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Lou boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is, my job to interview, world-class performers from all different disciplines to tease out, the habits, routines influences, life lessons, and so on that, you can apply to your own lives. My guest today is Andrew huberman. That's hu, ber, Ma and PhD. You can find them on Twitter and Instagram at huberman. Lab Andrew is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the department of neurobiology
G at Stanford University School of Medicine. He has made numerous important contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function and neural plasticity. Andrew is a McKnight foundation and Pew, Foundation, fellow, and recipient of the 2017. Cogan that Co Gan award for his discoveries, in the study of vision work from the huberman laboratory. At Stanford medicine has been consistently published in top journals, including nature, science and sell Andrew is the host of The huberman Lab podcast, which he launched in January of this year.
The show aims to help viewers and listeners improve their health with science and science based tools. New episodes are every Monday on YouTube and all podcast platforms. As mentioned, you can find him on Instagram and Twitter at huberman lab you can find him on the web at huberman. Lab.com, Andrew, many people have been trying to matchmake for five or six years and finally here we are. Welcome to the show.
Well, thanks so much for having me here. Yes, we've crossed paths near-misses for a long time and it's great to
Sit down and chat. I thought I would
start right in your wheelhouse and use a headline to introduce the subject of vision Scientific. American interview, do not long ago and they titled the piece quote vision and breathing, maybe the secrets to surviving 2020 and quote. So breathing, I think for a lot of folks might seem self-evident stop that you have a lot of problems on your hands or if you do it incorrectly we can we can certainly dive into that later on Vision. I think we'll jump.
Doubt is perhaps odd to a lot of folks. Why Vision, why is Vision perhaps a secret or a key to surviving 2020 or any year for that
matter?
So the vision and our visual system is perhaps the strongest lever by which we can shift our state of mind and body and that might at first come as a surprise because we think of vision, is this thing that we have to see colors and motion and recognize faces Etc. But the two little goodies, in the front of our skull, our eyes are actually part of our central nervous system. So a lot of people don't realize
Is this but your neural retina, the little light sensing piece of the eyes in the back of the eye, kind of lines it like a pie crust, her actually, two pieces of your brain that were deliberately squeezed out during early development. So they're the only two pieces of your brain that are outside the cranial vault as we say. And those little pieces of brain have an enormous impact on the state of the rest of your brain. So it's fair to say that what you see and how you view the world.
Early has an incredible impact on your State of Mind respiration breathing, also on your state of mind and body. But the reason is the following our visual system is not just for seeing objects shapes and colors, Etc.
Our eyes have two functions so much in the same way that our ears are responsible for hearing, but also there's a balance mechanism in there. Are eyes are responsible for detecting shapes and colors, Etc, but also for telling the rest of the brain, whether or not to be more alert or more relaxed. And the most fundamental way that our eyes do that is communicating time of day, the presence or absence of sunlight to our Central circadian clock. And then the central circadian clock, which is really just an aggregation of neurons communicates to the
Rest of the brain and body whether or not for instance, metabolism should be higher metabolism should be low whether or not we should feel like moving or feel like lying down and not moving at all. But there are a number of ways in which the visual system works on fast, timescales to adjust our inner State. And one of the most simple ways that it does, that is one that normally happens when we're stressed or relaxed, but we don't recognize it. So, for instance, if we are very relaxed, our pupils change, our
the shape of our lens changes such that we actually have dilated Vision. We see the entire environment, we're in so-called panoramic Vision when we are stressed, or we are excited about something. The pupils dilate, the shape of our lens changes, literally, the Optics of our eye changes and the information about the outside world. That's delivered to our, the rest of our brain, and body changes the aperture of our experience. Our entire experience shrinks, we get so-called soda straw view of the world. We're looking through.
Soda straws essentially when we are alert or stressed and we've experienced this, but we don't normally notice it happening so much, like breathing our experience of life whether or not we're alert or stressed excited or calm changes are patterns of breathing. We're all accustomed to that, you know, are breathing speeding up or holding, our breath in anticipation, but as well, our inner state drives changes in our visual system, the aperture of whether or not we see the big picture, or we have a very
Tracted view of the world. But both those things breathing and vision also run in, Reverse meaning, if we change our pattern of breathing, we change our Interstate, if our state changes are breathing changes. So it's reciprocal bi-directional likewise with vision when we are excited or stressed the aperture of our visual window shrinks. We get that soda straw view of the world. When we are relaxed the aperture of our vision expands but as well it runs in both directions. If we expand our
View of the world literally Force are our visual field or just it's very easy actually you can do it no matter where you are right now. If you just try and expand your visual field not by looking around or moving your head or eyes, but by trying to see yourself in the environment that you're in. So you literally dilate your views, you could see the ceiling and the floor and the walls if you're inside. Or if you're Outdoors, seeing as big, an aperture of your visual field or your visual environment as
possible, so you're directing your attention to even though you might remain looking straight ahead.
You're just directing your attention to, as Y, at a peripheral view, horizontally and vertically as possible. Is that what you
mean? That's right. Exactly. So, essentially, if you keep your head and eyes mostly stationary, you don't have to be, you know, rigid about rock steady but if you look forward and you expand your field of view. So you kind of relax your eyes so that you can see as much of your environment around you as possible to the point where you can see yourself in that environment, what you do is you are turning off the
Tensional. And believe it or not, the stress mechanisms, that drive your internal State towards stress. This is why. When you go to a Vista or you viewer Horizon, it's very relaxing because you naturally go into panoramic Vision. When you are indoors, you're looking at your phone, you're looking at computer or camera or something of that sort, or you're talking to somebody or an intense conversation, you don't may not notice it, but your entire visual field shrinks to a much smaller aperture and that drives an increase in alertness and internal state.
8 and we sometimes call that stress, if it's a negative experience, if it's a positive experience, we might call that love or Obsession or Fascination. But the important thing to realize is that both vision and breathing have a profound and very rapid effect on our internal State of Mind and Body. And it runs in both directions, our internal state that could be triggered by a text message or hearing something that somebody says drives changes in our breathing and our vision, but are breathing in our vision can also
Changes in our internal State. And so that article in Scientific American was a discussion about how we can leverage the visual system and the respiration, the breathing system in order to take control over our internal State, because it's not just that 2020 was stressful. It's that our internal State determines everything. It doesn't just determine if we feel like we're having a hard time, falling asleep or having a hard time focusing for instance it also determines how we batch time how we analyze
Where we are in the world in terms of our lifespan, a good example of this would be when we are very stressed, we find sliced time. This is why when people are in a car accident or something, they might report that things were in slow motion. There actually your frame rate increases, whereas when you're very relaxed, your frame rate slows down and when we are relaxed, we get so-called perspective. We are able to say well, this too shall pass, or I can place the stressful event in a context. So one,
That's just fundamental to our nervous system works is that we are constantly placing our experience, both are immediate and past experience, as well as our anticipation of the future into some sort of larger context and our visual system. Literally how we are viewing the world at that moment, dictates how we create perspective in terms of states of Mind. Sounds a little bit abstract, but it's actually boils right down to Optics of the eye and very concrete things. Like how you move your eyes and how you view the world. This is
Is super fascinating to me because I've thought a lot about breathing and how on one hand breathing is a function of the autonomous nervous system. So when you're asleep you don't have to consciously inhale and exhale. But simultaneously it's this almost API into your autonomous nervous system because while you're awake you can control and direct and modify your breathing for that directionality. But I've never thought about it from the from the visual.
Spective and just a quick bit of trivia that is out of left field. But nonetheless came to me that people might find interesting is that the dilation or this hyper dilation of pupils is, I don't know how much it is associated with arousal or sexual arousal. But for those who have ever heard, the word Belladonna is a plant, the reason it's called Belladonna beautiful woman and Italian is that it used to be.
Turned into a tincture and it is a psychotropic and it is also very dangerous. So don't recommend people consume it but many, many years ago, hundreds of years ago, women in certain parts of Europe would create a tincture and put it into their eyes to hyper dilate your pupils because it was thought to be very, very attractive and beautiful woman. Could you speak to how one can think about using their visual apparatus or
Me leading or not stimulating their eyes, their visual system for say sleep, if one wants to optimize for sleep, what are some considerations? And it could be that it could be other inputs. But I just be curious to know how this fits into sleep for you personally.
Our light viewing Behavior has perhaps the strongest effect on our levels of alertness and our capacity to fall asleep and get a good night's sleep.
And this is because at the fundamental layer of our biology every cell in our body needs information. About time of day, it's no coincidence that we have a collection of neurons over the roof of our mouth. The so-called suprachiasmatic nucleus, that's our Central circadian. Clock it informs every cell in our body about time of day, but it is deep in our brain has no access to light. So there are a collection of neurons in the eye, those so-called melanopsin ganglion cells or sometimes,
Intrinsically sensitive photosensitive ganglion cells. These are just neurons in the back of your eye. Remembering, of course, that the eyes actually part of the brain. That's outside the skull and those neurons communicate to the central clock, when it's daytime and when it's night. So, the simple behavior that I do believe, everybody should adopt including many blind people. We've talked about why that is is to view ideally sunlight for two to 10 minutes, every morning,
Morning upon waking. So, when you get up in the morning, you really want to get bright light into your eyes because it does two things. First of all, it triggers, the timed release of cortisol, a healthy level of cortisol into your system, which acts as a wake-up signal and will promote wakefulness in the ability to focus throughout the day. It also starts a timer for the onset of melatonin, this sleepy Ness hormone or the hormone of Darkness as they say.
Tone and is inhibited by light. So, by viewing light, first thing in the day you set in motion, these two timers, one for wakefulness that starts immediately, and one for sleepiness. That starts later. The key thing here is that people are hearing a lot nowadays about avoiding blue light. Blue light is so terrible. Well, turns out, that blue light is exactly the wavelength of light that triggers activation of these cells. And that's exactly what you want early in the day. So people generally will say, well, maybe I should just look at my computer and my phone for
first thing in the day. Well, it turns out that these cells are very hard to activate early in the day and very easy to activate at night. So it's kind of like the biology is encouraging us. If you will to take on the right behaviors which are to get outside. Even if there's cloud cover there's a lot more light energy a lot more photons coming through cloud cover. Then you're going to get off your phone or a computer and early in the day to 10 minutes outside without sunglasses.
Is going to be really beneficial for a huge range of biological functions and brain State.
I have made a practice of in the middle of nowhere in the country right now of getting up and not necessarily doing a full workout, but just jumping rope for literally, two to five minutes to ten minutes outside facing the sun where the sun is rising. And there's certainly an effect. I mean, I am moving. So there's an effect on cortisol, and as you noted, it's a cortisol gets this.
Ridiculously bad rap across the board. As I guys, if you don't have cortisol, you're dead exactly. If you like having storing glycogen and breaking it down into glucose and so on you you it's important to have some cortisol. There's a tremendous for me, mood elevating effect of this exposure. And I'm just I really have never familiarized myself with
The mechanism by which that would be the case and certainly, if it's Placebo, I'm happy to just take Placebo. But do you have any explanation for why that exposure can have such a mood elevating
effect? Yeah, it's definitely not Placebo. That morning. Light exposure is going to also trigger the activation of dopamine release dopamine being this essentially feel good neuromodulator that the best way to conceptualize dopamine is that, yes, it's part of the reward system but it's really the molecule of motivation and positive anticipation. That's
Really what it's about. And I should mention that the cortisol is going to be released in a pulse once every 24 hours. No matter what that's coming as we call, it's an intrinsic Rhythm. But you can time it by viewing light and or by getting exercise early, in the day, there are actually data to just kind of emphasize what happens when you don't do this. There are really nice data from my colleague, David Spiegel, slab. You actually co-published this with the great Bob sapolsky. Few years ago, David's our associate chair of Psychiatry at
Sanford. And they showed that. If that cortisol pulse shows up later in the day and especially if it's around 8 or 9 p.m. then, it's associated with depression by shifting that cortisol pulse earlier in the day you ameliorate some of the symptoms of depression and because of the dopamine release you get this overall mood enhancement. There are four things that really time our circadian biology and these mood mechanisms properly and align us for sleep. And they the
Powerful timekeeper as they say zeitgeber because Germans discovered this mechanism initially. So the most powerful timekeeper sighs Gabe, our time, give her? That's it. There it is. I knew you'd do better than I
would
is light when you view light and light is the most powerful stimulus for your biology and Central circadian clock. Then it's exercise. So it's your protocol of jumping rope facing the sun, your layering on timekeepers, you're giving more signals to the central clock and the
Rest of your body about when to be active and you're also indirectly singling. When you will want to be asleep later, then it's feeding. I know a lot of people fast through the early part of the day. Now that's very fashionable and I do that as well. But were you to eat early in the day that can also help? And then the other one is social cues. So interacting with people early in the day or with your dog early in the day of a dog had live alone with my dog. So that's how I interact with the world socially.
But those things are going to create wake up signals and your body will start to anticipate them and your brain will start to anticipate them such that if you miss it for a day, you're still going to wake up and feel that Alert in a signal early in the day. So this is not something that you have to do every day. But ideally you do it every day because it's like setting a clock or a watch properly. And I should mention that for people that live in areas with very dense cloud cover, you can use light boxes, and things of that sort, but irrespective of that in the morning and during the day and anytime you want to be
Gert, you want to flip on as many overhead lights as possible? This is, because these cells in the eye, that trigger activation and alertness of the rest of the brain and nervous system reside in the lower portion of the eye, they view the upper visual field. Now, the inverse of all, this is also important as you approach the evening or night time, and you want to go to sleep, that is the time to start. Avoiding, Bright Lights of any color, not just blue light. And if possible to place, whatever, lights are present in your environment.
Lower in your visual field. So this would be desk lamps. Most people don't have floor lighting dim the lights if you want to wear blue blockers or do something of that sort, that's fine. But I think people have taken the blue, blocker thing. A little too far by wearing them all day. That's actually going to disrupt your circadian clocks. So, in the evening, you really want to avoid bright light of any kind and again, it's an averaging. If you do this, every once in a, while you go to the bathroom all night or you have an emergency and things are really bright for One Nights, not going to screw you up. However, it was a
A paper published in the journal cell a few years ago by my good friend and colleague at the National Institutes of mental health is name is Sam. Arhat are he's the head of the chronobiology unit at the National Institutes of mental health? And what sammer's lab showed is that bright light exposure of any wavelength between the hours of about 11 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. cause a serious disruption in the dopamine system, such that in subsequent days, you have a disruption in
Ring of mood difficulty in learning. There's a Cascade of things that happen. In other words, we get punished for light viewing at the wrong times of their circadian cycle and we get rewarded for light viewing at the correct times of the Circadian
cycle. Let's talk about the latter portion of the day. Before I get to that, though. Just for my understanding, if one say wants to Target going to bed,
Or more accurately feeling sleepy enough to go to bed easily with rapid onset at say 10:00 p.m. is there a preferred time to get that exposure early in the day in the sense that if I'm doing my 10 minutes of jumping rope facing the sun, is it best to have it a certain distance temporarily from when I want to go to sleep?
Yes, it's about 14 to 16 hours prior to when you want to sleep, is the ideal time.
To get that morning, light exposure. And if we want to get a little bit technical about this, we can, and I'll do my best to make it clear. Because there's also a way that you can use this mechanism, to shift your circadian clock to avoid, jet lag and shift work. I'll just ask you. So what's your typical wake up time? Not getting up in the middle and I'm using the restroom necessarily and then going back to sleep. But when you finally get get up and get out of bed, what time does is that
typically I would say when I'm living my best life,
And not not being Marty from Back to the Future, it's usually seven o'clock. Let's just
say, okay? So if seven o'clock is your average wake up time, then we can be pretty sure that two hours prior to your natural. Wake up. Time is what's called your temperature minimum. It's when your body temperature was lowest that temperature minimum and I should be clear, we don't need to know your actual temperature. No one needs to know their actual temperature minimum, but you can count on the fact that two hours before
For waking up. Your body temperature is close to or at its lowest point
and to be clear, this would be if you are waking without an alarm clock, right? That would be if you following natural rhythms. Correct. So
if you view light, I should mention that you have to do this light viewing Behavior with your eyes that might seem obvious. But some years ago, there was a paper published in the journal science which is one of the three Apex Journal science nature cell and it stated that
Presented to the back of the knee of humans, could shift their circadian clocks. And that paper was retracted by the same authors that published the study. There was a technical flaw humans have no extra ocular photo reception. So we need to tell the cells of the body, what time of day it is essentially where we are in time by light viewing Behavior. With the eyes blind, people do this a little bit differently. Some blind people actually still retain these so-called melanopsin
And sells people without eyes at all, maybe from a burn victim or something. They are going to use social cues and exercise and other things. But most everybody on the planet does this through light viewing Behavior. So when I say get light, what I mean, is get light in your eyes, obviously, never. So bright that it's going to damage your eyes. You'll know if a lights too bright because you'll want to close your eyelids. That's a simple rule of thumb. But the key thing here, is that
if you view light in particular bright light,
In the hour or two before that temperature. Minimum. So for you Tim that would be between you know around 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. it's going to have the quality of delaying your circadian clock. What it effectively do is make you want to stay awake later and it will make you want to sleep in later the following nights. However, if you view light in the hour or so immediately, after that so-called temperature minimum. So this for you, this would
6 a.m. or 7:00 a.m. it's going to shift your clock in the other direction. You're going to want to go to bed a little bit earlier. And you're going to want to wake up a little bit earlier the next night. Now, if you hear this, you're probably thinking. Well my clock is always more or less in the same place. How come it doesn't jump around. I wake up. I view light. How come I'm not going to bed earlier and earlier every night and waking up earlier and earlier the reason is there's a second time of day which is in the evening as the sun sets where your circadian clock is also
Vulnerable again to these shifts and typically because most of us are viewing light in the late afternoon, all of us are naturally having our clock shifted so that we want to get up earlier and go to bed earlier the next night and morning. But we're also delaying our flock a little bit in the afternoon. Now we can make this all very simple. The simple thing to do is within 30 minutes of waking up, get bright light exposure in your eyes, and not from a phone, or from a screen, because it won't be, sufficiently bright, get it from sunlight and if you can't get it from,
Light. You can use one of these light pads. I don't use one of these expensive. Wake up clocks, or something like that. I bought an LED drawing pad. It's like a trace table, like the artist cheat mechanism. It actually says on it. I forget the company by says, 930 locks. You can find these very inexpensively online and that's going to work great. I just said it at my desk in the morning, if it's very overcast and I'll work now, it is important to get outside because even though your windows or the windshield of your car,
Is optically. Clear it filters out a lot of that blue light, that's important for setting your circadian clock. So 2 to 10 minutes of light viewing early in the day and then you can do yourself a great favor as well by going outside in the evening or late afternoon. As the sun is approaching this, what we call low solar angle because that will also send another signal to the brain that it's evening. So there's a morning stimulus and an evening stimulus. This
Only takes a few minutes each day and what's key to understand is that the cells in the of your body, they're going to have all these rhythms of liver function in metabolic function. Your brain is going to have its rhythms of alertness and anxiety and sleepiness, providing multiple signals. So for you exercise and light in the morning and then in the afternoon, a little bit of light is going to tell your system in a redundant way. But in a powerful way, these are the times to be awake. These are the times to be asleep and then if you like, we can talk about evening Behavior. But that temperature,
Minimum is worth knowing because if ever you are traveling, for instance to Europe, what you can do is in the two or three days before, you can just set your alarm, wake up around your temperature, minimum of maybe an hour before, turn on some bright lights in your home. So you get bright light exposure and you will start to shift your clock forward. That 9-hour jump can be accomplished in about 2 days. If you do this correctly, and the reverse is also true. You can shift your clock earlier, if you like, and when you land in Europe,
Want to get down into the weeds. When you land in Europe, you have to be cognizant of what your clock is back home. Remember your temperature minimum, it's much more important than where you are. In your new environment. That temperature minimum is an anchor Point. Remember light viewed in the hour? Or two before that temperature. Minimum will make you want to go to sleep later. And wake up later, light viewed after that temperature minimum will make you want to go to sleep earlier and wake up earlier,
let's talk about something. That is a
Daniel topic and that is sleep. Aids specifically. I'd love to get your opinion on various supplements or prescription medications for that matter that people might use. There's a huge list of things that people could use on the prescription side. Certainly you've got the ambience and the trazodone owns and so on. Then, on the supplemental side, you've got melatonin very, very popular. You have California, poppy? I mean, there's a infinitely long list of
Various supplements. I would love to hear your thoughts on at least two of these. One is melatonin because of its popularity and then the second is actually phosphatidylserine. So PS4 short, and using it to blunt cortisol release after going to bed. Now, just be curious to know if you have any opinions on those or any others that you would advise against or
Or advocate for or use
personally.
Sure. So I'll say why I'm not a fan of melatonin. When I was a graduate student, I worked on the Melatonin system in the Circadian system. And one of the most powerful effects of melatonin is to suppress puberty. The Melatonin system is closely linked up with Gaba inhibitory neurons in the hypothalamus. It effectively keeps puberty from happening. So the Melatonin rhythms of young children pre-pubertal children are not as phasic.
Either pretty constant and that's one of the reasons they don't go into puberty. There are many other reasons. They don't go into puberty until a certain triggers are set, but melatonin has strong effects on the sex steroid hormones that pathway is related to estrogen and testosterone. And I think it was the one experiment that I did where we took, we were working on these little called Siberian hamster. Sees little hamsters who in long days because they are seasonally breeding animals.
In long days, these Siberian hamsters have testicles. Well, that at least for siberian hamsters are pretty impressive. Size. If however, you inject those animals with melatonin or you put them in two short days. So you increase the amount of darkness and you decrease, the amount of light remembering. Of course that light inhibits, melatonin their testicles, shrink to the size of a grain of rice. So I don't know if this was my male ego or something. But I saw that experiment and I thought, wow, this is powerful stuff. This mellow
Conan stuff and it turns out in females of the same species, they leave estrus they stop cycling, they don't have menstrual cycles, they have Esther cycles and there are powerful effects of melatonin on the reproductive axis. Now humans are not seasonal, breeders and we have a more robust, sex steroid, hormone axis than that but especially for children. But also for adults, it just seems to me that melatonin has a number of other effects that are worth considering enough effects that I tend to avoid it.
I should also say that most of the concentrations of melatonin that are in supplements are 10 to 1000 times. What the endogenous internal levels would naturally be so people taking melatonin are seeing dramatic effects but you're taking super physiological levels of melatonin. We all kind of balk when we hear about people taking you know, a thousand milligrams of testosterone sippy innate a week, which unfortunately Circle certain people do. But this is the equivalent of
Super dosing, sleep hormones. And these are hormones, that have other issues and other roles I should say in the body. So that's why I Veer away from melatonin. Also, there are three things that I personally have found to be much more beneficial that seemed to have very good safety margins. Of course, everyone needs to check with their physician, but those three things are magnesium, 3 and 8 th R EO n 8e e or by glycinate magnesium glycinate
Magnesium, three and eight and magnesium by glycinate, are able to be transported across the blood-brain barrier more readily than other forms of magnesium. I know, you know a lot about this topic, Tim, so correct me anywhere I might miss speak, but like, for instance, magnesium citrate is a great laxative goes by another name to you. Can imagine what it might be. That will remind you that. It's a great laxative, what? It's not great at inducing sleep, magnesium, three and eight or magnesium by glycinate. So, 200 to 400 milligrams about 30 minutes before, sleep is
The powerful sleep aid, people with heart issues, might not want to take it or might want to check with their doctor, but I take a cocktail of magnesium, three and a, and then two other things. One is very commonly known, which is theanine th EA ni any 200 to 400 milligrams of theanine, can create a kind of a hypnotic State help you, fall asleep, basically, falling asleep requires turning off your thoughts and the only people that should really avoid theanine, I think are people who suffer from sleepwalking,
Night. Terrors, it can create very vivid dreams. And then the third thing is apigenin a pige ni n, which is a derivative of chamomile, but it acts as a chloride Channel Agonist. So it essentially helps shut down the forebrain by hyperpolarizing neurons, and all this kind of stuff for the afficionados if they want to know. So that cocktail of 50 milligrams of apigenin, 300 to 400 milligrams of magnesium, three, and eight or by glycinate and 200 to
Milligrams of theanine for me has been the best way to consistently fall asleep. Quickly and stay asleep. Most, if not the entire night, which for me is about 7-8 hours. And of course, I'm not a physician, I'm a scientist. Everyone needs to figure out what's right for them, but many many people who have recommended this to have told me that in combination with the Morning, Light viewing that their sleep has been completely transformed. They thought they were so-called insomniacs but they actually were just
A hard time turning off their thoughts and probably their cortisol was drifting too late in the day.
So to that cortisol point, this is fascinating and I just find it endlessly interesting that different forms of magnesium can be so Target specific with respect to different tissues in the body. So so fascinating, with respect to cortisol and needless to say, I have used phosphatidylserine before sleep.
Beep to help blunt cortisol release. But I do cycle I use it as needed, really. If there's a lot of rumination, I've had a particularly stressful day but do you have any thoughts on whether or not you would ever do that? Personally, or if you'd be too concerned about side effects or long-term side effects? I suppose that could be a larger issue if you just never cycling off. But do any thoughts on using different compounds to blunt? Cortisol release. If you are over, ruminating
And what sort of minimize that in this case stress response while you're trying to
sleep, I have not tried PS. I use ashwagandha from time to time if I'm in a particularly long bout of stress. One of the things that I think is relevant here, is that we hear about stress, but as terrible, but of course, short-term stress buffers. The immune system. It actually activates the spleen to release killer cells and things of that sort. We are more robust in fighting off infection in the short term from pulses and cortisol.
But I would say we can Define long-term stress as if you are having sleep disruption or you're feeling era, like, you're in that wired and tired mode. We don't really have a technical name for this. For more than two or three days, you're starting to enter the realm of long-term stress. And that's where buffering cortisol can really help. And that's where I start to take some ashwagandha late in the day. There's good evidence that can buffer cortisol. I do cycle it. So I'm not going to take it every night or every day.
I would probably stop after a week or so and then just go back to my normal regimen which doesn't include ashwagandha, but I always have some on hand. I have to say that I certainly use in and enjoy the benefits of supplements, many of them in fact, but the practice that for me, has really helped reduce stress and allowed me to fall asleep more easily and control my state of mind late in the evening is this practice that some people call Yoga Nidra, which literally means yoga sleep,
And that practice of taking 20 or 30 minutes a day, and it doesn't have to be done every day and lying down and doing a sort of body scan. It involves some long, exhale breathing, which is very relaxing to the nervous system and really allowing the mind to enter one of these pseudo, sleep States. We know from work in my laboratory and work that I'm doing with David, Spiegel's laboratory, as well as work from other labs that that state of shallow, nap or shallow sleep done in waking.
Allows the brain to and the person to get better at turning off their thoughts and falling asleep in the evening. So I use both behavioral tools and pharmacology which of course is really what supplementation is? I don't have any problem with buffering cortisol, a little bit in the short term, so doing that for a week or two, but I wouldn't suggest that people suppress their cortisol long-term, unless there's a real clinical need to do that.
Long-term being longer than two weeks.
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You mentioned long exhales, in the context of The Yoga Nidra practice, is it fair to refer to that Yoga? Nidra practice is also non sleep depressed or NSD? Are those separate phenomena?
Yeah. So Yoga Nidra is one of several what we call NSD are non sleep, deep. Rest, protocols, admittedly. I coined the term NSD are because scientists like acronyms almost as much as the military likes acronyms and I did it deliberately
Not to rob the beautiful history and community, that is Yoga Nidra. And the yoga Community is of anything but rather because many people are averse to doing anything that has a name like Yoga Nidra. And yet, it's such a powerful tool. It's a zero cost tool that has enormous effects on, not just accessing sleep and calm, but enhancing rates of neuroplasticity. Something that we could talk more about also David Spiegel, again, our associate chair of Psychiatry at Stanford and close.
Collaborator and friend of mine, is a world expert in clinical hypnosis, we are part of a just in full disclosure, we both sit on The Advisory Board of a company called reverie are EV ER, i.com reverie, is a zero cost app on Android. And Apple that has short hypnosis protocols anywhere from 10 minutes to 15 minutes, hypnosis and Yoga Nidra. Both fall under the umbrella of NSD are non sleep depressed and these are protocols that
People can use to deliberately access states of deep, rest for sake of, again, falling asleep more easily, reducing stress, but also for enhancing rates of learning of neuroplasticity. And because these are zero cost tools. I and because they're grounded in, excellent peer-reviewed research. I feel comfortable, mentioning them. And what you find is that
If people who are not familiar with meditation or mindfulness, or maybe they're not from West, LA or the Bay Area, if they hear Yoga Nidra, they think magic carpets and they think, and they hear hypnosis and they think that somebody's going to control their brain and Str is my attempt to create a more friendly language. Which is because all of these things are really just the same thing, they really involve two things, one self-directing, a state of calm, that's something that we never learned how to do unless we have a need to do it.
Suffer. Some trauma, we have chronic stress, we start taking a mindfulness class, we self inducing, a state of calm through respiration and vision, is the Hallmark of Yoga Nidra, and hypnosis, and frankly of all meditative practices, our thoughts, follow our vision, and breathing, and I can explain why that, is, in a moment in addition these NS Dr. Type practices involve not just self-directing calm, but they also involve directing our Focus to something. We generally have a
Hard time falling asleep because we think we have to turn off our thoughts completely like a switch, but the transition to sleep, involves allowing our thoughts to become fragmented and then we become relaxed. And then the brain enters the state where space and time are very fluid and not under our conscious control and those are things that we can teach ourselves. So Yoga Nidra scripts are found all over YouTube. There's some great apps out there. The zero cost ones that I use are any of the stuff by comedy Kam.
Ini, decide Eesa. I like her voice very much. Some people like my sister loves Liam, gillen's voice. Another zero cost Yoga, Nidra tool. Liam Dillon, a double LGI llen. You have to find a voice that you like the reverie app. Is David's voice. He has a very hypnotic voice, and there are scripts in there for smoking cessation, Stress and Anxiety, sleep etcetera. These, I really want to emphasize in addition to being zero costs are
Very powerful tools. If done regularly. There are two papers that were published in the last two years, from cell reports and cell Press Journal. Excellent Journal showing that a 20-minute non sleep, deep breath protocol. After a bout of intense, Focus or intense attempt to learn anything skill, learning or cognitive learning accelerates, plasticity by about 50%. So you are learning faster, much faster, and retention of that information, last much longer and that's because these are
Sleep, like States. And we know that neuroplasticity the brain's ability to change in response to experience is triggered by high focus, by deliberate periods of very high focus, but the actual rewiring of neurons, the formation of new. Synapses in the reordering of the circuitry that leads to that skill or that cognitive ability becoming reflexive that happens in states of depressed and non-slip. Depressed and SDR, whether it's hypnosis or Yoga Nidra or a shallow nap.
Of about 20-30 minutes, those things will all accelerate learning.
Let's hop around just a little bit Yoga Nidra. First on the NSD, our study, that you mentioned in the increase in plasticity, which I'm assuming it was measured by retention recall, Etc. But perhaps it wasn't. If you could send afterwards a link to that study, I'll put it in the show. Notes for listeners, who might be interested. We've touched on breathing in a few different capacities. I have term in front of me. That seems kind of self-explanatory, but I don't know.
Know what form? It takes physiological size, contrasted with other breathing methods for stress reduction. Could you define what that
is? Yeah, a few years ago when my laboratory got interested in studying stress in humans, we asked ourselves. What are the patterns of breathing that allow for the most rapid reduction in stress levels? And more importantly, what are the patterns of breathing that can be done in real time so that people can adjust their stress?
While they're still engaging in life, right breathwork classes, running off to esalen for a weekend as a magical experience. But life demands pressing on you. That's typically when you feel stressed. So it is still true that vacation long meditation, Retreats and massages or a nice drink. If you're of drinking age still work but they're slow and they take you offline. The physiological PSI is a pattern of breathing that was actually discovered by physiologist in the 30s and that was essentially rediscovered by Professor Jack Feldman.
At UCLA a world expert in the neurobiology of respiration. And by my colleague, Mark krasner at Stanford who studies lung function. The physiological PSI is a pattern of breathing that we all engage in.
In deep Sleep When levels of carbon dioxide in our blood stream, get too high, we or our dogs. You can see your dog do this. We'll do a double inhale followed by an extended exhale.
Children or, or adults for that matter that are sobbing and lose their breath. So to speak. We'll also do a double, inhale, exhale, that's the spontaneous execution of what we call the physiological side. The reason it works so well to relax us is because it off loads a lot of carbon dioxide all at once. And the way it works is the following our lungs are not just two big bags of are we have all these little millions of sacks of are that if we were to lay them out flat, they would be as big as about a
Quarter. So the volume of air. Therefore, and the volume of carbon dioxide that we can offload is tremendously High, except that we get stressed as carbon dioxide builds up on our bloodstream and is kind of a double whammy these little sacs deflate now when we do a double inhale, so I'll do this now, twice through my nose or you could do this or you could do it through your mouth, but it works better than those. It's inhale. And then you sneak a little bit more air in at the very end when you do that, you re-inflate.
Those little sacks and when you exhale, then you discard all the carbon dioxide at once. So the simple way to describe this protocol is that unless you are underwater, you do a double inhale, followed by an extended exhale, and you offload, the maximum amount of carbon dioxide and we found in our laboratory. And other Laboratories have found that just one, two or three of those physiological size brings your level of stress down.
Very fast, and it's a tool that, you know, you can use any time. I do hope that people will kind of watch other people or dogs as they start to relax or go down to sleep. You'll see this pattern of breathing, but again, it can be consciously driven. The other thing about breathing, and the reason why exhales are so vital is the following. I know there's a lot of interest nowadays in heart rate variability. Well, most people don't realize this, but your breathing is actually driving heart rate variability. So when you inhale,
Hail this dome-shaped muscle beneath your lungs, your diaphragm actually moves down because the lungs expand. It moves down. When you do that, you create more space in the thoracic cavity and you actually the heart gets a little bigger. It actually expands as a consequence blood flows, more slowly through that larger volume. And the Brain quickly, sends a signal down to the heart to speed the heart up. The short simple version of this is inhales speed. The heart up when you exhale the opposite.
True. That dome-shaped muscle of the diaphragm moves up the space in your thoracic cavity. Gets a little bit smaller, the heart gets a little bit smaller. Blood moves more quickly through that small volume and the Brain sends a signal to the heart to slow the heart down Physicians, know this as respiratory sinus arrhythmia, but this is the basis of what we call HRV, heart, rate, variability. And the simple way to remember, this is anytime you emphasize exhales. In other words, making them longer than your inhales.
You are slowing the heart rate down, your calming your system. Anytime you emphasize inhales, you make them more vigorous or longer than your exhales. You're speeding up your heart.
I'd like to come back to hypnosis for a second. I've never been hypnotized nor well, maybe I have self hypnotized and just not realized. That's what I was doing what characterizes hypnosis or how would we Define that and do the state's induced by hypnosis?
As any shared characteristics with some of the state's induced by any psychedelics
so hypnosis is a state of calm and high focus. So context is restricted. It's like looking at something through a telephoto lens, you're eliminating, the surround. So it's a state of high focus which normally as we talked about earlier with the aperture, the visual system would be associated with a high degree of excitement or stress.
But hypnosis is a unique State because you have a high degree of focus but you're very relaxed and just to remind people that neuroplasticity is triggered by states of high focused followed by periods of relaxation. Later in deep sleep or in on sleep deep rest in hypnosis. It brings both those States together at the same time and this is one of the reasons it's effective in accelerating neuroplasticity. I could probably do it right now to see if how hypnotizable you are. There's
Actually a test a clinical test called the Spiegel I roll test Spiegel's, father was a hypnotist and a psychiatrist. So these I want to be clear. These are not stage hypnotist. These are board certified MDS and phds who there's a lot of scientific research to support, what we're about to talk about. So, typically when we get sleepy, when we're relaxed, our eyelids closed, and our eyes go down, and the chin goes down the induction to hypnosis involves doing the opposite looking up, which actually believe it or not creates a
Of alertness and then having you close your eyes. So it creates a kind of conflict in the cranial nerves that innervate the eye and eyelid muscles. Again, the eyes and your state of mind are. So intricately wired back there in the brain stem. So, if you could look up toward the ceiling, Tim with your eyes open and then just while still maintaining upward gaze. If you could just slowly close your eyelids,
Oh boy, you're really hypnotized of one. So,
what did you see that was? Yeah, he's comfortable.
Yeah, I know it's a little bit odd. So for those of you listening or watching you sort of look up towards what, you know, sometimes in yogurt communities, they or meditation Community, they call the third eye center. You know, we don't actually have a third eye, but if we did, it would probably be someone decided it would be between our two eyes on our forehead. So by looking up you're inducing alertness and then you're creating this conflict where we're I asked you to close your eyelids which is
What you do when you're in a state of sleepiness. And what Spiegel, both, Spiegel, senior and Spiegel, Junior have figured out is that it's a very good predictor of how hypnotizable people are. You can look up the Spiegel I roll test. And what I was looking for is, let's say if somebody is not very hypnotizable, what will happen is as they close their eyes. They'll have a hard time closing them slowly, they'll just kind of snap shut and their eyes will roll forward. In other words, I'll see their pupils again. What happened when I saw you do this. Is that your
We're closing very slowly and I saw the whites of your eyes, your eyes were starting to roll back into your head. So you would have a score of probably about a 4, which is very hypnotizable. I'm about a for some people, you'll just notice you say, look up and then slowly close your eyes, and their eyes will just kind of snap shut in their eyes will roll forward right before it snaps shut. So you can do this experiment of sorts on people that, you know, and it predicts pretty well how quickly or easily you will go into hypnosis? I should mention that no one will go into hypnosis if they don't want to. But if
if you're interested in exploring hypnosis with the reverie app or with a clinical hypnotist and your eyes roll back, the way that yours did Tim, then you're home free. You're going to be long and raising
four amazing. I could maybe I'll start speaking in tongues to it does have a good good Associated look with it. How would you explain the utility of hypnosis? And and then I do want to hear if there are any sort of correlates to some of the
Own effects of psychedelics and that's a wide spectrum of class. So we could choose, we could choose short a given compound but what you'll do, what are the clinical applications? Because in my hypnosis naive mind, I think smoking cessation, isn't it? Good for quitting smoking, isn't it? Good? For really just these anecdotal reports that I've read at one point or another, but what's the sort of clinical? What are some of the clinical applications or practical applications of
Gnosis. Yeah. So for smoking cessation. If people do the practice about a 60 to 80 percent success rate depending on the study you look at these were all blinded controlled studies. In terms of Anxiety Relief, those are tremendously, strong affects as many as 90% of people are going to feel significant Improvement in anxiety for pain management for chronic pain. There's a high degree of success so, you know, people will vary depending on how hypnotizable they are and how regular they are about the practice. But anywhere from a
Two seventy-five percent of people will experience a significant reduction in chronic pain. And if they are using pain meds, they tend to be able to take lower doses of pain medications in order to manage that pain. So it's quite powerful. Now for a trauma and things of that sort. It, it needs to be done with a clinical. I would hope board-certified MD clinical hypnotist and their, the success rates are quite high as well. And if you want more research about this inside the reverie app, there's a
Long list of resources, you could also I can send over a good review article that David's written in. These are again, published in very fine, quality peer reviewed, journals of the New England Journal, Jama sort, and things like that. Great, in terms of similarity to psychedelics, they are quite distinct actually. So hypnosis being a state of high degree of focus and relaxation is a bit similar to some of the so-called psychedelic. So mdma-assisted
Psychotherapy, which it appears. Thanks to the support and work of people, like you and the maps group and the group of Hopkins in particular, Matthew Johnson, and I realize there are other people in that mix. But it's it I have to just say as a, as a point. It's really exciting to see what's happening and the enthusiasm about safe building, safe protocols, that people can access after so many years of people having to do this on a renegade or in unregulated environments, MDMA creates an a Very atypical.
Typical State. It's a state of high dopamine release. Typically dopamine is associated with a focus on things external to us, dopamine being a molecule associated with motivation and reward makes us want to do more of things that brought the dopamine whether or not that's food, sex online viewing of any kind, Etc. It's not always
it's not all that bad.
But online viewing online viewing, whatever that is. I the best way to describe
Effects of dopamine are that there's a book actually quite good book called the molecule of more and that's a great way to describe it. I wish I had written that book. I read the book and thought I wish I had written this book, it's because I love the neuromodulator systems and it is the molecule of more and actually anyone that thinks that dopamine is about pleasure, not motivation or seeking more consider. This, this is an anecdote, I borrowed. From my colleague, Anna Lemke who's in the department of Psychiatry at Stanford. The next time you eat a piece of chocolate or you engage in a behavior that feels
Is particularly delicious. Notice the sensation and the thoughts in your mind. It's rarely about complete presence and desire for staying present. It's usually a desire for more. It's this. I want more of this please as opposed to really basking in the experience and I should mention that Anna, has a wonderful book coming out in August called dopamine Nation. She was in the social dilemma. She's an addiction therapists and psychiatrists and
A lot about the dopamine system. So dopamine makes us want more of whatever feels really good and that tends to place Us in an external Focus.
Serotonin. Another feel-good molecule is exact opposite. It tends to make us feel good with what we already have. It tends to be the incredible feelings of warmth that, you know, holding a child or a loved one or time with your dog. I have this Bulldog Costello and there's times when I just sit with him and I feel immense pleasure just being there. I don't think I want for Bulldogs fact. I definitely don't want for Bulldogs. The snoring is loud enough already but it's about experiencing the Here and Now
In a full and complete way MDMA is unique because it creates huge increases in dopamine and serotonin at the same time and we don't ordinarily, see that in natural experience and it has this unique property of making people feel very excited and positive about their relationship to their internal State. And so, it has a kind of looping back of a mechanism that normally would Place Us in the viewing of the
What's out there? What can I get more of who can I interact with more of what? Drug can I take more of? That's going to make me feel this way. So MDMA is very unique and I mention it because it has certain correlates with hypnosis in that, it's a very focused state, in fact, so much. So that let's just say, I could imagine that if you're hearing music and you focus on that music, you can really kind of start to merge with the music. Whereas if you focus on your internal State, you can merge with your internal State and that's why I do think it's important that some of that if people are doing in a clinical setting
Be guided because otherwise the experience can be sort of lost, on whatever is external other psychedelics of the sort like psilocybin LSD. They have a very sleep-like State. They attend to be more serotonergic in nature and they are very similar to sleep in the sense that space and time become very fluid, whatever top-down governing mechanisms exist in the brains of called, you know, executive function, some of that seems to be dysregulated enough. So that
Inside of those psychedelic States. And in certainly inside of Dreams, anything can really happen. And you can essentially see and appreciate novel associations that normally wouldn't occur in waking States. We should remember that. The two extremes of Human Experience our stress.
And or excitement. So highly contracted visual window highly contracted time domain everything. Sliced very finely what's happening next? What's going to happen next? Think you're in the line at the airport and the first in front of you is moving slowly and you got a plane to catch, everything, constricted to right there, both in space and time, and then sleep. We're in sleep, space and time are extremely fluid. Anything can happen and you are essentially out of control mentally. It's just whatever is going to happen, is gonna happen. Psychedelics are
Much like that except that in LSD and psilocybin assisted States your alert. So I would say that psilocybin and LSD like states are similar to hypnosis in that way. But hypnosis has a little bit more of a rigidity to it. It's set toward a particular Focus. Like let's work on your control over stress or smoking or pain and so I would say the three of them occupy neighboring spaces but none of them
overlap completely. I'd be so curious to see some Type.
Type of multimodal study and perhaps they've been done but just looking at pharmacological interventions combined with hypnosis, right? So if we made hypnosis, the default sort of control State and then you add an arm that was comparing hypnosis plus fill-in-the-blank, not necessarily psychedelics. Certainly when you get it could be an intact degenerate and pathogen like MDMA could be a tryptamine like
All sigh been or could be like a thin ethylamine, like mescaline, which has very different effects. Certainly, I think, you know, Michael Pollan, does a good job of describing this. In his new book, your mind on Plants is entire section discussing the mescaline experience, which is really in a sense. An amplification of the real in high resolution certainly dose dependent versus Transportation, allow the tryptamines like else.
SD or psilocybin. They'll be very, very interesting to
see it would. And I have to say, you know, as usual you're five years or more ahead of everybody else Tim. And I don't say that at for sake of flattery, I mean you have a, you have a way of spotting The Horizon and I think we are so caught up as a culture now in asking, what should we do? What should we take? What device should I use? I would say, you've got behavioral tools, we all have to eat sooner or later nutrition. Supplementation prescription drugs off labeling on label and then you got
Machine interface devices for reading and writing to the nervous system and body for measuring things and changing things. And we always think of those as separate bins. But as you're pointing out, I think the most interesting bin is to consider well maybe at some point a learning about is going to be 300 milligrams of alpha GPC and a particular breathing protocol that will have a synergistic effect. I think that's where the real immediate future of beneficial Brain, Change lies and I think even the folks at neural
Think you know a guy that came up through my lab, he's a neurosurgeon McDougal is that neural link now? And they have other excellent neuroscientist there and you can be sure that they're thinking clinical issues first and they're thinking, obviously brain machine interface and chips and Robotics and things of that sort. But you can bet just given who makes up that company of roster that there will probably also thinking about ways, to accelerate plasticity, using a combination of brain machine interface and pharmacology. And if they're not thinking about that, they definitely should
I think for the typical person who's knocking plan to chip beneath their skull, I think you're hitting the nail on the head which is that we need to think about what works independently and combining those for sake of synergy. That's what's going to get us where we need to go much
faster. I also think just to build on what you said and thanks for the kind words that when you look at these possible synergistic combinations, you could also end up and in this is not a certainty but it's a possibility having a much more appealing.
whisk benefit calculus in the sense that if you can lower the required dose of pharmacological intervention, if you can lower the exposure necessary with some type of neurofeedback or neuro stem, like a TMS, or a tdcs or any of these other tools if you're able to lower the required doses of several things when they're used in combination and get a similar or better outcome,
Has such incredible ramifications for the, for the clinical use of these things. Let's take a step back here. So now we've covered a bunch of the research. We've covered a bunch of the Tactical, practical, implementations of some of the research findings. Now, I want to paint a picture for people who don't, who don't know you at all. So we've already covered Costello, we have not discussed the fact that you have looks like full sleeve tattoos.
Who's on both arms. I think you're the,
I think you outed me. Yeah, there's that. You're the first. That is the first? Yep, it's true. All right, birthmark there. All birthmarks, of course, they're all birthmarks kids, don't start because it's like potato chips. Okay, just one.
And we may get to aquascaping. That's a whole separate conversation, so we may get to that, but I want to, I want to rewind the clock for a second because I read your bio obviously very impressive bio. You've
You've numerous Awards. You've produced a lot of incredible work with your colleagues and your lab. Let's go back to what happened to you in July of
1994. So, in July of 1994, I was living in a little town called Isla Vista, which is near Santa Barbara. It's the home of UC Santa Barbara University of California Santa Barbara, just as a little bit of background, I was not a good high school.
And I had a very disrupted, High School experience, despite growing up in a good area, just a lot of tension and and stuff at home. So I barely finished high school but I followed a high school girlfriend off to college somehow, I got in at the time, I wanted to be a firefighter took fire science courses at Mission College in the South Bay and I thought I'd be a firefighter and I put that in my entrance exam and somehow they let me in. But by the end of my freshman year of college, I
Add terrible marks. I had been thrown out of the dormitory living for getting in fights. Something I'm certainly not proud of and I was basically doing nothing that summer. I was living in a sky was squatting. I was living in an empty house because a lot of the houses were empty. I figured why pay rent, you know, and I living in an empty house with with my pet ferret and to sort of set the context, right? I was I think I was still grappling with a lot of anger.
ER, and resentment and confusion based on having a rather confusing teenage years and and a lot of disruption, fortunately, I had formed a lot of friendships and formed a community in the skateboarding and punk rock culture. I was fortunate enough to get to know a lot of guys that have gone on to do great. Like, my friend, Carl Watson is Adidas skateboarding. I spend some time and got to know, although we weren't close friends with the great Danny Way. Probably the great one of the greatest skateboarders of all time. Jump, Great, Wall of China. But I wasn't a very good skateboarder. I
Not a musician, I knew how to do essentially, nothing. Well and July 4th 1994. I went to a barbecue with some friends and some guys were robbing the house that we were having this party at, we came back from the store and we saw these guys, essentially taking a bunch of possessions out of the house and the thing erupted into this big fight. This huge melee. I definitely went in excited to fight. Yeah. I've been involved in fights before and I had a adrenaline
Seeking thing, I felt like it was justified. I'm certainly not encouraging anybody else to do this, but essentially what happened was my friends took off my so-called friends took off and I ended up in a fight with a four or five guys, knives came out bottles. It's the sort of thing where quickly you realize that things can go badly wrong. Fortunately, I stayed on two feet and nobody got badly hurt or killed the police showed up. And actually, because of the fact that they were robbed
Yes there. She congratulated me I'll never forget. This is actually what made me feel worst of all was one of the police officers said, you know, like nice work or something like that. And I and I just realized that I was in serious trouble, you know, I'm 19, I barely finished high school. I barely scraped through my first year of college, I'm living in a squat with my ferret. My girlfriend had left me. I didn't do anything. Well, I didn't know how to do anything. Well and so that day and I still have this.
Letter. I actually sat down and I wrote a letter to myself and to my parents saying that I was going to turn things around. I don't know why I wrote to them because at the time I was kind of avoiding contact with them entirely. I've since formed a really good relationship with both my parents but I decided that day that I would use the one power that I seem to have, which is to remember, facts and information. And what I did was I left Santa Barbara, I took a leave of absence
And went back and went to a local community college in the Bay Area. I did two quarters there and I just started studying like a Maniac first psychology. Then biology eventually fell in love with neuroscience and related themes of endocrinology and the rest is sort of history in terms of eventually going to graduate school and getting a PhD in becoming a professor tenured and all that stuff. But it was one of those moments where I realized
I am no longer going to be a young screw up. I'm going to be a 20 year old screw up, and with time people are going to be less and less forgiving and whatever it happened prior. No one's going to Care. It doesn't even really matter. And if I do want people to care and it's not like I have a need to talk about the challenges early on, but I need to get my act together. I need to do something, I need to get good at something, and so I became a kind of a Maniac. Actually, when I read your book, The 4-Hour workweek,
The and the 4-Hour Body, which I read and loved a known, I should say again, not forsake of flattery because they've but they really helped me there. A lot of useful tools in there. There were certain things. That resonated, I figured out that if I drank a lot of coffee and took certain supplements. I could focus for many hours and if I worked out, I built another capacity. And if Iran, I built another capacity for endurance and and I started to explore the Crossovers between weightlifting is one thing. It's not about building muscles or necessarily.
Maybe it's about that. It's about really moving against a physical force in real time and really learning how to do that. Endurance work is about learning how to push through a different kind of barrier and learning the carryover in crossover point. So I was the guy that would sit down at my desk. I moved, I decide to live alone in a studio apartment and I would set a timer for several hours and I wouldn't allow myself to get up. I was allowed to listen to Rancid best band ever left, for me on, repeat and Bob Dylan, that's all I wouldn't even.
Myself to change music and then I would just sit there and I would read my textbooks. Underline, my textbooks, right, my textbooks. And I just decided, I'm going to get straight any marks. I'm going to go to graduate school, I'm going to get a PhD. I should mention. There were people that came along at various times and helped me Role, Models mentors people that spotted that. But it started with a switch that flipped on July 4 1994 and getting in a bad fight. And here, I am
deciding to choose a different path. So I want to
To underscore or explore a few things and I really appreciate you sharing this because I think it's very easy for people listening to folks with a bio like yours to sort of assume a certain trajectory to assume that it is always come easy. And that you've always since you were 2 years old known, exactly which direction you're heading, which is not the case one clarification with UC Santa Barbara, this might be an important.
Point. It might not you did not drop out. You took a leave of absence. Is that right? Is that material to the story? Because I know in a lot of cases, there are folks who are kind of painted as Dropout, but in fact, they kept their options open by taking a leave of absence instead. So let's try to clarify.
Yes, a leave of absence is a mechanism that most universities have. I think it was a design for things like family situations, if somebody gets pregnant or they have a family member who's sick that allows
You to leave and come back. And it's distinctly different from dropping out. Although, I was pretty close to dropping out and being forced to drop out for reasons related to you to poor grades and poor Behavior. Fortunately, that didn't happen. I think it's a really important point because we hear that Bill Gates dropped out of college. Steve Jobs dropped out of college, Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college. I think maybe it was Ryan holiday who I don't know, who said something like that. The people who are doing poorly in college, they're the ones that should stay in college.
Because it's that one environment where everything is scripted out for you. What you need to do in order to hit the next metric of success. And a leave of absence is very different. None of those people dropped out of college. They took leave of absences that gave them an insurance policy that they could go back if they wanted to, and it's very hard to make it back into a system of any kind. But it certainly is much harder. If you completely Divorce Yourself from that system,
I am a believer in formal rigorous coursework. I am a university. Professor, I know that college isn't perfect for everybody. It's some might even be the wrong decision for certain people, but if you're still uncertain about what you want to do, I think if it can be arranged financially and it's in the scope of things that somebody might want to do, I think learning how to sit down in a chair and force yourself to learn and then compete with others. In terms of how well you learn that information, I think is a great way to evaluate one.
Elf early in life and it sets the stage right.
I agree with that. If you're open to it and certainly you can say no or we can talk about it and then you can elect to have it edited out of the conversation, but you mentioned tension and stuff at home. Disruption. Are you open to sharing a bit more detail about what you mean when you say those
things? Sure. So, I had a pretty magical childhood really
My dad's a scientist, my mom wrote children's books and was a teacher. We ate dinner as a family, everybody together in the early part of my life, I acknowledge that. I had great privilege in having that experience and growing up where I did good schools, good Public Schools, I completely acknowledge the benefits of that especially early in life around 13. When I was 13, my parents split up and either because of the time, in which it happened, or because they weren't equipped with the right tools.
There was a complete fracture of that picture. My dad was very much out of the picture at that time. My mom hit, I think a series of challenges adjusting I think it was a male. What could only be described as a major depression? I think her view of family was one in which everyone stuck together. No matter what. She's from the East Coast. She's from New Jersey like you stick together. It's why we had an argument the other day. I don't think she wanted me selling This and like we got on and we were ready to scrap and we haven't had
One of those in years, but I just remembered that at the end of this conversation, we're going to be okay. And at the end we were, we were closer. So we both have that. And I think for her the fact that there was a complete disintegration of the picture, my sister out of the house, my dad out of the house and me there, she really hit the skids and home became a very empty. Very quickly, became a very empty and depressing place. It was really, it was just really sad and I found care and love and
City in the world of skateboarding, this was the early 90s and there was this collection of mostly young guys, at that time, who would aggregated Embarcadero Plaza, Justin, Herman, Plaza in San Francisco. I started going up there and hanging out at this. It's now the fame to EMB for. It's kind of got a golden era reputation now and that's where I learned that you don't have to go to school. There are a lot of guys, not going to school. There was a lot of drinking, a lot of drug use.
A lot of wild Behavior. But also I should say a lot of amazing skateboarding and amazing characters and personalities and fights and everything. It was true street life. And so I started staying there, I'd stay at people's houses or sometimes we even sleep there. And I learned a lot about how people outside the Cozy suburbs of the South Bay how they lived. I'm grateful for that because it exposed me to the fact that many of these kids had no parental.
Oversight from any age that they had to scrap for everything but quickly, I realized that I wasn't very good at skateboarding. I didn't have a future in it and I wasn't going to school. My home life was really disrupted and I lapsed into a pretty serious depression. I just remember and anyone who's experienced depression, I hope this will resonate with although I I'm sorry that it exists, but there's this weird thing about depression which is that
It changes your actual view of the world. I remember leaving Embarcadero sometimes and looking up at the sky back, then they had the Embarcadero freeway and thinking the sky is so sad like not the sky as a third as in separate object but that this scene of this Sunset is so sad. And actually yesterday, I was thinking about this because there's this beautiful sunset where I live and I thought, gosh, I haven't felt sad at the view of the natural world and so long. It's and so is clearly. It's
In my internal State and fast-forward. What happened was, eventually the school picked up on the fact my high school picked up on the fact that I wasn't going. They called me in at some point, I was sitting down with a school counselor and they had this guy in the room with me sitting there and pretty soon. I realized that I was in a different kind of situation and I realized they were going to probably try and take me away because I was completely true and I hadn't gone to school. I was clearly depressed. So
What happened against my will, and despite an attempt to run away, I was taken to a place up the peninsula, which was neither a juvenile hall, nor a psychiatric hospital, but we were under lock and key. And I was in there with kids that had dealt with everything from sexual abuse to hardcore substance abuse issues. I'll never forget this, they said the kids in the in the ward next door. They're crazy because they're really
And the adults in the word on the other side they're crazy. But you guys you're not crazy. And I thought well, that's ridiculous because they're probably saying the same thing to the ones that other side but I had no one to call. I called my skateboard team manager out of sympathy, not because I was any good. I'd got put on on a wheel company in a truck company for skateboarding. And I called the guy and I said, I don't know what to do, I'm in this place and and he I'll never forget. He said,
Look, I can barely take care of myself and you're the most normal guy, I know. And I realized at that point, I'm like I'm really alone here. So, the long and short of it was, I did the work I put my trust in the counselors that were there. They seemed like good people. And, you know, I did the work, but it's part of an agreement for getting let back into school. Actually, it's part of an agreement for being led out, I had to do weekly therapy and I was fortunate enough that I got placed
Working with somebody who understood my particular needs worked with adolescents and really encouraged me to start. Exploring my mind, a certainly, the situation I was in, but encouraged me to start meditating. He gave me Jon kabat-zinn. His book wherever you go. There you are. He saw how much physical energy I had, and he encouraged me to start running. I was always hurting myself skateboarding, and he said, well, maybe running or swimming and running and swimming, or amazing. Because unless, you really do it wrong, you can go.
Go and go and go. It's just an I could burn off all that anger and energy over time. And then I started getting into weightlifting and and weightlifting is kind of a double edged sword. I should mention. I think it's one of those things that is great but you know if you exceed a certain size it can actually make people kind of scary to you. So we're like the tattoos thing. A lot of like a lot of reasons why I cover up tattoos because then people just see that. See your tattoos. But I, it's true. I started getting tattooed pretty young the wrong way. Don't do it this way with India ink and a needle. This was before.
Claims that don't do it. But I decided at that age that the therapy. And this one person who seem to really care about my mental, and physical, well-being, and would spend the time was really worth investing in. And I hid it from everybody because no one did therapy. Then, no one talked about it. It's like late 80s, early 90s, nobody did that and I will confess. I don't think I've ever said this publicly, but I found a way.
Either through insurance or through my own income, I've continued therapy with that same individual now for 32 years. Wow. And so, I do, I confess, I do three sessions a week, a psychoanalysis remote, or in person. And I know people have a lot of, they do the other kind of I roll, not the Spiegel, I roll test. But the other kind of viral when you say psychoanalysis, I think an exploration of the mind is extremely powerful. It has to be done with the right person, and there's only one person.
I know who's done this kind of extended work for so many years and that's the Late Oliver Sacks who's a kind of a hero of mine. Also worked with a psychoanalyst for many, many years, and so psychoanalysis a fight on Jan, on July 4th 1994. A lot of attempt to both stabilize, my mind and also organize my behavior. Those two things. Go hand in hand, of course, but also biology to leverage. I guess you could call it biohacking a call.
It, I just got biology. I mean, when I learned for instance, that taking a thousand milligrams per day of EPA, essential fatty acids, not just fish oil, but getting above that threshold is, as effective as antidepressants in double-blind. Placebo-controlled, studies, you know, when I saw those papers I realized, well, I probably have a bit of a leaning toward depression. I'm going to do that now. Did I do that and drop therapy? No, I do that in therapy and I trained and I try and work on my sleep. It's a constant process.
But biology and the information contained in books like yours and hopefully in the information that I'm trying to put out into the world, now that stuff helps in a major way to. So it was a multi-pronged support system and many incredible mentors along the way, but I was definitely at the edge. I know you've talked about this public to, I mean, there were times when I just thought like why continue? And I'm fortunate nowadays, I feel very far from that. There's a saying in the world of addiction
Ian and addiction treatment which is that no matter how far you drive your always, the same distance from the ditch that I would say is true of addiction. Fortunately at least in my own experience that is not true of depression. I've vowed to never go back to a place. Where living seems meaningless and anyone who's been close to that place. All I can say is the work Works whether or not it's therapy. Biology Etc. You have to do it and there are things that can accelerate
That process but it's an ongoing battle to be honest.
While you're fighting the good fight man, I'm certainly right in there with you. How does it feel to talk about this stuff? It's
interesting, I always get a little quaky on this. I would say they're only two things that will always consistently, make me cry. And, and those are the thought of. I don't even wanna talk about for too long because I prefer not to cry, but at wanted would be when my Bulldog Costello goes that were very bonded and he's close unfortunately. So he's in his final years and the other is, when I think about my
My mentors in particular one passing away talking about, this gets me in a mode where it's uncomfortable, I'm definitely uncomfortable this moment. I'm okay to talk about it because I think these issues are important and I wholeheartedly believe that many people struggle with them. You know I'm always conscious of protecting the people in my life who were doing the best they could with what they had. So you know, my parents are good. People that generation didn't have the tools that I had access to and I do hope the next generation and will have access to
Or
tools. So I want to protect them. They are, you know, I'm blessed. I acknowledge my privilege I and I'll say that for political reasons, by the way, I just want to say I acknowledge that, I was born into a pretty fortunate or very fortunate situation that provided buffers and I only know my own experience but I acknowledge it as real.
Thanks for sharing all that and a mutual friend has prompted me to ask about the Hoffman
process.
Oh yeah, the Hoffman process. So the Hoffman process is a personal development process. It's a full immersion week-long process. I think it used to be two weeks. I don't want to give away too much about it because if one were to go you want to have the experience for the first time without expecting or knowing what's coming. It involves a lot of both physical and kind of emotional purging and what's interesting is it's generally between 20 and 40 people go, you don't publicly share any of the issues.
That you're grappling with, there is a teacher there that you communicate with and who knows a lot about your situation. There's a lot of work that you do beforehand, did paperwork. So they really know closely what you're grappling with. And you do get to know people there, but there are strict rules, no romantic relationships, no discussion of politics, no discussion work, no discussion of sports. And you quickly find that you realize that you spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about those things in the outside world and be that there are other ways to connect.
With people that are very authentic, that don't involve those things, Hoffman process was one of several things for me, that was transformative for me. It was most transformative in the realm of forgiveness. I felt completely resolved of my challenges with, you know, inability of focus, complete work structure, Etc. I'd solved all that. I learned how to work hard perform well by time. I went to Hoffman, which was in my early 40s. I'm 45 now.
I learned how to control my physical landscape as best as one could, or should I went there thinking like, why would I go here? What's the purpose and going? And yet, I realized that I harbored a lot of resentment mostly toward family members, but also toward experiences and and people outside my family and I almost got kicked out of Hoffman the first day not for misbehavior. But because I slept through the first day I've been working so hard.
They kept saying, I'm trying to escape by sleeping and I'm like, I'm just tired, like, they take a really good care of, they take really good care of you there. I've actually never felt so nurtured. I'm not somebody who accepts a nurturing very easily. I'm, I like to think I'm more of a caretaker, and a more of a kind of caretaker loner type than being taken care of and Hoffman. They, I felt comfortable to be taken care of in certain ways. And I discovered in doing the work that there were all these resentments, and I was able to purge those.
Edmonds and I have to say it completely erased. All feelings that I was wronged by anybody or anything and that's powerful and it's completely behavioral nature. There's no pharmacology there. I would say Hoffman is among the two or three things that were maybe four or five things that were really transformative for me and there is a price point but they do have a scholarship program that's been established. Thanks to the generosity of various folks.
So for people that can't afford the price point, they do have a fairly simple scholarship program where you write something out, people who are practitioners, you know, therapists and the Wellness Community. I think also get a break of some sort. I have no business relationship to Hoffman, but I've recommended that several people go and it is powerful, and it does last. In fact, the reason I decided to go to Hoffman was because somebody actually a mutual friend of ours, Tim, who I don't think when, when do y'all them, who I know from way back.
When we haven't been in touch in years but I think she said something about Hoffman and she said she knew somebody who went and I contacted that person and that person said I went to Hoffman and 10 years later, it still has a profound positive effect on my life and I found it to be more useful than any other therapy or training of any kind. That's my Hoffman story, and it's powerful.
And for people who want to hear more about Hoffman, I talked about it at
Length. Also, with Blake mycoskie in the last conversation I had with him so people can find that. That episode you mentioned one of four or five things. What are some of the other things that have had a disproportionate positive impact?
This is a broad category but get your biology right start with sleep. Figure it out, figure out how to get your sleep, right? Because it's the fundamental layer of mental health. So get that one right. Other things in the biological category are learn. How to
Guess learn how to defocus, learn how to flip the switch on. Learn house, flip the switch off, get good at sleeping, of course, exercise of various kinds is going to be good and all the other things but there's that physical bin and those are the primary levers there. I do think some form of exploration whether or not. It's psychoanalysis Psychotherapy journaling or some sort of internal reflection that somewhat unregulated, but obviously not damaging to you or anyone else?
So don't punch concrete walls but have the ability to sit down and data dump and reflect. If you can't afford therapy, reflect on what you're seeing and reading and feeling have the ability to experience what's internal. So that would be the second one.
The third one is an, I realize there's some issues around legality and things and right now, everything is in transition. I was part of a clinical trial. So I can safely say this. You know, I do think that there are certain aspects to let's just call it what it is. Either plant medicine or I was part of mdma-assisted psychotherapy trial that was extremely valuable there's no question to me that that's a powerful mover.
Of one's ability to feel comfortable and internal State. The way I would just briefly describe that experience for me is that I could feel and perfectly fine from here to here and from the belly button down. But I had this feeling always that, I couldn't kind of experience things in mind and body at the same time. I know this is gonna sound really wacko to people who maybe haven't experienced this but somehow in that brief experience, I was able to resolve that and I now experience my nervous system as a complete entity.
And I do not think people should Cowboy this stuff and do it on their own or try to do therapy for their friends or do this on their own. I don't think this is something that people should play around with. These are very powerful tools. You should do this with a board-certified MD, sign up for a clinical trial. Hopefully this will be done in the, you know, in these sorts of medical settings soon legally. And you don't have to be part of a clinical trial, but if you struggle,
Ongoing in some way. I do think there's utility there, so that's another bin and then there's another bin which for me, has been very powerful which is stay on the adventure, continue to have fun. It's so easy to forget to have fun when you're doing all these other things like stay in the adventure and don't get killed doing it. But, you know, really try and keep exploring. I do believe these dopamine systems are positively reinforced by novelty and exploration, we know that, and
Venturing into new territories. And that requires getting certain things wrong, it means going to a retreat. That sucks. It means taking a class that is not that interesting. It means finding out that, you know, a particular relationship is not right for you, but it's important to stay in a mode of Adventure because that's fundamental to The Human Experience. And it's fundamental to these neuro chemical systems as well. A couple of points. I'd love
to underscore here, so the bye.
Biological peace, you've discussed. In other places, this principle, it's a quote of sorts of Maxim, that I think is really worth remembering. And I'm saying that, to myself, as much to anyone, listening that is, you cannot control the mind with the mind. And whether or not there might be exceptions to that. I think as a general rule using, the bidirectionality, as you've mentioned sort of Body Mind, mind body and you know, when in doubt working through
Your Fuller biology is incredibly powerful. I mean, for me like to get out of my head, I need to get into my body, there's just no metacognitive way generally for me to otherwise do that or if there is it's just much more difficult. You have you even told my girlfriend, I'm like, if I'm trying to figure out what is bothering me and I spend more than like a half hour on it. Just tell me to go to the gym and lift heavy things for at least 30 minutes
sestra best around.
Midi in the world and then I come out, I'm like, yeah, that that bullshit's fine, it doesn't matter.
And that's what was necessary on the adventure side. Actually, before I get to the adventure side, just a quick note on Costello because I think a lot about my dog Molly and mortality, and it's just, it's like so easy to get sad. And how old is she? She's seven, but she's had some health issues. She's had two, spinal surgeries,
And if you haven't looked into the canine research with rapamycin, I would look into that. It's very, very compelling. So that might be I'll do that. I listened to your podcast
with Peter attea and a lot of discussion about rapamycin, I'll definitely check it
out. Yeah. It's it's worth checking out. There's also a separate episode with David sabatini of MIT, who is a genius and I know
Sort of mtor wizard,
who said family. His, he has a brother, Bernardo sabatini, who's a famous neurologist at Harvard, who I know quite well and their dad, there's another sabbatini who was at NYU Med so those sabatini's they're gonna like the kornberg's kornberg, discovered RNA, his son discovered the structure of RNA, they both got no bells and I think they're brothers and they monologist something like that. So, if your last, if you're thinking about changing your last name, sabatini or kornberg is a good one to
select? Yeah, not not not.
Bad. Yeah, they come from the Secretariat stock, the scientific gene pool. I'm sorry, examine the adventure side. So you said don't die or don't let something kill you which I think is a perfect segue to as I'm reading it from a paragraph. From outside magazine huberman was about 40 miles off the coast of Mexico and forty feet below the Periwinkle surface of the ocean. What does this refer
to? Oh my yeah. So
Before I went to Hoffman, I was still working out some things. The quick back story, this is in 2016. I decided, I was going to shift a lot of my laboratory work toward humans. I understand the issues of animal research and why it's important. My lab still does work on mice because there's certain things you can only do on mice. But I want to work on humans and I want to use Virtual Reality to induce fear in the laboratory and study stress, and fear and other brain States. And we realized that VR
As it stood at the time, was just pretty lame. It was computer-generated images. It didn't have 360 video or sound. And so I got linked up with a guy named Michael Mueller. I'm you LL. ER, who's a very, very famous photographer in Hollywood. Mostly does all the Marvel stuff ice is shot, everybody. The you just can go to his website is just it's kind of a just a constant Scroll of iconic images, Mueller, and I got to be friends. And the reason I was
was excited about getting to know him is because a hobby of his is that he takes photos of great white, sharks underwater. He brings these giant strobe lights underwater and Muller is you know you hear about the character the Wolverine Hugh Jackman, right? Molar is a wolverine, he's kind of hunched over and he's the nicest guy in the world, but it was like, it was immediate friendship but he loves Adventure, he's got, he's got a family kids everything, but he loves adventure and he said, this is my best Mueller personation. He's like,
You gotta come down to Guadalupe, the sharks are there, and I was like, well, what are we gonna do? He's like, well, we'll just film them with 360 cameras. So in 2016, we went down there and we filmed great white sharks as a stimulus for this fear laboratory that we were building and got 360 video and the way we did that was that Mueller and a couple other guys, these expert, great white shark divers would leave the cage you lower the cage about 40 feet below and they leave the cage to come back in so-called cage, exiting definitely illegal.
To do we got permits from the Mexican Government because this was for scientific study,
I would have loved to see that permitting process. Anyway. Continue.
That was something else. So we we got the footage, brought it back, built this thing up and then what happened was in the subsequent year the technology for VR really improved. So, we decided we were going to go back and I decided, for, whatever reason that I was going to cage exit. Also, I actually learned how to scuba dive for the first trip, but I had stayed in the cage. And so the
I can trip, we went out there and I brought a good friend of mine who's actually a mutual friend through Blake mycoskie. Pat Dawson is a former former Seal Team guy. I brought Brian Mackenzie because Brian learned, Brian, Mackenzie learn how to scuba dive in a lake in Oregon. And his first ocean dive was caged, eggs it with great whites sound. The guy has unscared tattooed on his knuckles. I know he was featured in a number of your books. So is Brian. Pat me and some other guys, we went out there with
The intention of getting better footage to create a very realistic VR experience of great white sharks. So, what happened was on the first day, I decided, I'm not going to kjx it today. Let Pat go, he's a Seal Team guy, he'll do it. He did it, of course, masterfully. The first time, when a few meters Beyond everybody, because those guys aren't competitive or anything, anyway, it all worked out, but the first day I was in the cage. So, I went down, I've been in the cage before and you're breathing off a hookah line, which is up to the surface. You're not on scuba and the reason you don't
In Scuba is because you don't want to take up too much space in the cage. So the other divers Mueller and a couple other guys had left the cage and I was there just watching the Sharks and really enjoying it. I'd been down there the previous year and these great white sharks. Their girth is an incredible. And they come at you, unlike a Volkswagen and they'll stop right in front of you and hover, they'll eyeball you and then disappear into the darkness. So does it's really amazing. And I realized as I was down there, I'm like, I'm alone in the cage this time. I've never been alone in the cage.
We had a lot of sharks that day so I was moving around and swiveling around a lot and then all of a sudden I had no air nothing just nothing coming through the mouthpiece and I looked up and the hookah line. Got all boa, constrictor it up. So I popped up to it thinking. I'll just untangle this thing and it's like hard as concrete. It's like good. So, I took another suck of air and nothing, and I looked down their safety tanks in the two corners. So I spit out the mouthpiece I drop down in the safety tank. So
Him up and the needle doesn't move. They're empty. This is like the biggest Nightmare and it's interesting we were talking about Costello, I had one thought at that moment, a totally inefficient use of mental space, but the one thought was I'm going to go home alive. I'm going to see Costello. He just popped into my head so this stuff really does happen apparently so nothing off the safeties tanks. So I decided
I got to get out of here when they're sharks everywhere but I've got to get to the surface and you're just desperate for are so I pop up to the top of the tank and I've got a weight vest on and I've got to take that weight vest off if I want to get up to the surface. Now the Sharks actually don't eat you. When you're outside the cage, if you're swimming toward them, they actually if you loom on them they steer away. That's the way that these cage. Exit divers are able to avoid getting eaten.
If your ocean Ramsey, you just kind of understand them and you swim next to them, but I was genuinely, frightened, and stressed? And so, I thought, okay, I'm going to shoot for the surface. I could see the silhouette of the boat. I'm going to shoot for the surface. I'll either get eaten or I'll drown but I'm certain I'll drown if I stay here and then what happened was one of the divers, his name's Brock, saw me and started kicking back toward me and he's carrying this big vacuum cleaner size, the our thing and
That felt like an eternity, you know, he's coming back to me back to me slowly. So I'm just hoping if I pass out I want to fall into the cage. If I float, I want to make sure I float up but it was a good 20 or 30, more seconds, which doesn't sound like very long, but it's not like I got sounds like an eternity. It was an eternity so he made it back, we did the share are thing. But then we had a whole other problem which was that we're sharing are those guys are out there were now on one tank and the safeties are empty. So now there's a chance that we both might.
I have to shoot for the surface. So fortunately everybody made it back in time and we got up to the surface but I will never forget that experience. I do feel like I'm on borrowed time and I did feel quite traumatized by it and I will say that that night I did one thing and the next day I did something else was that night. I was able to sleep. I did Yoga Nidra and I was able to calm my mind and my nerves and the next day because I understand
Bit about the relationship between trauma and exposure. I did go back down the very next day and I cage exited and some people might think that's foolish. I certainly didn't do it to be tough. Or does it seem like I'm tough? I did it because facing the trauma is the best way to purge the trauma. We know this and cage exiting for me, allowed me, I believe to report the experience. I feel nothing in my body, no tension, no stress, no quaking or anything related to that, so
I do think it's been completely
purged and want to dig into what I read as a definition of fear from you and just to hear more about your fascination with fear and where it comes from. So here's what I have and you can fact check this, please quote fear, it's the anxiety that you feel when you don't know what Behavior can remove a feeling of helplessness in the face of a threat end quote, does that sound right to
you?
You can't have stress without anxiety. You can't have trauma without stress, but you can have stress or anxiety without trauma. I think that the key variables are anxiety, as a state of heightened. Alertness is Contracting in the visual field, quickening of the heart rate, breathing, all the kind of standard stuff that we hear of sympathetic nervous system activation. But the mental component is one in which time is being sliced. Very finely. So you're constantly anticipating in a
Evaluating your environment and your internal State because oftentimes people are aware of their so-called interoception. They're keenly aware of how nervous they are upset. They are. And this element of uncertainty, of being unable to predict when it's going to pass. And this creates a kind of meta, stress is sort of like when people have trouble sleeping, then they create this kind of meta anxiety and insomnia there. Now, they're stressed about not sleeping and so, then it makes it even harder to sleep. The same thing with stress,
The more we stress, the more we want the stress to pass and I think that resolving the uncertainty element is powerful and I think it starts by taking control of the Mind through the route of the body. When our mind is not stable whatever that means but we're not able to control our mental state or it's not where we'd like it to be. We need to look to the powers of respiration of vision of movement of weight training of running to reorient.
The mind, I think it is futile to try and rescue thinking with thinking, that's not to say that thinking and an exploration of the mind, like, with psychoanalysis or journaling is not powerful, but for restabilizing our system, he's brain states of Mind and Body. I think the body is the more powerful entry point
and have you always been fascinated by fear or what, why did that become a focal point?
Probably, because I was the kid that was last to drop in.
On the ramp probably because I have lived and existed with a fair amount of fear this seems to have gotten better over the years. For instance, I can remember skateboarding home. There's this bike path. That used to connect the school that I went to the back of some houses and I would push back through their night and I would start to imagine that terrible things were going to happen to me. I think that fear was, it was a strong default and I can't assign that to any earlier experience. I think
I've just had a lot of Baseline anxiety and fear, and so resolving that and figuring out tools that people could use that I could use also to resolve those things, really fast as been a major major effort in my life including my laboratory.
I'd like to if it's okay with you shift, gears a little bit and just pepper you with a bunch of random questions that have absolutely no continuity with anything. We just talked about,
right? That's okay. Sure thing.
All right, because I just, I have this sort of scratchpad full of these various things that I want to ask about often without a whole lot of context, just from from various reading. And so on, so turmeric effects on DHT, could you elaborate on this? A DHT, dihydrotestosterone, I'm guessing, what should we know about DHT? And turmeric has effects on DHT, and I asked in part because it's something that I use all the time in cooking. There's seems to be some research to suggest that products like tharok human. I
It's called is the brand name. Might attenuate some risk related to say neurodegenerative disease or Alzheimer's. So I'd love to know more about this. Yeah, so brief
Endocrinology lesson on testosterone DHT testosterone is the Androgen of course that's responsible for muscle growth. Keeping the voice aggression, sex drive, Etc. But DHT dihydrotestosterone is made from testosterone through an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase. DHT is the more
powerful Androgen anywhere from 300 to 600 times. The affinity for the Androgen receptor. DHT is the and its affinity for the Androgen receptor. Not. So, incidentally is the basis of nandrolone Deca known in Jim circles, actually a female Runner, that was a good pick for the 1,500. Just got a four year ban Hoops or an Andhra loan positive test. She claims and her coach claims that came from a burrito containing poor.
Me and you alone. I actually would love somebody to go explore. We're going to see more of this in the years to come. I'd like somebody to actually analyze meat for clenbuterol and nandrolone to just see because the and I'm not happy that this happened and it's a sad situation. But we could fairly say that there's been a dark shadow cast by a burrito over the Olympic qualification. It's
kind of like going to what all the sprinters were diagnosed as narcoleptics. Remember that with a really medieval? Yeah, they're all on the dad.
Vanilla on various stimulants. And so they had these scripts from their doctors and letters saying they're all narcoleptics, just amazing, the Venn
diagram to get them quick out. The blocks, that's where the race is one here that gun and get out the blocks. That's so nandrolone is DECA the reason people take it, whether or not she took her. No, no. But were the reason people take it as because DHT, as the more powerful, Androgen with this higher, Affinity is the one that's mainly responsible for libido, and many of the cognitive effects of testosterone.
Drone. One of the more powerful effects of testosterone is that because of the fact that there are Androgen receptors in the amygdala that it has a fear suppressing component to it and DHT testosterone. But really DHT has a property of making effort, feel good. That's probably the main psychological effect of testosterone aside from its effects on on libido and the body. Periphery. So some people are very
Very DHT, sensitive. If you're somebody for instance, that takes creatine and experiences hair loss very quickly, you're probably DHT sense of. That's because creatine increases DHT. DHT will promote hair loss on the scalp. Like my hair lines retreating quite nicely and now I have because of DHE receptors here and it promotes beard growth. So it has these inverse effects on the face and on the scalp. But tumeric is a fairly potent, DHT antagonist.
Out whether or not it does that by occupation of the Androgen receptor or some other mechanism. I don't know, people will vary in their sensitivity. I am very sensitive to turmeric. If I take turmeric, my DHT levels plummet and I'm not taking nandrolone, nor am I eating pork burritos, but the sensitivity will vary, and you can kind of predict that sensitivity by how you react to creatine. If you're somebody that takes low doses of creatine, which many people do and experience hair loss. Chances are when you take
Turmeric. You're going to see a reduction in DHT means that your 5-alpha reductase system and or this interaction between turmeric and the Androgen receptor are for whatever reason, more sensitive and use some people take turmeric and feel perfectly fine. I noticed an immediate blunting of all the good stuff. Let's say that DHT and testosterone do. When I take even a minimum of turmeric. Now, that doesn't mean I can't have a little bit of turmeric and a drink, like, a Juice drink or something. But dosing tumeric is not something that I do or that.
Recommend for your people. Now, women do make a little bit of DHT. It might be a whole different story with them, but I think for men you probably just want to do the experiment. It's Quickly. Reversible, if you stop taking turmeric so you could evaluate this. Some people will be fine, you could do a blood test, you could do it.
Subjectively is finasteride. Propecia, that is often used for mitigating hair loss, that is, I think it's a 5-alpha reductase inhibitor would that also,
Have the effect of decreasing DHT levels. I want to say there are anecdotal reports and people please do your own homework. Go to go to PubMed and do some research. But I want to say that least amongst strength athletes that I've heard anecdotal reports of Propecia use correlating to decreases in strength, gains for male
athletes. Yeah, absolutely. And it certainly can reduce DHT levels, certainly more for those that are sensitive to it just to
Score. How powerful DHT is we have? What are called primary and secondary sex characteristics. Secondary sex characteristics are like body hair, deepening, The Voice, Etc. But the primary characteristics like the presence of a penis or not, and this is independent of gender, this is your biological sex. It's encoded by the Y. Chromosome, that's entirely controlled by DHT during development and masculinization of the brain is a separate pathway. But there's this phenomenon that I think is in the Dominican Republic. A genetic disruption in some of these
He's Pathways and there that people can look this up. The so-called, whoever dosis, this is a famous story in endocrinology of children, that it looked female at Birth by genitalia. And then because of a surge in DHT later, they literally sprout a penis at about and testicles descend at about age 12 whether doses. Wow. And there's a whole story there, it actually was part of the story that helped neuroendocrinologist and developmental biologists understand the role of 5.
For reductase in testosterones conversion to DHD, fascinating biology, they're much too much go into now in detail but you people can look it up. Online DHT is powerful in development and it's powerful throughout the lifespan so you want to keep levels of DHT appropriately. Hi, but don't take nandrolone if you're sprinting in the Olympics. So that's not the way to get your
nandrolone is not the way to get your DHT. Yeah, even if you do get it through through anabolic Piggies, just like there's so many.
More cost-effective ways to make pigs. Grow deck. Adorable and injections is probably not high on the
list. They need Natty menus, right? I need menus that are like, if your Olympic Athlete, please just prepare your own
food. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, so many directions to go here. It makes me wonder. Also, if anyone has looked at turmeric or curcumin or whatever, the actual compound is responsible for this DHT inhibition, whether it's via 5-alpha reductase.
Otherwise on pregnancy and birth gender, I'm wondering if that would have any effect of DHT, is pressed in a woman who is pregnant? If that would have any effect on birth gender.
Yeah, that's the topic that I don't think the experiments ever been done. But my postdoc advisor been beerus was transgendered, and it's an interesting story, briefly, he was an identical twin. He from a very early age, he felt entirely uncomfortable in a female.
Nobody. He knew he wanted to be mail from a very young age long before puberty his sister who I've interacted with. As well, is perfectly happy being a woman enjoys being woman and they're identical twins and their mother was actually treated with an androgenic drugs during pregnancy. Then unfortunately passed away of pancreatic cancer a few years ago, he was an incredibly accomplished neuro scientist and physician is name is beerus be a, our res. There are a number of obituaries. I wrote one for nature that you know
Describes his life in his transition and some of the biology. But nonetheless, been and I spent about a year before he died. I recorded a lot of conversations with Ben that I haven't released yet talking about what it was like to be a girl. What it was like to be a woman. What it was like to be a man later in life. Just as I his her close friend of mine, I want to understand that and he described that this was an immediate effect as soon as he knew there was a difference between boys and girls.
I knew that he was in the wrong body. He likened it to if you woke up tomorrow and you were in a gorilla's body, that's how uncomfortable it was, knowing that that's how he described it. And he thought that perhaps, you know, this early intergenic drug treatment might have shaped his brain differently than his sister somehow.
Hmm. Raises so many. So many interesting questions about phytoestrogens or sort of these Xeno estrogens and the Environmental.
Puts that could affect that entire bow chemical cocktail two different different outputs testosterone. So we talked a little bit about DHT. There's a Goldilocks range depending on your gender and your objectives for testosterone. Are there any particular supplements that you use to? I hesitate to use this word because it's so gold dependent. But optimize your testosterone or DHT levels or reduce sex hormone-binding.
Globulin or whatever. If you're sort of toying with your androgens, how do you like to do it
optimizing and or understanding testosterone I think is vital for men and women because it's so powerful obviously, get your sleep, right? That's an important one and you do that through. So, that's an indirect effect, stress, keep stress. Chronic stress to a minimum, that's an indirect effect trained hard, but not too long. That's an indirect effect mostly in the supplementation space there.
Two
things that have worked very well for me. And that I've recommended to a number of people that have worked well for them. And those two things are tongue. Got a lie which at 400 milligrams per day, is thought to reduce sex, hormone-binding globulin because of, for those that don't know, testosterone can exist in a free or bound form people here, binding globulins and they bind up testosterone prevent free testosterone. They think this is terrible, but actually albumin and sex hormone-binding globulin are
Awful because they ensure that whatever testosterone you make will be delivered to your tissues over a long period of time and different tissues need different amounts of testosterone and so you don't want to plummet sex hormone-binding globulin but Tunga Ali. Either through reducing sex hormone-binding globulin or through Direct effects on increasing Androgen release.
Will increase your testosterone. Now, the way to explore this and I'm not saying anyone should do this. You definitely want to work with your physician, but the way to explore this is 400 milligrams per day taken, once per day, early in the day, because it can have a little bit of a stimulant effect make you more alert that works. Well, it does need to be taken chronically. It tends to work better as you get into the second and third month of use. And I don't see any reason to cycle it. Unless somehow something,
You know, spikes on your liver enzymes or something. The other supplement that is quite useful, is Fado Gia, aggressiveness, Fado Gia grass. This is one of these plant alkaloids that think that comes from a Nigerian shrub. I might have that wrong, but, but don't you agree Estes acts as a luteinizing hormone mimic. So it actually stimulates the testes to produce more
testosterone. So it's like HCG, it's like
a, it's a bit like HCG but it for
Ever reason, it doesn't seem to increase estrogen, which is unique, because HCG will increase estrogen. Now, just anecdotally I started using those in combination it, so it's 400 milligrams of Tonga Ali. I have no relationship to the company so I can mention where I get it from. Although I hope they don't sell out as a company, will sell out as a consequence, a solar array makes a good version of this. Sometimes, these things are packaged in with other things, but solar has a pure form and then Fado G aggressiveness. I think it's
herbal elixirs makes a doji aggressiveness. And some people make the mistake of taking far too much for doji aggressed has I think on the bottle they recommend three, two to three times a day. One 425 milligram capsule. I believe is more than sufficient and anecdotally for me. What this did is it it increased my total testosterone by about 200 points. So, I've fell kind of in the middle of the range. I was neither High nor low, I was at about 600, hovering somewhere around 600.
These two supplements consistently, bring it up into the high sevens or low eight, which is in the direction that I wanted to go.
Do you think Fado G aggressed is if it is luteinizing hormone similar? Meaning, it's a mimic of sorts. Do you think that would have any because it probably would have a sort of down-regulating effect on endogenous production of LH?
Well, what's interesting is when I've done my blood work twice a year at least.
Least for me, it did not down-regulate LH huh. Which is nice because things like HCG definitely would down-regulate LH. People who take testosterone sippy innate, you know T so called trt or similar will see a down regulation and luteinizing, hormone sofa dodea and Tonga Ali. I mentioned, because they're sort of an intermediate between doing nothing with respect to supplements, or taking things that don't really work there. A lot of those out there or taking the full plunge into
Trt and I'll just mention if I may about trt, there's a lot of interest and excitement in trt. They now even have what's called Sports trt, which is not and just for people who don't
have the context, if I'm not sure if you, if you already kind of named it out but testosterone replacement therapy trt. So see what sports do? Your tea is like Med Spa type
stuff. Yeah. So people are probably wondering what your a neurobiologist. Why do you know so much about this stuff? Well, I
I have the Good Fortune of doing work with various high-performing communities and there's just a lot of discussion around hormone and neural augmentation. And so I'm not making recommendations. I what I generally do with those communities, and what I'm doing now is point people to the fact that they're there are things that lie somewhere between doing nothing and going the, the prescription drug route. Eating pork burritos.
Yeah, exactly exactly
in the realm of trt testosterone replacement therapy, the
Dosages. That people use are 160 to 200 milligrams a week, but the way it's administered, doesn't match the biology. I think this is a serious problem that needs to be dealt with. Typically, if you get a prescription, you'll go in, they'll give you one injection of anywhere from a hundred 60 to 200 milligrams, and then you go back. Two weeks later and you get another injection. The testes normally make anywhere from about 5 to 10 milligrams of testosterone a day,
So if you're taking 160 milligrams of testosterone on one day, you're going to set an emotion, all sorts of Cascades of aromatization and estrogen conversion into DHT that you might feel terrible, then great, four days later. And then so, so two weeks later, the way people are doing this. Now, more intelligently is to do their injections at home either into subcutaneously or into muscle and every third or fourth day to take a low dose of maybe 40 milligrams.
And to dose it more evenly because these long-lasting forms like sippy innate do release over time but Sports trt, is this intermediate? That's been created on the internet where people are neither doing testosterone replacement therapy to get levels up to normal or high normal. Nor are they doing what the gym rats call blasting? They're not taking three, four, five hundred. They're taking 200 a week or 300 a week, and the amount of self-directed pharmacology. That's
Hang out there is pretty incredible and I like I don't pass judgment everybody. It's your life to live but there are a lot of horror stories to you can really mess yourself up by getting Androgen levels too high. I'm a fan of gently moving into the supplementation space for this, seeing how it works, doing a blood test. And then if people want to do trt over time, that certainly there, right? That's not my place to judge and you need to. You need a prescription anyway. Yeah I'll talk to a doctor.
Yeah. And just a couple of
Your thoughts on all of this stuff will first the lower dose. Higher frequency. Regimen can also be applied to too many things, right growth hormone would be another example from the same sort of portfolio of interventions /. Augmentations a lot of folks would use and separately I would say and please please feel free to correct me or fact, check on this but whether you're eating pork, burritos injecting yourself with anabolics.
Of different types or eating deer antler velvet or whatever. The latest fad is that people claim increases testosterone. If you dramatically increase your testosterone levels, if you are not taking an anti aromatase, you are also going to increase your estrogen levels even though it depends on the anabolic. Obviously, and nandrolone is very different from different types of testosterone. So on, which some are more anabolic, some more androgenic. But if you suddenly
Help yourself with much higher levels of testosterone. You are also going to portion of that will be converted to estrogen. And so it's just something to be aware of Freddy. It's very hard to get a biological free lunch and, and if you're is, you're feeding yourself a bunch of stuff and your testes, like the Siberian, what were they albino
rats that does it has earned
hamster, says, yes, I buried hamsters. If your if your balls go from whatever you're comfortable ball, diameter is down.
To like raisins. You may require post Psychotherapy PCT, various drugs to successfully off-ramp from these types of interventions in less like some powerlifters you're just going to be loaded all year round 365 24/7 which is obviously your your choice if you want to do something like that. But sufficed. How'd you get a good idea to get medical medical supervision for all these
definitely and and along those lines? I should just mention
Well, I will say that for dodea tends to have the opposite effect on the testicles. It actually will cause it fairly not pronounced but a increases testicle sighs. That's a pretty strong effect or media effect of Fado Gia. The other thing is that right now, there's a lot of excitement about peptides people are like, oh, the so-called Secreto God's? It sounds like synagogue. But it's secreted. God, which these are like, not not taking growth hormone but taking peptides that promote growth hormone release and then people are taking, you know, gastric peptide this. And here's the
The deal.
Things that make us feel more vital like testosterone DHT growth hormone, generally will shorten your life. I know that's a bit of a controversial statement but but if you step back and use this, just ask yourself. What is the most vital energetic phase of your life? It's puberty when all these hormones are really high and puberty is the most rapid period of Aging that any of us go through. I was talking about this recently with the longevity
Researcher. And I, and it's kind of interesting that all the longevity. The attempts at increasing lifespan are like starving yourself, which is catabolic reducing blood sugar, which is catabolic. And that's on the opposite side of all these things like testosterone which is anabolic insulin which is anabolic growth hormone which is anabolic and so anabolism sounds like a great thing it does sound remarkably similar to cannibalism but growth and vitality libido strength Etc that all
Sounds wonderful and in its proper form and context is wonderful. But the reason why I think we see people dying early who do a lot of growth hormone and testosterone is because they've effectively created a third and fourth round of puberty. You're accelerating aging and so I think, vitality and Longevity always have to be balanced with one, another, totally, and
we could go for hours just on this one topic. One other cautionary, note well two, actually number one
Unless your type 1 diabetic, don't inject insulin, there are athletes who do this, but you can very easily kill yourself. The second is, if you're taking a lot of growth agents, some of them are not selective to skeletal muscle tissue and you may as a male end up looking like you're in your second trimester from enlarged organs and guess what? When you get off of those drugs, your organs don't automatically resume their smaller size. This is also why certain baseball players and so on have gone up much.
The ball helmet sizes, it's not from Park burritos, those effects are durable, you can't just hit undo on those things.
So very, very good points,
pays to be cautious. All right. So to a few other things, cognitive enhancement or cognitive boosting supplements. Much like the testosterone playing field. There's a clown car, full of ridiculous propositions. There are, of course, then the prescription
and medical route where there are certain things that will help some things like, nicotine can be tremendously effective but come with some possible downsides Associated. Do you have any particular thoughts on cognitive enhancement or how you think about that specifically on the pharmacological supplement side? I know there are many other things that we could also talk about.
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned it, many other things I won't list them out again, but I do believe that the most powerful nootropic.
Cognitive support is going to come from quality sleep and
a hundred percent a great.
Yeah. So it's night and day on the pharmacologic side. I think Alpha GPC has real effects that are supported by quality peer reviewed studies, including some studies looking at offsetting age-related cognitive decline. So generally it comes in capsule form of 300 milligrams or so. I think taken occasionally or more than occasionally
We provide it's fairly early in the day. It does increase focus without increasing the kind of sympathetic arm of the nervous system make in other words without increasing arousal and alertness too much. So I do think Alpha GPC is a useful supplement and I use it from time to time. If I've slept, well, I don't take it if I really want to push a workout hard or a work session, a writing session, or data analysis, session hard. I'll take 300 milligrams of that.
And drink a couple espresso or drink, some mate, and some water stay hydrated. Hydration is a big one for cognitive function and it's one that people often overlooked. But the simple rule is that, this is what I call the Galpin equation, because Andy Galpin who's a great exercise physiologist, came up with this for physical work, but it turns out to work for cognitive work to, which is that basically your body weight in pounds, divided by 30 will give you the number of ounces of water that you should drink about every 20 minutes. When exercising or
or doing mental work might seem like a lot. There might be an extra trip to the bathroom or two but it's worth it. Dehydration is a subtle but very pernicious creep where you start having hard time. Focusing your eyes you you just feel like you want to go to sleep. That hydration factor is real. So drink plenty of fluids especially if you're ingesting caffeine, which, of course, is a
diuretic. My personal favorite vehicle for Kathy and remains yerba mate. I just absolutely
The Adorn, the effects of yerba mate. I'm not saying it's for everyone, but you have the caffeine and I might be getting the pronunciation off. You also have a belief Theophylline, which you would find in green tea and theobromine, which you would also find us a dark chocolate side. Note, trivia for folks theobromine from Theo as in theosophy, theobroma food of the Gods. So that's kind of fun. But yeah, but the pharmacokinetics of those are all different. So unlike coffee, which
Why I have a love-hate relationship with because I metabolize it so quickly that I get this, this sort of Snickers bar sugar, high of caffeine for very short time, 20 or 30 minutes. And then my Baseline of sort of subjective perceived energy is lower than when I started. So, what happens then, I become a crackhead who drinks you to 8 cups of coffee a day. Not so with yerba mate, especially when you're kind of titrating it in, in the way that they would consume it in a place, like our
Tina or who do I where you're just kind of sipping. It
slowly, it's great stuff. I found a brand that and I don't have any relation to them but I found one that I particularly like it's has a weird name but Anna Park. It's an organic and a party but mate, I don't know who Anna is or her Parker. Maybe her name is Anna Park but it's nice. It has the right amount of that tobacco flavor but it's not burnt to the point of feeling kind of overwhelming. The other thing about caffeine that's kind of interesting is that most
If people would benefit from waiting, 90 minutes to two hours after waking to ingest their caffeine, the way caffeine interacts with the adenosine receptor, remember you get sleepy because of time of day with that Circle, circadian, clock mechanism, but also because of the build-up of adenosine in your system. That's the sleepiness Factor really. And when you wake up in the morning, if you immediately, compete out any residual adenosine, you lose the benefit of that cortisol pulse.
Essentially clearing out the rest of the adenosine. And so a lot of people, despite the pain of having to do this the first day or two, feel much better throughout the day. Less of that crack doubt, kind of rise in Crash feeling on caffeine, if they delay their coffee or mate, or about 90 minutes to two hours after waking, that's great to know. Side
note for people who may want to do some some further research and reading into caffeine the named Roland, Griffiths has come up
Multiple times on this podcast. He's an incredible scientist and researcher based at Johns Hopkins, who is he is one of the most I would say esteemed. Researchers alongside say, Matt Johnson, Roland has just been at it for longer with respect to psilocybin and psychedelic. So he's associated with that. But prior to psychedelics, he was one of the world's foremost, experts in caffeine metabolism and so he is he has published and
Perform studies related to caffeine that are intensely interesting. So for people who want to dig deeper into that role in, as Roland, Griffiths is a great resource. It'll one thing I've been wondering because there are drugs that you can use to counteract other drugs, right? So if you go to Bellevue and you're at the psyche are and someone comes in just High out of their mind on cocaine right there are medications that can be given to try to take them down.
A notch or two or three or ten, the Khaled, All, or not sure if that's used any longer. But there are many different drugs that can be used. In the case of caffeine, let's just say, someone named Jim Barris, just for sake of argument is working on his laptop at a restaurant and said, restaurant has excellent service, which means they also have the NeverEnding cup of coffee. So before he knows it, he's add five cups of coffee, even though he only ordered one coffee.
Is there a way to reverse or counteract the effects of caffeine on adenosine such that you can actually get to sleep. So if you hit the golf ball and you're like oh fuck looking at the half life of caffeine, there's no way I'm getting to sleep until like 3:00 in the morning. Is there any way to address that or is it just fait accompli in your more or less screwed? Yeah,
one direct and to indirect the direct way to do that is increase your glucose.
You know, the whole notion that you can soak it up by eating some bread, you will see a blunting of the stimulant effect. Now whether or not, that's also due to some minor, no increase in serotonin or something from the carbohydrate isn't clear. But, yeah, you could have a bagel or two, or whatever it is that you're compatible. Carbohydrate these days, carbohydrates, are such a complicated thing for most people. I like carbohydrates, especially late in the day. I do the either fast and go low carb, no carb during the day, because that lets me focus, and that's a meat and salad.
During the day or not eating for portions day. And then at night, I eat pasta and rice and I eat very little protein, sleep, like a baby, that's what works. But the other way is to take theanine. So before we were talking about theanine in reference to pre-sleep supplementation, 30 or 60 minutes before sleep, but a hundred to two hundred milligrams of theanine will take the Jitters out of a caffeine experience and in fact so much so that a lot of energy drinks now are starting to include theanine as in a
To get you to ingest more of those energy drinks because they understand that at some point people hit threshold and they feel so wide-eyed and wired that they're not going to consume more so they they're tricking you this way and it does indeed work. The other thing is if you ever really need to sleep I mean again be cautious do what's compatible with your Physicians advice but Gabba you know, you can buy Gaba and glycine in capsule form. So a gram of Gaba Grandma of glycine in combination, that's more.
Of a heavy hit over the head. What if you're having a hard time getting to sleep that can help. I don't recommend people take those chronically because gab of course is a neurotransmitter and I don't believe really in taking things that are very close to the actual thing that you're trying to manipulate. For instance, I'm not a fan of taking l-dopa. Why would I do that? I don't have Parkinsons but people will take mucuna purines, which is this, you know, essentially 99% l-dopa and you'll get really really elevated. But then you'll really crash.
A day or two. So I think that pulling on the Marionette strings a little bit from a distance, is better than taking the specific compound that you're trying to replace unless there's a clinical need. Of course,
one more topic and since we're at about 2 hours and 30 will wrap up in just a little bit. But the vagus nerve, what is the vagus nerve, what is the latest and greatest? Why is it of
Interest? So, the vagus nerve is a nerve Network, its many
Nerves. It could even be thought of as its own major branch of the peripheral nervous system. It comes out of the brain, basically, and connects to all the organs of the body. And this is the pathway by which a mental state can influence our digestion. Our heart rate are breathing, we talked earlier but HRV heart rate variability. The Vegas is important component to the slowing down of the heart rate when we exhale, it's a very important pathway Bandits bi-directional. So the organs of the body that I just
In the lungs, the got the heart etcetera, the spleen. They also send nerve connections back to the brain and there's been a lot of interest in the Vegas as a purely calming system and that's simply not true. The medical textbooks, call it appropriately. Cranial nerve 10. It's in the parasympathetic arm of the nervous system which suggests that it's all calming, but actually it's not. It has branches of it that are kind of stimulating as well. So in the kind of wellness and self-help Community you here, oh, you know,
You should do this thing of rubbing in front of your ears. It. That's a branch of the vagus it. Calms you down, or stimulate the vagus to calm down. Now in Neuroscience, Laboratories and even in some human neurosurgery Laboratories the way that you get people, more alert, in fact, a form of depression treatment is to stimulate the vagus and it makes people more alert and more positive and excited. So vagal stimulation can easily cause increases in alertness.
How do they do the stimulation?
This is a beautiful story. A colleague of mine perhaps in
To my mind, the most impressive neurobiologist. I know a guy by the name of Carl dieser off, he invented discovered and invented channelrhodopsins, which are these from algae. Essentially, that are light-sensitive clone the genes, you can put those genes into neurons, you have to do this by viral injection, and then you have a little blue light diode, that will allow you to stimulate just those neurons. Locally Carl's a psychiatrist, a bioengineer, and a neurobiologist operating at the very highest level. Actually, there's a book that he just published that I'm listening to now, that is
It's just can only be described as beautiful. It's a description of the landscape of Psychiatry and his attempts to build tools that are better than drugs to manipulate the nervous system. It's called projections and it's a beautiful read. You'll learn a ton of Neuroscience. Carl is well, on his way to win every big Prize in science. He's got all of them right now except the last one. And I'm not on the committee that votes for those, but he's remarkable also has five children, happily married. I mean he's like one of
His wife is a phenomenal scientist and physician. These people are as one of the reasons I like being at Stanford is because the mean is so very high. But Carl shifts. The mean, like, he's that dot way out there in any event Carl. There's a beautiful article that I can reference send you the link to in the New Yorker where Carl is sitting there talking with his patient and she has suicidal depression and she's describing her lack of desire to live and then he cranks up the intensity on this stimulation of the vagus.
Des. And in real time, she starts describing how she actually would be interested in applying for a couple of jobs this year. This is happening in the order of seconds by stimulation of the
vagus. What is the machine? What is it, actually? How does it connect to her? That
one is an implanted electrical stimulation device. That's placed. Probably on their many branches of the vagus and so on a branch that isn't going to impact breathing. Sometimes people have challenges with swallowing. So there are problems with doing the coral, a big part of his mission.
Is to create very small light diodes that can stimulate nerves without the need to inject viruses, and things of that sort. So that wild, I think, at a time, not too far from now, thanks to his work and the work of other. Bioengineers we are going to be able to stimulate for instance, just the serotonin neurons in the RAF a that lead to active coping. This is a well-known phenomenon. Whereas when you take Prozac or Zoloft or one of these other drugs, it will stimulate those neurons, but will also stimulate the serotonin receptors on the
final neurons that control the sexual response and that's why they have sexual side effects. So more Precision is coming. So as it relates to Vegas, the other way in which the Vegas is stimulating, is something that we do quite often, we have neurons in our gut that we all hear about the gut brain axis and people say, what's your second brain? But very seldom does anyone actually describe how the second brain actually impacts the other brain and the simple way to put this is we have these neurons that live in the mucosal lining of our gut.
And those neuron sends three things, they sense fatty acids. So they like fat, they sense. Amino acids, they love that mommy flavor. And they love amino acids because that's vital to protein repair metabolism, Etc. Protein synthesis scuse me and they like sugar. And when you eat something that has fatty acids, amino acids or sugar, these neurons send a signal, their part of the vagus nerve up to a little cluster of neurons in your neck, called the NoDoz ganglia. And
Oh Dio SE and the NoDoz ganglia, then stimulates your deep brain centers to release dopamine. And the amazing thing about this, these are data from a guy named Diego Boris at Duke University. The amazing thing about this system is that even if you numb, the mouth, even if you just gavage a person or an animal and put these substances into the stomach, you will seek more of these foods. And so, you're actually seeking sugar amino acids and fat.
More when you ingest those Foods independent of how they taste. And so this has a whole set of implications for hidden sugars and the fact that so many of the foods we eat, we just find ourselves eating more of them. We think this doesn't even taste, I don't even know why I'm eating this. It's because these neurons in your gutter, stimulating, dopamine release. And as we talked about before, dopamine isn't a molecule pleasure. It's a molecule of making. You want to do whatever led to dopamine release. Yeah, the
molecule of more the molecule for
So, the Vegas is multifaceted and we will soon hopefully subdivide it into some more meaningful Pathways, I don't like to knock on anyone elses work, but I do think that most of what you read out there about the Vegas and what it does and various theories about it. Our partial truth to Total nonsense, but they are partial truths to Total nonsense. That were grounded in the biology as we understood it at the time. And just a lot more has been understood in the last 10 years or so. So, no disrespect to those people but it's time for
A
revision, maybe two or three, more questions than we'll go get some food or something along those lines. The first is what books have you gifted the most to other people? Or are there any books that come to mind that you've gifted often to other people?
I love poetry and it's almost cliche now to say this because so many people like his work, but I think David whites work is just beautiful. And is a wonderful kind of entry point to to poetry.
I'm also a big Wendell Berry fan has written a lot about farming and the natural world and I've never met him but I'm a huge window. Barry fans. Some I'll sometimes give Wendell Berry books as gifts. The book that I think is perhaps that least to me the most beautiful book of all is longitude by Dava, Sobel about the history of the discovery of timekeeping at Ocean, which is not a trivial problem to solve and it's just a beautiful
Ori of how scientists or in this case, a particular scientist merged the Quest for a technology with a scientific problem with Adventure and going out on boats and you know, risking one's life for the sake of science is something that resonates with me a bit. It's a beautiful short book and it's very accessible to anybody whether or not you have a background in science or not and she said absolutely wonderful writer. And so that's the one I gift most often.
Is there a particular
David White book or starting point that you might recommend, you
know, I own several of his books, but I confess that, I forgetting the titles. Now you know what's interesting about David White is that his poetry is best consumed by listening to him, read it because he does this thing of repeating, things twice and his Cadence is so impressive. And so I would even though I load to kind of push people toward online to buy his books but I would suggest just going online and
Listening to a YouTube video or watching YouTube video of David reading, one of his poems, he's onto something. The thing about poetry that so fascinating to me, is the same reason why I love anything sung. By Bob, Dylan or Joe Strummer? Is that the words don't necessarily make sense in the pure cognitive landscape? They're tapping into some sort of deeper layer of the nervous system that defies the normal structure of sentences, and thoughts. And so, I think they good poets are accessing the subconscious.
And has nothing to do with rhyming. It has to do with accessing some layer of neurobiology that we just don't have a name for Andrew.
This question is, sometimes a complete dead end and I'll take the blame for that if it is, but just to just to go fishing and see what we catch here, if you could put anything on a gigantic billboard metaphorically speaking to get a message out quote, an image or word could be anything a quote from someone else. Anything at all
To billions of people. What might you put on that billboard?
Well, assuming this is a big
billboard. I could probably squeeze two things on there, but I would diminish the impact of either one. So, it's so simple, but it's the most use. At least has been the most useful thing in life to me, which is credit goes to the Oracle, which is know thyself. If there's one thing that's a really useful Pursuit is too.
Take a really good stock of what you've come into the world with and where you happen to be at present, get really honest about that with yourself and in doing that it illuminates. The path to filling in the gaps and improving oneself and knowing thyself is a dynamic process and the answers to knowing thyself and what that is will change over time. But that is the question that I think everybody, as soon as we are, able to should be asking ourselves and constantly updating
Know, thyself. What was second pick? You can put on the other side of the
billboard. Yeah, the other one was far weaker as one, I think. But use the body to control the mind. I really worry about this current state of the world where people are so unable to regulate their autonomic nervous system. Their stress, they're angry, they're pissed. And look, I suffer from this to someone's sometimes a comment on whatever I'm mostly on Instagram but sometimes on Twitter and I noticed all this anger and stuff.
And you start getting pulled into it from time to time. I regulate my behavior but I don't respond but we're all subject to this but almost all
harm. Almost all
self-harm and unfortunate things in life. Are the consequence of a poorly regulated. Autonomic nervous system, we say the wrong thing, we do the wrong thing, we're impulsive Etc and I think controlling the autonomic nervous system is simple in one sense and challenging in the other simple in the
That the tools exist, I do believe that respiration and vision are the two ways to control the autonomic nervous system in real time. The best ones and at the same time it's very hard to do. So we have to remind ourselves that's why I want to put it on the billboard that when your mind isn't where you want it to be.
Use your body to control your
mind. I love that going to use that on a long hike with the pooch a little later today. And we'll also include for everybody listening show notes with links to various resources, all the resources that we've discussed. So, Yoga Nidra, the various types of breath work. I'll also add a name, which is Leah Lagos, dr. Leah, Lagos has done a lot of really good work.
King at resonance training using breath work for improving HRV. Although improved HRV is really just a proxy for all of these other desirable outputs and effects in the world and, and in life. So we'll include all of that in the show notes and roof covered. A lot of ground is there anything else that you would like to mention or say, or Point people to and your request of the audience, anything at all that you'd like to add before we
Wrap up for today we mentioned some of the things that the beginning I teach Neuroscience on Instagram at huberman lab, those are resources. Brief Snippets anywhere from one to three minutes about Neuroscience, exciting papers. I see a lot of tools be wonderful. If people want to check out the podcast, we cover a lot of topics, not just neuroscience and we batch those by month. So that we do for five episodes in one thing, like hormones and then move on to something else. And I suppose, one request would be, we have the saying, in a
Tori. It's certainly not unique to Laboratories which is watch one, do one, teach one. And what would be most gratifying for me, would be if people find tools that they find useful, and they that they learn about them, that's the watch one part that they do them. They apply them in their own life and modify them if you like. And then I think the way the world works best at least in my view is when people go on to teach those tools and attribution isn't required. I didn't, as I always say, you know, I wasn't consulted at the design phase and I don't know anyone else.
That was either. So, you know, mother nature and deserves and biology deserve credit for all this. And so, if people would like to learn practice and teach, I like to think that the world can improve by virtue of sharing of
tools. I love it. A dig it, man. And there are a number of places people can follow you and should check you out. As you mentioned, the human Lab podcast, human lab.com and human Lab at human lab on Instagram and Twitter. This has been
So fun and I really appreciate all the time. It's been a real pleasure spending time with you. Andrew and I look forward to many more conversations. I've feeling that people will want a round two. So until then thanks to you and thanks to everyone for tuning in.
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