A Complete Guide To Transforming Your Life - Andrew Huberman

I'll tell you super scary being like almost 19 years old girlfriend left me I'm not good at anything I wasn't good at anything not skateboarding couldn't play an instrument everyone in that town surfed um family family I mean I didn't yeah I could have gone to the fire service and that's a Wonder career path um yeah I didn't I didn't have any like marketable skills I couldn't really do anything except I knew my capacity to learn I've always had a very good memory and I've always enjoyed learning so I thought okay School seems like a

good option they tell you what you need to know in fact at one point I realized and I think it was Ryan holiday that said that you know the people who should absolutely not drop out of college are the people who are not doing well because the real world is a lot harder in many ways it's a lot harder than College in college they tell they tell you what to do I remember taking a class in Greek mythology you go there if you sit near the front you pay attention you try not to pay attention

to anyone else you sit down they tell you what you need to know now sometimes it's complicated you can't keep up but then they have these things called office hours where you can ask they have teaching assistance I mean the whole thing is set up so that you almost can't fail if you do the required steps whereas with skateboarding it's like I was always getting broke broke off as they say you know I was always rolling my left foot snapped again uh nothing couldn't do it um there's so much uncertainty in other things at least

with a college education for me it was like okay I can I can learn this stuff and then what I found is when there's a desire to learn and then you learn and then you do well and I started doing very well um and but there's that one class that I got a B+ in that I'm still pissed off about you know my first year was a disaster then it was all LA and then there's this one class in neural development from Ben Reese and I got a B+ and as a consequence when I went

to graduate school I studied neural development you know it's the thing that you don't get the the place where you make an error that you forever carry that signal I need to get better at that so I think a lot of it is just having the the knowledge of self right what did the oracle say know thyself the knowledge of self to really think okay like what are my strengths do I like to learn if I'm interested in something do I have a voracious appetite maybe if you're a person with less energy um maybe uh

you're more reflective or you like to journal or you need more time to process I think turning what often appear as weaknesses into strengths is really possible and then I do think that we are all each endowed with some unique gift I really believe in this um it's not mystical for me I think that we all have some wiring of our brains that's very similar and we all have some unique wiring based on our genetics and our experience and I just thought I'm going to keep paying attention to what fills my body with energy but

if the question is can a person change can you learn new things can you unlearn certain patterns can you overcome traumas at any age the answer is absolutely categorically yes how well it's very clear that as a child until about age 25 more or less just passive experience will shape the brain for better or worse after about age 25 and again these are not strict cut offs we can change our brain but what's required is a market shift in the neurochemical environment under which something happens so one of the reasons why any traumatic event will

forever be remembered although by the way you can remove some of the emotional load of that trauma does not have to be traumatic forever is because when we see or experience something very intense of a fearful nature there is the release of certain what we call neuromodulators things like epinephrine adrenaline and other neuromodulators that cause a state shift in our body and brain and the nervous system recognizes this as unusual and as a consequence in the subsequent days there's reordering of the connections so that the brain can prepare for that event should it happen again

this is why we have what's called one trial learning you go to a certain location something terrible happens there you will forever associate that location with something terrible but there are tools therapy and other tools that can allow the emotional load to be removed from that so that you could go to that location and feel calm no fear whatsoever the good news is you can also learn anything you want to learn provided there's a shift in this neurochemical environment this is why when we are very interested and focused on something two of the main requirements

for neuroplasticity we have to be alert and we have to be focused we can't learn passively as adults we can't just play um you know a a lecture about Ai and large language models or Neuroscience in the room and then it just the knowledge doesn't just sink in by osmosis but if we pay attention and we're alert when we pay P attention there's a shift in the neurochemicals associated with that attention what we call the catac colomines it's three molecules dopamine epinephrine and norepinephrine all which cause an increase in alertness all which cause an increase

in focus a tightening of our visual field and our auditory field so like cones of attention is one way to think about it and then it sets in motion a bunch of biological processes such that if we get adequate sleep that night maybe the next night as well there's reordering of neural connection so that that knowledge that new experience is Consolidated in your brain you are forever changed as a consequence of that experience so when we hear that the brain is constantly changing everything that we encounter changes our brain that's not true why would the

brain change unless it needed to right as a child the brain is basically a template for change it's it's trying to understand the environment and make predictions and so that's true neuroplasticity is is a cardinal feature of of childhood and Adolescence and the teen years just think about the music you listened to when you were a teen no other music will ever have as much significance and that's because as a teen your body is flooded with hormones and neuromodulators that the amount of meaning that comes from now seemingly trivial events when you're a teenager or

adolescent is immense that song meant so much and it's because of the neurochemical meu it creates in you but as an adult it takes a stronger stimulus as we say and if you were to fall love as an adult or see something a painting that just strikes you as just so unbelievable yes then you are forever changed but just going to see a bunch of paintings at the Met doesn't mean that every single one of those paintings is forever stamped into your brain the the nervous system is very um efficient in that way it doesn't

change unless it has to and it always changes if it needs to in order to keep you safe this is why there's an asymmetric influence of fear as opposed to um just interest in terms of what will shift our brain but it's nice to know that love and excitement and appreciation are very strong stimula for changing the brain and um you know I can kind of draw to mind conversations I've had with my good friend Rick Rubin I'll get accused of name dropping but I'm very fortunate to be close friends with Rick and Rick always

talks about you know how when you just see and experience something and you just have this love for it it changes the brain he's not a neuroscientist but in many ways he's a neuroscientist so in any case you absolutely can change your brain but you have to pay attention to the thing you want to incorporate into your brain you have to be alert while you do that and then you absolutely have to go get some rest because it's during sleep and during meditative States and during rest that the actual rewiring of the brain occurs stories

are very powerful and very dangerous stories are the way that humans organize knowledge by and large right we don't tend to organize things into lists we have these narratives that we call stories because from a young age we learn things not just by hearing them and seeing them but they are compartmentalized into narratives that have a beginning a middle and an end sometimes they have a uh kind of a crescendo and then relaxation just think about a childhood song of learning like the ABCs they don't teach you the ABCs A B CDE E F G

H I J right they don't do that what do they do they give you a song which is a story musicians will understand this inherently again I'm not one but when I started researching Neuroscience of Music in the brain came to understand so it's a b CDE E F G right the change in the inflections as one does the alphabet as a young kid is the story of the alphabet now people might say okay what is he talking about what's happening here is you create variation in terms of batching of ideas so that something has

a beginning a middle and an end so if you think okay I grew up in this house and it was really messy and now I have too much mess and in order to undo that there's this kind of like hardwired right dangerous words hardwired neural circuitry in my brain that I would have to work really really hard to undo and I'd have to be scared into being a cleaner person or you know ier person whatever it is that's very dangerous because there's a beginning to that a middle to that and an end to that and

it has immense meaning as a consequence one of the most powerful things is to understand that neuroplasticity really involves taking an existing story and dismantling some component of it what could the component be well there's all this stuff like the Byron Katy work which says you know you you take something that you believe as true and you say okay like uh like I'm an untiy person and then you counter it how do I know that well okay I have this experience okay that's the story then you start running counter narratives you say I'm uh I'm

uh actually a tidy person and then people say well this is silly you're just lying to yourself right where they say is it always true that you're a messy person you start challenging this story from different sides now I believe as because I'm a neuroscientist I'm not um in I'm not a psychologist or in the self-help world that the Brilliance the kind of unconscious Genius of that approach is actually that what one is doing is you're starting to create a new story you're starting to kind of Infuse different questions into the existing neural network now

the brain loves questions like that the brain since we're we're young kids we're asking questions and so if you take an existing story and you start challenging it with questions you're not saying lie to yourself you're not suddening to say okay like I'm super TIY you're not cuz you're not going to believe that but if you start challenging why it's that way or you know youve been able to change so many other things why you wouldn't you be able to change that you say it's just a habit I can't do it you say well what's

a habit and you start poking and pushing and pushing what you eventually arrive at is this kind of huh actually there's nothing keeping me from being a tidy person except this kind of fluency of a particular story what you've done is you've interrupted the fluency of that story so then when you go to the behavior of you know do you set things down all over the place or do you put them in an orderly fashion you start interrupting the Habit the fluency of your typical Behavior so I raised this as a as a way um

to kind of shine light on essentially what I do in my podcast career which is you know we I I believe very strongly in the fields of psychology I think self-help has some wonderful things to offer we've got ancient wisdom that goes way back and when you start to look at things through the lens of biology you start to see that all of these things actually have Merit and they're just different paths to the same outcomes so if you wanted to become a tidy person I would encourage you here would be one let's just say

Neuroscience supported approach would be to write out one page about what a tidy person you really are you'll know that's a lie right and then to look at it and realize that in many ways if you just replace tidy with you know Messi at any location it'd probably be the exact same story and so what you're really talking about here is just a default that your nervous system is running and if you were to just swap the words would you feel differently or do differently on the one hand you'd say no that's kind of trivial

but I bet you the practice of writing it out would forever interrupt your notion of like just going to set something down he be like ah now you have something to kind of disrupt The Habit cuz so much of habit disruption that you'll look like some people say oh you you flick a a you know rubber band on your wrist or something like that there's nothing special about the rubber band there's nothing special about the pain on your wrist or the you put a sticky note we know sticky notes work for about one day why

don't sticky notes work why don't reminders on the the mirror work because they don't have enough salience they're not new they're not different the nervous system only changes if something is new and different so anyway we could talk a lot about habit formation but fear works but so does disrupting the story how do you disrupt the story you essentially give the opposite story and you think well that's just lying to myself but neurally it makes sense because the nervous system again likes to be very economical likes to do everything with the minimum amount of uh

energetic expenditure and to change anything requires attention and attention is expensive attention is expensive and also I would say as I'm kind of rambling all this things are going very well for you so you actually don't have any reason to tidy your space PA now and another PA and I have a cleaner so it's do you know what I mean the yeah you Outsource it yeah great well there is incentive for all the folks that feel like they're not um tidy enough you have two choices you can either start to be tidy now or you

can be successful enough that you can hire some assistant and I actually think I say this in with in all seriousness I think that one has to ask like where is my attention in neural real estate best devoted I think about this every day I mean we are living in a war of attention I wake up in the morning and I can be a consumer or a Creator if I reach for my phone I'm a consumer if I go to my journal I'm a Creator my advice to anyone who wants to be successful in any

domain is to do things away from where you broadcast and then take it to that broadcast I mean take your real life to Instagram and be very cautious about taking Instagram to your real life does that make sense if you look at successful people they're doing things away from the platforms and putting them on the platforms yeah so I have to be very careful then I go into the kitchen obviously I talk to people in my home um but if I pick up the phone and I start making a phone call it's like is this

call really about moving the needle forward or is this just kind of like passive use of of attention we have to be so careful nowadays so so careful it's really challenging so there's a wonderful researcher at New York University by the name of Emily baltis who talks about how for goal setting and habit formation fear setting is often one of the best tools you spend some time maybe five minutes or so thinking about all the terrible things that are going to happen if you don't actually accomplish your goals nobody likes to do this but guess

what it turns out to be pretty darn effective really I know it's really frustrating that this is the case but again you know that has a lot to do with the way that the human brain is is wired and and likes to rewire itself now that said it is important to Envision goals visualizing goals in detail um writing them out in some cases talking about them although we can discuss that um why that might not be the best idea in every circumstance and can be very beneficial because it's hard to conceive something that you can't

imagine but I think when people hear that visualizing goals or visualizing outcomes is critical we sometimes forget that we don't always know what the end goal is sometimes we have to break this up into Milestones this is where I think uh Rick Rubin even though he's not a formally trained scientist um has drawn a lot of interest for his work on creativity which is you know Rick is about largely you know sensing the kind of energetic pull of an idea and being able to explore that without too much self-judgment or filtering or thinking about how

it's going to be received in other words that the metamorphosis that leads to great music great poetry great scientific Discovery podcasts finance companies that one is building Etc is a series of iterations that occur on the time course of about a day you know and so we can't always imagine the end or the end product as the outcome this is why I said University is easy compared to other goals because the end is a degree MH right say you pick up your diploma like whereas in other areas it's far more mysterious often now visualization I

think can be very powerful but perhaps what's more powerful is to learn the brain and body state that best serves the work you're going to do so for instance if I'm going to do some writing and right now I'm working on a book it's largely done but I'm writing some bonus chapters unless I'm hyper motivated to do that when I sit down and Hyper focused I'll spend two three minutes just closing my eyes focusing on my breathing it's meditation of sorts but what I tell myself is if I can't focus on my breathing for 2

or 3 minutes how in the world am I going to focus on writing for 2 or 3 hours that sort of thing the other thing I want to make sure I don't forget is I mentioned that telling people your goals often times can be useful if it stimulates a little bit of fear like you have some accountability but we also know that because of the affiliative nature of people in particular people that support us there is this danger uh a friend of my who's a cardiologist at UCSF taught me this he said you know be

careful who you tell that you're going to start a podcast or write a book because oftentimes the response will be oh yeah that's great you absolutely should write a book or you should do a podcast and people get a sort of reward from telling people about it and then they never actually go do it whereas I can cite numerous examples of where people were told you're never going to be able to do that you're never going to be able to be successful in that and my goodness those people dig their feels and they show that

they can do it now I get into debates about this with Rick from time to time it's a you know it's unclear to me whether or not the energy around trying to prove oneself is detrimental to the outcome and I sense it is right this kind of grinding against like take that and take that as opposed to just doing things out of real love of craft I think about the way I felt about Aquaria and fish as a kid and it's just like pure delight that's the word that comes to mind just Delight I want

to learn more about it I want to do it and tell people about it that's the wonderful romantic picture of effort and progress and outcomes but in reality you probably need both you need to be able to access some fear and sense of competition but also Delight in craft you know like Peter Teal's book 0 to1 as I recall defines competition as anti- creativity in many ways because through competition You Are by definition changing what you're doing in order to outdo somebody else or something else and so you're morphing your Creation in order to kind

of overcome something whereas if you're just purely thinking about something you want to grow and cultivate they're none of those barriers but in the worlds that I've been in science to a lesser extent podcasting and that's a wonderful feature of podcasting but certainly in science it is hyperco competitive right two Laboratories working on similar things people are con concerned that if one publishes first the other will not be able to publish certainly not in as high quality a journal and jobs are created through these Journal Publications podcasting is actually a wonderful field um because let's

say you and I have the same guest on our podcast all it does is raise it in the algorithm it's not like you know and and it's such a and so I think there's a lot of um collegiality and camaraderie in the podcast field that um exists in little pockets in science but science is a brutally competitive field which doesn't mean it's anti- creative but in a dream world where there's infinite amount of money for scientific research because that would better Humanity in my in my view um and people didn't have to be competitive about

Grant dollars or publication I think we would make far more progress as a species so competition Fosters outcomes this is clear in markets it's clear in a lot of domains but pure love and Delight of craft and creativity that's definitely the way to go but in most Endeavors you got to have both if sitting next to someone in class and realizing okay cuz this was me back when I'm thinking okay I I love this topic but gosh I want that Top Mark I want that top mark on the distribution like that's and and like she

and he are really really good and I'm going to we're going to study together but my god when it comes time for that exam like I'm going for it a little bit of competition can can bring out our our best I think um certainly in sport [Music] take your passion take your circumstance and pick a craft and just document stuff and so in many ways like what happened at in barad a what happened in skateboarding and I always love punk rock music and going to shows I have no musical talent and I I didn't suck

at skateboarding but I wasn't going to go anywhere with it but the what I saw was if you love something and you want to learn as much as possible about it and you love the culture around it you do have to learn how to sort out the unored elements don't get yourself into trouble but you take that energy and I just took it to academics I remember realizing when I got to graduate school I found a wonderful lab to work in with a wonderful woman named Barbara Chapman unfortunately she passed away and at the time

she said listen I'm going to have a couple kids but we have grants you can so she said I'm going to have a couple kids so I'm going to be very busy but we have grants and here's the she said don't burn the lab down don't hurt yourself but just do experiments have fun and I realized I was like this is the best and I had so much energy and I thought I never have to go home so I lived there a lot of the time brush my teeth in the sink there work out at

the gym gun shower come back and I remember people saying you're going to burn out what are you doing and I'm like what are you talking about and I would work 80 sometimes 100 hours a week I was so happy and I realized like this is the exact same feeling I'm just taking my interest and I'm just pouring myself into I did that when I was a graduate student I did when I was a postto and actually when I was a postto I started writing some music um articles for Thrasher magazine I've always kept some

little tie to the skateboarding industry that way just to make some extra cash and then when I was a junior Professor I had to really pour myself just into the laboratory but it still worked out and I guess the point is that you know earlier you and I were talking about if you have an I'm borrowing in this phrase from one of my heroes Martha Beck um who's a wonderful person and teacher such wisdom and she calls it a um interest based attention system some people might call it ADHD but have you ever noticed that

even people and we know this from the scientific literature people kids adults with ADHD when they're so-called ADHD when they are doing something they really love they're like a laser they're not going to peel off that their attention is like level 11 out of 10 so I took that energy that I've always had in me for fish for tropical birds skateboarding punk rock music eventually it was biology and I just went okay here are my chips I'm all in all in but the goal has always been and remains to take what I learn and share

it because the real joy in doing anything for me anyway is the ability to share in that knowledge or in that experience and so um those early years were really choppy and really dangerous you know frankly but then when I started a laboratory and decided hey I'm going to study human stress let's go get VR of stressful circumstances and my friend Michael Mueller who's a very accomplished portrait photographer in Hollywood and also takes photos of great white sharks out of cages he said to me oh you know your VR stimulus in your lab um here's

what he told me he he's like it sucks he said it sucks it doesn't look real it's all CGI it's not scary at all how about we you know go film some great white sharks down in Guadalupe Island and we leave the cage and you know the the young Andrew was like okay so got dive certified went and did it one year stayed in the cage went the next year exited the cage I'm not recommending people live this way I'm not because I had an air failure at depth the second year while I was in

the cage I bailed out I made it I lived but it was super scary and it was not an experience I want to repeat and I realized you know that's the line like I you know the great Oliver Sachs Another Hero Of Mine British trained neurologist and and author he wrote was basically what became the script for Awakenings and things like that um there's a quote about him that resonates a lot and the quote I think is you know uh an early teacher of his said Oliver will go far provided he does not go too

far and so you know you have to be careful right these Adventures leaving school doing you can't be halfhazard about about it so if you look at the broad Arc it's highly nonlinear but there's a Common Thread through all of it which is this desire to learn curiosity desire to share intensity and when I'm involved in any one thing and I recommend that if people are involved in any one thing if it's podcasting or sport or video games or math or AI or program whatever it is skateboarding whatever it is that you can't be halfhazard

in that world because forward progress even if you change things over time is the consequence of taking that inherent uniqueness that we each have and whatever level of intensity we have and making sure that you you know do take steps forward and there what I've learned is as a child as an adolescent and as an adult there are all these traps along the way there are all these shoots down to failure and destruction and you have to be very very thoughtful and so you can't be Reckless do you believe in Burnout H if so what

would be your recommendation protocol relinquish burnout once it's already occurred this is a very interesting question you know we don't quite know what burnout is and it can come from a combination of things um um and typically burnout comes not during the stress period but several months afterwards you know that the adrenals you know these two little nuggets above our kidneys and our lower back are capable of driving so much neural energy in us that we can do all sorts of things for a very long time even in the absence of food as long as

we have water and salt you know that the adrenals because they kick out adrenaline and cortis all and by the way are involved in salt appetite there's a reason for that because you need that the adrenals can keep us going and there is no such thing as true adrenal burnout because the adrenals don't burn out you've got enough adrenaline in your adrenals for two lifetimes but there is an adrenal insufficiency syndrome so that's a real thing it's rare but it exists but burnout seems to be in my mind more related to psychological burnout and I'm

not a psychologist but I'm a fan of the poet dve white and he has this beautiful poem that is either entitled or somehow includes um the word wholeheartedness I think that where we recover ourselves is by relating to and engaging with things and people that we wholeheartedly enjoy even if that is simply relaxation or gardening or drawing or maybe just doing nothing for a bit I think burnout is very real and I think burnout as pushed through the filter what we've been talking about earlier in the evening is when we are not getting periodic experiences

if you will of delight or excitement or a sense of meaning and and here we're starting to drift into kind of abstract you know not everyone gets to do a job that they Delight in um certainly there were years where I didn't Delight in the sorts of things I had to do for certain jobs but finding some areas of life that create those neural energy states that carry forward that Wick out into other aspects of what we're doing and I don't know if I made this point clear enough earlier but those moments of you know

really feeling excited about something in a way that really lights you up in particular are are not just about that moment and seeking out more of those moments but in the way that it lifts our nervous system the way it carries us forward and allows us to do the other things that we have to do which frankly sometimes can be um not as exciting or even drudgery so if you've burned out um I know the feeling I I have burnt out before and I encourage a combination of rest but also exploration of things that can

evoke that kind of internal excitement or sense of meaning and one has to be a bit of a forager in order to do that try new things and that can be difficult um but burnout is real and I encourage you to take it seriously because unfortunately typically what follows burnout is depression and then um things can really uh run [Music] ashore what types of food do you try to eat every day and why oh I love to eat um I do I love to eat I even like the mirr act of chewing so much so

um it just yeah um that's why I buy those Persian cucumbers you just munch on those things all the time the um I tend to eat according to how alert or sleep I want to be it violates a few kind of popular thoughts about nutrition but that's what I do uh generally for me I like water caffeine um in early in the day and eat sometime around 11 or noon I'm not really strict about these things if I'm hungry I'll have a plate of eggs in the morning or something or a handful of macadamias by

the way the macadamias down in Australia are awesome they're so good in the states they like Infuse them with all these Palm kernel oils stuff and so when I first tasted the ones and they taste good but they're I'm not like going to get into the seed oil debate I think of better ways to hang myself like with this micro microphone cord it's just like you know I don't I guess I do sort of avoid the seed oils but you know I feel best um I love the oh the macadamias see told you always find

my way back the macadamias down here tastes as if they've been infused with all sorts of stuff but then you look at the packaging it's just like macadamias and salt I don't know what is so good the coffee down here is amazing I know why it tastes so good it's so good the produce I mean basically I eat like you guys gals I that's what I do that's what I do I basically eat meat and eggs and fruit and vegetables and I do like rice and oatmeal and like there people on social media tell you

like oatmeal is going to kill you and I'm like if oatmeal were going to kill me I'd be dead like I eat so much oatmeal but that's not to say that some people feel better if they don't eat oatmeal I kind of find the nutrition debates to be kind of like like funny they're so non-scientific they're funny but I also know that and here I have a theory that when you eat most of your foods from unprocessed or minimally processed sources something magical happens not only are you let's say eating healthier foods quote unquote but

we should Define healthier foods that for which their macronutrients proteins fats and carbohydrates also and calories tend to be matched pretty well with high micronutrient content something that doesn't exist in highly processed foods right but probably also better for the planet but which is great I'm not being planet's important we want to keep that around the um but the other thing is that neurally when you eat Foods as their main ingredients which is not say you can't have a soup or a stew or a salad every once in a while but closer to their original

form and I do cook my meat unlike other people on on the internet the there's the guy eating chicken raw for like 28 days I was in the barber shop the other day they're like what about the raw chicken guy and I was like not a good idea like the so when you eat Foods in their kind of basic state the brain can associate The Taste with the macronutrient and amino acid content and micronutrient content and we know that the gut is sensing a lot of that unconsciously so consiously we know this through neural Pathways

beautiful work being done by people here in Australia and in the states and elsewhere about the signaling of for the gut is actually tasting the food or it's it's measuring the amount of amino acids fatty acids Etc and so when you eat Foods in their kind of more original form nonprocessed or minimally processed it's clear that the brain starts to develop a more specific Intuition or appetite for what you need you start to know oh like I need some fat or I need some protein or I'm crave you start to Crave the things according to

what's actually in them and highly processed foods and Rich combinations of foods don't allow you to do that so and that hasn't really been explored there's a little bit of work that's coming out on this by Dana small at Yale and um Kevin Hall elsewhere you know but it's s of starting to get there so this is why I believe when people go on these elimination diets where they like I'm only eating meat like the lion diet or whatever like Costello meat only and like that they many of those people quote unquote feel better better

I think because they're starting to form a relationship with the nutrient content of the food the chloric content and the taste in a way that after that they like see a cracker and they're like no you know they can kind of reset the neural circuits around appetite and all of this stuff but for me because I'm an omore like a normal person and sorry no disrespect to the carnivores I just kind of like the blood drinking like liver chomping car like come on like the um I'm going to catch a bullet or like a you

know someone's going to at me so I I I fear them more than I fear the vegans they'll just be like a bunch of you know the vegans will attack you online but in person they'll just like hit you with a parsley so it's not as you know the the um I'm going to get myself in trouble the um I'm an alore like most people and the and so for me between 11: a.m. and 8:00 P.M is typically want to eat but sometimes I eat at 9: I didn't eat before this cuz I don't like

to eat right before I do this sort of thing so I'll eat a meal before I go to sleep tonight I'm not super strict about this stuff I'm not super super strict but in general it's some sort of intermittent is fasting thing and it tends to be Meat and Fish and eggs and love parmesan cheese and coffee and oranges and cucumbers and lettuce and and and food like food and pasta and um and I I suppose that having done that for so many years I do you know adjust it like if I do a hard

resistance training workout I'll eat a few more starchy carbohydrates to replenish glycogen but but I tend to do avoid extremes with all that stuff and I love a great slice of pizza and I've sort of lost my taste for sweets but occasionally I'll I'll do that and I love vegetables like croissants and things of that sort so um but you know all kidding aside um you know I do try and eat pretty healthy every [Music] day what are your top health and fitness style recommendations for someone who has a busy lifestyle this is a great

question and you know get accused a lot I get accused a lot of a lot of things um but you know one of them is well no one can do all this stuff but we talked about it earlier we do the best with what we have and the time we have try and get some bright sunlight even through cloud cover especially through cloud cover every day I try and dim the lights or you know get under a red light not Red Light Panel necessarily but just put in like red party light I've done that this

whole trip when you travel in the evening just it's just a red light bulb there it's not fancy a red light bulb screws in this little pedestal turn that on all the other lights go off and then makes for a nice easy taper into sleep because you know the the blue the blue in bright fluorescent lights the short wavelength light really is activating for the nervous system especially late in the day so light is a big one for me try and get a few walks in I think if you were going to exercise just two

days a week it's very clear that those two days per week should be include some resistance training exercise and then maybe follow up with some easy cardiovascular training or something like that um hopefully one could get out in about maybe three days or or exercise sometimes not outside one can only exercise indoors maybe three days per week so I don't think it takes a ton of time necessarily but that might even be excessive so with busy lifestyle I think it's those little carve outs of five or 10 minute walk um when we had Andy Galpin

on the podcast and did a series and by the way Andy's launching his own podcast through our podcast um Channel um which is scom uh which Rob and I started um he's got the perform podcast with Andy Galpin he talked a little bit about these exercise snacks these are actually pretty cool um in the sense that if you just take 60 seconds and do you know like an near allout you know run up the stairs but be careful or jumping jacks for a minute as fast as you can that raises heart rate in a way

and adjusts your physiology in way that really does carry over to better performance including even things like V2 Max in other endeavors so it's probably not the case that that's all you should do but even small bouts of exercise can be very very valuable um so that that's reassuring and then I am a huge fan of non-sleep deep rest AKA Yoga Nidra which means yoga sleep which is just lying there as uh we talked about before but it's slightly different than what we were talking about for creativity lying there and deliberately inducing using your mind

to a deep deeply relax the different muscles of your body stay calm long exhale breathing this kind of thing there's a 10-minute nsdr with my voice on YouTube that you can simply find and at zero cost there are many with other voices female voices Etc that you can find on YouTube as well and if you don't like those we're soon to release on our hin lab Clips Channel a number of different meditations and nsdr again all zero cost of 10 minute 20 30 minute I would say that for limiting stress improving sleep and restoring mental

and physical Vigor nsdr is perhaps the best tool out there and again I didn't create it I simply took yoga Nedra I started calling it nsdr and by the way I was aware that I was going to upset some people when I did that I was not trying to appropriate anything I promise the problem was I would talk about Yoga Nidra and studies of Yoga Nidra showing that it replenishes dopamine in the basil ganglia can restore mental and physical Vigor and then people would back away from me slowly like yoga I don't want to do

yoga I'm like no no no this is Yoga sleep you don't actually move and they're like well that sounds pretty different and I'm like I know it sounds different I'd go on and on and then I just decideed to call it nonsleep deep rest and when you call something what it is or what it can accomplish you move away from nomenclature and um I have very mixed feelings about renaming things but I figure as long as I don't call it like the huberman protocol at least I'm distancing myself from it and it's a zero cost

protocol so non-sleep deep rest is valuable for restoring mental and physical Vigor it can potentially help offset sleep that you didn't get it can help you fall back asleep at night you do it in the middle of the night it can help you get better at falling asleep if you do do it during the day I did it for 20 minutes just prior to coming out here I always do that um prior to any event that or thing that requires a lot of focus this kind of thing otherwise the jokes I tell are really you

know just not okay and um so I do think it's quite valuable and it's something to explore while I'm getting more sleep now I neglected sleep for many years me too and at least 15 years of getting just five or so am I doomed or can I offset this past damage you can offset the past damage one of the things that's really um wonderful about the brain and body is that it can compensate you know there's certain things that I get asked a lot I don't know why I get this question a lot but people

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

about sleep so much if I didn't have challenges with sleep I mean for a long time I slept like a bulldog I would sleep anywhere any time by the way folks if you ever walk down the street and you see a bulldog and you stop you'll notice they always stop they always seem so friend they always stop they always stop and they look up at you and you pet them and like the reason they seem to like you so much is because they love to stop I owned one they're all about the stopping it's all

it's not you it's about the stopping anyway the the goal is not necessarily to sleep as much as a bulldog actually it's the only animal see can't help myself it's the only animal for which there's a genetically induced apneia they're brachy calic which means they have a short snout all those folds you know you know why the folds are there the folds are there because they have a genetic mutation they bred out the pain receptors in the face cuz they used to like have them like they would bull bait they bite on the face of

the bull they kill all the pain they bred out the pain receptors gave them a floppy face short snout English Bulldog thank you for the specificity a biologist loves the specificity the Frenchies are pretty cool the Frenchies are pretty cool they have a little more kick in them right the Bulldogs a little less and costell was a Bulldog Mastiff so he was more or less like a sea turtle you know just slow movement stopping and he's going forward and you can move aside or in fact Costello was so mellow that when he would lie down

on the floor had one of those you know kind of robot vacuums things we call a Roomba in our country it would come up to his face and he would just and it would bounce off his nose and he wouldn't even take the opportunity to Blink it's the Bulldog is sort of the essence of economy of effort and actually if you look at people people resemble different dog breeds I spent a lot of time thinking about about this some dogs and some people have a bit more kind of reverberation in them they kind of higher

RPM all the time all the time all the time and then they're the Bulldogs right Rick Ruben right there are these people that are just more still and we look at these people that are more still and think well probably isn't that much going on in there but now we know from the Rick thing and the Carl thing that they're thinking a lot but in the case of Costello they don't don't get much done you know I maybe cost wanted to get things done but I he if he woke up on New Year's Day and

said all right 50 rabbits this year he never actually achieved that but listen the point is some of us sleep like Bulldogs some of us tend to go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night I'm one of those people go to sleep four hours wake up I hate it but I figured out that nonsleep deep breast or yoga needra has taught me how to fall back asleep really quickly and I can recover some sleep I haven't gotten through nonsleep deep rest some people are waking up in the middle of the night

because they don't have their sleep timing right we have a series on sleep coming out soon with the great Matt Walker we record a six episode series with Matt and he talks about something I take no credit for this this is Matt's acronym qqr T quality quantity regularity and timing you want to pay attention to the amount of sleep some people need six some people need eight if you only got seven for years and you're reading that you need eight or else you'll get dementia please don't worry about it it is simply not the case

some people need less some people need more this varies across the lifespan then there's the quality how much of that sleep is continuous did you drink caffeine in the afternoon or alcohol in the evening in which case the quality will be diminished the regularity is very interesting going to sleep more or less five nights a week at least going to sleep more or less at the same time every night plus or minus an hour it's fine on the weekends I'm not just saying that so you don't all leave at once or a third of you

leave um some people do Best by going to bed at 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. and waking up at 3:00 or 4: in the morning and that's where you would feel best in fact if you're somebody that wakes up at 3:00 or 4 in the morning you might be going to sleep too late and you have this intrinsic chronotype as it's called and you can shift your clock a bit later but most people want to go to bed sometime between 10 p.m. and midnight wake up sometime between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. and there's great variation

there too um but you know qqr T so think about the quality the quantity the regularity and the timing once you dial those in everything is much much better so much so that even if you're not getting enough sleep as long as you're going to bed more or less at the same time each night you'll you'll feir better so if you didn't do any of this stuff for years like I didn't uh when I was in graduate school Etc I don't despair don't despair um it's very clear that the brain can recover um and I

wouldn't waste a single moment thinking about what you didn't do um um also my time machine's broken your time machine's broken I realize that doesn't create a lot of comfort but it's unlikely that you did substantial damage unlikely you did substantial damage unless you did that your whole life and we're talking about a conversation that's happening late late in life but even then more sleep would be better