← Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee
Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee
Dr Andrew Huberman: The One Daily Practice Everyone Should Do, Training Your Brain and Reducing Anxiety (re-release) #524
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If I told you there was a simple, free habit you could take up to optimise your health in just five to 10 minutes a day, would you be up for trying it? If the answer’s yes, then you’re going to love today’s guest, a brilliant science communicator who reveals what the habit is – and shares ground-breaking insights from his research.
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- [00:00]
A
Digestive issues, mental focus issues, depression, anxiety Exacerbation of every major psychiatric disorder from OCD to ADHD is closely associated with disruptions in circadian clock function. So you need to coordinate the cells and systems of the body. The primary way that happens is through the arrival of light to the eyes at the appropriate times of day and the absence of light at other times.
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B
Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast Feel Better Live.
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A
More.
- [00:41]
B
This podcast is getting so many new listeners at the moment because of the global release of my brand new book, the number one Sunday Times bestseller Make Change that Lasts nine simple ways to break free from the habits that hold you back. And so I had decided to re release some classic evergreen conversations from this podcast's back catalog every Sunday to give new listeners a real flavor of what this podcast is all about. And today's re release is a wonderful conversation with professor of Neuroscience at Stanford University school of medicine, Dr. Andrew Huberman. Now, Andrew's lab has made numerous contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function and neuroplasticity, and his work has been featured in global media outlets such as Time Magazine, the BBC and Scientific American. In our conversation we discuss so many fascinating topics, including why exposing our eyes to morning light is so important, how this practice affects our sleep immunity, mood and appetite, what exactly is going on in the brain when we feel fearful, and how something as simple as getting outside and looking at the horizon can completely change our physiology and powerfully inhibit anxiety. We also talk about the role that technology is having on our attention. And throughout the conversation Andrew shares a variety of simple exercises that we can all do to improve our focus, health and performance. The way I thought we could start this conversation was because we've got very different experiences in our life. You know, I'm a clinician, you're a scientist. So I've been a practicing medical doctor for over 20 years now and I'm very passionate how lifestyle influences our health. And when I see a patient, I'm always trying think about what aspects of our lifestyle, of their lifestyle, can I try and change? And there's always so many options. So what I always try and do is think, what is that upstream lever that I can turn? And if I can get that right, then automatically it's going to take care of a lot of downstream consequences. And when I think about your work, one of the key things that sort of jumps out to me is that the visual system may well be one of these key upstream levers. If we can learn how to manipulate it, if we can learn how to let the right type of light in at the right times of day, that can also have a whole myriads of downstream consequences.
- [03:36]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I think when we think about health practices, I think about foundational practices. And often those are lifestyle practices. And foundational practices, in my mind are the things that bring the tide in so that the ship that is our health can actually get out of harbor and get out into whatever destination it wants to head to. For many years I paid close attention to these areas of wellness and biohacking and also standard healthcare. But as an outsider, or somewhat of an outsider, cause I have many colleagues who are clinicians. But as you point out, and it's important for me also to point out, I'm not a clinician. I always say I'm not a medical doctor. I don't prescribe anything, I'm a professor. So I do research and profess a lot of things. And you know, the, the, the visual system, I think really sits at the top of the list in terms of what practical tools and I think science people should be aware of in order to lay down the bedrock of their foundation of mental and physical health and high performance for those that already feel as if they're doing well and want to level up their mental or physical practices. And the reason I say that is for the following reason. As you know, but maybe some of the listeners are not aware of. You have a brain, of course, but the brain is really part of this larger organ, the nervous system, right, the brain and spinal cord, central nervous system. And then you have a so called peripheral nervous system. And the nervous system's job is to coordinate the activities of all the, of all the organs of the body, including our movement and our thought and our emotions. But really coordinate the immune system, coordinate the endocrine system. It's really the conductor of the whole business that is us. The visual system is unique in that it's the only piece of the central nervous system that resides outside the cranial vault. So our eyes we think of as seeing devices, little cameras with lenses that inform the brain about the rest of the outside world. But they are actually the primary and in some sense the only way in which the nervous system has knowledge about external circumstances. And so lining the back of our eyes is this three layered structure called the neural retina. And the neural retina is part of the brain proper. It's a piece of the brain that got extruded out of the cranial vault during development. So you've got two little bits of brain outside your cranial vault. And when those two little bits of brain see light, or when I should say more accurately when light lands on those two little bits of brain, has a profound effect on levels of energy, the function of the immune system, the timing of sleep, the depth of sleep, the appetite, and a whole other host of biological processes. And it sounds very complex, but actually the system is quite straightforward. It was organized or it is organized such that if light arrives at the appropriate times of the 24 hour cycle onto the neural retina, many, many things go terrifically well and set you up to do very well in mental and physical health. And if light lands in those two little bits of brain, the eyes, at the wrong times, well, everything doesn't go to disaster right away, but in a day or two, very quickly, things start to fall apart at the level of immune system and mood and functioning. We could talk about the practical tools, but I hope that lays the organizational logic behind why we say the visual system is so important. We could not say the same thing for touch or hearing, smell or taste. While those senses are important, they don't have this major lever effect on the rest of the nervous system and therefore the rest of the body.
- [07:35]
B
Yeah, I find that super fascinating because there's other senses, of course, we get so much information, touch receptors, we can glean so much from our immediate environment through those touch receptors. But yeah, I like what you say that the visual system really is that kind of top down driver. Get that right. And lots of things sort of take care of themselves. So, you know, compared to when we were sort of evolving or for the, for the majority of our time on planet Earth, we have been exposed to light in a very particular way, haven't we? You know, we had presumably lots of natural light in the daytime and low levels of light in the evening. Yet for many of us that's been flipped. So maybe you could talk to how many of us live these days and what are those practical tips that we can use to get the visual system to start working for us and not against us?
- [08:36]
A
Great, yeah, I'd be happy to. So a couple of just basic facts about the way we are organized. Every cell in our body, every cell has a 24 hour oscillator. Just meaning it's like a clock that counts down from 24 to 0 and then repeats. And every cell in our body needs to be coordinated to some master clock so that the cells of our body work as a coherent whole. This system, when disrupted, is what happens in jet lag. It can happen under a number of conditions. A lot of people are what I call jet lagged at home. The clocks of their cells are out of sync and this causes many problems. And I'll mention the problems first. These include digestive issues, mental focus issues, depression, anxiety, exacerbation of every major psychiatric disorder from OCD to ADHD to Alzheimer's, which is a neurologic disorder, of course, sometimes classified as one or the other, but you get the idea. So you need to coordinate the cells and systems of the body. How does that happen? Well, the primary way that happens is through the arrival of light to the eyes at the appropriate times of day and the absence of light at other times. So I'll give the practice and the tools first, and then I'll flesh it out with some science so that we don't go too far down the rabbit hole of circadian neurobiology. So the foundational practice that I truly believe every person should do, ideally every day, but if not every day, most days, is to view bright light, ideally sunlight, within 30 minutes to an hour of waking. And ideally it would be even sooner. Now, this is not practical for many people. You live in certain areas of the world where there isn't a lot of sunlight, and we'll get to that. But the idea is to get up in the morning and within about 30 minutes to get outside and get sunlight into your eyes. It is fine to, to wear corrective lenses like contacts or corrective eye lenses. In fact, because of those, what they do, those actually focus light to the retina. Precisely. That's the role of those lenses. So that the light actually lands not in front of or back of the neural retina, but on the neural retina. But sunglasses would be problematic. So provided you can safely do it. You get outside and you want to view sunlight, do you need to be in direct sunlight? No. Do you need to stare at the sun? No. Please don't stare directly at the sun. I always say never look at any light artificial or sunlight that's so bright that it's painful to look at. You have a blink reflex for a reason. But how much and how long to do that? Well, it's going to vary because of time of year. People have different sensitivities to light. But in general, getting outside for about five to ten minutes every morning is extremely important. If there's cloud cover, it's still important. And it's far better than getting light from artificial sources like the ones behind me. Even Though artificial lights can seem very bright early in the day, they really don't carry the light into intensities that are required to do the following things. When you look at sunlight, especially early in the day, there's a special class of neurons, nerve cells in the back of the eye called intrinsically photosensitive cells. These were discovered by David Burson at Brown University and others. These cells connect to your hypothalamus. They literally send a wire that we call an axon to your hypothalamus, which resides over the roof of your mouth. And there resides what we call the master circadian clock. The master circuit clock also has a name, the suprachiasmatic nucleus. And the suprachiasmatic nucleus acts as a conductor for all the cells of your body, from your liver to your brain cells, every cell. And it starts sending out signals to coordinate those clocks. Think about a clock shop where all the clocks are out of sync. The suprachiasmatic nucleus sets them all to the same correct time so that they all chime at the appropriate time. Otherwise it would be chaos. So light early in the day is the primary signal by which that clock setting mechanism occurs. Now, if it's very dark out, you may have to rely on artificial lights. And I'll mention some low cost options. If you wake up before the sun comes out, turn on as many bright artificial lights as you can. But then once the sun is out, then go outside. People ask, can and should you do this through a window or a car windshield? And the answer is no. Because of the filtration of particular wavelengths of light by windows and windshields, it will take about 50 times longer. You'll be spending all day waiting for this clock mechanism to kick on. A couple other things about positive things that happen when you do this practice. First of all, every 24 hours, your body will release a hormone called cortisol. We often hear about cortisol as a stress hormone, and then it's terrible for us. But cortisol, as you know, is vital to life and it actually provides a lot of the alertness and focus that is wonderful for so many things. That pulse, as we call that increase in cortisol, is going to happen at least once every 24 hours, regardless of when you view light. But by viewing light early in the day, that pulse arrives early in the day and gives you energy and focus for a 10 to 12, maybe even 14 hour period. If you do not view light early in the day for a couple days in a row, what happens is that cortisol pulse starts to drift later and later into the afternoon. And a late shifted cortisol peak I should call it peak or pulse is closely associated with many forms of chronic depression. People's mood starts to get worse, they start having evening anxiety, they start having trouble sleeping. So get as much bright light in your eyes as you can early in the day, as is safely possible. If it's a really bright day or you're on a snow field, it'd probably only take a minute or two to set this clock. If for instance, today actually it's pretty overcast. It's looking pretty UK here right now. I spent some time over there and I'll get outside and view light. Maybe I'll spend 30 minutes there. Maybe I'll take my work outside. It's raining a bit, so it's tough. But you try and do it most days. If you miss a day, no big deal. But the next day you should try and get twice as much time outside. Now why would that be? It turns out that this clock mechanism is what we call a slow integrator. It's actually counting photons over time, light energy. So this part of our visual system is very different than the visual system components that we use to see edges and faces and recognize motion, et cetera. It is a clock setting mechanism for our entire brain and body. So get that morning and early light if you don't have access to sunlight for whatever reason. I know there are a lot of daytime simulators that are for sale out there, so called SAD lamps, seasonal affective disorder lamps, they're quite expensive. I want to be very clear, I have no financial relationship to any of these companies. But one low cost alternative is to get a ring light of the sort that the Instagram or YouTubers use to make themselves look good. It's like a blue ring light. You can find them very low cost and you just put that at your breakfast table or while you work in the morning. That is bright and will get the system going. And some people like that on all day. And that brings me to another point, which is that there's a lot of interest nowadays in blue blockers. And we've heard so much about how blue light is so terrible for us, but nothing could be further from the truth. Blue wavelengths of light are one of the main wavelengths that sets the circadian clock. In other words, don't wear blue blockers in the morning and throughout the day. You're actually short circuiting this wakefulness signal and clock setting signal. If you're going to wear blue blockers, or try and truncate the amount of light coming into the eye for sake of better sleep, et cetera. Do that late in the day and I'll get to late in the day in a moment. So hopefully that covers the main bullet points and the questions that I usually get asked about this. It's a zero cost practice to get outside. Yes, you can bring your phone. I suggest bringing your children or your dog or your, you know, or just yourself and getting outside. Take your coffee outside. Even on a day where it seems kind of overcast, you're getting far more photon energy than you would from bright indoor lights. So that's the main thing. And many people report feeling much better immediately. But in addition to that, as you do this more and more, you'll start to recognize the physiological response. It's not a placebo response. There are two things that happen. That cortisol pulse starts to get entrained, as we call it, synchronized to this behavior into this light viewing. And the other thing that happens is that when you do this morning light viewing, it sets about a 16 hour countdown to the release of another hormone called melatonin, which is released from the pineal gland and is the hormone that's responsible for transitioning us into sleep, not keeping us asleep, but transitioning us into sleep. So it actually helps establish better transition and quality of sleep later that night. Many people who have sleep issues find that just a simple morning light viewing practice assists their sleep issues tremendously. So that's the primary layer, and this is all mediated by vision. There are other things one could do. For instance, if you want to kind of synergize with this practice, which would be if you're an exerciser, you could try and do your exercise outside without sunglasses. There are a number of other practices you can layer in, but in terms of the visual system, that's the main one. The other one, I would say a close second is to absolutely dim the lights in the evening and late hours. The hormone melatonin, as I mentioned before, is powerfully inhibited by light. When you view light, even if you go into the bathroom in the middle of the night, you turn on really bright lights. That quashes the levels of melatonin that are released from the pineal. And many people get a little paranoid about light when they hear that. I wouldn't worry about it. I would just dim lights as dim as you need in order to safely move about your evening activities. And basically the time to avoid light would be between about 10pm and 4am Shift workers are a separate conversation. I have an episode of my podcast completely devoted to shift work. It involves some technical details to figure out how to adjust these behaviors for them so they could check out that episode. But let's think about typical night diurnal people, as we call it, sleep at night and awake during the day. So avoid bright lights in the evening. Now earlier I said the lights that are artificial lights are not bright enough to set the circadian clock, so you need sunlight. So why can't you view Netflix or your screen or bright lights at home between 10pm and 4am? Well, turns out that the sensitivity of the cells in your retina changes such that it doesn't take much light in the evening or late, you know, 10pm to 4am to throw off your whole clock schedule and system. So in the evening is when you want to dim the lights. And ideally you would also have the lights low in your physical environment. The cells that transmit this information to the hypothalamus reside in the lower half of the retina and because of the optics of the eye, they view the upper visual field. So table lamps lights down near the floor. Firelight or candlelight is fine, moonlight is fine, believe it or not, even though a very bright moon actually doesn't carry that much photon energy. So avoid bright lights between 10pm and 4am As a last point, if you somehow have to run to the store, to hospital or you turn on the lights in the middle of the night, don't freak out. Remember, these are slow integrating systems. It's just that if you're consistently looking at screens late at night or you're consistently turning on bright lights in the middle of the night, you're really messing up your system. So these are averages. It's a lot like nutrition or exercise. Try and get it right or mostly right about 80% of the time. And don't panic if you happen to violate these tools every once in a while, you'll be just fine.
- [20:43]
B
Yeah, I love that. Very, very thorough, very, very comprehensive. I just want to echo Andrew. In my own clinical experience, I have seen natural light exposure just like you be game changing for people. I first wrote about it, I think about five years ago, my first book, and I still get messages today from people taking photos of themselves outside having their morning cup of tea or coffee in the garden. I think that's really, really important. And I also love, you know, the way you talk about the visual system and these cells in the back of the retina. For me, it sort of feels like light coming through the eyes first thing in the morning is. It's kind of like the conductor of this beautiful orchestra that can be played by different organs and cells within your body. Is that, is that sort of fair to say?
- [21:35]
A
Absolutely. And yeah, I think as a clinician, you'll probably recognize this phenomenon, ICU psychosis, when people don't get regular sunlight because they're in the hospital. Remember, hospitals are some of the most unhealthy places to be. Sorry, my clinical friends, but you look at the food in hospitals, it's dreadful. You look at the lighting conditions and they violate everything that I just said. And there's a phenomenon well known called ICU psychosis where people literally develop psychosis in the hospital because of the chaotic lighting schedules. They leave and they feel better. And I'm mentioning this because there are two studies from University of Colorado showing that when people get onto these schedules of morning light viewing and avoiding artificial lights at night, to some extent, their melatonin and cortisol rhythms correct within two days. And so that's. I just, you know, put that in there as a kind of an encouragement that it works very quickly and nobody escapes this mechanism. There is no one, you can say, nutrition. We could argue about plant based carnivore omnivore. I mean, the discussion is such a hairball topic that I've made the mistake of touching that third rail before. But when it comes to light viewing, nobody escapes this. In fact, even blind people, provided they still have eyes, have this mechanism. And actually, because my lab works on visual repair, in addition to a number of other things, I consult a lot of people who are blind and they have vastly improved their sleep. A major issue for blind people is sleep and other aspects of, well, being through this mechanism. Now you said the conductor of the orchestra, and that's absolutely right. It is fair to say that this is the most important mechanism by which we coordinate the activities of all the cells of our body. In the classic circadian literature, they call it light is the primary zeitgeber. That's my terrible German pronunciation for timekeeper. When you eat, when you exercise, when you socialize, and temperature are the other factors. But light is the primary zeitgeber by which your body and your brain orient itself in time. And so when you say the conductor, we should just. You're exactly right. We of course know where we are in space because of. In physical space, because we can see where we are. But how do we know where we are in time? And actually this mechanism of viewing sunlight is how we orient in Time because the Earth, non coincidentally, I should say our cells, non coincidentally, have a 24 hour clock because the Earth rotates once every 24 hours. In addition to that, because it's a 365 day orbit around the sun each year and the Earth is tilted toward or away from the sun somewhat at different times of years, the so called equinoxes and so forth. The there's a beautiful mechanism by which sunlight viewing every day orients us in time and in ways that are powerful. Because melatonin, as I mentioned, is inhibited, it's prevented by light. So as you on average get longer days or shorter days throughout the year, and because of the changes in the intensity of light in the morning, what ends up happening is there's a signal that's sent to your brain, a very slow integration signal, so that your brain and body know where you are in that 360, 65 day journey, which is incredible, right? And we're talking about an annual calendar that's transmitted from the eye to the hypothalamus, converted into a hormonal signal, which is melatonin. And you actually know what season you're in biologically as a consequence. And we know that for instance, in longer days, shorter nights, the body and brain make much more dopamine and serotonin neuromodulators that enhance our sense of well being and safety and motivation. In longer, shorter days, excuse me, longer night periods, you know, in the winter then we tend to feel a little bit more solemn, a little bit less energy, we tend to want to eat more cortisol lowering foods like carbohydrates, which function pretty well to lower cortisol, so called comfort foods. I'm not suggesting people do that, but it does work. Pigmentation of the skin is related to this, hormones related to libido and in mood and all of this. Now it varies depending on where you live. If you're at the equator, there isn't much variation in the melatonin signal because there isn't much variation in daylight across the year. But this orchestra is one in which your body and brain need to anchor themselves in time. And it seems somewhat abstract, but one thing that we know for sure is that people with anxiety, sadly, suicidal depression, different forms of depression, almost always before an episode or sadly before a suicide that ends in death, in almost always preceding those events is a disruption in somebody's sleep schedule. I mean it's almost 100% is that somebody is feeling off, but their sleep schedule is off. And a characteristic feature of Depression is waking up at 3:30 in the morning or 4 in the morning and failure to be able to fall back asleep or two in the morning. That doesn't mean, if that's happening to you, that you're necessarily clinically depressed. But every depressive disorder, suicide, anxiety, ADHD is closely associated with disruptions in circadian clock function. And while what we're talking about won't necessarily cure those issues or resolve those issues, they greatly facilitate the transition to health and well being in all people, but in particular in depression and anxiety and so forth.
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B
Yeah, I mean, thank you for sharing that. One of the things I notice with a lot of patients who are struggling with a whole variety of different conditions, but like the mental health conditions sort of you were describing there, is that yes, it can be early morning wakening, but it can also be this general lethargy and an unwillingness to get out of bed and to get outside. So there's a lot of time spent indoor. And actually, you know, that action of getting natural light exposure in the morning can be so, so beneficial. And I think a lot of people also, in my experience had. You don't realize that actually it becomes this vicious cycle. You don't expose yourself to natural light till early afternoon, you push your whole clock back. So you go to bed later, you wake up feeling exhausted the next day, and again you don't want to go outside in the morning. And then you keep getting locked in this cycle where as you say very quickly we can start to reset that with natural light exposure. So I think that's a really great point to make. The other thing, what you were saying about seasons, I had that written down actually. I wanted to talk to you about seasons because one of the things modern life does for many of us is that it kind of imprints certain times that we do things irrespective of our natural environment. So here in the uk, as we have this conversation, you know, it is still dark at 7:30 in the morning and it is now getting dark again at about 4:30, 4:45 in the afternoon. So, you know, dramatically limited our exposure to natural light. So it strikes me that it's hard depending on which job you're in. But you know, do we need to live with the seasons a little bit more is the first question. And I guess semi related to that is something that I as a parent is probably concerning me somewhat at the moment. My son started secondary school or high school just a few months ago and I think because of the restrictions over the past two years, a lot of homework now gets given online. And I also go into schools to help them with wellbeing. And how do we address all these mental health problems? And for me, talking about these levers that can have. These key levers that can have multiple downstream benefits, for me, I think, well, particularly in the winter when it gets dark so early, if kids have to be on their screens in the evening to do homework, that's going to push back melatonin. They're going to be more tired the following day, they're going to be less emotionally regulated. They're going to be more prone to getting triggered. So talk to me a little bit about those things if you can, because I think this could be quite a big problem that could be addressed with a very simple dictum, which is, let's not give homework to our kids on screens.
- [30:24]
A
Yeah, I think that improper viewing of light, meaning at the wrong times, is going. We're going to look back and realize that this is the snack and junk food of the 80s and 90s that's led to so many issues, metabolic issues and obesity crisis and things of that sort. Mostly because it fits a lot of the same. It has sort of the same contour, easily accessible, Everybody's doing it. It's kind of meshed itself into the way that we work and behave and in ways that, you know, that I have a friend, he's a psychiatrist, so he uses this as kind of language, which is, you know, the subtle informs, the gross. You know, it's these little. These little behaviors that we accumulate over time that lead us down the path of either health or disease of various kinds. So, you know, a couple things those kids, just from a practical standpoint, could dim their screens. It would not be a bad idea for them to dim the room lights as well, Keep phones and tablets out of their rooms at night. It's that bright light relative to dark background that really can amplify the signal to the clock in the evening. There are a couple other things that I should mention about kids and just. And adults, too. So when we view things up close, there are changes in the optics of the eye. The lens of the eye is this beautiful structure. It actually can move. Your eye is a very dynamic structure. It's got little muscles and the lens moves. It's incredible. But one of the consequences of viewing things up close too much is that the eyeball lengthens and children and adults develop myopia, which is nearsightedness, and they need corrective lenses. One of the more exciting things to happen in the last couple of years are a couple of large scale clinical trials, thousands of patients, and where they looked at if kids and adults, but mostly kids, if they spend two hours a day outside, even if they're doing their homework outside on a computer. But if they spend two hours a day outside, two things happen. One is they greatly reduce the incidence of myopia through a different eye, to, excuse me, light to eye mechanism that we won't go into the details, but these are very solid findings. And the other thing that's very, very powerful for kids and for adults, but especially for kids, because their brain is still plastic, as we say, can change very easily in response to experience is to view things at a distance. When you go outside in the morning and get that sunlight or throughout the day, periodically you want to try and view things that are certainly beyond the extent of your phone or your computer or the walls of a house, but also often to the distance. If you can view a horizon, even better. But if you can't, try and look across the street, down the street as far as you can. There's a number of reasons for doing this. First of all, viewing things up close all day is a very active process of keeping that lens in your eye, a particular shape and the muscles of your eye. And it can lead to headaches, it can lead to eye strain. Many people who have migraines have migraines because they're just not looking far enough into the distance very much. The other thing is that getting that sunlight outside during the day through mechanisms separate from the clock mechanisms is known to improve mood and improve metabolic function. And this is because of the linkage between the eye and a structure has a weird name called the habenula. The habenula is a little structure in the thalamus, kind of middle of the thalamus, for those of you that want to know. That is associated with the dopamine system and with feeding and regulation of mood and feeding rhythms is the beautiful work of Samur Hatar, who's the head of the chronobiology unit at the National Institutes of Mental Health and others. So there's real science to back up what I'm saying here. So get outside during the day as much as possible. Take a walk, view things in the distance. Don't be looking at your phone like this as you walk, getting the optics of your eyes into what we call panoramic vision, where you're not necessarily moving your head or eyes around a lot, but you're just kind of opening up that aperture of your visual field. Very important. And especially in kids. So we're talking now about improving sleep, improving wakefulness, improving concentration through morning light viewing, improving sleep, improving, or I should say offsetting the development of myopia, nearsightedness, possibly even reversing myopia or some of that myopia in adults. We're talking about also anxiety relief. One of the things that's really exciting in the last few years is that we've known this for a long time, but that when we move through what we call the scientists are so geeky when we say when we self generate motion, whether or not on a bicycle or running or jogging or just even walking, doesn't matter what speed, the visual world is slipping by us, right? But we don't actually see blurry blur going by like we would if we took a picture on our phone and moved our phone. And that's because we have what are called slip compensating eye movements, where we're constantly making adjustments for the slip of the visual image on our retina. And those slip compensating eye movements and forward movement in particular, as long as it's self generated, is known to directly inhibit and powerfully inhibit the activity of the threat reflex that involves brain areas like the amygdala, which is associated with fear and anxiety. In other words, walking forward or biking forward or jogging forward, provided that your visual system isn't staring at your phone the whole time. And no, unfortunately this won't work on a treadmill. When you do that, you're actually creating an anxiety relief. And this is so we're talking about very basic things. Get outside and take a walk. Don't look at your phone while you're doing it. Run outside as opposed to on a treadmill, if you can safely do that. Some people might say, well, on the peloton I see all this stuff streaming by, but it's not actually streaming by. It's a slightly different situation. Probably better than not having any visual imagery there. But get outside, take a walk, view things at a distance. Even if you're just doing this 10, 15 minutes a day, you're doing tremendous things for your health and kids who aren't doing this or lock the screens all day and all night. I mean, I don't want to be hyperbolic, but they're messing themselves up and their brain is very plastic. They're going to have issues, vision issues, anxiety issues. It's really serious. And sadly there isn't enough attention on this at the national and international level. But there is a lot of science to support the practices that we're talking about here.
- [37:01]
B
Yeah. And again, all these practices that you've mentioned so far are completely free of charge, right? That's nothing. And you know, like me, I know you're super passionate about that. So I think it's one of the many reasons why I'm drawn to your work is I always see that with you, this kind of desire to make sure that the things that you recommend, where possible, are accessible to everyone. And I feel if teachers, if head teachers around the globe could hear that and really think about how they can implement those things within their schools. Again, it's a top down effect that would have just multiple downstream consequences straight away. What you said about panoramic vision, I think is fascinating and I want to talk, if it's okay, Andrew, about this sort of bi directional communication we have between certain behaviors that we have in our brain. So, you know, we could talk about vision or breathing and hopefully we'll get to that. But you know, let's take with breath work, for example. If we're feeling super stressed and we're trying to get through deadlines, you know, that can change the way that we breathe, but at the same time we can consciously change the way that we breathe to have a calming effect on our brain. And I sort of feel with respect to vision that's, I think with breath work we're sort of getting there. Like people are starting to understand that, but I don't think with vision they are. So maybe you could talk to how, whether you have this peripheral sort of soft vision or this kind of tightly focused vision, what is that doing? What messages is that sending up to our brain?
- [38:41]
A
Yeah, and I'd be happy to talk about respiration. That's one of the things that my lab works on. But you're absolutely right. I mean, the breathing system is amazing because it bridges subconscious and conscious processing. Right. All the time we're breathing and we don't have to think about it, just like our heartbeat. But at any moment we can grab a hold of our breathing and change our breathing. And that's a unique neural apparatus that allows us to bridge between those two. The visual system is similar in that we are seeing things all the time, but we can also take control of our vision. I can decide to focus in a very narrow soda straw view of the world or I can open up the aperture of my visual field. So let's talk about opening the aperture, so called panoramic vision. You don't have to try this. You can do this anywhere. You don't have to actually be stone still. What you want to do is just try and see without moving your head or eyes. What you're trying to do is dilate your gaze so that you're seeing more of the space around you, the ceiling, the area in front of you. Ideally, you'll see your own body a little bit in your peripheral vision. And when you do this, when you shift into this mode of vision we call panoramic vision, a couple of things happen. One is that you release a connection between the brain and the brain stem that's involved in alertness. And so it's not that you become less alert, but it has a relaxing effect. It's like coming off of the accelerator just a little bit. If ever you are in an argument or you feel like you're getting triggered and you are, you can feel your heart rate increasing. You can feel the. When adrenaline hits our system, it hits it very fast and there's this propensity to move and there's a propensity to say things. And if you want to inhibit those reflexes because those can be kind of life damaging depending on what you're going to do and what you're going to say. Also, it's always better to be the calm one in an argument if you can. Panoramic vision is great because it's completely covert, whereas we'll talk about breathing tools in a moment to calm down. But breathing tools require a kind of overt shift in one's behavior. So you can tell when someone's, you know, or something like that. But with vision, you can, in a very covert way, you can expand your visual field and it will relax you. People have fear of public speaking, people who have challenges in different environments, going to the doctor's office face to face communication for a lot of people is hard, especially if they don't spend much time doing it. And nowadays people, many people, are more isolated than before. Panoramic vision is a wonderful way to relax the systems of your brain and body just a bit. And what's really fun is that you can start feeling that shift. And the more you do it, the more you engage the mechanisms by which you decelerate. I would say this is less of a break than a deceleration. It's not like slamming on the brake of stress. It's coming off the accelerator a little bit. So it allows you to kind of drive the car that is you. And panoramic vision also has a unique feature which is that you actually become more alert, aware and responsive. The neurons that are Responsible for panoramic vision, the aficionados are so called magnocellular, meaning large magno neurons of the eye and brain and big neurons transmit information much faster. So when you catch a ball or when you reflexively do something, you're actually using this panoramic system rather than the high acuity fine system and your reaction times go up about fourfold. So you might think, oh well, I'm kind of tuning out. But you're not tuning out. You're actually far more situationally aware. And I'm fortunate to do a little bit of work with people in U.S. and Canadian special operations. They talk a lot about situational awareness, going into environments where you can monitor large swaths of, of behavior and activity, but be be very responsive to things in different locations. And so actually panoramic vision is a wonderful way not just for them to do their work, but when you're walking down the hall, for instance, let's just take an example, you just took a meeting or you get off a zoom, you're headed upstairs, Are you going to look into the narrow box that is your phone and check something? Bringing a soda straw view of the world that's driving those attentional mechanisms up and stress level up. Or you're just going to walk to your car down the hall or up the stairs. And kind of panoramic vision allows your system to relax a little bit so that when you get to your destination, you're able to focus again. Remember, throughout your day, your focus is designed to be a bit of a roller coaster. You weren't designed to wake up in the morning and go phone, check Instagram, boom. Check email, get kids to school, okay, brief trough, what am I going to do? Okay, you know, you think about the way that our attentional system is working and it's absurd what we're demanding of ourselves. Now we've killed all the micro breaks throughout the day and maybe later if we have time, we can talk about learning and the power of micro breaks, even 10 second breaks. But I'll just put out a little teaser that even little 10 second pauses in high attentional activities. So learning or like what we're doing now, talking back and forth, Even just little 10 second pauses allow the brain to store a bunch of information much faster about what was just learned. It allows the system to decompress a bit. And here's the real, the really powerful aspect of it is that then when you lean back into activity, you have a heightened level of focus. Many, many people out there are struggling. They think my memory is Bad. I have trouble with focus. A lot of people are taking ADHD meds who don't need them. A lot of people need them and are taking them. Let's, you know, let's be honest. There's a lot of ADHD out there, but a lot of people have trouble focusing because they're basically spending their focus, if you will, throughout the day. It's like dropping, you know, small coins all day long. By the end of the day, you've spent out quite a lot of money. So you have to be judicious in your use of this thing that we call focus and attention. So panoramic vision is one excellent way to do that. Ambulating through space, getting that optic flow to shut down the anxiety system. And then of course, the sunlight.
- [44:46]
B
Noon. The key point there for me is, for people is that as I said before, many of us sort of know that we're feeling stressed. We can apply a selection of breathwork techniques potentially in the moment to change things, change our physiology. But you're sort of really making a very powerful case that we can actually also do that with our peripheral vision. So this could be potentially irregular practice. People in between zoom calls, get outside. And I guess this is what of the reasons why nature is so calming for us. Maybe it's not just the fractals in the trees and the coastlines, maybe it's also the fact that we are by default, presumably going into that peripheral vision.
- [45:31]
A
Yeah. You know, walking through nature or outdoors of any kind, you're grabbing all of these mechanisms, you're getting sunlight even on a cloudy day. You're getting peripheral panoramic vision and you're getting what we call self generated optic flow, as I mentioned, which shuts down or quiets these threat reflex centers, including the amygdala. So it's, you know, what we see obviously has a powerful effect on how we feel. The brain represents visual images mostly in symbols. We could play a little mini experiment right now where imagine viewing a particular politician's face. It's going to make you feel a certain way and bring about a whole library of ideas associated with that. We store things in visual object symbols and those visual object symbols are the gateway into a whole set of ideas about what we're looking at. However, the mechanisms that we're talking about up until now, sunlight viewing, etc. Evolved long before the mechanisms for high acuity vision, object recognition, face recognition, or color vision. And so we tend to think that, oh, color is so powerful, or what we see is so powerful, but far more Powerful in terms of our mood and our physiology, is when we see, AKA light and our mode of physical action as we see. And so this would be self generated forward optic flow and so forth. The point I wanted to make was that yes, respiration, breathing is very powerful, very powerful, but it requires signals from the body, from the lungs and tissues of the body to the brain, and then the brain will adjust its state and we can talk about those. Vision, as you recall, is the brain. So it's the fastest route by which we can change our state of mind. There's one other kind of tool that I think might be useful in the context of vision, which isn't so much about calming down, but about focus. One very effective tool, and this is actually in use in China, pretty widespread now, is if people have a hard time focusing, remember that cognitive or mental focus follows visual focus. So if you're going to sit down and do some work and you find like, I can't concentrate, I'm not getting it, I can't get into the writing or I can't do what I'm doing, very simple practice, it's been tested. You can take a piece of paper, put a little crosshatch on it, put it at the distance of your computer and force yourself to bring your vision, what we call a vergence eye movement, to that location and try and hold that blinking as seldom as possible as you can for about 60 seconds. You've now adjusted the aperture of your visual field, but you've also changed the aperture of your thinking in doing that. And this is very different than if you were just to concentrate on the feeling of touch on the tips of your fingers. Because as you do work, most all work requires vision. And then the work that you do, you'll find exists in this kind of narrow tunnel and you're able to rule out distractions quite a bit better. That's one of the reasons why this device is so terrible. I mean, I fall victim to this too. But if you have your phone, every two seconds you're looking at your phone, your visual attention is darting all over the place. So there's a lot of clinically legitimate, if you will, ADHD that we've brought up on our cells. And so you can use visual focus as a training tool. I have a simple meditation I do in the morning, I call it a meditation, but it's really just visual training. I can explain it now. I don't think I've described this anywhere that anchors several of these practices. I actually will close my eyes and just concentrate on my internal state, something we call interoception. And I'll just breathe three times. Then I'll open my eyes, I'll stare at my hand or something at about a distance of arm's length, and I'll focus my visual attention there and breathe three times just for sake of timekeeping. Then I'll look in the distance and I'll do the same. And then I try and go into panoramic vision, even if I'm indoors, and I'll breathe three times and then I bring myself right back into my internal landscape. I'll focus on a little cross hatch and usually then I get to work. And so what am I doing? What is this wacky practice? Well, this wacky practice I just described, described is stepping through each, as we call it sounds abstract, but space, time, bin of the visual system. The visual system can orient to now, it can orient to the future, it can orient to the past, mostly to the present and future. And so this stepping through a visual attention systematically, what I'm doing is I'm training my system to adjust to these shifts. Because throughout the day, life is a series of shifts between one thing and the next and the next. And the ability to transition between these and then lock into them and then transition into the next is what makes us effective. And this might seem a little abstract, but if you try it, what you'll find is that transitions between, say, work and a conversation or dropping into work very deeply become much easier. And there's neurobiological underpinnings to this. This is a forced practice. It kind of mimics what we ought to be doing all day long. The problem is, is that the interference of, of mostly of smartphone communications is that we're constantly being bombarded with content, new context after new context. That's what's really. I don't think there's as much problem with the content on social media, although that's a debate. You know, there's. There too obviously want to protect kids and so forth, except that when you're on social media, it's the equivalent of watching 50 movies in two minutes because you're scrolling through and context switch, context, switch, context, which the, the human brain has never been confronted with this. Even if you have 200 channels on the television, it's very rare to just go channel, channel, channel, the whole idea of social media. And by the way, obviously I participate, I teach on social media and I consume social media. But you're context switching, context switching, context switching in a very passive way. And so what I'VE tried to do is create practices that are grounded in the neurobiology of vision and how vision anchors attention and can induce calm. And the practice, that simple practice I described, what it does is it gives you the power and control to shift your visual attention to different things as opposed to some external stimulus shifting your visual attention for you. And I find it. I've been doing this for about eight years now. I do it every morning and sometimes in the afternoon. And what I find is that it's allowed me to be far more effective in the activities that I'm engaged in and transitioning between those activities. And my lab's looking at this as from the experimental perspective. But I just thought I'd put the tool out there because again, it's zero cost. There's bio safe, et cetera.
- [52:17]
B
I love it. It kind of sounds like training a muscle in the gym is going to allow us to, well, do many things but lift heavier things, be more strong and robust in our life for whatever we want to do. And it sounds like this kind of four part process of focusing on things at different distances. It kind of feels to me as though this is a process that's helping adapt our visual systems to the way the modern world is now. Because the modern world ain't changing any time soon. So it sort of feels like this might have been a practice that Maybe wasn't necessary 100 years ago, 50 years ago, but it is now highly necessary because of the environments in which we find ourselves in.
- [53:09]
A
That's right. Very well put. The smartphones and Internet are delivering experience at rapid speed in ways that the human brain just simply didn't evolve to contend with. Now, the human brain is great at dealing with new technologies, creating new technologies. What I'm describing are very basic practices that are designed to offset some of the damage. But also it's not just about avoiding problems. It's also about being functional. I think that everybody wants to be mentally healthy, physically healthy, and perform well in their various activities. And we do that by engaging the intentional systems and then disengaging the attentional systems. Everything in terms of learning, whether or not you're a child or an adult, is a function of being able to lean in with intense focus and then lean out and access rest of different kinds. In fact, I know we were talking about respiration, but neuroplasticity, the nervous system's ability to change in response to experience is what, Aside from the fact that the nervous system anchors and coordinates all the actions of the body, the nervous system is so Unique in that it can change itself. But unless you deliberately force specific changes onto your nervous system, the passive consequence of living in a particular way will also change your nervous system and not necessarily for the better. So excessive light viewing at night, not getting enough sunlight, not getting enough movement, I mean, the nervous system will atrophy or change in response to whatever you give it. That's the beauty of it. For better or for worse. And so what we're talking about here is leveraging this incredible capacity of the nervous system to change and saying, well, what are the simple zero cost, very low time investment tools that are going to allow me to be very effective as I transition from one stage of life to the next. And I'm a big fan of a lot of the work that's happening now in the clinical setting, I should say around various compounds to improve plasticity or to open plasticity or some of the. I know that the pharmaceutical industry gets a tough rap, and I agree that there tends to be this kind of default to pills mentality is not one that I subscribe to. I think lifestyle factors are extremely important. I should mention that I do think that for a number of people, they are so depressed or their ADHD is so severe that the idea of doing the sorts of practices that we're talking about is kind of overwhelming. And that's something that unless someone has really been in those states, it's really hard to empathize with. But so we should keep that in mind. But for most people, I would say 90% of people out there, these are practices that we can simply do and we get an immediate benefit, but in addition to that, we get a cumulative benefit, because as I mentioned before, these are slow integrative processes. So the day to day and across the year it accumulates. And then there's a third benefit, which is neuroplasticity, which is that your nervous system becomes very good at doing the things that are best for it. So the systems of the brain that are responsible for being able to rest or being able to de. Stress or to focus, those systems actually get stronger. So that your default is to be able to rest more easily when you need to rest, to be able to focus more easily when you need to focus, and so on. And so that's unique. It's not just about putting pennies in the jar, putting small coins into a jar. You could say, well, eventually you accumulate a lot. But it's more than that. Those small coins are actually in the neuroplasticity model, are actually being converted into a much More valuable currency by way of that action. And so then what you find is after six months or so of doing some of these things, you feel much better all the time. And if you miss a day or two, it's no big deal. That's the idea.
- [57:10]
B
I love that. I think that's just a great way to put it. And I guess there's that wider point that the environment around us is affecting our nervous system. It is changing our nervous system whether we want it to or not. So why not be intentional about some practices that are going to help strengthen it or improve its functionality in a way that we want before we get to respiration and breathing? You know, one of the things that I've heard you talk about before, Andrew, which has always struck in my mind, probably because I subscribe to this view as well, is you said this. Almost all of the unfortunate things that happen to us in life is down to a poorly regulated nervous system. I wonder if you could speak to that initially, because I think that really helps set some context for why vision or breathing or whatever it might be why it's so beneficial.
- [58:21]
A
Yeah, so the like. Let's take stress, for instance. We hear a lot of times that stress, stress destroys our immune system. And nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, stress is actually the way that your immune system knows that it should turn on. Let's just think about the ways that our species got to where we are. There were long periods of time with bad weather, cold, babies that were undernourished, et cetera. Many of us are familiar with working very hard in school or just generally working hard or taking care of a loved one. And then you stop doing that, you finally get rest and all of a sudden you get sick. Why is that? Well, because we have this incredible system whereby mental stress and physical stress causes the release of adrenaline, epinephrine, depending on where you live in the world, from the adrenals, which reside right above our kidneys. And adrenaline is the signal by which the immune system decides to employ killer cells. Anti inflammatory cytokines and also inflammatory cytokines, which can be beneficial for wound healing and things of that sort. So the activation of the stress system in the short term is actually very good at keeping us healthy. I'll just point to a practice that many people now do, which are cold showers, deliberate cold showers for three minutes a day, three minutes every two or three days, taking a three minute cold shower, and then it's fine to get into the hot shower or doing what we call cyclic hyperventilation. Which is just okay. Both those practices, you might say, okay, what is powerful about a cold shower or cyclic hyperventilation? Well, there's nothing actually powerful about the directly hate to tell people this, it's that they cause the release of adrenaline. And in excellent studies, peer reviewed studies, it's been shown that breathing of that sort, and we can describe it in more detail, or the cold water exposure, the cold exposure creates this adrenaline release which then creates an ability to resist infection of different bacteria, viruses and even fungal infections. Dramatic results. But it shouldn't surprise us because we have a system that we are here and we are the curators of the planet, not the house cats or some other species, because we had the capacity to lean into, challenge and resist infection, heal wounds. And that is all mediated by adrenaline. And the release of adrenaline is mediated by the nervous system. Now, when things go bad, for instance, people with chronically elevated adrenals, they're drinking coffee all the time and working like crazy, not getting enough sleep. Psychological stress, they're not shutting off that system. Then you start getting into chronic health issues, right? Because the stress system can't be chronically activated for too long or else you run into issues. But the nervous system coordinates that. Likewise for people that have anxiety, we have to say, well, what is anxiety? Well, at a biological level, anxiety, stress, trauma, fear and PTSD are all the same thing. It's ruminating on thoughts, but it's the release of adrenaline in a very unregulated way. And adrenaline has a primary effect which is to make us want to move or speak. It biases us towards action. It's the quaking of the hands, it's the quaking of the voice, it's the quickening of the breath, it's the dilation of the pupils of the eyes, which sort of counterintuitively creates a constricting of our visual field. It takes us out of the past and future and puts us into the moment so that we can identify what's going on. So the idea is to take basic practices in the case of this discussion, practices that mainly anchor to vision and respiration and learn to control adrenaline release and the timing of that release. Learn to control. It is a three essentially has three components. One is you can increase adrenaline release and there are times where that is beneficial and we can talk about that. Then you can come off the accelerator of adrenaline release. And then there's a third component, which is to slam on the brake and shut down the adrenaline system. And the ways to do that are people tried to do it Pharmacologically, they drink alcohol, they drink coffee, has opposite effects on the adrenaline system. Obviously, they use sedatives and opioid compounds. But they also do things like take vacations or do meditation or get massages, which are all wonderful. The meditations, massages and vacations are great. However, those all require that you step out of life. I love getting a professional massage, but professional massage is like $190, which, frankly, even at my stage of life, I always feel like it's great. But, you know, it's a considerable investment. I'm not going to do it every day. I don't have a masseuse in my home. And to be honest, it requires that I not do something else. Being a functional human and functional human on any kind of budget means that you need to be able to turn on and off focus and relaxation and stress and so forth in a way that you are in control of that. And so when you start learning how to control your nervous system is tremendously empowering. And I don't think that people should not take vacations or not get massages or whatever it is, but the ability to control your nervous system in a dynamic way, in short timescales, on the timescale of seconds, on the timescale of days, on the timescale of weeks. That's what leads to really terrific work and school and relationship and sleep and exercise practices. I just simply can't think of any other route to it. For instance, there's no liver detox that's going to do that. There's no gut microbiome fixed. The gut microbiome is very important, by the way, for reasons we could discuss and as you know and know more, far more about than I do. But there's no one tool or pill or potion or practice that's going to allow the whole system, that is you, to fall into place. Whereas if you learn to control your nervous system from the standpoint of attention, focus, relaxation and sleep, and you use the appropriate tools to access those, then you find that everything else works better and that those additional tools of. I am a believer in certain supplements. I also think people should eat fermented foods to improve their gut and reduce the activity of the inflammatory. There's great science to that, but that one practice isn't going to change everything. It's going to help. But learning to control your nervous system will indeed change everything. Your whole life gets better, mentally and physically.
- [64:51]
B
The idea learning to control your nervous system, I think, is one that we should just pause on, because sometimes in life, we'll want to upregulate our nervous system to I guess, perform a certain task. Other times in life, we'll want to down regulate it. In my experience, and I'm sort of, my bias is as a clinician, what I have seen is that at least the people who come in to see me are usually struggling to down regulate a lot of them. They've taken on too much. We know this is a big problem. You know, chronic unmanaged stress, burnout, taking on too many things, not actively prioritizing relaxation. That's a big problem. So, you know, maybe we can talk about some of the things that. Well, first of all, would you agree that actually that's a key skill and one that actually is potentially not as hard as we think to teach people? And then what are some of those practical tools that we can use to down regulate our nervous system?
- [65:53]
A
Yeah, well, first of all, I completely agree. And even if I do agree, and even if I didn't, you'd be right, because you're the clinician, not me. Right. Well, really, and I should say I have tremendous respect for the clinical fields. I mean, I'm on the school of medicine side side at Stanford. I don't teach undergraduates. I used to be at an undergraduate university. So I'm in the medicine side. And I think that chronic stress is a major issue. And stress makes every neurological. I know we said this earlier, but it's worth paying attention. Makes everything worse when it's chronic and stress, when you can take advantage of the mechanisms of stress and leverage them, it's tremendously empowering. I mean, I will even say that, I mean, clearly you're not an example of this, but there are a lot of physicians who are very unhealthy. This idea that scientists and doctors are healthy, I mean, just look at most of them, right? They're not taking good care. And so that is not. I'm not poking at them. What I'm saying is that everybody has to learn how to do this. There's a truth which is that we are generally compensated in life for the degree to which we can lean into hard work and effort. But a lot of people learn how to hit the accelerator and as you said, they never learn how to decompress. So a big part of my lab's work has been to develop zero cost tools that people can use in real time to adjust their levels of stress and calm down quickly so we can talk about those tools. And then we've also been developing tools that people can do as Short practices separate from real life, meaning like a five minute a day practice that will what we call raise their stress threshold so that their trigger point to become stressed is further away. And the first practice, which is based on work that goes back to the 1930s, actually it's what's called the physiological sigh. Physiological sighs are something that we all actually do about once every five minutes. So in sleep or in wakefulness, every five minutes or so we take a big deep breath. We don't realize it, but we do this. And dogs will do this right before they go down to sleep. Humans do this. Why do we do that? Well, there are two main reasons why we breathe. One is to bring oxygen into our system. And then that oxygen, it's beautiful system, it actually fills the lungs and then as we know it, moves from the lungs into the bloodstream. And our, our cells require oxygen and then exhales. We discard carbon dioxide. And we need oxygen and carbon dioxide, of course, for our health. Every cell relies on this. You wouldn't want to get rid of one or the other entirely. The stimulus to breathe, meaning the impulse to breathe, is because if you have a small set of neurons in your brain stem that detect the buildup of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream, so when that level gets too high, you take a big deep breath and then you offload the carbon dioxide. That's actually why you do the physiological science, to discard carbon dioxide. As a consequence, you bring in more oxygen. Now here's what's interesting. The lungs are not just two big bags of air. They have millions, actually hundreds of millions of little alveoli, little sacs. And when we under breathe or when we are stressed and when we over breathe, so either way, those little sacs actually deflate. And because they have fluid inside them, because of surface tension, they are not easily re inflated. And so we're actually asphyxiating ourselves. We don't have oxygen and we're not able to offload carbon dioxide. Bad situation. The physiological side that I recommend that people do when they're feeling stressed, anytime or any place, I suppose, unless you're underwater, is to do two inhales through the nose, back to back. The first one is a big long inhale. And then the second inhale, you're only going to be able to sneak in a tiny bit of air and then a long complete exhale through the mouth. So it's, so it's a very sharp little second inhale after the first one. You almost feel like you couldn't get any more air in. But when you do that second inhale, you re inflate the alveoli of the lungs. You snap open all of those, they don't break. And then when you exhale, you offload the carbon dioxide. Doing that just once, sometimes two or three times, but just once, we know from data in our laboratory and other laboratories, will immediately reduce your levels of stress and anxiety. Immediately, it's the fastest approach that I'm aware of to de stress. Far faster than trying to tell yourself not to worry. Certainly far faster than telling you or somebody else to take a deep breath. It's this. This double inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth is a very efficient way to bring in oxygen, dump carbon dioxide, and reinflate the alveoli of the lungs so that in the immediate moments afterward, you're breathing more naturally and more calmly. So it's a. You know, I don't like to use the phrase of like, power tools and this kind of thing, because that's not the business I come from. But I think if there were one tool that I would like everyone to do would be the morning light viewing. But the other two I'd love for people to have in their kit is this physiological sigh. And as I mentioned, you do this spontaneously in claustrophobic environments. People do it during sleep when they are developing apnea. And then when we cry or we observe someone crying, watch how they recover their breathing after sobbing, because sobbing is mostly exhaling. And then they. There's a reverberating inhale. So big inhale, second inhale through the nose, just squeeze in a little bit more. And then long exhale through the mouth. And that one has saved me. And from the feedback I've gotten, it saved many, many people many, many times. And it can be done essentially anywhere.
- [71:47]
B
Is that in some ways a reset for your nervous system? Things are getting out of control. Tension, pressure's building up, and you instantaneously can sort of reset it back to baseline. Is that a way that we can think about it?
- [72:02]
A
Yeah, think about it as a break on the adrenaline system. Think about it as. Because when there's elevated carbon dioxide in the bloodstream, the brain registers that and sends a signal to your adrenals. Uh, oh, we're running out of air. You need to move. You need to get to someplace else in order to not asphyxiate. And so this is why the. The signal is so powerful. Now, I think that there's another aspect to this, which is that when our minds are racing out of control, it's Very hard to stabilize our thinking with thinking. I always say, you know, trying to control your thoughts with thoughts is like trying to grab fog. It's very, very difficult. So when your brain and your mind and your thinking aren't where you want them to be, you need to look to your body, to, to recalibrate your state of mind so that then you get a new vantage point to view whatever it is that you happen to be contending with mentally. I actually had this happen the other day. I've been dealing with a set of issues that are kind of chronic and ongoing and it's a slow grind and it's working out that details aren't important or relevant here, but it's something I have to think about a lot each day. What I'm going to do, how I'm going to handle this situation. And I noticed I was on the plane and I was feeling pretty stressed about this. And you do a couple of these physiological size and then what happens is you're able to still parse those thoughts, but from a different perspective. It's much easier to look to the body, readjust your state of mind to a calmer place, and then be able to analyze something cognitively than it is to try and prevent yourself from thinking about something, which is very hard. And in many cases we need, we do need to think about what's stressful. I mean, this is something we don't often acknowledge. People think, okay, we're going to go meditate or we're going to take a vacation, we're just going to stop, step away, we're just going to take a deep breath. All sounds wonderful. Right. But many times the thing that we're stressing about is critical to our well being. It's important that we be able to think about this stuff. So use the body to control the mind and place the mind in a better vantage point. That's the idea.
- [74:00]
B
Yeah. I really like that. I think it's so powerful for people and I think so many people will hear that, Andrew, and go, yeah, when I feel anxious and I do some yoga or I go for a walk around the block, I just don't feel the same when I come back. You are literally changing the way you experience life through that action. And I wanted to talk to you about something that again, I've heard you speak about many times, which is the idea that grounded in neuroscience, that it is actions and behavior first, thoughts and feelings, seconds.
- [74:37]
A
Yeah. I definitely believe that we should put our actions first when it comes to taking control of our mental and physical health and performance. I want to be clear that I don't relegate feelings, emotions and thinking. I've been open about this before, but I'll be open about again. I've through a lot of effort of my own and through great expense and challenge. I've been doing analysis for many decades. I got into this because I was a bit of a wayward youth and I was forced to do it at first. So I just want to point out that I wholeheartedly believe in the value of therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy, exposure therapies, talk therapies. I think we are a social, verbal species and there's tremendous value to journaling, tremendous value to thinking and to feeling our feelings. However, feelings are complicated and they can become their own trap. Being able to parse a hard emotional problem or being able to think about life in a way that's from a good stance as a kind of. I like to think about the stance of the nervous system more than the state because a stance allows you to move in different directions, Whereas a state implies that there's one ideal state to be in all the time, which of course not. I mean, there's a time to be stressed, angry, sad, in awe, devastated. I mean, that's life. That's actually what makes for a rich life. But the ability to be in a good stance around all that means that when we are in a state of deep sadness or deep confusion or great happiness, that we know that we will eventually transition out of that state. And that's a manageable idea, that we're going to transition in and out of these states. One of the hallmarks of mental illness of different kinds is, is that people have horrible feelings and they feel like those horrible feelings are going to go on forever. That's one of the things that leads to suicidal depression or chronic anxiety, as people are told. We're always told, don't think about the future, don't think about the past, just be present. Well, what if your present really is awful? That doesn't help much. So the reason that I'm a fan of physical tools is the following. Orienting towards action first and physical tools is the following. First of all, there is no fossil record whatsoever of the things that we feel or think. None. Your feelings and your thoughts actually are pretty meaningless in the long run. But what you do and what you say has a profound impact on you and other people. Second, using physical practices allows us to communicate with one another about tools. Thinking is tricky. I don't know what I'm thinking. Excuse me. Feeling half the time, how do I know what anyone else is feeling? You know, I have a colleague in psychiatry who says this. Most of the time we don't even know what we feel exactly, much less how someone else feels. And so if we were to enter a dialogue around how we're supposed to feel and control our feelings, well, now we're really moving into the realm of wishy washy nothingness, because I can't tell you what to do or how to think about something. But when we're talking about feeling physical tools and using the body to influence the state of mind or the stance of the mind, then we know if we're doing the same thing. Two inhales, followed by an exhale. Panoramic vision, light viewing, these are tools that everybody can access. And so it creates a whole different conversation. I also believe, and I've had a lot of experience with the fact that there are times when things can feel so overwhelming and we are so back on our heels that we have to get outside of our head. And the best way to do that is to get into physical practices. The imagery I like to use is that any moment we are either flat footed, forward center of mass, which is kind of leaning into life and feeling strong, or we're back on our heels. Many people wake up back on their heels. Many people feel back on their heels a lot of the time. So the question is, how do you go from mentally and physically back on your heels to flat footed stance and sometimes and maintain the ability to go into forward center of mass? How do you do that? Well, you do that by controlling the. This basic system in the body that we call the autonomic nervous system. It's a bit of a misnomer because autonomic means automatic, but you can think of it like a seesaw. That on one end is our ability to get into states of alertness and focus, and on the other end is the ability to relax and get into states of calm or sleep or deep rest or focused but relaxed. Maybe the even seesaw would be focused but relaxed. And so much of being functional is the ability to move from alert to asleep, because sleep is so key for our health, of course, or from sleep to getting up and getting outside and exercising. But a lot of people get trapped at one end of the seesaw or the other, chronically activated or chronically exhausted. And the notion of a seesaw is important here because it's not so much about your ability to be on either end, it's about the tightness of the hinge of that seesaw. What I'm talking about are tools that allow the seesaw to be calibrated so that it's very easy to go from sleep to alert, from alert to relaxed, from relaxed back to work, as opposed to getting locked in one position. That's really the key. And so I realize this is all I'm talking all in an analogy now, but I think I'm hoping it's worthwhile because we've heard so much about mindfulness, which is a wonderful concept. We hear about mental health, we hear about physical health, but it's never actually been defined. What is a mentally healthy person. Usually when we're talking about mental health, we're talking about mental illness. So to me, a mentally healthy person and a physically healthy person is somebody that, that can be in action when they need to be in action, can relax when they need to relax, can focus when they need to focus, and can sleep when they need to sleep. That's a pretty darn good life. And you can get a lot done. And you can have very effective relationship to yourself and others with that kind of ability. And that ability is anchored in the nervous system.
- [80:43]
B
It's kind of nervous system flexibility, isn't it? It's that ability to adapt and utilize your nervous system in an optimal way, depending on what you need at any given moment. I think that hinge analogy is great. And just to sort of follow up on that, Andrew, I totally agree. If someone is stuck in a negative loop or in a way that they're feeling, there's nothing better than a physical practice to actually, you know, move them. You know, movement is by definition becoming unstuck, right? It's going to move thoughts, feelings, it's going to sort of mix them all up together. So I completely agree. I guess where I was going with it, and I'm really interested in your thoughts on this, is I have, like you, for many years been trying to promote healthy, low cost lifestyle practices. You know, I've written four, my first four books have all been about this, how you can inspire people to take on these things. But one thing I've noticed, including with myself, is that some of my patients would do all the best lifestyle behaviors, whether it's diets, good sleep practices, breathing techniques. But there's still a subsection who was struggling because they would allow the thoughts or the actions of other people to negatively influence them. And so for the last year or so, I've been writing my next book, which is really about trying to address this point of the way we think we can change the way we think. It's harder, it takes time, but we can train ourselves to think differently. And so a concrete example. Let's say you were doing loads of great lifestyle practices. You know what to do when you feel stressed and anxious. You know, you can use the physiological sigh when you need to and you're in a good place. And then your boss sends you an email that really upset you and wound you up. So you want to comfort eats, you want to have a glass of wine to de stress. Yes, you can use the physiological sigh to calm yourself down and hopefully make better decisions because of that. But I'm also sort of thinking about, well, what if you could also not get triggered in the first place by that email? What if you could work on your mindset and change the way that you think so that actually you don't. You're needing these practices to deregulate, to downregulate less and less.
- [83:21]
A
There are a couple of things that come to mind. And you know, I am a big believer in the fact that. Well, what I consider the fact that subconscious processes, mainly brought on by our developmental models of attachment, really act as a filter by which we engage in the world. Meaning if you grew up with a narcissistic parent or an avoidant parent or somebody that had a quick temper, I mean, you would think the rational approach would be, okay, you're not going to be like that, or you won't seek out people like that. But as we know, that is not how it works. Freud was probably right about the repetition compulsion, which is that we tend to engage in those types of dynamics over and over again. His theory, which I rather like, is that we do that in order to offer ourselves many opportunities to respond differently. It's kind of an interesting concept. I think that I have a friend who's an analyst who I respect a lot who said that basically all of Freudian psychoanalysis can be summarized in a three box diagram with two arrows. And the first box says wish. And then there's a little arrow and then there's another box that says anxiety. And then there's another arrow to the right. And then there's a third box which says defense. And basically we have a wish, we want something, then we feel some anxiety around that wish, and then we have some defensive reaction. Unless of course, we identify what those arrows are and we understand the subconscious processes in which case we can intervene in our own thinking. So this is completely separate from the kind of conversation we were having earlier where it's like, do a physiological Sigh. The whole idea is to make the unconscious conscious. And so the email from the boss that shows up, we can think, okay, why do I get so triggered? I mean, oftentimes an email from a boss is pretty important and it makes sense to get triggered. But can we maintain the kind of perspective of, are we a pleaser, Are we a rebel? Are we a person that. Like, for instance, I went into the profession I'm in because I don't like to be told what to do, Frankly, I was. My own mother had a hard time controlling me when I was a kid. And so I don't like to be told what to do. I'm not a people pleaser, but there are people pleasers. And so how can we start to intervene with our own tendencies? And see, I think it's worthwhile. I will say this now, it's just my beliefs. I don't have any laboratory data to support this. But most people, I would say 95% of the world, does not do any hard, ongoing psychological work to try and better themselves and adjust their thinking. Sadly, this is a matter of resource, but it's resources and lack of resources, but most people don't. So that means that 95% of the misbehavior that we see in the world is coming from kind of untrained nervous systems and people who are not super reflective. I'm not being disparaging of them, but I think that's the reality. We also have to remember that, and this is actually very useful for online interactions where people get crazy comments and things. Just when I first started teaching in university, a colleague of mine who's a psychiatrist came to me and said, just remember, 1% of the world is schizophrenic, has schizophrenia. About 4 to 8% are dealing with a bipolar disorder of some sort. About 10 to 20% are dealing with anxiety disorders, OCD. He starts listing all of them off and then he says, so when things happen and you hear or see things that are concerning, just remember to filter them through the reality of mental challenge. And so you start when I used to get comments online and someone's being very aggressive, I think to myself, I'm like, wow, like they must be struggling in some very intense way. I think that, and I say this a little, you know, I'm smiling as I say it, but. But it brings me both a lot of relief for myself. But also, I think we need to acknowledge the sadness around this, is that our species is, is very flawed. We're an amazing species, but we're very Flawed in that unless we intervene in our own internal processes, we're apt to just shed our inherited and our learned and our innate dysfunction onto one another. So I think a lot of learning to adjust one's thinking is about the acknowledgement that most people are dealing with a challenged nervous system to begin with and that it's a lot of work, but well worthwhile to, to be one, to try and make oneself one of the healthy ones. You know, you look at a lot of the dysfunction and the despair in the world and a lot of it is the consequence of people who just are not very self aware and are not taking care of themselves or other people. So when that email comes in from your boss, I wouldn't recommend sending them a recommendation for a clinical seminar to help them get some relief. But I often look at it and think, wow, it's incredible how, how angry somebody seems about something that you know, is kind of easy to deal with or is kind of trivial. They must be pretty dysregulated, they must have a really hard time regulating. And again, I don't say it from a stance of better than or disparaging. I just think that we are not very good at taking care of ourselves. And it takes a lot of work. And that's why I orient to the physical practices first. It's like, let's talk about concrete things to get into the stance so that one can then do the deeper work. Because the deep work is hard and it takes years. Even cognitive behavioral therapy takes a long time. And so that's why I've oriented my public facing work more towards the things that everyone I believe can and should do. It's about adjusting the stance that we're in to be able to access the deeper work. But I love that you're writing this book. As you can tell. I'd love to share a meal with you sometime or a long walk and chat about the psychological aspects of this and thinking. Because I mean, that's at the heart of how we experience life.
- [89:34]
B
I, like you, have always focused on these practices. I decided to go here because I kind of feel a bit like the breath, the way we breathe influences the brain. The stress signals coming into the brain influences the breath. Same with the visual system as we've already spoken about. I kind of feel that our thoughts and our mindset can also totally influence our behaviors and what we might want to do, how we might choose to do it. But at the same time, yeah, I, like a lot of people, know that if we focus on the action and the Behavior, we change our state immediately. And I kind of feel it's a two way thing. It's not necessarily either or. And sometimes these physical practices, especially these ones that can be done regularly, are really good to keep us tuned up and ticking over. So in the background we are in a better position to actually start working on these thoughts. And even what you said about your colleagues saying, hey Andrew, look, this percent of people currently have schizophrenia. This percent of people have this. That's kind of mindset in some ways, isn't it? Because it's helping us view those comments through a different lens. So instead of getting triggered, we can immediately go, oh man, there's a lot of people out there who are struggling and they're just sort of putting that out on me. And I love that untrained nervous system. Because you, I've heard you talk before about your, your teenage years. I don't think we're gonna have time to get into that today. Maybe on a part two, if you have time at some point. But when we think about what you've said before, that a lot of the bad things that happen to us in life come about because of a dysregulated nervous system or an inability to manage it. I know from doing inner work and therapy, which again has taken years, I sort of feel that my nervous system used to be tightly strung, right? So I could do lots of lifestyle practices. But it was on the background, on the bedrock of this tightly strung nervous system. And as I have processed traumatic experiences early on in life, as I've done various forms of inner work, I sort of feel there's more kind of flexibility and spring now in my nervous system. So I feel that I need less of these symptom relief tools compared to the past. Or if I, if I use them, I can go deeper with them now, whereas before they used to just get me back down to baseline.
- [92:07]
A
That makes perfect sense and that makes very good sense. And I think that I find this too. I've been doing practices for a long time, I noticed a couple weeks now. I've been traveling a lot and life's been particularly busy and a little stressful frankly. And then I tend to orient back to the tools as the bedrock of my well being. I noticed I miss some of my sunlight. I'm human sunlight viewing. My sleep was really off. So I go back to those bedrock practices, but I don't rely on them quite as much as I used to. And I like this idea of flexibility and range, feeling comfort in exploration and feeling range. And I Think that. I think part of that also, if I may, is just. I think it's a sign of just general maturity that, you know, this notion of this too will pass. A child can't really understand that because they haven't had enough bad experiences. You know, you go through a couple hard rounds in life or more, and you realize for most people, fortunately, there are ups and there are downs and there are seasons, and you learn to lean into sometimes even the sadness of a loss or a challenge because you know things are going to pass. You also lean into the gratitude of opportunity and the gratitude of a close connection. And that connection can be with your interaction with your dog or even with yourself or with nature. And you just can marvel at how amazing life is because you have an enormous data set to compare it to for the engineers in the audience. And you want to signal the noise. If you are experiencing something. How do you know how great or how lousy that is, except relative to other experiences? So I think that as we get healthier physically, we become healthier mentally, and as we become healthier mentally, you're right, we don't have to rely so much on these physical support systems. But it's good to know. I think that they're always there and that they work the first time and every time. And I think that there are very few ground truths in life, but the things that we're talking about in respiration and light viewing, they work the first time and every time because in many ways the circuits and cells that are in us are there for that purpose. One thing I know for sure, I wasn't consulted at the design phase, but all of this stuff exists in all of us and it's very trustworthy hardware. I think that again, I'm really delighted that you're writing this book because one of my real loves is the mind. And not so much just neurophysiology is where most of my public facing work is focused and lab work is focused on now. And I think the mind is really the incredible frontier. It's harder to parse. And as a colleague of mine in psychiatry, Carl diceroth says, one of the amazing things is that the mind, the only thing we have to parse it in terms of with one another is language. And we may not even have adequate language to describe feelings. We may not even. People like to say, oh, this culture has one word for sadness and this culture has 50. But I would say maybe language isn't even the right way to parse feelings. I think as we move forward as a species. It's going to be really interesting to see where we take all this ideas about inner landscape and how we conceptualize them. So I look forward to reading your book.
- [95:39]
B
Well, I can't wait. I've got to say Andre, I'm feeling a lot of pressure now given the high regard in which I hold you when you're looking forward to it this much. It went off actually to print a few days ago in the uk, so I will send you an electronic version. And just to be clear, I've met what I always try and do is really simplify things down. I want to be able to speak to the man or the woman on the street and not use jargon. I want to break things down, make them low cost for people, Paul. So bear that in mind as you're reading it. I hope you like it.
- [96:07]
A
I'm sure it's going to be great. Also, again, the medical training is wonderful because medical training, as you know, is very nuts and bolts. The difference between clinicians and scientists is an important one. That clinicians have far more knowledge in their heads. True. This is true. I'm saying this so that you don't resist me on this one. They know far more about more aspects of biology then scientists are very narrow typically. But the difference is that clinicians learn how to communicate with people because they have patience, whereas scientists usually have no concept how to communicate with anyone except other scientists. And so clinicians are masterful at translating the complex into the straightforward. So I look forward to the book and hopefully it'll land land here in the US before long.
- [97:01]
B
It will do. And look, I appreciate that difference between clinicians and scientists, I would have to say. I mean Andrew, I think there are very few science communicators better than you. I think one of the reasons so many people around the world are deeply drawn to your content, including myself, is your ability to simplify these potentially quite difficult concepts and make them really actionable. So I really do think you're doing a great job with that and I think it's really, really needed. I'm conscious of time is winding down. It certainly wasn't as much time as I wanted with you, and it isn't face to face. But before we close down the conversation for today at least, a mutual friend of ours introduced us email. Brian McKenzie and Brian's condition of email introing me to you was that I had to ask you a very specific question on the podcast.
- [97:52]
A
I know what this is.
- [97:54]
B
I. I have to ask it because that's basically what Brian said So I'm going to try it. Here it is. Your good friend Brian McKenzie wanted me to ask you which supplements you take.
- [98:09]
A
All of them. All of them, Brian. Okay, so a little bit of context and then maybe I can flesh the answer out with a little bit of information that might be useful. Brian McKenzie is a world class. He trains for high performance, he's done ultras, he's a close friend. We've done a lot of great adventures, including a few foolishly dangerous ones together. He's an incredible human being and really a pioneer in the area of breathwork. And you hear a lot about the benefits of nasal breathing from James Nestor. There was the book Jaws from my colleagues at Stanford. Brian was talking about that stuff long before everyone. Honestly, Brian is a decade ahead or more on this stuff, so you can check out his Instagram and various other channels. But I'm of the belief that behavioral tools are the most powerful way to shift our mental and physical well being. And that there are prescription drugs that are very useful to some people and necessary for some people. But in between there are a number of other things, certainly good nutrition, good sleep, et cetera. But there are also this, there is, excuse me, this huge category of non prescription over the counter compounds. Let's just call them what they are. We call them supplements, but compounds that can have an outsized effect on health and well being. And many of these are better, frankly, alternatives to prescription medication. I will always say that behavioral tools should come first because if you don't have your behaviors right, doesn't matter what you're taking, sooner or later you're going to run into trouble. So I will just say there are a few supplements that I take that I think many people could benefit from. I also want to be clear that I'm not selling these supplements. My podcast has a relationship to a supplement company, but I'm not even going to mention it because I would just say shop for cost. But getting There are two states of mind that I think can vastly improve all of our well being and that's the ability to be alert and calm during the day and the ability to be asleep at night for long periods of time. And there are a number of things to do for sleep, including the light viewing. I'm a big believer in yoga Nidra, which is a free practice that it's a 30 minute script that you listen to. It falls under the category of non sleep deep rest or nsdr. It gets you better at falling asleep. You do this during wakefulness or if you wake up in the Middle of the night. Another great resource also zero cost is Reverie R E V E-R-I.com that's an app that was established by my colleague and the associate chair of psychology at Stanford, which is a self hypnosis app to get better at sleeping, to manage anxiety, focus, et cetera. Again free for Apple and Android, zero cost. But for people who have trouble falling and staying asleep, many people benefit from from taking magnesium threonate T H R E o N a t or bisglycinate one or the other. And there's also evidence that magnesium threonate can offset some symptoms of cognitive decline. There are good data on that starting to surface. And then the other thing is apigenin. A P I G e N I N 50mg of apigenin which is chamomile extract is can help a lot of people fall and stay asleep. Those two supplements have really helped me with sleep. They're non addictive some people, about 5% of people experience gastric discomfort with Magnathreonate but that's very rare. Most people report that their sleep is just fantastic. I don't monitor my sleep with whoops and auras and things like that. I'm not against it, I just go by the subjective feeling. But for people that do monitor their sleep, they tend to get a lot more deep sleep sleep. I just like to use subjective measures like I feel really rested or something like that. And I've talked about this. We have a newsletter on hubermanlab.com that lists out some of the dosages and this kind of thing if people want to look at. It's very easy to find zero cost. You don't have to sign up, you just can just grab it there. I do think supplements are powerful that way. But Brian was teasing me because when we traveled together to give some talks, I was constantly getting stopped at security because I had a duffel full of what essentially looked like a pharmacy. I take a lot of stuff. I do, I take a multivitamin, I take ginger, I take garlic, the allicin in ginger, excuse me, in garlic. A L L I C I N if you look at the data on allicin, I mean in terms of cardiovascular health, it's quite impressive. I take 1 to 3 grams of EPA essential fatty acids per day because I don't eat fatty fish. I don't like the taste of fish. And in double blind placebo controlled studies, 1 to 2 grams of EPA per day stands up against SSRIs, things like Prozac and Zoloft without the side effect profile. And for people that do need to take those drugs, it lowers the total dosages that they need to take in order to have an effective antidepressant effect. So it essentially lowers the side effect profile, so to say. I think a few years ago, the idea of supplements was like, ooh, can't you get everything from what you eat? Maybe, but I personally derive tremendous benefit from vitamin D3 for my gut microbiome. I don't take probiotics. What I do is I eat one to four servings of fermented foods per day because there's evidence from Justin Sonnenberg's lab, which is upstairs from my lab at Stanford, that it can improve the pathways that are related to inflammation. So, you know, there's a lot of stuff that one can do and take. I like to focus on the do and then focus on the take. And then I do think people should be scientists about this. I think that you don't want to start taking 50 things at once and wonder what you know, it's a big expense. And then you're wondering what works and what doesn't. You know, if one wants to experiment, introduce things one at a time, talk to your physician, obviously, make sure these things are safe for you. But that's why Brian was making that joke, because he, you know, he was like, what, what supplements do you take? People always ask me. I just say all of them. Because otherwise I could. I could do a three hour podcast on everything that I take and it would put everyone to sleep, it would cure insomnia.
- [104:19]
B
Well, I've got plenty. Thank you for answering it. First of all, I've got plenty more to follow up on that. But just to finish off then, a lot of people in the world right now are struggling. A lot of people can't see a way out. The way the world has changed, it's making them feel fearful, anxious. A lot of people have tried to go and see their doctors, yet feel very frustrated with some of the solutions that are on offer and with your wealth of knowledge about the brain and the body and the mind. I wonder for people who are wanting some practical help. You've mentioned some great tips already in the show so far, but just to finish off, the podcast is called Feel Better, Live More. When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of life. Could you maybe share some of your sort of final words and thoughts with my audience?
- [105:14]
A
Sure. Well, certainly there is a lot of challenge in the world right now. Yes. And I think that the thing to remember Is that ultimately if we start in close with our nervous system and start thinking about adding one, Practice some morning light viewing, dimming the lights in the evening, simple things. Having that physiological sigh. You can practice it once or twice, but it's ready to go. It was installed in you with everything you need. Realizing that you have control over your response system and your nervous system, I think that's a start. I think without getting into the science of it, I am a believer in doing a little bit of journaling each day. It's amazing how our anxieties and stresses when placed onto paper can actually expunge some of those anxieties and stresses. Sort of obvious, but even if your handwriting is as poor as mine, even if you're not writing in complete sentences, even if you tear up the sheet of paper afterward, or even if it's just a walk where you're thinking about this stuff, that can be very powerful. You know, I. I'm not. I usually don't come to things from kind of the tough love stance, but. So I don't want this to sound like that. But the truth is that there is no magic stork or fairy or pill or anything that's going to be handed to us or deployed that's going to take care of our challenges. We are all responsible for our immediate well being. And what I can promise, however, is that these tools and practices, they work and they lead to places where we have a more optimal stance to deal with the challenges of the world. Our species is remarkable. We've come through far worse than what we're dealing with now, believe it or not. I mean, the number of deaths from childbirth alone, mother and infant, you know, over time, has gone down. I'm not saying the world is much better than it used to be. I can recall a not too distant past when things felt far simpler, frankly, and I think others can too. But I think that as bleak as things appear, we are here. We have this incredible system, our nervous system that was arranged to adapt. And we are, right now, we are building resilience. It's uncomfortable, but because it's uncomfortable, it means that our species is actually getting stronger right now, not weaker because we are a little bit back on our heels. And so we're just trying to get to flat footed stance as we talked about earlier. And the discomfort of that is, it's uncomfortable. It's a circular statement, I realize, but it's uncomfortable. But we're getting stronger and I'm an optimist. I do believe that we will reap the benefits of all this hard work and strain. And meanwhile, we should try and reinforce ourselves from the inside out. And hopefully today's discussion provided a few tools and some mechanisms behind those tools that allow people to do that with zero cost and with just a little bit of time and effort.
- [108:31]
B
Yeah. Andrew, thank you so much for that. Thank you for everything you've shared during the conversation today. Thank you for everything you do to share freely such wonderful information with hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people across the globe. Now you are having an impact in such a profound way. And as I said right at the start, it isn't just the information you share, it's the way you share it. I think you are one of the best followers on Instagram out there for people I'd highly encourage. They follow you, they check out your podcast because it's full of practical tips, but it's done in a very kind, gentle and non judgmental way which I deeply, deeply resonate with. Is there anywhere else you would like to point people, Andrew, apart from what I've just mentioned?
- [109:20]
A
Well, thanks. No, we're Huberman Lab on Instagram, Huberman Lab on Twitter, Huberman Lab podcast. And then of course there's the Huberman Lab at Stanford, which right now is not open to studies. But eventually we will start recruiting again. Those are the places to find us. And listen, I just really want to extend my thanks. I've been a consumer of your content for a long time now and I love the the approach that you take. Again, non judgmental. Give, give, give, give, give. I can feel that. I can see it. I know other people feel and see it and I feel very much a partner in arms with you in this and I look forward to being able to meet face to face. And should I be so lucky to come back for a part two or a part three on here, I'd be honored and delighted. So thank you so much.
- [110:13]
B
Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just want to I just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free@drchatterjee.com Friday 5 Now if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers or over the world covering all kinds of different topics. Happiness, food, stress, sleep, behavior change and movement, weight loss and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out. They are all available as paperbacks, ebooks and as audiobooks, which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the Episode Notes in your podcast app and always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.