Andrew Huberman · 129 min
Timestamped transcript. Each marker links directly to that moment in the video.
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welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today we are going to discuss your brain chemistry and how to control
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instance be focused when you want to focus that allow you to relax when you need to relax and de-stress that allow you to optimize your sleep that allow you to optimize your exercise routine or to work through a pain point in relationship or in career or in your relationship to yourself so what I can
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mous.com SL huberman in addition momentus supplements ship internationally something that a lot of other supplement companies simply do not do so that's terrific whether or not you live in the US or you live abroad right now not all of the supplements that we discuss on the hubman Lab podcast are
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lipids or more carbohydrate whether or not they're relying more on glucose metabolism based on the contents of their breath this is true during waking and during sleep and this is what allowed them to do these incredible measurements of what's being metabolized during sleep they measured close to
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depth of sleep and duration of sleep is important for metabolism during the daytime and indeed that's the case if people are sleep deprived or they're not sleeping enough things like glucose metabolism Etc get really disrupted during the daytime but what this current study shows is that the metabolism that
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So-Cal night owls there's a lot of controversy out there as to whether or not different so-called chronotypes exist that is people who just naturally or genetically want to be an early bird wake up early and go to bed early so these people that wake up at 400 a.m. and would be most comfortable going to
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mental health physical health and performance this is a study done in humans focusing specifically on people that like to stay up late and sleep in but who desire to be able to get up and feel Alert in order to go to work or study and they want to go to sleep a bit earlier and so there are a lot of
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wakes up at 10:00 a.m. to try and get up at 8: or even 7: a.m. consistently but they were also asked to maximize outdoor light exposure during the mornings for reasons that if you've listened to this podcast before if you heard me talk about before you know that I'm constantly talking about I'll
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light episode you can find those at huberman lab.com they're asking them to do that here and they ask participants to keep a regular schedule for their daily meals not eating on the hour for consistently you know at 9:00 a.m. noon 300 p.m. exactly but within again about 15 to 30 minutes they're always eating
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feeling more alert during the day again improvements in cognitive performance mood and physical performance grip strength Etc very few studies are able to or willing to tackle so many variables and combine them in one study this paper I think does a marvelous job of doing this and is incorporating
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to me because there is now a wealth of data showing that our gut microbiome that is trillions of little microbacteria that are good for us impact our immune system our hormones and the so-called gut brain axis the connections between our gut and our brain that go in both directions gut to
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to that personalization they take it a step further by offering free consultations with a coach to help you optimize your experience and dial in your perfect formulas I've been using thesis for about eight months now and I can confidently say that their New Tropics are the best that I've ever used
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of insid tracker plans that's insidetracker docomo to get 20% off let's talk about how to optimize and indeed how to control your brain chemistry for a sake of health and performance now in order to do that we all need to be on the same page about some basic facts some of those basic
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principle that we can generate electricity and pass electricity to other beings or in the case of neurons from one neuron to the next the way neurons do that is that in between the neurons they little spaces those little spaces are called synapses and neurons literally vomit
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lighting up and indeed talking about brain areas lighting up can be a little bit or a lot misleading because in fact no single brain area controls any one single perception or behavior or feeling State rather we have so-called neural circuits chains of neurons chains of specific neurons that is that create
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creative state or whether or not you're going to be in a state of mind more fit more capable that is of doing focused work or math or more so-called linear types of work where there's a correct answer there's a specific thing to follow and you're simply going to plug and chug as it were through a particular
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well consider that at any given moment whether not you're asleep or awake whether not it's morning or afternoon or night you have some amount of dopamine being released in your brain and body some amount of Serotonin some amount of epinephrine and some amount of acetylcholine it is rarely if ever the
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picture far simpler because what we can say for sure is that the fast actions of dopamine or the fast actions of epinephrine serotonin or acetylcholine are actions that occur on the order of seconds or minutes or up to about an hour or so whereas the slower actions of those neuromodulators tend to occur on
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dopamine and epinephrine levels tend to subside a bit compared to the earlier phase one part of the day and serotonin levels start to increase and then phase three of the 24-hour cycle which is from about and again about these Areo approximates from about 17 hours after waking until about 24 hours after waking
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that you can do in the late portion of phase two of the day in order to enhance your transition time into and depth of sleep but you can't really do much during sleep right you're not taking supplements you're not doing breathing practices there things to fall back asleep but you're not really doing much
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day serotonin tends to dominate more than dopamine and epinephrine and so if you think about that what it means is that if your goal is to increase serotonin in order to get some particular effect on your mental performance or physical performance or health or if your goal is to increase
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effect it will have but if you can understand these backdrop Baseline elements to how neuromodulators work well then you're in a terrific position to leverage the best tools in the immediate and short term and that is on the order of seconds minutes and hours before we dive into the more pointed
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adolescent becomes a young adult right that's what puberty really is in fact puberty is perhaps the most traumatic transformation that we go through in our entire lifespan in terms of our aging because indeed it reflects a very rapid I should mention period of aging and transformation of the identity of cells
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epinephrine levels go up and in general when hormones like oxytocin or prolactin are increased levels of Serotonin go up we can't draw a direct link between any one hormone system and acetylcholine aceto Coline kind of sits off in a category of its own in that way but again in general testosterone and
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spend at least 20 minutes or so closer to 30 minutes each day trying to maximize sunlight exposure to as much of their skin as they could in terms of still maintaining decent exposure meaning not overexposing themselves in a cultural way meaning wearing enough clothes that they were decent but still
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amounts of dopamine or or at least when prolactin levels are high dopamine levels tend to be lower You observe this after the birth of a new child You observe this post qually after mating in all species humans and animals when prolactin is elevated serotonin tends to be elevated and when
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sort of Kit a grab bag of things that you can use in any context or I should say that you can look to depending on the context you're in and create the states of body and mind that you want now once again painting with a somewhat broad brush but nonetheless an accurate brush we can say that dopamine when
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neuromodulators so dopamine we can think of at least in the context of today's discussion as controlling and indeed promoting motivation drive and pursuit and to some extent Focus epinephrine and a closely related molecule called nor epinephrine and again I want to
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infections of multiple kinds at least in term that and all the details of that and tools related to that were covered in our episode on the immune system if you want to check that out now the neuromodulator serotonin creates a number of different states in the brain and body but for
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hormone systems and acetylcholine we can mainly associated with states of focus and we can go a step further and say that it's mainly associated with steps of focus as they relate to learning and encoding new information so-called neuroplasticity now neuroplasticity or the brain and nervous
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brought over this couple they had a newborn I think this baby had been born maybe two or three weeks before and it was seated or not seated it was lying down it couldn't see it like a potato bug you barely hold its head up but it was lying in a little bassinet on the floor as we ate dinner and it was almost
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which I certainly do not recommend supplements nutrition you can listen to particular music you can do all sorts of cognitive behavioral nutritional supplementation tricks or you can just understand that what you're really after are increases in dopamine above Baseline that you control and
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way that's appropriate maximize the amount of sunlight exposure to your skin but please don't get burned please do wear sunscreen if you're prone to getting burned typically early day sunlight is not going to burn you at least not most people unless you're extremely fair skinned so don't get
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and feelings of being in Pursuit and generally in craving and pursuit of things in life now there's another way to increase the effect of whatever dopamine happens to be circulating in your brain and body and this again relates to increasing the number or the efficacy of The receptors for dopamine
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fall asleep having too much caffeine in your system is not good because it disrupts the architecture of sleep and now knowing about all the metabolic variability across the night according to different stages of sleep it should be even more obvious as to why disrupting the architecture of sleep
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they've got a lot of tyrosine in their system and dopamine in their system and they've got less of the enzyme that removes that dopamine or limits its action and so they have an excess of dopamine and dopamine has effects on blood pressure Etc so the cheese effect is something to avoid if you are
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ADHD and you can find that hubman lab.com and the other places this podcast is found prescription drugs aside because they require prescription and a discussion that's in-depth and appropriate with your physician healthcare provider there are supplements that can very potently
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as a supplemented amino acid I sometimes take this I would say I probably take it about once a week maximum for work bouts or workouts I'll take it in dosages of anywhere from 500 milligrams to 1,000 milligrams people vary tremendously in their sensitivity to supplementing El tyrosine I know people that can take two
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are going to look at behavioral tools for potently increasing dopamine that too is a vast landscape and we know based on hundreds if not thousands of studies that things like winning at some sort of competition or succeeding in reaching a goal can certainly increase dopamine we talk a lot about this in the
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the other catacol amines as I mentioned before dopamine tends to collaborate with epinephrine and vice versa now you don't need to put yourself into 60° Fahrenheit water to get these kind of sustained increases and you certainly don't need to do it for two hours we have strong reason to believe
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very significant increases in dopamine and epinephrine I think you'll agree that this is a really potent tool that provided it's given safely and gone about safely is giving you the kinds of increases in dopamine that you would seek using prescription pharmacology now it shouldn't be used as a replacement
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some peripheral neuropathy some death of nerves in the per periphery if you want to know what dosage levels are relevant there just simply look it up online there's a lot of information about this but you do want to make sure that you're getting enough B6 B12 Etc such that you can keep prolactin levels in check and
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system day-to-day for motivation mood and focus and of course keep in mind those things that can suppress dopamine the bright light exposure elevated prolactin and so on my hope is that by understanding those tools and how they work and understanding that dopamine does certain things and not others that
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you'll be able to adjust them and apply them in the ways that allow you to access the dopamine increases that you're after so next I'd like to talk about epinephrine also called adrenaline I want to point out that epinephrine is released both in the brain and the body in fact there's a barrier between brain
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about stress how to master stress how to leverage stress how to conquer stress there are a lot of great tools to do that that are behavioral supplementation based please see the episode on mastering stress for those tools but there are people including me that want to increase our levels of epinephrine at
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before if you drink too much caffeine close to waking you're going to have an afternoon crash better to push that caffeine intake out about 90 to 120 minutes after waking I know this is really painful for certain people but caffeine does increase epinephrine caffeine does other things to limit
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epinephrine adrenaline release in the brain and body it works the first time and it works every time to increase epinephrine and thereby energy and in fact there are protocols and great scientific studies of using cyclic hyperventilation for periods of minutes if not longer where for instance you
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or for various heart conditions Etc that's really the domain of Physicians and should really be worked out with your cardiologist with a physician Etc I think the tools of exercise and should you want very potent increases in Adrenaline high-intensity exercise as well as the tools of caffeine cyclic
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being bombarded with sensory information through all of our various senses and acetycholine released from this area in the back of the brain has the ability to increase the extent to which say visual information or just Visual and auditory information would make it through to our Consciousness whereas all the other
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include again nutrition and supplementation it is important to have Baseline levels of acetylcholine be sufficiently high as well and for that really the ideal situation is to regularly ingest foods that provide enough of the precursors for acetylcholine to be made if you go
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muscle and yes smoking nicotine either by vaping or cigarette will activate those nicotinic receptors but of course smoking is a terrible thing it will also activate things like lung cancer so I definitely don't recommend that it also activates addiction because of the ways that it triggers activation of the
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often take 300 milligrams of alpha GPC prior to workouts or prior to cognitive work bouts but when I say often I tend to do this anywhere from three to four times a week typically not every day although there are people including people who are trying to offset age related cognitive decline that will take
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years increasing stroke risk again those studies looked at people who have been taking it for up to a decade but in any case one way to prevent the increase in tmao if you're taking Alpha GPC at all is to take 600 milligrams of garlic because it contains something called Allison this was a uh trick that was
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supplementation based ways to improve acetylcholine or I should say increase acetylcholine and that does in fact lead to increases in one's ability to focus this is why a lot of the prescription drugs for the treatment of Alzheimer's age related cognitive decline and indeed even some of the drugs that tap into
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supplementation tools that can tap into the serotonin system not to the same degree in potency but nonetheless in ways that can still impact our feelings of well-being in positive ways so let's focus first on the behavioral tools and some of these might make people chuckle a little bit but I want to point out
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increasing serotonin and activity of the brain circuits that involve serotonin and that lead to increases in feelings of well-being so is interesting receiving much more than giving gratitude is what activates those serotonergic Pathways so the takeaway from that is both give and receive
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that contain a lot of tryptophan and that some people will leverage um in order to try and increase the total amount of circulating serotonin available to them in order to have a modest increase in overall mood and well-being so what are some of these Foods these are things like milk in
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that study the study was focused not so much on serotonin but was focused mainly on treatment of obesity and appetite and weight loss and it should come as no surprise that serotonin if increased might lead to decreases in appetite a cautionary note cisus quadrangularis may need to be
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5htp is just far too much it blunts their appetite might even reduce libido there aren't a lot of very wellc controlled studies looking at this and so it has to be figured out on an individual basis if you decide to approach it at all now one molecule that I found to be particularly interesting
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tremendously high things like five grams 8 grams 18 grams of myosl Taken throughout the day I don't know how people stomach that and in fact many people drop out of those studies because of gastric discomfort and yet I also wonder how people tolerate it because it has
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well to them others like myself don't and of course always be on the lookout for dramatic or even subtle decreases in appetite or libido or things that you might not want if you are going to be tinkering with your serotonergic uh levels and Pathways and then myosl actually is proving to be quite useful
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if it's appropriate for you prescription drugs and certain behavioral protocols to try and get these potent increases these acute increases in whichever the neurom modulators you happen to want to leverage for your particular goals so that brings us to the end of at least this exploration of the neuromodulators
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most useful for that matter that the information that I've provided today allows you a kit of versatile tools that allows you to figure out what levels of dopamine and augmentation of dopamine are appropriate and necessary for you what levels of acetylcholine and tools for manipulating acetylcholine are going
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different phases of our 24-hour cycle during which those very same neuromodulators tend to be naturally higher or naturally lower and I reviewed that at the beginning of the episode so my wish for you is that you will take this information experiment with it as you see fit for you and in a safe way
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