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what you need to do is get comfortable and stay in a no-go response under conditions where you have high levels of adrenaline in your system uncomfortable levels of adrenaline that can be done by getting into an ice bath
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that can be done through what we call cyclic hyperventilation we're running a study on this now actually the data are in it's just not published yet cyclic hyperventilation means sitting or lying down for take you know we found that five minutes
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a day actually is very effective even though it's very brief and it looks a little silly when i do it but i'll just do it cyclic hybrid ventilation is going to be a big active inhale through the nose and then a passive exhale through the mouth so this
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you just kind of let it fall out so you do that 25 to 30 times and you're gonna feel agitated what's happening you are generating adrenaline release into your system i can already feel like a little bit of blood flow heat heating up
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you're generating adrenaline release this is different than running up a hill this is active stimulation of adrenaline into your brain and body then after 25 or 30 breaths you exhale all your air through your mouth and you hold your
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breath and you try and be as calm as you can for about 15 to 60 seconds this done we had people do this daily but if you do it on a regular basis maybe even just three times a week what you'll notice is really incredible you actually when
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things happen in your world people will say something or you won't feel that sharp spike of adrenaline you've raised your stress threshold let's start with light light seems to impact the way we feel how we learn and how we sleep how does light exposure or sunlight
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exposure impact the way we sleep during the day we have the opportunity to interact with light in various ways and our cells use that information but maybe you can take us through how we can use light to get a better night of sleep
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sure so light is perhaps the most powerful stimulus for our mental physical health and for our performance in every endeavor we often miss this point because the effects of light are what we call slow and integrative you know if you look at a particular
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color of light it's not that suddenly you're going to be endowed with superpowers if you don't view light it uh for half a day or for a day you're okay but what light does is it sets the foundation of our abilities and it does
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that indirectly and directly in it does it indirectly by controlling when we are asleep and when we are alert and it also has direct effects on the way that our nervous system functions so i'll just get right into
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some practices and then i'll flesh out those practices with some science to explain why they work rather than dropping a lot of scientific nomenclature and then telling people what was is useful the way that we function is by way of our nervous system
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our nervous system links all the organs of the brain and body so we've got brain spinal cord but then of course spleen heart lungs etc and the nervous system is the system that coordinates all of those and the nervous system therefore is without
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question the most powerful organ system of our body and it acts as a conductor it is locked inside of our skull and body and it has no knowledge of the outside world and vision which involves photons light energy
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reaching the eyes getting converted into electrical signals is the way that the nervous system decides when to be alert and functional and when to be asleep and it also is what determines all the various little oscillations in ability
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to focus and um creativity and all the other things that we consider life when you wake up in the morning your brain and body have effectively been in the dark regardless of uh what sleep environment you happen to be sleeping in and you have a set of
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neurons nerve cells in the back of your eye a little structure called the neural retinal three-layered structure and those nerve cells are not involved in detecting the shapes of things what they are essentially looking for what activates them
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is bright light ideally from sunlight and when bright light ideally from sunlight reaches the eye those particular neurons send a signal off into the vaulted dark of the brain they do that by way of a little wire called an axon
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and they communicate with an area of the brain that's vitally important called the hypothalamus it sits right above the roof of your mouth and it harbors a bunch of structures that are responsible for hormones like testosterone and estrogen for um
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cortisol release um in other locations in the body basically controls when you're going to be alert when you're going to be asleep your hormones your immune system function and your appetite and your mood so this morning signal of getting bright
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light in your eyes is absolutely vital now how does one do this the best and ideal way to do this would be to wake up go outside and get some bright light in your eyes without sunglasses if you have to wear corrective lenses or contacts that's
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absolutely fine if you think about what corrective lenses and contacts do they actually focus light onto the retina precisely as opposed to when people don't wear those if they have vision problems it's because the light actually
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falls in front of her and back of the retina so-called you know nearsightedness and farsightedness so corrective lenses actually help focus the light to these neurons now the ideal situation would be a nice bright clear day you get five to ten
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minutes of sunlight you don't have to look directly at it in fact never look directly at any light of any kind that's so bright that it's painful to look at but you get some light indirectly through into your eyes some bright
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sunlight you go inside and get ready for your day by doing that you you do a number of things first of all every cell in your body has a 24 hour clock meaning there's a timer that goes from 0 to 24 and then repeats
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and that's true from the day you're born until the day you die however every cell in your body has its own separate clock and the way that those clocks are coordinated into coherent action is from a signal from this brain structure called the hypothalamus
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and the only way that signal can arrive properly is if you're getting light to trigger the hypothalamus to say okay it's the start of the day everybody start otherwise your body slowly over time becomes a little bit of a clock
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shot where every clock is on a different timer and it's alarming at different times it's actually what happens when you travel and you get stomach issues or you're not feeling right from jet lag your body clocks are the individual clocks of the cells in your body are
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falling out of sync okay they're becoming what we call um unentrained or asynchronous so you get up in the morning you go outside and you get some bright light in your eyes however many people including me wake up before the sun is out in fact
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um i'm up you know early this morning and there's very little light in the sky the sky is just a pale gray right now in that case it's very simple flip on as many bright artificial lights as possible ideally overhead lights because
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the neurons in the eye that perceive this light and send that signal to the brain reside in the lower half of the eye and therefore because the optics of the eye they actually view the upper visual field so as you'll notice i've got some
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bright lights on behind me um but sunlight is really the key and so once the sun is out it's very important to get outside and get anywhere from you know five to twenty minutes of bright light exposure a lot of people can't afford the time of
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20 minutes if it's a dim overcast day the remarkable thing is there is more photon light energy coming through that cloud cover than there is from these bright lights of the sort that are behind me here now some people live in an area of the world
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where it is very dark in winter or their schedule is arranged such they just can't do this within 30 minutes of waking in that case there are daylight simulators that are commercially available they're very expensive what i
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recommend is actually something um quite low cost and works just as well which is you get a ring light like the selfie ring lights that the youtubers and the and the instagramers use and just put that on on a table or facing you as you work in the morning
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and actually you could leave that on all day basically what you want to do is get as much bright light as you safely can in your eyes all day long and then as little bright light in your eyes as you can between the hours of about 10 pm and
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4am for reasons we can discuss so bright light exposure through windows or windshields will not suffice those unlike corrective lenses on your eyes glasses and contacts don't focus the light to your eyes in fact they're designed to filter the very light that
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triggers activation of these neurons and so you the key thing is to understand that um people probably heard that blue light is bad wear blue blockers blue light is wonderful blue light is actually what sets this clock in the eye
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excuse me the clock in the brain that signals to the rest of the body it creates a state of alertness and well-being throughout the day and it sets a timer of about 16 hours for when you're going to get sleepy later that night
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and i'll explain the mechanisms in a moment so throughout the day you want to get as much bright light in your eyes as you can if you need to use one of these ring lights great some of them are very low cost i realize everyone has different
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budgets but the daylight simulators are kind of ridiculously expensive considering that all you really need is a bunch of bright light in your eyes however sunlight is best and so if you have brakes during the day go outside
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even if you're going to be on your phone texting if you can take calls outside do it if you can get out onto a balcony do it if the sun is on the opposite side of the building and you're on the balcony taking a call you're still getting more
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photons more light energy and a fun little free resource that's out there there's an app called light meter and the photographers will know um about this light meter uh you basically open up this app you can press it in the direction you point it excuse me in the
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direction that you're um looking and you can press the little button and you'll see it'll tell you how many lux how much light energy is coming from that location it's approximate but it's pretty good and you'll notice that on a
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dim overcast day you're getting you know 8 000 lux of light coming to you and then you'll point at one of these very bright artificial lights in your home and you'll look at and it'll say 800 lux wow how is that well it's because there's a
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lot of light scatter in the outside so you don't perceive it as a focused beam so this this behavior this this activity should be done every day if you miss a day it's okay there's a slow integrative system but you don't want to miss more
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than one day why well one of the key features of every cell in our body is that it's coordinated to a general hormonal signal hormones are chemicals that released in one location in the body that go and act at other
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locations in the body and a key hormone for health is cortisol we always hear about cortisol as a stress hormone but cortisol every 24 hours there is going to be a peak in cortisol release that's non-negotiable it's a healthy peak it's
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the one that wakes you up in the morning increases your body temperature which is part of waking up gives you focus and alertness it activates your immune system in a positive way provided you don't have too much cortisol throughout
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the day and that peak is going to happen no matter what if you get light in your eyes early in the day that peak will arrive early in the day this is vitally important because one of the key findings in the in the field of
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psychiatry biological psychiatry is that when that peak doesn't arrive early in the day it starts drifting later and later and later in the day and people start getting mood issues they start feeling irritable and actually it's a
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hallmark physiological signature of depression to have a late-shifted cortisol peak in addition to that many people who have depression or even mild depression wake up at two or three in the morning and can't fall back asleep in fact that's one of the first
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things that a psychiatrist will ask about if you go into their office and it doesn't mean if you're waking up at two or three in the morning that you're necessarily clinically depressed but it's one of the hallmark features and
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many people report that just simply getting bright light exposure in their eyes early in the day ideally from sunlight corrects a number of these issues will it cure clinical depression probably not if it's very severe but many people
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actually feel better all day long they sleep better obviously this is a zero cost tool and when i say we were designed to do this i i don't get into discussions about design and um spirituality as i always say one thing
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is absolutely certain which was that i was not consulted at the design phase and neither was anyone else uh that i know so i can't answer questions about that but these cells and circuits are there for a purpose they have no other function except to bring
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information about when there's light in the environment to the brain and essentially to convert that into a bunch of hormonal signals so i want to talk about the other hormonal signal because this is really key many people have
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heard of the hormone melatonin this is a hormone that is secreted from a little gland little pea-sized gland in the brain called the pineal the pineal is the only source of melatonin in the brain and body and melatonin's role is
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to make us feel sleepy and fall asleep it does not actually keep us asleep i'm not a fan of melatonin supplementation for reasons we can talk about in a little bit but light viewed by the eyes inhibits melatonin so much so that if melatonin
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levels are at their peak and you walk into the bathroom at night and you flip on the lights and it's really bright if you spend more than 10 or 15 seconds in that light your melatonin levels will drop to zero so this is a remarkable relationship
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between the external world and melatonin and this is why in the evening you don't have to be paranoid about lights but what i recommend is that starting around you know eight nine pm or ten pm start dimming the lights in your environment just dim the lights as low
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as you can safely have them people have different lifestyles and different needs if you're on screens dim the screens if you want to buy blue blockers fine i i don't have any relationship to any blue blocker company the truth is
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you need to be worried about the brightness of light more so than the color of light i know people that have converted their entire home to red light at night which is definitely the wavelength of light that has the least stimulating effect on
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this system and that's um kind of an interesting thing i i think we're going to start seeing more kind of smart homes and smart lighting systems but most people don't do that i don't do that what i do is in the evening i start
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dimming the lights and if i use lights i use lights that are set low in the physical environment and that's because they won't trigger activation of these cells quite as much you really want to control your transition into wakefulness by viewing
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bright light early in the day and throughout the day and then you really want to control your transition into sleepiness by dimming the lights in the evening and if you if people do those two things they are going to see an outsized effect
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on their mental and physical health it's without question and then there's one other kind of um tweak to all this that's if you can try and get outside in the evening or late afternoon when the sun is is headed towards the horizon it doesn't have to
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be a sunset if you can watch the sunset great but what we call low solar angle light has particular wavelengths that are optimal for activation of these cells and what happens then is very interesting you're giving it two signals
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you're giving it a morning signal saying ah it's morning if you'd like that morning then you're getting an evening signal and this clock in the brain for the it gets a little technical but it has two oscillators and has a morning
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oscillator and an evening oscillator and then your system really knows where it is in time and then if you avoid bright lights in the evening most days you know we've all you know fall off every once in a while you go to a show or you go out and it's
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bright in the restaurant fine no big deal but if you do this most days your system starts to hum along with the natural rhythms of the rise and falling of the sun and it's no coincidence that we have a 24-hour clock in every one of our cells
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because the earth of course spins on its axis once every 24 hours and in addition to this if you start doing it regularly something really beautiful happens which is that melatonin signal remember light inhibits melatonin the longer the day
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the shorter the melatonin signal so in summer months your your body it releases very little melatonin in winter months because days are shorter and there's less light overall you release much more melatonin so you
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actually have a calendar system in your body that relates to the orbit of the earth around the sun once every 365 days and what happens is when you start getting regular about morning light viewing and in some sense evening like viewing every
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once in a while or ideally every day what happens is your system starts to fall into a very regular pattern where you feel sleepy when you expect to and want to be sleepy you feel wide awake and people actually report the subjective experience of going outside
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in the morning and as the sun comes out or as they get this bright light exposure from an artificial light they can actually feel their system charging that's not a placebo effect that's a real effect of the release of cortisol
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and adrenaline into your body the release of dopamine is controlled by light powerful neuromodulator that makes you feel good so i could go on and on but um it's very simple get as much bright light in your eyes ideally from
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sunlight throughout the day when you want to be alert really limit the brightness of light and the amount of light as you head into the uh night time if people have shift work or they're raising newborns and things of that sort there it's a whole other
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discussion but what i recommend is i have an episode on jet lag and shift work that gets really technical but does offer some tools and it just would take us off course here but i do realize and i i want to acknowledge the shift
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workers and parents that are raising kids that can't adhere to this but i think most people can what's your evening routine including supplements from like take walk me through 5 p.m until your your lights out falling asleep in bed yeah so i i
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generally go to sleep somewhere between 10 and 11 pm although lately i've been going to sleep much earlier um because i've been finishing my last meal sometime right around 6 30 seven and that's not because i'm on some
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extravagant um nutritional routine i've just started getting up earlier for social reasons my partner she goes to bed really early and so just for coordinating schedules it just um it just makes sense um but i think most people go to bed somewhere between 10
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and 11 p.m or you know 9 11 p.m so right around 5 00 p.m um i'm not an evening exerciser i like exercising in the morning or the day uh especially because the way i like to exercise i like to exercise pretty intensely for about 45 minutes or 50
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minutes and that requires caffeine for me uh and i don't want to drink caffeine too late in the day so i stopped drinking caffeine around 2 or 3 p.m and oftentimes um earlier that's just what works for me but a couple of things happen in the evening
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first of all my evening meals are more laid in with carbohydrates than they are proteins typically not every day there's times i'll have a steak for dinner or something like that chicken soup or whatever it is but it's very clear that
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fasting and low carbohydrate meals i'm not saying diets overall but meals that those lend themselves to more alertness and focus and a lot of people say well how can that be the brain uses glycogen you need carbohydrate well when
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you are sl when you eat a meal that is slightly devoid or devoid of starches it creates a sense of alertness because there's actually a mild adrenaline response so what i do is i basically i'm rewinding a little bit into the earlier part of the day but i
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fast until about um 11 o'clock i usually get my exercise at some point before 11 o'clock or noon i'm not super strict about that then my meal is generally something some meat a salad something low carbohydrate if i train
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really hard i might have some rice or oatmeal or something like that and some fruit and then in the afternoon i have a snack which is also pretty low carbohydrate because i want to have that alertness and i'm drinking caffeine so
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i'm kind of humming around um doing my work and trying to get into that high focus state for dinner i generally will eat pasta or something that includes more starches because starches are known to actually reduce cortisol levels in the body this is why
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we eat comfort foods most comfort foods involve eating foods that are pretty carbohydrate laid in because there's um a pathway involving carbohydrates and the amino acid tryptophan that converts to serotonin and it essentially blocks
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the cortisol response a lot of people that are very low carbohydrate diets i have no problem with that if people do ketogenic diets or low carb diets but those people often have a hard time sleeping they have to rely on a lot of sleep
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supplements or medication we'll talk about supplements in a minute because there are some excellent ones so in the evening i tend to eat pastas and rice and soups and i still eat some protein but i um from clean animal sources because that's
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what works for me but but i generally am shifting my whole system towards more quiescence i might do a little bit of work in the evening we are not big um screen people in the evening i do read books um generally we end up hanging out just talking and
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listening to music and things like that i might do some writing on the computer but i'm not a big screen time guy and i i should say i love movies it just so happens that um uh i ended up with somebody who doesn't have much interest
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in in movies but is it is a really terrific musician so sometimes she'll play music and i'll read or work and that's kind of my evening uh most days sometimes dinner with friends or if it will happen of course so right around um
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8 or 9 p.m i start bringing the lights down in fact i have a real sensitivity to the overhead lights because i'm so used to this pattern so i start dimming the lights in the evening overhead and then for the transition to sleep um i do
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keep my phone out of the the bedroom as much as possible sometimes i'll use it as an alarm but i'll put it on airplane mode if i'm feeling a little too alert i remember two things one the biggest peak in alertness actually occurs about 90 minutes before your
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natural to sleep time a lot of people don't know this this beautiful work from chuck zeissler's lab he's an md out of harvard medical school and what he discovered in tracking people's um wakefulness and activity patterns is
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that they're buzzing around all day doing things ideally but then right before their natural pulse and melatonin takes off they have this peak in activity and this i think um probably harkens back to some need to uh you know tamp down all the
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safety leaks that might be in one's environment um and you know get everything prepped because when you're asleep you're actually pretty vulnerable to predators and attack and things that sort that's the rationale nobody really
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knows but you can essentially figure out your net your best two-bed bedtime by when you have this big peak in activity and then it kind of subsides so sometimes if i'm feeling a little too alert and wide awake what i'll do is
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i'll just remember that that's going to pass naturally and i i'm not neurotic about it but i have to say i generally don't do too much um screen time viewing or arguing or parsing of hard you know ideas before sleep i i try and kind of shut that down
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and people vary but some people are just really tend to be very for brain oriented as i call their thinking and anticipating all the time it's good to try and taper that off one of the absolute most powerful tools that has
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come into my life in the last decade and then my lab works on and there are people in psychiatry at stanford that are also working on is a practice that i call non-sleep deep rest which is nsdr non-sleep depressed is an umbrella term that admittedly i
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created to include things like yoga nidra which is actually doesn't involve any downward dogs or handstands or anything yoga nidra is a ancient practice there's some scripts online many of them are very good you go on youtube you can
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find one of these scripts they're totally cost free put in headphones or put your phone next to you you lie down and it's a 10 to 30 minute script that walks you through a progressive relaxation of your nervous
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system there's some breathing some of them have intentions and that kind of thing for that reason um some friends of mine at a company called made for made a free resource you can just look up nsnsdr um nancy sam dog robot nsdr uh and made for and
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there's one there that removes the kind of intentions and other elements what this practice does is it teaches you to deliberately turn off your thinking and to relax your body and it makes it easier for people to access falling
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asleep and more easily de-stress now the question is when to do nsdr you can do nsdr first thing in the morning if you ever wake up and you did not get enough sleep i often wake up and feel i didn't get enough sleep i'll do a 30 minute nsdr
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and i come out of that feeling terrific as if i got a full night's sleep and i do this almost every day at some point i might do it in the afternoon or if you wake up in the middle of the night and you're having trouble falling back
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asleep i highly recommend doing this because even if it doesn't put you back to sleep it's better than being awake and ruminating and you're teaching yourself to fall back asleep the other resource that's really wonderful is something called reverie r-e-v-e-r-i
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reverie is an app for android and apple it was developed by my colleague david spiegel in the department of psychiatry at stanford it's an md he's a world expert or i should say the world expert in clinical hypnosis not stage hypnosis
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but self-hypnosis for um you'll find a number of things in the app improving sleep focus chronic pain anxiety and i should say every one of those scripts and reverie on the whole has excellent peer-reviewed data clinical data scientific data that we know what
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brain areas turn on and off as a consequence of doing these things it's a really powerful tool and these are only 15 minute scripts again the best time to do them is first thing in the morning before you go to sleep at night or any
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time of day is the kind of joke that i make which is just get in the habit of doing an sdr or a reverie script you don't have to do it every day you could do it maybe once or three times a week and what you're doing is you're
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learning how when you wake up in the middle of the night you go to the bathroom you come back ah now my mind is racing what do i do instead of getting on your phone you can start to use some of the progressive relaxation that you learned from those
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scripts or you can actually do those scripts and so i tend to do those in the evening or when i wake up in the morning and that greatly facilitates my uh transition to sleep and and just being a more rested person now in terms of
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supplements i'm a big believer that um supplements are powerful and are a terrific often a terrific replacement for prescription drugs not that there aren't terrific prescription drugs i mean many people benefit from prescription drugs i take a few
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um but i think that many people rely on things that are excessive and and habit-forming expensive and unnecessary but i will say first off behavioral tools should form the foundation of all your sleep tools your wakefulness tools behaviors first
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behaviors first behaviors first for one simple but important reason which is that behaviors rewire your nervous system they so they engage what we call neuroplasticity which is your nervous system's ability to change you get better at falling asleep when you do
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nsdr or reverie you get better at waking up and feeling alert when you view bright light in the early part of the day with supplements and and things of that sort your system can react in the moment but it doesn't rewire it doesn't
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get better such that if you don't take that thing you're just where you were before now that said there are some supplements that have been tremendously helpful for me for sleep over the years and i know now that there are i
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you know uh humility aside just from having blabbed about these on various podcasts including mine i think there are probably hundreds of thousands of people taking these things and i want to be very clear that i have no financial
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relationship to that whether or not people take these things or not my podcast is sponsored by a by a supplement company but i'm not even going to mention it i just think find the lowest cost high quality source you
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can um there are many and so the three things that really can help with the depth and transition to sleep are magnesium three and eight t-h-r-e-o-n-a-t-e magnesium three and eight an alternative which is just as good is magnesium bis-glycinate bis-g-l-y
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c-i-n-a-t-e bis-glycinate either one and what you're looking for is to get somewhere between 100 and 200 milligrams of those sometimes you'll see on the bottle it says 2000 milligrams that's the elemental magnesium you'll it'll
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also see a smaller number go with a smaller number what does this do well it makes people feel a little drowsy and it greatly increases the depth of their deep and the amount of deep sleep if you're a sleep tracker type with whoops or auras you'll see this
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about five percent of people don't like magnesium three and eight and biscuit because it gives them stomach upset you'll know the first time but most people do just fine the other thing that is a really powerful supplement which is wonderful
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is apogenin api genin apigenin is a derivative of chamomile both of these things and i should say that 50 milligrams is the target there and there's only one source that i know of i have no relationship to them but that's swanson and these things are
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available online these are both pretty low cost the three and eight can get expensive um i take bisc glycinate and apogenin and you take them about 30 to 60 minutes before sleep and most people report having incredibly improved sleep
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are they habit forming not that i am aware of should you check with your doctor if yes if you have especially if you have a heart condition taking magnesium because of the way neurons work you it's an electrolyte and you might want to
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check for that purpose but i think um most physicians i i think would put these well within the margins of safety but check with yours now there's a third supplement which is theanine t-h-e-a-n-i-n-e theanine is an interesting one
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theanine magnesium-3-8 and apogenin all trigger the activation of a neuro hormone excuse me a neuro a transmitter in the brain called gaba which tends to shut off our forebrain gaba incidentally is also what goes up if you have one or two
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alcoholic drinks the problem is drinking alcohol before sleep really screws up your sleep even if you're not drunk it really screws up your sleep a lot of people ask about cannabis and thc uh matt walker the great matt walker you
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know from berkeley who's the preeminent sleep doc scientist rather will tell you that thc and marijuana in various forms and alcohol are really disrupting people's sleep but listen people are going to do what they do but these supplements trigger a
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healthy release of gaba theanine anywhere from 100 to 400 milligrams is a that of a powerful third component of this three and eight or biscuit apogenin stack and theanine is interesting though your dreams will get
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very vivid people who have night terrors or who have um uh who sleepwalk should not take theanine theanine is actually showing up in a lot of energy drinks now companies are sneaking thinning into drinks during the day and even into coffee because it
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eliminates anxiety a little bit and it eliminates the jitters you can drink twice as much caffeine you could drink uh four of the same energy drink that normally you could only have one of if they stack cleaning in there so you
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might also want to take a look i'm not a big fan of energy drinks i am drinking some yerba mate tea this morning but um that's all that's in it um but feminine is a great addition to this evening um supplement stack and i do that about 30
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to 60 minutes before sleep one last point about sleep if you wake up in the middle of the night turn on as many lights as you need in order to navigate around safely but again try and keep the lights low and waking up once in the middle of the
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night to use the restroom is perfectly normal a lot of people think oh i woke up now my sleep is disrupted my sleep tracking score my recovery isn't good um i'm a big fan of sleep trackers but i don't use one i go on subjective
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feelings of wakefulness during the day just remember insomnia clinically defined is whether or not you're falling asleep during the day because you're having trouble sleeping at night a lot of people think they have insomnia when
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what they actually have is anxiety about waking up and they they're just concerned that they've heard all the terrible things that happen if you don't get enough sleep so i think that hits the on the major things obviously you don't want to drink so many fluids
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before sleep that you're waking up all night to use the restroom one of the nice things about a carbohydrate um rich meal in the evening is carbohydrates actually hold water um for every gram of carbohydrate you're going
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to hold some water anyone on a low carbohydrate diet will notice that they lose a lot of weight they think they're leaner they're actually excreting a lot of water so that's key and then the temperature thing is really big we haven't talked
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about temperature but second to light temperature is the most powerful um stimulus for wakefulness actually when you wake up in the morning it's because your body temperature is rising and well we can do a little experiment right
33:36
now um so what time do you typically wake up in the morning i wake up around five so so your what we would call temperature minimum is 3am meaning that your low point in body temperature across the 24-hour cycle is probably somewhere around three or four a.m and
33:53
then as it starts to rot so a temperature minimum is not a specific temperature it's a time in the 24 hour cycle and it's about two hours to 90 minutes before your natural awakening i'm not talking about the waking that happens in the middle of the
34:05
night and you go back to sleep i'm talking about the weight the typical wake-up time where you would rise okay so for you your temperature minimum is about 3 a.m and then your body temperature is going to start increasing
34:15
increasing you have that cortisol release if you can get light exposure as that slope is rising as it's increasing then you're going to augment a faster increase okay if you were to view light or get up at 2 am it would actually jet lag you it would
34:35
actually shift you in the opposite direction as if you were waking up in some other location in the world so that temperature minimum is kind of a nice thing to keep in mind we'll get back to it in a minute but what happens is your
34:45
body temperature is going to go up and then somewhere around three or four in the afternoon maybe for you because you're a really early riser maybe about two or three in the afternoon it's going to hit a temperature peak the
34:54
temperature peak is interesting the temperature peak you would think oh that's my time of gr greatest wakefulness it's actually when you're going to feel a little bit of a drop in energy in the afternoon and then it starts dropping you actually feel pretty good
35:07
in the evening and then temperature should continue dropping because in order to fall asleep and stay asleep you need your body temperature to be about one to three degrees lower than it was in that in the afternoon so one thing
35:19
you can do is you can keep the temperature in your home a little bit lower at night and just stay under blankets um i did a whole episode on this but i and i don't want to get too far into it but um we actually dump heat mainly
35:31
through the palms of our hands the upper half of our face and the bottoms of our feet there's a special portals between the blood and the skin there beautiful um thing was discovered by my colleague craig heller at stanford these are
35:42
called glabrous skin um there's uh special for the aficionados you have arteries capillaries and veins and in these particular locations it basically only goes to art from arteries to veins you skip all the little estuaries that are the capillaries between them and
35:56
you're able to basically dump heat more easily during the middle of the night the best thing to do is to have warm blankets on top of you and be in a cold room and then if you get too warm you will just naturally in your sleep you'll just
36:10
extend a foot or a hand out you've probably heard sleep with socks on terrible idea um i don't know why that caught on that makes no sense whatsoever you you want to be able to dump heat in the middle of the night because if you
36:21
get too hot you'll wake up now some people say wait i was in a classroom and when i was in college and it was always when it was warm in the afternoon then it would get hot that i would fall asleep yeah that's true too it has more to your
36:34
digestive patterns than anything else but um sort of i think it's called the post perennial dip which is just nerdy speak for after lunch you get sleepy uh but if you can extend a handout that's great because if the room is too hot
36:48
what are you gonna do you're not gonna put your hand into a bucket of ice next to your bed i mean most people don't have that device some people use these chili pads or ate sleep or these kinds of things i i um actually don't have one
37:00
personally i tend to run kind of warm that's an interesting question like i use an eight-sleeve and it can adjust the temperature throughout the night so how should i adjust that to optimize the quality of my sleep should i start from cold and like gradually go warm or
37:16
should i just do cold all night yeah great question um i was sent one i still need to set it up but i don't have any relationship to them yet i think they perhaps they were curious about forming one but so i need to try it um
37:28
so you want it to be cool uh so i would say moderate temperature at the beginning of the night um for the first two or three hours of sleep then you want to keep it cold until about that three or four a.m point and then starting right around
37:45
4 45 your body is naturally heating but if you were to allow it to heat up then i think you would wake up more quickly um i didn't realize you start with like yeah you want to start with like an average temperature and then go colder
37:58
and then go warmer that's right you want to mimic what would happen if you were sleeping outdoors essentially um right it's it right and and there's a beautiful study that was uh two studies actually that were published at the university of
38:13
colorado uh where they took students um camping for two days and they made them eliminate all their electronic devices so they had to rise with the sun and go to sleep or get into their tents at night more or less when the sun went
38:26
down um and i should mention that fire campfires fireplaces candlelight and moonlight will not wake you up at night they they're just they may even the brightest full moon you might think wow this is going to keep me awake all night
38:39
so that the lux you can use light meter and check it's very little light energy but they did this with these students and they found that just two days of getting onto that pattern with the rise and fall of the sun and they were sleeping
38:52
outdoors so they had the temperature whatever temperature what happened to be that time of year in colorado they found is that that reset the cortisol and melatonin rhythms for a week which is incredible they went back to their
39:04
normal chaotic pattern of bright lights and college life and their and the the rhythm because it's a slow oscillator system stuck for a week now that doesn't mean just do these things two days out of the week but it's really incredible
39:16
um i've looked at those data a lot and uh it's it's just remarkable how the system will map to this so i think if you want to have moderate temperature um early in the night then drop it low to bring you to your temperature minimum
39:29
and then heat heat up when you want to wake up you're good to go um i should mention that some people like to heat up in the morning to get more energy and they'll do that with a cold shower or ice bath and you might say wait that's crazy you're getting in the
39:43
cold water well this is a kind of an interesting and counter-intuitive one your brain has an area called the pre-optic area of the hypothalamus that's more or less like a thermostat so if let's say you're overheating you went running you're
39:56
overheating and you put some cold icy towels over you and on your head and you're squeezing cold water on guess what that's just like putting cold water or an ice pack on the thermostat what happens your body heats up so when you
40:10
get into cold water as long as you don't stay in there to the point where you start becoming hypothermic you actually are increasing your metabolism and body heat so a lot of people take a cold shower get into an ice bath early in the
40:20
day because you get that shot of adrenaline and cortisol you also get the release of a neuromodulator dopamine which this is incredible but there's a paper published in the european journal of physiology it showed that there's a 2.5 x huge increase in
40:34
dopamine release very long lasting 2.5 x is the amount of dopamine that's triggered by the use of cocaine but the difference is cocaine has a very sharp peak on it and then it falls which is why people become habitual users
40:46
obviously not a good thing um to use cocaine at all um frankly um but this long sustained increase in dopamine from cold water exposure of anywhere from one to three minutes is really powerful and it increases body
41:02
temperature so some people do that early in the morning to wake up as well and i people will probably say well how cold i always say it really varies so what you want to do is you when you want to get into cold ideally you would submerge yourself up
41:18
to the neck but you can also use cold showers the the cold should be uncomfortable to the point where you want to get out very badly but safe and that's the only prescription i can give because i can't say 30 degrees or 40 degrees or
41:33
50 degrees because people have different heat tolerance and cold tolerance and so it should be uncomfortably cold like you really want to get out of that cold shower and then um the other question i get we're talking a little bit about temperature but i don't
41:47
want to go off course with sleep but the other question i get is how long to stay in there ideally you would do this for a total of 11 minutes per week so that could be 11 1 minute sessions it could be a couple two or three minute sessions or three or four two or three minute sessions but then people say well do i end on cold or can i then take a nice hot shower and get ready well if you're me you take a nice hot shower and get ready for the day
42:08
um but if you want to increase your metabolism a lot because this will increase your metabolism you're looking at fat loss or this kind of thing well then you want to end with cold because then you need to use your body's natural mechanisms to heat up right so
42:25
there's a real rationale to all this i confess i don't do the cold shower thing every day we do have a nice um plunge right outside um i'm terrible about getting into that thing i much prefer the sauna or a hot shower or bath
42:42
and that if you think about it works in the same way when would be the best time of day to do that well you could do it any time but the best time for things like growth hormone release for cardiovascular health and for a number
42:54
of other effects would be to do it in conjunction with the cold we could talk about that or in the evening why in the evening because you want your body temperature to cool off in the evening right well if you get into a warm environment provided you don't stay in
43:07
there for too long you're not in there for an hour or two and becoming hypothermic if you get into a sauna for 10 or 15 or 20 minutes you're actually your brain sends a cool off signal because it's the effectively like putting a heating pad on the
43:21
thermostat so the temperature system is very counter-intuitive the way it works and i should say that saunas are hard for most people to access but likewise a hot bath um before going to sleep um for many people is very useful um and
43:36
and and it has a number of other effects i mean if you're gonna do heat cold contrast probably best to do um you know 15 to 20 minutes of heat um and then three minutes of cold 15 to 20 minutes of heat three minutes of cold but frankly i often don't have
43:52
time for all that so i'll just do i'll get into the cold i hate it i hate it for one to three minutes i get out i'm always glad i did it then i'll get into the sauna and then i'll take a shower and head to work or something like that
44:05
so there are a number of different ways to do this but what i prefer is rather than giving people a very specific prescription 11 minutes always end on cold okay well that's true if you want to increase your metabolism or
44:18
you know alternating heat and cold in very specific ways just think about it when you're in a cold environment you force your body to heat up you become a better radiator and you kind of have more oil in the candle so to speak that oil is the brown fat
44:30
which is not a blubbery fat but it lives around the heart and it's that's why for instance if you were somebody who's always cold in the winter you need to do more cold showers because you build that reservoir of internal heat generation
44:43
and so in scandinavia that was saying which is as you head towards winter get cold take the jacket off take cold showers jump into cold lakes as you head towards summer you need to heat adapt so you need to start getting good at running
44:57
with a hoodie on and and getting warm so that during the summer you're really good at sweating and dumping heat so that's the rationale all right some quick questions before we get into some longer ones do you cycle your
45:07
supplements at all or do you just do them every night the three that you mentioned yeah i do them every night unless i pass out reading without them and i've never developed a dependence on any of them i do notice that um you know if i don't take them
45:21
uh consistently then i'll start you know my sleep isn't quite as good there are two other things i should mention that i do use just in full disclosure i do take about 200 milligrams of gaba um i've been doing that lately because
45:37
it really improves my sleep and i'm really big on sleep and i sometimes will take a gram or two of glycine as well so i'm taking a lot i'm taking this glycinate i'm taking epigenetic and i'm taking theanine i'm taking gaba i'm taking glycine but why am i doing all
45:52
this well i fall asleep and stay asleep for about six to seven hours and i feel completely charged during the day and if i get woken up i'll do that yoga nidra or something of that sort um to or reverie but to me sleep is the foundation of all
46:12
mental and physical health and i'm not somebody who struggles with clinical depression um although i would say in the past when i was a postdoc for instance and in college looking back i think i probably had a low level of
46:25
depressive symptoms i was waking up a lot in the middle of the night maybe it was just being young i was ruminating on a lot and i think about now i'm 46 years old i i i feel great most all of the time even if life is hard and that for me is
46:41
a is sort of a like a wow i can't believe it right given my work schedule given life is challenging now i have a wonderful life but i also number of challenges like anybody else and i think what what's different well what's
46:54
different is that i've been getting really good sleep consistently for for years now there are nights of poor sleep um i'm big on a physical routine and training and my physical routine and training has my output has improved my
47:07
recovery has improved um you know i completely disagree with this idea that oh you know starting at 30 your testosterone drops and you're going to feel miserable and you're going to recover more slowly everything that i've experienced is that over time my blood
47:21
panels have gotten better my performance in athletic performance has gotten better i'm not an athlete but i think i'm a recreational exerciser but so when i say performance is just what's what i um want for me and i think it's just a matter of
47:36
taking really good care and the foundation of what we call good good care is getting quality sufficient sleep on a regular basis do you read in bed or do you read on the couch and then go to bed i'll sometimes read in bed
47:49
typically i'll read on the couch um or work on my computer on the couch i no longer bring the laptop into the room or and now that you ask it i don't tend to read in bed so much i've kind of converted the bedroom into only bedroom
48:02
activities you know um and not a place where i work you know that's um do you take you know i take naps at all i do i'm a big napper i love taking a 20 minute nap or doing an nsdr in the afternoon the rule on naps and matt walker and i agree on this is that
48:22
nap should be shorter than 90 minutes and they should um you should only take them if they if they don't disrupt your nighttime sleep i love naps and i can sleep anywhere anytime now because i do the nsdr so if i just
48:36
decide i'm gonna lie down and pass out i can just do that it just happens and i um so i'm big on naps for a couple of reasons um there are several very good papers that were published in the last few years in the journal cell report showing that short
48:52
naps and nsdr i should say has some good science to support it um accelerates neuroplasticity and learning especially if you take that nap within four to six hours after a very intense learning bout there's something about that sleep state that allows the brain to
49:09
rewire and most of the rewiring and neuroplasticity occurs during deep sleep but also during these short sleep bouts um that we call naps or nsdr so i'm a huge fan and yeah my evening is basically just trying to take things down a notch
49:25
um and everything's a little bit quieter a little bit mellower occasionally i'll get a bout of focused writing in during that one hour peak or something of that sort i'm just really trying to taper everything i try and not walk the dog at
49:39
night but sometimes the dog needs to walk so it's not that i you know i'm i'm super strict about this occasionally i will um go you know take the dog out for a walk or watch a movie but most of the time it's it's a progressive mellowing
49:52
toward the evening and then in the morning um you know we started pretty early today um and i i'm up and i'm up in adam and all day long i'm going going going one thing that's really um i should mention if people are having an
50:05
afternoon crash uh one thing they can do to support themselves is to um delay their morning caffeine for 90 to 120 minutes after waking the longer you're awake the more there's a buildup of of a molecule in the brain and body called adenosine
50:22
and that's sort of a sleepiness molecule if you will caffeine inhibits adenosine function it does this through a it basically parks in the receptor and prevents adenosine from working so if you wake up in the morning and you're blitzing caffeine like i am
50:36
this morning um but i've been up for a while you're drinking caffeine straight out the gate what happens is whatever residual adenosine was in your system is still floating around you've blocked where it can bind to the adenosine
50:48
receptor so it's not making you sleepy but then sometime right around 1 or 2 pm when that caffeine wears off all of a sudden there's this glut of adenosine and you feel tired when you wake up in the morning if you delay caffeine
51:02
the cortisol peak actually is able to clear out the remaining adenosine that happens to be around but it requires uh gets a little technical but it requires an interaction with the receptor so if you keep caffeine out of your system for
51:14
the first 90 to 120 minutes of waking and then have your caffeine you'll notice that you'll push through the afternoon just fine without any um afternoon drop it also allows you to drink less caffeine overall because a
51:27
lot of people are just habitual coffee drinkers um which i i happen to really enjoy coffee and i drink yerba mate as my other preferred source of caffeine for reasons that i could spin off too but yerba mate has a number of things in
51:40
it that are good for metabolism like glp1 and things like that it seems common at least among people that i know that they can fall asleep like right away almost instantly but then four to five hours later they're wide awake you
51:54
sort of mentioned depression what else is going on there what goes through your mind in terms of uh how to handle that yeah so a couple things one is they might not be getting enough physical activity during the day or they're getting too much they're over
52:06
trained um you know that there's a i don't want to get the exercise gurus on my back because they're they're some of the most the nutrition and exercise folks online or you know with pitchforks or whatever um with forks um but you know you can if you
52:25
train too much and too often uh you'll find that you can't get enough sleep and you're always tired if you train too intensely you'll often find that you um you'll you'll have this uh waking up um agitated thing now that's that's i
52:41
wouldn't get too bogged down in that but it's something to keep an eye out for people that are doing tons and tons of miles on the road and then they're always exhausted well your body's just not recovering and likewise with work if you just work work
52:54
work and you're just burning yourself down but i think people who are waking up after um four or five but sorry i should close that out and say that but an appropriate amount of physical exercise each day is going to help you
53:05
get the appropriate amount of sleep and the rule of thumb from the literature is about 150 to 180 minutes per week of zone two cardio so this is um cardiovascular exercise of any kind where you could have a conversation but
53:18
you're a little bit strained you'd prefer to be quiet to keep it going um zone two cardio 150 to 180 minutes a week approximately um broken up into various sessions and then it's very clear that the body and brain and the skeletal system in the muscular
53:36
system benefit from any from a minimum of six sets per body part per week just to maintain muscle i'm not talking about people building muscle i'm talking about people like my mom who's in her you know late 70s should be doing
53:50
six sets a week of quadricep work um and the intensity of that and so forth is a full discussion that we don't have time for but you know people would need to maintain their strength um so six sets would be the minimum and of course if
54:04
people are doing you know sets to failure and drop sets and assisted reps and all that that's a different business right because then you know i'm talking about the typical person that that will help sleep the 150 to 180 minutes of zone 2 cardio and getting
54:18
resistance exercise you know three or four times a week you're going to be a much more fuel efficient better sleeping more focused system without question there's tons of science to support why that's the case in fact there's this
54:30
really cool study i'll just mention that was done at stanford recently by my colleague tony weiss corey where they take the blood from exercised individuals and they infuse it into non-exercise individuals and all sorts of aspects of brain
54:44
function improve there's actually stuff secreted from the muscles that then go off to the other organs this makes total sense when you hear about it because you think well how could that be but it the the rationale is that the other
54:58
organs of the body don't know what the other organs in the body are doing so they need to receive signals so when the muscles are working the brain says oh i need to keep the neurons that are responsible for motor function and
55:08
memory assad improvements in memory and alzheimer's patients in this study really amazing so there's that there's the exercise and effort component i don't think we were designed to just think and um and scroll and text i think we
55:21
were designed to move and that's vitally important provided we don't do do it to excess the other thing is that many of the people waking up after four or five hours were supposed to go to bed earlier remember melatonin puts you to sleep but
55:34
doesn't keep you asleep so many of these people might be going to bed at 11 o'clock waking up at three or four a.m here i am again when actually they need to go to bed at nine now there's this weird asymmetry in the way that our system is built in that we
55:48
can push through fatigue but it's very hard to make ourselves fall asleep so some people need to discover that they actually were meant to go to bed earlier i i know people think about night owls and morning larks and this kind of thing
56:01
that's a big idea in industry and to some extent it's true there are genetic polymorphisms that relate to these things but for the most part most people were you know evolved in under conditions where they went to sleep shortly after the sun
56:15
went down so i'm with age i'm going to bed earlier and earlier i realize there's some lifestyle factors too but i do think that there is something powerful about going to bed a little earlier there i keep asking matt walker
56:30
if there's any science to support this and he tells me no but i find and many people find that every hour of sleep before midnight recharges them more deeply than the hours after midnight and i don't know what this is um but i find if i go to
56:45
bed at nine o'clock and i'll sometimes wake up at midnight i'm like ah it's only midnight what am i gonna do but then i fall back asleep i'll wake up at three or four a.m and i'm ready to go and and that's that's great i mean you
56:57
can get so much done in the hours between you know four and seven a.m fewer distractions your focus can be very high the problem is most people are going to bed late they're waking up at four or five hours later then they're scrolling on their phone because it's a
57:12
very kind of passive sensory input they're trying to get themselves back to sleep it doesn't work and then throughout the day they're working at about 75 capacity so i would encourage those people to start going to bed earlier
57:24
um i i didn't finish up with melatonin earlier i'm not a fan not a fan of melatonin supplementation dosages are much too high it's a hormone that interacts with the other hormone systems of the brain and body mostly the dosages are much too high
57:40
what you take in terms of one milligram melatonin very small dosage is something like 100 times what you naturally secrete i get really concerned about this especially in kids because melatonin is actually the hormone that suppresses the onset of puberty
57:55
um i don't have any direct data in myself but i'm not interested in taking a hormone uh exogenous hormone that suppresses the uh sextorian hormones which are testosterone and estrogen powerful hormones in men and women um for all
58:10
sorts of things and i know that a lot of people just think oh testosterone men estrogen women that's not the way it works they're present in both and actually having sufficient levels of estrogen for men provides not too high
58:21
is important for brain longevity and health it's actually really important for libido a lot of people that um get on uh hormone replacement men that get on hormone replacement will take things like an astrozole and they'll start crushing their
58:33
estrogen and they run into a serious sexual side effects so you want these things working naturally um hormone therapy or not and melatonin just it causes all sorts of problems so i i know that the melatonin supplement manufacturers probably don't like that i
58:49
say this but melatonin is should i don't think should be just taken the way that people take it like m m's um maybe occasionally for jet lag but don't rely on this powerful hormone it disrupts a number of other systems i
59:03
want to briefly touch on caffeine and alcohol maybe we can start with alcohol what happens when someone has a glass or two of wine or an after-dinner cocktail how does that impact our sleep and is there anything we can do to
59:14
counterbalance the effects of booze in the moment just acknowledging that it's probably going to happen to get a better sleep yeah well i'm not a big drinker but um you know that's just me i've never liked alcohol it um it just makes me sleepy i actually i
59:31
sometimes wish that i could enjoy alcohol more because um it is part of this the social fabric of of being you know an adult and you have a glass of wine or a beer or something like that um but i think a drink or two every once in a
59:45
while is not a big deal provided you know people don't have a you know predisposition for alcoholism or something of that sort um you know and they're of appropriate age of course but i think that the key is to not do it too close to sleep
1:00:00
i think obviously hydration is key because alcohol is dehydrated you know a lot of the effects but you asked about ways to offset alcohol use remember a lot of the negative effects of alcohol on sleep are by way of the temperature
1:00:12
system remember we used to hear that oh you know if you drink and you're outdoors i guess we've all had the experience of you know partying and you're outside and you're not wearing a jacket and it's freezing cold and you feel fine right and
1:00:26
that's because of the way that alcohol um actually it's it's a little bit counterintuitive alcohol actually lowers your body temperature but your perception of that lower body temperature is disrupted um so part of the reason you can fall
1:00:38
asleep when you drink alcohol is because it lowers your body temperature now if there's a dosage component and so on but one idea would be if you're going to drink alcohol hydrate the supplements i refer to at least to my knowledge
1:00:55
don't um interact with alcohol obviously the deadly combination is alcohol and any kind of barbiturates or sedatives so there there's actually a strong incentive for staying away from sleep medication if you're drinking right i mean people a lot of deaths have
1:01:08
occurred just because people combine sedatives um prescription sedatives with alcohol but the supplements i'm referring to um as far as i know don't do that there's a loss of sodium in your system when you drink alcohol because you
1:01:23
secrete a lot of fluid neurons run essentially uh the way they're able to function is from three main electrolytes it's sodium potassium and magnesium the actual firing of your nerve cells is because sodium enters the cells
1:01:35
potassium goes out so a lot of people will feel better if they'll drink water with some electrolytes low sugar electrolyte solutions are now very easy to find out there so that will make a big difference in terms of reducing hangovers and
1:01:51
improving sleep you want appropriate amounts of sodium potassium and magnesium in your system salt has gotten kind of a bad rap but there was an article published in science magazine which is one of the premier three apex journals and science
1:02:06
scientific publishing about the the whole myth around salt i mean it's true that people with chronic hypertension need to avoid salt but for most people are consuming enough fluid salt is great i mean salt is something that brings volume it keeps your blood
1:02:20
volume up keeps your brain feeling alert and focused a lot of times people will feel jittery during the day they'll think that i have low blood sugar take a little bit of take a pinch of salt put in some water maybe a little lemon juice
1:02:30
to kill the taste and drink that you notice you're just rock solid why you might have been low blood pressure or low sodium sometimes people can't focus and they are low sodium sometimes we crave sugar and we're actually low
1:02:42
sodium this isn't wishy-washy new agey california stuff this is really like this is goes right down to how our kidneys function and blood volume and how the brain requires a certain amount of blood pressure in order to have
1:02:55
enough blood going to our brain in order to be able to focus so when we drink alcohol we're inhibiting all these things you're excreting sodium you're lowering body temperature and of course it makes you feel kind of drowsy now about 10 percent of people
1:03:08
have a genetic um predisposition to get a big dopamine increase from alcohol alcoholics have to be afraid of this and and people who have this need to be on the lookout for alcoholism i i have a good friend who um when they drink they experience this
1:03:25
dopamine surge so they can drink and drink and they feel alert and they feel great and they want to party they it's not that their tolerance is high they actually have a dopamine response to alcohol whereas most people it's more of
1:03:36
a gaba sedative type response and after one more drink than they normally can handle they're just ready to pass out or they're kind of heading into the blackout type drunk stuff which is really bad so just keep in mind that alcohol can have
1:03:51
different effects on different people but for most people a drink or two hydrate hydrate with electrolytes and then when you wake up in the morning you also want to hydrate with electrolytes that's that's really key and i think
1:04:02
that can offset some of it i think they can offset some of it what about caffeine maybe you can walk us through what we know about it and how we can use this knowledge to get better performance while minimizing the impact on sleep
1:04:13
yeah i'll take a sip of caffeine just now um okay i love caffeine i'm a um you know i was never as i mentioned i was never really into drinking um i'm not a marijuana smoker i just i never liked it it just wasn't for me no judgment it's just just not my thing i i
1:04:31
like being focused and alert and energetic because i maybe i suppose i have a little bit more of adrenaline um thing than a sedative thing so caffeine as i mentioned is in it it works it's actually a competitive agonist of of adenosine so how does it
1:04:48
work caffeine parks in the adenosine receptor remember adenosine is this molecule that builds up the longer we've been awake so parks in that receptor and it in so it's an agonist meaning it can park there but it it out competes
1:05:02
the adenosine so it creates an artificial state of alertness that way but it also triggers the release of of adrenaline also called epinephrine epinephrine and adrenaline are the same thing from the brain and body two sources there's a you have your
1:05:17
adrenal glands above your kidneys that's one source and then you have a collection of little neurons in your brain stem called the locus ceruleus locus release is an amazing structure it sends those little wires we call
1:05:28
axons off into different areas of the brain acts like kind of a sprinkler sprinkler system releasing epinephrine and creating states of alertness in the brain and caffeine stimulates those neurons to release adrenaline so it
1:05:42
literally creates wakefulness in the brain and wakefulness in the body through locus ceruleas in the brain and the adrenals in the body in addition it does something really cool which is that it increases the sensitivity of the dopamine receptors now we haven't
1:05:57
talked too much about dopamine but dopamine is perhaps the most powerful neuromodulator it's involved in movement that's why people have parkinson's are deficient in dopamine neurons and they have trouble generating smooth movements
1:06:09
so they shake they have trouble in severe cases they can't speak they feel depressed because dopamine is not um we hear about dopamine hits it's in in other areas of the brain and body such that it controls motivation craving and drive
1:06:24
and dopamine makes us feel good but it really makes us feel motivated there's a classic experiment to demonstrate this and then i'll get back to how caffeine influences this they've done this with rats and with humans um natural
1:06:36
condition with humans but you take two rats and you give them a lever they can press that lever and they can get a reward the reward for a rat is really tasty food or you can water deprive the rat somewhat cruel experiment and then they can get
1:06:50
water you can food deprive them and they can press a lever they get food you can give them access to an opposite sex rat and rats like sex and so they they'll get to mate they press the lever and both rats will press
1:07:03
the lever as um they're rational in some sense if one rat is dopamine depleted meaning all the neurons that create dopamine are eliminated from the brain it will still work for pleasure and it gets pleasure however it will only work by hitting that lever
1:07:20
if you move those rats one rat length away from the lever what you find is the one with dopamine will work it will get up and walk across the cage and hit the lever the one with no dopamine won't even move one body length in order to
1:07:34
achieve pleasure it has no motivation so dopamine and this is true in humans there are naturalistic conditions that sadly there are some recreational drug users out there that got bad batches of certain drugs that killed all their dopamine neurons you see a similar
1:07:48
effect they can still have pleasure but they can't motivate people who are deficient in dopamine have trouble with focus they have trouble with motivation and they are the no um no disrespect but they are the people that can sit around thinking
1:08:03
about the things they need to do forever they are chronic procrastinators and they have very very high what we call activation energy and they're just not very motivated dopamine can be enhanced by taking various things and doing certain things
1:08:16
we could talk about but caffeine increases the sensitivity of dopamine receptors increasing not just the tendency to move by release of adrenaline but makes us more motivated to go out and pursue goals in fact the major effect of
1:08:30
dopamine is to place us into a mode of what we call like steroception of focusing on things that are outside our immediate experience or the confines of our skin create the company get the grades find the mate forage for food this is an ancient
1:08:44
generic mechanism that was designed to carry over to most every pursuit activity of any kind so caffeine increases dopamine receptor function by increasing excuse me dopamine function by increasing dopamine receptors
1:08:58
i i am a fan of taking caffeine or drinking caffeine early in the day i as i mentioned i think yerba mate is one source that's great some people like coffee some people like espresso just make sure you hydrate and make sure you're getting enough salt
1:09:13
as you hydrate you don't need to buy any fancy electrolyte solution you can just take a little pinch of salt and put in water for every coffee that you drink or espresso that you drink you'll find you feel much better in fact in some south
1:09:26
american countries and in europe they'll give you some water with your coffee they sort of understand this relationship of the dehydration and caffeine causes the excretion of sodium from the kidney um by way of the kidneys excuse me um
1:09:41
so i would stop drinking caffeine around two or three in the afternoon many people find that they can drink caffeine until 8 or 9 p.m and then still fall asleep but the quality of your sleep will be greatly disrupted so try and taper that off
1:09:55
toward the afternoon the other thing that you can do is that if you use caffeine regularly i recommend again drinking caffeine um avoiding caffeine for in the first 90 to 120 minutes after waking but there's some other fun things
1:10:10
you can do with caffeine one of the things is to become a bit of an intermittent caffeine user it's a little hard to do but if you're somebody who really relies on caffeine you can try deleting caffeine for a morning and then doing it
1:10:23
the next day you'll immediately feel the rewarding properties of it of like how great it tastes and how charged you get so if you get to the point where you're drinking more and more caffeine and you're not getting the the great
1:10:35
sensations and motivation from it you're probably um too caffeine adapted um i make it a point to not take too many um stimulants of any kind before training every third or fourth training session i'll just i realize it might not be the best
1:10:53
training session but i try not to rely on stimulants too much because i want my natural systems to work we've heard of adrenal burnout no such thing your adrenals could take you 200 years of activity take you through 200 years
1:11:07
of activity there is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome but adrenal burnout is the creation of online marketing it's not a it's not a medical term it doesn't exist your adrenals are remarkable um adrenal insufficiency syndrome are
1:11:22
people that don't make enough adrenaline and that actually is a serious clinical condition but you're not going to feel burnt out from drinking too much caffeine what what's happening is the caffeine isn't working anymore because you've saturated
1:11:34
all your receptors so avoid overuse stagger the use you know i actually think it's a good resilience exercise every once in a while to just skip caffeine for a day some people get headaches um and that's because caffeine affects blood flow
1:11:51
this is kind of interesting if you have a headache sometimes a little bit of coffee can help that headache depends if you're caffeine adapted or not for people that are caffeine adapted the way that caffeine works is going to be it's
1:12:01
actually going to help dilate the blood vessels if you're um of the brain and body so it's going to actually allow more blood flow if you're not caffeine adapted and you don't drink caffeine very often it's going to
1:12:12
constrict those blood vessels and make them uh and essentially make it harder to relax so you know this gets a little technical but um there's some fun things you can do with caffeine like mix it with feeling if you feel like you're over stimulated you
1:12:28
could take 100 milligrams of theanine and you could adjust down your level of jitteriness some people really like that caffeine plus the immune combination because it's that alert but calm whereas when they just drink caffeine they're just too
1:12:41
buzzed and they can't focus let's chat about subordinating impulses which i think is sort of a good segue here it seems like the source of almost all of our problems come from a lack of impulse control and what i find interesting
1:12:54
about this is it's not that we're not capable of making rational choices but more we're not even aware in the moment we're being irrational we're reacting without reasoning and in popular books it seems like they make it easy and say
1:13:06
well if you're driven by feelings you're reactive and if you're driven by values you're proactive but i'm curious to hear your take yeah i'm fascinated by this you know most of the disorder and dysfunction in the world um is caused by lack of impulse control
1:13:22
right i mean there's so much has been made of motivation and drive and um in the popular literature and far less as you point out about suppressing action or i mean just think about all the people that tweet something stupid and then
1:13:37
lose their jobs or you know or we hear these cases like wow like the person was on a zoom and they did something inappropriate not by accident wow they really have a heart people will have a hard time suppressing their behavior and they lose things that
1:13:51
they've invested tremendous amounts of resources in um you know i will just to explore this a little further as we move towards an answer i mean some of this is relates to biological drives that you know primitive drives you know you hear about
1:14:06
people who have made fortunes or have wonderful families and then they go and have a one-off affair with somebody and they lose a lot right they lose relationships they lose reputation you just think wow so do
1:14:19
we conclude that the forces of of the hypothalamus that drive us towards um certain types of behavior are more powerful maybe although maybe it's we should look at it from the other side and just say well maybe they were just
1:14:32
actually far weaker in terms of impulse control across the board and maybe that's what made them effective because they were very action oriented i have someone in my life i won't mention who they are who likes to say about themselves they're all tactics no
1:14:45
strategy and they're an extremely effective person they can make more happen in 45 minutes than anyone else i know but they have no long-term strategy it's really it's and it's gotten them into some serious hot water um and no i'm not referring to
1:15:01
myself um i'm very i'm probably more on the on the strategic side i tend to think out i play i try and play chess not checkers um in life and but maybe to a fault um but but in any case so there's an area of our neural
1:15:18
circuitry called the basal ganglia the basal ganglia are vitally important for controlling and integrating thought and action and they have two main circuits that are both regulated by dopamine but they use different receptors for
1:15:34
dopamine to have different effects in fact opposite effects some of the circuitry in this basal ganglia um pathways are involved in what we call go functions like pick up this thing or lean into the work it's go it's action oriented and that includes thought and
1:15:49
then the other one is no go and there's a it actually involves certain neurotransmitters including dopamine to suppress behavior so what we learn as kids is actually a lot of no go type behavior sit still don't interrupt okay it's not just clear
1:16:07
your plate from the table it's not just be kind say thank you those are go type behaviors it's sit there it's the two marshmallow tasks and beautiful work has a two marshmallow task of course being the study done at
1:16:20
stanford many years ago and repeated many times seems like i'm citing only stanford studies i realize there are other universities but a lot of great work was done there where they give the kids an option to have one marshmallow
1:16:30
an hour two marshmallows if they wait those videos are very cute and it's fun to watch that the kids will sit there they use all sorts of distractions strategies one of the kids like starts getting close to the marshmallows some turn away others sniff them um and
1:16:44
they've tracked these kids over time and indeed there are some data to support the fact that kids that were able to defer gratification do better in life it's not the studies are not as robust as we once thought but adults have a lot of problem with
1:16:58
delayed gratification they're just not very good at it um and so one thing that i've done over the years to try and reinforce these circuits in myself based on my understanding of how they work is every day i try and have somewhere
1:17:12
between 20 and 30 no-gos and the no-gos can be trivial like i'm ready to pick up my phone no and i force myself to not pick it up and all i'm doing is trying to reinforce that circuit because the thing to understand about neural circuitry is
1:17:27
that it's generic it doesn't it's not designed so that you have a strong no-go response just to picking up your phone it actually carries over to multiple other things and this is also true of the go circuitry maybe this is the problem
1:17:41
we're in we heard years ago and i think it's still a wonderful thing from was admiral craven you know you get up you make your bed in the morning why well i have a friend from the seal teams he's like well the you know the mcraven
1:17:51
narrative was you do it so that at the end of the day even if you have a miserable day your bed is made and i heard that and i was like well i like the idea but frankly seeing my bed mate at the end of the day doesn't do that much for me i actually think it's a much
1:18:03
more powerful underlying mechanism and no disrespect to him great admiration for mcraven and i love his work and what he's doing but but i think that at any moment we can be back on our heels flat-footed or forward center of mass that's the way i try and
1:18:17
visualize the waking portions of my life sleep of course allows you to toggle between these states more easily so get that sleep but where you know at any moment we're kind of like feeling defeated we're flat-footed or forward
1:18:28
center of mass and forward center of mass takes energy but it also has its own momentum and so i think getting up and doing something without involving rumination or consideration or thought just getting into action sets your whole
1:18:42
nervous system into a mode of go and i think we then we drink caffeine it's a ghost stimulus then we move towards the things that are important to us we're emailing we're always doing go go go go even if you're scrolling on
1:18:53
your phone it's go scrolling instagram or something it's a go type function we rarely rehearse our no go functions and no go functions are simply about suppressing behavior so if you have a meditative practice there's a little bit of that
1:19:08
where you think i don't want to do it but i'm going to force myself to sit still even though i want to get up that's a no-go but think about it if you get better at meditating you actually have less of an opportunity to get into
1:19:20
this no-go mode right to trigger the circuitry so what i try and do is introduce 20 or so no-go's throughout the day that i deliberately impose on myself as i'm about to get into reflexive action and it could be delaying um a bite of food
1:19:36
for a couple of minutes i realize it sounds almost like an eating disorder thing but that's for people with eating disorders probably want to stay away from that one but there are all sorts of ways that we can do this we find ways that we are
1:19:47
are short short circuiting this process and so i think we need to keep these no-go circuits trained up i think nowadays there's so much opportunity and so much reward for go that we don't train the no-go pathways and i could
1:20:00
give a number of different examples but um one that i think works well for me is oftentimes if i'm training in the gym i'll have a set routine and then i'll start changing it i'll notice that i'll have this impulse to i'll give a dumb
1:20:13
example but just because i want to make it concrete you know you're doing one exercise and suddenly you'll you'll go to alternate limb it's like why did i do that i had a plan right i should stick to that plan so the no go there is to
1:20:25
not default to something more spontaneous it's to force into really enforce regimen and i think what happens is we become adults there there isn't anyone supervising us making us do these things quite as much and the phone has allowed for so much context switching
1:20:40
and so much opportunity for go go go go that pretty soon you've got hours of your day that are gone that were not structured so i'm not talking about becoming neurotically attached to these no goes what i'm talking about is is
1:20:52
keeping the um the blade sharp on both sides keeping the goes intact getting up making your bed getting into action doing things but also forcing myself to not check the phone to not check email to stay in a groove of focus and that's actually where there's
1:21:10
the greatest opportunity i'm a big believer 90 minute focused work bouts and of course in that time attention drifts and there's the temptation to get up go use the bathroom get up and get a cup of coffee get up and do anything but
1:21:22
what i'm doing but i try and just really create tunnel vision even if i'll just sit there and go this is miserable i can't focus on this but not allow myself to go do something else unless it's there's a real urgent need and this is
1:21:35
actually the way i train myself to study in college it was a little bit masochistic but i used to sit down set a timer and i wouldn't let myself get up for any reason for any reason whatsoever i mean a nuclear bomb could have gone
1:21:47
off i suppose i'd be dead but a fire alarm could have gone off and i was not going to get up whatsoever and i learned how to sit and work for long periods of time and i think i've lost some of that over the years so i'm trying to build up the
1:22:01
circuitry again but it's the same thing that happened when you were in kindergarten and you were rocking back and forth and your teacher says hey sit still you're like okay and it's kind of painful to do there's this underlying
1:22:13
oscillation and you want to move you want to move but learning how to suppress that is really powerful a good friend of mine pat dossett from the you did nine years in the seal teams and he's a big believer in keeping these circuits tuned up and he said uh we
1:22:26
always do a certain challenge each year um and the other day he said to me he's like how about in 2022 we do the hour of pain and i was like oh no that sounds you know i'm from the former special operations let's do our pain turns out the hour of
1:22:40
pain is where you sit in a pretty uncomfortable position and you have to remain in that position for an hour i was like that sounds great that sounds like a really great low-cost miserable way to build up these no-go circuits um
1:22:53
because it's not dangerous right you're not going to harm yourself cold water you could do for a little bit longer but eventually you're going to get hypothermic right heat you can burn yourself exercise you can damage yourself but one
1:23:06
hour of pain so i i gotta try this so i think we're gonna do it that's awesome breathing and vision seem to not only affect our state of mind but also our body when we're stressed for example our field of vision like narrows and we we
1:23:18
have blind spots not only with what we can literally see but also with what we can cognitively see can you maybe take us through the relationship that vision and breathing have on our internal state and any behavioral practices that we can
1:23:31
use to feel better and see more yeah so um we'll start with vision when we are relaxed we are in panoramic vision even without moving our eyes our head we actually have a wider aperture field of view those from special operations communities will
1:23:48
understand this as situational awareness you have to be relaxed in order to see what's going on why well the moment that you have adrenaline in your system goes up your field of view actually narrows the pupils dilate so you know
1:24:03
police will look at see how high people are by if people are super relaxed their peoples are very small and if they're very um agitated their pupils will be large um agitated or excited in a positive way when the pupils are large
1:24:16
there's a movement of the lens of the eye and actually your visual field narrows you get a soda straw view of the world so when you're very stressed you have a narrower aperture and you're actually viewing the world um
1:24:27
just imagine trying to identify something in a scene by looking through binoculars much harder actually than if you have the entire panoramic view so stress in the visual system relaxation and the visual system um linked together there's actually a
1:24:41
simple practice that you can do if ever you're in conversation or in an environment where you're stressed you're trying to find a plane gate that you're running to you're trying to find somebody god forbid you've lost your kid you actually
1:24:55
want to dilate your gaze you can consciously do this by you can do this even now just as we're talking you can start to you don't move your head or eyes it's fine to blink but what you're trying to do is see the periphery of the
1:25:04
room the ceiling you actually want to see your body in the visual scene that you're in actually your motion detection goes up four-fold when you're in this panoramic vision mode because of that you shift to a different category of
1:25:15
neurons that are much better at detecting motion whereas when you go into kind of watch watchmakers mode you are looking for things that are happening over a very small space and in the visual system and in the brain this is really the key thing
1:25:30
space and time are linked so if you have a narrow field of view you're actually measuring smaller time increments you're micro slicing your environment and you're micro slicing it in space and time whereas when you have broad
1:25:44
swath of vision you actually have bigger time bins and here's a good example that if you are um you need to get home and you're in line at the at the grocery store and that is you know some places you're even in a mask which is kind of uncomfortable
1:25:59
and the person in front of you is returning something it's going to seem like time is going by very very slowly because you're micro slicing you're getting higher frame rate okay however when you're relaxed it doesn't bother you at all you're
1:26:12
actually batching time in bigger swaths and so the visual system drives your time perception system okay so if you're feeling stressed in conversation or public speaking or anything where you want to remain covert
1:26:27
about that stress and you want to relax in a way that's covert dilate your gaze just try and open up the aperture of your field of view the other thing you can do is exhale because in a very straightforward way inhale speed up
1:26:39
your heart rate and exhales slow it down i'll just give explain why that is you've got this muscle called the diaphragm the diaphragm is is unique to mammals it's really incredible but it's a it's incredible because if it's a skeletal muscle it's actually can be it
1:26:54
can work voluntarily in the background or you can take control of it when you breathe in your lungs expand the diaphragm moves down okay so when you breathe in and what ends up happening under those conditions is that your heart actually um
1:27:10
because you're you create a change in the amount of space in your thoracic cavity you you change the flow of blood through your heart because as you inhale diaphragm moves down there's a little more space heart gets a little bigger and the brain sends a
1:27:24
signal to the heart to speed the heart up when you exhale the diaphragm moves up there's actually a contraction of the heart in the thoracic cavity it's a little smaller there's the blood flows faster through that smaller
1:27:37
volume and the brain sends the signal to slow the heart down simple way to remember it is inhales speed your heart up transiently exhales slow it down so if you get stressed exhaling is the key now there's another way to de-stress and this is the fastest
1:27:53
way that i'm aware of to de-stress my lab works extensively on this but it's something that's actually been known since the 30s and that's what are called physiological size s-i-g-h size physiological size are actually something that you do every
1:28:08
five minutes or so in sleep or wakefulness you're breathing you're working whether or not you're holding your breath or you're stressed every five minutes or so you do this you reinflate your lungs because the
1:28:20
lungs aren't just too big bags of air they actually have hundreds of millions of little sacks called avioli and remember you bring in air you got trachea it then creates a lot of volume by by branching into the lungs and you have all these millions of sacs if you
1:28:34
were to lay them out would be about as big as a tennis court huge volume inside of you and air oxygen can actually move from those little sacs directly into the bloodstream and deliver oxygen to your brain and body when you exhale
1:28:47
you dump carbon dioxide now the stimulus to breathe in is from neurons that sense carbon dioxide when you aren't breathing enough carbon dioxide levels go up and then it forces you to take a breath so here's the here's the deal
1:29:01
as you get stressed or if you under breathe or if you over breathe these little aviola sacs collapse so now you can't bring as much oxygen in and you can't offload as much carbon dioxide and also they are moist so because of surface tension if you just
1:29:15
take a big deep breath let's say your stress one says take a deep breath and you go they don't open they don't reopen because they're sticky a double inhale with the second inhale being a really kind of sharp inhale will reinflate those little sacks so it's
1:29:36
so the idea is you take a big deep inhale and then you sneak in another inhale even if you feel like you're not getting much in and ideally the inhales are done through the nose so again it's inhale and then long exhale through the mouth
1:29:52
that double inhale through the nose followed by a long exhale through the mouth will rapidly de-stress you so much so that most people find they just need to do it once sometimes two or three times in order to go from a state of
1:30:04
real kind of stress and anxiety to feeling completely calm is that why kids do that when they're crying or we adults do that when they're sobbing too yes when we sob we are effectively asphyxiating ourselves that's the because what if we think about sob sobs
1:30:18
are mostly exhales is the crying thing that's my weak you know attempt to to um cry on cue but you're collapsing those little sacks and then it then there's a this kind of thing okay people with sleep apnea do this every once in a
1:30:33
while they're falling asleep they're in sleep and they're they're basically asphyxiating themselves people who are very large and that includes by the way people not just people who are obese but people who have a lot of muscle who have
1:30:45
big necks oftentimes they they sleep on their back and their mouth breathers they're basically oxygen starving themselves and then they'll they'll do this kind of physiological science the body's attempt to offload carbon dioxide and bring in more oxygen
1:30:59
there's a well-known neural circuit for this involving an area called the parafacial nucleus discovered by jack feldman at ucla i just mentioned those things so that if people want to dive deeper into this they can if you're in a
1:31:10
claustrophobic environment actually whether you're in a crowded elevator or something there isn't much oxygen nowadays also because people are in the masks every once in a while and people will take off that mask finally
1:31:21
if they're outside right and they get they're allowed to do that i don't know where people are in the world but here we've got a lot of mascaras then all of a sudden it's this big that's the physiological side so the double inhale followed by an
1:31:34
extended exhale is a great way to rapidly bring down your level of what we call autonomic arousal which is just fancy language for de-stressing it works great when you're running too if you have a side stitch this is kind of a
1:31:49
interesting aspect of of the side stitch a lot of times people get a side cramp that side crimp isn't a cramp at all that side cramp that you feel is actually you have a nerve called the phrenic nerve p h r e n i c that innervates the diaphragm and controls
1:32:05
the diaphragm and it has a what's called a collateral a little branch that goes to the liver and you a lot of pain that we feel in the body is what's called referred pain where you feel it in one area because branches of nerves um split off
1:32:18
oftentimes they'll feel it in their shoulder too because the phrenic actually kind of courses up and around near the shoulder and so they'll have some shoulder pain and they're side cramping and they'll think oh i have a
1:32:28
cramp or something i need to run with my hands above my head or i need to um drink more electrolytes try do a physiological sigh two or three times while running and the cramp will relieve itself i in 99 of the time and because of the way
1:32:44
that it relaxes the diaphragm and so you're taking out that collateral pain so i think that the physiological side is a great tool it's not completely covert because if you're in conversation with somebody and you do it you know
1:32:55
they might spot you but you can do it um in conjunction with panoramic vision uh dilating your vision you can do it in most any situation besides i suppose underwater now a lot of people are benefiting from nasal breathing more generally
1:33:11
and i always say unless you're speaking or you're exercising hard nasal breathing should be your default also in sleep nasal breathing should be your default there's a wonderful book called jaws a hidden epidemic by sandra khan and paul ehrlich both
1:33:26
colleagues of mine at stanford with a forward from jared diamond and also from robert sapolsky so a lot of heavy hitters on this book talks about the cosmetic benefits and the health benefits of being a nasal breather the
1:33:37
nose has mucosal lining and has a microbiome that filters bacteria and viruses far better than breathing through your mouth being a mouth breather is terrible it actually disrupts the aesthetics of the mouth and kids they've done twin studies one kid's
1:33:50
a mouth breather one's not and the whole jaw structure the nasal structure improves when you become a nasal breather and it's very plastic over time so you can correct things over time a lot of people say they can't read
1:34:02
through their nose because they have a deviated septum guess what the way to get better breathing through your nose is breathing through your nose the reason you have a deviated septum is because you're a mouth breather there are rare exceptions where if
1:34:13
people boxed or they had broken nose or something like that but your sinuses can learn to dilate so learn to be a nasal breather one fun way to do that that isn't too embarrassing like taping your mouth is you can take a sip of water when you exercise and run with
1:34:27
that simple water in your mouth you learn how to nasal breathe i like to do laps in the pool every once in a while i don't have access to a pool too much anymore but i used to like to um swim with my nose just above the surface of
1:34:39
the water by my mouth underneath and i'm only going as fast as i can where i can continue to nasal breathe people look at me like i'm crazy brains deteriorate with age what exercises for the brain have demonstrated either slowing or
1:34:50
reversing some of this natural process yeah so th this is really interesting so they're they're great data from uh the nobel prize winning uh neuroscientist eric kandel's lab at columbia showing that when we do certain forms of
1:35:03
exercise there's a hormone-like molecule that's released into the blood bloodstream called osteocalcin osteocalcin is known to provide support to neurons in a brain area called the hippocampus which is involved in learning and memory
1:35:18
um the 150 to 180 minutes of zone 2 cardio per week will support overall brain health and function by way of improving blood flow so a lot of cognitive dysfunction is over time and age-related dementia is just poor perfusion of the
1:35:33
brain this is why people have general cardiovascular issues also generally have issues with thinking quite honestly sleep apnea is also a major problem fix sleep apnea by taping your mouth shut and becoming a nose breather at night that's the best way
1:35:50
people again the excess weight issue is not just fat weight it also is muscle weight so this is also why bodybuilders are always dropping dead a lot of them are just asphyxiating themselves in sleep which is terrible but that's a
1:36:02
niche population but for most people not sleeping on your back and not carrying too much weight in the neck and in the torso is going to be helpful um now in terms of brain function a couple of things i um just want to mention before i forget one of the ways
1:36:18
to improve cognitive function is to make sure that there's appropriate amounts of glymphatic clearance the brain has its own lymphatic system this lymphatic clearance happens during sleep one way to enhance it is to have the feet
1:36:29
slightly elevated 10 to 15 degrees i put a pillow under my ankles when i sleep at night usually in the middle of the night i realize i kicked it away or something like that but feet elevated naps of about 10 to 15 degrees are very useful
1:36:42
it increases the glymphatic clearance there's beautiful data to support lymphatic clearance as an important process now in terms of exercise exercise during the day increases the rates of lymphatic clearance at night so the reason i
1:36:55
mentioned this is that these are indirect effects on lymphatic clearance and blood flow now what about direct effects the direct effects bring us to osteocalcin and the direct effects of exercise on brain function and health
1:37:07
actually come from stimulation of the skeleton and load-bearing exercise and this is something that i think is under-appreciated when we do cardiovascular work again you support blood flow glymphatic clearance but osteocalcin is made by the bones
1:37:24
wow hormone that's made by bones that's released into the bloodstream and then goes to the brain and improves brain function and how does this work well when the skeleton has load load bearing is load bearing then osteocalcin is
1:37:39
released and it makes perfect sense why would the brain continue to support its own function if the body isn't being used well you could say how does the brain know that the body is being used the body knows that the brain excuse me
1:37:53
knows that the body is being used for load-bearing work because osteocalcin is that signal again the brain and body have to communicate and it's not like the body says oh i weight trained today or i did um calisthenics today
1:38:06
no it doesn't work that way there's a hormone signal to communicate that to the brain so this can be achieved a number of different ways i actually think bodyweight exercises can be quite good um there are a couple of online sources that
1:38:18
i mean i think the incredible work that edo portal is doing ido portal he's big on this movement he calls it movement culture but this is he's in he's a phenom but you know not just doing push-ups and and burpees and not that
1:38:33
sort of thing which are very linear but a lot of none of dynamic non-linear movement he talks about explosiveness suppleness um but at a basic in basic form people doing push-ups sit-ups pull-ups dips um you know jump squats you know basic load-bearing um behaviors
1:38:54
it's actually well-established that cognitive function in aging can be assessed indirectly by grip strength now why would that be you have lower motor neurons which are neurons in your spinal cord that control contraction of the muscles
1:39:06
that by releasing neurotransmitter onto those muscles but you have upper motor neurons which control deliberate motor action and grip strength is something that really involves those upper motor neurons and you actually can do this as
1:39:18
a test that if you're lifting weights if you grip really strong let's say you're even doing a unilateral movement if you clinch the opposite fist really really hard you'll find that you can move more weight for more repetitions because
1:39:32
you're engaging the entire upper motor neuron to lower motor neuron system so there's a chain of neural events there so the idea is that people should be doing three to four days a week minimum but when you say minimum there isn't much
1:39:45
more room for upper upper limit but three to four days a week of some sort of load-bearing exercise that could be weight training with machines or free weights but it could also again be push-ups pull-ups dips um jump squats the ability to jump
1:40:02
and grip strength are highly correlated with cognitive function later in age you think why would that be again it's these hormonal signals sent from the body to the brain now while doing a bunch of load bearing exercise make you smarter
1:40:14
probably not in fact we we probably both know examples of people that do a lot of exercise but aren't um thought of as as the swiftest folks cognitively that you obviously still have to learn stuff and we talk about how to learn better um but when
1:40:29
you do this three or four days a week of resistance exercise you are providing a signal from the body to the brain to not just maintain but to build your cognitive capacity and i think that the over uh you know the overwhelming amount of
1:40:44
evidence has been placed on cardiovascular exercise and improvements in the brain even so much so that people have um focused on there's some mouse data studies published on on mice showing that exercise cardiovascular exercise can um
1:40:58
increase the number of neurons in the hippocampus turns out that's true for mice but not for humans i wouldn't focus so much on adding new neurons to the brain it's more about getting the ones that you have to already be um to be more functional
1:41:11
and i think that one of the reasons why so much of the work was done on cardiovascular exercises is very easy to make mice uh run on a wheel they love to run on a wheel harder to get them to lift weights if you want mice to do
1:41:24
load-bearing exercise they actually do these kind of cruel experiments where they actually make a limb deficient so that they can i have to hobble around on another limb to overload that limb nowadays the techniques have gotten better to do sort of these
1:41:38
studies on humans um and just one more incentive for doing load-bearing exercise there's a beautiful paper published this last year showing that when people do resistance exercise a little what's called a micro rna
1:41:52
which are little tiny rnas as the name suggests actually are released in little vesicles little bubbles from the muscle and travel to the body fat and help facilitate burning of body fat so resistance exercise has obviously effects on caloric burn that
1:42:07
can indirectly support fat loss in states of you know subcaloric intake but resistance exercise itself facilitates lipolysis the usage of body fat for energy so so many reasons to both do cardiovascular work 150 to 180 minutes a
1:42:24
week minimum and to do three to four days a week of resistance exercise and it doesn't have to be excruciatingly hard or heavy it does have to be um effort but it pays off through this osteocalcin system dude i could talk to you all day i got one last question
1:42:40
today but maybe we can do another episode next year just on mental performance and learning but one aspect of mental performance that doesn't get a lot of attention is that we often get into these ruts that totally undermine us like for
1:42:52
example somebody cuts us off or we feel slighted or wronged by someone is there a way that we can use the body to control the mind and let go yeah that's an interesting question i mean i agree we get into these these ruts i mean i
1:43:04
think that we're such a social species and and it's so easy to feel wronged um mostly because i think there are a couple things to remember um one is that and i say this with a lot of sensitivity i really do um one is that most people are not
1:43:24
mentally healthy doesn't mean they're mentally ill but you know if you think about you know most people have not done a lot of self-reflection work um in a way that translates to their behaviors most people sadly um grew up in families where there was at
1:43:41
least some unhealthy dynamics most people are stressed um at some point and a lot of people shed their stress onto others and so you know we're constantly being bombarded with kind of dysfunction um and i'll take us out of this this swamp in a minute but a
1:43:59
colleague of mine who's a psychiatrist years ago when i started teaching he gave me some great advice he said just remember one percent of people have clinical schizophrenia four percent are bipolar five to ten percent are
1:44:13
clinically depressed another ten percent have anxiety he listed off ocd all these syndromes i thought this is so and he said now when you get your feedback from your course be sure to pay attention to the things that you need to
1:44:25
do better but please understand that as you move through life you're dealing with people are struggling i thought wow i had no you know it's true so when you look at comments online and someone says something crazy i mean there's a very
1:44:37
high probability that they're dealing with a mental disorder of some sort so if you're somebody who is um moving through life and feeling bombarded by a lot of kind of quote-unquote crazy behavior just remember that um there's a lot of struggle out there um
1:44:56
and if you're somebody who's really into self-optimization and you're doing a lot of work on yourself maybe you've been doing some therapy or journaling or work on traumas and you're you know you're optimizing your hormones
1:45:09
and sleep you are in a very small category unfortunately of people that's really trying to be healthy for yourself and for others so the first thing i say is that the second thing is after age 25 the brain doesn't change
1:45:22
unless it's self-directed change so don't expect anybody to change unless it's self-driving forget trying to get people to change it does not work it works with children it does not work with adults unless it's self-directed plasticity and there is
1:45:35
tons of literature to support that statement now as we you know move forward in life though you know if we are healthy and functional it's our job to step into to leadership roles and to demonstrate healthy behavior how do we do this i think that one thing that we
1:45:53
can do is raise our stress threshold you know we talk about these days there's a lot of quote-unquote trigger warnings and about being triggered and people everybody's getting triggered so one one way to look at all this is that
1:46:04
okay that there is to eliminate the problems the people triggering the other is to reduce your trigger threshold and i think that um trying to reduce the amount of problems in the world by forcing or encouraging other people to
1:46:18
change is just generally not that good you offer tools that's what i do that's what you do and you just hope that people will take them but we i we can increase our stress threshold so that our trigger threshold is much higher and
1:46:29
the way to do that is a self-directed practice um that my lab has been working on for for a while now and some people recognize this as tumor type breathing or wim hof type breathing the truth is it doesn't actually have to be done with breathing
1:46:45
you could do this with ice baths you do this with any resilience increasing behavior what you need to do is get comfortable and stay in a no-go response under conditions where you have high levels of adrenaline in your system
1:47:01
uncomfortable levels of adrenaline that can be done by getting into an ice bath that can be done through what we call cyclic hyperventilation we're running a study on this now actually the data are in it's just not published yet cyclic
1:47:12
hyperventilation means sitting or lying down for take you know we found that five minutes a day actually is very effective even though it's very brief and it looks a little silly when i do it but i'll just do it cyclic hyperventilation is going
1:47:25
to be a big active inhale through the nose and then a passive exhale through the mouth so this you just kind of let it fall out but you repeat that 25 to 30 times so i'm not going to 25 to 30 times i'll do it five times just to demonstrate so it's big
1:47:40
active and now it's work this is work it's gonna feel like work it's so you do that 25 to 30 times and you're going to feel agitated what's happening you are generating adrenaline release into your system i can already feel like
1:48:02
a little bit of blood flow heat heating up you're generating adrenaline release this is different than running up a hill this is active stimulation of adrenaline into your brain and body then after 25 or 30 breaths you exhale all your air
1:48:20
through your mouth and you hold your breath and you try and be as calm as you can for about 15 to 60 seconds don't try and hold your breath too long just when you feel the stimulus to breathe go back into it 25 to 30 big active inhales
1:48:35
passive exhale big active inhale passive exhales and you'll notice a tendency to want to shorten the inhales but try and really do a full inhale passive exhale then you exhale all your air again sit there for about 15 to 60 seconds until
1:48:50
you feel the impulse to breathe then you do a third round 25 to 30 of these big inhales passive exhales then you exhale all your air 15 to 16 seconds and then you take a big gulp of air [Music] lungs full and you're going to sit as calmly as
1:49:10
possible as you can with lungs full and at that point you'll thank me because what's going to happen is you're going to feel a kind of mild euphoria you're going to be very alert extremely alert because your system is filled with
1:49:24
adrenaline but you're going to feel very calm there's also dopamine release at that point and then when you feel the impulse to breathe please don't pass out just just exhale and start breathing normally this done we had people do this daily but if you
1:49:41
do it on a regular basis maybe even just three times a week what you'll notice is really incredible you actually when things happen in your world people will say something or you won't feel that sharp spike of adrenaline you've raised your stress threshold so we hear a lot about grit resilience and mental toughness but those are just psychological terms what we're talking about here is the how to build grit resilience and mental toughness and so
1:50:07
this is very similar to the kind of cold water torture that they do for you know still team screening um it's a it involves some goes because you have to do these breathing things as we talked about earlier go type behaviors there's
1:50:18
also a lot of no go the no go is sitting calmly while your system is filled with adrenaline and there's another perk of all this that's very relevant right now which is that there's a beautiful study published in the proceedings in the national academy
1:50:32
of sciences that shows that when people do this kind of breathing prior to an injection of e coli something i don't recommend people do they are actually able to remain symptom free in the face of that very serious infectious um injection
1:50:50
why well this breathing and adrenaline in particular activates the immune system in a way that allows you to counter infection so the other day i got off a plane i've been traveling a lot now planes are starting to get more crowded there was a
1:51:03
lot of coughing and sneezing on the plane i was like oh god like this is the last thing i want i mean i feel pretty safe in general about all the other stuff going on but you know colds and flu we haven't been exposed much so
1:51:14
we're all a lot more vulnerable i hate being sick so i got off the plane got outside took my mask off and i immediately did this round of breathing in order to get that stimulus and unfortunately i'm not sick but it's a great tool for activating the
1:51:30
immune system great tool for building up that stress threshold you could do it by getting into ice baths or cold water but i really like this practice and again it's a little early to report the specifics but we had people do this just five minutes a day and we see some really impressive effects on mood on countering anxiety on improvements in sleep and it makes you a tougher person basically don't do it near water or in water because you could
1:51:55
pass out and drown but aside from that don't do it while driving the obvious stuff right be rational but it's a great practice takes a little bit of effort to get into but i guarantee that if you do it three or f or more times a week
1:52:07
you're going to notice a big improvement in your ability to not get triggered someone's going to say just it won't feel triggering because there's no adrenaline response to it you've raised your stress threshold let's end with what is success for you
1:52:21
uh that's a hard question but a really good one um yeah well i place tremendous value on certain things and i think some of those will be obvious so i'll just list those and i'll try then i'll try and give a more succinct um answer i'm not a good
1:52:37
philosopher but um and i'm not very succinct as you've learned today you are an excellent listener at least very patient so i apologize for doing monologues i just try and hit as many details as i can so that people are not left wondering
1:52:52
that's really the reason but i do joke that i have a little bit of a scientific tourette's if you ask me a question i'm a professor i'm going to try and answer and i'm going to tell you more than you ever want to know um you know the things
1:53:03
that have really made a huge difference in my happiness in life um are first of all feeling physically and mentally well is our own individual obligation regardless of upbringing we no one can do it for us there's no magic pill or
1:53:19
ferry or stork that's going to deliver the solution so i place tremendous value on keeping my physiology where it needs to be i wanna i i wanna have endurance i wanna have strength i wanna have mental strength i wanna have kindness i wanna have
1:53:32
openness i want to be open to learning i want to um so that's very important friendship to me um i i have with male and female friends but mostly male friends i grew up in the skateboarding punk rock world and then eventually we get friends from other
1:53:48
sectors of life science and so forth friendship to me is is a is the bedrock of my well-being because um i just i depend very heavily on it for the feeling that that life is moving forward and that's just unique to my own
1:54:03
experience but i think you don't need many friends but friendship is is a wonderful and important part of my life um so i try and take good care mentally and physically i try and invest in my friendships and obviously other relationships too
1:54:18
um success to me really is about embracing this capacity that we have to to improve our nervous system it really is it's not just a job for me it really is um i feel my duty as a human being to always try and be better do better
1:54:36
for myself and for others and that involves having tools and protocols being reflective um you know there are so many ways that we can improve and there's so many ways that we can devolve when we don't do that work um i'm a big
1:54:57
believer in the psychologist erickson's stages of development he talked about these different stages of development that at every age we're working through some fundamental conflict and if we can resolve that conflict that then we can
1:55:08
advance to the next stage and it and the ages are somewhat plastic because of changes in culture and life but i remember develop i started off as a developmental neurobiologist and development doesn't end at 25 your whole life is one big developmental arc and so
1:55:25
i'm 46 now and i try and think okay what have i managed to accomplish and then what's my work what's my what do i need to do for instance i don't know much about spirituality at all um i intend on learning um
1:55:39
i didn't grow up in a particularly religious family i don't even know that my goal is to set out to do that but i feel like at this stage of life according to erickson um if you've resolved a career you've resolved relationships to some extent
1:55:50
you've resolved your relationship to yourself to some extent and that's an ongoing process what's the next thing that we face we face um according to him to try and understand how we our short life span relatively speaking fits into
1:56:03
a larger and more coherent whole and so that's the work i'm doing so i look at life as a success to me is is looking at life as a series of developmental milestones and making sure that if i didn't hit any milestones in the past for whatever reason
1:56:17
that i take responsibility for meeting those milestones and looking forward and where i'm at now i just try and say well what are the milestones that i should be working on now so that i find myself at 50 and 60 and 70 hopefully beyond that
1:56:32
um having you know checked off the boxes that make for a um a full life and that's really where it's at and i think that it's hard to go back and take care of things of past um we can't be super performers at everything so that's not
1:56:49
what it's about but i really believe i think that's that erickson was quite correct in understanding that our nervous system changes over time and that we need to meet these milestones nothing bothers me more than regressive behavior i see a lot of that in the
1:57:02
world now adults acting like children just kind of regressive reactivity even just a little exercise that we did a moment ago of trying to raise stress threshold i feel like adults need it just as much and maybe even more than
1:57:13
children because i think we've become like collectively regressed um and that includes me i'm no better than anyone else i just try and put the work in to try and resolve these milestones so that's where i'm at um
1:57:26
lately uh with in terms of what i see as successful in terms of my professional life i mean i have a very simple and um to me important mission which is i just want to share the beauty and utility of human biology that's that's my goal that's why i have a
1:57:41
podcast that's why i go on podcasts that's why i have social media i just want people to understand what is to know about and what we understand about the body and brain in ways that can help improve their lives and the ways that they
1:57:55
interact with others and so that's my singular mission and um i'll continue as long as that feels like the right one andrew thank you so much for taking the time today this was an amazing conversation so informative and so deep i love it [Music] you