The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast - Andrew Huberman Pt. 1 On Mastering Sleep, Stress, Anxiety, Hormones, & Improving Eyesight For Optimal Health Benefits

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

#457: Today is the first part of a two part episode this week with Andrew Huberman. Andrew Huberman, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and tenured Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford ...University School of Medicine. Today we discuss how to master sleep, hormones, stress, anxiety, and how our eye sight can improve not only our vision but our overall health.  Dr. Andrew Huberman is hosting two live events this May. The first is in Seattle, WA on May 17, and the second is in Portland, OR on May 18. The events will include a discussion on "The Brain Body Contract" along with a live Q&A on all things human health & performance. It's almost sold out so be sure to visit https://hubermanlab.com/tour to get your tickets.  This episode is brought to you by Feel Free from Botanic Tonics. If you are looking for an alcohol alternative try this euphoric kava drink and get 40% off your order or subscription by using either code SKINNY40 or code SKINNY240 at www.botanictonics.com  To connect with Lauryn Evarts click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) Produced by Dear Media   

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Starting point is 00:00:00 The following podcast is a Dear Media production. it. And I'm going to be honest, it was difficult in the beginning, but now I don't even think about it. And one of the reasons I don't even think about it is if I ever feel the itch or if I'm ever out publicly or socially, and I want to partake and get a euphoric feeling, instead of alcohol, I take this euphoric kava drink called Feel Free by Botanic Tonics. We've talked about it on this show. We had the founder, JW Ross, on the show. It's an incredible drink. It's just this one little tonic. It's got kava. It's got kratom. So you do have to be a little bit careful. Make sure you're not consuming it all the time. And I take it instead of alcohol. I use it, you know, going out socially, then have a little bit of water with it. And honestly, it's been a game changer because I've been able to completely kick alcohol out
Starting point is 00:00:56 of my life, still kind of get that social euphoric feeling and in a much healthier way. So like I said, to try it out, we have a 40% discount code for you. All you have to do is go to Botanic Tonics, that's B-O-T-A-N-I-C, tonics.com and use code skinny40. And if you've already used that code because it's a one-time code, we have a special offer just for podcast listeners. If you use code skinny240, you can do it again to try it again. I suggest doing the subscription to get the biggest discount, but it's up to you. So check it out. That's botanictonics.com and either code skinny40 or skinny240 for 40% off your entire order. It's a great offer. Enjoy. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride.
Starting point is 00:01:45 Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the Skinny Confidential, him and her. Aha! If you give people a little bit of an understanding of the underlying mechanisms, it creates a system around any tool that makes it easier to do that practice and makes it more impactful as well. So what I mean is, you know, I could do a whole episode just listing off tools and protocols for everything from fat loss to focus and attention, mental health, depression, trauma, grief, et cetera, based on the data. But if I start each episode, which I do with a little
Starting point is 00:02:21 bit of a description of the mechanism. Then when I go into some of the description about the tools, my hope is that people will have those mechanisms in mind, or even just subconsciously they're embedded. And then not only are they going to be more willing to lean into those tools, but those tools will be more impactful. Welcome back, everybody. Welcome back to the Skinny Confidential, him and her show. That clip was from our guest of the show today, long awaited, Andrew Huberman. For those of you that aren't familiar with Andrew, Andrew Huberman, PhD, is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. While he has made
Starting point is 00:03:00 numerous significant contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function, and neuroplasticity, which is the ability of our nervous systems to rewire and learn new behavior skills and cognitive functioning. I can't believe I just got through that. He has a phenomenal podcast called The Huberman Lab that both Lauren and I regularly listen to. It's one of the few that we tune into weekly, and we use it as a resource for optimizing human health, performance, or just understanding the human body and function. I'd highly recommend you guys check it out. I think after this episode, you definitely will. And it's not surprising that this show has become one of the most popular podcasts in existence, the Human Lab that is. And it's because his science-backed approach to information around optimization, the human body
Starting point is 00:03:38 and mind is digestible, it's attainable, and it's beyond informative. This is for sure the longest episode that Lauren and I have ever recorded in a single session. It was almost two and a half hours just sitting down shooting the shit, maybe three if you count the stuff that we were talking about off air before we even got to record. And there's just so much in here. I definitely think you guys are going to find this to be one of the most valuable episodes that we've done. And because of the length, we have broken this down into a two-part episode. So what you're listening to now will be part one of this two-part episode. And then Thursday, you know, we regularly release Mondays and Thursdays. This Thursday will be part two. So here's what you can
Starting point is 00:04:14 expect in part one. First, you can expect the conversation to start with how to get the highest sleep quality. We think starting with sleep was the most important thing to start with because sleep affects almost everything we do. It affects our hormones. It affects our performance. It affects our mood. It affects just our general function. And with that, we're talking about circadian rhythm and just the best ways and best sleep hacks to get so that you can get the best night's sleep. Then we start talking about eyes and the visual system, eye health. Many of you guys know I've been talking about eye health. I firmly believe that Andrew Huberman helped me heal my eyes, which is a whole thing. My eyes are definitely improving and better.
Starting point is 00:04:46 And we learned in this episode that the eyes are connected to the brain. They're part of our hormonal system. They affect our mood. They affect our circadian rhythm. They affect so much, obviously, as well as our sight and everything that we see in our picture and our view of the world. Then we actually start talking about how there's science-backed proof and data on how our belief systems actually affect our
Starting point is 00:05:05 performance, our health, our overall well-being. We talk all about that. And then we talk about managing stress and anxiety and how different types of breathing not only affect our energy levels, but potentially our facial structures, our sleep, our performance, et cetera. So this one's jam-packed just in part one. Before we jump into the episode, I want to mention that Dr. Huberman is hosting two live events this May, the first in Seattle, Washington on May 17th, and the second in Portland, Oregon on May 18th. The events will include a discussion on the brain-body connection, along with a live Q&A on all things human health and performance. It's almost out, so be sure to visit hubermanlab.com slash tour to get your tickets now if you're in the area or if you want to travel to the area.
Starting point is 00:05:41 With that, welcome to part one of our episode with Dr. Andrew Huberman. Look out for part two this Thursday. Enjoy. This is the Skinny Confidential, him and her. Andrew Huberman, I just told you, I don't know if there's been a man in my head more than you as of recent. And I got to say, I remember we spoke on the phone, like what was it, 20? Like right before you did the podcast, 2019. And in my line of work, as you imagine, I meet different people entering the space and talk about a guy fucking knocking it out of the park, man.
Starting point is 00:06:11 I think like phenomenal. Like your podcast is incredible. Like I don't even know what else to say. Everyone that's listening should just stop this show right now and go listen. He listens to it while he's in an ice bath and a sauna and taking his athletic greens and doing everything you say.
Starting point is 00:06:27 And doing my morning light and eye exercise. We're going to get into all of it. But anyways, man, welcome to the show. Been a long time coming. It has been a long time coming. Great to be here. And thank you. And thank you for the kind words.
Starting point is 00:06:35 Yeah, we spoke about the possibility of working together. And at the time, there wasn't really a clear idea in mind about doing a podcast. In 2019, I started posting science snippets to Instagram. And then in 2020, with the world events, I just started putting out information about mental health and going on podcasts. And then at the end of 2020, it made sense to start a podcast. And yeah, we do touch on a lot of lifestyle applicable stuff. So if you're in the ice bath and listening to the podcast or not, or drinking Athletic Greens or not, my wish and my goal for the podcast is just to share the beauty and utility of biology. That's what it is.
Starting point is 00:07:11 It's really, you know, teach about biology and then teach about it in a way that can be useful for mental health and physical health. You do such a good job, I think, because you make it digestible. Sometimes when you hear the word biology, if you're not a biologist, it's very overwhelming, but you make it digestible and you give us tangible tips to take away. So I think that's cool. Thank you. Yeah. I really believe and based on my experience teaching in the classroom, which I still do, I teach medical students, graduate students, and undergraduates at Stanford. The belief that I hold very close is that if you give people a little bit of an understanding of the underlying mechanisms, it creates a system around any tool that makes it easier
Starting point is 00:07:52 to do that practice and makes it more impactful as well. So what I mean is, you know, I could do a whole episode just listing off tools and protocols for everything from fat loss to focus and attention, mental health, depression, trauma, grief, et cetera, based on the data. But if I start each episode, which I do with a little bit of a description of the mechanism, for instance, how cold impacts metabolism, how, for instance, a particular childhood attachment pattern to a parent translates to an adult romantic attachment pattern. Then when I go into some of the description about the tools, my hope is that people will have those mechanisms in mind, or even just subconsciously they're embedded.
Starting point is 00:08:36 And then not only are they going to be more willing to lean into those tools, but those tools will be more impactful. And the last thing I'll say about this is I have a colleague at Stanford. I should introduce you guys because she'd make a phenomenal podcast. Guess her name is Ali Crum, Alia Crum. She is a tenure professor at Stanford. She's a trained clinical psychologist.
Starting point is 00:08:53 She was a division one gymnast, and she's a martial artist, and she works on beliefs and belief systems. And she has incredible data showing that the result of anything you do or what you eat is both the consequence of that thing. So like she's done experiments, for instance, where they give people milkshakes and they tell them, okay, this is a low calorie milkshake,
Starting point is 00:09:17 or they tell people this is a high calorie nutrient dense. It's a regular milkshake. It's a milkshake. People drink that and they measure subjective reports of how fulfilling that and how much satiety, how much satisfaction it provides and for how long. And they measure hormones, insulin, ghrelin, all the hormones that are the consequence of eating.
Starting point is 00:09:37 And what you find is that if you think, what they find is that if people are told this is a high calorie nutrient dense shake, it provides much more satisfaction for much longer than if they're told that it's a low calorie nutrient sparse shake. And the hormones that one secretes in response to that milkshake differ in the two groups, even though the milkshakes are absolutely identical. Because it's all about your beliefs. It's in part about your beliefs. Because of course, if you can't tell yourself that the entire chocolate cake is a bowl of broccoli
Starting point is 00:10:06 and it's going to have the same effects as a bowl of broccoli. So anything you do, whether or not it's exercise, cold bath, what you consume is the consequence of that thing. There are some undeniable, non-negotiable realities about your biology. And then there's the belief system.
Starting point is 00:10:19 And the other example I'll give is, they've done these beautiful studies where they tell one group, listen, stress is a part of life "'and it gives you dementia. "'It makes your thinking suffer. "'It can kill neurons. "'It can do all this terrible stuff.'"
Starting point is 00:10:33 They tell another group, all that's true, by the way, in certain contexts. They tell another group, "'Stress is a part of life, "'but it can sharpen your thinking. "'It can bring out your best. "'It can stimulate your immune system as long as it doesn't last too long.
Starting point is 00:10:47 And what they find is that the biological effects of stress on those two groups match what those people are taught about stress. Wow. And so you can't get around the realities of stress or calories or things of that sort. There's the laws of physics and the laws of biology, but belief systems have a powerful role
Starting point is 00:11:04 in how the tools and practices that we engage in shape us. And so that's the logical backbone for teaching people a bit about the mechanism. Because if I say, hey, do an ice bath, it increases your metabolism, increases your resilience, and can reduce pain and inflammation, help you sleep better at night. Great. But lots of people are saying that. But if I say, listen, there's this pathway where when you get into cold water and it's really uncomfortable and you really want to get out, but you stay in for an extra minute,
Starting point is 00:11:29 you stimulate this certain adrenaline-related pathway in your brain and body. Now, when you do it and you hit that wall, you're like, I really want to get out of here. You think, no, I want to stimulate that pathway. And then your belief and understanding about that pathway really does shape the fact that it works. And so teaching mechanism is in part for me about educating
Starting point is 00:11:47 and turning people onto the beauty of biology. But I realized, look, not everyone wants to be a biologist or a researcher, but I think everybody wants better mental health, physical health, and performance. And so mechanism has a real impact. No, to dumb it down, I mean, I was a poor student for a million reasons, but never did well in school. But I always felt that I would,
Starting point is 00:12:05 and this is not a blame on the teachers. I have to take accountability just a lot. You can blame them too. There's some pretty lousy teachers. You know, I had these things where I felt like people never explained the mechanism. I never understood the why. It was just like the high level stuff
Starting point is 00:12:16 or like memorize this, memorize that. And I remember sitting there and kind of craving, like I want to understand why at the root, I'm doing something or learning about something or, you know, something has an effect. And I do think that a lot of people go through the school system and are inhibited from learning because they don't get that mechanism. So why I like your show so much in the way that you teach is that you get the mechanism first. And then of course you get very detailed. And I mean, that is a compliment. I just think that it's important to point out.
Starting point is 00:12:41 Well, and I'll put the compliment right back in a very sincere way people are smart if you explain things in a clear i like to think interesting and actionable way people will use that information they'll embed that information into their consciousness there's a great physicist max delbrook that said anytime you teach assume zero knowledge but infinite intelligence and so whether or not it's on social media or on the podcast or in any conversation, my belief is people are curious and that curiosity is its own form of intelligence. And so you just also, I have no interest in talking over people's heads. There's just like, there's no value in that for me. I would say that's the same with selling. If you're going to sell something, I think sometimes with an influencer or something,
Starting point is 00:13:23 I'll see someone trying to sell something in a way that's like cunning to the audience. It's like, no, no, no. They're smart. Give them the real reasons of why they need that instead of just trying to get in the back door. I think the consumer is very, very smart now and they have access to a lot of different things at their fingertips. Absolutely. And there are plenty of online folks that are going to poke holes in things if we slip. And actually, I think they perform a useful role. I mean, I would never want to be a heel biter. These people, their entire online presence is just about taking down other people. A heel biter. I'm going to use that one. I mean, it just seems like a pretty poor use
Starting point is 00:14:00 of a life, but they do serve a role. And I actually really appreciate them because they keep everybody in line. They raise our game, make sure that we button things up. And yeah, I think that, but to your point, I think that people want resources. They don't know who to trust. And so to the extent that you can give them information about at least your, or in this case, my reasoning for why I'm telling you this. I'm not just saying it because I feel like talking about it. I'm saying because I really think some of these things can be very useful.
Starting point is 00:14:30 And I do believe that people are smart. I think they really are. So let's, like I said, we're going to go through, and for the audience, you know, definitely you're going to go through a host of your shows. You have so many different subjects. But I think to start, I want to start with what you started with on your show, which is sleep. And I think I have an idea why you started
Starting point is 00:14:48 there because it's so foundational to our health. But just to start, maybe that's a topic we could jump into. Sleep, let's dive in. What are people doing to inhibit sleep and what can they do to get better and more effective sleep? Yeah. Great question. I think if we only had time for one question, this would be the question. Sleep is absolutely the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. Some people need more, some people need less. It's going to vary depending on age, circumstances.
Starting point is 00:15:18 If you're pregnant, if you're not, if you're young or if you're older, if you're going through stress, et cetera. Everybody should prioritize getting quality sleep of sufficient duration, meaning the sleep they need for at least 80% of the nights of their life. It's very clear that that's going to raise their performance in life. All you have to do is sleep deprive somebody or yourself for two or three nights and watch yourself fall apart. So I don't think there's much convincing needed. Now, I want to start off by saying that sleep-related anxiety is a big issue.
Starting point is 00:15:53 I wouldn't want people to think that if they don't sleep well for a few nights, that they're going to lose their mind or fall apart. That could happen. Meaning they stress so much about not getting sleep that they... That's right. Okay. Yeah. So what are the things that get in the way of sleep? And then maybe we can list off a few of
Starting point is 00:16:07 the things that everyone can do. Most of which, I would say 90% of which are zero cost. They're just behavioral decisions that people need to make. Okay. Things that people are doing that are disrupting their sleep. Drinking caffeine after 2 or 3 p.m. Even if you can fall asleep, that's going to disrupt the architecture of your sleep. Now, admittedly, the other day, I had a double espresso dropped in coffee at 6 p.m. and did a workout, and it was one of the best workouts I've had in a long time,
Starting point is 00:16:34 and I loved it, and the sun was setting, and it was outdoors, and it felt so great. I slept okay that night, but I can guarantee that had we measured my sleep, it would not be as high quality deep sleep as the sort of sleep I would have gotten if I hadn't had that cup of coffee. So we all slip sometimes, but avoiding caffeine in the past two or 3 p.m. is a good idea. Maybe even earlier. The other one is too much bright light of any color, not just blue light, screen
Starting point is 00:17:00 light between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. Now, people doing shift work or people up in the middle of the night feeding babies basically use as little light as required to do those activities safely. Clear Stim, the owners were just on the podcast, Danielle and Kaylee, and they talked all things acne. This is a non-toxic skincare brand that actually works to create positive change without sacrificing health. So they really, really disrupted the acne industry. I feel like they have come in. One of them is a practitioner who dealt with acne, and the other one is known as the Acne Guru. And they partnered to really create education that helps you identify your unique acne triggers.
Starting point is 00:17:51 It was so wild. They told us on the podcast that one of the things that people don't realize is that eggs actually contribute to acne. You have to listen to that episode. Anyways, I went on their site. Although I don't deal with acne myself, there's a lot of different skincare products on there and they're non-toxic. Like I said, they're also anti-aging and of course anti-acne. I like their mineral sunscreen that comes in a brush. It's like this brush situation that you can use on your hands. I use it on my car. It's like a mineral sunscreen, almost like a powder. And then I also can apply it over my makeup. So if you don't struggle with acne, definitely check that out. And you can use code SKINNY at checkout for 20% off your purchase. It's clearstemskincare.com. That's C-L-E-A-R-S-T-E-M skincare.com. It's
Starting point is 00:18:39 clearstemskincare.com. That's C-L-E-A-R-S-T-E-M skincare.com. This is something that I heard from your show that we've implemented and it's been a game changer because we would sit on our phones or even read on an iPad or whatever and wonder why we weren't getting sleep. And now, 10 p.m., everything's off as dark as possible. That's great. I mean, basically, light coming in through the eyes, not just exposure to the skin, but through the eyes is converted to a set of neurons in an area called the hypothalamus,
Starting point is 00:19:12 just sits over the roof of your mouth. Doesn't really matter what the name is, but light is a potent inhibitor of melatonin. It basically squashes the amount of melatonin that you naturally make down to zero. Melatonin is a hormone that you naturally release. So I'm not talking about supplemented melatonin right now that starts to rise in the late evening
Starting point is 00:19:33 and it promotes a sense of sleepiness in the evening and night. It doesn't keep you asleep, but it helps you get to sleep. So if you look at a very, unfortunately, the reality is, if you look at a very bright light, blue reality is if you look at a very bright light, blue light or any color light at 9 p.m. for more than 10, 15 seconds.
Starting point is 00:19:51 This includes phones. If you dim your phone, you're okay. If you dim the screen, you're okay. It also has to do with the background light. So if you're going to, I got addicted to Ozark. It's easy to get addicted to. Easy to get addicted to, amazing show. If you're going to watch something on a screen or on your phone and the room is dark, it's that
Starting point is 00:20:09 contrast that makes a big difference. So I don't want people flipping on a lot of lights late in the evening, but if you are going to look at a screen, you're better off doing that in a room that's dimly lit. Oh, you don't want to just be staring at the TV because it's like, yeah, that makes sense. That's right. And some people are more sensitive to light than others. But the key thing here is that in the late evening, so 8 p.m., 9 p.m., 10 p.m., until about 4 a.m., your eyes and your brain are exquisitely sensitive to light. So if you look at light, make sure it's very, very dim. And for shift workers, we have a whole episode on shift work. First of all, thank you, shift workers, because we need you. I just want to acknowledge them. But that's a whole other set of issues. There are ways to work around shift work. First of all, thank you shift workers because we need you. I just want to acknowledge them, but that's a whole other set of issues. There are ways to work around shift work,
Starting point is 00:20:47 but most people are asleep sometime between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m., I would hope. The other thing is if you wake up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom, keep the lights dim. And if you can keep the lights low in your physical environment, that's helpful. And the reason is that the cells in your eye, the neurons that reset your circadian clock and wake you up, they look at the upper visual field. So what I tend to do is in the evening, I just try and dim the lights in the house. I try and dim the lights on screens. Just really limit the amount of light exposure. Bright moonlight is fine, believe it or not. And candlelight is fine. Fireplaces are fine. I have a couple micro questions.
Starting point is 00:21:25 Sure. Is this why when I wake up in the middle of the night and if I look at my phone, my body, I notice I get almost sick to my stomach, like a nervous system kind of thing. Am I being intuitive with that? It's interesting. I think you have a strong, what we call interoception, is our perception of our internal state within our body, within the confines of our skin. Some people have a much higher interoception than others. It can be useful. It can also be tricky.
Starting point is 00:21:52 Actually, there's a really, just as a quick aside, if you want to know if you have a strong sense of interoception or not, see if you can count your own heartbeats without taking your pulse and have someone else take your pulse. She's really sensitive to light compared to me. Yeah, and that can do,
Starting point is 00:22:08 some of that has to do with events within the eye. I'm looking at your eye color. This is also, I've never done a podcast with two people. It's also like the best looking couple on the planet. So it's like, I'm just sitting here, God, looking back and forth. So I'm looking at both your eyes and realizing that, okay, you have light eyes,
Starting point is 00:22:21 so you are going to be more sensitive to light in general. So was my daughter. Just a little side note, the way he grew up, his dad would flick the lights on, like wake him out of bed, rip him out of bed, cortisol. I didn't know what a dimmer was until this year, I think. My family was like dimmers and like incense and candles
Starting point is 00:22:39 and the lights were on. My dad's an ex-Navy guy, right? So like morning, lights on, full blast, get up, go. My high school girlfriend, her dad used to come in at five in the morning, lights on, full blast, get up, go. My high school girlfriend, her dad used to come in at five in the morning, flip on the lights and sleeping in wasn't allowed in their home. You know, I think in general,
Starting point is 00:22:51 it's good to let kids and teenagers sleep until their natural waking time, if possible, try and get them to bed earlier. My eyes are also very sensitive. If I sit outside on a bright day and I'm at a table, you know, at a cafe or something that's metallic, I can't tolerate it.
Starting point is 00:23:04 I need sunglasses. Some people can be outside without sunglasses just fine. But in the evening, your eyes are very sensitive. So if you wake up in the middle of the night, really dim those screens. In general, it's great to keep the phone out of the bedroom. And the other thing is a lot of people keep their sleeping environment too warm. When you wake up in the morning, part of the reason you wake up is an increase in body temperature. That body temperature will continue to increase throughout the day. You may feel a little sleepy in the afternoon, and right after that sleepy period, body temperature starts to drop again. The ability to get into sleep and to stay asleep depends critically on that one to
Starting point is 00:23:40 three degree drop in body temperature. So if you're sleeping in a room that's too warm, you're going to wake up. The best situation is to make the room cold or cool. How cold is cold? It's going to depend on how hot you run. 68 too cold? That's not too cold. I'd sleep in a room that's about 67, 68 degrees,
Starting point is 00:24:02 but then putting blankets on or wearing socks if you need to. Turns out that you dump a lot of heat from your body through the palms of your hands, the upper half of your face and the bottoms of your feet. And so the best situation is to get into bed, ideally no socks, no gloves, who wears, no one wears gloves to bed,
Starting point is 00:24:20 unless there's something out there that I'm not aware of. Different topic, different altogether. Get under the blanket so that you're warm. And then during the night, even while you're asleep, you'll naturally move your feet out. You might find that you wake up in the morning with a foot hanging out. That's you trying to cool yourself off. So you need to be warm enough to fall asleep.
Starting point is 00:24:36 But if you think about it, if the room is too hot, how would you cool off? You'd need a nice bucket next to you or a cold water. And so you're not gonna do that in your sleep. So keep the room cool at night, keep it dark and taper off the light in the evening and avoid caffeine, these sorts of things. Also, something I haven't talked about too much on the podcast is that the most alert you'll ever be throughout the day, believe it or not, is one hour before your natural sleep time.
Starting point is 00:25:01 Is that why you get like, kind of like that anxious feel right before you're in bed? You're running around, you're checking things. You're feeling hyper, you won't be able to go to bed. You suddenly feel like you might actually want to do the dishes. I hate doing the dishes period, but I especially hate doing them at night. But then there's that period right before you go to sleep
Starting point is 00:25:16 where you start waking up and a lot of people worry, oh no, I'm not gonna be able to sleep tonight. That passes. This is beautiful work by a guy named Chuck Zeisler at Harvard Medical School has shown that there's this big peak in alertness right before your natural bedtime. You can also use that information
Starting point is 00:25:29 to figure out what your natural bedtime is. A lot of people fall asleep around 10, 30, 11, maybe midnight, and they wake up at three in the morning, wide awake. Waking up to go use the restroom in the middle of the night, perfectly normal, especially if you're hydrating or overhydrating well. Totally normal.
Starting point is 00:25:44 Just go back to sleep. And we can talk about ways to do that. But many people wake up and they're wide awake and they don't know what to do. They're probably going to bed too late, meaning their natural rise in melatonin was around eight o'clock and they should have gone to bed at 9.30. But for social reasons, we don't tend to do that. And I think that a lot of people would do well to shift their to bedtime a bit earlier, or at least just get into bed. Speaking of caffeine, before we move, I want to talk about eyes. Lauren's going to kill me because I had this whole eye thing, but I listened to you and I actually feel better from it. But anyways, the caffeine, one last thing. One thing I implemented that I learned from you was delaying caffeine. I was
Starting point is 00:26:20 one of those guys that woke up, I would have my athletic greens and three minutes after, I'd have a big cup of coffee, black coffee. But then I listened to you talk, you said, hey, delay it basically 90 minutes to two hours. And I've been doing that. I feel way better. Great. Way, way better.
Starting point is 00:26:32 You weren't having introspection. Is that what you- Interoception. Interoception. Introspection is a good one. That's the equivalent. That's the one that the therapist would all like us to have.
Starting point is 00:26:43 Self-awareness of our thinking and our feelings. Interoception is just your awareness of the internal state of your body. You know, some people are like, oh, I ate the wrong thing. You know, some people never notice how they feel in response to anything. That's how I felt about coffee. It felt really unnatural to wake up and just drink that. I felt like I needed to hydrate and then almost dehydrate with the coffee. Well, that's actually the better way to go. To answer your question, let's put this now in the category of things to do early in the day to help support sleep. So we cover the things
Starting point is 00:27:14 to not do. And maybe segue eyes here too, because I know that's a part. Absolutely. It's pretty critical. I would say it's the most critical practice that you can do for your overall health. If I had to pick one for benefits on sleep, benefits on metabolism, benefits on mood, benefits, all of that would be when you wake up in the morning, if it's still dark out,
Starting point is 00:27:39 flip on as many bright lights in the house as you possibly can. You get so mad at me. Wake up your system. If you want to be awake, if you want to go back to sleep, go back to sleep. Keep the lights dim. Once the sun is out, get outside and spend 10 to 30 minutes outside without sunglasses. Eyeglasses and contacts are fine.
Starting point is 00:27:58 They'll just focus the light to your eyes. But not through a window. Not through a window. Most windows are filtering out the, it's called UVB, ultraviolet blue light. Everyone thinks blue light is bad. Blue light is great in the morning and throughout the day if you want to be alert. These bright lights that we have in here are terrific.
Starting point is 00:28:15 You wouldn't want it any other way. But then in the evening, you don't want UVB light. If you are getting really biohacky, you can use red light in your home at night, dim red light, because it doesn't stimulate the system as much. But early in the day, get you can use red light in your home at night, dim red light, because it doesn't stimulate the system as much. But early in the day, get outside and get some sunlight in your eyes. You don't have to, nor should you stare directly at the sun, obviously. Any light that's so bright that it's painful to look at, don't look at it directly. But indirect
Starting point is 00:28:38 light to your eyes sends a signal into the brain that sets the timer for melatonin release about 12 to 16 hours later. It's setting up the time that you're going to go to sleep. If you stay indoors and you don't get outside and get that light, or you think that you can get it through a window or through a windshield, forget it. You're basically jet lagging yourself. You're at home, but your brain is traveling. You're delaying your circadian clock. These are clocks in the brain and body. And it's going to be the case that around 8 or 9 p.m., you're going to have a hard time falling asleep, or if you fall asleep, you're going to wake up. That bright light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight, is going to stimulate
Starting point is 00:29:12 multiple pathways in the brain and body that promote metabolism, positive mood, focus, etc. Now, you asked about caffeine. When you wake up in the morning, assuming you feel groggy or alert, doesn't really matter. People differ how quickly they wake up. Has to do with how quickly your body warms up. In fact, if you want to wake up very fast, hop in a cold shower. When you hop in a cold shower,
Starting point is 00:29:37 obviously you feel cold, but your body heats up in response to that, which wakes you up. There are other reasons as well. But if you wake up and you immediately reach for coffee or any form of caffeine, that's a problem for the following reason. The longer you're awake, the more you build up a molecule in your body called adenosine. Adenosine is kind of the sleepy molecule. It makes you feel sleepy and tired. Caffeine blocks the actions of adenosine. That's one of the main ways it works. It has other
Starting point is 00:30:04 effects too. So if you wake up in the morning, whether or not you slept enough or not, most of the adenosine from the previous day is cleared out, this sleepiness molecule, but there's always some residual adenosine. There's always some. If you immediately drink caffeine, you block the actions of adenosine, which is fine. You feel alert and better. But then around 1 or 2 p.m., that caffeine wears off and the adenosine has an even more powerful effect in making you sleep. And then people feel like they need that next cup and so on.
Starting point is 00:30:32 Exactly, and then it perpetuates and then they're not getting sleep because they're drinking caffeine late in the day. So a simple solution to this is wake up, hydrate, as you pointed out. Some people even do well to put a little bit of salt in their water to get electrolytes, something we could discuss. But hydrate, delay caffeine intake for 90 to 120 minutes, so an hour and a half to two hours. I don't expect people to make that leap all at once.
Starting point is 00:30:57 You can push it out by about 15 minutes per day. My sister is so neurotically attached to caffeine that she's pushing it out by five minutes per day, and she's not convinced she can get to the two hour mark, but anything you do to delay caffeine a little bit is going to prevent that afternoon crash. It's also going to prevent your need for yet another shot of caffeine or multiple shots of caffeine in the afternoon, and it will really enhance your sleep. So get light in your eyes early in the day, ideally sunlight, and push caffeine out 90 to 120 minutes. It will have an outsized positive effect on mood and alertness during the day and sleep at night. And the last thing I'll say about this is,
Starting point is 00:31:31 if it's cloudy where you live, still get outside. There's a lot of photons, light energy coming through cloud cover, far more than you could ever get from artificial lights inside. Now, if you live in Scandinavia in the depths of winter, if you live in a cave, or for of winter, if you live in a cave or for whatever reason, you absolutely cannot get outside,
Starting point is 00:31:48 maybe someone's in a home or is in the hospital, you can get an artificial light to simulate the sunrise. I would not waste money on the more expensive ones. What I would do is just get a, you can just put into any search engine, you know, a 930 Lux LUX drawing pad. It's for tracing. And those work just as well.
Starting point is 00:32:10 And they're a 10th or a 20th of the cost. I'm not a big fan of the kind of blue light simulators that are designed to mimic sunrise. Most of them are way overpriced and all they really are is a bright LED light. You can also use them. We got those lights at one time. that made you feel, she was like- In Finland.
Starting point is 00:32:28 Yeah. We had to. Yeah. And they know about this in Scandinavia because it's so dark there. So I actually work with a light like that on my desk all day long just to get additional light. And that's the other point is you want to get as much bright light in your eyes as you safely can throughout the whole day.
Starting point is 00:32:41 And then you want to start tapering it off. So I'm not crazy when I went to London that I felt seasonal depression. I felt depressed. So I was telling Michael like so bad. Well, here's the other problem. No, you're definitely not crazy. And it sounds like you're very sensitive to light.
Starting point is 00:32:56 I'm sensitive in general. Which is great. Which is great because if you're sensitive to light, you can push in the other direction too. In fact, when I travel, I now bring that little light pad. It's nice and thin. It barely weighs anything. You can plug it into any wall socket.
Starting point is 00:33:11 And in the morning, because sometimes when you travel, your schedule's just messed up and you want to wake up, you put that thing in front of you and you get that light. And listen, some days I'll run off to a meeting and I don't get my morning light. I'm not perfect. I get it most days. I would say 80, 90% of the days,
Starting point is 00:33:26 but sometimes I can't, in which case that light becomes a really important element. If you have not checked out the Vince Camuto woven strap mule, you are missing out. They come in all different colors. You guys are going to love them. I like the cool mint and the water lily and the black. Go stock these shoes online. They go with everything and they just elevate the style. VinceCamuto.com is a one-stop shop for wardrobe staples and occasion pieces that make every moment a chance to express your personal style. The other day, I was wearing this bodysuit that really holds me in. Thank God for bodysuits when you're pregnant. And I wanted to add some added flair to it. So I put on their woven strap mule. I actually showed it to you guys on Instagram. And I just felt in this outfit invincible.
Starting point is 00:34:17 So if you want to refresh your closet for spring, they have so many beautiful on-trend, accessibly priced items. The woven mules, though, you've got to check out. I'm telling you, I know everyone listening will like them. Head to vincecamuto.com slash podcast and use promo code podcast. You're going to get 20% off your next purchase with code podcast. While you're there, do yourself a favor and sign up to be a part of their VC VIP program, and you can earn member perks, previews, and exclusive offers on your next accessories haul. Terms and conditions apply. Head to vincecamuto.com slash podcast and use promo code podcast. You're going to get 20% off your next purchase with code podcast. While you're there, do yourself a favor and sign up to be a part of their VC
Starting point is 00:35:00 VIP program and you can earn member perks, previews, and exclusive offers on your next accessories haul. Terms and conditions apply. So it sounds like, well, especially the way we've evolved. So many of us now, we wake up, we're in an indoor structure. We don't go outside until sometimes you go right in your car, then you get into your office. You're just not outside at all anymore. And it sounds like it contributes to a lot of, you know, anxiety, depression, lack of sleep, hormone imbalance, all of these things. Would you agree with that assessment? Absolutely. And there are data to support that. When you wake up in the morning, that temperature rise and the light times the release of a hormone called
Starting point is 00:35:39 cortisol. We've all heard cortisol is bad. Cortisol at the wrong times of day is bad. Cortisol release early in the day is fantastic. First of all, it stimulates your immune system in positive ways, wakes you up, creates a state of alertness. It does a number of really important things. There are data from Stanford, not my lab, but David Spiegel's lab and Bob Sapolsky's lab showing that if that cortisol increase is shifted into the evening, so if you are indoors all day and then you go out and get a bright light in the afternoon
Starting point is 00:36:10 or you're somehow, and you're exercising in the evening, that shift in cortisol to later in the day is actually a marker of depression. It predicts depression. So we really were designed to get up, not necessarily with the sun, but around the time of sunlight coming into our immediate environment. Because of course, where you live will depend on when
Starting point is 00:36:33 that happens. And then to be in the dark at night, you don't have to be in pitch black at night, but it's really important. Cortisol and melatonin are both regulated. So you mentioned hormone health. The other thing I'll mention is that some really interesting studies being done now in humans. And by the way, I know that a lot of scientists talk about studies in mice and humans interchangeably,
Starting point is 00:36:53 unless I say otherwise, I'm talking about studies in humans, men and women. So for those that care about that. So the other thing is that there's a beautiful study from the University of Colorado showing that if they took students into an environment, in this case, camping,
Starting point is 00:37:09 it's probably a fun experiment to be a part of. And they had them go to sleep sometime within three to four hours after sunset and wake up within one to two hours of sunrise. That reset their melatonin and cortisol rhythms and other rhythms of hormones in the body for two weeks, even though they went back into their normal kind of chaotic environment of artificial lights. So do you have to sleep outside? No, but to the extent that you can just adhere to this idea as much bright light, ideally sunlight in the morning
Starting point is 00:37:41 and throughout the day to your eyes. And also I'll talk about in a moment to your body and then limiting lights of all colors and kinds, dim them way down between the hours of 10 PM and 4 AM. There's no individual on this planet that won't benefit from that. And some people will benefit tremendously, both in terms of mental health and physical health. And then of course, there are all these things about sleep and sleep depth and metabolism being reset by sleep and emotionality being reset by sleep.
Starting point is 00:38:09 We, you know, Matt Walker is the expert on that. I mean, I could talk about it. I'm somewhat versed in the data, but the point is that when you're sleeping really well, your waking life is better. But what we haven't been taught and what I'm really kind of emphasizing here is that you need to control your waking life.
Starting point is 00:38:24 And that morning sunlight exposure is non-negotiable for me. And this is something everyone can do for free. Yeah. All of these things I'm talking about are zero cost. If anything, I just cut out your second cup of coffee in the afternoon. Maybe you do decaf or something. I don't need it anymore. So now I found with that, I only really want the one. And I used to be somebody that would have one in the morning, one in the afternoon would feel that crash. I don't think you, I mean, we're not, you're pregnant, but we both don't really need as much anymore.
Starting point is 00:38:51 One cup. I like to do two hours after I wake up. I didn't even know that that was a thing. It's funny because on this show, a big topic and we get asked all the time is hormones. And we have different specialists and different conversations all the time. But it sounds like with these two things,
Starting point is 00:39:03 with getting the proper sleep hygiene and getting this morning light in the morning, you can solve a lot of the issues that may be underlying without having to get into all the other stuff to balance. Yeah, we could discuss hormones if you like. That's actually a great segue for the stuff about getting light on the body. There's a beautiful study that came out recently
Starting point is 00:39:20 in Cell Reports, Cell Press Journal, excellent journal. This is peer-reviewed data showing that if you have people go outside and get sunlight on their body, not completely naked, but just sleeveless, ideally shoulders exposed as well, no hat, no sunglasses, shorts, or whatever's culturally appropriate, for three times a week for 20 to 30 minutes in the afternoon, you see significant increases in testosterone and estrogen that are appropriate for men and women. Because of course, men and women both have testosterone and estrogen. All the guys think, oh, I don't want my estrogen to go up. Actually, guys, if you're taking an estrogen blocker, if you reduce your estrogen,
Starting point is 00:40:00 just as a point, libido in men, cognition in men and women critically depends on having enough estrogen. We can talk about hormones as much as you like. And obviously testosterone is key too in both men and women. They saw significant increases in testosterone and estrogen, significant increases in libido, significant increases in feelings of wellbeing. And this is interesting, significant increases in the positive perception of romantic partners. Very interesting. And in fact, it has a little bit of a twist. The women incidentally experienced more excitement about the physical attributes of their partners, whereas the men experienced greater increases in the kind of obsessive thoughts about their partner,
Starting point is 00:40:41 totally in the opposite direction of the stereotype that you would expect. And kind of opens up a whole other discussion about hormones, which is my other favorite topic because I came up in the neuroendocrinology stuff. So we can talk about hormones, but here's the bottom line. Try and get some sun exposure each day to your skin as well. Now I am aware that people are going to want to wear sunscreen in some cases. Some people know sunscreen is a little bit of a controversial topic now. Some sunscreens actually contain substances that can go transdermal and can cross the blood brain barrier, which is a little bit of a controversial topic now. Some sunscreens actually contain substances that can go transdermal and can cross the blood brain barrier,
Starting point is 00:41:07 which is a scary thing. You don't necessarily want that. So you have to be really careful about which sunscreens you use if you're going to use sunscreen. But in any case- Is there a brand that you use? So I don't use sunscreen.
Starting point is 00:41:18 Okay. I'm just not a fan, but I don't tend to burn. My dad's Argentine. He's pretty dark. Dark eyes, dark skin. My mom's the one with the light eyes and light skin. So I can tolerate a lot of sun without burning. I just don't tend to, I don't wear sunglasses most of the time unless it's really bright. I don't wear sunscreen, but I would encourage people to explore. I think, you know, I'm going
Starting point is 00:41:39 to defer to the experts on sunscreen here because there's some excellent stuff coming out and I'd be outside my wheelhouse to talk about it. Are there ingredients you don't like in sunscreen? Yeah. So there are things like, I think that, and this is in some cleansers as well, things like triclosan, I think it's called, that can cross the blood brain barrier. You know, the blood brain barrier, just incidentally, is super interesting. You have a blood brain barrier that prevents molecules that you bring into your body by eating or drinking or rubbing on your skin, whatever it is, or inhaling from getting into your brain. And the reason for that is that neurons, nerve cells, they don't really turn over across the lifespan. You can't regenerate
Starting point is 00:42:13 them. Maybe a few, but not many. The other barriers in your body that are really important are the blood to ovary barrier and the blood to testes barrier, which makes really good sense, right? You want to protect your DNA. You don't want to ingest something or put something on your skin and have it go mutate your sperm and your DNA so that could be very problematic. So biology is beautiful. It's put these fences in for brain, ovary, and testes.
Starting point is 00:42:38 Turns out that some of the substances in certain cleansers and soaps and conditioners and cosmetics, but also in sunscreen can cross these very rigid barriers. So I would encourage people to look into that. And of course, there are going to be a lot of conspiracy theories about what's terrible. I just don't use sunscreen. And some people are really extreme. They won't use deodorant. They won't do anything. I guess it sort of depends on how much your partner likes your natural scent, which itself is an interesting I've learned that I have to like it a lot now. She doesn't want to touch that deodorant ever. I guess it sort of depends on how much your partner likes your natural scent, which itself is an interesting-
Starting point is 00:43:05 I've learned that I have to like it a lot now. She doesn't want to touch that deodorant ever. So- Well, I confess- I've learned to love it. Yeah. I confess. This is a weird, I don't often disclose these sorts of things. Yeah. I stopped wearing any kind of deodorant years ago.
Starting point is 00:43:17 Now I'm fortunate that my partner at least tells me that she likes the way I smell. But certainly I'm aware that not everybody does. It's weird to put a chemical underneath your lymph system armpit. There's something that doesn't sit right with me. I just, Frank, yes. And I also just don't like the smell and the feel of them. And I realized that it's probably aversive to a number of people, what I'm describing. But I want to emphasize that what I'm describing is not conspiracy theory. These are quality FDA and National Institutes of Health supported labs. There's a lot on this. A good free website
Starting point is 00:43:54 resource is examine.com for anything related to supplements or things of that sort. They tend to compile the research with links to studies that anyone can access. But getting sunlight onto your body each day turns out to be important for hormone health. Now, this is interesting because it also changes the way that we think about skin. We think of skin as a barrier to the outside world, and indeed it is, or something to hang adornments on, like people put earrings and things on. Skin is actually an endocrine organ. It's a hormone related organ as well. So this study showed that when you get sunlight onto your body for 20 or 30 minutes per day, there's a particular cell type in your skin called the keratinocyte. The keratinocyte makes a molecule. It's called
Starting point is 00:44:35 P53. None of this matters, except again, if you understand a little bit of mechanism, I like to think that it can be beneficial. And that P53 molecule sets off a signal to the testes and the ovaries and the adrenal glands to make more testosterone and estrogen in the proper ratios. This almost certainly has to do with an ancient form of seasonal breeding. When there's a lot of sunlight, in general, there's a lot of food growing. There's a lot more light by which to hunt, et cetera. So this is a just so story of why this would all work. So in times of abundance, our body feels safer to reproduce. In times of famine and darkness, right?
Starting point is 00:45:13 If it's winter and you have to stay indoors, that generally means resources are scarce and hormones are a way of sending out signals to the rest of the body of how to behave, right? Your body doesn't really know what's going on in the outside world, except by two features. One, how much light is coming in through the eyes and on the skin and temperature. Those are the two dominant variables that you can learn to manipulate. I literally did not want to have sex in Finland. I love having sex. I did not
Starting point is 00:45:42 want to have sex in Finland. That is so weird. I did not want you to touch me in Finland. Yeah. Huh. Looks like you're not going back to Finland. It was a nice trip. We're not going back for a while. Okay. So there is a phenomenon.
Starting point is 00:45:55 I have Scandinavian relatives and actually given a talk in, this isn't an advertisement for it, but I'm giving a talk in Copenhagen on June 3rd. And so I've been to Scandinavia in the winter and I've been to Aarhus, excuse me, forgive my pronunciation, Aarhus, and it was dark, it was unbelievably dark. For the first day or so, I was fine
Starting point is 00:46:13 because these mechanisms we're talking about are very slow acting. But by the third day, I needed out of there. I was feeling agitated. My sleep was disrupted. Now, of course, I was jet lagged too. Scandinavia in the summer, however, it's the opposite effect.
Starting point is 00:46:26 It's only light, right? People, there's a little bit of a mania associated with it. People are having a lot more sex. They're partying. There's a kind of general increase in mood. And the reason is light coming in through the eyes and onto the skin, in particular sunlight, stimulates the release of a neuromodulator
Starting point is 00:46:41 that most people are familiar with. It's called dopamine. Most people think of dopamine as a molecule that makes them feel good, and indeed it does, but it also makes them feel motivated to go pursue all the sorts of things that we're talking about. Dopamine is the molecule of motivation
Starting point is 00:46:57 and craving and desire. And it's very closely related to the testosterone and estrogen pathways. And again, testosterone and estrogen are important for libido and sexual desire in both men and women. If you have not tried the pineapple bars by That's It, you are missing out. They are my favorite fruit bar and that is because they have one ingredient. There's none of this added shit like are in so many of these bars and snacks. It is one ingredient and it's pineapple. They're chewy. They're perfect. I roll
Starting point is 00:47:30 them into balls for Zaza. You could even cut them into little slices. They remind me of like a fruit roll up, but with not the nasty shit ingredients. And I just eat them plain. I'll give one to Michael. I leave them in my purse. They're everywhere. And then of course, you know, I also have their kids apple crunchables. They come in these little bags that are perfect to put in your handbag. And these crunchables are tiny little apple pieces, which is perfect because they're so little, but they're also so good. And they're only one ingredient too. It's literally just apple, organic apple. You should know they're crisp to perfection. They have no added sugar, no preservatives, no weird ingredients that you would normally find on the fruit snack aisle. Zaza is such a fan. She
Starting point is 00:48:09 literally grabs these Crunchables out of my hand when I'm eating them. So my advice is to go to that'sitfruit.com and use code skinny to get 25% off your order. Do not forget to get the pineapple bars and the kids apple Crunchables. I even know so many of my adult friends that eat the kids apple Crunchables. They're that good. One ingredient. That's that'sitfruit.com. Use code skinny to get 25% off your order. So my advice is to go to that'sitfruit.com and use code skinny to get 25% off your order. Do not forget to get the pineapple bars and the kids apple crunchables. That's that'sitfruit.com. Use use code skinny to get 25 off your order i want to talk about the eyes he loves the eyes because you know why he loves the eyes so much
Starting point is 00:48:55 because he had such a bad eye problem and you literally cured it i'm not joking what was the well he loves eyes way more than me well i have a i a split appointment in neurobiology, ophthalmology. I'm not an ophthalmologist, to be clear. I'm not a clinician, but I spent enough time with ophthalmologists. And yeah, basically my career was built initially on understanding the visual system. So your eyes look good. Do you have six hours? Because he's going to tell you about his eyes.
Starting point is 00:49:18 What was the specific issue? Here was the issue. I woke up one day and was driving and I just noticed, I was like, this is blurry. And it was a little bit uncomfortable, just the right eye noticed, I was like, this is blurry. And it was a little bit uncomfortable, just the right eye. And I was like, that's strange. I've always had great vision. And I started doing this thing and I probably irritated where I kept like going like this and be like, what the hell is going on? I think after listening to you more and more that my brain just caught up that there may be like a slight astigmatism in this eye. And I just never
Starting point is 00:49:39 noticed it before. But once, I guess, once the brain catches it, there's not a lot. But in addition to that, and I want to talk about this because I've heard, and tell me if I'm misquoting, you said that we may have the equivalent of eye obesity in modern times. And I noticed like I'm somebody that I'm working a lot on a phone and a lot on a computer and I'm staring all the time. And I had the small phone. I just finally got the big phone and I was looking at a computer all the time in light. And I just realized like when I was a kid, I grew up, I played all these sports. I was a boxer. I did these things and I played hockey.
Starting point is 00:50:08 And so I had a visual system that was looking, you know, chasing a puck or chasing a football or box, you know, so you have to look far. And I noticed as I've aged and as I've gotten more into my career, I'm staring at my phone. Like I think many adults are, like staring at a computer, staring at a phone, not getting outdoors enough. And so I almost had like trained that astigmatism or my eyes to only see closer. And I would say like from a screen time perspective, I was probably on the extreme end way too much. And so I was like, what the fuck's going on here? It started to bother me.
Starting point is 00:50:37 And then it started to feel like there was something stuck in the eye the whole time. Maybe you know that feeling where you feel like there's an eyelash, but there's not. And it was driving me nuts. And the reason it affected me so much, and then I'll shut up, is that what I was trying to explain to Lauren, when the visual system changes out of nowhere like that, it hits your mood because it changes your whole picture of how you see the world out of nowhere. And so I spent all this time, and we can talk about it going through, I listened to all of your episodes on eyes, but namely the main focus and doing the different eye exercises and the tracking and all that stuff.
Starting point is 00:51:05 And it's helped a ton plus some supplements. But yeah, for a while there was- You saved our marriage because if he said the word eye one more time, I was going to die. So you saved it. Literally, he was doing all your exercises. I want you to,
Starting point is 00:51:16 we've touched on the importance of light in the eyes, but I want you to touch on, you know, how people are potentially diminishing their eyesight in modern times with the way that we interact on these screens? First of all, thanks for sharing that. I have a feeling a number of people suffer from that or are going to suffer from that
Starting point is 00:51:31 if they don't take some remedial steps. And I'll also talk about a new tool that's based on some really exciting research that you can further expand your improvements in vision. So the eye, your eyes are the only two parts of your brain that are outside your skull. They are not eyes, they are literally pieces of your brain. Okay?
Starting point is 00:51:53 And they're there to wake up the rest of the brain at the appropriate times of day to gather light. Now, other animals don't necessarily use their eyes for the same purpose. So reptiles, and they have little pits on the top of their head so that the sunlight can get literally into their brain directly to their pineal gland.
Starting point is 00:52:09 We have to do all this through our eyes because we have a thick skull. Some of us thicker skulls than others. So that's critical to understand is that your eyes are a piece of your brain and your brain and your mood and your focus and your ability to focus largely depend on your visual focus. For low vision or no vision people, it's largely going to
Starting point is 00:52:29 relate to what you hear and touch. As a kind of interesting aside, blind people actually have, some of them have a kind of ADHD, except it's related to their touch and their hearing, right? For us, vision is the dominant sense by which we navigate the world and survive. We anchor our attention, et cetera. Okay, so the eyes are pieces of brain, but they are not fixed structures that your eye actually changes shape. If you move your hand in closer, move it out further away, there's something called accommodation.
Starting point is 00:52:58 The lens of your eye is really dynamic. It's kind of a squishy lens and the eye changes shape. If you, or especially kids, view things up close for many hours a day, the eye actually becomes elongated, permanently elongated. Which is why I don't want our kids staring at a screen too close too long.
Starting point is 00:53:15 And then what happens is you have this lens and the light is focused, but it doesn't land on the part of the eye that it needs to land on. It lands in front, which is why it's called near-sighted. It's landing too near to the lens. Far-sighted is that it's focusing too far. So basically the picture of the world
Starting point is 00:53:34 that your brain is getting is out of focus. That's sort of a scientific description of a duh. Okay, great. What to do about it? Well, clinical trials involving now thousands, approaching tens of at least 10,000 kids in China and elsewhere have shown that two hours a day outdoors per day can offset or even reverse this myopia nearsightedness. What's interesting is that
Starting point is 00:54:00 time outside is having that positive effect through two mechanisms. One is the UVB light coming in, which is important for eye growth and metabolism. And the other is viewing things off in the distance. The analogy that I'll give here is that what if I were to tie your ankles and shackles and have you shuffle around all day? You'd get where you needed to go,
Starting point is 00:54:21 but your hip flexors would get tight, your back would get tight. It's a very different way to locomote, to move through life. We are now living in a visual world, or we are engaging with the world, I should say, in a way related to our visual system that is the equivalent of putting our eyes into shackles where we're only looking out at short distances. Viewing a horizon at a distance several times a day is going to naturally relax your eyes. These mechanisms of accommodation just relax your eyes. If ever you're feeling
Starting point is 00:54:50 stressed or strained on the computer, some people think it's blue light. Maybe it is, but again, you want as much blue light in your eyes throughout the day as possible. Every 20 minutes or so, go and view a horizon. And now doing it through a window is okay, although being outside would be even better. That's what I implemented the most because I realized I wasn't doing that anymore. And as a kid, I said I was an athlete, right? And I was fortunate enough when I discovered your episode, we were actually in Switzerland and we were going skiing. Oh, wonderful.
Starting point is 00:55:14 And I went by myself each day and even driving to the mountain on the car, I was looking so far out. And then on the mountain, I actually took off the goggles and was just looking as far as I could. And honestly, within a week, I noticed a huge change. Yeah, the beauty of the system is that it's plastic in both directions. You can make it a lot worse fast, or you can make it a lot better fast. The other thing is, if you look at people, and listen, I'm guilty of this too,
Starting point is 00:55:37 walking down the street or taking their walk to get their morning sunlight, and they're on their phone, you're basically looking up close. You might as well be indoors. Now, you're getting a little bit of indirect UVB exposure. So that's good. It's better than, and you're walking. So that's better than sitting at a desk and doing this. But I would argue that a lot of the ADHD
Starting point is 00:55:55 of the depression, of the anxiety that kids are experiencing is that they're never getting out of their little cocoon of close viewing. And so we're going to have a lot of kids with myopia. And maybe to frame it the other way, if you're a young person or a parent, or even just a mature person who does something to correct this, you're also placing yourself at a distinct advantage over others, right? It's not hard these days actually to be a healthy person, but being a healthy person nowadays
Starting point is 00:56:26 mostly consists of not doing certain things as opposed to doing certain things. I mean, here we're talking about things one can do, but a lot of those things are about not doing other things. And, you know, this gets, we don't need to get into the topic of nutrition because it's such a, you know, barbed wire topic, but, you know But I think it's fair to say that whether or not you're a vegan, a carnivore or an omnivore, everyone should just avoid highly processed foods for 90% of their food intake. You do that and you've just given yourself an outsized improvement in your health,
Starting point is 00:56:57 regardless of what macronutrients you eat, right? In the same way, if you can view things at a distance, take a walk without your phone, get some UVB exposure, especially early in the day, and dim down the lights in the evening, we're talking massive improvements in mental and physical health, all at zero cost and probably even saving cost, right? Because it's also about what you're not consuming and purchasing. With kids two and up, say they're watching TV, would you just prescribe in quotes to
Starting point is 00:57:27 them to also make sure they're balancing that out with getting outside or would you take the TV away? Tell your real opinion because my two-year-old just wants to watch Paw Patrol. Right. So a picture is worth a thousand words and a movie is worth a billion pictures. I mean, it's just unbelievable how motion and movies can captivate our minds, child or adult. We see a movie and it's just immediately, you see it on Instagram feed, picture, picture, picture, movie, picture. It's just the way that the visual system and the brain work. So I have two answers. I'm not yet a parent, although at some point soon, hopefully there'll be a litter of kids. I've always wanted, I'm going to be an old dad
Starting point is 00:58:05 because I'm 46 and I, but I've always wanted- My dad had me old and it's like, it's been, he's my best friend, it's one of the best relationships I've ever had. I think it's a good, what I got from that, this is a tangent, is I had a mature dad that was able to teach me a lot. And he kind of got through a lot of the shit
Starting point is 00:58:18 that I'm probably in, which is like still trying to figure out who you are. And he was always like very calm and stable. So I think it was a good thing. Thank you. Yeah. I always had a plan to be an older dad. My plan also was, you know, we had high conflict divorce in my family growing up
Starting point is 00:58:29 and a bunch of, and I decided I'm going to just skip the first marriage. So, you know. I'm on my first. Great. And listen, anytime I come into contact with a couple that clearly has it worked out and I realize it's ongoing work, it's such a pleasure.
Starting point is 00:58:43 You know, and I know many people make it work the first time around, but I just decided consciously, I'm just going to skip the first marriage. I also have leaned very hard into my career, juggling multiple careers and things of that sort. So I wanted to be fair to my partner and kids. But in any event, when I have kids, I will not allow them to engage with screens
Starting point is 00:59:02 for particular designated parts of the day. However, I will have a TV in the home and computers in the home for the following reason. When you deprive a kid of something that is very, very dopaminergic, that stimulates the release of a lot of dopamine, and then they actually have access to that at a friend's house or something of that sort, it is going to create a massive increase in pleasure. So I think there's this issue of not eliminating things, but having a controlled relationship to these very, very powerful stimuli.
Starting point is 00:59:40 I mean, movies are very powerful. This is not the topic that we're talking about right now, but I get a lot of questions these days about dopamine and about pornography, for instance. Pornography, you know, removing all judgment from this, because that's not what the basis of the conversation is. Pornography has created an enormous number of problems for in certain countries in the last 10 years, mostly because of its immense availability and the intensity of the images. It's also wired up a lot of young brains to become aroused watching other people have sex
Starting point is 01:00:11 as opposed to being in the physical act of sex themselves. So there's a lot of like, you can't even call it third personing. And they're not, you know, they're aroused by imagery that they're not actually participating in. And this is, and I hear a lot about, I get a lot of questions about this,
Starting point is 01:00:23 especially from the younger audience. Am I saying all pornography is bad? No, not necessarily. I don't know. Any discussion about sex and sexuality, I always say we're of course framing it in the context of age appropriate, consensual, context appropriate, species appropriate. But the point is that anything that stimulates a lot of dopamine release is a very sharp blade. So if you eliminate it completely, great in the short term, potentially treacherous in the long term. That kid goes to a friend's house and sees a movie.
Starting point is 01:00:54 Let's just remove pornography from the conversation. Or get a bag of cookies. Yeah, a bag of cookies. Suddenly it tastes candy for the first time and the brain is hardwired to get very, very excited about that. So then now you're dealing with a kid that potentially could get even more addicted to these things.
Starting point is 01:01:09 So it just has to be controlled. It has to be controlled. Any potent stimulus, highly processed, highly palatable food, visual imagery, movies has to be controlled. And I actually think in the context of relationship too, people that are really, really in love, like your friend that's super in love, the new guy, the new person, and then comes the crash, right? They didn't regulate the dopamine around that experience.
Starting point is 01:01:30 So with dopamine, what goes up goes down, and there's always a mirror increase in the pain molecules after dopamine. So if a kid is watching a bunch of Paw Patrol, is really, really excited, and then you take away Paw Patrol for three days. Pissed. There's a molecule called dynorphin, which is kind of a negative end Paw Patrol. It was really, really excited. And then you take away Paw Patrol for three days. There's a molecule called dynorphin, which is a kind of a negative endorphin that actually makes people feel miserable. It's the same molecule that's released in alcoholics going through withdrawal. So you just have to be very careful with any high potency stimulus. And so
Starting point is 01:02:01 in my home, there will be television, sure, but it will be for designated periods each day. And it won't be just kind of at a ad libitum, as we say in science, which is just geek speak for as much as you want. It'll be regulated. Now, going back to your eyes. So the key is look at your computer screen, look at your phone,
Starting point is 01:02:20 but try and get an almost equivalent amount of distance viewing. If you get out in the morning and get that sunlight, even better to do it walking. There's something very powerful about self-generated optic flow. Okay, so when we cycle or walk or run through physical space,
Starting point is 01:02:37 and sorry, the Peloton doesn't quite do it. Treadmill in a gym won't quite do it. But just even simple walking will do this. Visual images are going by on our retina. That optic flow shuts down or at least quiets a brain center that some people might be familiar with called the amygdala, which is a center of the brain that's associated with fear and anxiety.
Starting point is 01:02:55 And it's very calming. But if you're looking at your phone while you're walking, you're doing two things. You're making yourself more nearsighted. You're changing the shape of your eyeball. You're not getting that optic flow. So is that what I did if I was staring too close for too long as I was actually changing the shape of my, because I imagine that I am not unique in this case, especially nowadays,
Starting point is 01:03:13 that I was actually physically changing the shape of my eyeball. And then over time, it got to a point where it actually diminished my eyesight. That's right. And it can get to the point where a lot of people will go to the ophthalmologist or optometrist, and then they'll give you a corrective lens. And then what are you doing? You're basically just making it comfortable to look at things up close. So if you need corrective lenses, get them. But a lot of people can repair their own vision. And then if you go on YouTube, there are also what are called smooth pursuit eye training, where you're basically following a small bead around the screen.
Starting point is 01:03:45 And that smooth pursuit can help develop some of the muscles that move the eyes and can be very useful for repairing vision as well. So that's what they did is they gave me like a slight lens and I've actually been trying, I've been on the fence. I'm like, should I resist? Should I not? You have a prism, a little prism there?
Starting point is 01:04:00 Like a little, yeah, it's like a stigmatism right here. I'll tell you why you don't want to do this. I guess we are in camera. So what I have a one as well from a childhood thing, it was just stupid. I was swimming, not using goggles. And I kept closing and opening one eye. And when you're young, the brain is very plastic. And it only takes a couple of days of having one eye occluded for your brain to completely shift over. And the way to shift it back is you actually have to cover up the quote unquote good eye and repair it. This work I'm referring to is the work of my scientific great grandparents,
Starting point is 01:04:30 David Hubel and Torrance and Weasel. They won the Nobel prize for this discovery. So they gave me a prism glass to shift the image so that I would feel comfortable, right? The images come in and it's just shifted slightly. The problem is watch this. I can actually move one eye in, pretty creepy, right? Well, this eye wants to move in. And so when I started wearing that prism glass and I took it off, I had one eyeball that was strabismic, which was- So I don't want to do that.
Starting point is 01:04:55 You do not want to do that unless you absolutely have to. All right, I'm going to be bothering you after the show. So corrective lenses can be really useful for certain people, but corrective lenses can cripple the visual system of certain people and make you highly dependent on them. And strabismus is not something you want if you can avoid it. So if you were going to prescribe, you Andrew Huberman, to the high majority of people, the perfect setting in a day,
Starting point is 01:05:18 how to use the visual system, what would it be? Okay. A couple of things. And this is also an opportunity to optimize workspace and alertness. One thing, don't look down at your screen. When your eyes are up, the brainstem centers, these cranial nerves for alertness get engaged. So literally looking up wakes you up. So you don't want to be working on a laptop, on your lap, looking down. And looking down and with eyes closed
Starting point is 01:05:41 is associated with the sedation. Makes perfect sense when you hear it. But so you want to be on a screen that's at least at eye level, at least at nose level, or even slightly up. Okay. You don't want to recline to have to do that because it turns out that as you recline, your brain actually gets sleepier through these brainstem mechanisms. It's all very logical related to gravity because most of the time when we're lying down, we're asleep. So try and get a screen, set your screen or use a standing desk that,
Starting point is 01:06:06 you know, is at eye level or slightly above, and you're going to stay more alert. For every 20 to 45 minutes of work that you do, it'll depend, right? I mean, here we're indoors, we're talking and we're not going to stop and go do some gazing out the window. That would be impractical. We haven't got to that part on the show yet. I'm happy to do it, but it's just, you know, or you're in meetings. Sure. That's fine. But then afterwards, try and look off into the distance through a window if you can't get outside or take a brief walk, five minutes and just with some distance viewing and just let the images float by on your eyes. And then you'll find that it's much easier, less eye strain, far fewer headaches. Migraines and photophobia are also
Starting point is 01:06:43 related to getting light at the wrong times of day. A lot of the treatments for migraine now have to do with adjusting the timing of light to the eyes. And in general, if you can take a 20 or 30 minute walk once a day and just, you know, you can be walking and talking. Sure, you can look at your phone, glance at it every once in a while, look at the person you're talking to. But in general, just try and look off in the distance and you don't have to rigidly hold your view at a distance. And of course you can blink, but just let your eyes do what you would normally do. You have to kind of imagine your ancestral version of yourself where you do some hunting and focusing and
Starting point is 01:07:17 gathering and some relaxing and just letting your eyes view things at multiple distances throughout the day. Well, like I said, I just think about when we were kids and you're outdoors and you're running, and we grew up, we all grew up in a time where even on porn, like we were lucky to find a VHS back. And if we found a VHS on porn, we're like, holy shit, we found like, but there was no inner, you know. There was the, some kid would have a magazine and the kids would go over there. It was like a library or something. Yeah, exactly. Here, I'm not promoting this. It's just, just as a contrast to now. Sure. Where a kid with,
Starting point is 01:07:44 with access to a laptop can just get access to all this very powerful and almost assuredly confusing imagery, right? You just imagine that the brain is plastic and the reactions to that, some of those reactions are hardwired. And even the porn back, I mean, it was pretty tame. Like now I imagine when you're a kid and you see some of this stuff, it's not, I this stuff, we're jumping to the advanced echelon of sexual activity in a lot of these videos. So I think people, they think that's what sex is. And then you get with a partner, it's probably not that for your first experiences. So it's also probably fucking up the mechanism and how people even think about sex.
Starting point is 01:08:28 We're obviously talking all about health, wellness, overall human optimization. And I'd be lying if I didn't mention that Symbiotica, yes, Symbiotica has been one of the biggest factors in Lauren and I's health journey. We had the founder on the show, Sherveen, multiple times now, two times because he's a phenomenal guest. But not only that, they have phenomenal products. And I'm not lying when I say that I think I'm their number one customer at this point. Even though they're a partner of this show, I go on and buy every single product that comes out full price. Don't look for any discount. I just buy it because it's fucking great. And I love it. At this point, I'm on the vitamin D with the CoQ10 and the K2. I'm on the B12. I'm on the vitamin C. I take the mushrooms, the longevity mushrooms. I
Starting point is 01:09:06 take the charcoal. I take the zinc. What else do I take? I take pretty much everything from the line because it's all the best ingredients. A lot of it's liposomal, so it absorbs the best in your body. And they just came out with a new plant protein that I think is phenomenal as well. So listen, I'm not saying you have to go and jump into every single product, but I definitely recommend if you're going to supplement and start taking supplements, especially after listening to this episode, that you check out this line. What I would start with if I were you and I hadn't been taking any supplements is I would definitely try the vitamin D3K2 and CoQ10 supplement. I think the vitamin B12 is also phenomenal. And then definitely the magnesium threonate. Those are the first three
Starting point is 01:09:43 that I would recommend. I know Lauren's a huge fan of the plant protein. So if you're looking for a plant protein to swap out whatever you're taking right now and you want something clean and have the highest quality and you want that protein boost, definitely check that out. And of course, we have a code. We have an offer for you guys. Use code skinny at checkout for 15% off your first purchase. This is in addition to the custom bundle discount.
Starting point is 01:10:02 So people can get up to 45% off. That's a huge discount. Create your custom bundle at symbiotica.com and get 30% off using this. That's C-Y-M-B-I-O-T-I-K-A.com and code SKINNY at checkout. Trust me, you guys are going to love these products. They're phenomenal. Enjoy. It's a super important topic that if we can look at through the lens of biology and neuroscience and remove the judgment about the whys and the whats and all that, because that's not my place, right? And I'm sure there's great research on that as well. But what you realize is any very potent, powerful imagery, especially when it's seen by the young brain, has a lasting effect.
Starting point is 01:10:48 We could change the conversation to violence, right? Now, sex is a part of life. I mean, let's get one fact clear. All of us are here because a sperm met an egg either in vitro or in vivo. There's no way around that, at least to my knowledge. There's a certain species of vulture in which the females can reproduce.
Starting point is 01:11:07 That was actually demonstrated this last year. But as far as we know, in human beings, that's not- That doesn't happen with humankind because we'll be in a lot of trouble, us men. Well, I have a feeling that in the next few years, there are going to be examples of female-to-female fertilization done. It would involve some molecular chicanery.
Starting point is 01:11:23 I'm sure. But that's happening. There's also now three parent IVF, taking the DNA from the mother, sperm from the father, and then putting the DNA from the mother into the egg with spindle with mitochondria of the donor. Wow. And so that's actually done in the UK
Starting point is 01:11:39 and it was in Mexico and in the Ukraine, because most of the aging of eggs has nothing to do with the DNA. It has to do with the aging and a malfunction of the spindle that pulls the chromosomes apart. Wow. So that's happening now. Three-parent IVF is happening.
Starting point is 01:11:54 Just in this country, it's not FDA approved yet. But to sort of return to this idea, the more intense an experience, even a triple espresso, for instance, as one's first experience of caffeine will generally change the way you think about a cup of coffee or a soda, right? So I don't want to create a situation where parents or kids are so freaked out about interacting with anything that's high potency. The brain is also resilient. Kids are resilient. Adults are resilient. But chronic ongoing interaction with something
Starting point is 01:12:24 that's very potent emotionally or physically changes your nervous system. It's almost like experience stretching. It is experience stretching. The brain essentially for things like breathing and heartbeat and digestion is pretty hardwired. You come into the world, you don't have to train that stuff up.
Starting point is 01:12:41 But the time between birth and age 25 is when you lay down a map, which is basically a map that predicts what's coming next. And that map is a predictive map so that as you go from age 26 and onward, you can move through the world without having to think about too much. So what we expose kids to,
Starting point is 01:13:03 and even as adults, the brain is plastic. What we expose ourselves to, and even as adults, the brain is plastic. What we expose ourselves to is it impacts us, but it's not irreversible. I want to talk about stress and anxiety and take a shift. What are the biggest causes of stress that you see? So the number of stressors, the causes of stress is near infinite. Okay. So for people that suffer from stress and anxiety, here are a couple of things. First of all, there are foundational practices, namely sleep and quality social interactions, right? Friendship, relationship, great sleep, great nutrition, exercise. Those all provide buffers against stressors, right? When you're
Starting point is 01:13:43 sleeping better and you feel socially supported and you're eating well and you're exercising, stressors don't have the same impact. But then there are some things that we can all do to offset stress. And there we get to the specific work of my laboratory, which is focused on stress and vision. There are two main ways to combat stress.
Starting point is 01:14:04 One is what I call real-time tools. So ways of reducing stress in the moment. Because we all know that exercise, meditation, massage, and et cetera, et cetera, are great for combating stress. But there are going to be times in life where someone cuts you off on the road, or you're stuck in traffic, or you look at your phone and something really troubling comes in. You need to be able to deal with that in real time. The best way that I'm aware of to reduce your anxiety and stress level in real time is through the use of breathing, through respiration. And there's a couple of things that are important. First of all, taking a deep breath when you're stressed is the absolute worst thing to do. Absolute worst thing to do. When people say take a deep breath, terrible idea.
Starting point is 01:14:48 Why? I'm sure you're going to tell us why, but I actually haven't heard that yet. Yes, because there's something called respiratory arrhythmia that relates to your heartbeat. So when you inhale, your heart rate actually speeds up. And when you exhale, your heart rate slows down. And the reason for this is the movement of your diaphragm. So I'll just briefly describe for those that want to, when you inhale, your diaphragm moves down, your heart gets a little bit bigger physically, and blood moves more slowly through that large space. The brain sends a signal to your heart, speed up. When you exhale, the diaphragm moves up, your heart gets a little more compact, blood moves more quickly through that small volume, and the brain sends a signal to slow your heart rate down.
Starting point is 01:15:26 Sinus arrhythmia is the proper name. So if you take a deep breath, you're going to speed- You're going to speed your heart up. The important thing here to understand is that there's a mode of breathing that is hardwired that you do during sleep anytime you get stressed or there's a buildup of a molecule called carbon dioxide in your bloodstream.
Starting point is 01:15:42 That's why you breathe. So the best way to calm down quickly is to take a very deep breath through the nose till your lungs full, then sneak in a little bit more air through your nose, and then a long exhale through your mouth until your completely lungs empty. Keep going. Okay. That is called a physiological sigh. That was discovered in the 1930s. Turns out you do this when you're claustrophobic. You do this in sleep when you become hypoxic and you need to get more oxygen. Is that why when you watch someone sleep and they do that thing where they're like, okay.
Starting point is 01:16:14 You actually do this every five minutes when you're awake and you don't know it. So your lungs are two big bags of air. This is an amazing system. You breathe in air and then the oxygen permeates into the bloodstream. And then when you exhale, you offload carbon dioxide. Now, but your lungs aren't just two big bags of air. They have hundreds of millions of these little sacs called alveoli. Those little sacs deflate every once in a while when you're not breathing enough or deeply enough,
Starting point is 01:16:41 which is normal. Like I'm talking right now, the alveoli in my lungs are collapsing, and they're wet on the inside. And so they're very hard to reinflate. You know, if you ever tried to fill a balloon at a kid's party and you like blow into it, sometimes you'll have to go, and then really blow hard.
Starting point is 01:16:55 And that's because there's a fluid tension to pop those sacks back open. So when you do a big inhale, your heart rate does speed up. But then if you do a second inhale before exhaling again, even if it's a short one, and then what you're doing is you're reinflating all those little sacks in your lungs. And then in the exhale, you offload all the carbon dioxide.
Starting point is 01:17:16 Just one or three of those physiological size. So double inhale through the nose, long exhale through the mouth until your completely lungs empty will bring your level of stress and anxiety down considerably within seconds. And if you do need to do it again and again, fine. Should you do it during meditation? So meditation's interesting. You can, you can do it during meditation. You should basically use it anytime you want to calm down.
Starting point is 01:17:42 So telling someone take a deep breath, what generally happens is they'll go, they'll mouth breathe or they'll, and then they won't exhale long enough. So the ratio, the duration of inhale to exhale is very important. So it makes it worse. Yes. It makes it worse. No wonder when I tell you to calm down and take a breath. And anytime we tell somebody to shift their state, even if they don't like the state they're in, it can be kind of a grading thing. Yeah. I found this out last night. Did the makeup come off my eye yet? I'm just kidding.
Starting point is 01:18:10 So it's hard to shift our state, but if people just understand that inhales tend to make us more alert, long exhales tend to make us more calm, then you can start playing some fun games. So that's a real-time tool to adjust stress before while you're public speaking or if you're in a hard conversation. If you want to be really sneaky, covert about it, and you don't want someone to know you're doing it, you could do the whole thing through your nose. In general, we should all be nasal breathing
Starting point is 01:18:37 unless we are eating or speaking or you're doing some specific breathwork practice. Do you like mouth taping? Mouth taping is great for keeping certain people quiet. No, I'm just kidding. Mouth taping is great. I'm sure there are other purposes too, topic of another podcast.
Starting point is 01:18:50 The mouth taping is great for people that have trouble with snoring or switching over to nasal breathing. One of the best science supported practices for health is to get 150 to 200 minutes of zone two cardio per week. Zone two cardio can be measured on a monitor, or you can take the zero cost approach, which is to exercise just as hard as you can without shutting down your ability to have a conversation, or you can do even better and just tape your mouth shut or keep your mouth shut, or even take a swig of water and do your zone two cardio with that
Starting point is 01:19:20 water in your mouth and just nasal breathe the whole time. If you can do cardio with purely nasal breathing, you're probably roughly in that zone too. And you're teaching yourself to nasal breathe. For those that think, oh, well, that's kind of crazy. First of all, there's a beautiful book called "'Jaws, A Hidden Epidemic," written by my colleagues at Stanford. These are serious academics.
Starting point is 01:19:42 That just came out recently. It came out a few years ago, but no one really knew about it because it was too nerdy for most people. The book, Breath, the new science of a lost art by James Nestor is also an excellent book. Jaws shows a lot of images of twin studies and siblings in general,
Starting point is 01:19:58 who either were nose breathers or mouth breathers. And some of these kids were mouth breathers because they got a pet hamster and they got an allergy allergy or because they lived in a culture where there was the consumption of a lot of soft foods. So chewing hard foods and nasal breathing, you look at these images of boys and girls and it's striking. The jaw shape of people that are nose breathers is very impressive and the quality of their teeth alignment. The jaw shape and teeth of people that are mouth breathers is dreadful. In fact, the face will continue to elongate and the eyes droop and become tired looking
Starting point is 01:20:32 in people that are mouth breathers because they're hypoxic. And actually the sinuses, I should have brought a skull with me. The sinuses are actually little tunnels that run through the jaw. So you actually have these little holes right here and holes here and holes here.
Starting point is 01:20:47 And the sinuses can dilate over time if you become a nose breather. So that beautiful structure that we sometimes see in people that, you know, in the 1940s and 1950s and 60s, I don't know that they were all nose breathers or not, but probably it was the consequence of not slurping down a lot of food and calories, but largely from chewing and eating their food.
Starting point is 01:21:07 So it's been shown that if you eat foods that require a lot of chewing and you're chewing, chewing, chewing, the jaw muscles and the whole shape of the face changes. People that are mouth breathers, the eyes become droopy, they look tired, the crow's feet start to drop. And it's striking. You look at these images
Starting point is 01:21:24 and literally you see these two cute kids. Then they were raised apart. One's a nose breather, one's a mouth breather. Or one is chewing a lot of foods that require chewing and others are slurping it down. And one kid looks, Gore or Boyd, looks incredibly attractive. And just, you know, it looks like their bone structure,
Starting point is 01:21:40 high cheekbones, nice jaw, all of this, teeth really nice. No braces, no dentistry. The other kid is a kind of unattractive kid. They look kind of tired. They look like they're kind of turning into a melted candle. And this can also be changed in adulthood. One of the most overlooked aspects of cosmetic health and overall health, turns out your nose is much better at filtering out bacteria and viruses. Your nose, in fact, any contact of your body to the outside world, so surface of your skin, urethra. Women have a vaginal microbiome.
Starting point is 01:22:10 We have a nasal microbiome. And if you nose breathe, you improve the quality of the oxygenated species. It's a better filter than your mouth. Much better filter. So be a nose breather, not a mouth breather. Tease the mouth breathers because it's easy to fix. Don't tease them. I guess nowadays you get like- I was a mouth breather my whole life and I had to have
Starting point is 01:22:28 double jaw surgery and they had to break my entire face and move it for exactly that reason. But now I still sometimes notice my mouth breathe. So you would say to do tape on my mouth. When you're doing your zone two cardio, which listen, everybody should get 150 to 200 minutes of zone two cardio per week. I think there's like zero debate as to whether or not this is useful for cardiovascular health. It's sort of one of those things
Starting point is 01:22:53 that I don't even know that we should consider exercise. This can be walking, right? And you wouldn't do it at night. You would do it just for the zone two cardio only. Well, I'm just saying if you want, I would still try and keep your mouth closed at night and breathe through your nose. But a lot of people claim
Starting point is 01:23:07 they have a deviated septum. They do not have a deviated septum. They're just not good at nose breathing. The best way to become a nose breather is to nose breathe. You know who first taught us about that? I think we're, you know, Gabby Reese and Laird Hamilton,
Starting point is 01:23:18 big proponents of nose breathing working out. And when she told me, she came on here and was telling me about it. I've been super conscious now when I work out, I try to do as much as I can. It's obviously more difficult, especially when you're starting out, but I feel I get a bigger energy boost by doing it as well. Well, you're oxygenating your brain far more. There are studies, really good quality studies in humans, again, showing that, believe it or not, when you inhale through your nose,
Starting point is 01:23:40 your ability to learn and remember information is greater. These are several studies on this. And in fact, when you inhale, during the inhales, you're actually better at attending to and learning information than during your exhales. It literally varies from moment to moment. Now, you have to exhale. What if you have, my daughter, sometimes she mouth breathes. What should I do? Tell her all the benefits of nose breathing. I would- Close the mouth. That's what I do. Close your mouth. In the same way that-
Starting point is 01:24:08 That's what I do. I just go like this. Yeah, in the same way that if you saw your child walking with a shoulder that was this much lower and there wasn't an underlying physical cause, like a difference in the length of their legs, you would probably say, hey, you know, like try and keep that shoulder up when you walk.
Starting point is 01:24:23 We got to do that. This kind of thing. In the same way that if you see your child looking always at screens, you'd say, hey, try and keep that shoulder up when you walk. We got to do that. This kind of thing. And the same way that if you see your child looking always at screens, you'd say, hey, look off in the distance a bit. This is especially true in kids, but in adults as well. I think based on the data, it's absolutely clear that nasal breathing is so beneficial for our health
Starting point is 01:24:42 in sleep and in wakefulness. I mentioned the cosmetic stuff because oftentimes people are brought to the table by the idea of a cosmetic enhancement. And it's exciting that this stuff is reversible. And we're not saying you have to have complete reconstruction of your sinuses. You can create that restructuring.
Starting point is 01:24:57 Now, of course, there are circumstances like swimming where this isn't going to be possible, but most people aren't in the pool all day. Sure. But you're saying basically, before you jump to all those cosmetic steps, if you get mouth breathing under control and get more nasal breathing,
Starting point is 01:25:10 you could potentially reverse some of those effects and improve. Oh, absolutely. And so if the cosmetic effects are the motivator, great. You know, it's incredible. In that book also, they show that, you know, there are a lot of animals out there that have perfect teeth,
Starting point is 01:25:27 but they are nose breathers. If you look at a bulldog, I had a bulldog mastiff for a long time. Their teeth are a disaster. They're mouth breathers. Dogs that are largely nasal breathers, unless they're panting, of course, which is how they offload heat, have great teeth.
Starting point is 01:25:42 Dogs that are mouth breathers, the so-called, the ones with short snouts, brachycephalic, as they're called, nerd speak for short snout, the pugs, the bulldogs, the French bulldogs, et cetera, their teeth are horrible. And they're underbite. And they're cute because we like that little squishy face look. But as a human being, having an elongated face with droopy eyes, nasal passages and sinuses that are occluded and breathing through your mouth sets you up for colds and infections to be hypoxic. Sleep apnea, which is lack of oxygen during sleep, it's a huge health risk for cardiovascular events in men and women,
Starting point is 01:26:16 for sexual dysfunction in men, for all sorts of issues related to the movement of blood and oxygen through your body. So becoming a nose breather during sleep is key. So a little bit of medical tape on the mouth. Can I do it pregnant? He's scared for me to do it pregnant. Well, I wouldn't nasal breathe during childbirth. I would just focus on getting that baby out as safely as possible. I don't see why you couldn't do it while pregnant. I mean, your fetus is perfectly happy to get more oxygen. Now, what I wouldn't do is sort of extreme breathwork training.
Starting point is 01:26:50 What I didn't mention was the other way to protect against stress, which is to raise your stress threshold. So there's real-time tools, which is basically like, okay, my system's too ramped up right now, I want to push back. That's the physiological side. We talk double inhale, long exhale.
Starting point is 01:27:03 But then there are things that you can do to get better at dealing with stress. And the way to get better at dealing with stress is to get comfortable with high levels of adrenaline in your system, to stop trying to live a life where you are removing all the stressors because they're going to happen. That's what we're going to talk about in a second. Thanks for listening, guys. If you liked this episode, be sure to check out part two that's coming this Thursday, where we will continue this conversation and discuss optimal types of workouts and the cadences of those workouts, i.e. when and how long, how often.
Starting point is 01:27:31 We also discuss supplementation, diet, the immune system, support, testosterone, estrogen levels. And then we also cover questions around biohacking tools like cold and heat exposure, which include cold showers, saunas, cold plunges, ice baths. We also discuss red light therapy and so much more. And we end the episode talking about sexual health and reproduction and all of these things. So definitely another jam-packed episode. Be sure to check it out. Before we jump into this episode, I have a groundbreaking offer for you guys, and it is a good one. It has 40% off this product that I'm obsessed with. If you guys have been
Starting point is 01:28:02 following along for a while, you know that I have completely kicked alcohol this year, just completely stopped consuming it. And listen, at some point I may go back, but for now I'm just not consuming it. And I'm going to be honest, it was difficult in the beginning, but now I don't even think about it. And one of the reasons I don't even think about it is if I ever feel the itch or if I'm ever out publicly or socially and I want to partake and get a euphoric feeling. Instead of alcohol, I take this euphoric kava drink called Feel Free by Botanic Tonics. We've talked about it on this show. We had the founder, JW Ross, on the show. It's an incredible drink. It's just this one little tonic. It's got kava. It's got kratom. So you do have to be a little bit careful. Make sure you're not consuming it all the time. And I take it instead of alcohol. I use it going out socially,
Starting point is 01:28:42 then have a little bit of water with it. And honestly, it's been a game changer because I've been able to completely kick alcohol out of my life, still kind of get that social euphoric feeling and in a much healthier way. So like I said, to try it out, we have a 40% discount code for you. All you have to do is go to Botanic Tonics, that's B-O-T-A-N-I-C, tonics.com and use code SKINNY40. And if you've already used that code because it's a one-time code, we have a special offer just for podcast listeners. If you use code skinny 240, you can do it again to try it again. I suggest doing the subscription to get the biggest discount, but it's up to you. So check it out. That's botanictonics.com and either code
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