LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre

This episode features a live Q&A session with Dr. Andrew Huberman, exploring the intersection of neuroscience and everyday health practices.

1. Effective sleep and controlled environmental temperatures are crucial for mental and physical health.
2. Nicotine can enhance cognitive function but poses significant health risks, including increased blood pressure and potential addiction.
3. Dietary choices should focus on unprocessed foods for better health outcomes and more intuitive eating habits.
4. Regular physical activity and strategic nutritional intake are essential for maintaining focus and energy.
5. Practical strategies for managing stress and enhancing mental health include engaging in non-sleep deep rest and leveraging light exposure to regulate circadian rhythms.

1: Introduction to Health Technologies

Dr. Huberman discusses innovative sleep technologies and dietary supplements that can significantly improve sleep quality and overall health. He emphasizes the role of environmental control in achieving restorative sleep. Andrew Huberman: "Controlling sleep environment temperature can drastically improve sleep quality."

2: Nicotine and Its Effects

Exploration of nicotine's cognitive benefits and risks, distinguishing its use in non-smoking forms like patches from more harmful methods like smoking. Andrew Huberman: "Nicotine itself doesn’t cause cancer; it’s the mode of consumption that does."

3: Strategies for ADHD and Performance

Dr. Huberman covers alternative approaches to managing ADHD, including behavioral and nutritional strategies, and the potential benefits of medications like Adderall when used appropriately. Andrew Huberman: "Combining behavioral, nutritional, and prescription tools can be effective for treating ADHD."

4: Nutritional Philosophies

Discussion on the importance of diet in mental health, focusing on minimally processed foods and the benefits of matching macronutrient intake with physical activities. Andrew Huberman: "Eating foods close to their natural state helps the brain associate taste with nutrient content."

5: Q&A with the Audience

Dr. Huberman answers various questions from the audience, providing insights into effective daily routines, the impact of light on well-being, and how to manage burnout with lifestyle adjustments. Andrew Huberman: "Adjusting light exposure and engaging in brief, intense exercise can significantly improve health outcomes."

1. Enhance Sleep Quality: Use technology to control your sleeping environment's temperature to improve sleep quality.
2. Consider Nicotine Alternatives: If using nicotine for cognitive enhancement, choose safer consumption methods like patches, mindful of addiction risks.
3. Adopt a Whole Foods Diet: Focus on unprocessed or minimally processed foods to improve health and intuitive eating.
4. Integrate Physical Activity: Include resistance training and brief intense exercises like stair running to enhance cardiovascular health and overall stamina.
5. Manage Light Exposure: Utilize morning light to help regulate circadian rhythms and consider red light in the evenings to prepare for sleep.

Recently I had the pleasure of hosting a live event in Brisbane, Australia. This event was part of a lecture series called The Brain Body Contract. My favorite part of the evening was the question and answer period, where I had the opportunity to answer questions from the attendees of each event. Included here is the Q&A from our event at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre.

People

Andrew Huberman

Companies

Eight Sleep, AG1

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

A
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life.

B
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Recently, the Huberman Lab podcast hosted a live event at the Great hall in Brisbane, Australia. The event was called the Brain Body Contract and featured a lecture followed by a question and answer session with the audience. We wanted to make the question and answer session available to everyone, regardless if you could attend. I also would like to thank the sponsors for the event.

They are eight sleep and ag one eight sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep is the critical foundation for mental health, physical health, and performance. Now, one of the key things to getting the best possible night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually needs to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and alert, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. Eight sleep mattress covers make it extremely easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment and thereby to control your core body temperature so that you fall and stay deeply asleep and wake up.

A
Feeling your absolute best. I've been sleeping on an eight sleep mattress cover for about three years now and it has completely transformed the quality of my sleep for the better. Eight sleep recently launched their newest generation of pod cover, the pod four ultra. The pod four cover has improved cooling and heating capacity, higher fidelity sleep tracking technology, and the pod four cover has snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve airflow. And stop your snoring.

B
If you'd like to try an eight sleep mattress cover, you can go to eightsleep.com Huberman to save $350 off their pod four ultra eight sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eight sleep.com huberman the other live event sponsor ag one is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens and other critical micronutrients. I've been taking ag one daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they decided to sponsor the live event. I started taking ag one and I still take ag one once or twice a day because it gives me vitamins and minerals that I might not be getting enough of from whole foods that I eat as well as adaptogens and micronutrients. And those adaptogens and micronutrients are really critical because even though I strive to eat most of my foods from unprocessed or minimally processed whole foods, it's often hard to do so, especially when I'm traveling and especially when I'm busy.

So by drinking a packet of ag one in the morning, and oftentimes also again in the afternoon or evening, I'm ensuring that I'm getting everything I need. I'm covering all of my foundational nutritional needs. And I, like so many other people that take ag one regularly, just report feeling better. And that shouldn't be surprising because it supports gut health. And of course, gut health supports immune system health and brain health.

And it's supporting a ton of different cellular and organ processes that all interact with one another. So while certain supplements are really directed towards one specific outcome, like sleeping better or being more alert, ag one really is foundational nutritional support. It's really designed to support all of the systems of your brain and body that relate to mental health and physical health. If you'd like to try ag one, you can go to drinkag one.com huberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs with your order, plus a year's supply of vitamin D.

Three k, two again, that's drinkag one.com huberman and now for the live event at the great hall in Brisbane, Australia.

A
What are my thoughts on nicotine? Nicotine causes cancer when it's consumed in the form of smoking, vaping, dipping or snuffing. So don't do that. There's a debate now about vaping. Is it bad?

Is it good? It's bad.

It is. Is it worse for you than smoking? Probably not. Is it better? Probably slightly, you know what's better?

Just not doing it. But if you need to do it and you have to pick, you know, I suppose, you know, I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I think that vaping has allowed a good number of people to smoke less. I'll acknowledge that. And it's also clear it's not good for you. So if you're going to do something that's bad for you, do a bunch of things to offset the thing that's bad for you.

That's always my advice. But now, in terms of nicotine itself, nicotine doesn't cause cancer. The mode of consumption causes cancer. That's important. Nicotine binds to so called nicotinic acetylcholine receptors.

So these exist naturally in your body and on your muscles, they're the way that actually your nerves control contraction of your muscles. So the consumption of nicotine, let's just say, I don't know about down here, but in Europe, it's becoming fairly common. And in the Middle east also, for people to take little pouches of nicotine can be absorbed sublingually or through the gum gets into the bloodstream, and it is truly a cognitive enhancer. It's a cognitive enhancer, not going to lie to you. It will raise attention, focus, cognitive performance.

This is well established. The problem is it also raises blood pressure and causes vasoconstriction. This is well established. So you have to ask yourself, is it worth it? Do I do it sometimes?

Do I do it often? Do I choose to not do it at all? I don't think the young brain should be consuming nicotine, even in these non cancer causing forms like pouches, for a variety of reasons, but mostly because the brain is so plastic at a young age anyway. But I actually am familiar with the use of nicotine for offsetting certain neurologic diseases. When I was visiting Columbia Medical University in New York City some years ago, I was in the office of a Nobel Prize winner, won't tell you who it was necessarily.

And he proceeded to consume no fewer than six pieces of nicorette gum. In our half hour meeting, I was like, whoa. At the time, he was in his late seventies. He's now in his eighties. And I was like, hey, listen, what's.

What's the deal with the nicotine? And he said, oh, well, it offsets Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. I said, really? He said, yeah, yeah, you can increase cognitive function. I used to smoke, but I don't want to get cancer.

So I just chew a lot and a lot of nick rat. Okay. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of nicarette.

You know, it can increase the amount of acetylcholine activation through the binding of these nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. Might even maintain some dopaminergic neurons, which are the neurons that. That one tends to lose with age and is rampant in diseases like Parkinson's. I thought, whoa, okay, so there's something there. The fact of the matter is that nicotine can enhance focus, alertness, and learning, but it does have those other issues.

So you want to be considerate of those other issues and not become dependent on it. And my experience is that people who taste the nicotine focus from a zin patch are those people who are buying those things. Pretty regularly. I know somebody that went from one zin patch twice a week to a canister a morning in about a month because the effect will wear off if you keep consuming it every day, you have to consume more and more. So take that into consideration.

Probably best to avoid, unless you really need the boost and you can afford the increase in blood pressure. That would be my suggestion. I've never taken nicotine and I don't smoke. What's the best you can do for managing ADHD if not taking medication? Okay, so we did two episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast on ADHD.

The first was on behavioral, nutritional, and supplement based tools. 50% of the comments like, thank you so much. This is very helpful. Can't wait to try some of this stuff. The other will I get your evil?

You're trying to persuade people to not take pharmaceuticals, which is not true. I'm interested in all of it. I just covered that stuff in the first episode. And then the second one we did on ADHD was about things like Vyvanse, Adderall, Ritalin, et cetera. Most of which, by the way, are amphetamines.

Are we putting our kids on speed? Yes. Yeah, they're amphetamines. But I don't think that we should walk away from those things in every case. They do have real clinical value in many cases.

And their clinical value comes from the fact that one, not all, but one of the major effects of amphetamines is that it can increase dopaminergic and noradrenergic, meaning dopamine and norepinephrine release in the brain, which can increase attention and focus, which is actually beneficial in some cases for the brain to learn to focus, to get neuroplasticity of those very circuits. So it's a consideration that 50% of the comments of that second episode were, why don't you talk about the behavioral tools, the supplement based tools and the nutrition tools. And everyone else said, thank you for talking about the prescription drugs. So the point being several fold. One is that certainly a combination of behavioral, nutritional, supplement based and prescription tools is viable for most every situation.

And it's worth thinking about all of those when considering a treatment for ADHD. And I think we really need to get out of these silos of thinking, you know, like big pharma is evil. Listen, there are drugs that can help people. Is it evil? I don't know.

Is it going away? No. Okay. Is there value there? Sometimes.

Is it over prescribed? Sometimes. What about nutritional tools? Well, in some cases, it can really help in other cases, one still needs prescription drug tools. In some cases, doing behavioral, nutritional, or supplement based tools can allow one to take lower doses of pharmaceuticals.

If that's your goal, I think it really needs to be tailored to the individual. What I would like to see is more of a tailoring to the individual than the simple write a script, send people off, or tell people that it's all bad if it comes out of a prescription drug label format. Now, it is very clear that the original dosing schedule for things like Adderall, Vivance, et cetera, was during the weekdays, but not the weekends. That somehow has moved to no weekends off. So there's been a lot of changing in the dosing schedules and the way these drugs are taken.

Are we creating a dependency on these drugs? Is always a big question, and the answer seems to be assorted. Very few people for whom these drugs work decide to come off them. There's nothing magical about turning 25, after which you don't need these enhancements. But sometimes people don't need them or need as much of them because the neural circuits can be built up.

One thing that I would like to see more of is attention to the behavioral tools for ADHD, not the least of which is what's being carried out in many schools and clinics in China, where people are being. Children are being encouraged to teach themselves how to maintain visual focus on a target some distance away from them, which then allows them to maintain cognitive focus when they move to their work. The relationship between visual focus, as we've talked about a bunch of times tonight, in the case of the cuttlefish, etcetera, and cognitive focus is an intimate one, such that if you expect yourself to focus, you can't really expect yourself to drop into focus as an immediate state. So it's not a square wave function, as you say. You don't just sit down and drop into a state of focus.

We're so attracted to these notions of focus, and we have these concepts like flow. And by the way, I'm not disparaging of those concepts. I know Stephen Kotler. I have respect for him and his books about flow. But from a neuropsychiatric, neuropsychological standpoint, what we can really say about flow is that backwards spells wolf.

We don't really know that much about it. And so I think that if you expect yourself to focus, you need to give yourself some warm up time to focus. Assume that you have attention issues. If you sit down and it takes five or ten minutes to drop into a state of focus, just like, you wouldn't expect yourself to go out for a hard run without some sort of warm up jog beforehand. So the behavioral tools, such as focusing on a visual target, are under explored, at least in most countries.

But in China and elsewhere, they are being explored pretty extensively. So I would encourage a full exploration of all the tools. In this case, it says not taking medication, then obviously heavier reliance on the behavioral tools is going to be helpful while I'm getting more sleep. Now, I neglected sleep for many years. Me too.

And at least 15 years of getting just five or so. Am I doomed or can I offset this past damage? You can offset the past damage. One of the things that's really wonderful about the brain and body is that it can compensate. You know, there's certain things that I get asked a lot.

I don't know why I get this question a lot, but people say, you know, smoked meth for years and then can I get my neurons back? And I'm like, well, you know, it's neurotoxic. But the fact that you're asking the question is reassuring, you know, so don't start. But if you did, you know, I mean, you can always do better than you're doing, and you certainly can do better than you did in your past, or at least that's what they tell me. So really, when it comes to sleep deprivation, you know, I spent many all nighters.

I wouldn't talk about sleep so much if I didn't have challenges. I mean, for a long time I slept like a bulldog. I would sleep anywhere, anytime. By the way, folks, if you ever walk down the street and you see a bulldog and you stop, you'll notice they always stop. They always seem so friendly.

They always stop. They always stop. And they look up at you and you pet them and you're like, the reason they seem to like you so much is because they love to stop. I owned one. They're all about the stopping.

It's not you, it's about the stopping. Anyway, the goal is not necessarily to sleep as much as a bulldog, actually, it's the only animal. See? Can't help myself. It's the only animal for which there's a genetically induced apnea.

They're brachycephalic, which means they have a short snout. They have all those folds. You know why the folds are there? The folds are there because they have a genetic mutation. They bred out the pain receptors in the face because they used to, like, have them like they would bull bait.

They bite on the face of the bull. They kill all the pain. They bred out the pain receptors. Give them a floppy face, short snout, english bulldog. Thank you for the specificity.

A biologist loves the specificity. The Frenchies are pretty cool. The Frenchies are pretty cool. They have a little more kick in them. Right, the bulldogs, a little less.

And Costello was a bulldog mastiff, so he was more or less like a sea turtle, you know, just slow movement, stopping, and he's going forward and you can move aside. Or in fact, Costello was so mellow that when he would lie down on the floor, I had one of those, you know, kind of robot vacuums things. We call it a roomba in our country. It would come up to his face and he would just. And it would bounce off his nose, and he wouldn't even take the opportunity to blink.

The bulldog is sort of the essence of economy of effort. And actually, if you look at people, people resemble different dog breeds. I spent a lot of time thinking about this. Some dogs and some people have a bit more kind of reverberation in them. They've got a higher rpm all the time.

All the time. All the time. And then they're the bulldogs, right, Rick Rubin? Right. There are these people that are just more still.

And we look at these people that are more still and think, well, there probably isn't that much going on in there, but now we know from the rick thing and the coral thing that they're thinking a lot. But in the case of Costello, they don't do much done. You know, maybe Costello wanted to get things done, but if he woke up on New Year's Day and said, all right, 50 rabbits this year, he never actually achieved that. But listen, the point is, some of us sleep like bulldogs. Some of us tend to go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night.

I'm one of those people. Go to sleep 4 hours, wake up. I hate it. But I figured out that non sleep, deep rest or yoga, Nidra has taught me how to fall back asleep really quickly, and I can recover some sleep by having gotten through non sleep, deep rest. Some people are waking up in the middle of the night because they don't have their sleep timing.

Right. We have a series on sleep coming out soon with the great Matt Walker. We record a six episode series with Matt, and he talks about something. I take no credit for this. This is Matt's acronym, QQRT.

Quality, quantity, regularity and timing. You want to pay attention to the amount of sleep. Some people need six, some people need eight. If you only got seven for years and you're reading that you need eight or else you'll get dementia. Please don't worry about it.

It is simply not the case. Some people need less, some people need more. This varies across the lifespan. Then there's the quality. How much of that sleep is continuous?

Did you drink caffeine in the afternoon or alcohol in the evening, in which case the quality will be diminished. The regularity is very interesting. Going to sleep more or less five nights a week at least. Going to sleep more or less at the same time every night, plus or minus an hour, it's fine on the weekends. I'm not just saying that.

So you don't all leave at once, or a third of you leave. Some people do best by going to bed at eight or 09:00 p.m. and waking up at three or four in the morning. And that's where you would feel best. In fact, if you're somebody that wakes up at three or four in the morning, you might be going to sleep too late.

And you have this intrinsic chronotype, as it's called, and you can shift your clock a bit later. But most people want to go to bed sometime between 10:00 p.m. and midnight. Wake up sometime between 06:00 a.m. and 08:00 a.m.

and there's great variation there, too. But, you know, qqrt. So think about the quality, the quantity, the regularity, and the timing. Once you dial those in, everything is much, much better. So much so that even if you're not getting enough sleep, as long as you're going to bed at more or less the same time each night, you'll fare better.

So if you didn't do any of this stuff for years, like I didn't when I was in graduate school, et cetera, don't despair. Don't despair. It's very clear that the brain can recover, and I wouldn't waste a single moment thinking about what you didn't do. Also, my time machine is broken. Your time machine is broken.

I realize that doesn't create a lot of comfort, but it's unlikely that you did substantial damage. Unlikely you did substantial damage unless you did that your whole life. And we're talking about a conversation that's happening late, late in life. But even then, more sleep would be better. Do you believe in burnout?

Hmm? If so, what would be a recommendation protocol? Relinquish burnout once it's already occurred. This is a very interesting question. You know, we don't quite know what burnout is.

And it can come from a combination of things. And typically, burnout comes not during the stress period, but several months afterwards. You know, the adrenals, you know, these two little nuggets above our kidneys and our lower back are capable of driving so much neural energy in us that we can do all sorts of things for a very long time, even in the absence of food, as long as we have water and salt. The adrenals, because they kick out adrenaline and cortisol, and, by the way, are involved in salt appetite. There's a reason for that, because you need that.

The adrenals can keep us going. And there is no such thing as true adrenal burnout, because the adrenals don't burn out. You've got enough adrenaline in your adrenals for two lifetimes. But there is an adrenal insufficiency syndrome. So that's a real thing.

It's rare, but it exists. But burnout seems to be, in my mind, more related to psychological burnout. And I'm not a psychologist, but I'm a fan of the poet David White, and he has this beautiful poem that is either entitled or somehow includes the word wholeheartedness. I think that where we recover ourselves is by relating to and engaging with things and people that we wholeheartedly enjoy, even if that is simply relaxation or gardening or drawing, or maybe just doing nothing for a bit. I think burnout is very real, and I think burnout has pushed through the filter of what we've been talking about earlier in the evening, is when we are not getting periodic experiences, if you will, of delight or excitement or a sense of meaning.

And here we're starting to drift into kind of abstract. You know, not everyone gets to do a job that they delight in. Certainly there were years where I didn't delight in the sorts of things I had to do for certain jobs, but finding some areas of life that create those neural energy states that carry forward, that wick out into other aspects of what we're doing. And I don't know if I made this point clear enough earlier, but those moments of really feeling excited about something in a way that really lights you up in particular, are not just about that moment and seeking out more of those moments, but in the way that it lifts our nervous system, the way it carries us forward, and allows us to do the other things that we have to do, which, frankly, sometimes can be not as exciting or even drudgery. So if you've burnt out.

I know the feeling. I have burnt out before, and I encourage a combination of rest, but also exploration of things that can evoke that kind of internal excitement or sense of meaning. And one has to be a bit of a forager in order to do that. Try new things and that can be difficult. But burnout is real and I encourage you to take it seriously because unfortunately, typically what follows burnout is depression, and then things can really run ashore.

What types of food do you try to eat every day, and why? Oh, I love to eat. I do. I love to eat. I even like the mere act of chewing so much.

So it just. Yeah, that's why I buy those persian cucumbers. You just munch on those things all the time. I tend to eat according to how alert or asleep I want to be. It violates a few kind of popular thoughts about nutrition, but that's what I do generally, for me.

I like water, caffeine early in the day, and then eat sometime around eleven or noon. I'm not really strict about these things. If I'm hungry, I'll have a plate of eggs in the morning or something, or a handful of macadamias. By the way, the macadamias down in Australia are awesome. They're so good.

In the states, they infuse them with all these palm kernel oils and stuff. And so when I first tasted the ones, and they always taste good, but I'm not going to get into the seed oil debate. I think of better ways to hang myself. Like, with this microphone cord. It's less like, you know, I don't.

I guess I do sort of avoid the seed oils, but, you know, I feel best. I love them. Oh, the macadamias. Told you. Always find my way back.

The macadamias down here taste as if they've been infused with all sorts of stuff. But then you look at the packaging and it's just like, macadamias and salt. I don't know what is so good. The coffee down here is amazing. I don't know why it tastes so good.

It's so good. The produce, I mean, basically, I eat like you guys gals. That's what I do. That's what I do. I basically eat meat and eggs and fruit and vegetables, and I do, like, rice and oatmeal.

And, like, there are people on social media tell you, like, oatmeal is gonna kill you. And I'm like, if oatmeal were gonna kill me, I'd be dead. I eat so much oatmeal. But that's not to say that some people feel better if they don't eat oatmeal. I kind of find the nutrition debates to be kind of, like, funny.

They're so non scientific, they're funny. But I also know that, and here I have a theory that when you eat most of your foods from unprocessed or minimally processed sources, something magical happens. Not only are you, let's say, eating healthier foods, quote unquote, but we should define healthier foods for which they're macronutrients. Proteins, fats, and carbohydrates also. And calories tend to be matched pretty well with high micronutrient content.

Something that doesn't exist in highly processed foods. Right, but probably also better for the planet, but which is great. Not being planet's important. We want to keep that around. But the other thing is that neurally, when you eat foods as their main ingredients, which is not, say, you can't have a soup or a stew or a salad every once in a while, but closer to their original form.

And I do cook my meat, unlike other people on the Internet. There's the guy eating chicken raw for, like, 28 days. I was in the barber shop the other day. They're like, what about the raw chicken guy? And I was like, not a good idea.

So when you eat foods in their kind of basic state, the brain can associate the taste with the macronutrient and amino acid content. And micronutrient content. And we know that the gut is sensing a lot of that unconsciously, subconsciously, we know this through neural pathways. Beautiful work being done by people here in Australia and in the states and elsewhere about the signaling for the gut is actually tasting the food, or it's measuring the amount of amino acids, fatty acids, et cetera. And so when you eat foods in their kind of more original form, non processed or minimally processed, it's clear that the brain starts to develop a more specific intuition or appetite for what you need.

You start to know, oh, like, I need some fat or I need some protein, or you start to crave the things according to what's actually in them. And highly processed foods and rich combinations of foods don't allow you to do that. So. And that hasn't really been explored. There's a little bit of work that's coming out on this by Dana Small at Yale and Kevin hall elsewhere, you know, but it's.

So we're starting to get there. So this is why I believe when people go on these elimination diets where they say, like, I'm only eating meat, like the lion diet, or whatever. Like Costello meat only. And like that they, many of those people, quote unquote, feel better, I think, because they're starting to form a relationship with the nutrient content of the food, the caloric content and the taste in a way that after that they, like, see a cracker and they're like, no, they can kind of reset the neural circuits around appetite and all of this stuff. But for me, because I'm an omnivore, like a normal person.

And sorry, no disrespect to the carnivores, I just kind of like the blood drinking, like liver chomping, like, come on, like the, I'm gonna catch a bullet or like a, you know, someone's gonna throw a bone at me. So I fear them more than I fear the vegans. It'll just be like a bunch of, you know, the vegans will attack you online, but in person they'll just like, hit you with a parsley. So it's not as, yeah, I'm going to get myself in trouble.

I'm an omnivore like most people. And so for me, between 11:00 a.m. and 08:00 p.m. is typically when I eat, but sometimes I eat at nine. I didn't eat before this because I don't like to eat right before I do this sort of thing.

So I'll eat a meal before I go to sleep tonight. I'm not super strict about this stuff. I'm not super, super strict, but in general it's some sort of intermittent ish fasting thing. And it tends to be meat and fish and eggs and love parmesan cheese and coffee and oranges and cucumbers and lettuce and food, like food and pasta. And I suppose that having done that for so many years, I do adjust it.

Like, if I do a hard resistance training workout, I'll eat a few more starchy carbohydrates to replenish glycogen. But I tend to avoid extremes with all that stuff. And I love a great slice of pizza and I've sort of lost my taste for sweets, but occasionally I'll do that. And I love vegetables like croissants and things of that sort.

But, you know, all kidding aside, you know, I do try and eat pretty healthy every day with a ton of info out there about health and wellness. Andrew, I love the way. Nikhil, what are your top health and fitness style recommendations for someone who has a busy lifestyle? This is a great question. And, you know, I get accused a lot.

I get accused of a lot of things, but, you know, one of them is, well, no one can do all this stuff, but we talked about it earlier. We do the best with what we have and the time we have. Try and get some bright sunlight, even through cloud cover. Especially through cloud cover. Every day I try and dim the lights or, you know, get under red light.

Not red light panel, necessarily, but just put in, like red party light. I've done that this whole trip. When we traveled in the evening, it's just a red light bulb. It's not fancy. So the red light bulb screws in this little pedestal, turn that on, all the other lights go off, and then makes for a nice, easy taper into sleep.

Because, you know, the blue and bright fluorescent lights, those short wavelength light really is activating for the nervous system, especially late in the day. So light is a big one for me. Try and get a few walks in. I think if you were going to exercise just two days a week, it's very clear that those two days per week should be include some resistance training exercise, and then maybe follow up with some easy cardiovascular training or something like that. Hopefully one could get out in about maybe three days or exercise sometimes not outside.

One can only exercise indoors maybe three days per week. So I don't think it takes a ton of time necessarily, but that might even be excessive. So with busy lifestyle, I think it's those little carve outs of five or ten minute walk. When we had Andy Galpin on the podcast and did a series. And by the way, Andy's launching his own podcast through our podcast channel, which is which Rob and I started.

He's got the perform podcast with Andy Yalpin. He talked a little bit about these exercise snacks. These are actually pretty cool in the sense that if you just take 60 seconds and do, you know, like near all out, you know, run up the stairs, but be careful or jumping jacks for a minute as fast as you can. That raises heart rate in a way and adjusts your physiology in a way that really does carry over to better performance, including even things like vo two max in other endeavors. So it's probably not the case that that's all you should do, but even small bouts of exercise can be very, very valuable.

So that's reassuring. And then I am a huge fan of non sleep deep rest, aka yoga nidra, which means yoga sleep, which is just lying there as we talked about before. But it's slightly different than what we were talking about for creativity, lying there and deliberately inducing, using your mind to deeply relax the different muscles of your body. Stay calm, long, exhale, breathing, this kind of thing. There's a ten minute NSDR with myvoice on YouTube that you can simply find and at zero cost.

There are many with other voices, female voices, et cetera, that you can find on YouTube as well. And if you don't like those, we're soon to release on our hebrew and lab clips channel a number of different meditations and NSDRs. Again, all zero cost of ten minute, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. I would say that for limiting stress, improving sleep and restoring mental and physical vigor, NSDR is perhaps the best tool out there. And again, I didn't create it.

I simply took yoga Nidra. I started calling it NSDR. And by the way, I was aware that I was going to upset some people when I did that. I was not trying to appropriate anything, I promise. The problem was I would talk about yoga Nidra and studies of yoga Nidra, showing that it replenishes dopamine in the basal ganglia, can restore mental and physical vigor.

And then people would back away from me slowly, like yoga. I don't want to do yoga. And I'm like, no, no, this is yoga sleep. You don't actually move. And they're like, well, that sounds pretty different.

And I'm like, I know it sounds different. I go on and on. And then I decided to call it non sleep deep rest. And when you call something what it is or what it can accomplish, you move away from nomenclature. And I have very mixed feelings about renaming things.

But I figure as long as I don't call it like the Huberman protocol, at least I'm distancing myself from it. And it's a zero cost protocol. So non sleep deep rest is valuable for restoring mental and physical vigor. It can potentially help offset sleep that you didn't get. It can help you fall back asleep at night.

If you do it in the middle of the night, it can help you get better at falling asleep if you do it during the day. I did it for 20 minutes just prior to coming out here. I always do that prior to any event or thing that requires a lot of focus, this kind of thing. Otherwise the jokes I tell are really just not okay. So I do think it's quite valuable and it's something to explore.

At what age would you consider testosterone replacement therapy? Wow. What are the risk versus benefits of starting it sooner rather than later? Well, so one of the major effects of testosterone replacement therapy is spontaneous shouting out in crowds.

Just kidding.

You know, there have been a number of studies of testosterone in males and females. By the way, females have more testosterone than they do estrogen. You know that, right? Per deciliter of blood, higher testosterone than estrogen, just on average. On average, they tend to have lower testosterone than men per deciliter of blood.

So it's important in both males and females. I think you're referring, James, to the use of so called TRT in males. But I'll touch on it in females as well, because low dose TRT therapy. Oops, sorry, I just did that. I get in trouble if you say, like, PCR reaction, ATM machine.

Is there a name for that? Okay, the t at the end of TRT is therapy. Testosterone replacement therapy. Testosterone replacement therapy technically means that someone's levels prior to that therapy fall outside the reference range. So lower than 300 nanograms per deciliter, typically, or some other array of symptoms, and they replace it.

Replacement therapy. Many, many people nowadays, in my opinion, far too many and too young, take what I call testosterone augmentation therapy, where their levels are within normal range, and then they take it to get out of range. And look, there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm not a cop.

You do what you want to do. There are a couple things, TRT or tat augmentation. And here we're setting aside high dose steroid use because that's just a whole other biz, and frankly, the bodybuilders will get upset, but I'll get away from you because you'll be waddling and I'll be running.

That's just like a whole other business. So, testosterone replacement therapy is widely used nowadays, I think far too young. Basically, it will lower your sperm count dramatically if you're a male. So you'd have to. If you want children, you want to conceive children, you will need to offset that by taking something like human chorionic gonadotropin, HCG, which is available synthetically.

They used to sell it in the form of pregnant women's urine. There was a black market for it. We could really go off into the sticks with this question, in my opinion. If you want to explore this, I would say, first, get your behaviors right. Sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress control training.

Get that right. Don't train too hard or too long, get that right. Then there are certain supplements, and we've talked about this on the podcast. Some are debated a little bit more than others, things like zinc, tongale, etcetera, that can probably provide a boost beyond normal without shutting down the gonads. And then, and only then, if you feel you really want to do this and it's in line with your ethics or, you know, I don't know, if you're playing a drug tested sport, etcetera, then just minimal effective dose.

And then if you want to have kids someday, or if you don't know if you want to have kids someday, make sure you're taking the appropriate things to offset that. That's basically what I would say. And the major effect of testosterone in men and women is not libido per se. And it's not aggression per se. It tends to make people more like them.

If you're a jerk, you can become more of a jerk. If you're calm, you become more calm. If you're kind, you can. I don't know if you become kinder, but there actually have been studies of altruistic behavior and administration of testosterone by nasal spray or other means. And frankly, people will become more, they'll become competitively altruistic.

I think the major effect also could be described as it makes effort feel good. So we could go on and on about this. I'll just toss in that nowadays there's a lot of excitement about peptides. I'm going to do an episode about peptides. A lot of the young people I run into here and in the states are like, what are your thoughts on BPC 157?

What do you think about this peptide or that peptide? Peptides are simply small proteins, amino acid chains. So there are lots of things called peptides, but typically these are things that increase growth hormone. Keep in mind that anything that increases growth hormone will increase the growth of any and all tissues. So if you have a small tumor that you're not aware of, that will grow also.

So just keep in mind, if you're going to tickle these pathways, you're playing with some serious biology, but there are safe ways to do it. Sorry, you said, what are the benefits of start sooner rather than later? Start it later. What are the physiological and practical differences between breathing techniques akin to Wim Hof and the physiological sign relation, stress, focus, etcetera. Okay, we can make this pretty straightforward.

First of all, I know Wim. We go way back to 2015. I went over to the Pyrenees and visited him and hung out and then brought him to the states. And Wim hof breathing is tummo breathing. But in science speak we call it cyclic hyperventilation.

It's just cyclic hyperventilation. So if you inhale vigorously and long, your heart rate goes up. If you exhale vigorously and long heart rate goes down through a process called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Volume of the heart changes when you breathe in versus breathe out. Speed at which blood moves through the heart changes as the blood gets bigger or smaller according to inhales and exhales.

And basically the net effect is inhale, heart speeds up a little bit. Exhale, heart slows down a little bit. So if you do wim hof, aka tummo breathing, and you inhale vigorously, let it fall out of your mouth, and then you're gonna increase heart rate, increase autonomic activation, etcetera. If you do a pattern of breathing, like inhale, inhale, long. Exhale, inhale, inhale, long.

Exhale. Cyclic sighing over time, you're gonna slow the heart rate down and you're gonna calm down. That's just how it works. So when I hear about box breathing, or now you hear about box breathing, okay, it's relatively equal ratios of inhale, exhale, it's a little bit of pause in there. That's the box.

Inhale, hold. Exhale, hold. Inhale, hold. Exhale, hold. Of varying durations depending on your so called carbon dioxide tolerance.

But at the end of the day, you're maintaining kind of even heart rate. When you do big cyclic hyperventilation, aka wim Hof, tumor breathing, your increasing heart rate and autonomic arousal, release of adrenaline, do cyclic sighing, a lot of exhales. The opposite is true. Okay. So that should give you a framework for thinking about breathing and how to apply different breathing techniques and get us away from some of the naming of things.

But I'm not trying to take anything away from so called wim hof breathing. By the way, if you're going to do wim Hof breathing, be very, very careful to not do cyclic hyperventilation or wim hof breathing. And then do breath holds. And don't do it anywhere. Don't do that anywhere near water.

There have been cases of people drowning, dying from combining cyclic hyperventilation and breath holds with water, because it changes the threshold for shallow water block out. When you exhale a lot or when you hyperventilate, you remove a lot of carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide is the stimulus to gasp. So what will happen is indeed, if you do, you're blowing off a lot of carbon dioxide, and then you go, right, that's a whim. Exhale. And then you hold and you go underwater.

Yeah, you'll hold your breath longer than you normally would, but instead of feeling that impulse to breathe like that, gasp reflex, and you shoot for the surface, you'll just black. Done. So it's a serious thing. And you want to be really careful to not combine cyclic hyperventilation and breath holds, and especially both with cold water. Frankly, any water exposure, I would say, don't do wim hof tummo or cyclic hyperventilation, breathing, even standing or seated in a puddle.

Okay. So in response to stress, it's really, if you want to be more alert, increase the vigor and duration of your inhales. If you want to be more calm, increase the duration of your exhales. Would you recommend that children also get morning sunlight? Yes.

And your pets, too, unless they're nocturnal pets, right? For anyone that had the not so smart idea of getting a hamster, you realize they're nocturnal, right? They're gonna run all night long on the wheel. In fact, rodents like to run on wheels so much that hoppy Hofstra Harvard has shown that if you put a little running wheel, like, you know, little wheels, that the mice like to run in there in a field, animals will run to the wheel and run in the field, which tells you everything you need to know about rodents. But really, children need that.

But obviously, babies have sensitive eyes. You know, we all can potentially hurt ourselves with sunlight. And down here, the uv index is very high when the sun is low in the sky, so called low solar angle sunlight in the morning and in the evening, the uv index, and mostly because of atmospheric interference, but some other things as well, it does. It's not as damaging to the eyes. That's why it's easier to watch a sun rise or a sun closer to the horizon than it is to, you know, please don't stare at the sun in any case, but an overhead sun.

So I think it's really important for circadian rhythms. But, of course, kids need their sleep. So if they're going to sleep, sleep in a little bit, that's fine. Just get them outside afterwards. It's the staying inside and staying on a phone that's problematic.

And then leaving that room at noon really shift your circadian rhythm in unhealthy ways. And that's true for children, perhaps especially true for children. As a father, what can I be doing to give my children the best start in life? What a great question. I hope my parents asked that.

They abandoned me at the pet store. No, I'm kidding. They didn't abandon me. They didn't abandon me at the pet store. If they did, I noticed I was among my friends, the fishes and the birds.

I think this question probably should be, I'm going to edit and just say, what can we all be doing to give our children the best start in life? And what does that mean for those of us that have already started in life? So, first of all, we have a episode of the Huberman Lab podcast with an absolutely magnificent guest, Doctor Becky Kennedy, coming out on, I guess it'd be Tuesday down here. So this coming week, all about this. And, you know, we could talk about things for learning, encourage them to play an instrument.

I would think that we perhaps should teach kids some tools to modulate their stress in real time, like physiological size. I don't see why not. I certainly wish I had tools to regulate my stress when I was younger. They didn't teach us that stuff. They didn't know it or the knowledge was there.

But as I mentioned earlier, they didn't teach us that stuff. They taught us all sorts of stuff in high school, health and stuff. I mean, they taught us that, you know, drunk driving is bad. They taught us it just takes one sperm one time. They taught us all sorts of stuff, but they didn't teach us the this business of physiological size or stress thresholds or about the anterior mid cingulate cortex because a lot of that stuff wasn't known or just wasn't discussed.

So I think some tools to control one's inner landscape, play music. I certainly am going to encourage the exploration of these energy states that, you know, letting kids explore. I mean, they need rules and regulation and boundaries, of course, but there's this concept of impingement that I find very interesting, that the classic psychologists used to talk about, you know, when we. And when a kid says they like something or don't like things, like, yes, they need to be doing certain things for their normal life progression. But kids are very good sensors of what works for them and what doesn't work for them.

We don't want to impinge on, certainly their healthy loves and desires, things that don't endanger them, right? Things that really reflect their unique loves and desires. Don't force them to play Suzuki violin. If they want to play the drums, right, let them bang on stuff and let the kids that want to play Suzuki violin do that. Don't make them play the drums.

So these impingements actually, I think, are problematic. They lead to a lot of confusion, and if anything else, they take us away from that unique wiring to be our own unique expression. Becky Kennedy does describe a few key principles of parenting that I think are really interesting. That extend to all kinds of relationships. She talks about the main role of parenting, and to some extent, all relationships, is to create boundaries and to make kids feel safe.

Seems pretty good to me. The other kind of short list of two things that she describes how to do this in ways that are highly actionable, is that every child. I found this really interesting. Every child wants to feel real. Like, they want to feel like they're real, like, they're seen, they exist, and they want to feel safe.

And so that one of the things that really rung in my ears and still does from that episode recording again, out this week is that when a kid or an adult says something about how they feel, that perhaps one of the best responses we can give them is, you know, I believe you like that. It doesn't. You're not saying that, like, you don't want to go to school. Don't go to school, right? We're not saying you don't.

You don't enjoy doing something. Don't do it. Or you want, like, a, you know, a fifth serving of candy. Like, you can say, like, I believe you, you know? No, you know, and so I think that a lot of it is, you know, we get confused with terms like validation and listening.

I mean, what I like so much about what Becky offers, and I do hope to do a child development series in the not too distant future.

What I like so much about what Becky offers is that it boils down to simple concepts like, we want to be real, which I guess is kind of an analog for seeing, and we want to feel safe. Not unlike when we did the podcast series on mental health with Doctor Paul Conti. He said, you know, it's really about mental health, is really about agency and gratitude. But there are a lot of things that siphon up into those feelings or those moments or that state of agency and gratitude. So I would say that's perhaps the most important thing, is, you know, boundaries.

Make kids feel safe and then make them feel real, like their feelings and what they're reporting matters. And then, of course, the impingement thing becomes a little bit complicated because they do need boundaries. So we have to constrain their wishes sometimes in their behavior, but we don't want to do it in a way that takes them away from that unique wiring that makes them who they are so they can become the characters and people and professionals and creatives and scientists and poets. Just good people, right? Everyday good people.

So that's the best answer I can provide at this time. They're not going to give me another question, but I can keep going, just briefly, if I may, by just first of all, saying that again. I'm very, very grateful for the opportunity to convene with all of you here tonight. I realize it was me speaking and you listening, except for the guy on testosterone. And I certainly, you know, I can't really express enough in words what the podcast means to me.

You know, it's a bizarre, it's a bizarre thing. It's completely transformed my life. It's made it, you know, incredible. I never dreamed of anything like this. But for me, it's really not about hearing my own voice.

It's this compulsion that came in at an early age. And it's really my wish, frankly, that the tools, the protocols, the knowledge, whatever it inspires you to do or to think, we don't have to agree on everything. I would hope we don't agree on everything. The ways we disagree with me and with each other and with others, that we start maybe thinking about ourselves through a lens of science and think about health and really try and meet those discussions with the kind of benevolence and curiosity and vigor. Good argument.

Every once in a while is healthy, too, that it really deserves. I think we're in a very interesting and kind of sometimes scary time. I often feel scared, frankly, because of what I see and even my own position in this whole landscape. I sometimes I feel like a lot of times things are just kind of hanging on by a thread. But I actually have a lot of optimism.

I think our species is very smart. I think that we've managed to navigate tricky places before, and I think that through the learning and teaching of things that work for us, that we learn from these kinds of things and from each other, that pretty soon we're going to start to fill in the gaps between the silos that are the yogic traditions, the chiropractic massage, health and fitness, traditional medicine, non traditional medicine, functional medicine. I mean, I really encourage all of you to try and, you know, stand back from it all and try and identify the common themes that may exist across these things and really try and identify some of the links and points of convergence more than the differences, and at the very least, to explore things. If you don't like them, you know, that's great. And if you do, to pass them on to other people, especially the behavioral tools that we all harbor within us, that I think can really enhance our mental health and vigor, our physical health, and hopefully our longevity, too.

So I could go on and on, but I really just want to say thank you so much for coming out tonight. This is our last night in Australia and I'm certainly going to miss being here, and we intend to come back again soon. Thank you so much for paying. Tuning into the podcast, paying attention to and tuning into the podcast, and for being willing to learn. You're all amazing students and you're also amazing teachers.

I learned from you all in comments and feedback. So if you have that, please keep that coming. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

Actually, I've never done this before, but because it's my last night here, I've always seen people do this and I've never done it, but I'm gonna do it. Can we get the house lights up? I want to get one of these. Like, I'm gonna do this as a video. And you don't have to do it.

Your faces will show up. But don't worry, we won't. It will go on the Internet. But this is not for me. I just wanna.

I'm gonna send my mother this. Okay. There we go. Thank you. That's on you.

Thank you. You made my mother very happy.