel about yourself, you might feel better or worse, but you're you every day. You recognize yourself. But what is you? And how malleable is your default personality? Well, what is you is, I mean, that's certainly not gonna be anchored in one brain area.

We know this is gonna be a network of activity. There are cases of course of multiple personality and things of that sort, but exceedingly rare. Our self-percept is often very different than other people's perception of us. I don't wanna out him, but we have a member of our podcast team who to me is just like the calmest person in the world.

And he manages an incredibly complicated life with immense grace. He's extremely talented in his work. He's just an incredible human being. But if you ask him a bit more about his internal world, if he's feeling like he wants to share a bit, he'll say, yeah, internally, it's just chatter, chatter, there's tons going on. But externally, I experience him

as one of the calmest people I know. And I think a lot of people see themselves or feel themselves as anxious when in reality, the way they emerge in the real world is very, very different from their internal percept. So that's the first thing to recognize. Conversely, a lot of people who think they're incredible might not be perceived as incredible.

And we could have a whole conversation about narcissists some other time because that's a real thing, right? I mean, narcissists sort of exploit the reactions of other people and the commitments and allegiances or lack of allegiances of other people in order to feed this very squishy internal ego, right?

That they have. Their self-concept is actually very weak, but they come across often as very dominant and in control. And we're getting better at recognizing who those people are. And the interesting thing is they probably don't realize that they are the way they are, despite the thousands, if not tens of thousands of videos

about narcissists on YouTube and elsewhere. So narcissists aside, the reality is that much of how we are gauged in terms of who we are is on our behavior and how calm people perceive us to be or how stressed people perceive us to be in a bunch of different contexts. And that's actually one of the major ways that we just sort of assess whether or not

somebody would be a useful partner or somebody to know in one situation or another or in many situations. We're very good at subconsciously perceiving other people's level of autonomic arousal through things like pupil dilation. I'm talking a lot now, so I might be more flush than usual, but it's contextual, right?

It's contextual, we're here and we're talking a lot. So you also gain knowledge over time and you realize that, ah, when this person is in this situation, they occupy this kind of level of arousal in that situation, that level of arousal and so on. So in terms of our concept of others, I think that we're gaining a lot of knowledge

about the brain areas, for instance, incredible work from Nancy Kanwisher's lab at MIT. We have what's called the fusiform face area, literally a little catalog or library of neurons in your brain, this fusiform gyrus area of your brain that recognizes faces with exquisite precision. I mean, any number of people can walk into the room and you'll know who they are, or if you don't know them. So facial recognition, even when people are in profile or you see the back of their head, so it's not even a face,

face recognition in old world primates of which we are, there's incredible machinery there. Very little is understood about self-perception and where self-perceptions reside, but most people can recognize themselves in the mirror and that occurs from a very early age. So I'd be willing to speculate that a lot of what we perceive

about ourself and the stability of our self perception has a lot to do with our visual images of ourself and people's reactions to us. So we're cataloging all those data all the time. Now, how malleable is it? Well, I mean, last time we sat down for a recorded discussion, we talked about how, I was really emphasizing actions first

as a way to shift perception, sensations and emotions. And I still stand behind that, you know, because that's the accessible form of neuroplasticity for most of us. Actions change your nervous system over time. And, you know, if ever there was a truth in neuroscience is that the nervous system can change in response to experience,

the more heightened or critical that experience is, the faster those changes are going to occur. So that just leads me to a place where I'd say, how crucial is it to change one's behavior and therefore one's identity is probably going to dictate whether or not you're able to do it or not. I think about that show, Mad Men, where he basically takes on a completely different life

and persona. And he was able to maintain that and this secret that he was actually somebody else for a long enough period of time. But it's through behaviors that people gauge us and then we start to gauge ourselves. Sure, so it's actions. If you wanna transcend whatever loop you're in,

you start behaving in contrast to whatever that narrative is until your nervous system kind of cottons onto that and it becomes more habitual. But the ultimate question of course would be if somebody just started behaving in complete contraposition to, you know, their entire personality started, you know, talking about, you know, the opposite of the ideas that they believe in and start behaving on that. Like, could you just completely transcend your personality and become another individual altogether personality wise? Yeah, I believe that's probably possible.

Which is wild. It's really wild. And it really speaks to the fact that the nervous system is paying attention to its own actions. It's kind of a case of cognitive dissonance and it's what your actions do in some sense define you, both to people outside of you and to oneself. There's this concept in psychoanalysis of the introject,

which I find fascinating. The introject is this idea that we can subconsciously embody the reactions of somebody else. So one thing that fascinates me now that I'm a bit more involved in, you know, sort of online interactions and social media is, you know, the tremendous number of really inspiring people out there.

I put you in this category, I'll put you on the spot and embarrass you, but I read your book long before we met and was really motivated to make a number of important changes in my life on the basis of reading that book, I truly was. And so just to, you know, embarrass you a bit here, but that's the reality. I'm going to get flush. Appropriately. Yeah. Because it's an incredible journey. And,

or, you know, last time we talked about David Goggins and there are many examples, right? You can go online now and see examples of incredible people doing incredible things. Now, one version of that is to think, oh, that's inspiring. It shifts my autonomic arousal so I can get up at 4.30 in the morning, like Jocko and like get after it and do this stuff, which, and frankly, there've been times when I'll see a social media post. I'm like, yeah, you know, I'm being lazy. I should really push a little harder. Or you had Chad Wright on here, whose content, you know, he and I are very different in a variety of ways and we've never met, but I find his content incredibly inspiring

because the way that he communicates his conviction, even though some of my convictions are different than his. And so, and I learned about him through you. So we could consider that inspiration, but then the idea of the analyst that I think is appropriate, and keep in mind that while Freud, there were many issues with him and Jung and analysis,

they did have a heavy interest in physiology as the root of the subconscious. And there's this idea of the introject is fascinating to me because what it says is that if you consume enough of that content, if you read enough books about people who have embarked on certain kinds of journeys and made certain choices,

that at some point you might interject some of their personality and their responses and subconsciously start making decisions, hopefully positive decisions on your own behalf, maybe having more appropriate boundaries, maybe taking better self-care or care of other people. And that without even realizing it, you're starting to make better choices on your own behalf. And then at some point you move from the interject to a recognition that, wait, it was me that made that change. I'm the one that managed to get up a bit earlier and do a little bit more or to be kinder in this context or to listen a little bit better in this context. And over time, we start to ascribe those changes to ourself. So this is a more gradual shift in personality and the story of who one is, So this is a more gradual shift in personality and the story of who one is. But I think it's a powerful one. And I like it because we hear so much today about the negativity shining lights out there because I do think that the information that we consume

sets the internal context of our subconscious and sets the internal context for what we decide to do consciously. And in many ways, it's sort of like garbage in, garbage out. And if it's positive stories and inspiration in, that's how you're basically gonna react in the world. So I think that the nervous system has a tremendous capacity to learn consciously and subconsciously.

And after all, it is during sleep that our nervous system rewires. We know that the dreaming that occurs during rapid eye movement sleep has this very unique signature of being very emotionally salient, falling, being chased, et cetera, but that the body is incapable of releasing adrenaline,

epinephrine during that time. So that's its own sort of form of trauma therapy, right? So that's a subconscious learning that we go through each night, provided we're getting into rapid eye movement sleep. So the brain is designed to access these states in sleep that help us rewire in beneficial ways. You can, if you want, I don't recommend it,

you can run the other experiment, sleep deprive yourself for three nights and see how your emotionality is doing, right? Yeah, that's super interesting. I mean, I think ultimately though, it always goes back to action. Like you can consume a tremendous amount of inspirational content and then convince yourself

that you did something productive or you feel better about yourself without having ever actually done anything. And I see a lot of that as well, but ultimately at some point you would think that that's gonna translate into some kind of action or behavior. One would hope.

And that brings up kind of these ideas around alter ego, right? Like if you feel yourself not worthy of, you know, being that type of person, you see Jocko, he's waking up at 4.30 in the morning and doing what he does. And you say, well, what would Jocko do? And then you do that. Like you kind of step into the alter ego of Jocko

and what he would do and start mimicking that behavior. Over time, then like you said, you wake up and you realize like, oh, it's me. I no longer, I can shed that alter ego now and I can kind of own this space for myself. Yeah, exactly. And I think that one of the hardest things to do is to calibrate one's consumption of social media or any kind of high potency information. I mean, if you think about it, this is the first time in human history that you can scroll through 50 movies in one minute.

I mean, if a picture is worth a thousand words, right, we know that a movie is worth 10,000 pictures. I mean, the visual system loves motion. And so there's, you know, I'm sure the algorithms reflect this. And so really setting constraints on the amount of interaction with stuff is important. And I think setting constraints

on what type of information you're going to consume. I mean, there is something about our nervous system that draws us to look at the car crash, to click behind that muted screen that allows you to see the gory thing or to get involved in some sort of a very narrow context online argument. I mean, everyone is prone to that,

some people more than others, but there's also a lot of incredible content out there. And I think that the high potency positive content, whatever that means, for some people that's listening to a piece of classical music. These days I'm really interested in finding a lot of incredible artwork online

and just going, wow, like people are creating some amazing stuff. That can be inspiring. So it comes in a variety of different forms for different people, but being very, I think that we all need to be more guarded of the kinds of information in the context that we expose our nervous systems to. And the problem with social media to just acknowledge it is that it's a free for all in terms of context context and you can set limits on it in time, but you can't set limits on it in terms of context at all, unless you're very good at self-governing

or governing the use of social media in kids, for instance. I mean, the just endless fire hose of stimulation that you can expose your neurochemistry to is unprecedented. Like we're not wired for that. Like I can't imagine that being impulsed so vociferously, like so continually in the way that we are is doing anything good for us. Like that seems to be the study, right?

That needs to be done on like, what is this crazy mass experiment that we're running on the human brain right now? Yeah, well, I think it brings us back to this issue of brain states. You know, we meaning neuroscience, certainly not my work, but Matt Walker and others, William Dement at Stanford, who defined rapid eye movement sleep,

although he didn't discover it, he helped define it. You know, they successfully defined the major stages or states of sleep, slow wave sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, alternating in 90 minute cycles, more or less, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When we dream, when we have emotional dreams, muscle repair, growth hormone, all that stuff. We have very poor definition of waking states. We just don't even know what to call them. We call them flow or focused or happy or sad, but a lot of those are emotional labels and kind of subjective labels that have some degree of grading to them.

Like, oh, that was a good state or a bad state or a happy state. We have not yet defined most waking states. We hear about alpha waves, gamma waves, et cetera, but that's very crude. For people that don't know, the brain waves are generally measured by EEG. These are these skull caps that are non-invasive

with a bunch of electrodes. Terrific because you can do this anywhere without drilling through the skull. Terrible because they only measure activity in the outer centimeter or so of the brain. So they're not telling you a whole lot about what's happening. It's like looking at the ocean,

the waves on the ocean, trying to figure out what's happening at depth. It's just not gonna work. So we need to better define waking brain states. However, one thing that's clear from the work on sleep that's now working its way into the naming and understanding of brain states and wakefulness is that one state precedes another. Now your bike ride where you're listening to the audio book is a way in which you're coordinating your respiration physiology,

your breathing and your motor output, your bike riding with the ability to access auditory information and remember it well. So you figured out something about that state, but the neuroscientist in me says, okay, but what follows that state when you get back? What state are you in then? Is it a state of exhaustion that allows you to go into deep rest to access neuroplasticity? Or is it a state of where you've essentially moved all that excess autonomic arousal out of your body and now finally you can sit down and just focus your cone of attention on your work. So one state precedes another. And one thing that I think can be incredibly useful

to people would be to think about two hallmarks of brain states in order to access them more readily. One is that the thing that we are all a slave to, all of us is the 24 hour circadian cycle. One is that the thing that we are all a slave to, all of us is the 24 hour circadian cycle. Every cell in our body has a 24 hour clock that runs at the level of genes and the level of cellular processes

and every network in our body, whether or not it's nervous system, spleen, whatever, is governed by this 24 hour clock. We can fairly crudely, but still accurately, subdivide that 24 hour period into three phases. What I would call phase one, and I'm just naming it phase one because we don't have a better name for it,

is from about zero until about eight or nine hours after you wake up. Phase two is from about nine hours after you wake up until about 16 hours after you've woken up. And phase three would be from about 17 hours to 24 hours. The 17 hour to 24 hour period that we're calling phase three is sleep. And we know what we should be doing in that state. We should be accessing as much uninterrupted deep sleep as we can. And the beautiful work that Matt's done and others have done says, okay, lower the temperature in the

room, elevate your feet a little bit, et cetera, et cetera, keep it dark. I mean, there's a lot of things that we could talk about there. Phase one and phase two, we know based on really good neuroscience, have certain signature patterns of neurotransmitter release and autonomic arousal that lend themselves better to certain activities,

both mental and physical and not others. So phase one, for instance, is always accompanied by an increase in cortisol. And this is a healthy release of cortisol, a stress hormone that wakes us up. It's part of the wake up system and the release of epinephrine, which is also called adrenaline and the molecule dopamine. It turns out epinephrine and dopamine, dopamine actually manufactures epinephrine, they're biochemically. So that phase one of the day in many ways is ideal for any kind of linear action-oriented items.

If you had, and people will differ. Some people say I do creative work best early in the day, but most people are gonna do best at kind of correct answer type work, meaning where there is a correct linear output, it's going to be accounting type work, or it's going to be exercise where you might not know exactly what you're going to do, but there is a process that you can follow. It's going to be punching out a certain amount of words on a page because you're

just trying to get the words down on the page for the book or doing math or doing any kind of linear operations during that first phase one. Phase two has a signature pattern of neurotransmitter release in the brain and body that are more closely associated, not exclusively, but more closely associated with the release of things like serotonin. These are neuromodulators that tend to make us feel a little bit calmer and they disrupt,

or I should say they alter because it's not a pathological shift, but they alter our perception of space and time in a way that allows us to make mental associations that are a little bit looser. They can be nonlinear. So that's a time that's excellent for creative work or for brainstorming. And you might notice that when you're a little bit fatigued, your mind is a little freer. And if you're very fatigued, your mind is all over the place. So one thing that I think has been missing from the brain state work has been a kind of cohesive framework. And yet everyone, I think every neuroscientist would agree

that the 24 hour cycle really governs, not just digestion and bodily temperature, because it does, temperature is higher in the morning, rising, rising, rising to the afternoon, then starts coming down, and then you go into sleep in phase three, because your body temperature is lowered. So those three phases really drive our brain states,

and one precedes the other. This is the key thing. We can never look at a state in isolation. But if you wanted to understand, for instance, how to access a state of heightened creativity, you might try placing it in phase two of the day. So 10 to 16 hours after you've been awake and see how that works for you and pay attention to your state of mind

before you attempt to go into that state and as you exit that state. And so I think that if we've learned anything from the sleep science, it's that we can't look at one state of mind in isolation. We need to ask what preceded it and what follows it in order to understand its structure and how to access it better.

At the same time, human beings do their best to fuck with this by sugar, caffeine, alcohol. Like we're trying to perpetuate a certain state that where we feel the best or we're the most productive and that disrupts this natural like sort of preset regarding the circadian rhythm and the kind of hormonal regulatory balance that we would experience, you know,

without, you know, all of these inputs that are screwing us up and impairing our sleep and, you know, ultimately have short-term gains, you know, obviously, or we wouldn't do it, but long-term, you know, problems. Yeah, I think that there are basic things that, if I may, everyone should do in order to anchor their body and their mind in the most productive rhythm that they possibly can. And the reason I feel comfortable saying this is that we were not designed to be nocturnal. We are capable of nocturnal activity. And I want to just give a nod to shift workers and of all kinds that have to work in the middle of the night. I mean, that's the way the world works nowadays.

And there are a whole set of things that shift workers suffer from, digestive issues, mental health issues. I mean, they're prone to more cardiac events and suicides. I mean, it's obvious that shift work, especially swing shift work, where people are alternating their schedule pretty frequently is extremely detrimental to

brain and body. And there are a number of things that people can do to offset that. I've done an episode of the podcast on that. And I do some work with communities that are restricted to shift work to try and help offset that. But for most people, it's going to be heading to sleep somewhere between 9 p.m. and midnight and waking up somewhere between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m., I would think. I mean, depending on the college students and what college years of sleeping in. But there's tremendous value in anchoring one's biology to this 24 hour cycle.

And it's very simple as to how to do that. I mean, the most dominant zeitgeber, as we say, timekeeper that governs all these states, including sleep is light. There's no question about it. And you ask any circadian biologists to say, there's a kind of a principle of circadian biology, which is that light is the dominant zeitgeber, called zeitgeber because the people

who define this were German. And I'm pronouncing it incorrectly because I don't speak German. That it's clear that if possible, one should view sunlight or at least get outside, even if it's cloudy outside within the first hour of waking. And if you wake up before the sun comes out

to flip on as many artificial lights as possible, if your goal is to be awake, if your goal is to go back to sleep, definitely keep the lights dim. But getting sunlight in your eyes, even through cloud cover is going to set in motion a number of different biological events read out first through certain cells in the eyes, these so-called melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive ganglion

cells is the fancy name they were discovered by David Burson at Brown University. And they send a signal to your hypothalamus, which then sets in motion a huge number of hormonal and neural events in the body. They create a cortisol pulse that wakes you up further, sets the baseline for your attention throughout the day, also sets a timer of about 16 hours, not coincidentally, on your first melatonin pulse, which will happen in the evening. So it's timing when your sleep is going to come. People who stay indoors in dark environments

for the early part of the day, just looking at their phone, you're not getting enough light stimulation. The tricky thing is that later in the evening, about 17 hours after you've been awake or when you woke up, what you'll find is that even a minimum of light from screens can shift your circadian clock. And the reason is that there's a gradual shift in the sensitivity of the retina to external light. So you need a lot of light, ideally sunlight early in the day. And of course you don't wanna stare directly

at any light that's so bright that it's painful. You don't have to look directly into the sun, absolutely blink. You can be kind of off center from the sun, but try and get out there without sunglasses if you can. People always ask, can I wear eyeglasses or contacts? I say, absolutely, because that actually will focus the light to your retina.

That's what they're designed to do. Through a window or a windshield simply will not work as well because of the filtration of the wavelengths of light that you want. And then there's a lot of data to support the fact that getting as much bright light in your eyes throughout the day, provided it's not painfully bright,

is excellent for your wakefulness mechanisms. And even for the mechanisms of the brain and body that control metabolism and feeding, mood and wellbeing. This is the work mainly of Samer Hattar at the National Institutes of Mental Health. He's the head of the chronobiology unit at the National Institutes of Mental Health. So Samer would say, get as much bright light in your eyes

as you can early in the day and throughout the day. And then somewhere close to bedtime, trough that and live in the darkest environment you possibly can manage safely. He's not a big fan of being in completely light absent environments, but that simple behavior of early light viewing, most days, if not all days,

sets in motion these three phases that lend themselves best to focused work, creative work, the ability to stay awake most of the day. Naps are fine, we know, provided they don't interfere with nighttime sleep. So naps should be shorter than 90 minutes. But if a nap of any duration prevents you from falling and staying asleep at night, then you don't want to nap. So light is the dominant way

that you set this whole process in motion. And we know based on work that I wasn't involved in, but that David Spiegel did with the great Robert Sapolsky, that if these cortisol pulse doesn't arrive early enough in the day and it starts arriving in the afternoon, that's a physiological signature of depression and anxiety. So that cortisol pulse is happening one way or another, and you wanna anchor to the early part of the day.

And so if you're feeling wide awake, anxious and the sort of wired and tired late in the day, chances are you're not getting enough sunlight early in the day and throughout the day. Right, so the delayed exposure to sunlight in the early part of the day can lead to that kind of depressed state. Absolutely.

And it seems like it's an easy fix to ensure that you're exposed to sunlight in an adequate way in the early part of the day. The end of the day part is harder in our modern lives. Like we could do things with our screens and make sure they're off. Is there a qualitative difference between the light that's being emitted from the screens that we're looking at

versus the overhead lights in our indoor environments? Like we're just in light until it's time to flick the light off and close our eyes. Yeah, it's a great question. One of the things that I think can be very useful, again, is anchored in the biology of the system is that, so the melanopsin cells reside mostly, not exclusively in the lower half of the retina,

and they view the upper visual field. That makes sense because these were cells that were essentially evolved to extract sunlight information. They're not involved in pattern vision. They're involved in gauging how much light there is in our overall environment. In the evening, a lot of people now know to dim their screens, dim the lights, but if possible, also try and shift to an environment where if you

do have lights, make them desk lamps, or if you're really extreme, you can make them floor lamps, but try not to have too much bright overhead lighting. And I suppose if you work in an environment where you can't avoid that, if they allow you to wear a hat or a brimmed hat or something of that sort, that could work fine too. A lot of people like blue blockers. They are not necessary in most cases, but I shouldn't say that, excuse me. They can be very useful if you're stuck

in a bright environment to screen out some of the wavelengths of light that can wake up your circadian clock, so to speak, because light inhibits melatonin very potently. And yet, if you're in a very bright environment, it doesn't matter what wavelengths you screen out, these cells will be activated. So blue blockers alone won't do the job. You also need to try and dim screens and ideally physically lower the lights in your environment, or at least turn off the lights overhead and rely on lights that are further down physically in the room. And the converse of that is during the day, having as many

bright lights above you is terrific. And so, you know, I found a simple low cost solution to this. I don't want to name any brands because I don't have an affiliation with any of them, but a lot of people ask about daytime daylight simulators. I've found that the least expensive and most effective thing, frankly, is to just get a ring light of the sort designed for selfie type stuff and just put it on your desk while you work throughout the day.

And that's giving you a lot of additional photons, bright light. But you would also do well to, you know, do some of your workout on a deck. If you can get outside and take walks, if you can. We know that the major stimuli for setting these brain states are light, temperature, movement, food, and social interactions.

But it all really starts with light. And if we were to talk about temperature, it's clear that everyone has what's called their temperature minimum. So I should just ask you this, we can do the experiment in real time. What time do you normally wake up more or less? Generally about six.

Okay, so we can estimate that your lowest body temperature across the entire 24 hour cycle probably occurs somewhere around 3.30 or 4 a.m. So your goal is to get sunlight in your eyes in the two to four hours following that temperature minimum. If you were to get bright light in your eyes in the two to four hours before that temperature minimum, it would push your clock out of phase.

It would be like traveling. And the key point here is that most people nowadays are jet lagged even though they're not traveling. And so when we feel anxious or disrupted or our sleep is fractured into two major phases, which isn't entirely abnormal, but when we are having all sorts of issues, a lot of times it just brings us back to the question of,

are you getting the major stimulus for your autonomic nervous system to wake up at one time of day and be quiet and quiescent and sleepy at another time of day? Are you getting that stimulus on a consistent basis? And for people that are in the Northeast or in the UK, and they say, well, you should see how much light is coming through right now.

It's like zilch. It's really dark. More photons are coming through that dense cloud cover than you're ever gonna get from your tablet or your phone. At the same time, seasonal affect disorder is like a real thing, right? Like I have a really hard time every winter. I get into a funk, I slide into this semi depressed state

where I just have a really hard time getting enthusiastic about anything. I assume that that's related to the wavelengths of light and what I'm being exposed to as well as temperature, et cetera. And I've done the, you know, expose myself to ring light and all that kind of stuff. Helps a little bit, but it doesn't really ameliorate it.

And what's interesting is even if I travel to a warm climate, you know, and I get in it's tropical or whatever, that time of year where the days are short, unless I go below, you know, to go to Australia or South America or whatever, that time of year where the days are short, unless I go below, you know, to go to Australia or South America or something like that. And so it only ameliorates it in part, even though I'm in a warm environment,

I still, you know, kind of can feel that washed over me until the days start getting longer. Yeah, well, there are a couple of mechanisms for this. First of all, the dopamine system, it does many things in the body, responsible for movement, motivation, craving, et cetera. But dopamine is very strongly regulated by seasonality in a lot of animals.

In fact, for the animal lovers out there and the wildlife lovers of which I am, the shift in pellage color, that animals will have white or very pale fur in one time of the year, and then it gets darker, is actually due to a light regulated shift in dopamine. So when days are short and nights are long, levels of dopamine are reduced.

This probably also explains the reduced mood that you experience to some extent or another. And dopamine is in this tyrosinase pathway, people can look this up, that is upstream of the melanin pathway. And as a consequence, pelage becomes white. In the spring and summer months, when animals are getting more sun,

there's an activation through the eyes, again, activates the dopamine system. The dopamine system then triggers the melanin system to produce darkening of the pelage, right? And there's all sorts of amplification in seasonally breeding animals where animals testes involute, it's a horrible term, but they involute in the winter

and ovaries will involute too. In other words, they shrink. There's a species of hamster actually where the Siberian hamster, where it's testes are about the size of a grain of rice during the winter. And then they increase by more than a thousand fold in the spring and summer.

So there's these massive shifts. Now humans are not restricted to seasonally breeding. and then they increase by more than a thousand fold in the spring and summer. So there's these massive shifts. Now humans are not restricted to seasonally breeding. You know, I mean, after all I was born in September, so that doesn't work. Cause I'm imagining if all things still work the way they do now that I was conceived sometime in December. There's a multitude of factors.

I don't know the story of my conception nor do I want to know, but nonetheless, you know, humans are subject to more subtle mood-based variations and physiology shifts across the year. And the reason is the following. Light comes in, triggers these intrinsically photosensitive cells, then trigger a pathway that eventually converges not just on the circadian clock and the hypothalamus, but on the pineal gland. And the pineal is responsible for secretion of melatonin. So when days are long, because light inhibits melatonin, the pulse of melatonin, the duration of your melatonin pulse, as we call it, is very short. When days are short and nights are very

long, there's less light to inhibit melatonin. And so there's a long melatonin signal. The melatonin signal does a number of things. It makes you sleepy, et cetera. It's gonna make you feel a little bit more subdued, but it has a number of downstream effects as well. So what I would suggest for people that experience moderate seasonal depression would be to really emphasize trying to get as much bright light in your eyes

as you can outside. And if appropriate, there's a study out of Israel that shows that exposing as much of your bodily surface to light actually can be useful too. And for appropriate, there's a study out of Israel that shows that exposing as much of your bodily surface to light actually can be useful too. And for the following reason, we think of skin as just this barrier to outside stuff, which it is, but it's actually an endocrine organ. It can secrete hormones through, or it can direct the secretion of hormones. There's a pathway involving something called P57, and it's a beautiful paper that described how people who get two hours of upper body, most of upper body sunlight exposure

have greatly increased levels of both testosterone and estrogen in the appropriate ratios in men and women, et cetera, and improved mood and improved libido, improved metabolism. The metabolism study is kind of a separate study, but nonetheless, it's not just about getting sunlight on your eyes, it's also just about getting sunlight on your eyes. It's also about getting it onto your skin,

which typically we only do in the spring and summer months. So again, if appropriate, try and expose as much of yourself to sunlight as possible. And I should say, no, this is not a reinforcement for this trend that was taking over Instagram a few years ago of sunning every orifice on your body. That was more, I think-

I think we all know what we're talking about. That was more of a subculture phenomenon. And there, as far as I know, there are no laboratory data to support that. That would be a study that would be hard to get approved. I wanna switch gears here a little bit and talk about performance states. Like I feel like as an athlete, I was taught certain things

and I just naturally developed my own habits around getting into an optimal performance state. Visualization has always been a tool, but also intentional breathing practices without any instruction. It's just, you watch people, for example, in swimming behind the blocks at the Olympics, they're all taking deep breaths. It's almost as if their body is telling them what they need to do to induce a state in which they can perform at their absolute peak. But I've also been in situations where now I go on stage to give a talk and sometimes I'm very relaxed and it goes great.

And other times I'm hyperventilating and I'm sweating and I'm nervous and I can't catch my breath and I can't get a word out. Like I've exceeded the performance state and I'm in a state of induced panic, right? So what are some practices? Cause everybody, whether you have to give a presentation at work

or make a difficult phone call or have an uncomfortable conversation, we all have moments in our life where we wanna kind of execute to the best of our abilities. And I know that there's many things that we can do to kind of ensure that we're in the best position for the outcome that we seek. Yeah, before I answer, I just have to ask,

is there any correlation with what you described with how well you slept the night before? Oh, 100%. Like when I sleep really well, I'm alert, but I'm calm. I have a sense of confidence that comes easy. Words come easy, thoughts come easy. My memory is better, my recall, all of that. If I don't sleep well, and often I don't,

particularly when I have to give a speech in front of a lot of people, because that induces a lot of anxiety in me and that I don't rest well. And then I wake up and I'm already off my game. And then I'm in some sort of damage control. And often I find myself in a vicious circle that just makes it worse.

And then there I am on stage and just delivering a C minus performance. Yeah, I have a lot to learn when it comes to that art form. You're an excellent speaker. I hear the Stanford student in you and very self-critical, but look, self-criticism is also the gateway to high performance over time, right? So, okay. So in terms of thinking about accessing states and self-directing states for performance, we should probably return to this notion of the autonomic seesaw, because we are all slaves to this process of alert, alert, but calm or stressed or sleepy,

et cetera. The reason I asked about sleep is that the way to think about the autonomic nervous system is that it's not truly autonomic. Autonomic means automatic. We actually can exert some control over it. We can have certain kinds of conversations and not others. We can breathe faster or more slowly. As we talked about before, you can use your visual system in a number of ways. So we can exert control over this thing that we're calling the autonomic nervous system or the seesaw. Perhaps a better way to visualize it is that you're sort of like, imagine yourself as a stick figure. That's you on the autonomic seesaw and under well-rested, well-prepared conditions, you can move back and

forth across that seesaw. You can kind of surf that seesaw all day long. And the hinge on that seesaw, so to speak, is of the appropriate tightness and looseness that that makes it very easy. When we're sleep deprived, there's a tendency for us to find that getting from one end of the seesaw to the other is a little bit more strenuous. And I've talked to Matt Walker about some of the underlying circuits that might reflect the hinge might actually be. And it's something that we might collaborate on in the future.

But it's very clear that when we're well rested, we can surf the seesaw pretty well. We feel stressed and we can kind of take a deep breath, calm ourselves, tell ourselves, okay, you know, that person's nuts or that person, you know, is, I'll deal with that later. But when we're sleep deprived, we compromise our ability to do this.

Okay. Regardless of whether or not you're well-rested or not, it's clear that there's a small handful of tools that can allow one to direct their movement along the seesaw more efficiently. The first one is one that we talked about before, which is the physiological sigh. And I'm not here to promote,

first of all, I didn't discover it. I don't own it. It was Jack Feldman that really understood the neural machinery, but physiological size have been known about since the 1930s as a way to reset the oxygen CO2 balance in the system. If one is feeling stressed,

or I should just say more alert than one would like to be under any conditions. Physiological sighs are at least to my knowledge, the fastest way to bring down that level of alertness. And again, it's a full inhale through the nose as deeply as you possibly can. And then sneak in a little bit more air at the top. That's going to inflate the maximum number of alveoli

and then a long exhale until basically you have no more air to exhale., that's going to inflate the maximum number of alveoli and then a long exhale until basically you have no more air to exhale. And how many times do you do that? We find that just once is often enough, but maybe three times maximum. Now that's very different than the five minute physiological sign practice that we were talking about before.

This is what I would call a real time tool. And this is something that my lab has been really interested in developing because so many of the things that make us able to perform well involve taking us out of the arena that we're in. It's meditation, it's a massage, it's a great night's sleep,

it's quality social interaction and nutrition. And of course we should still all do all of those things as often as we can. But there's this double-edged sword about, or I should say, there's this very diabolical aspect to stress, which is that when we are stressed, oftentimes we can't remove ourself from the stress

or the thing that's stressing us. And oftentimes we are compromised in our ability to access the states of mind and good sleep and all those sorts of things. You even alluded to that in your description. So physiological size are an excellent real-time tool for dealing with things in real time. The other thing that's clearly useful is for people to get comfortable at high levels of autonomic arousal. And in many

ways, this could be thought of as raising one's stress threshold. And here I have to give a nod to Wim Hof type breathing also, which is very similar to TUMO type breathing, which is very similar to what we call cyclic hyperventilation in the lab. But basically having a practice that you do away from the event, it doesn't necessarily have to be done every day, but maybe three times a week or so

of deliberately putting your autonomic nervous system, excuse me, into a state of very high autonomic arousal. So this would involve doing 20 or 30 really deep breaths in through the nose and then exhaling very intensely. You know, normally our inhales are active and our exhales are passive. In reptilian species, it's the opposite. It's kind of interesting.

Their exhales tend to be active and their inhales tend to be passive. But for humans, we tend to inhale and then just let the air kind of drift out of us. When you both inhale intensely and exhale intensely 20 or 30 times, you're going to quote unquote heat up. That's the release of adrenaline from your adrenals. There's no question about that. You could also get into a cold shower. You could also do an ice bath. You could do submersion. You could do any number of things provided that it makes you

uncomfortable. What you're doing is you're tipping that seesaw and you're doing it deliberately. And then immediately after that 20 or 30 breaths, you exhale all your air. What I'm describing is classic Tumor Wim Hof type breathing to many people. And you hold your breath and try and maintain a state of mental calm, despite being flooded with adrenaline. And then you repeat and then you repeat again. And maybe you do that three or four rounds. Some people include big inhales with breath holds. I should point out that none of this should be done anywhere near water, not even standing next to a puddle because people have blacked out and drowned in ice baths and in oceans. And people have died doing this type of thing

because of the ability that you can't breathe underwater and the shallow water blackout phenomenon. So I wanna emphasize that. People who have a high degree of anxiety or who suffer from panic attacks are not going to want to do this unless they're doing this with clinical support right there.

But for most people and for sake of high performance, getting very comfortable in high levels of adrenaline pumping through your system can be immensely useful such that when you get hit by something from the outside, like the sudden appearance of an elevated heart rate for reasons you don't understand, you can sort of third person from that in recognizing I've been in this state before.

It's sort of like when you learn how to drive, you do it around the parking lot and you do it in the local roads. And then the first time you drive in really dense fog on a mountain road and you're scared for your life, it's one reflector at a time. And that, you know, you make it through that. The next time it's two reflectors, you're like,

okay, don't like this, could get rear-ended anytime, could go off a cliff, but I've been here before. So that's a useful practice. Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. No, no. A lot of that has to do with the root of the anxiety. And often that's traced to a relationship with control. Right, like you wanna control the outcome.

If you're an athlete and you have a game or a performance or whatever it is, it's that idea of like, I want this to go a certain way. I only have control over some of these variables. How am I gonna be perceived? What happens if X, Y, or Z happens in an unexpected way, which is why I found visualization to be a powerful tool. And I've generally used that or deployed it to visualize success, like walking myself mentally through every step of what's going

to happen and kind of plotting how it's going to turn out in a favorable way. But I know that you have some thoughts around doing that in a failure context as well. So you're getting a comprehensive view of all the things that could happen, which could then kind of calm yourself down because you've considered it all. Yeah, so there's some interesting data, actually modeling data,

I mean computational models of learning that say, what should the percentage of successful trials versus failed trials be when you're trying to learn something? So this is a little bit different than high performance in the context of competition or the onstage performance. We're really talking about training at this point. And there are a couple of interesting things about this. First of all, the number that falls out of this really nice paper is that the best level of difficulty for something should be approximately successful trials, 85% of the time, 15% of trials should be failed trials. And obviously this will vary by context if you're

learning piano versus if you're shooting on a range or in for cognitive tasks for math, et cetera. But this 85-15 rule seems to work well for the understanding of how the underlying neural networks for learning work. So that's, hopefully we'll give people a little bit of guidance in terms of structuring their training or their learning in a way that it's appropriate levels of difficulty,

neither too difficult nor too easy. The other thing that's very clear is that the process of neuroplasticity, as I mentioned, has two steps, major steps. One is focus and then one is deep rest. Most of the rewiring and learning in your nervous system is going to occur during deep sleep. And so obviously try and get sufficient amount

of quality sleep, slow wave and REM sleep as much as possible. But there are two really nice papers published in the journal Cell Reports, the Cell Press Journal, excellent journal, which show that even brief 20 minute periods of resting or napping after a learning bout can greatly accelerate the neuroplasticity process.

So whether or not you're trying to learn a new motor skill, whether or not you have just done an intense visualization, which can be relaxing, but it's really a form of training and repetition, whether or not you're learning math or piano or whatever it is that at in some period of time within the immediate four hours after the learning bout or the visualization to get 20 minutes of maybe a shallow nap, you could do what we call non-sleep deep rest. Some people call it yoga nidra. There are other forms of non-sleep deep rest, essentially letting the brain go idle,

closing your eyes. They've done, and this was, I should say this is work done in humans. It was done sensory motor learning, learning complex sequences of a kind of a Simon Says game, which is hitting, some people won't remember what that is, but remembering the sequences of lights and that can be very easy

when there's only three or four things in that sequence, but as you get up to 20 or 30, that's some serious work. The other thing that really favors neuroplasticity are what are called gap effects. And these date back more than a couple of decades, but, and have been demonstrated in a huge variety of contexts of learning. But anytime you're learning something, it pays to have random intervals in which you stop and do nothing. So let's use learning a sequence of keys on the piano, just for sake of example. You're practicing a scale or you're practicing a piece of music. Every once in a while, if you have a timer that goes off randomly or the

instructor or teacher tells you stop and you attempt to do nothing, you could close your eyes or keep them open, but you stop the motor pattern or you stop trying to do the math problem or you stop trying to do the physical sequence that you were doing. It turns out that when we sleep, there's a rapid replay of these sequences of events during the day, but at much higher speed. So per unit time, you're getting about 10 to 60 times the replay or repetition of what you're doing during the day. During these brief gaps, these 10 second gaps that are introduced while awake during your learning, you get a 10 to 20 times repeat of whatever sequence you were trying to learn.

So this is a way of getting more repetitions in even though you're doing less. And so these gap effects are fascinating. They're being demonstrated now for more and more types of learning. And fortunately, the more recent papers really point to the neural mechanisms. It's the hippocampus and the neocortex areas involved in storage and retrie types of learning. And fortunately, the more recent papers really point to the neural mechanisms. It's the hippocampus and the neocortex areas

involved in storage and retrieval of memories that are rapidly replaying these sequences. It's like you, we talked about how one state defines the next. So when you're repeating something over and over and over and you stop, the nervous system doesn't just switch to what you're doing.

It keeps generating that sequence. And when you suddenly limit your motor behavior, your cognitive behavior, so maybe you're reciting lines to generating that sequence. And when you suddenly limit your motor behavior, your cognitive behavior, so maybe you're reciting lines to remember, and all of a sudden you just stop and you attempt to stop doing that, your mind keeps going and accelerates the number of repetitions,

and then you return to the practice. Why has that not been incorporated into our educational system? I mean, that's crazy. That seems like such a turbo blast in our ability to synthesize information that it should be part and parcel of how we are approaching our curriculums. Well, first of all, two responses to that.

First of all, I've made some attempt to put that out there. We had a, there's a free lecture that I did, thanks to the support of Logitech. There's a free online lecture that was specifically for teachers and some steps to gaining more rapid neuroplasticity because I think teachers are hungry for better ways to teach their students.

I think I can speculate, having been in the field of neuroscience for a long while now, that there was so much excitement about neuroplasticity and BDNF or neuroplasticity and nerve growth factor, all these, frankly, hard to access mechanisms that people were thinking,

what can I eat? What can I do in order to enhance my learning? What's gonna trigger BDNF release? When in fact, the process of neuroplasticity is built into our childhood and how we developed for better or for worse, right? Hence the discussion about trauma. But there are a couple elements to

neuroplasticity that we now know require focus and then rest. So the number one support for learning is going to be deep sleep, regular deep sleep. So if kids want to learn better, adults want to learn better, that's the thing to focus on first. That's really the anchor to everything. And we know this. And for people that feel anxiety hearing this, realize that you are resilient. You can have a poor night's sleep. I would say try and get great sleep about 80% of the time, but that sleep is really the thing to focus on until it's in place to get everything else to work well. But these other things like gap learning effects, they've been in the literature, but they've never actually been translated into protocols for the real world. And so the

neuroscience field is sort of guilty of placing things in language and context that's been really hard to access. And, you know, kind of there have been people who've attempted to unvault this stuff. People like Mike Merzenich from UCSF, John Rady from Harvard Medical School. But, you know, I think in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s,

the world wasn't really ready for it. And here's a case where social media wasn't there. There weren't a lot of online learning platforms for people to hear about this stuff. And I wanna be very clear, I have nothing to do with this specific research. I am the academic descendant of some people who did very well in their discovery

of critical periods of neuroplasticity, but this isn't my work. But I am absolutely overwhelmingly enthusiastic about this work because I feel like we can all benefit from it. And this is absolutely free. There's no product to purchase. There's no thing to do except to introduce these short gaps.

And then after learning to take a 20 minute nap, if you can, or just try and shut off the amount of sensory input coming in. And again, that doesn't have to happen immediately after the learning, but at some period't have to happen immediately after the learning, but at some period in the next four hours after the learning, because we know that recall, persistence of the memory of what you learned

and the ability to execute these motor sequences just goes way, way up. Yeah. It's so crazy how we've historically gotten it backwards. Like whether you're a med student or a college student or law school or whatever it is, like it's all about cramming, staying up all night, exhausting yourself, showing up for the test,

doing the dump and then crashing for a couple of days, which is completely antithetical to maximizing your performance. Yeah, or, you know, unfortunately Stanford understands the biology and so they don't do this at Stanford Medicine or that in medical school, many places, students are sleep deprived, the residents on call.

I mean, we all know that I'm gonna get in trouble for saying this with the medical community, but I'll say it. If you end up in the hospital in the middle of the night, you should ask how long the physician has been there. I mean, fatal mistakes have been made, right? So air traffic controllers. Like all these people, the people that we turn over complete control of our lives over to,

yeah, air traffic controllers, pilots, surgeons, people like that are the people that are on these crazy shifts. Yeah, exactly. It makes no sense. It makes no sense. And the consequences are many and they're severe. I mean, they really can be severe. I don't know what it's like in law school,

but I wanna make sure that any lawyer I hire has actually been rested for the learning of the material. Who knows what the lawyers are doing? I certainly don't. Not a lot of sleep in law school. All right, well, we gotta round this out, but maybe let's close it down with, you know, a recap or a supplementation of some of the practices

that people who are listening or watching can begin to incorporate into their lives. We talked about some of the breath work practices, exposure to light, sleep we've talked about. We don't need to go super into nutrition, although that's super important, but maybe just a few things that people can start thinking about and practicing.

Yeah, I think the most important things are the foundational practices, which are get your sleep right. Best way to get your sleep right is get your morning sunlight exposure, ideally within an hour of waking up. Again, if you wake up before the sun comes out, flip on as many lights as you possibly can,

if you want to be awake, right? That's one basic way to just set the whole thing in motion properly. I think everyone should have a real-time tool for dealing with stress. The physiological size, the best one that I'm aware of, and it's grounded in close to 100 years in physiology and excellent work in a variety of laboratories.

I think that people should also have a way of increasing their stress threshold. And there's a lot made nowadays of ice baths and cold showers for dopamine release. And there is evidence for that, believe it or not, extended dopamine release from cold showers or ice baths or just cold immersion. That can be very useful.

I also think it's just very useful to have some sort of breathing practice or cold water exposure practice that you do maybe three to seven times a week, depending on how aggressive you are to raise your stress threshold so that you can manage under conditions of high adrenaline. And your minimum effective dose for that is pretty nominal.

Yeah, so there was a beautiful study published. The first author is Dr. Susanna Soberg. This was a study done out of Scandinavia, published in Cell Reports Medicine. I've spent a lot of time with this study. It was mainly focused on the metabolic effects of cold exposure, showing that if you want to be comfortable

in cold environments, the best thing you can do is get into a very cold environment for about 11 minutes total per week. They also saw metabolic increases. You also see increases in resilience, which is basically translated to an ability to stay mentally calm when you have a lot of adrenaline. You can do this with cold showers. You can do this with immersion up to the neck. A lot of people say, which is better? Immersion is better mostly because it's been studied more.

It's hard to do studies on showers because people don't always stand in the same depth of the shower as immersion is one way, et cetera. If you don't have access to either of those, yes, you could go outside in cold conditions, but the heat transfer in water is much greater. So 11 minutes total translates to two or three minutes as many times a week as needed to hit about that 11 minute threshold is really going to improve your brown adipose tissue stores. These are tissue stores that generate heat. It's kind of like a furnace in your body, increase metabolism, increase this thing we're calling resilience or stress tolerance. So 11 minutes per week. There's a lot of data also about sauna, et metabolism, increase this thing we're calling resilience or stress tolerance. So 11 minutes per week. There are a lot of data also about sauna, et cetera,

but I'll just say, if you are somebody doing cold exposure, people say, can I end with a warm shower or hot shower? That's what I do, because I like it. You're not supposed to do that. If you want to increase your metabolism, you will end with cold so that you have to continue to use your bodily functions, your metabolism, in order to reheat. Shivering is actually a good thing. There's evidence that shivering from the

muscle can release something called succinate, which triggers the more brown fat accumulation, which is not the blubbery fat that most people want to get rid of, but is the fat that generates this heat in the body. So those are good practices to have. So 11 minutes of cold exposure total per week divided into several sessions. But if it ends up being six minutes and five minutes, that's fine too, I imagine. It's never really been looked at. And I can only imagine having talked to Susanna Soberg

that that would be good as well. So have a real-time tool, have a tool to increase resilience or stress tolerance. Then also try and limit your light exposure in the evening. Try and dim those lights, bring them low in the environment, try and make the room cool so you can sleep well. Pile on the blankets if you want. That doesn't mean being cold. It means having your environment be cold so you can toss off the blankets as needed and get deep sleep. The other things I think could be very useful is to think about this three-phase view of states, both in

sleep and awake, that from zero to eight or nine hours after waking, that's going to be high energy, high output, high adrenaline, just naturally high cortisol. So linear type of operations that people always say, what's your morning routine? Do you do the most difficult thing early in the day? Not necessarily. Sometimes I do the most boring, terrible thing in the day,

which for me would be like an Excel spreadsheet. For me, it's just, I'd rather get hives than do an Excel spreadsheet. But the most difficult thing might be the creative work, which would fall, or brainstorming work, or where it's what we would call nonlinear type thing. Taking existing elements, but arranging them in new ways. Probably best done for most people

in the second phase of the day. And then of course, from 17 to 24 hours after waking, you wanna be asleep. Naps and deep rest are terrific. Limit them to 90 minutes or less and don't do them at all if they inhibit your ability to sleep at night. And then in terms of additional resources,

I think the, or tools, I should say that the gap effects introduced during learning at random. So 10 second gaps introduced at random, what the proper ratio is. So let's say you're doing an hour long training bout, you might introduce a kind of a 10 to one. So for every 10 minutes, excuse me, for every 10 minutes of training,

you might introduce one of these gaps. You could do them more frequently. It really hasn't been explored how often to introduce these gaps, but they should arrive more or less at random. Is that a situation like, for example, you're reading a textbook, you're a student, so you read a certain section for 10 minutes

and then you get up and walk around for a minute, or is there something about moving the body that enhances that? In general, these have been studied simply because it's a laboratory setting by simply having people stop and either eyes open or eyes closed, just to try and limit the amount of sensory input

and motor movement. Doesn't mean that walking around wouldn't help, but you certainly don't want to look at your phone. That's bringing in additional information. That might even, we could speculate, would inhibit this ability for the hippocampus to engage this more. You're essentially getting more reps during the rest.

And then of course the learning, the ratio that seems about right is make things challenging such that about 15% of the time you're getting things wrong, 85% of the time you're getting things correct. And then we touched on a few other things, some naps and deep sleep or shallow naps immediately after a learning bout

or within the, I should say within the four hour period after a learning bout. And then if you're interested in hypnosis, which is indeed a very powerful tool for a lot of people, depending on how hypnotizable they're going to be, that Reverie app I think is extremely useful. I've been using it to improve my sleep. Somehow in the last year, my sleep got fractured. I always seem to wake up at 3 a.m. I was struggling to get back to sleep. And so I will use the sleep script in the Reverie app during the day. It teaches you to get better at sleeping. And if I wake up in the middle of the night,

I use that to get right back to sleep. And now I'm very hypnotizable. So for me, it's worked very well, but there are clinical data and research data to support the hypnosis scripts in Reverie. I'm bummed that I'm not so hypnotizable. Well, and we should just get Spiegel here for a richer conversation about hypnosis anyway. I would love to talk to him. He has, and I can, we should just get a Spiegel here for a richer conversation.

I would love to talk to him. He has, and I know he'd love to talk to you. He has incredible stories about how hypnosis emerged as a clinical practice and its various uses. He talks about people who've had what they thought was asthma, but it was a kind of anxiety induced asthma and the use of hypnosis and clearing that up in single sessions. So hypnosis is powerful. and I wish there was a different name for it.

So that, you know, neural, you know, neural re-scripting or something, but then it sounds like some sort of online program. Right. And all of this is, was, I should say all the work on hypnosis, I will say was paid for by federal tax dollars and the NIH and donors and things of that sort as well. But, you. But this is serious science. The work that Spiegel and his colleagues do is serious science around generating neuroplasticity through this, trying to access the both ends of the seesaw simultaneously.

Well, I think we did it, man. I suppose we have. How do you feel? I feel grateful that you had me back on. And I'm always grateful when I get to sit down with Rich Roll. I'm gonna embarrass you even further by saying, And I'm always grateful when I get to sit down with Rich Roll. I'm gonna embarrass you even further by saying, even though we've known each other for some time

and I'm very comfortable around you, because I read your book first and because I so admire what you've done and what you do, whenever I'm in your presence, I'm also just fanning out a little bit. Oh, come on, man. No, not flattery. You're the superstar.

I don't say it to flatter you. I say it because it's true. So maybe someday my autonomic nervous system will adjust. I'm trying to get better at receiving that kind of stuff. So I appreciate that. And I appreciate what you do. It really is a gift to humanity and you're so talented at it.

And can't wait to see what you do next. I know you're working on a book. So hopefully we'll have something to read pretty soon. Hopefully someday. Get around to it. Did my editor ask you to say that? And you're always welcome here. And I think, do you have some like live events coming up

or what's coming down the pike for you? Yeah, so we're gonna definitely continue with the podcast, the solo episodes, and then I love having the guests on. That's so much fun to showcase their incredible work. And then I am gonna do some live events. So May 17th, I'll be doing a live event in Seattle, May 18th in Portland. And then toward the end of the year in the fall and winter,

I'll be doing some live events in some other cities. Yeah, fantastic. Well, we'll put all the appropriate links in the show notes and let's go for round three. When you're ready, when the book's out. Terrific, thanks so much, Rich. All right, man, thanks, peace. let's go for round three when you're ready when the book's out terrific thanks so much Rich alright man thanks

peace that's it for today thank you for listening I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest including links and resources related to everything discussed today

visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast,

the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo

with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg and Grayson Wilder. Graphic and social media assets, courtesy of Jessica Miranda, Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and AJ Akpodiette. Thank you, Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management.

And of course our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.ナマステ Thank you.