Andrew Huberman

The Tim Ferriss Show · #521: Dr. Andrew Huberman — a Neurobiologist on Optimizing Sleep…

• How Does Andrew Huberman Want Useful Tools to Spread?

  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 an

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• Why Seek Sugar With a Numb Mouth?

  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 in

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• How Do You Undo Too Much Coffee Before Bed?

  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 mill

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• Why Wait Ninety Minutes Before Morning Caffeine?

  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

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• How Much Water Does the Galpin Equation Call for?

  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 inge

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• What Testosterone Dose Sits Between Normal and Blasting?

  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

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• How Did Fadogia Agrestis Lift Andrew Huberman's Testosterone?

  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. Pe

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• Does Turmeric Block Dihydrotestosterone?

  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 p

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• Why Did Andrew Huberman Cage Exit the Next Day?

  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

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• Why Did Andrew Huberman Almost Get Kicked Out of Hoffman?

  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 car

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• Did Bill Gates Really Drop Out of College?

  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 sta

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• What Fight Made Andrew Huberman Turn His Life Around?

  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.

  H

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• Why Does Andrew Huberman Mix Tools for Brain Change?

  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

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• What Spiegel Eye Roll Score Did Tim Ferriss Get?

  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 ag

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• How Does a Physiological Sigh Cut Stress So Fast?

  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

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• Why Did Andrew Huberman Coin Non-sleep Deep Rest?

  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 minut

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• When Does Andrew Huberman Take Ashwagandha?

  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 no

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• How Does Two Days of Light Cover a Nine-hour Jump?

  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 th

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• How Did an Earlier Cortisol Pulse Ease Depression?

  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 timekee

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• Why View Sunlight Right After Waking Up?

  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 t

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