How to Optimize Testosterone & Estrogen | Huberman Lab Essentials

welcome to hubman Labb Essentials where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health physical health and performance I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford before we begin today just want to acknowledge that if you're watching this on YouTube yes I have a bandage on the left side of my face I was trying to cook something for Costello and I and I got burned burned myself it was cooking acccident

I'm fine no need to dwell on it we can move on but I just wanted to let you know everybody's going to be okay he got a great meal I got a burn and a great meal today we're going to be talking about hormone optimization and we're mainly going to be focusing on estrogen and testosterone and their derivatives now estrogen and testosterone and their derivatives are what we call sex steroids but I just want to emphasize that estrogen and testosterone are present in everybody it's their ratios that the determine their effects So today we're going

to talk about how specific types of exercise particular patterns of cold exposure as well as particular patterns Believe It or Not of breathing can impact sex steroid hormones both estrogen and testosterone so one of the first things to understand if you want to optimize your hormones is where they come from there are a lot of different glands in the body that produce hormones but when we're talking about the sex steroid hormones estrogen and testosterone the major sources are ovaries for estrogen and the testes for testosterone although the adrenals can also make testosterone now there are

also some enzymes enzymes are things that can change chemical composition and the enzymes that we're going to talk about today are the aromatases mainly the aromatases convert testosterone into estrogen so in a male for instance that has very high testosterone some of that is going to be converted into estrogen by aromat taste the important thing to know is that prepub ENT females make very little estrogen and when we talk about estrogen we mainly talk about estrad which is the most active form of estrogen in both males and females so preu and females very low levels

of estrogen during puberty levels of estrogen AKA estradi basically Skyrocket and then across the lifespan estrogen is going to vary depending on the stage of the menstrual cycle but as one heads into menopause which typically takes place nowadays somewhere between age 45 and 60 levels of estrogen are going to drop and then postmenopause levels of estrogen are very low as well testosterone will fluctuate across the lifespan testosterone is going to be relatively low pre pre-puberty in males during puberty it's going to Skyrocket and then the current numbers are that it drops off at about a

rate of 1% per year so let's talk about other sources of these hormones and then it will make clear what Avenues you might want to take in order to optimize these hormones the other glands and tissues in the body that make these hormones testosterone and estrogen as I mentioned briefly are the adrenals so the adrenals right on top the kidneys and the release of these steroid hormones from the adrenals in particular testosterone and some of its related uh derivatives are mainly activated by competition it's pretty interesting there's a lot of evidence in animals and humans

that competitive scenarios at least short-lived competitive scenarios can liberate testosterone from the adrenals so let's talk about competition because it turns out that competition is a powerful influence on the sex steroid hormones and the sex steroid hormones powerfully influence competition so most people don't realize this but most males of a given mamalian species never get to reproduce in fact they never even get to have sex at all and we don't often think about that but testo tone plays a powerful role in determining which members of a given species will get to reproduce which ones of

that species will actually get access to females and so here I'm not talking about humans specifically but it's well known in species like elephant seals in species like antler animals and Rams for instance that the higher levels of testosterone correlate with access to females now one interpretation of this is that the females are detecting which males have high testosterone and selecting them they're more receptive to them but it's actually more so that the males that have higher testosterone forage further and will fight harder for the females and this is really interesting because there's very good

evidence now that testosterone can reduce anxiety promote novelty seeking and promote competitive interactions and so before you leap too far with this in your mind and think about all these human behaviors just stay with me because there's a little bit of biology here that makes it all make sense and it turns out to be pretty simple we have a brain region called the amydala in Latin that just means almond but the amydala is most famous for its role in fear we hear a lot about fear and the amydala but the the amydala is really involved

in threat detection it sets our thresholds for anxiety and what we consider scary or too much testosterone secreted from the gonads and elsewhere in the body binds to the amydala and changes the threshold for stress so I've said before on previous versions of this podcast and on other podcasts that testosterone has this incredible effect of making effort feel good but what I was really referring to is the fact that testosterone lowers Stress and Anxiety in particular in males of a given species testosterone increases generally lead to more foraging more more novelty seeking increases in libido

and increases in desire to mate so it is the case that increases in testosterone promote competitive and foraging type behaviors in in humans and in non-human mammals but it's also true that competition itself can increase Androgen such as testosterone now some people have come to the conclusion that if you win your testosterone goes up and if you lose your testosterone goes down and to some extent that's true but that's not a direct effect on the gonads that's actually mediated by the neuromodulator dopamine we talked about dopamine in the episode on motivation and drive and dopamine

and testosterone have a remarkable interplay in the body dopamine is actually released in the brain in ways that has the pituitary this gland that sits over the roof of your mouth release certain hormones that then go on to promote the release of more testosterone and indeed winning promotes more dopamine and later more testosterone however in the short term just competing increases testosterone independent on whether or not you win or lose so testosterone is driving the seeking of sex and estrogen is promoting the actual Act of sex from females so-called receptivity consensual receptivity in males it's

interesting to point out the testosterone is promoting seeking of sex but it's also estrogen in males that's important for libido if estrogen levels are brought too low then men will completely lose their libido so it's not simply the case that high levels of testosterone produce a lot of sex and mating behavior and low levels of estrogen are good across the board you actually need both in both males and females it's just that in females the testosterone levels are always going to be lower than the estrogen levels and in males the estrogen levels are always going

to be lower than testosterone levels so just as there are behaviors that can increase testosterone there are behaviors that can decrease testosterone and one of the most well-characterized ones in humans is becoming a parent so expecting fathers have an almost 50% decrease in testosterone levels both free and bound testosterone it turns out that these effects of reduced testosterone increase testr and reduce cortisol can all be explained by an increase in prolactin it is a well-known phen phenon that testosterone is going to drop prolactin is going to increase estrad is going to increase in males and

females that are expecting children the other behavior that markedly reduces testosterone in both males and females and markedly reduces the desire for seeking sex and sex itself is illness and many of you might say well duh when people feel sick they don't feel like seeking out mates they don't feel like having sex but have you ever wondered why that actually is well it turns out that it can be explained by the release of what are called inflammatory cyto kindes so cyto kindes are related to the immune system they travel in the lymph and in the

blood and they attack Invader cells like bacteria and viruses and under conditions of illness we make a lot of different cyto kindes some of them are anti-inflammatory but some of them are pro-inflammatory and the best known example of a pro-inflammatory cyto kind is il6 and it's known that il6 when injected into individuals will decrease the desire for sex and eventually will reduce levels of testosterone and estrogen independent of feeling lousy now isex doesn't just travel to the gonads and shut down the gonads it actually has ways to interact with some of the receptors that the

steroid hormones estrogen and testosterone bind to and impact those receptors so that the sex steroid hormones can't have their effect in shorted and put simply inflammatory cyto kindes like il6 are bad for sex steroid hormones one of the main behaviors that's been shown to be associated with poor levels of estrogen relative to age match controls for people with ovaries or lower levels of testosterone compared to AG match controls for people with testes is apnea so what is apnea apnea is under breathing or mainly cessation of breathing during sleep so people are holding their breath and

then they they'll suddenly wake up people people who are dramatically overweight also suffer a lot from apnea during sleep and it's well established that going into deep sleep and getting the proper patterns of slow wave sleep and REM sleep are important for hormone optimization breathing itself can be adjusted in the daytime waking hours in ways that can powerfully impact both sleep reduce incidence of sleep apnea and also help to optimize various hormones even just by breathing in particular ways while awake believe it or not being a nasal breather and avoiding being a mouth breather can

actually positively impact hormones and in particular the hormones testosterone and estrogen although the way that it does that is by making you a better sleeper which allows you to produce more testosterone and the appropriate amounts of testosterone and estrogen but it does that in part through indirect mechanisms Because deep sleep supports the gonads the ovaries and and the testicles and the turnover of cells and the production of cells remember in the in the ovary particular cells and the Egg follicles themselves make estrogen and in the in the test in the testicle that the CI cells

and the liic cells are important for the formation of sperm and for testosterone respectively so what does this all mean this means we have to be breathing properly to get your breathing and sleep right so that your sleep can actually be deep enough and you're not entering apnea States getting proper sleep can um really offset all the reductions in testosterone and estrogen and reductions in fertility that occur if we don't get enough sleep but seldom as it discussed how sleep actually adjusts things like testosterone and estrogen and it does it by modifying cortisol so the

molecule cholesterol can be converted into testosterone or estrogen but there's a competition whereby the cholesterol will turn into cortisol and not test testosterone or it'll turn into cortisol and not estrogen if stress levels are too high so the simple version of this is getting your breathing right during the waking hours meaning primarily unless you're working out really hard or there's some other reason why you're maybe eating or speaking that you need to be breathing through your mouth you should be a nose breather there's really good evidence for that now and in sleep you also want

to be a nose breather because that's going to increase the amount of oxygen that you're bringing into your system and the amount of carb di oxide that you're offloading okay so the simple version of this is get your breathing right so how do you do that how do you get your breathing right well for some people that have severe sleep apnea they're going to need the CPAP machine this is a machine that you actually put on your face and it helps you breathe properly and sleep in the daytime the best way to get good at

nasal breathing is to dilate the nasal passages because a lot of people have a hard time breathing through their nose and one way to do this is to just breathe through your nose more and one way to do that is that when you exercise in particular cardiov vascular exercise most of the time provided you're not in maximum effort you should be nasal breathing now for a lot of people nasal breathing during exercise is hard at first but as you do it because the sinuses have a capacity to dilate over time you'll get better at it

so my advice would be breathe through your nose while exercising unless you're in maximum effort pretty soon what you'll find is you actually can create more output than you would if you breathing through your mouth learn to a nasal breather has positive cosmetic effects it reduces apnea it offloads more carbon dioxide it increases lung capacity it dilates the sinuses and it prevents apnea in sleep so unless you have severe apnea and you need the CPAP Nas becoming a nasal breather can have all sorts of positive effects by reducing cortisol reducing apnea and indirectly raising testosterone

and estrogen in the proper ratios the second piece of Behavioral advice relates to the viewing of light and many of you have heard me talk about this before and I'm not going to belabor the point that viewing Bright Light Within the first hour of waking whether or not it's from artificial light or ideally from sunlight has these powerful effects on sleep and wakefulness but we have to return to this if you want to understand how light can impact hormones because hormones light and dopamine have a very close knit relationship so much so that your light

viewing Behavior can actually have a direct effect on hormone levels and fertility I think most people don't really understand how powerful this relationship is between light dopamine hormones and when dopamine levels are high as I mentioned before there's a tendency for more genotropin releasing hormone lutenizing hormone follicle stimulating hormone all the hormones that come from the hypothalamic pituitary axis and stimulate estrogen and testosterone release from the ovary and testes so how does this translate to a protocol if you want to optimize testosterone an estrogen you need to get your light viewing Behavior correct it's not

just about optimizing your sleep which is also important it's about getting sufficient amount of light in your eyes so you have sufficient levels of dopamine so the simple protocols for that I've reviewed before but it means getting anywhere from 2 to 10 minutes of bright light exposure in your eyes early in the day it is not sufficient to do this with sunglasses unless you have to do that for safety reasons it's fine to where prescription lenses in contacts if you can't get sunlight for whatever reason you want to use bright artificial light but that is

absolutely critical for timing the cortisol release properly limiting cortisol release to the early part of the day getting increases in dopamine that are going to promote the production of testosterone and estrogen to healthy levels the other aspect of light viewing Behavior that's extremely important is to avoid bright light exposure to your eyes in the middle of the night if you're viewing bright light in the middle of the night you are suppressing dopamine release if you're suppressing dopamine release you are suppressing pressing testosterone levels so you can't even begin to talk about supplements and other ways

to optimize testosterone diet and its effects on testosterone and estrogen and fertility and reproductive Behavior Etc until you get your breathing right until you get things like your light viewing Behavior right so bright light early in the day and throughout the day is great and avoiding bright light in the middle of the night is not just about not disrupting your sleep it's also about optimizing the sex steroid hormones Okay so we've talked about breathing we've talked about light let's talk about a third element that there seems to be some excitement about lately uh for other

reasons but that can actually have some pretty profound influences on hormone levels and that's heat and cold so as always rather than just offer a tool I'm going to tell you the underlying science as it relates to naturally occurring phenomenon because in understanding that and understanding the mechanism you're going to be in a far better position to understand the tools and mechanisms and how you might want to adjust them for your own life so now you understand the relationship between light day length dopamine and hormone levels and everyone should realize that temperature and day length

are linked temperature and day length and sunlight those are all intimately related because of the systems that we evolved in right so nowadays there's a lot of interest in using cold as a way to stimulate testosterone sounds pretty crazy but believe it or not that and things like ice baz and cold showers can have positive effects on the sex steroid hormones what happens is there's a rebound in vasod dilation after cooling so cooling causes Vaso constriction and then after the cooling there's a rebound vasod dilation and there's more infusion of blood into the gonads put

simply we don't know whether or not cold and heat directly affect the prod the production of testosterone and estrogen we only know that cold and heat can modulate those probably through indirect mechanisms like controlling the amount of blood flow by way of shutting down or activating the neurons now let's talk about particular forms of exercise and how they modulate the steroid hormones so what's interesting is when you start digging into the more mechanistic studies what you find is that heavy weight trainings but not weight training to failure where completion of a repetition is possible leads

to the greatest increases in testosterone so anywhere from one rep maximum to somewhere in the you know 6 to8 rep repetition range in males or females increases testosterone significantly and it does it for about a day sometimes up to 48 hours now many of you might be endurance athletes or also enjoy exercise besides heavy weight bearing exercise and there are several studies exploring whether or not endurance activity can increase or decrease Androgen levels and whether or not you combine endurance activity and weight training whether or not that has any effect if you do the endurance

activity first or second and the takeaway from all of this was that endurance activity if performed first leads to decreases in testosterone during the weight training session as compared to the same weight training session done first followed by endurance activity in other words if you want to optimize testosterone levels it seems to be the case that weight training first and doing cardio type endurance activity afterward is the right order of business now when these are done on separate days it doesn't seem to have an effect there is they showed no statistical interaction but it seems

that if you're going to do these in the same workout episode that it's move heavy loads first then do cardiovascular exercise so there's a little bit of data looking specifically at how endurance exercise impacts testosterone and its derivatives and it's very clear that high interval training sprinting Etc which somewhat mimics the neural activity that occurs while moving heavy weight loads is going to increase testosterone there's ample evidence for that in the in the literature and that endurance exercise that extends Beyond 75 minutes is going to start to lead to reductions in testosterone presumably by increases

in cortisol so now let's switch over to talking about estrogen so there are many people who are trying to optimize their estrogen levels and and one of the places where this shows up a lot and I get a lot of questions about is menopause so menopause as I mentioned earlier is this fairly massive reduction in the amount of estrogen that one is circulating in one's blood mainly because the ovary is now depleted of some estrogen production of its own the eggs are not being produced they've been depleted Etc so menopause is characterized by a variety

of symptoms things like hot flashes things like mood swings things like headaches in particular migraine headaches there can be a lot of brain fog it can be very very disruptive for people so what are the various things that one can do for menopause well one of the most common ones is that Physicians will prescribe supplemental estrogen so this is hormone therapy where somebody takes either oral estrogen or they'll take they use a patch or a pellet some way to secrete estradi into the system and that has varying success depending on the individual some people respond

very well to it other people really have challenges with it and there are a lot of side effects associated with it for some people not others in addition there's a concern always about supplementing estrogen when there's a breast cancer uh background in the family or there's concern about breast cancer for any reason because a lot of those cancers are estrogen dependent and that's why drugs like tamoxifen and an asrol and drugs that block either aromatase or block and uh excuse excuse me estrogen receptors directly were initially developed okay so now let's talk about the role

of specific compounds some of which many of which can be taken in supplementation form to optimize sexo hormones it's very clear that certain collections of nutrients are useful for promoting testosterone and estrogen production in their proper ratios and those things are what I would call the sort of Usual Suspects vitamin D which is important for so many biological functions including endocrine functions zinc magnesium Etc one of the things that's been shown time and time again to have very negative effects on sex steroid hormones testosterone mainly in men estrogen mainly in women is opioids the opioids

dramatically reduce levels of testosterone and estrogen and they do that mainly by disrupting The receptors on gonadotropin releasing hormone neurons these neurons with than the hypothalamus that communicate to the pituitary and in fact people that take large amounts of opioids or even take low levels of opioids for long periods of time will develop all sorts of endocrine syndromes that's been shown over and over again gyacom Masia or male breast development in males disruptions to the ovary in females it's really a a quite terrible situation so uh excessive opioids are very problematic for sex steroid hormones

now there's an entire industry devoted to supplements and various things that people can take to increase testosterone some of which have scientific data to support them uh some of which do not and some of which have anecdotal support and some of which do not there are supplements in particular Tonga Ali which is has this other name it's sometime called tongat Ali sometimes it's called and the forgive me that it's hard to pronounce but uroma uh longifolia Jack this has been shown in several studies and you can find these on exam.com or you can go to

PubMed if you like I've looked at these that it does seem to have some pro- fertility Pro free testosterone and subtle aphrodesiac effects it does also seem to be a slight anti-estrogen so um the reports of this people take this anywhere from 400 to 800 milligrams a day again I'm not suggesting you do that but that's kind of what's out there and there is some decent scientific literature uh to support the fact that it liberates some of the bound testosterone and allows more free testosterone to be available some of the reported quote unquote side effects

are things like um excessive alertness and insomnia if it's taken too late in the day and so forth but I encourage you to explore that further if if an increasing free testosterone is something that you're interested in doing people with different backgrounds and conditions as we talked about for menopause and estrogen have to be careful because when you're starting to modulate hormones you're starting to modulate not just the tissues that thrive on binding of those hormones but remember um the reason why there's so much breast cancer and there's a reason why there's so much testicular

cancer is that any tissue that undergos rapid reproduction of particular cells so there's a lot of reproduction of cells and shedding of uterine lining and the reproduction of cells and eggs in the ovary and in the testes there's the production of Li dig and CI cells and there's this kind of ongoing production of sperm that's why those tissues are particularly vulnerable to the development of cancers and many of those cancers are Androgen sensitive that's why one of the major treatments for prostate overgrowth or prostate cancer is to give anti-androgenic drugs it's really about trying to

prevent testosterone from encouraging growth of tumors so I want to you know really emphasize the caution there um because it it's easy when thinking about optimizing estrogen and testosterone to just think oh more is better more is definitely not better any tissue that recycles itself is prone to cancers and those tissues thrive on androgens and estrogens to create more tumors so you have to be careful anytime you're modulating hormones especially androgens and estrogens and while we're talking about supplementation the effects of supplementation I would say in some individuals can be quite traumatic but they're always

always always except in extreme cases going to be far more subtle than would be for instance just in injecting testosterone or injecting estrogen Etc so I think we should just be honest and upfront about that so thus far in terms of talking about optimizing hormones and in the discussion of supplementation I haven't really talked about things that actually affect the brain directly that increase the pituitary output and things of that sort we' mainly been talking about things that free up testosterone or that increase estrogen at the level of the periphery but if you remember way

back to the beginning of this episode hormones are made in different locations in the body and then there are hormones promote the release and the production of of hormones from other tissues in the body and one of the main hormones for that is lutenizing hormone lutenizing hormone again comes from the pituitary circulates and either goes to the ovary to Pro promote various aspects of of egg maturation um as well as production of estrogen and to the testes to promote testosterone and sperm production and the prescription version of increasing luteinizing hormone is something called HCG or

human chonic gonadotropin which has been synthesized and is now available as a prescription drug it's taken in various uh contexts for increasing fertility both by males and by females it can increase um for all the reasons that now make sense it can increase sperm production it can produce um ovulation frequency it can produce the number of eggs even that that are deployed in in a given ovulation although that's not always a good thing um it B basically is pro fertility Pro testosterone pro- estrogen depending on your background and what's interesting is HCG was initially uh

synthesized um collected and synthesized from pregnant women's urine and believe it or not uh before it was synthetically uh made and sold as a prescription drug um there was actually a black market uh for pregnant women's urine where people would buy the urine uh I don't know I'm guessing that probably just um consumed it which is weird but in any case um human corion ganat tropin is now available as a prescription drug and it's one of the things that many people use to increase testosterone or estrogen for increasing fertility but there are certain supplements not

many that apparently can increase lutenizing hormone and thereby can increase testosterone and estrogen and one of the more well documented ones is fogia agrestis that's f a o g i a separate word a g r s t i s which at least according to the literature uh that I was able to find can increase levels of lutenizing hormone and thereby levels of testosterone or levels of estrogen the side effect profile of fogi agus hasn't really been documented so it's a little unclear I just want to emphasize that anytime someone's going to start taking supplements that

uh or modifying sex steroid hormones getting blood work done is extremely important um it for safety reasons and also just to know whether or not things are working and because all of these things are subject to negative feedback talked about this previously uh previous episode but if testosterone goes high or too high it can feed back and shut down lutenizing hormone which will then shut down further testosterone production likewise if estrogens are going too high or they're going too high at various phases of the cycle that can start to throw off various other hormones including

um FSH progesterone LHH the menstrual cycle itself is a just absolutely Exquisite balance of feedback of L luteinizing hormone kept low and constant at least for the first 14 days of the cycle then midcycle there's a peak and that's typically when ovulation occurs that's why pregnancy is most likely during the middle of the 28 day cycle FSH kind of goes up and then down across the first 14 days so taking anything or really modifying one's estrogens or testosterone on on that background of the menstrual cycle is really going to disrupt the way those things interact

and it's just such an Exquisite feedback loop so I'm not saying don't um do that but you definitely want to be aware of what you're doing and blood draws are one way to do that monitoring Cycles uh for ovulating females is another way to do that and in males having a good window into what's going on with testosterone DHT aromat taste estradi um LH Etc it's just vital and it's really um part and partial with the practice of thinking about optimizing these incredible things that we call sex steroid hormones estrogen and testosterone and their derivatives

so once again we covered a tremendous amount of information I hope that you'll come away from this with a deeper mechanistic understanding of how the brain and body are interacting to control the output and the ways in which these incredible things that we call sex steroid hormones work and influence us I hope you'll also Come Away with some ideas of that you can do in particular behavioral practices that can improve sleep and your relationship to light Etc because those things really set the foundation not just for healthy steroid hormone output but for all sorts of

health effects and for both the psychology and the biology of your nervous system in closing I hope you'll leave today's episode with a much richer understanding of the mechanisms that control the endocrine and nervous system in the context of estrogen and testosterone as well as take away various tools that you might choose to apply and as always thank you for your interest in science [Music]