Your Top Health Questions Answered

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science [music] and science-based tools for everyday life. [music] I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today's episode is a solo episode of the podcast, meaning no guest. However, there will be a large number of outside voices heard on today's episode, and that's because I solicited for your questions on social media. that is people had the opportunity to call in and literally record their questions about anything related to science and health. Well, really anything. But today, we're going to focus on science and health. And I would answer them in real time, meaning I'm hearing them for the first time today as you hear them for the first time today. And we're going to cover, I'm told, because I haven't heard the questions yet, a large number of topics related to signs and health that are relevant to women, to men, to people of all ages, and covering everything from health and fitness to mental health, supplementation, and on and on. I should mention that if you called in with a question for today's episode, and you don't hear it on today's episode, that does not necessarily mean that it won't be included in a future Q&A episode. Again, we got many, many more questions than we could possibly include in a single episode. And I also want to say to everyone who called in with a question, thank you. We really appreciate the feedback even if your question isn't included. It does cue us to what people are interested in and absolutely will shape the future of guest episodes, solo episodes, and again perhaps a future Q&A of this sort. So without further ado, let's get to your questions. Okay, so just to remind you, you're going to hear the question from the audience member played in real time. And again, this is the first time that I'm hearing these questions. Hello, my name's Anthony Richards and I just want to thank you so much for all the content that you put out. It's helped me profoundly in so many aspects of my life. My specific question right now is on preworkouts. I work out late at night because of work and I generally go to bed an hour and a half or so after I complete my workout. I'm curious as to what's the most effective pre-workout I could take to maximize my strength training without impairing my sleep. Thank you. >> Well, first off, Anthony, thank you for the kind words. I love to learn. I love to teach and I especially love to teach information that I hope can be of use to people in their health journey. So, in keeping with that, you asked, "What is the best preworkout for someone who's working out late in the day?" And in your case, going to sleep about an hour and a half after finishing your workout. And your workouts, as you mentioned, are going to be for strength and presumably for some muscle size as well, which suggests that they're going to be of moderate to high intensity, which means that they're going to pretty impressively increase cortisol over its baseline late in the day. And everyone hears that and they think, "Oh my gosh, cortisol stress hormone. We don't want to do that." Yes and no. It is true that we want our cortisol high in the morning. You all know the ways to do that. You get your morning sunlight, you hydrate, you exercise, you maybe drink some caffeine. If you like to drink caffeine, you get into your day, maybe even some stress, that's okay. But if you can't work out early in the day, what do you do? So, your question about pre-workout is really a question of how do I get energized enough, enough autonomic arousal, enough alertness that I can generate the kind of intensity that's going to stimulate that cortisol peak, right? We don't want to avoid that high cortisol level during these workouts. That's part of the stimulus that's going to induce the adaptations that we want. How do we do that? Well, you've all heard me say that drinking caffeine in the 8 to 10 hours before sleep is going to disrupt your sleep, even if you can fall asleep after caffeine. So to be quite direct, one thing and perhaps the only thing that I'm aware of that can give you an increase in alertness and that will allow you more focus and intensity for your workout, but that can also help your sleep is something that increases levels of acetylcholine. And the most direct way to do that over the counter and the safest way that I'm aware of to do that is to use the supplement alpha GPC. 600 milligrams to 900 milligrams of alpha GPC taken simply with water will give you a increase in focus and alertness that you can devote to that high intensity or moderate in to high intensity workout. Alpha GPC is also one of the few supplements that I'm aware of that can increase the amount of rapid eye movement sleep that you get REM sleep. And that REM sleep is critical for a number of things for inducing neuroplasticity. So any learning that you did in the preceding day or days is going to be consolidated during REM sleep. And importantly, REM sleep is critical for removing the emotional load of previous days, not just one day, but days memories. And if we don't get enough REM sleep, we tend to feel more emotional. We tend to feel like the emotional load of stressful things in our prior days are not coming off those memories. Okay. So, alphagpc has been shown to modestly increase REM sleep. But the great news here is even if alpha GPC doesn't increase the amount of REM sleep that you're getting, alpha GPC is not going to hinder the amount of REM sleep or slowwave deep sleep that you get. So, it makes it a unique sort of quote unquote stimulant. I'm reluctant to call it a stimulant because it's not really stimulant in the classic sympathy sense, right? Things like caffeine, um, other forms of stimulants that increase dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine, the so-called catakolamines are called sympathy because they actually increase the activity of the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system, which is just nerdy speak for increased alertness. Alpha GPC is a unique tool in its ability to increase focus and alertness by virtue of increasing the output of the acetylcholine pathway which is involved in focus and to some extent energy. but it's not a classic sympathy and it either doesn't seem to hinder REM sleep or it can slightly again slightly increase the fraction of REM sleep that you get. So that makes it a great tool. Now it's not a perfect tool and I'll tell you why. Increasing the amount of choline in your system can after a few biochemical steps increase the amount of TMAO that is circulating in your body. Now TMAO can be increased by any number of things, fish, meat, etc. Anything that increases choline levels can do this, but alpha GPC does it pretty potently. And so the key thing here is you don't want too much TMAO consistently over time because it does carry some cardiovascular risk. And there was one paper a few years back that suggested that perhaps people who use alpha GPC regularly at high dosages, so 900 milligrams multiple times throughout the day over long periods of time may have increased risk of stroke and other cardiovascular insults. And so that's something to pay attention to. There is some literature that suggests that taking 600 milligrams of garlic pretty much any time in the 24-hour period that you take alpha GPC, but probably best to just take them together. Garlic has something called allisonin in it, which can inhibit some of the production of TMAO. We don't have time to get into the whole TMAO production pathway, but this has to do with your gut, and a lot of these conversions are done in the gut. And garlic can inhibit that. It's probably a good idea to be ingesting some garlic regularly anyway. These garlic capsules aren't um stinky like garlic. Some people like the smell of garlic, others don't, but it's not going to give you garicky breath. It's very inexpensive. So, my suggestion would be just to be on the safe side if you're going to take alpha GPC pretty regularly. And you didn't mention how often you're doing these workouts late in the day. I don't know if this is 5 days a week or if this is three days a week. I would say anytime you're going to take alpha GPC, you should take 600 milligrams of garlic along with it. or if you can't do it along with it, take it at some point in the in the next, you know, 12 to 24 hours to try and offset this TMAO. I think you'll notice also that if you take alpha GPC very regularly, like every day or any more than like three, four times a week, it's going to have a diminished effect. So, I would reserve taking the alpha GPC to just maybe once or twice a week, maybe three times maximum. And hopefully, you'll be able to generate the kind of intensity that's required for your workouts to stimulate those adaptations that you're seeking in strength, etc. without taking it every single workout. How do you do that? Well, you go into the workout relatively rested. Okay, so this means getting the proper amount of sleep the night before. I think we vastly underestimate the extent to which just getting your mind in the right frame can help you generate the kind of intensity that you need to get a really terrific workout in. And that doesn't require taking anything. And if you happen to take alpha GPC2, now you're doubling up these tools, right? So when I say we vastly underestimate, you know, most people just kind of go into the gym, they're looking at their phone. So if you can afford to, if your life is arranged this way, Anthony, and others, I recommend make your workouts for you. Pour everything you can into them mentally and physically, maybe use alpha GPC once, maybe twice, maybe three times a week. Offset that TMAO effect. And then there's another piece to this, which is how can you ensure that you get the best possible sleep coming off a workout regardless of what you took. Okay, maybe you drank some caffeine too late in the day, maybe you didn't. I can understand where there's kind of a pushpull of things here. Here's what I suggest. After you finish your workout, doesn't have to be immediately, but take a hot shower. Believe it or not, taking a hot shower by virtue of the fact that you warm up the surface of your body, will trigger neurons in the medial preoptic area of your hypothalammus, which act as sort of a thermostat on your core body temperature and will actually help drive core body temperature down, which is a prerequisite for getting to sleep. So in other words, for many different reasons, right, removing bacteria, etc., take a nice hot shower after your nighttime workout. And while you do that, or perhaps while getting in or out of the shower, do some long exhale breathing. I've talked a lot about physiological sigh. It's called physiological sigh, not just sighing because it involves this double inhale, long exhale, which is involved in reducing the amount of so-called sympathetic autonomic arousal. Again, just alertness. When we do a deliberate exhale, okay, so not just passively exhaling, but when we draw out our exhale [sighs] like so, you activate a descending portion of the vagus nerve. Everyone thinks about the Vegas nerve, like sensory information coming up from the body. That's 85% of the vagus pathway. The other 10 to 15%, no one knows the exact numbers, comes from the brain down to the organs of the body. And one of the main pathways there is to your heart. And when you exhale, you slow your heart rate down. And I've talked a lot about this on previous podcasts. So just doing that three or four times, [sighs and gasps] like so after your workout, could be through your mouth, could be through your nose, maybe while you shower, getting out of the shower, you're trying to bring your level of autonomic activation down, down, down, and your cortisol levels will follow. So even though you spiked your cortisol levels, you know, triple or quadruple from a really effective workout, you can bring them down deliberately using long exhale breathing, nice hot shower to which is warm and relaxing, right? It's not like a cold shower which is stimulating. It's going to help bring your levels of arousal down. And then is the food thing. Everyone has heard, me included, don't eat two or three hours before sleep because it will increase your heart rate and it'll increase your nighttime and morning glucose. will impede your sleep. Well, yes and no. Being super hungry and waking up in the middle of the night because you're hungry from a really hard workout, that also will mess up your sleep. And I've had that happen where I fall asleep after a shower, I worked out later in the day and then I'm awake at like 3:00 in the morning and I'm eating a bowl of oatmeal or something and it's not convenient. Okay, then usually I can fall back asleep, but it's just not a good not a good way to arrange things. My suggestion would be after you work out, especially if it's a moderate to highintensity workout, that you should eat something. There's some literature out there that suggests that the slower digesting proteins such as milk proteins, casein, you could have some Greek yogurt. You could get some, you know, casein uh protein powder if you wanted. It's easily available out there. Any number of different, you know, quality brands will work. Uh maybe a a bowl of oatmeal, some starch after you work out to replenish glycogen stores. These are all good things to do even in that final hour before sleep. And no, it's not going to completely nuke your growth hormone levels during sleep. you just spiked them tremendously during that workout anyway. Now, if you're not working out late in the day, folks, then probably good to put a little bit of a buffer between your final uh meal, certainly full meal, and your sleep if you can. But if you don't do that every day, it's not the end of the world. But for you, Anthony, and others who are working out late in the day, if you do these things right, sometimes alpha GPC, sometimes no. Get it get your head straight before you go in the gym so you can really focus. That's the main one I have to say. You know, I was recently down in Spain working out with six time Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates. And before the workout, you know, you said, you know, you're going to go in the corner, you're going to, you know, ride that stationary bike for three, four minutes. And it's as much about warming up your mind and really focusing on what we're going to do today than the warming up of your core body temperature. Yes, that too. But you have to get into the right frame so that you're training. You're not just working out. I actually prefer to call it training because you're practicing every single time trying to get better, bringing more focus. Don't underestimate the value of that. and it doesn't require taking anything at all. And then if you do the other things I described and afterwards you take a nice hot shower and you're feeling really jazzed up, do a bit more long exhale breathing. And then as a final final point, no one does all these things perfectly every single week, week in and week out, year in and year out. Do some of these things. You'll notice a significant difference. I do believe that. These are the things that I know to be most potent for addressing the question that you're asking. If you do all of them, great. And if you can't do all of them, you're still going to derive some benefit. So, good luck with uh your later evening workouts transitioning into sleep. I'm sure it's going to go great. And if you have additional questions, call us back the next time we solicit for them. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Eight Sleep. Eight makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. One of the best ways to ensure you get a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. And that's because in order to fall asleep and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3°. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about 1 to 3°. Eight automatically regulates the temperature of your bed throughout the night according to your unique needs. 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All right, let's hear the next question. >> I have been making a concentrated effort to get outside first thing in the morning to help reset my circadian rhythm. Is it okay to just be outside even though all I really see is the sky above me and the western sky or do I really need to walk 20 minutes so I can see the eastern horizon? >> Okay, this is a great question. The person remained anonymous which is also terrific but thank you for your question whoever you are. I get asked this question all the time. Here's the deal. Any amount of ambient daylight that you can get in the first hour after waking will greatly benefit you. It'll increase your morning cortisol peak, which by the way is a great thing. No, it's not going to give you Cushing syndrome. No, it's not going to make you gain weight. Quite the opposite. In fact, it's going to kickstart so many beneficial mechanisms. Okay? It's also going to increase your mood focus and alertness all day long as a consequence of that early morning cortisol peak. So, get ambient daylight in your eyes in the first hour after waking. Of course, if you wake up before the sun comes out, you're going to have to wait. A 10,000 lux artificial light can be beneficial in those circumstances. I don't have any relationship to any company that sells them, but they're out there on the internet. They're all basically equally effective. If you get outside and you can walk eastward, sunglasses off, brimmed hats off, because the light's coming from above and you don't want to olude that with a brimmed hat. Wear sunglasses. Eyeglasses and contacts are fine. If you can do that, great. Many people can't. Many people only have the opportunity to step out onto their balcony of their apartment and it's west facing. Okay, you're still going to benefit from all those photons, all that ambient light. And the reason I say daylight and not sunlight is that for some reason, it's semantic, but it's semantic and it leads to a lot of confusion. When people hear you got to get sunlight in your eyes early in the morning, they think, "Oh, I have to see the sun as an object." No. Compare how bright it is at, say, 9:00 a.m. in the depths of winter on an overcast day facing westward in the morning compared to midnight the night before. It's so much brighter. There's just so many photons. And that's what are going to trigger these special cells in your eye, the intrinsically photosensitive melanopsin retinal ganglen cells that literally send a direct connection to your circadian clock, set your circadian rhythm. So any amount of ambient daylight that you can get into your eyes, westward, eastward, eastward being better, but westward still being great. Clear day better than overcast, but you can't control the weather and neither can I. All are going to help increase that morning cortisol peak lead to larger increases in the catakolamines, dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, which translates to more daytime energy, improved mood, improved focus. And here's the real key that most people miss. By spiking all these pro-arousal chemicals early in the day, in particular in the first hours of our day, ideally the first hour itself, you're setting up the whole system to have low levels of these proarousal chemicals circulating come nighttime, come evening. It makes it so much easier to fall asleep. and cortisol and all these other stimulatory chemicals that you make they are in opposite phase to melatonin. So by getting them high in the morning and low in the evening and at night with this daylight viewing and that is the most potent stimulus to do that you're setting yourself up for increased melatonin your own natural melatonin release at night and better sleep more ease in falling asleep more ease in staying asleep and more restful sleep and on and on. So, the short answer, totally fine to face westward. The other short answer, please remove your sunglasses. Please remove a brimmed hat while you do it. You'll get more ambient light in your eyes that way. If you can rotate eastward and still get some daylight, even better. If you can walk eastward into the rising sun, even better. Never look at any light, sunlight or otherwise, that's so bright that it's painful to look at without blinking to protect your eyes. You have a natural blink reflex to protect your neural retinas, right? You don't want blasting your eyes. You don't want to force yourself to hold your eyelids open. But I promise you, promise you, promise you, if you do these things regularly, you're going to benefit tremendously. There's just so much literature on that in humans in all these different populations, ages, etc. And as a final point, you mentioned that you're benefiting from this to set your circadian rhythm, and that's wonderful. Just as a favor to everybody, I want to take this as an opportunity to tell you that your circadian rhythm when you feel alert and when you feel sleepy is dictated by these mechanisms. Okay? But these mechanisms are slow integration mechanisms. Meaning that your supercismatic nucleus, your brain's central circadian master clock that organizes all of this is literally integrating the number of photons that you saw light energy in the previous two or three days. So, if one morning you have to just jump in the car and rush off with your sunglasses on and get to work and you can't do this, fine. Try and get outside for a little bit longer the next morning, okay? If you get a ton of sunlight in your eyes one morning because it's nice and clear and the next day it's overcast and dreary, okay? or god forbid you stay in bed and scroll your phone which I don't recommend but if you do that your super chaismatic nucleus is making its physiological decisions as to when your cortisol should increase and your melatonin and so on according to your previous two or three days early day light exposure. Yes, late in the day light exposure matters. It really does. And you want to keep your lights low late in the evening. I talked about that just a few minutes ago previous question. But that morning bright light is really the thing that sets the whole thing in motion. And it's your last two or three days of post-waking bright light exposure that really dictates your circadian rhythm. There are other things too. Exercise, eating, social interactions, etc. But that's the biggie. That's the big what they call zeitgeabber. That's the classic language in the circadian literature. The classic timekeeper. It means timekeeper. So if you miss a day, double up on the amount you get outside the next day. This, by the way, is also why when you travel someplace, your circadian clock doesn't shift right away. It's still on your previous city's schedule. It takes a few days for things to adjust. That's a bad thing when you travel. It's called jet lag. It's a great thing when you're at home because it gives you some flexibility. So, you don't have to optimize everything to the point where you're like 20 minutes every day, 10 minutes every day. Get 20 minutes one day, get five the next, perhaps get 15 the next. Do what you can. More photons, better as long as you blink to protect your eyes. But if you're getting fewer photons, make it a little bit longer and give yourself some ease. Give yourself some grace. These mechanisms will take really good care of you all on their own. And next question, please. >> Hello, Dr. Hub Berman. My name is Dr. Datillos, MD. I have a simple question about longevity and optimization culture. I've seen people be strict and diligent with their optimal protocols. However, sometimes it becomes a source of stress. When would you say longevity protocols do more bad than good if people worry about them? >> Oh, thank you so much, doctor. I'm just going to refer to you as doctor because forgive me, I couldn't make out the pronunciation of your name and if I were to attempt it, I would probably not get it right. So, uh, forgive me. I'm just going to refer to you as doctor. But I'm also going to extend my gratitude for your question again because I know a lot of people are thinking about this overoptimization question issue these days and it's a very important one. You know I've uh spent the last six years or so talking about protocols for health for all sorts of things on the Huberman Lab podcast and others have of as well of course and the real issue I think that everyone's dealing with right now is kind of protocol overwhelm like like what am I supposed to do? I barely have time to do the basics and now we're, you know, getting right down into the details of, you know, particular mechanisms at particular times of day. Like, what am I supposed to do? Here's the big picture. At least in my opinion, optimization in its truest form is about addressing each day of your life as an independent unit and asking yourself, okay, what can I do today to set myself up for the best possible day given the constraints upon me? Right? Maybe you're dealing with a sick family member. Maybe you're dealing with jet lag. Maybe you're dealing with a deadline. You know, I've dealt with all these things, some of them recently. Maybe you're dealing with being extremely well-rested and you're on vacation and you wonder if you should just kind of take the day off and relax. These are real life issues and optimization has to meet those real life issues, not the other way around. So optimization is about stepping back and saying, "Okay, what are the things I really enjoy doing and that clearly give me energy, clearly make me feel better?" These are the ones that are easy to do. For me, that's getting morning sunlight. It's hydrating in the morning. It's exercise. I happen to like exercise. Okay? Some days more, some days less, but I happen to like it. Some people loathe it. Okay? If you like a particular protocol, you're more likely to do it. That just stands to reason. But then we also have to ask ourselves, what are the most important protocols to do consistently over time? And those are very straightforward. Everyone knows what those are. You want to do what you can to get the best possible sleep. Enough of it and high quality sleep. But we're all human and it's also great to stay out late doing fun things every once in a while. Perfectly fine. I do that. All of you should give yourself permission to do that. In my opinion, you will be just fine in the short and in the long term. Okay. I do believe that getting bright light in our eyes, ideally from sunlight in the first hours of the day, is one of the things to really strive for because it's so brief. It costs nothing and it is so well supported by human data to create to create excuse me outsized positive effects on your mental and physical health. It sets everything into its right place. But as I just talked about a few minutes ago to the previous question, if you miss it one day, no big deal. The next day, just make up for it. I do think that a neurotic approach to trying to get everything exactly right is going to harm our mental health. Maybe not severely in the short term, but in the long run, it's just going to lead to a different kind of burnout. Kind of health optimization burnout, which again is not about true optimization anyway. So, we say morning sunlight, great. Dimming the lights at night. These are all zerocost, very effective ways to improve our health and well-being. If you're under the bright lights at an event or doing something fun, or god forbid, you have to be at the hospital for a loved one or you yourself in the hospital and the lights are bright, you'll be okay. You want to try and mitigate that if you're confronted with it day after day after day. You may get an eye mask, etc. But every once in a while, no big deal. We know that hydration is critical and is very overlooked as a tool for increasing energy and well-being. This is just true, right? Most people don't think of hydration as, you know, as exciting or interesting, but it's very, very important for mental clarity, physical and mental energy. So, do that, right? People argue how much you need to drink, whether or not your urine needs to be clear or not. It doesn't, by the way, but making sure that you're getting enough fluids. And by the way, the idea that all fluids that aren't water are dehydrating you, including coffee and caffeine, the literature just doesn't support that. I do think you should drink some just good old water every once in a while, but if you're getting a lot of your liquids from, you know, I drink a lot of yerba mate or coffee, you're getting hydrated. Okay? Also, drink some water if you can. And then we know that exercise, nutrition, and social connection are also vital. These are the core pillars. Now, it's highly individual as to whether or not somebody needs these every single day, right? I resistance training three times a week. I do cardio three times a week. So, that's six days a week of exercise. But some of those sessions, in particular, the high-intensity interval training, it's very brief. 6 to 12 minutes to get a sort of quote unquote max heart rate V2 max type workout and very brief. One of the cardiovascular exercise training sessions is longer. It's an hourlong hike or jog once a week. You have to figure out what you can do consistently over time. This is the other critical feature. Overoptimization is going to come from feeling that you have to do everything all the time, right? Which undoubtedly will lead to mental or some other form of burnout or resentment of this whole protocols health optimization thing. It's what you can do consistently over time. And when I say over time, I don't mean your whole life. When I was in graduate school, I literally only exercised two to three days a week because I was in lab all the time, but I was going back and forth to the, you know, I had to go to the vivarium. I had to go back and forth and back. I was doing so much physical activity. So, two or three times a week. I wasn't happy about that, but I was in heaven doing experiments and I love doing science. So, I was full and I was young, too. So, I probably offset some of the whatever health detriments would have been there. And I didn't take very good care of my sleep. It eventually caught up with me. I made adjustments to my sleep. So what I'm trying to say here is that true optimization is about taking a rational look at your life over the next 6 months or year or if you're confronting a deadline over the next month or two or if you have a newborn child over the next, you know, 6 to 12 months and you're, you know, as anyone who's had a kid will tell you, you know, you have to constantly update what you can do and what you can't do at particular times of day because your job is to make sure that they are taken care of first and then that you're taken care of, right? Uh this is obvious, but optimization is not going to be about being rigid. It's going to be about being adaptive. So there's no simple prescriptive like when you travel, cut back on exercise. In fact, when I travel, I try to exercise as much or more than when I'm at home because I tend to do better on travel, less jet lag, etc. I actually try to eat better when I'm traveling. That means mostly unprocessed or minimally processed foods. And I enjoy doing that. For some people going on vacation for them is really just an opportunity to just like I just want to be a complete you know uh lazy lump and enjoy myself. Okay, if that's your thing that's your thing. You are in charge. I think this is the key point. You are in charge of which health quote unquote optimization protocols you use. You are in charge of which ones you don't use. I think the burnout and the stress that people are experiencing and I do think your point is a good one that it can be detrimental if we internalize the stress. I have to I have to I have to can only be addressed one of three ways. The first one is to change your attitude about it. Okay. Well, do I like this? Do I like the effects? All right. Well, if I don't like it, but I like the effects and they're big enough for me, cool. I'll do it anyway. Ideally, you like it and you like the effects, right? That's ideal. You're more likely to do those things. The next one is you have to ask yourself, can I be consistent about this? Can I be consistent with six workouts a week, even though some are very short? Maybe I just need to work out longer three times a week, or maybe you just get two times a week to work out. Can you eat clean, mostly unprocessed, minally processed foods, plenty of fiber, plenty of low sugar fermented foods, get enough protein, etc. whatever that means to you if you're vegan, vegetarian or you, you know, eat meat does, you know, everyone has their different, you know, kind of regimens. But you need to be able to do that in a way that you enjoy. I like eating healthy food, okay? I don't really feel good after eating garbage food. So, I don't like garbage food. I'm not drawn to garbage food, but some people really like their their treats. They like their quote unquote bad food. You're going to have to allow yourself a little bit of that if you're going to remain a happy person. And certainly if you're going to resent all of the process, that's the third category. If you're going to resent something, you're going to resent yourself or whoever you think told you to do it. Look, I don't tell anyone what to do. I make suggestions that you can take or leave. And that's what other people in the public health communication space are doing, too. So, you know, and this is true for alcohol, too, as well. You know, I've talked a lot about alcohol. Zero is better than any. Two is probably fine for non-alcoholic adults, etc., etc. But that doesn't mean that I condemn people that drink. I personally don't like drinking. I feel better when I don't. But I have many people in my life that enjoy having a drink every once in a while and I've insisted that they not apologize to me when they order a glass of wine. I don't want that. I, you know, that can only lead to resent. Okay. So, the big one is to ask yourself what you can do consistently over time. And then really understand what that time word means for you. This week, this month, this period of your life. And just be willing to be flexible, update, and then check yourself for resentments, right? Do you resent me? Do you resent the world that's telling you to do this or are you like, "Oh, this is cool." Like, "I can take it or leave it." You know, you're your own person. I'm telling you this to everyone, not just you, uh, doctor. Uh, of course, I'm telling this to everyone. You're your own person. You are in charge of you. Self-care for you is going to mean something different than it does to me or somebody else. And by no means should you feel guilty for coming off the the the gas a little bit, as we say, and like easing up a little bit. And I will make this point. By no means should any of you feel guilty for doing every little thing perfectly as you see perfect to be because you enjoy that and because you think it makes you feel better. Do not apologize for being you. That's the most important point. And I think that's what real optimization is about. You know, the saying that I've put out on social media a few times over the years, but perhaps I haven't put out enough is do what you want for you, provided you're not hurting anyone else. But know what you're doing. This podcast is about trying to educate people about what they're doing when they do A or B, what you might benefit from if you do A or B, but you have to be your own laboratory, and most importantly, like I just said, be you. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. I'm excited to share that AG1 has just launched their newest formulation, AG1 Pro. AG1 Pro takes the clinically backed AG1 formula, which is a blend of vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and adaptogens, and adds three important new ingredients: creatine monohydrate, calcium HMBB, and zinc carnosine. Each serving has 5 grams of creatine monohydrate to support muscle strength and performance, as well as brain health. Calcium HMBB to support muscle recovery and reduce muscle breakdown, and zinc carnosine to support and improve the lining of your gut. All three of these ingredients have compelling science to support them, and therefore, I love seeing them added to the existing AG1 formula. As most of you know, I've been taking AG1 every day for nearly 14 years now. I started taking it long before I even knew what a podcast was. It's a great product, and it's now made even better with the new AG1 Pro formula. If you would like to try AG1 Pro, you can go to drink a1.com/huberman to get a special offer. AG1 is giving away a free bottle of Omega-3 co-enzyme Q10 with your first subscription. Again, go to drinkaga1.com/huberman to get a free bottle of omega-3 co-enzyme Q10 with your first AG1 subscription. Okay, these are great questions. So, let's get another. >> Hello, Dr. Huberman. My name is Sarah and I come from the south of England in the UK. And I would love to know what your top health hacks um from a neuroscience perspective were for improving your memory and also improving your sense of smell. Um, those two things I would really like to work on and I was wondering if you could tell me what the best things to try would be. >> Great. Well, thank you Sarah from south of England. Just came back from London recently. Used to get over there a lot more uh to the UK. It's a lovely place. I won't attempt my British accent, but I'm envious of the British accent. It's um delightful. Okay. Neuroscience supported tools for improving memory. There is a vast neuroscience literature on memory in particular that memories are encoded, right? They're first made in the structure that we call the hippocampus. You actually have two of them, hippocampi, one on each side of your brain. And then memories once they're formed are kind of pushed out. They're not really pushed out, but they're sent to uh different circuits in the neoortex, which is the outer part of the brain, the bumpy part of the brain that appears wrinkly uh when the skull is removed. And what we know about that process is that memories change from when we first make them to when they're first stored to many years later depending on whether we rehearse or we have to recall in some instances what those memories were. Meaning a memory that you formed in the fifth grade that might have been very relevant to your life then. remembering the the um intersection where a good friend, not your best friend, but a good friend uh lived and how to navigate there. Important perhaps when you were friends with that person in the fifth grade, not later. Right? So, the memory was made. It was put into your neoortex and elsewhere presumably and eventually it just sort of dissipates, but it's still there. And the reason I'm giving you this brief neuroscience lesson, this and it's only a tiny tiny fraction of what we know about the formation and storage of memories, is because when you're thinking about neuroscience supported ways to increase your memory, there's really two approaches to that. One is about recall of things that you very likely will lose if you don't continue to practice them. The other is about learning new things. Okay? And these operate differently in terms of how your brain is able to remember additional things going forward. In other words, you need to practice both forms of memory. That is recalling previous memories to keep them available to you as well as learning new things in order to keep the whole memory system vital and able to continue to both remember things like names, which people often are upset that they start forgetting as they get older. that they see that as a warning sign that they might be developing dementia or something of that sort, which it isn't necessarily, I should point out, and their ability to continue to learn new things. So, we can break this down into either a 4-hour podcast or a brief answer. And I'm going to try and provide a brief but sufficient for now answer for you and anyone else interested in this issue. If you are interested in forming new memories, the most important pieces of the formula are the following. And this is very well supported in the neuroscience literature. You must be focused at the time of encoding. At the time when you're trying to learn the thing. Okay, that means you also have to be alert. There's no focus without alertness. That also means getting good sleep. That also means exercise. And this is a point about exercise and brain longevity that most people miss, which is that many, not all, but many of the benefits of exercise on brain health and memory are because of the pro- arousal effects of exercise. Meaning, if you do a 30-minute jog or brisk walk even, or you do a moderate to high-intensity resistance training session, or you hop on a uh like an one of those uh aerodyine bikes with a with a fan, which you'll quickly learn is not designed to cool you off, but rather to provide resistance and you warm up for a minute and then you sprint hard for a minute or half a minute and then, you know, pedal easy for a minute and then go 30 seconds again. That sort of thing will get your heart rate up up. There is now a vast literature showing that all those forms of exercise and others as well. Even things as mellow as Tai Chi, which turns out to be pretty difficult. I tried it recently. It's not that easy to do correctly. Tai Chi, a yoga class, all forms of exercise because they raise your levels of autonomic arousal and alertness. And they get these again the catakolamines is a repeating theme, the dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, and circulating. Yes, they increase things like brain derived neutrophic factor etc. They set you up to learn better in part because of the chemicals and their ability to make your brain connections more plastic. But the biggest effect of exercise is the pro-arousal effect. Put differently, it increases alertness which allows you to focus better which is the first real step in triggering learning and neuroplasticity. So this is a very important point for people to understand because people want to hear ah you know um it's this form of exercise or that form of exercise. It's the form of exercise that gives you a boost in alertness. Sure BDNF and there are other things too. IGF-1. I mean, why could make a list of 50 chemicals that exercise increases that facilitate neuroplasticity? But the most potent effects are by virtue of the fact that exercise increases arousal, which then allows you to focus better in the following one to six hours. What do you do in those 1 to six hours is really the key to actually learning something that benefits your memory. Just being more alert but not focused on anything specific is not going to help your memory specifically. Okay? It might facilitate brain health. So the exercise thing is the first domino that needs to fall, but if you can be alert and really focused on any kind of learning without doing exercise first, yes, you should still exercise for other reasons, but there's nothing special about exercise in terms of neuroplasticity of learning other things except this arousal effect. Okay. Alertness allows you to be focused. When you're focused, the neuroscience tells us that you have to make errors. You have to make errors. Whether or not you're trying to learn dance, you're trying to learn uh do a cross word puzzle, you're trying to get better at chess, you're trying to learn um how to code, you're trying to learn um how to be different in certain social interactions, whatever it is you're trying to learn or a physical skill, you have to push yourself past the limits of your abilities. Why? Well, put simply, if your nervous system can carry out something that you're trying to do, there is absolutely no reason for it to change. Period. End of story. You have to make errors through deliberate effort to do things correctly, right? You can't just do throwaway errors. Like, you can't go just, this is obvious, but just for sake of uh example, you can't go out to the tennis court and intentionally miss a bunch of of serves and get better at serving. That's obvious, right? What you have to do is serve to the best of your ability. serve to the best of your ability. And when you fail, when you screw up, that sends a signal through a very interesting set of circuits that's relayed through your mini brain, as they call your cerebellum in the back that then carries the error signal forward, and then the rest of your brain has to reshape itself. And here's a critical point. The reshaping occurs during deep rest, in particular, sleep. Both slowwave deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep, which we talked about earlier in this episode. Both are crucial. Some people need six hours of sleep a night, some seven, some eight, some nine. Okay, do your best to get what you need consistently. So you need that sleep in the ideally the night after you try and learn something or every night. Please see previous question about the problems with overoptimization. I don't want anyone to take these things as rule of law. If you don't sleep well for a night or two, it's not like your learning is completely nuked, but you don't want to do that consistently. The deep rest piece is critical. But then there's another one. There's a really impressive literature that shows and this is backed by neuroscience. Okay, so brain imaging, it's backed by performance, which is perhaps the most important thing, people's ability to learn new information. And remember the other important aspect of memory to call back memories of things from the past, and it's self- testing. This is the most overlooked powerful protocol for neuroplasticity. In fact, I covered a bunch of studies on this in the how to study and learn episode of the podcast. I'm guessing a bunch of students watch that podcast. Very popular episode. Um, but I'm guessing a lot of non- studentents probably didn't because the word study probably sounded like if you're not in school, this wouldn't be relevant. But it's highly re relevant. And here are the the key takeaways. People were given a passage of information to read and they could either do it once, twice, three times, or four times. This has been done with multiple uh iterations in different studies. Some studies included taking notes. Some studies included highlighting. You know, all the different ways that people study information to try and learn. By far the most impactful thing for forming stable memories over time or calling back old memories to keep this memory system thriving was self- testing. That self- testing can take the form of just, hm, can I do a mental walk back to my friend's house from the fifth grade? Now, you have to ask yourself, is this relevant information for your life now? Well, perhaps not, but maybe you're just testing your memory system, right? And here's the key. Errors should be expected and embraced. Whether you're trying to learn some new information from two days ago, whether you're trying to remember information from uh three years ago or 30 years ago, when you can't remember, that's your nervous system's cue that it's going to need to draw it out of those circuits which are now in your neoortex. It's deep within your memory. Although it's a bit of a misnomer because your hippocampus sits deeper to your cortex, but anyway, that's a nerdy side point. It's distributed out there and you need to call it back. And the only way to really call back those memories in a way that they're going to stay with you going forward to keep your memory and keep these circuits going that allow you to continue to form new memories keep this whole system robust is to make errors where you go I can't remember what came after three in well question one of the Hubberman Lab podcast Q&A like right now what was that third thing? So you have to test yourself. Now, if you go right back and you just get the information, that's not going to help you much. That's just like reading it again or hearing it again or highlighting it, it's not going to help you that much. You have to remember what you can remember and then you have to hit the point of ah, I can't remember that. Darn it. That friction point, that tip of the tongue phenomenon. Like, I can't remember that person's name. Great. Those memories are now resurfacing. If you wait some period of time, typically they come back. If you have to go look them up later, great. You won't forget them as readily as if, of course, you didn't go look them up. The point here is that all of learning is anti-forgetting. It almost sounds like a giant duh when you hear it, but all of learning and memory is anti-forgetting. And we need to push both the learning, right? Alertness, focus, trigger that plasticity. Deep rest and sleep allow the plasticity to actually occur. The physical reshaping of circuitry that's going to carry those memories. But then we have to consolidate that over time. We have to recall it. Okay? and self- testing with errors, pushing ourselves to the point where we can't remember something and then looking it up and reconsolidating it. That's the key. That's what the neuroscience literature says. That's what the psychological literature says. And there's just so much data to support this. So Sarah, my suggestion would be test yourself on things that you're interested in learning regardless of whether the learning occurred recently or it's from the the past. Both forms of of testing yourself. And again, this can just be done mentally on a walk. You could write down questions for yourself. Most people won't do that. These days, I'll use chat GPT to test myself on material either from a podcast or even some material that I learned long ago and I'll sort of say design a basic test at the level of kind of second year graduate school at I don't know for me it was you know graduate school neuroscience and you know in synaptic transmission. And I of course remember that stuff, but they're little details that over time, if you don't practice, can Wayne. And of course, I'm learning new things all the time. And in order to put those to memory to really consolidate those, I'll use chat GBT to generate a a test for myself. And it is really good because I can say, you know what, that was too easy. Make it harder. Okay. So, there's a lot more to say about that. Um, I suggest listening to the how to study and learn episode if you'd like to go deeper into that. We've done a number of episodes on memory, including working memory elsewhere. But the general themes here are consistent across all forms of memory, all ages, and all forms of learning. Your second question, Sarah, was about how to improve sense of smell. The one very wellsupported way is to test yourself on smells, to actually take a lemon. You will probably also want a quite different smell, maybe a rose, maybe some chocolate. This could be a fun one to do. Any number of different smells. Let's avoid noxious smells. And I'll tell you why you can avoid noxious smells in this because there's a hardwired pathway for that. You never you actually never uh lose your core ability to detect noxious smells unless you've had some damage to the alactory system. It's a different pathway. But all these other smells, coffee, you can lay those out and you simply want to take some time to [snorts] do more sniffs than you think you need to do. We had a very popular episode of the podcast with Noom soil who's one of the world experts in uh olfaction in in our ability to detect smells and he taught there and I followed up on what he taught and it's a beautiful literature showing that our sense of smell is actually on par with that of canines. I know dogs and you might say that's impossible. Well, it turns out that if you look at the sheer number of olfactory neurons, we don't have quite as many but we're headed in that direction. our ability to smell at a given level and their ability to smell at a remarkably higher level has much more to do with the amount of sniffing that they do per unit time than the olfactory system itself. And it turns out that some people can get really really good at detecting smells. The alactory neurons, the ones that are critically involved in our sense of smell, not only do they turn over throughout the lifespan. So this is very different than other central nervous system neurons, which you basically get one set for life. There are a few others that turn over, but the alactory neurons are really the world heavyweight champions of turnover throughout the lifespan. You're constantly turning them over. That turnover and their tuning to particular smells, which translates to your ability to smell, is activity dependent. It requires the electrical activity of those neurons. How do you generate the electrical activity of those neurons? You sniff. Sniffing is what does it and smelling particular odors is what does it as well. You need those two things in combination obviously. So, [snorts and laughter] or and really paying attention. So, close your eyes. Try and make it a quiet environment. There's some background noise. No big deal. If this is in a crowded restaurant or something, give a really good set of sniffs, a really good deep long inhale. Why am I telling you this? Well, the more act times that you sniff, the longer those inhales, the more those cells fire in the presence of that odor. And by the way, odors are the actual molecules of that thing entering your nose, which is why we're not talking about noxious things as well. It's clear now why this is such a beautiful system. I could talk about it for hours, but I'm going to keep this brief going forward. I promise just a few more minutes. Dogs, when they sniff, [snorts] they're actually getting many more sniffs through one inhale. How can that be? Well, if you've ever seen that sort of J-shaped nostril on uh the dog's nose, it's kind of like little notches on the sides. It creates a a physical environment where every inhale, keeps the odor in and keeps it circulating. So, they're spending a lot of time with each odor, even if they smelled something a few seconds or even minutes ago. They're integrating odors across space. They actually have stereo, which simply means they're comparing the odors coming in through one nostril versus another unconsciously presumably paying attention to odor plumes, what direction they're coming from. They are so spectacular. In particular, the scent hounds. Other animals do this too of course, but dogs are a great example. And so when they sniff what's there, they're getting a rich amount of information in part because they have a lot of neurons to detect it, but also because they're paying total attention. Watch a dog when it's really fixated on a smell. They're almost, you know, it almost seems as if they're deaf to anything you're you're saying and blind to anything that's around. They're really focused. They're cutting out all other sensory cues and they're spending a lot of time with that odor by virtue of the physical structure of their nose. There's a beautiful literature on this, by the way. So, to build up your sense of smell, spend some time with some smells. Inhale longer. Pay attention. Focus on it. This might sound like kind of just kind of trivial, you know, uh, nuts and bolts type stuff, like, oh yeah, well, of course, right? You know, how else would I build up my sense of smell? But this is really the way that the activity dependent rewiring and reestablishment of this ongoing turnover of this population of neurons occurs. Now, if you have a respiratory illness or uh god forbid someone takes a head hit, the cribopform plate, which is a kind of it's like a Swiss cheese shaped uh bone at the back of the nose where the alactory uh neuron axons go through, they can often get sheared off and people can become so-called adnosmic anosmic. So, they can't smell for some period of time. And a lot of people think they'll never get their smell back, but these sorts of things have been shown to help, especially immediately after the injury. Although there is some evidence that uh you can get enhanced smell over time. And if you haven't had such an injury, you can really build up your sense of smell. So improving our sense of smell is vital enough that when it's reduced or removed, it can be really rough on people in a serious way. Okay? It um it can really in inhibit their quality of life. But if you're going to put in major effort to get your sense of smell back, well then I can just say if it were me, I would do the kind of smell training or I should say the multiple sniff training. All right, let's hear your next question. >> Hi, this is Van Spina. There's a lot of advice on the internet around eating specific foods for fertility. What do you see in the literature around any specific foods that boost either male or female fertility beyond just eating a healthy balanced diet? >> Thank you, Van, for your question. This is a very interesting question and I've hosted a number of guests on the Hubberman Lab podcast, including some female fertility experts. I had a discussion about male hormone health and fertility with Dr. Kyle Gillette who's a medical doctor and there are a couple of basic principles that apply to both men and to women. So I'll cover those first and those at least in the context of nutrition can be summarized the following way. You need adequate calories to ensure fertility but you don't want an excess of calories. Now that might seem obvious but when you think about it a little bit more deeply it has some important implications not just about caloric load but food choices as well. So, I was in a discussion with Dr. Kyle Gillette, MD, who is truly an expert in male hormone health and fertility. And we were talking on the podcast a while ago, and I've had some offline conversations with him as well about should men be wary of cutting calories too much if they want to have their testosterone and their fertility in the ideal range. Okay, what are we talking about when we talk about ideal? Yes, there's a reference range, the so-called 300 NOGS per deciliter up to typically 900 or in some countries 1,200 NOGS per deciliter. That's a huge reference range. But keep in mind that that's just one indication of hormone health and testosterone health. There's also your free testosterone, which is critical. There's also the testosterone to estrogen ratio. And contrary to what many people believe, men do not ideally want their testosterone really high and their estrogen really really low because estrogen is is actually very important. So we were having this general discussion and Dr. Gillette explained it very simply. If a man is carrying excess body weight, if he's starting to carry more than, say, 20% body fat, then he would be wise to cut calories to a submaintenance level and lose some of that body fat, ideally while doing resistance training in order to preserve or even build muscle and bring that body fat percentage down. And that's going to improve his testosterone, free testosterone, and other hormone markers of verility, vitality, and fertility. However, he pointed out that if a male is, you know, 15% body fat or less, if he cuts calories below maintenance level for too long, so I'm not talking about one or two days per week. I'm talking about consistently across the week, six or seven days per week perhaps, and doing that for two or three or more weeks in order to lower body fat percentage. That's very likely to reduce his testosterone and free testosterone levels. And in the context of fertility that could could potentially have a negative impact on his fertility. Now fertility in males has a number of different metrics. Okay? It's it's not assessed by just one thing. It's not just sperm count. It's also sperm quality which has a number of different measures itself. Fortunately, the measures of male fertility in the context of a sperm sample are very inexpensive to obtain nowadays. Uh there's some mail home kits that men can use uh if they'd like to do that at home. There are clinics that can do this. It's and it's very inexpensive and easy to assess. So, if you're a male and you're interested in conceiving or you're just generally thinking about your fertility given some other things you might be doing or your medical history, you might want to get a sperm analysis. It's easy to do. It's inexpensive. All of that is fairly straightforward to do nowadays and you can get a snapshot into your fertility at basically any age and in the context of other medications and things that you might be taking. Okay, so that's the caloric either excess. Okay, so men who are carrying excess body fat should try and get that body fat level down. Men who are in a healthier range of body fat percentage would be wise to not go into at least a severe caloric deficit. Okay, probably no more than 500 calories per day caloric deficit for extended periods of time if you're thinking about conceiving or you want to maintain fertility. And then I should just put this out there and this wasn't part of the question, but I know there's a lot of interest nowadays in testosterone replacement therapy, be aware, this is the critical point. If you take exogenous testosterone, even a little bit, even if you're quote unquote micro doing it, so less than 100 milligrams per week or so, it will negatively impact your sperm count. It will negatively impact your sperm count. It can be partially to completely offset by taking hCG which is typically taken you know something like 500 IUs three times a week. Some people do higher doses etc alongside the the testosterone therapy. But if you don't take hCG and you're taking any kind of exogenous testosterone because of the negative feedback loop by which testosterone is is made in the in the male body it will deplete your sperm count. Okay. And whether you can bring that sperm count back up with hCG and other therapies later on. Usually the answer is yes. But sometimes the answer is no. So you want to be very careful, very, very careful about using exogenous testosterone. Do it in the context of a well-informed doctor. Let them know your fertility goals and let them also tell you that your fertility goals may change over time. So if you're like, I don't want kids, maybe someday you will and you need to think about that. Maybe even just freeze a sperm sample. Okay. for women who on average carry higher percentages of body fat than do men, right? The same general principle applies and this is based on conversations that I've had with Dr. Natalie Crawford who's a fertility expert and I've had other fertility experts on the podcast, Dr. Tais Aliabati and they agree on several things related to female fertility generally in this context of nutrition and calories and and so forth which is if a woman is carrying a much higher than is healthy percentage of body fat there's a higher degree of inflammation in the body and it would be wise to try and bring that percentage of body fat down somewhat or even considerably if the goal is to get pregnant. the general principle of if you're carrying excess body fat, then trying to reduce that by virtue of eating a submaintenance, not by a ridiculous amount, but a submaintenance caloric intake for some period of time in a healthy way. Still eating a nutrient-dense diet and so forth, getting enough protein, getting enough fiber, getting enough fruits and vegetables and micronutrients, but bringing that body fat percentage down, excuse me, often can help. But as most everybody knows, if a woman's body fat percentage comes down too far, she may stop menrating entirely or it could adversely impact fertility in other ways. So that's really a discussion that you have to have with your OB/GYN. The point being, you don't want to be too lean, nor do you want to be carrying too much excess body fat. What all the physicians who work on either male andor female fertility agree on is that you want to consume a low inflammation diet. Okay. What's a low inflammation diet? Well, immediately people jump to okay lots of fruits and vegetables and you lots of fiber and you know Mediterranean diet. Yes. Yes. And we need to add a bit more information here. High in micronutrient diet is something that's often overlooked. And in terms of reducing inflammation in the body, I'm aware of one study that talks about specifically what to do in addition to what not to do because I think we all now know too much hyperprocessed food, you know, too much packaged food, any food that can survive for long periods of time on the shelf in its near to ready eat form is considered highly processed, right? You know, when I talk about, you know, rice can sit for a long time on the shelf, but it has to be prepared, right? So, you're not really processing it, you're preparing it. But yes, fresh fruits and vegetables. Yes, lean proteins like chicken and fish. Probably some lean red meat like beef if that's with within your diet as well. Eating monounsaturated fats like olive oil. I think we all know this stuff by now. Lentils, rice, starches, but not too many. So, the whole idea behind this lowinflammation diet is really also thinking about micronutrients that are going to be rich in fruits and vegetables, eating quality proteins. When I say quality proteins, it's about high quality protein to calorie ratio. Meaning, look at foods like lean beef, chicken, fish, if you like shellfish, scallops, this sort of thing. Think of those as quality protein with all the essential amino acids without, you know, a high caloric load. The fruits, the vegetables, and some of the starches without excess fats. And if you're going to eat fats, mostly unsaturated fats, maybe a little bit of saturated fat from the animal proteins. That's basically the low inflammation diet. And I mentioned there's one thing specifically that has been shown in the human literature to reduce inflammation and that's low sugar fermented foods. Highly overlooked, highly beneficial. This has been shown in a beautiful study from my colleagues Justin Sonnenberg and Christopher uh Gardner at Stanford University School of Medicine. people were given either a low sugar fermented food um sort of call to action to eat more of those each day or increase their fiber intake pretty marketkedly. They did a ramp up because they need to you need to do that kind of slowly for a few weeks in order to get your system acclimated to it. You don't want to go from like no low sugar fermented foods to tons of them. But slowly adding, you know, a few servings a day, one serving, two servings, you know, up to about four servings a day, which isn't very much by the way. you know, few spoonfuls here, some, you know, Bulgarian yogurt there, you know, maybe some low sugar kombucha there, and, you know, you're getting essentially what they quote unquote prescribed in this diet for the subjects. What they saw is that many inflammatory markers were significantly reduced in the low sugar fermented food group. Whereas in the fiber addition group, they found something interesting. Some people who significantly increase their fiber intake experienced a reduction in inflammatory markers. Others had an increase in inflammatory markers. Does that mean fiber is bad? No. It means that certain types of high-fiber foods might cause some inflammation in some people, not others. And that's a important discussion going forward. Personally, I have family members who will take some selium husk, like a small amount of pselium husk. It's very inexpensive to increase fiber. So, you could do that route, but ideally eating fruits and vegetables plus maybe a little bit of that for increasing fiber is going to benefit most people terms of colon health and reducing inflammation. But the low sugar fermented foods is a recommendation that you know I've certainly adopted into my own life. I eat Bulgarian yogurt. I eat sauerkraut. It's you have to eat the type that needs to be refrigerated. And the low sugar part is important. So no, we're not talking about beer. We're not talking about sweetened pickles. We're not talking about that sort of thing. We're talking about the stuff that has to be in the refrigerator. Natto, kimchi, and so on. And really striving for the low sugar variety. So low inflammation diet. Okay, that's enough about diet. I touched a little bit on TRT in discussions with the other people I mentioned earlier in this answer as well as in the episode that I did about male and female fertility which admittedly is a very long episode. In that episode I did touch on some of the things that have some I want to be really careful have shown some positive impact on egg quality which is an important um metric when trying to conceive as well as sperm quality. I talked about some of those metrics as well. And those include things like Lcarnitine, co-enzyme Q10. Why would those be potentially useful? And I should mention when having discussions with now three different fertility doctors, okay, about male and female fertility. Okay, so we're talking sperm and egg health and quality. All three of them say, "Yeah, I recommend to my patients co-enzyme Q10. I recommend to my patients some LC carnitine. Some fertility experts will also recommend other things. And for that, I'll just cue you to Natalie Crawford's excellent book on the titled the fertility formula as well as her podcast episode that she did with us where she gets into some details of some other things that can be beneficial because some experts will recommend things like lowd dose melatonin at night presumably to improve sleep uh perhaps other things as well. Some don't. Some will recommend DHEA, others not. So here I'm just going to focus on the overlap in the vin diagram as they say where everyone says yep I recommend that to my patients. I don't think it's necessary for my patients but as long as they're trying to increase their fertility their egg quality or their sperm quality I suggest they do it if they can afford it. And that's Lcarnitine and co-enzyme Q10. Both of which have been shown to well in the case of males to improve sperm motility. not so much count but motility and quote unquote quality because that's a multimetric label quality as well as egg quality and Lcarnitine can be taken orally as capsules. Typically those are high higher dosages. So those can be as high as you know 500 milligrams or 750 milligrams a day. You don't absorb as much of it when you take it orally. Some people will actually do the injectable form of Lcarnitine. And then with co-enzyme Q10 the dosage recommendations vary. I'll point you to Natalie's podcast with me. We'll put a link to that particular segment in the show note caption. But these are the things that seem to help with egg quality and sperm quality. Why? Because they seem to indirectly, perhaps directly, but indirectly support mitochondrial health. And so much of what's happening in conception and the formation of the early embryo is about taking that fertilized egg and creating more cells from it. And that's highly dependent on a number of different factors that mitochondria are critical for. And mitochondrial health within the early embryo, within the egg and the and the sperm, but within the early embryo is crucial for the normal development to lead to a successful pregnancy. So I want to be really clear. I'm not saying that the lynchpin factor in fertility is co-enzyme Q10 or it's Lcarnitine. It's going to be multivaried. I think the most important thing is to set a context for overall reproductive health. So that's going to be bodywide keeping inflammation relatively low through the low inflammation diet, exercise being critical. So yes, nutrition, sleep being a critical one to keep inflammation low, you know, and so on and so on and so on. a lot of it's age dependent. There probably is some genetic variation, but if somebody's struggling to achieve or maintain fertility or somebody's at the kind of um age threshold where they're more and more concerned about these things, then it just stands to reason to do more to try and support fertility. So, if you're trying to get your fertility in the right direction for you, well, these things have been shown to help. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration, can diminish your cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are vital for the functioning of all cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking Element makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. My days tend to start really fast, meaning I have to jump right into work or right into exercise. So, to make sure that I'm hydrated and I have sufficient electrolytes, when I first wake up in the morning, I drink 16 to 32 ounces of water with an element packet dissolved in it. I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors. In fact, I love them all. I love the watermelon, the raspberry, the citrus, and I really love the lemonade flavor. So, if you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com/huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with any purchase. Again, that's drinkelement.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack. Okay, next question, please. >> Hello, Dr. Hubberman. This is Josima from Brazil. My [clears throat] question is as women enter pmenopause, what is the actual impact on mental health during this stage? Is it common for women to experience more panic attacks or panic disorder symptoms or are these not related to perry menopause? If they are related, how long do these symptoms typically last? Thank you so much. >> Thank you, Joseada. I think that is the pronunciation of your name and forgive me if it's not. Thank you, Joseada, for your question. We received a lot of questions about pmenopause and menopause um suggested treatments, what's new in the literature and so on. And so I just want to start off by saying that this topic and set of questions deserves an entire episode of the Hubberman Lab podcast or indeed several. And I've been looking for guests uh to have this discussion with in more depth. So I want to be very clear about that. We have also done a few episodes that cover pmenopause and menopause from different perspectives. So, we'll put a link to some of those in the show notes caption. Just to take a step back from all of this, um, as most people know, per menopause menopause reflects massive changes in hormones, in particular, estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone in women at a particular stage of their life. And it can be fairly gradual or it can be more accelerated over a shorter uh time period. That means that the range of symptoms that women experience is highly variable from one to the next. And I think this has been part of the challenge in the literature. The other big challenge in the literature is that indeed there were far too few studies of pmenopause and menopause and possible treatments in the previous decades. You know, we're now entering what hopefully is a new era where there's more studies devoted to women's health, permenopause and menopause, but also PCOS and indeed all the things that potentially differ between women and men as it relates to cancer, cancer treatments, um you know, nutrition, etc. There are a huge number of unanswered questions in the women's health space that hopefully will be resolved u in the upcoming years. also and many people are now aware of this one of the largest scale studies about hormone replacement therapy for menopause to some extent permenopause but it was mainly focused on menopause from some years back it's largely general consensus now there might be a few hold outs but many many people now conclude that the early conclusions of those studies were wrong meaning the early studies concluded that hormone replacement therapy was either dangerous or ineffective or only mildly effective And I think a large number of people and this is independent of politics. This is independent of whether or not people are pro hormone therapy or anti hormone therapy. They will conclude that there does appear to be a beneficial effect of certain hormone replacement therapies for pmenopause and menopause if the therapies are started early enough. Meaning if the therapies were started too late, there was some evidence of some detrimental effects perhaps. But if the therapies were started early enough either in menopause or permenopause, then there were some beneficial effects observed that weren't advertised, weren't popularized enough on the basis of the actual data. So that's created a landscape now where fortunately people are re-evaluating those data, doing new studies, right? We always need more, but doing new studies to evaluate the best timing for hormone therapies. And when I say hormones, I'm deliberately being uh broad about that. Um because we know that estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone and other hormones all change during pmenopause and menopause. And there are now different forms of hormone replacement therapy. To be very direct in answering this specific question, which was, is there a relationship between pmenopause and menopause, the changes in hormones? Because it's not always reduction. Sometimes it's increases in certain hormones because all these hormones are have intense interplay in terms of how they regulate themselves and each other. Is there a relationship between that and things like anxiety? Now the short answer is absolutely yes. In pmenopause and menopause when steroid hormones like testosterone and estrogen are changing and hormone other hormones as well of course like progesterone and on and on. So many hormones change during permenopause, menopause. Many cells are not just changing the way that they're quote unquote behaving. They're not their short-term physiologies, but some cells are turning off the expression of certain genes and proteins and other cells are turning them on. And so we know that many hormones have a strong effect on neurons, nerve cells in the circuits of the brain, including the hypothalamus, which regulates all sorts of things, hunger, sleep, body temperature. Um, and yes, it's also involved in anxiety. You have the so-called hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, which is involved in the production of cortisol. So the short answer is yes, yes, and yes. When hormones change, neural circuit activities change in the short term, but the propensity for those circuits to be active or hyperactive or hypoactive, not active enough, is going to be strong strongly regulated by steroid hormones as well. Hormones in particular, they're impacting hundreds if not thousands of systems. So, I don't throw all this out there to confuse any of you. It's simply to say that you should trust your experience, right? You have to trust your experience. If you're seeing a reduction in a particular hormone on a blood test in permenopause or menopause or frankly at any stage of life that is a correlated in your experience with an increase in anxiety, right? Can you really tack your change in anxiety to that hormone directly? In some cases, yes. In many cases, no. Because there just so many little tributaries of mechanistic overlap here. I think the key takeaway is this. The early studies that concluded that hormone replacement therapy was either not beneficial or could be detrimental were apparently flawed either by virtue of the conclusion, meaning the conclusion didn't match the data or those studies weren't done correctly. The therapies in many cases were started too late, right? And it does seem that starting the therapies at the right these hormone therapies at the right time and at the right dosages, not surprisingly, is very important. So that almost forces the conclusion that if you're experiencing anxiety in pmenopause menopause, well, it may not be directly related or even indirectly related to a change in hormones, there is a mechanistic basis to suspect that it could be. And therefore, you should absolutely talk to your doctor. Any doctor that truly cares about your health should be willing to have a conversation about whether or not your levels of estrogen, perhaps even testosterone, progesterone need adjusting through any number of existing therapies, many of which are very inexpensive nowadays, by the way, in order to bring things back to uh a place where you're feeling less anxious, more vital, whatever whatever symptoms you may be struggling with that those could be overcome. But of course, there are other ways to approach this as well. I will mention that on previous episodes of the podcast where I had experts in pmenopause and menopause on to discuss these specific issues. There was also a lot of discussion about the importance of eating a low-inflammatory diet to making sure that you get adequate sleep and many people often say that in parmenopause and menopause their sleep suffers. So whether or not that needs to be approached from the symptom level like going after sleep specifically like okay you're going to make certain lifestyle changes to try and make it easier to get to sleep but if there's middle of the night wakings um night sweats these kinds of things perhaps hormone therapies are going to get more at the foundation of those issues and any doctor that cares about you will be willing to have this multi-pronged conversation. Again, this is a absolutely critical area of women's health and therefore human health. We receive so many questions about it. I will apologize again for not getting into more depth about this, but that really deserves having an expert guest on the podcast to go into what's latest in this area in terms of the research and the clinical trials. It's not happening fast enough, but there are new data. So, stand by. We'll talk about it more soon. Okay, next question. Hello, Huberman Lab team and Andrew. My name is Nick Ferendo. I live in North Carolina, United States. Me and my fiance are getting married this October. And when planning our outdoor wedding ceremony, we got to thinking about whether doing the ceremony during the sunrise hours of the day or sunset hours of the day uh would have a different mental effect on our guests u because of the sunlight being received during those two times and didn't know if it was different or the same. uh and would love your input. Thank you very much. Later. >> Well, I never predicted that I'd be giving marriage advice on the Huberman Lab podcast, but here we go. Nick, and to your fiance, congratulations. Um, super happy for you guys. And the fact that you're thinking about sunlight and its effect on your guests just shows not only a compassion for your guests, but uh that you're fully integrating your wedding and presumably your your life together going forward in this incredible thing that is our circadian rhythm. In any event, the answer here can be pretty direct and brief, which is I would go for the sunset wedding. And I'll tell you why. Otherwise, you're going to be getting ready very very early in the morning. And uh typically people like some time to get ready for weddings. While I would say about 20% of people fall into this category that we call early birds by virtue of chronotype, meaning they are genetically hardwired to prefer to get up very early and to go to sleep very early. Most people are either night owls. They like to get up later, you know, after 9:00 a.m. and stay up late. Or the majority of people prefer to get up between 6:00 and 8:00 a.m. and go to sleep somewhere between 10:00 p.m. and midnight. That's just the majority of people in the world. And people are going to want to have time to prepare for the wedding ceremony. They're going to want to get up, hopefully get some sunlight, um, you know, get get dressed and do all those things. And it's going to be tough for people to push early into the day for an early ceremony, but of course they're there to honor you guys and they can do it. And I'm saying all of this because it illustrates a really important larger point, which is that although our circadian rhythm is a really powerful force in our energy levels and when we like to go to sleep, most everybody has the ability to stay up later than we would prefer to. meaning we can push a couple more hours past our normal to bedtime and stay up later, but it's very hard for people to get into gear and be wide awake and alert earlier than their normal wake up time. So, you're being kind to all your guests by putting the event in the afternoon. I suppose the night owls will be happiest because to them that's sort of their, you know, it's not still their morning, but it's kind of their early afternoon. Uh to the people that tend to be on a more normal chronotype schedule, waking up between 6:00 and 8:00 a.m. and going to bed between 10:00 and midnight. Hopefully, they'll stay for the entire party. I imagine you'll have a celebration of some sort, and they'll be able to do that just fine. They might get to bed a little bit later than they normally do. They'll be just fine. And the early risers might struggle with the party, but they'll be fine as well. Uh, it just so happens that by time the ceremony rolls around at sunset and I don't know what time of year if it's going to be in the Carolinas or or elsewhere. So, I don't know exactly when the sun is setting. Now, we could get into details as to whether or not uh the ceremony is going to be east facing or west facing, but I don't think we need to do that. Um, that's too down in the weeds. Very simply, if you want to have the most number of people alert and rested and prepared and felt like they had enough time to get there, the few stragglers who are going to be late and all of that, um, make sure everyone's in attendance, I would go for the evening wedding. [snorts] And, uh, as a more general point, going forward, I again wish you congratulations and definitely get that morning sunlight uh, as a couple if you can. If one of you sleeps in a little bit later, honor that, too. All right. Chronotypes are a real thing. Some people will argue that having aligned chronotypes and schedules is critical for a relationship. Some people would argue that it's good to have slightly asynchronous ones. Look, there are no real studies on that. And were they to do those experiments, and I doubt they ever will. I think what you find is that either can work. Uh, watching a sunrise together is great. Watching sunsets together is great. And watching both is even better. Hello, my name's Kelly and I had a question about recovering from a kidney donation surgery and what you can do following the surgery to retain as much muscle mass as possible during that recovery time. Um, also if there's anything you would do beforehand to increase the odds of less loss in that post-surgical time period. Thank you very much. >> Well, thank you for your question, Kelly, and really thank you for uh the incredible um act that you're uh that you're asking about a kidney donation. I mean, these things save lives. Gosh, there aren't even words for it. I mean, to give a kidney to save somebody's life, what a wonderful and remarkable thing. So, thank you so much for that. What a beautiful example of uh humans helping humans. how to best go into and recover from any surgery and in particular this one. The short answer is go into it as fit and rested as you possibly can. Now, life constraints will determine what that means for you, but it's very clear and in particular if you're thinking about maintaining muscle and maintaining general fitness and speed of recovery, that having your strength and your cardiovascular health as good as it can be heading into the procedure. And that also means not exhausting yourself or injuring yourself by overtraining is going to be immensely beneficial. And I can say this because I have several friends who are surgeons that will say to me always, you know, that the athletes that come in, even if they're dealing with major surgeries, even if they're not proathletes, they're just sort of, you know, recreational athletes always recover faster. Why? Well, their metabolic health is better, their circulation is better, and yes, they probably also are used to pushing into challenge and coming out of surgery um can be challenging. I've had surgeries before and I can tell you that it's always striking to me how absolutely dreadful I would feel coming out of it. You know, 2 3 days I was like, "Oh my god, I don't know how I'm ever" and then 5 days later like, "Wow, I can't believe how quickly I've healed." And I don't consider myself a, you know, any kind of serious athlete. I mean, I'm athletic. I exercise and so forth. Um, those surgeries were when I was younger from broken bones and things like that. So, they weren't nearly as intense and invasive as as what you're asking about here. But have your cardiovascular fitness um in place if you have time before this surgery. So great time to do and I imagine you might be doing any number of things that I'm about to describe but perhaps more as well but as we talked about earlier at least one long slow distance you know of about 45 minutes to an hour zone two three-ish cardio per week um some highintensity interval training at least once per week maybe maybe twice and something more moderate in the middle kind of moderate intensity of about 30 minutes or so and some strength training for both the lower body and the upper body pro most probably on days other than the cardiovascular training, two to three days per week. And again, not overtraining, right? Not pushing yourself to try and get so fit that you're exhausted because you don't want to go into a surgery exhausted. But you do want to go in getting adequate sleep. It's normal the night before a big surgery to perhaps not get as great sleep as you normally do. That's normal. I think most surgeons will attest to the fact that while not ideal, that doesn't uh, you know, prohibit a really great recovery either. It's just normal kind of pre-surgery anxiety is is is common. But in the days and weeks before the surgery, being as rested as possible, and here's the big one, both going into and out of surgery. And I know some of you are going to go, "Ah, here he is again with the sunlight thing." I will tell you based on a lot of experience visiting people in the hospital which was just adjacent to my lab at Stanford. These are people who are dealing with everything from cancer to surgery patients of different ages. I actually was uh I sat in on I didn't participate of course I'm not a surgeon uh on a brain surgery recently up at UCSF and I'll tell you in talking with the brain surgeons that when patients get and stay on a as normal as possible circadian rhythm coming out of surgery it helps immensely. There are even data showing that recovery from surgery and other illness in the hospital is significantly improved if the patient is next to a window where they get some natural light. If you can't do that, really think about eye mask at night so that you can get it as dark as possible. It's really hard in some hospitals to get it really dark because there's and quiet because there's a lot of noise from the equipment and people are coming in for the checks all night and you know you have the night staff. Great eye mask for sleeping at night. Great earplugs to keep it as quiet as possible so you can sleep on as normal as is possible for you schedule. If you can be positioned next to a window. I think if you're giving a kidney, they should put you next to a window and they should put you next to an east facing window. I don't know what hospital you're at. This person is giving a kidney. They deserve to be near a east facing window. Uh darn it, uh for their recovery and that will allow you to get on and stay on a normal circadian schedule or even west facing as we talked about earlier, get some ambient light in the early part of the day and get that outdoor time, some fresh air. This is going to massively help your overall state. It's going to tremendously help your sleep, which is going to tremendously help reduce the inflammation postsurgically. It's going to accelerate your healing and on and on. This circadian rhythm stuff, folks, is real. It is absolutely real and it is foundational to our health. Then in terms of what you can do to just get back the muscle that you had or maintain it through this period, if you have been exercising and doing strength training and perhaps hypertrophy and strength training for some period of time going into this, you will be amazed at how quickly an atrophied limb or an overall reduction in muscle and strength comes back. A lot of the quote unquote muscle memory that we talk about is skill-based muscle memory. I haven't write ridden a bike in years, but I can still do it. Muscle memory. But there's the other kind of muscle memory, which is the nerve to muscle, the motor neuron to muscle, which controls muscular contractions, quote unquote memory, which is the reestablishment of strength, the reestablishment of hypertrophy when you had it prior. So, regaining strength and and muscle size is far easier than gaining it for the first time. with the one exception being that when you're young, if like you're in your late teens, early 20s, it's pretty easy to gain muscle fast when you first start uh exercising, but that tapers off pretty quickly after about a year or so. And then you have to fight for every bit of it. And as you get older, it's harder to to get stronger and to build muscle, but you can do it. Now, that's the conventional stuff. And even that doesn't sound that conventional. I'm guessing that a lot of doctors probably are not talking about this, but that's not because they don't talk about it. It's just it's hard to prescribe to a lot of patients. And in particular, and here I'm calling out the hospitals, not Stanford Hospital, but other hospitals. They treat people, they want them to heal, they want to free up beds, they want to send them home, but the environment in the hospital is not circadian friendly to the patients or the staff. It's just not. It's not the nature of how hospitals work. And I'm not just talking about the emergency rooms. It's just not. you know, the bright lights, the noises in the middle of the night and the lack of, you know, uh, natural daylight coming through and it has a negative impact. It really does, uh, at multiple levels. So, you have to kind of push back on on the system in order to try and, uh, get the best possible circadian, if you will. Once again, Kelly, thank you ever so much. You're a godsend for somebody out there, and we need more people like you. Okay, before our last question, I just want to put a note out to Cody Morrison who asked a great question about careers in science. First of all, Cody, good luck on your PhD defense. Let me know how it goes. Second, I'm happy to talk about postocs with you. I don't know if you're in neuroscience or another field. I'm not currently taking postocs in my lab, but I've had several including several who have laboratories of their own now and graduate students who now have laboratories of their own as professors. So even though the landscape has changed, the funding and other landscapes have changed since I started uh my research lab. I have some things that perhaps will be of interest to you that we can discuss. So I'll be reaching out directly to you. And [snorts] the only reason I didn't take your question publicly is because I think that most people listening are probably not in the research science track, but also because I'd like to give all your questions uh adequate time. And obviously I have a soft spot for anyone who's seriously considering going into research science and would love to be of help in any way that I can. All right, final question for today. We'll do more in the future. >> Hello, Mr. Andrew Heberman. My name is Kevin and my question is how does one find what they are truly passionate about? Because anyone that follows you and what you do can safely assume that you're passionate about health science and teaching the community about those things. And as someone who just graduated from college and is finding themsself in the world and I'm sure I can speak for millions of other people. I was wondering if there was any sciencebacked evidence of being able to find what someone is really truly passionate about. >> Kevin, thank you so much for your question. This is a vital question in our lives regardless of age. Oh, and congratulations on graduating college. That's no small feat. I know people have mixed feelings nowadays about the value of degrees, etc. I, you know, and here I'm heavily biased. I'm a university professor. Um, and I'm, you know, super enthusiastic about learning and teaching and all the rest, but I I still think for many, not all, it it's a wonderful choice and and it's no small thing to finish uh a degree. So, congratulations to you and to your family. Finding your passion, that's a big question. It's actually one that I touch on in the final chapter of my book, among other things in that chapter. And that's not a plug for the book. Um, it's just simply to say that I go into this in in some detail beyond what I'm going to offer here, just for sake of time. I'll do my best to give you and anyone else listening to this what I think are the key things regardless of age. First of all, if you don't know what your passion is, and even if you think you might, even if you are absolutely sure you do, it is absolutely critical that if you want to be successful, that you continue to be structured about your daily life. Now, I don't mean overoptimization, doing every single health protocol. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is you need to have a purpose each day and waking up even if it's not the thing. It doesn't feel like the thing. So I think it's very important if you're a student to focus on your studies. If you're able to do that and not work, more power to you. Many people have to do that and work. If you're working a job, no matter how far from where you would like to be eventually internally, you know, if it's the completely wrong career for you, until you start to feel something pulling you or even just tilting you in a slightly different direction, it is vitally important to continue to take care of yourself, to try and get the sleep that you can, to get your morning sunlight, to get some exercise. Do those things. Doesn't matter if you're a store clerk, you're selling shoes. I mean, long before I became a scientist, I mean, I worked in skateboard shops. I sold shoes. I assembled um uh radio flyer wagons and toys at a toy store. Um I mean, I worked in a bakery. I had a paper route. I mowed lawns. I did all those things. Um I can't say that I loved all those jobs. Some of them I liked more than others. Some of them paid barely anything. Some of them paid a little better. But it's just so important to to stay busy and to continue to work and work on yourself. And this isn't just theory, right? You're you're cultivating the skills that in some way you're going to apply to your passion once you find it. Now, how do you find the passion? The way you find the passion can be best summarized. Not to sound uh mystical here, it sounds a little bit like a riddle, but you know the great Joe Strummer from the Clash who in my opinion started the better band, the Meascaleros later, which wasn't punk rock. It's not I don't even know if it's rock and roll. It's just music. Amazing. He created three masterpieces later in his life. You know, he had this saying which was it was literally called Strummer's law, which is no input, no output. You need to be interfacing with the world in order to have ideas and to discover what your passion is. You know, the other day, um, because I had a bunch of just kind of wrote things to do. I had to handle a bunch of stuff that could be done kind of mindlessly, but it had to be done. I was listening to a lecture on modern art history. I just decided to put that in modern art history documentary into YouTube. Just saw what came up and I discovered two artists that just completely blew my mind. And I love art. I love modern art. I hadn't really gone down this rabbit hole of these two particular artists and it doesn't really matter who they are or what they did but in that listening I had a couple of ideas about things related to the visual system that I worked on years ago and some interest that I have in eye health as it relates to some of this emerging peptide science field. Okay, that's the way the brain works. It's taking different nodes of interest and combining them and that's what your original contribution to the world whatever it happens to be in whether it's in exercise science or finance or you're a high school teacher those things are going to converge in the unique version that is you. Now the only way that you can find your passion is to keep an active interest in the world. That also means not getting pulled into other people's rabbit holes. You need to avoid two things critically. These are the don'ts. Avoid drama, especially getting pulled into it, and avoid numbing out. Anything that activates you, gets you angry. Okay, that might be something that could turn into a sense of justice and advocacy. Great. If that's your path, okay, maybe you go into public policy or something of that sort or into advocacy for animals or the world or certain group of people. Great. But you have to be very careful that you're not getting pulled into meaningless dramas that you're not also numbing out because a lot of what's out there in the world is designed to do one or two of those things. So stay structured in your life. Do some job work. This is critical. I also think at a certain age for some people earlier than others because they have to earning your own money just feels good. Even if it's not a lot, just earning your own money, putting in savings, maybe spending some of it, putting into investment account, that kind of thing, feels really good. You're building something. That algorithm, that underlying operation of doing something, showing up, trying to be good at it, maybe even great at it, even though it's not your calling, sets the stage. It prepares you for when you get kind of pulled towards something. Oh, I'm really interested also in this aspect of fitness or this aspect of film making. And eventually you'll pick your trajectory. And the key thing is to remember that's not your final trajectory. You're heading off in a vector that will take you someplace that will take you someplace else someplace else. You may have one career. You may have several in your lifetime. But no input, no output. Remain curious and become good and ideally great at listening to your own inner compass or I like to think about it antenni. Occasionally I see something I'm just like, "Wow, this is I don't know why it's interesting and I don't care." You're inspired by it. Some element of it gets into your consciousness and you move forward with that. I actually have a notebook. This is something I've done um since my teens. Early in my academic career, I had a a list. I update that list and I have names of different people. Some were from the world of science, some from health and fitness, some from art, some from music. I'm not a musician. I have zero minus an infinity musical talent, but I love music as a consumer. I just really enjoy being a consumer of it. These are people whose kind of careers or what they did really impressed me. They resonated with me. That's that's the thing because I mean a lot of people impressed me, but it resonated with me. And over the years, I would cross some out and add some in. And in many ways, the career arc that I've taken, the passion arc or passions plural arc that I've taken is a reflection of all of that, plus my own unique experience. By the way, this was long before podcasts or even heard about personal development or any of that. Get in touch with what moves you, what wakes you up, what kind of gives you a charge in your body that's not meaningless drama. And also avoid numbing out. And here's the other piece. If you're going to go down a particular path, this is so critical. If you're going to go down a certain path, don't try and bring your unique spin into it too early. Every career path, whether it's biological sciences or psychology or exercise physiology or finance, there's a chop wood carry water phase of that where you have to develop the competency and go from unskilled to skilled and hopefully from skilled to mastery in that thing. And first of all, no one wants to work with a person that's trying to bring their own unique spin to the thing that they barely understand too early. Okay? You have to get your chops in something. So you have to apprentice yourself to something. And that can be very difficult for people who have a sense of self that they're a little different. They don't want to do things the way everyone else does. They need to see themselves, their unique gift in the thing. And I'll tell you what, you will be able to do that and you can transform an entire field. You will literally change the game of what you do. But you got to get the core mechanics and the basics first. You don't get to come in there and be like, I'm me and I'm going to change the game. No, it's chop wood, carry water. So that's like, you know, dribble, shoot, guard, pass, like you know, basketball, whatever. Whatever your at that time vocation turns out to be, you have to work through the core mechanics of that. You have to see the things you're proficient at, the things that come naturally. And then of course there going to be things that are much harder for you and you're going to have to overcome those to be in that field. And this can be a tough pill for a lot of people to swallow. But if you can accept that you're going to apprentice yourself to this thing for a short while knowing that it's not or a long while knowing that it's not your final destination and that you'll eventually be able to bring in some probably not all but some of your unique gifts to that craft. And that's where your unique contribution is going to come through. So, what I'm describing here are a number of different tributaries that all start with you that eventually converge in your unique gift to your passion. But in the meantime, stay structured. Take care of yourself. Avoid meaningless drama. Don't numb out. Try different things. Develop a sense of taste. What moves you toward or away from things? Learn yum yuck me. Like if you see something or like something in a given area of whatever any vocation like yes I love that or no I definitely don't like that or meh there can be some mess and some yums but the uh no that's not going to work but with that said once you take on something you decide to do it there going to be some things that are hard confuse that for yuck it just means you haven't developed the skill set yet and you're going to have to embrace and tackle certain things that are hard for you have to chop wood carry water for a while but once you go from unskilled to skilled and you're starting to transition from skilled to mastery. And certainly once you've developed mastery in an area, then you can bring together or include some of your unique experience and do something truly unique, truly exciting and transform your field, likely transform the world because in some small or large way, you're going to transform the world. So that's the recipe for finding your passion. It's really about being you, but plugging yourself into some sort of system long enough to get really good at something so that then you can put your stamp on it. Worked for me. All right, everyone. That closes out our Huberman Lab podcast Q&A session. I really appreciate all of you joining. Extra special thanks to those of you that called in with questions. And again, if your question wasn't selected for today, there's still a chance it will be selected for a future Q&A session of the Huberman Lab podcast. And of course to all of you the question askers and all of you listening. [music] Thank you for your interest in science.