Optimize Your Learning & Creativity With Science-Based Tools | Huberman Lab Essentials

welcome to hubman lab Essentials where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health physical health and performance my name is Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine let's talk about neuroplasticity more specifically let's talk about how we can optimize our brains neuroplasticity is this incredible feature of our nervous system that allows it to to change itself even in ways that we consciously decide now that's an incredible property our liver can't decide to just change itself our spleen can't decide to just change itself through conscious thought or through feedback from another person the cells in those tissues can make changes sure but it's our nervous system that Harbors this incredible ability to direct its own changes in ways that we believe or we're told will serve us better today's podcast is really directed toward answering your most common questions and the bigger theme of how does one go about optimizing their brain or even think about optimizing the brain what is this thing that we're calling optimizing the brain in doing so I'm also going to share some of my typical routines and tools I share them because many of you have asked for very concrete examples of what I do and when and so I want to open up the discussion today by emphasizing something that's fundamentally important which is that plasticity is not the goal the goal is to figure out how to access plasticity and then to direct that plasticity toward particular goals or changes that you would like to achieve let's start by talking about the different systems within the nervous system that are available for plasticity and in doing so I'll frame them in the context of what I do on a daily basis on a weekly basis and on a yearly basis first of all there are several forms of plasticity the best way I think about it is in terms of short-term medium-term and long-term plasticity short-term plasticity is any kind of shift that you want to achieve in the moment or in the day but that you don't necessarily want to hold on to Forever might say what kinds of things are those well for instance short-term plasticity might be you wake up earlier than you would like to catch a flight you're not feeling particularly alert and you want to use a protocol or you decide to use a protocol which could be coffee or it could be a certain form of breathing it could be some other tool to become more alert at a time of day when normally you aren't that alert but your expectation is that when you return home you will disc scarred with that the need to do that at 5:30 a. m. because you'll be asleep at 5:30 a.

m. so there short-term plasticity behavioral plasticity then there's medium term plasticity for instance if you go on vacation to Costa Rica and you don't know your way around Costa Rica you want to learn the different town and the routes there but you don't have any intention of going back it's just medium- term you want to just program it in for sake of your time there and then you want to discard it most of the time when we think about or talk about optimizing the brain we're talking about long-term plasticity we're talking about the kinds of changes that people want to make so that their brain reflexively works differently long-term plasticity is almost always the Big Goal it's I want to know how to speak that language I want to be able to do that skill I want to be able to feel this way I'm going to frame all this in the context of the daily life the weekly life and the yearly life and that's because neuroplasticity and optimizing your brain rides on a deeper Foundation of this thing that governs plasticity and in fact governs all our life called autonomic arousal which is that we're asleep for part of the 24-hour cycle and we are awake almost always I've said it before but I'll say it again the trigger for plasticity and learning occurs during High Focus High alertness States not while you're asleep and the focus and alertness are both key because of the neurochemicals associated with those States but the actual rewiring and the reconfiguration of the brain connections happens during non-sleep deep rest and deep sleep so you trigger the ch change and in sleep you get the change so some of the things that we'll talk about today about optimizing the brain are centered around not sleep but around the autonomic arousal system we have this system of neurons in our brain and body that's just incredible that wake us up and make us alert and when we're not accessing that system well we cannot access plasticity we cannot optimize our brain likewise if we cannot sleep well and we can't rest well we will will not access plasticity and rewire our brain because that's when the actual configuration between the connections occurs so to set this in context I wake up each day and I'll be totally honest I usually don't feel like bouncing right out of bed I wake up generally more tired and groggy than I would like because I tend to go to sleep too late what it means is that I'm not really matching my hardwired needs of going to bed probably at 8:30 or 9 and waking up at 4:00 a. m.

so neuroplasticity will allow me to optimize my wakefulness but I have to do something in order to access that that and some of you may already be anticipating what I'm about to say which is oh no he's going to tell us to get sunlight in our eyes in the first 30 minutes of the day I am going to tell you to do that but I'm going to also tell you two things that I've have not discussed before which relate to the plasticity between the melanops and cells these sunlight detecting bright light detecting cells in our eye and the circadian clock I've never said this before in this podcast but it turns out that the connections between these melanops and cells and the circadian clock are plastic throughout the lifespan so there's an opportunity for short-term plasticity so that's why I view sunlight first thing in the day it helps me wake up the other thing that I do is that there's a circuit that exists between the circadian clock and our adrenals that I've talked about before that triggers the release of cortisol first thing in the morning that wakes us up especially when we view light so if you're groggy in the morning that's why viewing light is helpful the other thing that I do is I delay my intake of caffeine for the first two hours that I'm awake earlier we talked about the adenosine system and how the accumulation of adenosine makes us sleepy and caffeine suppresses adenosine it makes us feel alert and so by delaying caffeine until about 2 hours after waking I'm able to capture and reinforce to potentiate the neural circuit that exists between the circadian clock and the cortisol release in the adrenals as well as leave those adenosine receptors unoccupied so that I can then use the caffeine to get a natural lift in alertness and focus 2 hours later as opposed to using it just to wake myself up out of sleepiness I also make sure I hydrate first thing in the morning there are there's plenty of data now showing that even a slight increase in dehydration meaning just when you're lacking water can make people have headaches it can provide an some additional photophobia for those of you that are migraine prone bright light can trigger migraines that's no surprise to those of you that get headaches and migraines but dehydration can can compound the vulnerability to migraine and headache so I drink water I drink black coffee or I drink mate which is just a because I have Argentine lineage which is just a uh high caffeine drink for thing in the morning but I delay it until two hours after I wake up and that's because I want the circuits between my eye and my and my circadian clock and my adrenals to be functioning in a particular way so that then later the caffeine is an addition it adds more alertness now this is a discussion about how to optimize your brain many people who wake up quickly and just naturally feel like bouncing out of bed I envy these people they will do just fine by going into a learning bout or taking care of uh whatever it is that they need to take care of sometimes that's kind more mundane tasks like email or um and whatnot here's a more or less a a rule about how the brain functions Visa Focus learning and creativity generally states of high alertness when we're very very alert are great for strategy implementation the sort of thing that we are very good at when we're well rested and we're focused and our autonomic arousal or our alertness rather as it is at a high level if you are somebody body who is hitting that alertness phase of your day very early right after you wake up that's a great time to move right into things that at least the research says you already know have the strategy and you just want to implement the strategy but for me for instance I get up I'm not terribly alert first thing and so I try and just get my brain and my thoughts organized it's not a time for me to be responding in a very linear fashion to emails or carrying out calculations that comes about 2 hours later I think um many people out there will relate midm morning is when we tend to when many people tend to achieve their peak in alertness and focus now many times I get the question and this is this what I'm about to say is directly related to the hundreds of questions I got about this should I use background music in order to learn so as a rule of thumb if you're feeling too keyed up then silence and quiet is going to be helpful in fact if you're very keyed up a particular circuit related to the basil ganglia starts getting triggered more easily it's called The Go noo circuit we have circuits that connect our forbrain to a structure in our brain called the basil ganglia which is actually a collection of structures and the forbrain which is involved in rational thought and thinking and planning and action is always trying to plan what should I do and then Implement that action and the basil ganglia are intimately involved in that discussion there's a reciprocal Loop of communication between basil gangli and cortex the basil ganglia has one set of connections to the cortex and the cortex back to the basil ganglia that facilitates go it facilitates action and the molecule the neuromodulator dopamine triggers the activation of go it tends to make us want to do more things it tends to make us biased toward action by the way that dopamine binds to something called the D1 receptor it's just a particular type of dopamine receptor for those of you that want to know the nogo pathway the pathway in the basil ganglia and cortex that suppresses action involves dopamine binding to this other receptor called the D2 receptor now D1 D2 receptors you can't just consciously decide oh I only want my D1 receptors and my D2 receptors be to be active you have to think about which sorts of states of Mind and Body facilitate go and which ones facilitate no go there are three sort of levels of autonomic arousal of alertness that bias us more toward go no go or both so here's how it works let's say I'm very alert maybe I got a particularly good night's sleep the night before I had a little too much coffee and I'm going to sit down to some work the thing to know and what I always tell myself is when I'm very alert I am very prone to go to action but I'm also prone to not no-o right I'm not going to be very good at suppressing action so those are two different things being biased toward action and being biased toward suppressing action are two different things okay so those P are push pull toward action suppress action so if I'm very alert I'm aware that I will have a bias toward action it'll be hard for me to suppress non-action but that it's very non-specific when you are very alert the best situation for learning is going to be silence it's going to be complete quiet if you are low arousal and you're tired and you're kind of sleepy a lot of people find that having some background chatter and some background noise can help Elevate their level of autonomic arousal for most people 3 hours after waking those 3 hours tends to be the period in which they're most alert throughout the day so that morning 3 hours is quite vital now many of you might ask about exercise and when into exercise in terms of rising body temperatures the it and matching body temperature to mental alertness Etc it's pretty clear that exercising early in the day not only biases us towards waking up earlier but that it also triggers the release of things like epinephrine and other neuromodulators that lend itself to a situation where we have heightened levels of arousal and mental acuity in the late morning and even into the afternoon this can be very good because if you want to restrict most of your focus learning to the early part of the day exercising early in the day does set a neurochemical context or millu for go it tends to trigger activation of the go pathway and so for those of you like myself who have a hard time kind of engaging and getting into action early in the day early morning exercise within an hour of waking and certainly no later than 3 hours after waking will give you quote unquote more energy throughout the day so in kind of reviewing what I've set up until now I do the morning light thing I delay my caffeine 2 hours after waking and then I generally try and get exercise in in the first hour or ideally within the first three hours of waking up and then I'll move into a focused learning bout if I find that I'm too alert and then I generally will tend to eat and kind of bring down my level of alertness and will continue working I typically eat my first meal right around uh midday um whether or not I've exercised or not in general I rely on a low carbohydrate meal I'll eat meat or salad or some variation of that and um nuts and fats and things like that because of the choline content for Focus I'm just going to Mar continue to March through my day and this is of course um what I experience some people are quite different but what I find is around 2: or 300 p. m. I start getting a little groggy a little bit sleepy I will tend to shift my work from work that requires a lot of duration path outcome really careful analysis is and activation of the no-o pathway around early afternoon I find I can do kind of typical more mundane tasks because those tasks require less cognitive load and they can be done more or less in an out of sequence I can answer a couple email here maybe answer that email there and then typically around 400 p.

m. or so I do two things one is I make sure I hydrate and then I always do a non-sleep breast protocol sometime in the afternoon this is sometimes a 10-minute Yoga Nidra type protocol or a 30 minute Yoga Nidra type protocol and I do that because for me by about 4:30 in the afternoon I'm capable of doing basically nothing I personally find it a mistake to at that point down a double espresso and charge really hard it just doesn't work for me I end up really disrupting my sleep schedule I end up disrupting a lot of different things so for me I do the non-sleep Deep breast protocol I usually emerge from that feeling like I have a another whole day second win like I could just work work work work work and then I'll do a second bout of learning I'll do some sort of work that either involves linear um analysis of something so maybe numerical work or I'm trying to learn something this learning bout is very different than the than the morning one this is a work bout or learning bout that's more in the clear common Focus regime because I've come out of this non-sleep deep bre I'm not ingesting caffeine because I want to make sure that I can sleep later that night really well and this tends to be more when I do creative type work creativity is a very interesting State of Mind in which we're taking existing elements things that we already know and rearranging them in ways that are novel creativity has two parts it has a creative discovery mode where you're kind of shuffling things around in a very relaxed way and kind of being playful or exploring different configurations and then creativity also has an absolutely linear implementation mode in which you take the the idea or the design you've come up with and you create something very Ro robust and concrete and so creativity is really a two-part thing and the first part of actively exploring different configurations sometimes in a playful way sometimes in a uh in a way that's almost random and just kind of exploring that state is definitely facilitated by being relaxed and almost sleepy when you find yourself in that kind of clear Cal and focused mode creative Works tend to come about very well in the those regimes now I know that a lot of people out there rely on substances to access creative States um I'm not a marijuana User it's just not the drug for me uh for a variety of reasons I'm not a drinker it's not the not the substance for me for a variety of reasons the problem with using substance to access creativity is that generally the ones that the substances that relax people will allow them to get into that creative brainstorming mode but not so good at the linear implementation mode so that afternoon block is when I try and access the Freer kind of looser mindset that's associated with the fatigue that comes later in the afternoon for some of you that state that favors creativity and Creative Learning might be better in the morning I don't know you're going to have to decide for some of you you're going to be late shifted some of you are going to be morning shifted but where we have alertness generally we are good at linear implementation we're good at activating the no-go pathway and suppressing action and we're good at at pursuing particular goals and and strategy implementation and where we tend to be more relaxed and we tend to be almost in a kind of sleepy mode so for me coming out of one of these non-sleep deep breath modes are or sleep that's when we tend to be better at novel configurations of existing elements which is creativity and this brings about a question that I get all the time which is what about psychedelics on psychedelics people report being able to smell colors or to um you know hear trees Etc and that's because there's a lot of sensory blending however that's led to the misconception that sensory blending itself is a creative process there's nothing creative about sensory blending the essence of a creative process is new ways of configuring things that lend themselves to a bigger bigger or greater or deeper or novel understanding on the part of the Observer and just sensory blending is not going to accomplish that now I think that there may come a time and certainly there are clinical trials that are happening now where psychedelics are leveraged toward particular clinical goals these are clinical studies done with a psychiatrist present that is authorized to do that that can help people through depression trauma Etc so all of this is to say that no I don't take psychedelics to access creative States that's not where I think the major role the important role of psychedelics might show up if it's going to for Humanity I think that it may have these important roles in the clinical context provided it's done legally and safely I think that that the creative process being a two-stage process means that I am personally best served by having this period of nonlinear EXP ation of Concepts whatever it is I happen to be working on in the afternoon but then I'll actually shove that work I'll just set it aside and then I'll revisit it the next day or even the next day to see whether or not the the work itself is ready for deliberate linear implementation which I would want to do during one of these high highly focused States so the long and short way of saying this is that when we're very alert do linear type of operations when we tend to be more sleepy and more relaxed that's when when creative Works can first be conceived but their implementation requires high levels of alertness now that gets us more to the kind of late afternoon evening now I am as I've mentioned before I'm a proponent of getting sunlight in the evening as well by getting light in the evening it accomplishes two things for me first of all it makes sure that I don't get up too early that I'm not waking up at 3:00 or 4: in the morning because it's going to shift my clock it's going to delay it a little bit and so this is really important if you want to keep your schedule on a normal routine on a regular 24-hour cycle and not have your circadian rhythms of sleep and wakefulness drifting all over the place and you want some predictability to how your mind is going to work in order to optimize learning and performance well then you need to get Morning Light and evening light the morning light is going to advance my clock make my system want to get up earlier and the evening light is going to delay my clock a little bit so that on average it kind of bookends my circadian mechanisms and basically want to go to sleep at more or less the same time each night and wake up more or less at the same time each morning that's how it works and that's a hardwired mechanism that's not some subjective thing that I tell myself that's a hardwired mechanism so that gets us to the evening and generally in the evening I'll get that light by going outside and then I'll start to dim them for the evening because as I've mentioned many times before and I'm not going to belabor the point you want to minimize your light exposure especially overhead bright light exposure in in the evening from about 10:00 p. m.

to 4:00 a. m. so for me it screens off it's um dim lights and that's what favors a falling asleep in a good night's sleep for me since we were talking about food earlier I'll just revisit a little bit of what I said before my evening meal tends to be more carbohydrate Rich so I'm not one of these people that's keto or high high meat only or anything like that remember fasting and low carbohydrate States facilitate alertness carbohydrate rich foods facilitate calmness and sleepiness they stimulate the release of tryptophan and the transition to sleep I tend to achieve that state using carbohydrates and it also replenishes glycogen the next piece of scientific data that I'm going to describe is a very important piece of scientific data for sake of understanding how to optimize your brain and access sleep it also can help avoid a lot of anxiety issues the peak output of the circadian clock for wakefulness in other words the peak of our wakefulness and the suppression of the sleep signal actually happens very late in the day so we have this trough of activity and and body temperature is lowest right before waking then as we wake up our body temperature goes up and into the afternoon it continues to go up up up up up and then it tends to fall in the evening and towards bedtime but there's a brief blip of release of peptides and other substances from the from the Sleep Centers in the brain that signals the peak of alertness and wakefulness about an hour before bedtime now that's often the time when people start stressing about the fact that they have something to do the next day and they worry about not being able to sleep and it can Cascade into a whole set of things I anticipate a peak in alertness and activity and I don't worry about it I use that perhaps to get organized for the next day but basically I just go through if I'm going to do anything it's going to be very mundane task like cleaning or things that require almost zero effort and that probably speaks to my cleaning ability too I tend to go to sleep somewhere around 10:30 11 and if all goes well I stay asleep for four or 5 hours typically it's 3 or4 and then I wake up what it probably reflects is that the real time meaning the time that I should go to sleep is probably closer to 8:00 the word midnight was literally supposed to mean midnight we were meant to go to sleep and wake up with the setting and rising of the Sun so I think that's the natural pattern and we've just deviated from it with artificial lights so waking up at 3:00 a.

m. or 4:00 a. m.

doesn't necessarily mean that there's something screwed up about you what it likely means is that you were supposed to go to bed much earlier and because of this asymmetry in the autonomic nervous system where it's much easier for us to push and to delay our sleep time than it is to accelerate our wakeup time in other words it's easier to stay up and hang out at the party even if you don't want to be there than it is to wake up when you're exhausted and you're fast asleep most people are pushing through into the late hours of the even evening and night and going to bed much later than they naturally would want to and so I personally don't want to go to bed at 8:00 p. m. a lot of good things happen between 8:00 p.

m. and 11:00 p. m.

and so I want to enjoy those and I push through the the evening hours but as a consequence I'm running out of melatonin my melatonin release is basically subsided by about 3:00 or 4:00 a. m.