“This Is The Culmination Of Everything I Know” - Dr Andrew Huberman #1150

Modern Wisdom

In this episode of Modern Wisdom, neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman discusses the foundational principles for living a healthy, thriving life, drawing from his upcoming book on health and

Key takeaways

• The first hour of the day should be high in cortisol to boost alertness and focus; the last hour should be low to support quality sleep.
• Morning sunlight, hydration, caffeine, and exercise are simple yet powerful tools for optimizing daily energy and mental clarity.

Main topics

• Cortisol regulation through morning and evening routines
• The role of sunlight, hydration, caffeine, and exercise in daily performance

Notable quotes

"Make the first hour of your day high cortisol and the last hour of your day low cortisol."

"The ability to suppress impulse is what I taught my bulldog pit mix strummer the day I brought him home."

Conclusion

Dr. Huberman concludes that sustainable health and mental performance come not from extreme measures but

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) People of the UK and Ireland, if you've listened to Modern Wisdom for a while but haven't seen me live, it isn't just a podcast on stage where you can finally see my legs. It's a show that I've spent over a year building specifically for a live audience. There are stories I've never told before, ideas I've deliberately saved for the stage, audience confessions, and a Q &A where I try to solve your biggest problems. Dublin has already sold out and all of the other cities aren't far behind. So if you want to see me live, head to chriswilliamson.live. That's chriswilliamson.live. Lots of people deal with brain fog and low energy throughout the day. What's your advice for combating that? I Speaker 1 (0:34) mean, it's funny. I'll probably end up saying this 20 times in today's conversation, but if I were to really, if I had two minutes with somebody and they said, what's the thing I can do for my health? I'd say make the first hour of your day high cortisol and the last hour of your day, low cortisol. Speaker 2 (0:49) High Speaker 1 (0:50) cortisol in the morning sets you up for elevated mood, focus, and alertness all day long. allows you to buffer stress better and it makes sure that your nighttime cortisol is going to be low. If you don't spike that morning cortisol enough in the first one to three hours of your day, you're going to have a high flat cortisol curve. Not good. Makes you less resilient to stress, brain fog, less amenable to learning and on and on. So then you just say, well, what can you do? And we can make this very simple. Bright light, especially from sunlight or 10,000 lux artificial light, and especially in the first 30 minutes after waking, hydration, caffeine, if you like caffeine, exercise in the first three hours of your day, if you can, right? Some people can't. And then roll into your day. At night in that final hour, you do everything you can to reverse that. You dim the lights, especially overhead lights, dim your screen. You could do the red light thing or the candle light thing. you know, limit caffeine, obviously exercise in the final hour before sleep, only if that's the only time you can do it. Some people that's the only time. And actually eating in the first three hours of your day, even though I'm a fan of, I personally fast in the first three hours of the day, but that actually can also spike cortisol. People say, why would eating spike cortisol? Well, I mean, basically anything that you do that's a pro arousal, that's about activity is going to spike cortisol. Speaker 1 (2:14) bookending your day with things that spike your cortisol at the beginning and lower your cortisol at the end is really, it really is the, if there is a cheat code to life. Now, why do I say to life? I mean, is it going to make you completely stress resilient? No. Is it going to make you able to learn anything you want with ease? No. But what it does is it sets you up for the best possible sleep, which makes you more alert the next day. Of course, it also, it, It anchors this process that I haven't talked about before on any podcast. And frankly, that I didn't touch on directly in the book, which is so much of life is about balancing what we call bottom up and top down influences. Bottom up influences would be, you know, you want the cookie. you're going to just eat the cookie. You know you shouldn't be scrolling as much as you're scrolling. You just keep scrolling. Those are bottom-up influences. These are impulses that are driven by hypothalamic and other deep brain structures. Then we have, thankfully, we have top-down influences. This is your prefrontal cortex suppressing impulses. Okay, this is the two marshmallow test in kids, which by the way, a lot of people say was debunked. The debunk was debunked. by the way. Yeah. So the ability to suppress action, it's what I taught my bulldog pit mix strummer the day I brought him home. And it's the basis of everything. You put a piece of food in front of him. He of course wants to take it, right? His prefrontal cortex isn't even online yet. And you take it away until he learns and he learns the first day and never forgets that he has to wait until I say, okay. What are you doing there? It's actually not about making him wait for a treat. It's about making him suppress what feels like anxiety and impulse. And that wicks out to every type of waiting. So you say, wait, or like, see you later, I'm going to work. And then you come back and he's not freaking out. He can just, now he doesn't have to actively suppress the whole time, but the ability to suppress impulse. So much of life, the ability to learn and lean into just enough stress that you trigger learning. The ability to listen when you want to react. The ability to. force yourself to get up and work on the book or the thing that you don't want to do. So much of that is top-down influences. Speaker 2 (4:32) And Speaker 1 (4:33) basically being an effective human is about building up those circuits of top-down. Now, do you have to do them in everything? This is a matter of debate. I think that people like Andy Stumpf, who I have tremendous respect for, it's just awesome. I've learned so much from him. I actually made some late, late stage additions to the book based on a conversation I had with him. So he actually made... you know, very late in the game, I was like, I need to, my editors were like, you can't do this anymore. Like enough is enough. And I'm like, I want it back or else I'm not signing off on the final draft to put in this, you know, Andy has a number of tools that are, that are really useful, but you know, he has this philosophy that he shares, which is. Speaker 1 (5:13) Throughout your day, when given the option between the easier thing and the harder thing, do the harder thing, that there's tremendous value in that. It's the make your bed thing. It's the Speaker 2 (5:23) replace the Speaker 1 (5:24) toilet paper roll is the example he gives in his book, Drown Proof, which is an awesome book. I highly recommend it. It doesn't pay me to say this. It's just an awesome book. I recommend it to everybody. But these little things, like there's that piece of trash on the floor that's this big. Do I pick it up? Why would, you know, does... Is it about the trash? Does it really make that much of a difference in your life? No, but the action of going against that bottom-up influence of just ignoring the harder thing and going toward ease, more pleasure, less pain, even just avoiding subtle pain, there are two ways to build up these circuits. One is by forcing yourself to go like, as we say, like writers always say, like ass to chair, like, you know, you're just going to like sweat blood until you get those 800 words a day out. There are advantages to that or doing the hard workout that you do not want to do. There's also a building up of the same circuits, those top-down suppression of impulse through the little things all day long. You probably need to do both, but I think that many of us nowadays who are exercising and doing health protocols, we absorb a lot of energy in order to get ourselves to those. Some people more, some people less. And I've started doing these, you know, stomp type smaller things throughout the day. He does the big things too, obviously, but those little things, what you find, what I find is that they make it much easier to overcome the friction that comes from anything. Speaker 2 (6:49) And so there's a Speaker 1 (6:49) really just like getting the reps in, like it doesn't, what it proves is that it's the circuit. It's not what you're doing. You're getting the reps into the circuit. It's kind of like Pavel Satsoula and the strength guys, like the grease, the groove thing. Okay, you do two pull-ups every time you pass through the door. And does that mean that you can do 200 pull-ups in a single set? No, but it actually turns out to be more effective than doing like three sets of 10 twice a week. Okay, then people say, well, it's not true if you add weight. Perhaps not, but maybe it's just two different roads to the same place. But the top-down, bottom-up tension, this dynamic tension between those two is so much about what... being non-reactive is about. It's about what not procrastinating is about. It's what morality is about. It's about being calm under pressure. It's about making appropriate decisions in the face of stress. Because it's not all about not feeling stress. It's about making adaptive decisions. Is there anything else Speaker 2 (7:45) that you would advise people to do for training willpower? I Speaker 1 (7:48) mean, I think what Andy talks about in his book, and obviously he's not the first person to talk about this, but, you know, that... that philosophy, like how you do one thing is how you do anything. That's a little bit vague for me. I like the way he describes it, which is these little micro sucks all day long. Like, like it happened to me the other day. Speaker 2 (8:03) Trust Andy to call it micro sucks. He's a man with a helicopter that's jumped out of a plane like 50,000 Speaker 1 (8:08) times. Speaker 2 (8:08) He Speaker 1 (8:08) holds two world records at wingsuiting. Yeah. I think he flew 36,000 feet or something like that. I mean, yeah. I mean, there are a lot of badasses in the world and in the tier one operator sphere. And I know a number of those guys that there are a lot of badasses, obviously. What's impressive to me is somebody who has the intelligence and the communication skills to be able to share the things that are relevant to everybody in a way that's relevant to everybody. He's also from Santa Cruz, which is a cool town. It's right over the hill from where I grew up. And like the fact that somebody like that came from Santa Cruz, this is kind of a hometown joke, which is a pretty, there's only two reasons to go to Santa Cruz if you're a guy. in your teens or 20s or 30s. You go to the boardwalk to meet girls or you go to fight. People in Santa Cruz, it was like, you'd always see fights. So I always thought of Santa Cruz, people think it's this hippie town. I always thought of it as kind of a, there's a rougher side of Santa Cruz. And then I hear about Andy's from Santa Cruz. I'm like, that makes no sense whatsoever. But he took all of that kind of local environment. Sounds like he had a good upbringing. He talks fondly about his parents, which is cool. and put it to some really impressive feats and can communicate what the exports from those experiences are. So, I mean, how many of us in our daily life need to like shoot, move and communicate, like the macronutrients of operators? I mean, some people, yes, but most of us, no. So to me, that's one way. The other way is obviously to do your workouts and I'm a big believer in... Asking yourself, what am I genuinely curious about learning? And where's the fear point for me? What is kind of, why am I shying away from learning about something for fear of like poor performance? And then that's the thing you should lean into. You have to be curious about something unless you're in school where you have to learn a subject. So that's another way, like pushing yourself to learn cognitively. And then to me, I think a big other part of this top-down training is just the way that we approach life. I think there are two reasons to do hard things. Rogan and I were talking about this yesterday. One reason is because it makes you better at doing hard things. The other reason is it allows you to access more awareness of the beautiful things in life. I mean, there's so much dog shit floating around on the internet and anger. And you and I talked about this. There's so many barbed wire drama things. I mean, if I went around, posting every opinion that I reflexively have about some of the like nonsense antics that I see online or the crazy documentaries that are coming out. And like, and, and, you know, you get to a certain point in life and you tend to be one to six degrees of separation from pretty much anything you see online as much as you would like to not think of you. Oh, I know someone who knows someone who knows that person. I met that person once in a party, got a eerie feeling. I won't say who that's about, but that was a real experience. You know, you can go down that rabbit hole. So much of being effective is going nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. And I always just take myself back to high school. There were only really three or four reasons to actually be in high school. There's like to learn, right, from teachers and from your peers and in class. That's a legitimate reason to go to school. You know, there were social reasons. There were all sorts of. observations that I had, like one that was still salient for me, I'll share in a moment. You can learn a lot about people in life. Speaker 2 (11:28) I have Speaker 1 (11:29) a friend who's a professor at Stanford who says, he unfortunately calls me Andy. It's really annoying. And he's Speaker 2 (11:35) - You don't like Andy? Speaker 1 (11:36) No, no, no, no, no. I think this Speaker 2 (11:38) guy's just persistent. Yeah. So what happened was- Kind of a power move. Speaker 1 (11:42) I lost a coin flip to another Andrew, like in the third grade. He gets to be Andrew and Speaker 2 (11:46) you have to be Andy. Speaker 1 (11:46) He got to be Andrew and it still pisses me off, you know? Anyway, I eventually took back Andrew. And, you know, and the other reason is a lot, there's certain observations that I had in high school that taught me a lot about human nature that are still true across men, women of all ages, all demographics is really, really helpful. Actually, I'll just share it right now. So as some people may know, in round 14, I got really into the skateboarding thing. Prior to that, it was like school, swimming, soccer, every kid in my town did those. I got really excited about skateboarding. Skateboarding was small then. Um, it wasn't this big thing. No X games, nothing. I wasn't very good skateboarder. I was decent enough to get picked up probably just out of sheer sympathy by one sponsor. Um, and people want to check me on this cause people are always trying to get his name. My team manager was Steve Ruge. I wrote for Spitfire. It was out of sympathy. Steve, I love you. Thank you for putting me on. I appreciate you also telling me I never be one of the big guys. Boom, done. Um, But I remember there was this phase of skateboarding in the early 90s and it wasn't a good phase, but where like the clothes got baggy, the shorts got baggy, there was some sag. Speaker 2 (12:51) And Speaker 1 (12:51) at that time, no one did that. No one, not in hip hop, nowhere. Now it wasn't really like really extreme sag. It was just like the shorts went from like mid thigh to like right above the knee, maybe a little longer. All right, so that's what we did. We were skateboarders. We didn't care what anyone else did. Came to school and just ridiculed. ridiculed by the jocks, by everybody. Didn't matter if the kids were like black, white, male or female, like Mexican, Vietnamese. You were uncool. We were like teased relentlessly. Everyone Speaker 2 (13:22) knew that Andy was uncool. Speaker 1 (13:23) Teased relentlessly, but we knew we liked it. It was a little extreme. Like, you know, at the time we liked it. The point back then was to be different, not the same. Okay, summer happens. That summer, something happened in the world of hip hop where somebody starts sagging their pants. Next year. Everybody. And I just realized in that moment, I was like, okay, this, I was like, they actually don't know. They actually don't know what they like. They really don't. They're just following. It wasn't following a trend. They actually haven't formed taste. And I was like, what I love about skateboarding, what I loved about certain forms of music, what I love about certain podcasters and what I love about certain scientists, I can name certain scientists who just have the. best taste. In particular, this guy, Jonathan Horton, a neuro-ophthalmologist, his papers are beautiful. They're articulate. The images are beautiful. The discoveries are clear. And he's just a, he's a phenom. And, but for a lot of years, you know, his papers kind of existed in good journals, but didn't really pop to the biggest ones. Then they popped. And what I realized was like, whether it's in high school or as adults, people actually Most people don't develop a sense of taste. Correct. They confuse what they like and don't like with what feels socially acceptable and what feels so different that it's uncomfortable to them. Now, I don't believe in doing things just to be different. That's not taste. That's doing things just to be different. I started realizing, I was like, there are certain people in life that have an... exquisite sense of taste. Rick Rubin's one of them. My friend David Cho is one of them. I believe you have taste. You think about how, you know, people don't let the velvet British accent fool you. Sometimes the British accent can confuse people into thinking, especially Americans, into thinking that somebody's smarter than they are. I'm not trying to, where the kids say, I'm not trying to like puff you up here. They have all sorts of names for this now. But really, I'm not just trying to flatter you. But if it flatters you, fine. Like you're my friend. But also, you think right at the boundaries between conflicting opinions. And then you form a third new opinion, usually, that highlights something both beneficial and deficient about both. That is a skill. It's a super skill that most people don't possess. Most academics don't possess it, frankly, because careers are sort of built on like planting your flag and protecting it until you absolutely get battered. And then you have to like, like relent, you know, and then pivot to something new. I have a beautiful story about that, actually. But I realized that taste is something that. Many people never develop. And the worst thing is when people who have taste think that their taste isn't taste, that it's a misdirection internally or something, and they don't cultivate that. And I think that, you know, so high school taught me a heck of a lot. It's true. The baggies got too baggy. The sag went way too far. And we just sort of laughed as it took off. We were like, this is hilarious. Actually, but it happened in skateboarding too. There were years later where... This kid that I grew up with, I'm friendly with now, but Danny Way, who jumped the Great Wall of China. Amazing. Jumped out of a helicopter. He has all these world records, but he was an aggro kid. He built the first mega ramps. I mean, he's gnarly. He was always just like, so aggressive skateboarder. Incredible, incredible athlete. I remember, you know, years later when he broke his neck surfing at Newport, he started working out. with Paul Cech. He started and he built like a strong physique. And I remember skateboarders being like, that's for jocks. Skateboarders are working out. Now, if you look, not all of them, but a lot of skateboarders are into like lifting weights, taking care of their body. Chris Jocelyn, Trey flipped the, you know, El Toro stairs this year. This was like a heroic feat. It was like breaking the four minute mile, more or less ish for skateboarding. I mean, that dude clearly works out. He takes care of himself. So the things within a subculture and community. that make that such a special community, what eventually happens is the community defies its own principles. The punks turn against it, go, that's not punk. Well, they did that to people like Joe Strummer who brought hip hop acts as openers. They've done that to friends of mine who are in the high-level band, punk rock, where they go, they sold out. Actually, no, actually, they're doing great and you're caught up in the eighth grade is what happened. But it's not regressive. It's that taste. is the hardest thing for people to understand because it forces them to really put a mirror in front of themselves and go, what do I actually like and dislike? Speaker 2 (17:52) It's Speaker 1 (17:52) a Speaker 2 (17:52) countervailing force against both what's popular and the fickleness of blowing in the wind. People confuse something that's popular for something that's tasteful. And you can also confuse something which is very tasteful, not popular. as something that's bad. Like you said before, the difference between liking something and not liking something, you can like something which is untasteful. And I think the difference between taste and popularity and liking is taste is the ability to discern between good and not good. Like, is this thing good in and of itself? And this is one of the problems. If you run it up, because everyone's looking for performance, if you run enough split tests, you will end up with a porn website. That's what happens. You run into split Speaker 1 (18:30) tests. It Speaker 2 (18:30) all regresses to, Speaker 1 (18:31) can you explain this? Because you and I have talked about this. It all regresses to porn eventually. Everything. Basically, if you want to get the most eyes and clicks on something, you keep going more extreme, more salacious. Correct. And you end up in the dumpster heap of online content. Correct. Yeah, Speaker 2 (18:47) yeah, yeah, exactly. Going back to the brain, what's your best advice for improving memory and focus? People understand brain fog's a thing. I'm struggling with that. I have lulls with energy throughout the day. And Speaker 1 (18:58) now you want me to actually answer the question? Yeah, that'd be great. Whenever you want. Speaker 1 (19:03) Okay. So brain fog is not a specific thing. It's an inability to focus. Let's get a couple of core principles down. People with severe clinical grade ADHD can focus if they're doing something they really like. Tells you something. It means the dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, we call these the catecholamine systems of the brain and body that are involved in many things, but focus among them. Are there, they're functional, but the threshold to access them is too high. Okay, what does that mean? What it means is that people can learn to focus. And they can get assistance in doing that by pushing on one of two ends or both. One is to ramp up the level of those chemicals. That's what things like Adderall, Vyvanse, Ritalin, and so on do. I studied this last year out of Washington University in St. Louis, sort of the Harvard of the Midwest, if you will, although I think that's unfair to the Midwest. Maybe we call Harvard the Wash U of the East. Speaker 1 (20:04) showed that when you compare the attention-improving effects of Ritalin to a great night's sleep, they're effectively equal. Speaker 1 (20:13) Hmm. Some of these stimulants, we know blunt stunt growth. Excuse me. They stunt growth. We know this. Okay. They limit ultimate height. They reduce sleep. So they're circumventing a problem. So there's a new idea, which is that maybe lower dosages of these medicines combined with better sleep would be as effective a treatment. A lot of parents are airing that way. A lot of adults are erring that way too. That said, some of these medications can be useful in extreme cases. If somebody wants to learn, let's just say if you want to learn, you want to focus and get rid of brain fog, you want to learn, here are the key steps. And I review some more of this in the book. But during today's conversation, and always, I'm going to try and reference the book only if people want more information. I'm just going to try and give people the information. If people want the book, they can get it. But I don't want to, like, cloak the information. Everyone Speaker 2 (21:05) needs to go and buy the book. Speaker 1 (21:06) Thanks for your support of the book. I did. There is a lot of... You fucking Speaker 2 (21:09) bled for this thing, dude. I watched you. I watched you basically... Eight years. You glanced off the bottom of insanity in order to be able to put this. Then the original word count was 120,000 and then you were forced to chop it down. It's Speaker 1 (21:22) basically seven short books with a long intro, which is some story and context. And I promise you can just navigate to a particular point in the book and understand what's going on, get the tool and go. You can learn the science or not get the science. You can take the story and read it or not read it. But I figure leave it all on the mat. Look, I'm 51 later this month. Like, I don't know if I'll make it to 52. I feel great. My biomarkers say I'm great, but you know, I mean, who knows? So I'm not living this life to try and, you know, soft pedal anything. I'm just going all in. So here are the steps to learning. You need to focus, obviously, to learn. To focus, you need to be alert. To get alert, there are many things you can do. And I talk about all of them in the book. There are foundational things like sleep, all right? That's going to help you get alert and focused. But there are also things like exercise. We all hear that exercise makes our brain better. It makes us better at learning. Exercise makes you better at learning for two reasons. One, it increases the catecholamines, dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. So in the four to six hours after exercise, you are more alert and you can focus better. unless you exercise to exhaustion. If you have leg day for 10 sets of 10 on the squats, followed by a bunch of hamstring work and et cetera, your brain's not gonna be so good at focusing. But 45 to 75 minutes of hard training, not taken to extreme a bit like what we did this morning. That was a little bit on the lighter side, not just because we didn't have a whole lot of time, but you're gonna come out of that more alert because you have more adrenaline in your body. more norepinephrine being released in your brain and more dopamine being released in your brain. And dopamine is a critical component for learning. Okay. Focus then it becomes easier to access. And in your focus, what are you focusing on? You need to focus on making. Speaker 1 (23:20) errors through genuine attempts to do something, something physical, maybe a tennis serve, or you're learning billiards, something cognitive, you're trying to learn a language. The error between what you currently do and what you're trying to do, the error is the signal that the neurons, the nerve cells need to change. It runs through a circuit involving the cerebellum and a bunch of other things, but that gap is what the brain tries to close. If you can do something, there's no reason for your brain to change. And the agitation you feel from those errors reflects elevated levels of epinephrine and norepinephrine in the body and brain respectively. And those tag, literally, chemically tag the synapses. I mean, there's some additional steps, but they tag those synapses so that then at night when you sleep, the synapses rearrange, and you close the gap between your current ability and the ability you're striving to achieve. That's how it works. So a curiosity and willingness to learn gets you to the gate of learning. The making of errors through genuine attempts puts the key in and turns the key. The agitation is walking through that gate and then getting some sleep. or maybe even a day or two later, even if you don't sleep quite as well as you would like, just some time for the synapses to rearrange, that's the last piece. There's an additional piece that can reinforce it all, which is self-testing. If you want to get good at something and stay good at it and continue to get better at it, you need to self-test. Mental self-testing is the best way to consolidate learning and learn faster. What do I mean by that? I don't mean visualization. I mean, asking yourself, Like for me, if I want to make my memory better, generally speaking, I might think, okay, so that was September 11th, 2001. Where was I exactly? What were some of the details? Now, that might be something I might not want to think about, but if I were to say, okay, I'm going to go back to my, you know, year one neuroscience graduate school training. Of course, I know what a synapse is. I know what neurons are. I know what asters are. I know all this stuff. It's embedded so deeply in me. I can almost do it in my sleep. But then I think, yeah, that's right. Like. what is the role of astrocytes? And they say, okay, because that's stuff that's relevant to me. When you hit the point where you can't remember something, you go and look it up, boom, you've now closed that gap again and it reinforces those synapses that were weakening. Speaker 2 (25:38) So Speaker 1 (25:38) if you're trying to learn something new or you want to maintain information from way back when, you need to retest. This is why we used to make people retake their driver's tests or physicians need to Speaker 2 (25:49) - Speaker 1 (25:50) Yeah, I mean, it used to be you had to retake your driver's test, not always behind the wheel, but you didn't used to just give people a license and turn them loose. Speaker 2 (25:57) Right, because they knew the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve was going to come Speaker 1 (26:00) in and smash somebody Speaker 2 (26:00) in Speaker 1 (26:01) the face. That's right. The supplement Speaker 2 (26:02) industry is full of products making claims that they can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentus. 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That's L-I-V Speaker 1 (26:55) -E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at Speaker 2 (26:59) checkout. I suppose one of the advantages, at least with regards to driving practically, is that people are re... triggering that on a multiple times per day basis. Yeah. Speaker 1 (27:09) Or you get a ticket or you get into an accident. I feel like I'm quoting my dad a lot lately. You know, that's a good sign. As my dad always says, you know, the thing about speeding tickets is they're expensive and money hurts. You know, speeding tickets were $20. For most people, that's Speaker 2 (27:25) - Speaker 1 (27:25) Formative experience. It's Speaker 2 (27:26) not Speaker 1 (27:26) trivial, but it's not enough money to really dent your heavy foot on the pedal. But if you give someone a $300 ticket, plus your insurance goes up, people speed less. Speaker 2 (27:37) You're going to remember that. Speaker 1 (27:38) People speed less. I'm not saying it, you know, I mean, we could argue about speeding laws, but money hurts, right? So that's how you learn. You have to bring yourself to those points of agitation. I wish I had learned that in the third grade. I wish they had told me that. Now, many people find that they are very disciplined about certain things. They're getting their sets and reps and they're pushed past failure. They love their video games. They love perhaps mathematics, but not literature. The things that we are not facile in that don't come easy to us. There are two reasons to do some of that learning at every stage of life. One is it enriches us. We often find that the things that are hardest to learn that we then learn are the most satisfying. This is the effort that precedes dopamine is far more reinforcing than when just dopamine comes in. You could say, well, you know, scrolling, there's no, you know, there's no effort involved. And that seems very reinforcing. That's more of a compulsive behavior after a certain point that's going to get passed into reflex. Speaker 1 (28:38) Talk to anybody, anyone, and their life experience, if they've had a life, will say something like, oh yeah, everything was going great until this big thing. Then I overcame that big thing. And that was really the thing that taught me that I'm capable of even bigger things, right? I mean, we don't really like success stories. We like underdog often to success story, pitfall come out of that. The hero's journey is something that we resonate with. in part because it's so true, but in part because for so many people, it's not true. We know it's there, but most people don't embark on those things. And I think it's because we set too lofty an idea of what the hero's journey is. I mean, for a lot of people, it's about learning to do less. I know a lot of hard-driving people. It's about learning how to achieve more peace. It's about exploring ideas around spirituality or... fiction if they only read nonfiction. I mean, we all have to ask ourselves, how much should we push ourselves to do things that we're not just naturally inclined to do? I think a mixture of what we love to do and some of the things that we've just avoided because they just seem too hard. I think there's real value in doing those things. And all the data on maintaining cognitive ability say, will exercise make you smarter? No, it's necessary, but not sufficient to make you smarter. You still have to go learn. Without completely joking, I mean, this is evidenced by many guys that spend hours upon hours in the gym and they're not brilliant people. So they're exercising plenty. Their brain is clearly not getting bigger. They're not necessarily getting stupider, but they're not doing anything to make themselves smarter. You need to learn information. So there's that, but then there's also, people say, is it crossword puzzles? If you love doing crossword puzzles, guess what, my friend? They're not going to help keep your brain young. You got to do the hard puzzles. If they're easy for you, then it's not going to help. You like chess, play Go. You like checkers, learn chess. So this is where I think people really lose out on the understanding that people who are striving, maintain brain and bodily function for a long period of time, their internal state is not necessarily one of like, oh yeah, I just love learning and so I just keep learning. I bet you Andy Stumpf, as calm and cool and collected as he is, even though so many of his tier one operator peers tell me, It's really frustrating because Andy's really good at everything. Speaker 2 (31:00) I Speaker 1 (31:00) bet you if we looked at his internal state, his narrative is probably by now says, you know, you can do this, but is, I doubt it's one of complete calm all the time. I'm sure there's, he's just managing the external, like he's not showing it. Speaker 2 (31:14) Yeah. Talking about that, it seems like one of the things that gets in the way of a lot of people's lives is stress. What are your best protocols for managing stress? Speaker 1 (31:24) And I, I, realize some people may have heard this from me like 35 000 times morning sunlight yes but that physio just do a long exhale when you're stressed do a long deliberate exhale it slows your heart rate down through a phenomenon called respiratory sinus arrhythmia which sounds bad people hear arrhythmia it sounds bad but we've all heard of the vagus nerve the vagus nerve collects sensory information from our viscera which is nerd speak for your internal organs so your stomach your spleen your liver sending that information up to your brain, unconsciously, your brain is responding to that all the time. The vagus nerve also has a portion of it that goes from the brain to the heart and other organs. And there's one particular pathway that contacts and communicates with the sinoatrial node of your heart. And it slows your heart rate down when you exhale. And the reason is as you inhale and exhale, the space available for your heart changes. So when you, at some point, your heart is a little bit smaller. right during your breathing and the volume of blood that's in there moves more quickly so your brain sends a signal through this vagus nerve pathway to slow your heart rate down so when you exhale Speaker 1 (32:37) deliberately, this is the key, deliberately, I don't think I've ever described it this way, you slow your heart rate down significantly, you offload carbon dioxide, and your level of autonomic arousal, meaning sympathetic alert versus parasympathetic calm, balances, it tips more towards parasympathetic calm immediately. It's the fastest and most effective way to calm down fast. Better if you can do two big inhales first. Speaker 1 (33:05) and then exhale all the way to lungs empty. That's the so-called physiological sigh discovered in the 1930s, not by shamans, not by breath workers, but by physiologists. You have a dedicated set of neurons in the parafacial nucleus of your brainstem that capture the activity of this vagal pathway and slow your heart rate down. But the beauty of this mechanism is it also increases what's called HRV. Most people know, I want higher HRV. How do I do that? Well, I train VO2 max. I do some high-intensity interval training. Great. I do some long-distance endurance training, lower intensity. Great. You have higher VO2 max. What is higher HRV? Heart rate variability reflects the number of times throughout the day and night that this pathway, this pathway in the vagus, signals your sinoatrial node. to slow your heart rate down. In fact, you can increase your HRV pretty significantly if you just do 10 deliberate exhales throughout your day. And then at night, look at your HRV. It will be significantly elevated. This Speaker 2 (34:05) is why I spoke about this last time. This is why I need to get you one of those ohm.health lamp things for resonance breathing. We talked about this previously. Oh, Speaker 1 (34:12) yeah. Speaker 2 (34:12) So it's an algorithm. It's Speaker 1 (34:14) a Speaker 2 (34:14) stone on the top of this lamp. I think they're about to launch this month, this ohm.health. Stone on the top of the lamp, it vibrates. You breathe in time with the stone. It's got 100 hertz. sensor in it so it's detecting your hrv all the time and as it vibrates up and down you breathe in time with it and it modulates to maximize that arrhythmia and if you were to see it you would be swinging from 61 to 72 to 62 to 70 so like 60 to 72 and it is so fucking cool and the the sensation of doing that if no one's ever done resonant breathing before it is like After about three minutes, it almost feels like you've had a drink. It almost feels like you're a little bit drunk. It's very, very... When you get it, and the guy, Jay Wiles, who's the main science dude behind it, he talks about precision with this because you can get a resonance breathing that's not doing biofeedback. The problem with that is everyone's resonance pattern is a little bit different. Everyone's resonance pattern. You might be 4.9 in and like eight out. And I might be... 4.1 in and seven out. And that difference to him, he says, makes a big difference. One final thing on that, he said to go from state change to trait change with regards to resonance breathing, you need to do over 12 minutes. He says over 20, it doesn't start to- It's Speaker 1 (35:38) a Speaker 2 (35:38) lot like meditation, sounds like. Very similar. Very, very similar. And what's cool about this, what I love about this particular thing is you can grab it and you can hold it while watching a movie. It's like if you're just doing something else, it's silent. Even if you're with someone. You've got the lamp next to the couch or you've got the lamp next to the bed. You can't sleep at night. You grab it. It vibrates. It's pretty much silent. And you can just breathe in time. But you can be doing, watching something else. I haven't been able to read whilst doing it. That's a bit too cognitively demanding. But you can breathe whilst watching the TV. And that, I've racked up hundreds of hours in the last year doing resonance breathing because I've grabbed that. I'm going to go Speaker 1 (36:10) buy one of these. Don't give me one. And I don't want Om to gift me one. It's funny. I love... Still love finding new technologies, trying new things. Dude, Speaker 2 (36:21) new Speaker 1 (36:21) interventions Speaker 2 (36:21) are the best. They're just harder and harder to find new ones that people don't know about, which is why when I find one, I like chirp on about it for ages because I think that it's cool. I Speaker 1 (36:30) do the same. I mean, it's funny, throughout the book several times I mention, because I talk about behavioral tools. I would say 80 % of behavioral tools. And then there's a lot of discussion about pharmacology and supplements, about the pros and cons of everything from nicotine to amphetamines and on and on. But multiple times I mentioned some of the devices that Sauna Space, a company I'm not affiliated with at all. Sauna Space makes these indoor red light saunas that are incandescent. They heat up right away. But I also, I travel with one of their... red lights, it fills the whole room. I love those things. Raw Optics has these incredible non-flicker shortwave length eliminated. Well, actually, same bulbs go from daylight to you can get candlelight at night with no flicker and it's LED because incandescents aren't very energy efficient. And I have no relationship to Raw Optics or to Sonospace. Speaker 2 (37:21) I Speaker 1 (37:22) know the people there now because I've mentioned them enough times they've reached out, but I just enjoy sharing. things that I find useful. Physiological size or, or, you know, these particular lights. Like I just like sharing what I think might be useful to people. And some people have more disposable income than others. I think that, you know, nowadays it seems like the, are we over-optimizing becomes a big question. Like, are we over-optimizing? Speaker 2 (37:44) I did a huge essay about it not long ago. Speaker 1 (37:46) No, I listened and I think it's, um, it's an important question. I mean, to me, optimization is just taking the mic. What do you got today? What's on your plate today? And how do you feel best and do best in that context? And this brings me back to something that I failed to say earlier, which is that top-down versus bottom-up dynamic tension. Pretty much everything that's in the book, morning cortisol high, nighttime cortisol low, physiological size, et cetera, all of those things put you in the best position, put these circuits in the best possible position for you to have a more adaptive. less reactive, it's not meant to rhyme, more adaptive, less reactive life, right? To be more aware of the goodness in life and less reactive to the BS that you have no control over, this kind of thing. To be less prone to impulse and more prone to focusing on what really motivates you, the people that you love and doing the right things in accordance with that. You know, we all know that a bad night's sleep cripples this circuit such that the bottom-up influences take over. We know this, right? People sleep less, they're more prone to... they have less impulse control across the board and they become slightly psychotic also, especially if they don't sleep well for three or four nights in a row. But when you have these top-down mechanisms really reinforced by high morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol, great sleep, you're buffering stress well, you do a learning