Andrew Huberman Demonstrates the Best Breathing Technique for Stress Relief | The Tonight Show

-Welcome to "The Tonight Show. " Thank you so much for being here. -Delighted to be here.

Thanks. -For anyone not familiar with your background, can you explain what type of work does a neuroscientist actually typically do? -Sure.

So, a neuroscientist is somebody that wants to understand the nervous system, which is the brain and spinal cord. And the brain and spinal cord has a bunch of cells, a bunch of little things there that connect to all the organs of the body -- the heart, the lungs, the liver, the stomach. And all of those organs are communicating with the brain, and the brain is helping to make all those organs work.

A neuroscientist wants to understand how all that happens. And so, for instance, they can take somebody like you, who's creative and funny, put them in a special scanner with a powerful magnet, and look at what parts of the brain are active, how the body changes, things like heart rate, et cetera while coming up with something in the creative process. Or if, God forbid, somebody is suffering from some sort of neurologic condition, you can try and understand what brain areas are failing and test different remedies for that.

And my particular laboratory at Stanford studies stress and how to ameliorate stress. And we've also worked on regeneration of the nervous system. So this is the kind of thing that neuroscientists do.

And it's been my obsession for a very long time. -Yeah. Were you always a curious kid?

-I was, you know, to the extent that it could actually get me into a bit of trouble. So, as a kid, I always had this voice, which is kind of unusual. -Yeah, you have a very good, deep -- -Well, they call me "Froggy," from the kid on "The Little Rascals.

" -Oh, I loved Froggy. -Yeah, so, my voice never changed. There's a -- It never changed.

-That's your baby, child voice? Right. So I grew up with this voice.

And so in class, if I was talking to somebody next to me, everyone could hear, right? It was a low-frequency sound. You know, it stood out in the classroom with other, you know, high-frequency voices.

-[Deeply] Do you have a crush on me? Or whatever, yeah. -Something like that.

-They would hear it. -So, the -- My weekends were largely spent reading about biology, flora and fauna, tropical fish, tropical birds, anything about science and nature. And then they realized the best way to get me to be quiet in class was I would come in on Monday mornings, and they'd give me 10 to 15 minutes to give a lecture about what I had learned over the weekend.

-Are you kidding me? ! -And then I would do my best to sit quietly.

So I've been giving you university-type or professor -- professorial, excuse me, type lectures since I was very young. -How old were you when the teachers let you do this? -Probably 5, 6, 7, yeah.

They actually -- -I love that story. -Yeah. -Look at you now.

I mean, you started "Huberman Lab," this podcast. It was in 2021. It's become giant.

It's the number-one health and fitness podcast in the world. [ Cheers and applause ] Crushing it. I personally have been listening to you every weekday morning for the last seven months, and I love it.

I love your podcast. It's so fun. It's so smart.

It's so approachable. The other day, I was relistening to -- It was a good one, a good, long one with Rick Rubin. -Rick is an unbelievable creative, as you know, and one thing that I learned from Rick, which is I think a useful tool that I've certainly applied, is Rick has this practice of taking a few minutes or longer each day and completely stilling his body with his eyes closed, but keeping his mind very active.

Now, this might seem strange. -Wait. So you're not sleeping.

-You're not sleeping. You're wide awake, intentionally, with the body completely still, eyes closed. -I'm doing it right now.

-Now, what's interesting about this practice -- it might seem kind of mystical or esoteric, but what's interesting about this practice is that it almost precisely mimics a state that we all go into every night when we go to sleep, which is called rapid-eye-movement sleep. In a particular stage of sleep, you have REM sleep. The eyes move back and forth like this.

If you're awake and you look at somebody, which is creepy, but look at them while they're -- you'll see their eyes moving under the eyelids. During rapid-eye-movement sleep, Sleep dreams tend to be very emotionally laden and elaborate, and it is during rapid-eye-movement sleep that we often come up with our most original ideas. -I come up with so many weird ideas in the middle of the night.

-Do you write them down? -I record them. I feel bad for my wife, because I will just get up in the middle of the night and just, like, I grab my phone and just be like, "Everybody's talking about my tight pants," you know?

And I go, "I'll get to that somehow and I'll figure that out. That's an idea. " But he does that during -- -During the day as a deliberate practice.

For some people, it's in the shower. For some people, it's while walking. For a lot of people, it's in this kind of liminal stage between asleep and awake that ideas spring to mind.

And it must be that -- And we know that it's during the nighttime, when we sleep, that the brain is reorganizing its connections based on the things we learned or experienced the previous day. This is one of the things that makes the brain a really special organ. It's the only organ, at least to my knowledge, that can deliberately rewire itself, something we call neuroplasticity.

-Yeah, a lot of -- Yeah, you talk about neuroplasticity. And I take whatever I can. I tried some things that you recommend or sometimes I just take it and listen to you and you go, "Yeah.

" But I do like the idea of neuroplasticity and just keeping your brain moving and alive. And I -- You've changed my idea of what sunlight means. -Yeah, one of the most fundamental and best things we can all do for our health is to get excellent sleep each night.

It's the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance in any creative -- -That's the secret -- sleep. -Sleep is absolutely the secret. It's when rewiring of the brain occurs, when learning occurs.

But many people struggle with sleep, and the single best thing you can do, not just for sleep, but for all of your mental health and physical health, believe it or not, is as soon as possible after waking, try and get some bright light, ideally from sunlight, in your eyes for somewhere between 5 and 15 minutes. You can take a coffee outside. You can go out on the porch.

It doesn't work so well through a window or with sunglasses on, fine to have eyeglasses or contacts on. Why does this work? Well, two things happen when you do that.

Light hitting the eyes early in the day, when the sun is low in the sky, even on an overcast day -- I would say, especially on overcast days, you want to do this -- triggers the activation of a special set of neurons. The name doesn't matter, but they're called intrinsically photosensitive melanopsin retinal ganglion cells, which is just nerd-speak for the nerves in your eye. -People know.

If you're playing the drinking game at home, take one shot. -That's right. These cells that everyone has in their eyes send a direct signal to the brain to wake you up, essentially, and give you better mood, daytime focus, and alertness throughout the day.

And that process of looking at the sun in the morning -- Don't stare at the sun, blink as needed. But what it does is, it sets a timer so that you get sleepy about 16 hours later, and you will enjoy much deeper sleep. So, this is the foundation -- -The reaction that I just did in my head.

Everyone's like, "Oh! Yes! " -Yeah, it's absolutely fundamental, it costs nothing, and it's what is called our circadian biology.

We have all these different clocks within our cells. They need to be aligned, right? If you were to walk into a watch or clock store and all the clocks are set to something different and alarming at different times, that's what happens if you don't do this morning-sunlight viewing on a regular basis.

-I love this, and another thing I got from you also is breathing, how important breathing is. I know it sounds ridiculous, but if I could invest money, I would invest in breathing. -Yeah, so -- -I think that's the new thing.

-That's a good investment. -Yeah. 2024, everyone's going to be breathing.

-Everyone's gonna be doing it. -Trust me. Mark my words.

-Well, the amazing thing about breathing is that your brain is always handling this. It's always generating these breathing rhythms -- inhale-exhale, inhale-exhale -- through a specific brain center. However, there's a particular station in your brain, a region, a collection of neurons in your brain that controls a different pattern of breathing.

This is an area of the brain that's specifically dedicated to a pattern of breathing called physiological sighs. So, what I'm about to describe is not breath work in the sense of, you know, going and taking a class in breath work. This is something that you actually do periodically throughout the day.

You don't notice it. During sleep, you do it. And this is -- and my laboratory works on this specifically -- the fastest and the best way to de-stress, to lower your level of stress in real time.

And this is very important because life is stressful, right? Like, we can't control external events. And we hear all this stuff like meditate, vacation, massage, do all this stuff, but that's great, but what if you're stressed in the moment, right?

You're about to give a talk or you're in a difficult conversation or, you know, the world seems to be spinning around you. The physiological sigh brings your level of stress down immediately, very quickly, and we all have the capacity to do it. And it's done the following way.

It's a double inhale through the nose. The first one is a complete inhale until your lungs feel full, and then you sneak in a little bit more air as a second inhale, and then a long, slow exhale through the mouth until your lungs are completely empty. Yeah, we can all do it together.

-We should do this. We should all do this together. Alright, so, will you tell us when to stop inhaling?

-Yeah, I can't do it while speaking. -Okay. -And this is completely safe to do unless you're underwater.

-No one here is swimming? Alright, good. Show of hands.

-So, you're going to do a big, deep inhale through your nose until your lungs are full, so let's do that. So big inhale. And now, before you exhale, sneak in a little bit more air to maximally inflate your lungs.

And now slowly exhale all your air through your mouth until your lungs are completely empty. -We all just destressed, right? I love this.

And then it brought. . .

-Yeah. -Fascinating. We all just learned this.

-Thank you. -Look at how happy everyone is. -Thank you.

-Alright. That's too much. They're clapping too much.

-No, no, no. It's quite all right. It can be done anytime, again.

Again, it's not a hack. You know, you hear this term a hack. A hack implies, like, doing something that was intended for one purpose for another.

This is not a hack. This pattern of breathing was discovered not by me, but by scientists in the 1930s. If you have a dog, you can watch your dog before it goes to sleep at night.

It will do this. It adjusts the levels of something called carbon dioxide to oxygen in your bloodstream, which impacts the brain. There's a brain center dedicated to this, and I can tell you that one or two physiological sighs is the fastest and most complete way to calm yourself down in real time.

-I'm a big fan and congrats. You deserve to be the number-1 podcast. Andrew Huberman.

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