LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman Question & Answer in New York, NY

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast,

where we discuss science and science-based tools

for everyday life.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor

of neurobiology and ophthalmology

at Stanford School of Medicine.

Recently, the Huberman Lab hosted a live event

at the Beacon Theater in New York City.

The event was entitled, "The Brain-Body Contract,"

and it consisted of a lecture followed

by a question and answer session with the audience.

We wanted to make the recorded version of that question

and answer session available to everybody,

regardless of who could attend.

So what follows is the question and answer

period from the Brain-Body Contract live Huberman Lab

event.

Want to be sure to thank the sponsors from that event.

They were Eight Sleep, which makes

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I started sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress

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In fact, I love my Eight Sleep so much that when I travel--

now, I'm quite bothered that Airbnbs and hotels don't

have Eight Sleep mattress covers on them,

and I've even shipped my Eight Sleep mattress cover out

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If you want to try Eight Sleep, you can go

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Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA,

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Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman.

I'd like to also thank our supplement partner, Momentous.

They make the very highest quality supplements.

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that match what is discussed on the Huberman Lab podcast.

If you're interested in any of those supplements,

please go to livemomentous.com/Huberman.

And now, without further ado, the question and answer session

from the live event held at the Beacon Theater

in New York City.

And as always, thank you for your interest in science.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

You've said before that stress can be good for us,

but how do we know when it's too much?

That's a good question, and I should preface that

by saying that there's some incredible work that

was done by a colleague of mine, Dr. Alia Crum.

Ali is how she goes by, Dr. Allie Crum.

Who is a-- she was a Division I athlete.

She's a tenured professor of psychology at Stanford.

She's a licensed clinical psychologist, like everyone.

So when I look around my colleague,

I'm like, oh, my goodness.

Who are these people?

Very humbling place to be.

But she's made some important discoveries,

and I want to just highlight one, which

is this notion of mindset.

And no, these are not placebo effects,

but let me just tell you.

When you think about stress, how you think about stress

is really important.

First of all, you can't lie to yourself.

But if for instance you watch a one or three-minute video,

as she's given subjects in her lab about stress,

and it tells you all the terrible things

that stress does to your immune system and sleep,

then you experience those things-- increases

in blood pressure, et cetera.

However, if you watch a one to three-minute video that's

also true about the fact that stress can sharpen

your decision making for certain kinds of things,

actually, can accentuate your immune system.

I wish someone had helped me get this narrative right out there.

Stress does not deplete your immune system,

unless it goes on a long, long time.

We'll talk about what long means in a moment.

Why would it?

Think about it.

If you had to fast and move with family

or weather a storm of any kind, emotional or physical,

and you got sick, that wouldn't make any sense.

It's usually after you're stressed.

If you've ever been go, go, go, or taking care of a loved one

or studying or working hard, and then you finally go

on vacation, you rest, you arrive, and you get sick,

it's because your immune system shut down.

It stopped.

Your immune system is mobilized by that alertness side

of your autonomic nervous system, but you do need sleep.

You do need sleep, and it's actually,

we think, the slowing of circulation.

And this is why it's probably not a good idea

to exercise if you're already sick,

and if you're veering towards sick

probably limit the intensity of any kind of interaction

as best you can and just still yourself.

Well, Ali's lab has clearly shown us over and over again

that what we know, our knowledge base, really

does shape the physiology over those outcomes.

Now, you know that stress is both bad and good,

so which one is it?

Does it average to nothing?

No.

It turns out that you can bias this

in one direction or the other, depending on which information

you're listening to more often.

I think this is really important.

I still am trying to get my head and my mind

around what's happened over the last few years

and where it's placed us.

Like where did it land us?

Are we more resilient now, or are we just really beat up?

I don't know.

I really don't know, but I think how

we interpret the last few years is

going to make a big difference in terms of how it impacts us.

How do we know if we are--

thanks, yeah.

What we're missing out there, I think,

is a narrative from somebody that people listen to.

And I'm not saying that person should be me.

In fact, it shouldn't be me but somebody that can help us frame

what's just happened to us, much like a good--

I think the world needs a good therapist, basically.

Needs a very good therapist.

So I would call short-term stress, which

is very beneficial for us, is the kind of stress that

happens on the order of a day, two, or three days.

Not a problem.

Even if you feel torn apart, provided you can get

rest afterwards.

Long-term stress is the kind of stress

that really starts to impede your sleep-wake cycle,

make your dreams more stressful and more like nightmares,

and they're not going away.

And I can promise you that for those of you that

have challenges with accumulation of stress

from the past that's now compounded by what's happening

now, et cetera, the solution does

seem to be to get yourself into a supported environment

of some kind that will allow you to go through a full catharsis.

Again, it doesn't have to require psychedelics.

That can take you through the full ride

of autonomic intensity--

catharsis of some sort-- and then relaxation.

That does seem to be what snaps people out

of what we would call longer term stress

and historical stress.

There's even the question of whether or not

focusing directly on the trauma and the story is so critical.

I think it is.

Obviously that's something that should

be done with a clinician, but stress

that impedes your sleep for three nights or more, that

shifts the pattern of dreams to more anxious dreams, that

is more long-term stress.

And for that, you need to take it seriously,

and it's the kind of thing where if you don't take it seriously,

it can start degrading things like your immune system,

et cetera.

And I would say that under those conditions,

use sleep as a good marker.

In fact, I'm sure there are some clinicians in the room.

I mean, one of the questions that is used as a diagnostic

for whether or not people are depressed

or anxiously depressed is whether or not

they are sleeping well or not.

Again, language is not very good at parsing

what's going on inside.

We have to look to behaviors and regularity

of sleep-wake cycles, et cetera.

Hopefully that was at least a partial answer.

I tried to be accurate, but if I were exhaustive,

I might actually cure insomnia someday

with these podcasts if nothing else.

How has hypnosis been impacting my life?

I'm in hypnosis.

No, the-- I actually spent most of the afternoon in hypnosis.

Before I do these, I spend a good hour in hypnosis.

Again, self-directed hypnosis-- gosh, it's so unfortunate.

I keep talking to David Spiegel about this.

Again, his dad was one of the originators

of hypnosis as a valid psychiatric treatment.

There's even the idea that things

like EMDR, the scanning of eyes back and forth

while reporting a narrative, may actually

be capturing some of the elements of hypnosis.

Again-- and this is why, at least for me,

I appreciate the opportunity to come together tonight

to talk about principles.

I would hope that after tonight, you

could look at any practice, anything,

any compound, any breathing exercise,

and just be able to frame up which

continuum, where on the continuum,

what's it really designed to do.

Move you up towards alertness or down towards calm.

And in fact, because I can't help myself,

I'll just tell you for all the breathing stuff,

it can be made very simple.

If your exhales are longer and more

vigorous than your inhales, you're going to get calm down.

If your inhales are longer and more

vigorous than your exhales, you're

going to become more alert.

And if you hold your breath, just eventually

just start breathing again.

The physiology maps perfectly to that.

That maps perfectly to the physiology.

And if, for instance, you do box breathing-- inhale hold,

exhale holding, and this kind of thing--

well, you're going to stay right where you're at.

You're going to be on an even plane more or less.

So that hopefully captures all of breathwork in one sentence.

Now, I'll answer the question you were asking me.

Hypnosis, it's impact in my life in a couple of ways.

One way is more from a practical scientific way, which

is that my laboratory works on vision, and we work on stress.

And in some ways, those might seem divorced.

Although now with the cuttlefish and the fact

that your eyes narrow their field of view

when you're stressed, et cetera, it

should become obvious why that is.

But hypnosis also takes advantage

of this really weird cool feature, which is--

and it's always weird when you do a group exercise,

but I can't really see you all that well.

I certainly can't see your eyes well enough to know this.

But David Spiegel, there's actually something in the--

this is a valid thing called the Spiegel Eye Roll Test,

and it's not the teenage eye roll.

That when you look up while not moving your head-- when

you look up, you actually are engaging

circuits in your brainstem that are involved

in generating alertness.

And when you look down and your eyes close,

the opposite is true.

You're engaging circuits in the brain that are taking you

into a calmer state.

Now, wouldn't it be wonderful if all you had to do was look down

and you'd be calm and look up and you'd be alert.

That doesn't quite work that way.

But to induce hypnosis, what they do

is they have people look up, and then while looking up,

close their eyes, which is actually hard to do.

Some people can't do it.

Their eyes roll forward, hence the Spiegel Eye Roll Test.

Some people, their eyes get-- you

see the whites of their eyes, and it looks really spooky,

and they're looking up while their eyes closed.

Those people are very prone to hypnosis.

Why?

Well hypnosis is a state of deep relaxation

with alertness and focus.

It's a contextual narrowing-- excuse me.

So it's like being in early stage sleep,

and that's why stage hypnosis works with telling people

to do certain things.

It's not that they don't care or they're

under the control of the hypnotist.

It's that they forget what's around them.

Why?

Because their mind is focused internally and on the dialogue

with the hypnotist and is not paying attention to context.

So it's a narrowing of context.

But hypnosis for me has been very useful because A,

it validated the relationship between vision and states

of mind.

It also checks off this box, again,

which is that to access neuroplasticity,

what do you need?

You need focus plus you need a state of deep relaxation.

Usually, first focus then sleep or non-sleep deep rest.

But Spiegel and his daddy figured out

because they're way smarter than I am that you can get people

into that perfect state of neuroplasticity

by combining them both in real time

through this atypical thing we call hypnosis.

So I do daily or maybe every other day hypnosis script

that's about-- it's self-directed hypnosis

script of about 5 to 15 minutes, usually,

trying to get myself to be less pissed off about something

that I'm really pissed off about, frankly.

I imagine the stuff I'm really pissed off

about in the screen on the left side.

I think about all the things that make me feel good,

and then I keep thinking about how angry I am.

This is really how it goes.

And then over time, I've noticed, well,

you're coupling that bodily state of calm

to the anger thing.

This is all very hard to do in talk therapy.

No disrespect to talk therapy.

There's a tremendous advantage to talk therapy that I myself

have benefited from it, although according

to certain people in my life not enough.

But hypnosis works because it's capturing

neuroplasticity processes.

Thank you for that question.

What are the most effective protocols

for boosting the microbiome?

Oh.

Well, here, I'm very fortunate because my upstairs

neighbor at Stanford is the great Justin Sonnenburg,

and he and his wife Erika run this amazing lab defining

all the principles of the gut microbiome,

and they have a really cool idea.

I don't know if he's serious about this,

but I can't help but chuckle when

I think that this might actually be true.

We all know-- this is definitely true--

that we all carry around trillions

of little micro-bacteria.

Not just in our gut--

that goes from one end of our throat

to the other-- any mucosal lining.

Eyes, genitalia, nose-- we have microbiomes

in our nose, et cetera.

This is why we're heading into the winter months

being a nasal breather.

That sounds like crazy new agey stuff-- be a nasal breather.

There's actually a book written by Paul Ehrlich and Sandra Kahn

at Stanford with a foreword by Jared Diamond and Robert

Sapolsky.

The book, Jaws, so these are some heavy hitters.

And there's very good evidence that people who mouth breathe

are making themselves more prone to illness

when nasal breathing because of the microbiome.

It's just a better filter for germs.

So this winter and always really try and be a nasal breather

all the time.

One of the best ways to do that if you're not into the mouth

taping thing, which people do, is

to try and do some of your exercise

with just nasal breathing.

It'll take a little while to get used to,

but I'm not good at the nasal breathing thing

because I'm always talking.

The microbiome is all over us and in us.

It's on our skin.

We're actually exchanging it when we meet

and we shake hands.

Do you know what happens usually in the first 10, 15 seconds?

Data from Noam Sobel's lab at the Weizmann

has shown that we wipe our eyes.

We wipe other people's molecules on us.

We're really good at that.

Just watch these interactions.

Now, everyone's going be doing the germ free handshake.

They're going to be fist bump.

But there is this idea that maybe we are the house cats.

Maybe we're not just transporting

all these microbiota because it's good for us.

What if we're just the vehicles, and they're running the planet?

And they're like, oh, we're running out of some stuff.

Like we should figure out somebody to take us to Mars,

and then we'll take over Mars.

I mean, maybe it's all them.

And Justin was the one that told me that,

and I was like, that's kind of eerie if you think about it.

But there might be these other intelligences that

are hijacking us, and that's scary

because we like to think that we're in charge, and who knows.

What's good for your microbiome, or what's good for them

that is?

Well, prebiotic fiber seems to be very important,

but the studies of fiber, at least,

as it relates to the microbiome are somewhat controversial.

There was a study done on humans at Stanford

by Chris Gardner and Justin Sonnenburg

that showed that people who eat one to four--

you have to ramp up--

servings of low sugar fermented foods.

This would be your kimchi, your natos, your sauerkraut,

your kiefer's, your kombuchas, et cetera.

Per day develop a very robust microbiome,

and fiber did not do that.

In fact, fiber increased the so-called inflammatory,

which is the markers for inflammation,

but that doesn't mean that fiber is bad.

Fiber actually is-- getting enough fiber

is correlated with a number of other things

that are great, like reduced cardiovascular disease,

for instance, cancers of the colon, for instance--

so fiber and gut microbiota.

Prebiotics, probiotics, probably only necessary

if you have a dysbiosis-- if you've been taking antibiotics,

or if for some reason you're depleted of the microbiome.

One of the great ways to deplete your microbiome

is to just eat highly processed foods,

but hopefully most people aren't doing that.

So prebiotic fiber and these low-sugar fermented foods,

and then someone always says beer.

So and always, yes.

Yes, beer will support your microbiome,

but it might do other things too.

So in general, low-alcohol, low-sugar fermented foods

reduce the number of inflammatory markers.

That's very, very clear from the Sonnenburg data.

And then there are other ways, of course.

The microbiome, actually, interacts with temperature.

So the cold exposure thing is actually

good for your microbiome, but--

and I want to really emphasize this.

If you hear about studies that such and such improves

such and such, keep in mind that anything

that improves your sleep, your microbiome,

or your social interactions will improve

basically everything else.

And those are what we call modulating-- excuse me--

effects, not mediating effects.

This is really important, and we teach first year graduate

students and medical students about this.

Like for instance, if there were a fire alarm pulled right now--

God forbid-- it would modulate all of your attention,

but would you say that fire alarms mediate Attention No.

It's not directly in the line of mechanism,

but it can adjust an existing mechanism.

So great sleep is great for everything,

but it doesn't control it directly.

And so things like getting great sleep,

keeping your microbiome healthy, getting enough sunlight,

et cetera-- they provide a kind of buoyancy

to all the organs and systems of your body,

but they aren't necessarily the thing that cures ADHD.

But of course, if you have ADHD or issues with focus,

getting enough sleep will help.

Is nutrition the way to cure your ADHD?

No, but if you improve your gut microbiome,

it's very likely that your neurotransmitter systems

will improve.

Limiting sugar will help, et cetera, et cetera.

So there's reason to think that great sleep, solid nutrition,

microbiome, social interactions, exercise--

those are the big five.

There are others too, of course.

With those you set a good buoyancy

to all the other systems, and then we

get into the things of how to directly increase

focus or modulate dopamine and so on and so forth.

Oh.

[LAUGHTER]

Well, I realize some people are afraid of dogs.

We actually have a dog stimulus in our fear lab.

We get people that are terrified of dogs.

We hired this dog trainer guy who

has these pit bulls that will attack you while you're in VR.

By the end, people are a little more comfortable

with dogs in general.

For you and me, if you're not afraid of dogs,

that's not terribly terrifying.

But if you are, even the thought of that

can be pretty terrifying.

A couple of things-- people have thought about the eye contact

thing.

They make eye contact.

We're big on eye contact.

Humans too.

Eye contact is meaningful in terms of oxytocin release.

That's all real.

Those data are-- the more and more data

that come out from better studies-- eye contact is

a big deal.

I think it's also that just the dogs are always

game to show up exactly where you want to meet them,

and they always show up in their most loving possible state

for them.

It's a pretty simple equation if you get it right.

They need proper care, but--

I mean, Costello was unique because the bulldog also--

you don't want to get me going on dog breeds,

but the bulldog also looks disappointed all the time.

And then you do something it likes,

and then it looks delighted, and pretty soon you're

working for their approval.

And we were like the odd couple--

me and him.

And I realize he's got me trained really, really well

to do my best to please him and delight him,

which delighted me.

And there I was on the hook.

So that's one reason.

I think there's also another reason, which

is super nerdy, which is this C tactile fiber

thing, which is you have these little nerve

endings in your skin.

And we know, of course, that oxytocin is

released from parent and child.

We know this from neuroimaging, et cetera.

We know oxytocin is released from non-sexual romantic touch.

One of the things that is very powerful for the release

of oxytocin-- very powerful--

is non-sexual grooming touch among members of a species

or even across species.

So those pictures of monkeys picking around in each other,

or people who insist on popping things on one another,

or people who go to the hairdresser or the barber

and they like touch.

It doesn't even have to be massage--

massive oxytocin release.

Those data don't get as much play

as all the data on oxytocin and love.

It's called the love hormone, but it's

basically a neurochemical signaling system

for this interaction, feels good, and is very much

of the present.

And I think that's an important distinction

to make more broadly.

Is that dopamine is really about the pursuit of all things

beyond the confines of our skin.

I'm going to get that thing.

I want that because it's all about anticipation.

And when you have some distance between yourself

and the thing that you think will deliver,

whatever it is you want, usually pleasure

in some form or another, or excitement, whatever

your pleasure is or combined, then you actually

have to mobilize.

And dopamine is the precursor to adrenaline.

A lot of people don't know that.

Adrenaline is made from dopamine.

It gets you into motion.

Then you have the reward systems that

are more about what you have from your skin surface inward.

So this is gentle touch, holding hands,

and indeed stroking your dog.

Probably does that for you.

It activates these C fibers, as they're called,

in your skin, which feed right into these serotonin

and oxytocin system.

So the brain-- sounds a little pop psychology-ish,

but it's a real thing, and it exists in essentially all

mammalian species.

So I think a lot of us just like dogs because they'll

let us just pet them all day.

Some people like to be touched a little bit more or less,

even when they trust is all--

it's this consensual, age appropriate, context

appropriate-- in this case, species appropriate.

Those are the conditions, very important.

When I was a kid, I had--

I don't know why.

My sister is in the audience.

I don't why she decided to do this in the first place,

but I loved having my face done--

pet like that.

I still like it, but don't try it

because she's the only one-- she can't do it anymore even.

So we all have these things that feel good,

and I think it feels good because it

releases these chemicals.

And these are ancient systems--

ancient, ancient systems that we all have, and I think dogs

let us do that.

And cats toy with us with this one.

Because there are those cats that let you pet them,

but most of the time they're doing it to you,

and then they withdraw.

And I don't know many dogs that do that.

So I think people, I'm going to answer the question finally.

I think dogs we love them so much because they let

us pet them as much as we want.

And cats play this very diabolical game

that's a lot more like human relationships.

[LAUGHTER]

How can night owls best function in a society

made for morning birds?

Can you change your chronotype or do us night

owls just have to suffer?

OK.

Well, as a former night owl, I used

to work long hours in the lab.

I still work long hours but less in the lab.

Just so happens that's the way the career goes.

I'd put tinfoil on the windows.

I would lock the doors.

I'd blast the music, and I would stay there over the holidays,

until I had to go home just for the holiday events,

and my clock would drift.

So I became a night owl, and then my clock would flip,

and everyone was gone.

Your mind gets really tweaked when you're not

interacting with anybody.

By the way, seeing faces in the morning and seeing

faces at some point during the day

once you're ready to face the day, very important

for mental health.

This is something I wish more people knew about.

It also-- and here, I'm not trying

to evoke any sentimentality.

But when you think about people who just are clearly

not doing well, whether or not they have shelter

or not-- it's how often do we actually make direct eye

contact nowadays?

It's not very often.

So eye contact is important, but I've also shifted

to being a morning person.

So here's the thing-- if you are a true night owl, that

means that your circadian clock, meaning the genes that control

the area of your brain and your hypothalamus that

controls wake-sleep cycles, is fundamentally different.

Very unlikely you'll become a morning person

without being a kind of angry morning person.

So you can use that argument, and you can cite me.

However, as we get older, it is true

that the amount of slow wave sleep to REM sleep

tends to change, and we can do better

on shorter bouts of sleep, mostly

because we're getting less rapid eye movement sleep.

And even if we try, we can't.

Those people would probably be better off

sticking to a limited amount of sleep at night,

and then getting a short nap.

The rule of naps is nap if you want to.

Don't if you don't want, but not if it interferes

with your nighttime sleep.

And if you can't nap, do some sort of non-sleep deep breaths

or NSDRs.

I refer to it as non-sleep depressed.

So you can probably shift your clock by anywhere

from two to eight hours, and that's true for lag as well.

Light is going to be the best way,

but if you really want to shift, you're

going to have to stack the big three or four.

Light-- so get light when you want to be awake.

Temperature-- you have to increase your body temperature

to wake up.

You have to decrease body temperature to go to sleep.

Keep in mind if you get into an ice bath or cold shower,

you get very, very cold, but then

what happens it's like putting an ice pack on the thermostat.

Your body temperature goes up.

Remember, thermogenesis-- that's the warming of the body

in response to cold.

Of course, if you stay in a long time, you'll get crispy cold.

You'll turn into a popsicle.

But the idea is that if you take a cold shower,

and you get some bright light, and you get some exercise,

and you drink some caffeine, you can train your system

to expect that at a certain time of day--

and you'll want to go to sleep a little bit earlier or much

earlier, and you'll want to wake up when you stack those things.

But that also means not taking caffeine and cold showers

and doing exercise late at night,

so it's going to take some work.

But those are the big four.

It's going to be light.

It's the most powerful way to shift.

More light, awake.

Less light, asleep.

Temperature increase, awake.

Temperature decrease, asleep.

Food is the other one.

Eating-- you can force yourself to eat breakfast,

even if you're not a breakfast eater.

This works when you travel too.

Just get on to the local meal schedule.

Because you have a clock system in your gut, believe it or not.

You want to synchronize that with your brain.

And then activity-- getting some sort of exercise.

But it takes a little bit of work, but you can do it.

You can definitely do it.

If you're nocturnal, that's weird,

unless it's because of your work, in which case

there are tools for shift work that we've put out there

on the podcast.

Your podcasts has been a wild success.

How do you see it growing over the next few years?

Honestly, I try in the tunnel of lack

of understanding and awareness about what's

happening with all this.

I really do.

Lex suggested we do the podcast.

That's a true story of doing it.

I still really do feel very much like I

did when I was a little kid.

I'm just going to keep trying to learn and share.

I'd love for people to share the tools.

I don't want credit for them.

If people credit us, great.

But if you think about it-- most of what we talk about

are not things that you buy.

These are tools that, again, work the first time every time.

I always say behavioral tools first,

then nutrition, supplementation.

And then for some people, prescription drugs

or some of these more experimental drugs make sense.

For some people it doesn't.

For instance, I don't think kids should be doing psychedelics.

I mean, childhood is enough of a psychedelic experience

in and of itself.

But I had an amazing clinician-- he's actually a triple-board

certified psychiatrist neurologist at Stanford Nolan

Williams on the podcast--

and he talked about even the use of ibogaine and MDMA,

even in some younger populations but again,

with therapeutic oversight.

It blew my mind.

I also didn't know this-- that MDMA I thought was toxic.

Please don't just take it off the street,

but if you're interested in clinical trials,

there are great clinical trials happening through maps,

and you can look at Nolan's website as well.

Most of the knowledge about the effects of MDMA

is from the LDS community because they volunteered

for these studies because it's not on the banned substance

list.

And so there's a lot of knowledge,

and they don't tend to-- or they don't use other substances,

like alcohol and marijuana and cocaine.

So much of what we know about the effects of MDMA

on the body and brain is from that community.

Other communities too as well.

So what are we going to do with the podcast?

Well, every Monday I'm going to keep putting out episodes,

until they put me in that grave with the thing.

Thank you.

Yeah.

It is a labor of love, and it's a lot of fun.

And we're just always trying to make them better, clearer.

Somehow they're not getting shorter.

I always tell Rob-- this one is going to be 90 minutes.

And he's like, yeah.

I'll believe it when I see it.

I think for me one thing that has brought

that's really wonderful is the opportunity

to learn from people in other domains

that are far better at putting information

and things into the world.

So I've been-- I hope he doesn't mind me saying this.

I've been very blessed--

I've become really good friends with Rick Rubin, who's

been really helpful to me.

He has an amazing book on creativity coming out

that's not a plug for the book, although I guess

I just accidentally did it.

But Rick of course, is like producing.

Created all this amazing music.

Everything from like Run-DMC, Beastie Boys, Slayer,

Johnny Cash, everything.

Just amazing.

And one of the things that he's been impressing on me

is that it's very important to stay focused

on the process of what you're doing

and to really not get into too much of how that's landing.

So I do like to hear when things are not clear.

That's really helpful to me.

I do like to hear suggestions about great people

to bring on the podcast.

I love criticism most of the time.

I try my-- it's hard sometimes, but I really

try and just absorb it for what it is.

But I love that aspect of interacting in this,

even though this is very fairly unidirectional.

Hopefully, there'll be more opportunities for dialoguing

and learning what's out there.

My real hope is that practitioners will

start to incorporate things.

And again, it's not about me.

I'm gleaning from fields and discoveries of other people

and trying to thread across fields.

So that's why I see the podcast going just more of the same,

more of the same, more of the same but a lot more

and more topics as best we can-- lots of guests.

And we actually have an episode with Rick coming out

at some point about creativity, which

I think is one of the more interesting aspects

of our being, so watch for that.

What is a stress inoculation protocol for workplace anxiety

(speaking)?

Does the principle of staying calm under high adrenaline

state-- yeah, definitely.

I think if you were to pick some sort of practice

that you could do privately and safely--

again, how cold should you make the water?

Cold enough that it's really uncomfortable

and you really, really want to get out

but you can safely stay in.

And that's why we never say 40 degrees because you can't

kill yourself with cold water.

It's just hard to do.

You have to get really, really cold before you kill yourself.

And open bodies of water aren't good.

Actually, I told my friend Samer Hattar.

He's the director of chronobiology unit

at the National Institutes of mental health.

He came on the podcast.

Got him really-- he's great about all the stuff

on light and sleep.

Taught me a lot of that over the years.

We're good friends.

I told him about the cold water thing,

and he got into some river in Bethesda and almost drowned.

And Sam right now-- he has a story about how he almost

drowned, and what he was-- and he thought about a paper

he wanted to write while he was almost drowning.

So just be careful-- open bodies of water, that kind of thing.

But I think you can quickly see within about a week or so

of doing some sort of deliberate adrenaline release.

It could be cyclic hyperventilation,

25 hyperventilated breaths with a short breath hold,

repeat, done two or three times.

We have good data to support that in the lab.

You see massive shifts in people's baseline level.

You become a little bit more like Costello.

You really do.

And the way to think about it is, if you are more on a seesaw

then on the continuum, you get better at loosening that hinge

and controlling that hinge.

Or you can imagine moving up and down that seesaw

a little bit more easily.

And then of course, you have to place yourself

into the environment.

You have to test yourself in that environment,

and some people will do Toastmasters and things

like that, and it can work.

My way-- I don't know if it works for everybody.

My way is just start talking.

Don't stop.

I can't feel the stress.

What do you think will be the next hot topic/new

trend in the field of neuroscience behavioral

therapeutics?

Ooh, I like that because I have a lot of opinions about that.

First of all, I do not think it's going

to be brain machine interface.

My good friend, Eddie Chang, who I've known since we were nine,

he came on the podcast.

He works on epilepsy.

He's a chair of neurosurgery.

We had a bird club when we were kids at two members.

You had to know the names of all the talking birds,

and then you had to know which one was the best talker,

and it's the minor bird.

And of course, no one wanted to join.

No one even took the test.

But he became a neurosurgeon and does brain machine interface.

He's doing truly incredible work getting people

with locked in syndrome to speak through a device implanted

under the skull.

They just think what they want to say.

These are people who haven't moved or shared

a word with anybody, and they're now communicating,

but here's what's really cool and--

he has also realized that facial expression is a lot.

It's one thing to see on a screen what

somebody in a chair or a hospital bed is thinking.

That's wonderful, but facial expression

is such a rich part of this.

So this is a really good use of AI.

He's now created very realistic iPad images

of that person's face, and so they're actually

speaking the words.

And people form a deep relationship

to the person who's right next to their avatar,

so that's a positive use, I think, of avatars,

and Eddie is doing amazing work.

That kind of work-- a brain machine interface neural link,

et cetera, I think is going to be very useful and popular

in the realm of therapeutics for Parkinson's, movement

disorders, epilepsy, locked-in syndrome, et cetera.

I think we are many, many, many decades from chip implantation

into the brain for things like enhancing memory,

and frankly I wouldn't want it.

Not because I wouldn't want to enhance my memory,

but because of what I said earlier.

Is that the nervous system has a certain amount of real estate,

and you don't want to make that real estate very lopsided.

And so I think we're going to see something very different

in the next 10, 20 years, and I hope, hope,

hope this carries over to younger populations.

I think we're going to hopefully start

learning about our nervous system and what it can do.

And the fact that we have these pre-existing circuits in us

that we can learn to leverage that

work first time every time.

So I'm strongly biased in my answer,

but I think that it still remains an open question,

for instance, whether or not people could require less

perhaps or no medication for certain things.

And I say certain things because for conditions

like schizophrenia, bipolar in particular medication,

OCD has proved very effective.

But then there are a whole other set

of conditions like depression and anxiety

for which behavioral tools really work,

but most people just don't even know they exist.

So that's my hope, and again, the therapeutic community

could try and expand their toolkit.

I also think we're starting to see

a blurring of the lines between different fields of psychology,

so it's no longer psychoanalytic versus

cognitive behavioral versus dialectic

versus EMDR versus hypnosis.

That it's all going to be governed

by some central principles.

All those camps-- it's just silly frankly to me.

It makes sense academically why those came to be,

but in neuroscience we had the same thing.

You used to have to pick.

It was like a John Hughes film from the '80s.

Are you going to be a jock or a punker or a popular kid.

Now, it's not like that, and half this audience

is looking at me like, what are you talking about?

And that's exactly the point.

Which is that I'll never forget I grew up

in the skateboard thing.

The first time I saw someone wearing skateboarding shoes,

I was like, damn.

They skateboard.

And they're like, no.

They just-- people are just wearing this stuff.

So well, you start to realize it's all blended together,

which is great.

And in the field of neuroscience,

you used to have to pick.

Are you an anatomist or a physiologist?

Are you into neural computation?

Now, your lab has to do it all, or you collaborate with people.

Those divisions have really melted

because people are interested in questions,

and they're interested in answers.

And don't get me started, but the careerism

of the requirement for everyone to have

their own independent laboratory and say this

is my mission, that is one of the worst things about science.

Because everything we know says that collaboration

collaboration, collaboration, leads to faster progress.

And I'm not going to take on the whole academic system.

It's been very good to me, but I'd

like to see a blurring of the boundaries.

It used to be that labs weren't-- here,

I'm really guilty, Huberman lab.

But it used to be that labs were named after the problem they

worked on.

Vision Lab, Stress Lab, Happiness Lab.

I like that quite a bit more, but I

screwed up and called this whole thing the Huberman Lab.

[LAUGHTER]

You have had a number of performance interests

and fitness experts on your show.

What changes have you made to your fitness protocol,

including nutrition?

Oh.

Yeah.

Well, I'm an omnivore, so I like those things

they call carbohydrates, and I eat them in moderation.

And so I've never really been too extreme about any of this,

or the fasting thing, although I do just--

I'm not very hungry in the morning.

That's also because I like to eat a lot at night.

I wake up not that hungry.

So what have I changed?

Well, in terms of the fitness stuff,

I've definitely started to incorporate

more nasal breathing when I do cardiovascular work because it

has eliminated any sleep apnea I had.

And sleep apnea is very, very bad--

very, very bad.

I wish I could say snoring was no big deal,

but we know based on work at the Stanford Sleep Lab, Penn Sleep

Lab, other sleep labs that people who have sleep apnea

are really in for trouble for a number of reasons.

So you want to learn to be a nasal breather,

and if-- some people will tape their mouth

shut with medical tape when they go to sleep.

Other people will just start doing cardiovascular work,

keeping their mouth closed.

And that requires that you not go too intensely,

but it does create a dilation of the nasal passages.

Those sinuses can dilate.

So I've definitely done that.

And at the end of training, I try and do

a one-minute or three-minute decompress.

Not immediately look at my phone to learn

to shift from high intensity thinking

and to lower intensity thinking and shift throughout the day.

Task switching, I think, is going

to be a big area of science and neuroscience in general.

We still don't know how to task switch

well-- how to shift the mind from focus to defocus

and back again.

That's something that-- by the way,

this is, I think a rich opportunity for people

to develop tools.

We don't know a lot about that.

We got too caught up on consciousness flow

and free will.

And that stuff is great, but as you can tell, I like tools.

I like physiology.

I like the things that work in my lifetime

and that we can figure out and agree upon in my lifetime.

Let's see.

Got it.

And I'm told that this final question--

when they put the clock up here earlier too,

they said we're going to run it for 60 minutes.

My first question was, where's the snooze button?

So I'm going to keep going, but I think

they're going to hold me to it.

And I know, people, this is New York after all.

There are other fun things to do.

For things that take a long time-- career,

pursuing a degree--

is there a right way to know that we're on the right path?

Is there a way to know we're on the right path?

Thank you for that question.

I get asked this a lot, and gosh, there's

so much information out there.

So much information about this.

We don't yet have a gauge of whether or not

we're in too much stress or not, but there

is one tool that's used in the free diving community

and in other communities that you

can use as a thermometer of how well you're functioning.

And some of you may know it already, and if you do,

forgive me.

It's this carbon dioxide tolerance test.

So why am I answering this question this way?

Well, I like to start with actionable tools.

If, for instance, you were to just take three or four breaths

and then take a big deep breath and then

do a very slow controlled exhale--

could be through your nose or through your mouth.

Ideally, through your nose.

And you're trying to make that exhale as long as possible,

until your lungs are empty, and you time that.

That's called the carbon dioxide discard rate

or the exhale discard rate.

And it tells you how well you're controlling your diaphragm

using something called the phrenic nerve.

It also tells you how well you're managing carbon dioxide

and how well you're managing stress.

And if you're very stressed, that number

will be very, very short.

And I'm not talking about how long

you can sit with lungs empty.

I'm talking about an honest appraisal of how long

you can control that exhale for.

And if it's anywhere from 0 to 20 seconds,

your stress level is high.

And if it's from 20 to 40 seconds, it's moderate.

And longer than 40 seconds means you

have good control over your carbon dioxide system,

more or less.

Now, these are averages, and guess what?

Has nothing to do with fitness, and also, it

has nothing to do with you per se because if you do this when

you first wake up after a good night's sleep,

you'll have a long discard rate.

If you do this after running, you'll

have a short discard rate.

You're not out of breath.

You're just not managing the system very well.

So you can touch into this every once in a while as a blood

pressure reading type thing.

This is very back of the envelope it's not perfect,

but it works well enough that alongside things

like resting heart rate, heart rate variability, et cetera,

you can get a window into how well you're managing stress.

Why am I answering this question this way?

Well, this is something I recommend

doing every once in a while, especially

if you are in a period of a career or any kind of pursuit

where you are feeling like you're grinding.

I think once your carbon dioxide discard rate starts to really

get shorter and shorter, you're having trouble sleeping,

I think it's time to focus on re-establishing that buoyancy

to your nervous system because then and only then can

you make good judgments about whether or not

you're in the right trajectory for you.

Now, in terms of the larger psychological themes,

are you doing something that brings you meaning or not?

That gets into some complicated territory.

We're very good at assigning meaning retrospectively,

and saying, well, that was a good experience

because we had it, and we learned from it, et cetera.

But I think most people would like to avoid things

that they can only look back on and say,

it was useful because I learned something from it.

And for that, I'll just give the default,

but I think, at least to me, accurate answer,

which is the more often that you can

tap into that feeling of excitement and delight

in your work, even if from small things

or from surprising things, or from the social interactions

that you're able to glean from that work,

the longer and better you're going to be able to pursue

that line of work.

For me is in graduate school, I was very isolated.

I worked alone in the lab.

Maybe it was because of the tin foil

I put on the walls or the windows.

I don't know.

In fact, my graduate advisor's one complaint

was that I seemed unfriendly.

I wasn't unfriendly.

I was just busy, but I got to be very good friends

with the janitorial staff because they

were the only one around at the time I was working--

were a few other people.

And those small interactions actually became

very significant to me and became sources of brief--

but to me, at least, at the time,

meaningful social exchange.

And of course, eventually, I made friends

and had relationships of other kinds and things

that were healthy as well.

But I think learning to tap into this love of what you're doing

is sometimes hard, but you have to look for it.

It's an active process, and I'll default

to the work and the podcast that's coming with Rick Rubin.

And he is a lot of what he talks about in terms of creativity.

Is about accessing what he and others have

talked about as the source.

If that is an abstract, I don't know what is.

But the source is this ability to see yourself

as more of a portal for getting certain things done

in the world than being so careerist

and focused on whether or not outcomes are really

matching what you need.

It involves some mental flexibility,

and of course, it's OK to pivot back and forth.

But we can only access this feeling

of delight and joy and this feeling

that we're somehow connected to some larger theme, aka meaning,

I think, when we are able to be calm enough and not so focused.

But in order to get anything done,

we have to be hyper focused, and that brings me back

to the basic principle of today's whole discussion, which

is that it's not about landing yourself

in a state of focus motivation and drive

or in a state of deep sleep.

Certainly, not in a coma.

It's about being able to move up and down the various continuums

that allow you to access focus and real gas

pedal down to the floor kind of thinking and action

but then also deliberately back off transition

to periods of rest.

And the real key is for you to feel like you're

in the driver's seat.

If we know anything from the last 100-plus years

of psychology and neuroscience literature,

it's that if an animal or a person

feels that they are in control of the physiological process

within them, and they know they can get themselves

out, some way somehow at some point and back into a state

that they want somehow, some way, at some point,

well, then, all the language around meaning and happiness

and delight starts to emerge.

So learn to move along those continuums.

Learn to do it deliberately, and I wish you

the very best of luck in it.

I know it works.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you.

Thanks so much.

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you.

Thanks so much for coming out.

[APPLAUSE]

I really appreciate it and grateful

to our sponsors, of course.

Thank you and to all of you for your time.

I know there's a lot to do in the city,

and I hope everyone enjoys it.

And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't say,

thank you for your interest in science.

[CHEERS]

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