Smash Notes
#521: Dr. Andrew Huberman — a Neurobiologist on Optimizing Sleep, Performance, and Testosterone
Dr. Andrew Huberman — A Neurobiologist on Optimizing Sleep, Performance, and Testosterone | Brought to you by Athletic Greens all-in-one nutritional supplement, Theragun percussive muscle therapy devices, and Helix Sleep premium mattresses. More on all three below. Andrew Huberman, PhD ( @hubermanlab ) , is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the…
People
Notes
-
Andrew Huberman says light viewing behavior has perhaps the strongest effect on levels of alertness and on the capacity to fall asleep and get a good night's sleep. Every cell in the body needs information about time of day.
The central circadian clock is a collection of neurons over the roof of the mouth, the suprachiasmatic nucleus. The clock informs every cell in the body about time of day, but the clock sits deep in the brain and has no access to light. Melanopsin ganglion cells, neurons in the back of the eye, tell the central clock when it is daytime and when it is night. The eye is part of the brain outside the skull.
Andrew Huberman believes everybody should view sunlight for two to ten minutes every morning upon waking, including many blind people.
-
Andrew Huberman says morning light exposure triggers dopamine release. He calls dopamine part of the reward system and the molecule of motivation and positive anticipation. A cortisol pulse arrives once every 24 hours no matter what. The rhythm is intrinsic, and viewing light or exercising early in the day can time it.
David Spiegel, associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford, co-published with Bob Sapolsky. They showed that a cortisol pulse later in the day, especially around eight or nine PM, is associated with depression. Shifting the pulse earlier in the day ameliorates some of the symptoms of depression, and the dopamine release brings an overall mood enhancement.
He names four timekeepers for circadian biology, mood, and sleep. Light is the most powerful, then exercise, then feeding, then social cues such as people or a dog early in the day. Miss one day and the body still sends an early alertness signal, because it learns to anticipate the cues. Doing the cues every day is like setting a watch.
-
Andrew Huberman says the temperature minimum is the anchor for shifting sleep before a trip to Europe. In the two or three days before departure, set an alarm, wake up around that temperature minimum, maybe an hour before, and turn on bright lights at home. Bright light exposure starts to shift the clock forward. A nine-hour jump can be accomplished in about two days when the timing is done correctly. The reverse is also true, so the clock can shift earlier as well.
After landing in Europe, the clock back home matters more than the new environment. Light viewed in the hour or two before the temperature minimum makes a person want to go to sleep later and wake up later. Light viewed after the temperature minimum makes a person want to go to sleep earlier and wake up earlier.
-
Andrew Huberman starts ashwagandha late in the day once stress has lasted more than two or three days. Short-term stress buffers the immune system: pulses of cortisol activate the spleen to release killer cells, so a person is more robust at fighting off infection. Sleep disruption, or feeling wired and tired for more than two or three days, is where long-term stress starts, and buffering cortisol can really help.
He uses ashwagandha from time to time in a particularly long bout of stress, and there is good evidence it can buffer cortisol. He cycles it and is not going to take it every night or every day. He would probably stop after a week or so and go back to a normal regimen that does not include ashwagandha, though he always has some on hand. Buffering cortisol a little for a week or two is fine with him. He would not suggest suppressing cortisol long-term unless there is a real clinical need.
The practice that has really helped him reduce stress and fall asleep is yoga nidra, which literally means yoga sleep. Twenty or thirty minutes, and it does not have to be every day, of lying down for a body scan and long exhale breathing lets the mind enter a shallow sleep done while awake. Work in his laboratory and David Spiegel's laboratory shows that state helps a person get better at turning off thoughts and falling asleep in the evening.
-
Andrew Huberman coined non-sleep deep rest so people who avoid the name yoga nidra will still use the practice. Yoga nidra is one of several non-sleep deep rest protocols. He left the history and community of yoga nidra intact and offered a name more people will accept.
Yoga nidra costs nothing and has enormous effects on sleep, calm, and rates of neuroplasticity. Hypnosis falls under the same umbrella. David Spiegel, associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford and a close collaborator of Huberman, is a world expert in clinical hypnosis. Huberman and David Spiegel sit on the advisory board of Reverie. Reverie is a zero-cost app on Android and Apple with short hypnosis protocols from ten minutes to fifteen minutes.
The protocols let people enter deep rest on purpose so they fall asleep more easily, reduce stress, and raise rates of learning and neuroplasticity.
-
Andrew Huberman says the physiological sigh cuts stress the fastest while a person is still engaged in life. A breathwork class or a weekend at Esalen is a magical experience, but stress hits when life demands press in. Vacation, long meditation retreats, massages, and a nice drink, for anyone of drinking age, still work, but they are slow and take a person offline.
Physiologists discovered the pattern in the thirties. Professor Jack Feldman at UCLA, a world expert in the neurobiology of respiration, and Andrew Huberman's colleague Mark Krasnow at Stanford, who studies lung function, later rediscovered it. In deep sleep, when carbon dioxide in the bloodstream gets too high, people and dogs do a double inhale followed by an extended exhale. Sobbing children and adults do the same double inhale and exhale. It relaxes because it offloads a lot of carbon dioxide at once. Lungs are not two big bags of air. Millions of little sacks, laid flat, would cover about a tennis court, so the volume of air and carbon dioxide they can offload is tremendously high. Under stress, carbon dioxide builds up and the sacks deflate. A double inhale, best through the nose though the mouth also works, sneaks in a little more air at the end and reinflates the sacks. The exhale discards the carbon dioxide all at once. Unless a person is underwater, a double inhale followed by an extended exhale offloads the maximum amount of carbon dioxide.
Huberman's laboratory and other laboratories found that just one, two, or three physiological sighs bring stress down very, very fast.
-
Andrew Huberman says Tim Ferriss would score probably about a four on the Spiegel eye roll test, and a four is very hypnotizable. Andrew Huberman is about a four too.
He asked Tim Ferriss to look up toward the ceiling with eyes open, then slowly close the eyelids while still looking up. Looking up induces alertness. Closing the eyelids is what people do in sleepiness, so the two instructions conflict in the nerves for the eyes and eyelids. Spiegel senior and Spiegel junior found the eye roll is a very good predictor of how hypnotizable people are. Someone who is not very hypnotizable has a hard time closing the eyes slowly. The lids snap shut and the eyes roll forward, so the pupils show again. Tim Ferriss closed the eyelids very slowly, and Andrew Huberman saw the whites as the eyes started to roll back into the head.
The Spiegel eye roll predicts pretty well how quickly or easily a person will go into hypnosis. No one will go into hypnosis if they do not want to. When the eyes roll back the way Tim Ferriss's did, Andrew Huberman says a person interested in the Reverie app or a clinical hypnotist is home free.
-
Andrew Huberman says people keep behavioral tools, nutrition, supplementation, prescription drugs, and brain-machine interface devices in separate bins. He says the most interesting bin is the combination. A learning bout can be 300 milligrams of alpha-GPC plus a particular breathing protocol, and the two will have a synergistic effect. He says the real immediate future of beneficial brain change lies in that mix.
He tells Tim Ferriss that Tim is five years or more ahead of everybody else at spotting the horizon. Culture, Huberman says, stays stuck on what to do, what to take, and which device to use. At Neuralink, neurosurgeon Matt McDougall, who came up through Huberman's lab, works with other neuroscientists who are thinking clinical issues first, along with chips and robotics. Huberman says a roster like that is probably also thinking about accelerating plasticity with brain-machine interface plus pharmacology, and if they are not, they definitely should. For a typical person who will not plant a chip beneath the skull, combining what already works on its own, for the sake of synergy, gets people where they need to go much faster.
-
Andrew Huberman realized he was in serious trouble after a fight on July 4th, 1994. He was 19. He had barely finished high school, barely scraped through his first year of college, and lived in a squat with his ferret. His girlfriend had left him. He did not know how to do anything well.
He went to a barbecue with friends. Guys were robbing the house. A huge fight broke out. His so-called friends took off, and he fought four or five guys while knives and bottles came out. He stayed on his feet, and nobody got badly hurt or killed. The police congratulated him because the guys were robbing them. One officer said something like nice work, and the congratulations made him feel worst of all.
He wrote a letter to himself and to his parents saying he was going to turn things around. He decided to use the one power he seemed to have, remembering facts and information. He left Santa Barbara, took a leave of absence, and did two quarters at a local community college in the Bay Area. He studied like a maniac, first psychology, then biology, and fell in love with neuroscience and endocrinology. He went to graduate school, got a PhD, and became a tenured professor. He was no longer going to be a young screw-up. He was going to be a 20-year-old screw-up, and people were going to be less and less forgiving. He needed to get good at something.
-
Andrew Huberman took a leave of absence from UC Santa Barbara. He did not drop out. A leave of absence is a mechanism most universities have. Huberman says it was designed for family situations, like a pregnancy or a sick family member, so a student can leave and come back. It is distinctly different from dropping out. He was pretty close to dropping out or being forced out for poor grades and poor behavior. Fortunately, that did not happen.
People hear that Bill Gates dropped out of college, Steve Jobs dropped out of college, and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college. Huberman thinks it might have been Ryan Holiday, whom he does not know, who said people doing poorly in college should stay, because college is the one environment where the steps to the next metric of success are scripted out. A leave of absence is very different. Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg did not drop out. They took leaves of absence as an insurance policy so they could go back if they wanted to. Getting back into a system is very hard, and much harder after a complete break.
Huberman believes in formal, rigorous coursework. He is a university professor, and he says college is not perfect for everybody.
-
Andrew Huberman says the Hoffman Process was most transformative for him in forgiveness. By the time he went, in his early forties, he had already learned how to work hard, perform well, and control his physical landscape. He is forty-five now. He still arrived harboring a lot of resentment, mostly toward family members, and also toward experiences and people outside his family.
He almost got kicked out the first day, not for misbehavior, but because he slept through the first day. He had been working so hard. Staff kept saying he was trying to escape by sleeping. He says he was just tired. He had never felt so nurtured, and he does not accept nurturing easily. He thinks of himself as a caretaker loner. In the work he purged the resentments. He says the process completely erased all feelings that he was wronged by anybody or anything. There is no pharmacology there. The change is completely behavioral.
Huberman has no business relationship to Hoffman. He says the effect is powerful and it does last. He went because Wendy Yalom mentioned Hoffman, and a person who had gone told him that ten years later it still had a profound positive effect and was more useful than any other therapy or training. Hoffman has a price point and a scholarship program where an applicant writes something out. He thinks practitioners, therapists, and people in the wellness community also get a break of some sort.
-
Andrew Huberman's safety tanks were empty inside a shark cage, and he calls it the biggest nightmare. One thought hit him: he was going to go home alive. Sharks were everywhere, he had a weight vest on, and he was desperate for air. He decided to shoot for the surface toward the silhouette of the boat. He would either get eaten or drown, and he was certain he would drown if he stayed.
A diver kicked back toward him over a good 20 or 30 more seconds, and they shared air. The pair was now on one tank and the safeties were empty, so both might have to shoot for the surface. Everybody made it back in time. Andrew Huberman felt traumatized and on borrowed time.
The night of the dive he was able to sleep, and he did yoga nidra and was able to calm his mind and his nerves. The next day he went down again and cage exited. He did not do it to be tough or to seem tough. He did it because facing the trauma is the best way to purge the trauma. He believes cage exiting allowed him to report the experience. He feels nothing in his body, no tension, no stress, and no quaking related to the dive, and he thinks the trauma has been completely purged.
-
Andrew Huberman says turmeric is a fairly potent dihydrotestosterone antagonist. Dihydrotestosterone is made from testosterone through an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase. It is the more powerful androgen, with anywhere from 300 to 600 times the affinity for the androgen receptor. Testosterone is the androgen responsible for muscle growth, deepening the voice, aggression, and sex drive.
Dihydrotestosterone is mainly responsible for libido and many of the cognitive effects of testosterone. Androgen receptors in the amygdala give testosterone a fear-suppressing component. Huberman says dihydrotestosterone, more than testosterone, has a property of making effort feel good, and he says that is probably the main psychological effect of testosterone aside from libido and the body periphery. Creatine increases dihydrotestosterone. Huberman says someone who takes creatine and loses hair very quickly is probably dihydrotestosterone sensitive. Dihydrotestosterone promotes hair loss on the scalp and promotes beard growth, with inverse effects on the face and on the scalp.
The higher affinity for the androgen receptor is the basis of nandrolone, also called deca. A female runner who had been a good pick for the 1500 got a four-year ban after a nandrolone positive test. She and her coach claim the result came from a burrito containing pork with nandrolone. Huberman says he does not know whether she took nandrolone.
-
Andrew Huberman says some people take far too much Fadogia Agrestis. He thinks the bottle recommends two to three times a day, and he believes one 425 milligram capsule is more than sufficient. Anecdotally, for him, Fadogia Agrestis increased total testosterone by about 200 points.
He fell in the middle of the range, neither high nor low, at about 600 and hovering around 600. Fadogia Agrestis and the supplement he takes with it consistently bring the level into the high sevens or low eights, the direction he wants. When he has done blood work twice a year, at least for him, Fadogia Agrestis did not down-regulate luteinizing hormone. HCG definitely would down-regulate luteinizing hormone. People who take testosterone cypionate, so-called TRT or similar, will see a down-regulation in luteinizing hormone.
He mentions the supplements because they sit between doing nothing with respect to supplements, or taking things that do not really work, and taking the full plunge into TRT.
-
Andrew Huberman says sports testosterone replacement is a middle path people created on the internet. It is neither replacement meant to bring levels up to normal or high normal, nor the heavy use gym rats call blasting.
People now inject at home, under the skin or into muscle, every third or fourth day, at a low dose of maybe 40 milligrams, spread more evenly because long-lasting forms like cypionate release over time. Blasting is three, four, or five hundred. Sports dosing is 200 a week or 300 a week. He calls the amount of self-directed pharmacology incredible, and says androgen levels that get too high can really mess you up. He favors moving into supplementation gently and then doing a blood test. Replacement over time still takes a prescription and a talk with a doctor.
-
Andrew Huberman says hydration is a big factor in cognitive function, and people often overlook it. He calls the rule the Galpin equation, after exercise physiologist Andy Galpin, who built it for physical work. Huberman says the same rule works for cognitive work.
Body weight in pounds divided by 30 gives the ounces of water to drink about every 20 minutes while exercising or doing mental work. The volume can mean an extra trip to the bathroom or two. Huberman says that extra trip is worth it.
Dehydration is a subtle but very pernicious creep. The eyes get hard to focus, and the feeling is a want to go to sleep. The hydration factor is real, so drink plenty of fluids, especially when ingesting caffeine, because caffeine is a diuretic.
-
On The Tim Ferriss Show, most people would benefit from waiting ninety minutes to two hours after waking before they ingest caffeine. Taking it right after waking competes out residual adenosine, so the benefit of the morning cortisol pulse is lost. The cortisol pulse clears out the rest of the adenosine.
Sleepiness comes from the time of day, through the circadian clock, and from adenosine building up in the system. Adenosine is the sleepiness factor. A lot of people feel much better throughout the day, with less of a cracked-out rise and crash on caffeine, when they delay coffee or mate for about ninety minutes to two hours after waking. The first day or two of waiting is painful, and the rest of the day feels better.
-
Andrew Huberman says caffeine can be countered in one direct way and two indirect ways. The direct way is to raise glucose. Eating bread blunts the stimulant effect, and he suggests a bagel or two, or another compatible carbohydrate. He says it is unclear whether a rise in serotonin from the carbohydrate is also part of the effect.
Tim Ferriss asked about five cups of coffee and a half-life that blocks sleep until three in the morning. Huberman fasts or stays low-carb or no-carb in the daytime, eating salad or skipping food for parts of the day, because the approach lets him focus. At night he eats pasta and rice with very little protein and sleeps like a baby. A hundred to two hundred milligrams of theanine will take the jitters out of caffeine, beyond the thirty or sixty minute pre-sleep dose already under discussion. Energy drinks now add theanine so people who feel wide-eyed and wired will drink more, and he says the addition works.
GABA and glycine are sold in capsules. A gram of GABA plus a gram of glycine is a heavier hit when sleep is urgent. Huberman says to be cautious and follow a physician's advice.
-
On The Tim Ferriss Show, neurons in the mucosal lining of the gut sense fatty acids, amino acids, and sugar. They like fat. They like amino acids for the umami flavor and because amino acids are vital to protein repair, metabolism, and protein synthesis. They like sugar.
When you eat something with fatty acids, amino acids, or sugar, the neurons, which are part of the vagus nerve, send a signal up to a little cluster of neurons in the neck called the nodose ganglia. The nodose ganglia then stimulates deep brain centers to release dopamine.
Data from Duke University show the drive does not depend on taste. Even if you numb the mouth, or gavage a person or an animal and put the substances into the stomach, you will seek more of the foods. You seek sugar, amino acids, and fat more when you ingest the foods, independent of how they taste.
-
Andrew Huberman says his one request follows a laboratory saying, and he notes the saying is certainly not unique to laboratories: watch one, do one, teach one. What would gratify him most is if people find tools they find useful, learn about them, do them, apply them in their own life, and modify them if they like. In his view, the world works best when people go on to teach the tools.
Watch one is the learning. Do one is the practice: people apply a tool in their own life and change it when they want to. Teach one is the step after that. Attribution is not required. Huberman says he was not consulted at the design phase, and he does not know anyone else who was either, so mother nature and biology deserve the credit.
If people learn, practice, and teach, he likes to think the world can improve by virtue of sharing tools.
Related notes
- What Is One Great Way to Reduce Stress
- How Long Does It Take for Caffeine to Take Effect in Your Body
- Why Is No Caffeine Best for Sleeping
- What Does Caffeine Do to Your Body
- Why Does Caffeine Block Sleepiness Instead of Raising It?
- Why Does Andrew Huberman Feel Alert After an All-nighter?
Related episodes
- #164 – Andrew Huberman: Sleep, Dreams, Creativity & the Limits of the Human Mind
- #381: Charles Koch — CEO of Koch Industries
- Exercise, Nutrition, Hormones for Vitality & Longevity | Dr. Peter Attia
- GUEST SERIES | Dr. Andy Galpin: How to Assess & Improve All Aspects of Your Fitness
- The Science & Practice of Perfecting Your Sleep | Dr. Matt Walker
- 16 - CAFFEINE
- Matthew Walker - Sleep is your super power
- What's on Your Mind in That Brain of Yours?