47__transcript.txt

- Welcome to The Huberman Lab Podcast,
where we discuss science
and science-based tools
for everyday life.
[bright music]
I'm Andrew Huberman
and I'm a professor of
neurobiology and ophthalmology
at Stanford School of Medicine.
Today we're talking all about sleep
and how to optimize your sleep.
This is a topic we've covered
previously on this podcast
in the episode called "Master Your Sleep."
However, since the airing of that episode,
there's been some terrific
new science to come out.
I've also received thousands,
yes, literally thousands of questions
related to the specific
protocols covered in that episode
as well as in the episode
on jet lag and shift work.
And while today's episode
is not specifically about
jet lag and shift work,
we are going to cover tools
that will allow you to shift your schedule
if you need to for work or travel,
and we will also cover tools
that will allow you to fall back asleep
if you happen to wake up
in the middle of the night
or if you get a poor night's sleep,
how to actually recover
from that poor night's sleep more quickly,
and yes, indeed, even replace
sleep that you've lost.
So today's episode is going to be filled
with practical tools.
We will touch on some of
the underlying science,
but it's really designed
to be a practical toolkit
for optimizing your sleep
depending on your specific sleep needs.
Various times throughout today's episode,
I will refer to studies that
form the backbone of the tools
that I'll be describing.
But whereas most of the
podcast episodes here
tend to be deep scientific
mechanism and then tools,
scientific mechanism, then tools,
today I'm mainly going to
focus on the practical tools
that anyone, indeed, all
people, I believe, should use
in order to optimize their sleep.
Why should everybody want
to optimize their sleep
and put considerable effort
into optimizing their sleep?
Well, put simply, sleep is the foundation
of mental health, physical health,
and performance of all kinds,
cognitive performance, physical
performance, et cetera.
It also controls things
like our immune system,
wound healing, our skin
health and our appearance,
whether or not we can
think clearly or not,
whether or not we will live as long
as we possibly can or not,
whether or not we suffer
from dramatic age-related
cognitive decline or not.
In other words, whether or not
we keep our memory as we age.
I could go on and on
about all the terrible things
that can happen to somebody
if they don't sleep well.
Thanks to the great work
of Professor Matt Walker
at University of California, Berkeley,
and the wonderful book that
he wrote, "Why We Sleep,"
I think the world is largely onboard now
that sleep is critical to our health,
our mental health, our physical
health, and our performance,
but what's not often discussed
is how great life is,
that is, how much more
focused and energetic
and how positive our mood gets,
when we are sleeping for the
appropriate amount of time
at the appropriate depth
and when we are doing that regularly.
Basically everything in life gets better
when we're sleeping well.
So today I'm going to teach you the tools
that will allow you to
optimize your sleep.
That is, get to sleep and stay asleep,
fall back asleep if you wake
up in the middle of the night,
and adjust your sleep
given the various life demands
you may be experiencing.
I'm pleased to announce that
The Huberman Lab Podcast
is now partnered with
Momentous supplements.
We partnered with Momentous
for several important reasons.
First of all, they ship internationally,
because we know that
many of you are located
outside of the United States.
That's valuable.
Second of all, and perhaps most important,
the quality of their
supplements is second to none,
both in terms of purity
and precision of the
amounts of the ingredients.
Third, we've really emphasized supplements
that are single-ingredient supplements
and that are supplied in dosages
that allow you to build a
supplementation protocol
that's optimized for cost,
that's optimized for effectiveness,
and that you can add things
and remove things from your protocol
in a way that's really
systematic and scientific.
This is really hard to do
if you're taking blends
of different supplements
or if the dosages are such
that you can't titrate,
or that is, adjust the
dosages of a given supplement.
So by using single-ingredient supplements,
you can really build
out the supplement kit
that's ideal for you
and your specific needs.
If you'd like to see the supplements
that we partner with Momentous on,
you can go to livemomentous.com/huberman.
There you'll see those supplements.
And just keep in mind that
we are constantly expanding
the library of supplements
available through Momentous
on a regular basis.
Again, that's livemomentous.com/huberman.
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize
that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and
research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part
of my desire and effort
to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information
about science and science-related tools
to the general public.
In keeping with that theme,
I'd like to thank the
sponsors of today's podcast.
Our first sponsor is InsideTracker.
InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition platform
that analyzes data from your blood and DNA
to help you better meet your health goals.
I've long been a believer in
getting regular blood work done
for the simple reason
that many of the factors
that impact your immediate
and long-term health
can only be analyzed from
a quality blood test.
And nowadays, with the
advent of modern DNA test,
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And, of course, your biological age
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The problem with a lot of blood tests
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They have a personalized platform.
So this is a web portal where you can go,
you'll see the numbers from
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and then it will tell you, for instance,
how you could adjust various
aspects of your nutrition
or your exercise or supplementation
in order to bring those numbers
into the ranges that are best for you.
If you'd like to try InsideTracker,
you can go to insidetracker.com/huberman
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InsideTracker's plans.
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Today's episode is also
brought to us by Eight Sleep.
Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers
with cooling, heating, and
sleep tracking capabilities.
It turns out that your body temperature
and your ability to fall and stay asleep
are very closely related.
If your body does not drop
by one to three degrees,
you are simply not going
to get into deep sleep
or stay in deep sleep.
And waking up, it also turns out,
is related to body temperature.
Every time you wake up in the morning,
your body is warming up
in order to wake you up,
and this has an enormous number
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Eight Sleep is an incredible device.
It's one that I've been
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The way it works is that you
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If you've been sleeping pretty well
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If you'd like to try Eight Sleep,
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Eight Sleep currently ships
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to save $150 at checkout.
Today's episode is also
brought to us by LMNT.
LMNT is an electrolyte drink
that has everything you need
in order to get your brain and
body to function at its best,
but none of the things you don't,
in particular, sugar.
Electrolytes are vitally important
to the way that your neurons,
your nerve cells, work
and, indeed, to the way
that all the cells of your body work.
But your nervous system and your neurons
particularly depend on electrolytes
because you need the electrolytes,
sodium, magnesium, and potassium,
in the proper ratios,
in order for those nerve cells
to fire what are called action potentials,
which are the electrical signals
that allow your neurons to work
and to allow you to do everything
from remembering information
to moving your muscles deliberately.
When you exercise, or even if you don't,
you can get quite low on electrolytes,
especially on a hot day.
You can get dehydrated.
There are lot of different ways
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and there are a lot of different
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Let's talk about sleep and
tools to optimize your sleep.
I want you to conceptualize yourself
as contained within a room
that has only very few windows
or very few entry points.
What do I mean by this?
Well, your brain and your
nervous system control
whether or not you move or don't move.
They control whether or
not you're digesting food
or you're not digesting food.
They control whether or not
you're stressed or not stressed,
happy or sad, et cetera.
All of that stuff that
controls all that stuff
is housed inside your
skin and skull, et cetera.
That might seem pretty obvious,
but what that means is that
for your brain and body
to feel alert and focused,
ready to move and
exercise or do some work,
or if your brain body are going
to lie down and go to sleep,
well, that brain and body
needs cues, it needs inputs,
to determine when to do
those different things.
And those cues and inputs arrive
through a defined set of
what I'll call stimuli,
but you can also think of
these as levers or tools.
The main levers and tools
that are going to allow you
to control when you are
awake and when you are asleep
and to get better sleep every single night
are light, literally
photons, light energy,
could be from sunlight, could
be from artificial light,
we will discuss those
particulars in a moment,
as well as darkness.
That is the absence of light.
So we've got light and dark.
Those are two very powerful tools
to encourage your nervous system
to be in one state or another,
meaning awake or asleep.
Temperature is another tool or lever.
Turns out that when your
body is cooling down,
you have a greater tendency
to fall and stay asleep.
In fact, every night
when you actually sleep,
your body is dropping
by one to three degrees
and that drop in temperature is required.
It's like a gate that your
body has to go through
in order for you to get into sleep.
And in fact, the converse is also true.
If your body heats up by
one to three degrees or so,
you will wake up.
So you've got light,
dark, temperature, food.
And when we say food,
we mean what we eat, when we eat,
and the amount that we eat.
Okay, so light, dark,
temperature, food, exercise.
And of course, exercise
comes in different forms.
We can do cardiovascular exercise
that can be low-intensity,
long-distance exercise.
It can be high intensity,
so-called high intensity
interval training.
It could be weight
training. It could be yoga.
It could be swimming, any
number of different activities.
But exercise, in general, causes
an increase in body temperature
and tends to make us more alert,
not just during the exercise,
but in the immediate
hours after that exercise.
Exercise does some other things
that relate to our sleep as well
and we'll talk about those today
and how you can leverage them.
Another potent lever
for adjusting your sleepiness
and wakefulness is caffeine.
This, of course, comes
as no surprise to people,
but why and how caffeine works
might come as a surprise.
Very briefly, we have a molecule
in our body called adenosine
and the longer we have been awake,
the more adenosine builds
up in our brain and body
and adenosine is part of the
reason why we get sleepy.
Caffeine effectively operates
as a adenosine antagonist.
It works by basically occupying
the receptor for adenosine.
So it's a little bit of
a convoluted mechanism.
But basically all you need to know
is that caffeine prevents
the actions of adenosine.
That's one of the reasons why
caffeine makes us feel alert.
But how much caffeine we drink
and when we drink caffeine turns
out to be vitally important
for adjusting our wakefulness
and for optimizing our sleep.
So we'll talk about that as well.
The other category of lever or tools
which are immensely powerful
for optimizing sleep
are supplements.
There now exist as many as
eight different supplements
that can powerfully modulate
sleep in healthy ways
and that have huge margins for safety.
So we're going to talk about
what those supplements are.
In previous episodes of this podcast
and as a guest on other podcasts,
I've talked about three
particular supplements,
magnesium threonate,
apigenin, and theanine,
which together can really enhance
the speed at which one falls asleep
and people's ability to stay asleep
and to really get into
those deep stages of sleep
that are particularly restorative.
Today we're going to
talk a little bit more
about each of those three
and how they can best
be used in combination,
but we are also going to touch
on some other supplements
that I have not talked about
much before, if at all.
Things like glycine and
GABA, as well as inositol.
Many people are going to
find inositol interesting
and of particular use to them,
especially if they're following
a low-carbohydrate diet
or if they are fasting before sleep
or just trying to avoid
eating too close to bedtime
and yet they're having a
hard time falling asleep.
Inositol also turns out
to be especially useful
for people who have a tendency
to wake up in the middle of the night
and have a hard time falling back asleep.
It also has some interesting
and potent effects
on anxiety throughout the day.
So we're going to talk about
inositol as a tool as well.
And then last in our list
of general categories
of levers and tools for optimizing sleep
are digital tools.
Now, when we say digital tools,
I don't necessarily mean devices.
What I mean are things like
non-sleep deep rest scripts.
These are zero-cost
scripts that you listen to
that take your body through
some deep relaxation
and that can help people both
fall asleep, stay asleep,
fall back asleep, and
get better at sleeping.
And also going to talk about digital tools
related to self-hypnosis.
This is distinctly different
from stage hypnosis.
So I know some of you hear
hypnosis and you think,
oh, you know, people
clucking like chickens
and doing things that are
outside their control.
That's not at all what
I'm referring to here.
I'm talking about clinically
and research-supported tools
that have been shown to
enhance people's ability
to fall and stay asleep
and that can get you
far better at sleeping.
So again, to recap the
list of levers and tools,
we've got light and dark,
and that includes the intensity of light,
the timing of light, et cetera.
We've got temperature.
We have food.
We have exercise, caffeine,
supplements, and digital tools,
not just limited to devices,
but zero-cost tools that
you can access on YouTube
and elsewhere in various apps
that can really help
you optimize your sleep.
So today we're going to
talk about all of these.
I really want to provide you
as many tools as possible,
give you the logic behind
each of those tools
and when and how best to apply them
so that you can develop the sleep toolkit
that's ideal for your sleep needs.
As we head into our description
of tools for optimizing sleep,
let's consider what the
perfect 24-hour cycle
would look like.
Let's start this 24-hour cycle
with when you wake up in the morning.
So for some of you, that will be 5:00 a.m.
For others of you, that will be 10:00 a.m.
Most people, I believe, wake up
sometime between 6:30 a.m. and 8:30 a.m.
But regardless of when you
wake up in the morning,
one of the first things that happens
is that your body
temperature is increasing
and that's just going to happen naturally.
Some of it is going to be the consequence
of your moving around a bit,
but really the increase
in body temperature
is one of the main triggers
for why you woke up in the first place.
That increase in body temperature
in turn causes an increase
in the release of a
hormone called cortisol.
Cortisol is often discussed
as a stress hormone,
but it's not just associated with stress.
It also enhances your immune system
provided cortisol is
elevated at the right times,
and the right time for
cortisol to be elevated
is when you first wake up in the morning.
That increase in cortisol
is also going to increase metabolism.
It's also going to increase
your ability to focus mentally
and for you to move your body.
So again, cortisol is often demonized
and consider this bad thing.
And indeed, you don't want cortisol
to be chronically or consistently elevated
throughout the day or night.
But you do want cortisol to
reach its peak early in the day
right about the time you wake up.
One way that you can ensure
that that cortisol peak
occurs early in the day
right about the time that you wake up
is to view bright light,
ideally from sunlight,
within the first 30 to
60 minutes after waking.
That's right, view bright sunlight
within the first 30 to
60 minutes after waking.
I'll get into all the caveats
about what happens if you
wake up before the sun is out,
what if you live in the
UK where there is no sun,
or people claim there is no sun.
Hate to tell you this, folks,
but there is sun in the UK.
We'll talk about all that.
But everybody, whether or not
you live in a cloudy place
or a sunny place,
whether or not there's
cloud cover or not that day,
should really strive to get
bright light in your eyes,
ideally from sunlight,
within the first 30 to
60 minutes after waking.
The reason for that is very simple.
You want to trigger that cortisol increase
to occur very early in your day,
and you don't want that
cortisol peak to happen later,
which is what will happen
if you wait to get
outside and see sunlight.
The reason for this
is that you have a set of
neurons, nerve cells, in your eye.
They're called
intrinsically photosensitive
melanopsin cells,
but you do not need to know that name.
Those neurons respond
best to bright light,
and especially right after
waking early in the day,
they are best able to
signal to a set of neurons
that reside over the roof of your mouth
called the suprachiasmatic nucleus,
which is a cluster of neurons
that then sends a huge
number of other signals,
electrical and chemical,
out to your entire body
that triggers that cortisol increase,
provides a wake-up signal
for your brain and body,
and sets in motion a timer
for you to fall asleep later that night.
So again, we're not trying to go into
too much mechanism today.
We are trying to really hammer on tools
and I'll substantiate those tools
just a bit with some mechanism.
But here's what you do, or
at least here's what I do.
I wake up in the morning and
I want to reach for my phone,
but I know that even if I were
to crank up the brightness
on that phone screen,
it's not bright enough to
trigger that cortisol spike
and for me to be at my
most alert and focused
throughout the day
and to optimize my sleep at night.
So what I do is I get out
of bed and I go outside.
And if it's a bright, clear day
and the sun is low in the sky
or the sun is, you know,
starting to get overhead,
what we call low solar angle,
then I know I'm getting
outside at the right time.
If there's cloud cover
and I can't see the sun,
I also know I'm doing a good thing
because it turns out,
especially on cloudy days,
you want to get outside
and get as much light energy
or photons in your eyes.
But let's say it's a very clear day
and I can see where the sun is.
I do not need to stare
directly into the sun.
If it's very low in the
sky, I might do that
because it's not going to
be very painful to my eyes.
However, if the sun is
a little bit brighter
and a little bit higher in the sky,
sometimes it could be painful to look at.
So the way to get this sunlight
viewing early in the day
is to look toward the sun.
If it's too bright to look at directly,
well, then don't do that.
You just look toward it,
but not directly at it.
It's absolutely fine to blink.
In fact, I encourage you to blink
whenever you feel the impulse to blink.
Never look at any light,
sunlight or otherwise,
that's so bright that
it's painful to look at
'cause you can damage your eyes.
But for this morning sunlight viewing,
it's best to not wear sunglasses,
that's right, to not wear sunglasses,
at least for this
morning sunlight viewing.
It is absolutely fine to wear
eyeglasses or contact lenses,
so-called corrective lenses.
In fact, those will serve you well
in this practice or this tool
because they will focus the
light onto your neural retina
and onto those melanopsin
intrinsically photosensitive
ganglion cells.
If your eyeglasses or contact lenses
have UV protection, that's okay.
There's so many different
wavelengths of light
coming from the sun
and they are bright enough
that they will trigger the mechanisms
that you want triggered
at this early time of day.
So try and get outside,
ideally within the first
five minutes of waking
or maybe it's 15 minutes,
but certainly within the
first hour after waking.
I want to share with you
three critical things
about this tool of
morning sunlight viewing.
First of all, this is not
some woo biology thing.
This is grounded in the
core of our physiology.
There are literally
hundreds, if not thousands,
of quality peer-reviewed papers
showing that light
viewing early in the day
is the most powerful stimulus
for wakefulness throughout the day
and it has a powerful, positive impact
on your ability to fall
and stay asleep at night.
So this is really the
foundational power tool
for ensuring a great night's sleep
and for feeling more awake during the day.
Second of all, if you wake
up before the sun is out,
you can, and probably should,
flip on artificial lights
in your internal home
environment or apartment
or wherever you happen to live
if your goal is to be awake, right?
If you wake up at four in the morning
and you need to be awake,
well, then turn on artificial lights.
Once the sun is out, however,
once the sun has risen,
then you still want to get
outside and view sunlight.
Some of you will wake up
before the sun comes out.
And if you're asking whether or not
turning on artificial lights
can replace sunlight at those hours,
unfortunately, the answer is no.
Unless you have a very special light,
and we'll talk about what kind of light,
the bright artificial lights
in your home environment
are not, I repeat, are not
going to be sufficiently bright
to turn on the cortisol mechanism
and the other wake-up mechanisms
that you need early in the day.
The diabolical twist, however,
is that those lights in
your home or apartment
or even on your phone
are bright enough to disrupt your sleep
if you look at them too late at night
or in the middle of the night.
So there's this asymmetry in
our retinal, our eye biology,
and in our brain's biology,
whereby early in the
day, right around waking,
you need a lot of light, a lot of photons,
a lot of light energy,
and artificial lights
generally just won't accomplish
what you need them to accomplish.
But at night, even a little
bit of artificial light
can really mess up your
so-called circadian,
your 24-hour clocks,
and all these mechanisms
that we're talking about.
So if you wake up before the
sun is out and it's still dark,
please turn on as many
bright artificial lights
as you possibly can or need,
but then get outside once the sun is out.
On cloudy days, you especially
need to get outside.
I repeat, on cloudy days, overcast days,
you especially need to get
outside and get sunlight.
You just need to get more of it.
Now, how much light and how
much light viewing do you need?
This is going to vary
depending on person and place,
literally where you live on earth,
whether or not there's
a lot of tree cover,
whether or not you're somebody
who has sensitive eyes
or less sensitive eyes.
It's really impossible for me
to give an absolute prescriptive,
but we can give some general guidelines.
In general, on a clear day,
meaning no cloud cover
or minimal cloud cover,
you want to get this sunlight
exposure to your eyes
for about five minutes or so.
Could be three minutes one day,
could be seven minutes the next day,
about five minutes.
On a day where there's cloud cover,
so the sun is just
peeking through the clouds
or it's more dense cloud cover,
you want to get about 10
minutes of sunlight exposure
to your eyes early in the day.
And on days that are
really densely overcast
or maybe even are rainy,
you're going to want to get
as much as 20 or 30 minutes
of sunlight exposure.
Another key thing is do not, forget about,
just don't try and get
this sunlight exposure
through a windshield of a car or a window,
whether or not it's tinted or otherwise.
It takes far too long.
It's simply not going to
trigger the relevant mechanisms.
You would be standing there all day
trying to get enough light into your eyes
from the morning sunlight
and by then the sun
will have already moved
from low solar angle to overhead
and it simply won't work
for all sorts of mechanisms
related to your circadian
rhythm functions.
So just don't try and do it
through a windshield,
sunglasses, or a window.
It's just not going to work.
Get outside.
If the weather is really bad
or for whatever reason, safety reasons,
you cannot get outside,
well, then I suppose try
and get near a window.
That would be the last, last resort.
But you really want to get outside
to get this sunlight exposure.
Now, if you live in a part of the world
where it's extremely dark and overcast
or the weather won't let you outside
or you live in a cave
or some other small box
that does not allow any
natural light into it
for whatever reason,
well, then you're going
to need a replacement
for that sunlight.
And there are sunlight
simulators or daylight simulators
that you can purchase.
Those are quite expensive in general
and therefore I suggest cheaper options
that work just as well
because they get just as bright.
Things like ring lights that are sold
in order for people to take
selfies and this kind of thing.
A drawing LED tablet
will work pretty well.
I actually have one of those
and I put it on my desk all morning
even though I still get
outside and look at sunlight
first thing in the morning,
again, also, especially, I
should say, on cloudy days.
We do not have any affiliation
to any ring lights or LED
lights or these panels.
So we will provide a link to
a couple of different options
if you want to explore
the various options.
I don't know what people's
different budgets are.
I don't know where people live.
I just know that many
of our listeners live
in locations throughout the world
where, for instance, during the winter,
it gets very, very dark,
so they can't get sufficient sunlight.
But get that morning light,
ideally from sunlight,
and take into account
all the specific points
that I've given you here.
And, I should say, enjoy this practice.
It's really nice to get outside
first thing in the morning
and get this sunlight.
In fact, when you start doing this,
you'll notice that your body
will start to feel more energized
and it will feel more
energized more quickly.
You'll actually start
to notice this mechanism
kicking in each day,
especially if you're paying
attention to your physiology.
So enjoy this practice of getting outside.
Yes, you can take your
morning beverage outside.
Yes, you can take your dog with you.
In fact, animals intuitively know
to get this morning sunlight.
They actually seek it out
at the right times of days.
We human beings need to be told
by podcasters and other people
about the science that supports
these kinds of practices.
Our pets apparently do not.
But get outside alone or with somebody,
with your kids, with your dog.
However you go about this practice,
make sure you do this practice
at least 80% of the days of your life.
That's right.
If you miss a day,
for instance, you're bedridden for a day,
try and get next to a window.
Let's say you are traveling,
or for whatever reason,
you are not able to get outside
first thing in the morning,
well, then try to get twice
as much sunlight in your eyes,
or I should say extend the duration
of sunlight viewing in the morning
for twice as long the following day.
This is a slow, integrative mechanism
that underlies this whole thing
of wakefulness during the day
and sleep at night due to sunlight viewing
and if you miss a day, you can
make up for it the next day,
but you have to get twice as much light
or twice as much duration of light.
If you really want to get technical
and you really want to measure
how much light is in your environment,
you can download a free app,
something like Light Meter,
and that will allow your phone
to act as a bit of a light meter.
It'll give you a pretty
accurate measurement
of how many lux, which is
a measure of brightness,
are in your environment in the morning.
And in general, that's just
going to be a good tool
for evaluating your environments.
Here's what I suggest you do.
Wake up in the morning, take Light Meter,
point it at the brightest
light in your home,
and take a measurement,
and what you'll probably find
is it's about a thousand lux.
Now go outside and if
there's some sunlight out
and there's cloud cover,
point it at the sky and press that button.
You can actually hold it down
and it'll give you a dynamically
updated lux measurement.
And what you'll find
is like 5,000, 10,000,
sometimes even 90,000 lux,
even though you don't experience
it as so much brighter,
and that's because an
indoor artificial light
is very concentrated
over a small spatial area
whereas the sunlight is very diffuse.
But it's that diffuse,
very bright sunlight,
that photon energy,
that you really want
that's going to set all the
rhythms of your brain and body
in the proper way.
Not just that cortisol peak,
but it's going to trigger
proper metabolism,
it's going to set a timer for you
to be able to fall asleep
about 16 hours later,
and on and on and on.
And I should mention within
the on and on and on,
it's also going to suppress any melatonin,
a hormone that makes you sleepy
that happens to be swimming
around in your bloodstream
at the time you wake up.
It does a number of other things too,
including interact with
the adenosine system
and kind of wash out some of the adenosine
that might still be residual
if you didn't sleep enough.
Fundamentally speaking, get
that morning sunlight viewing.
I promise you will be
grateful that you did.
It makes everybody feel
better, feel more alert,
and it will greatly
assist with your ability
to fall and stay asleep later that night.
Before we continue with
today's discussion,
we're going to take a brief pause
to acknowledge our sponsor,
Athletic Greens, also called AG1.
I started taking Athletic
Greens way back in 2012.
So I'm delighted
that they've been a
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Athletic Greens contains
vitamins, minerals, probiotics,
digestive enzymes, and adaptogens.
So it's got a lot of things in there.
That's actually the
reason I started taking it
and the reason I still take
it once or twice a day.
It essentially covers all
of my nutritional bases.
And the probiotics in
particular are important to me
because of the critical importance
of what's called the gut-brain axis,
that is neurons and other
cell types in the gut,
in the digestive tract,
that communicate with the brain
and the brain back to the digestive tract
in order to control things like mood,
immune function, hormone
function, and on and on.
Whenever somebody has asked me
what's the one supplement
they should take,
I always answer Athletic Greens.
I gave that answer long
before I ever had this podcast
and it's the answer I still give now
for all the reasons that I
detailed just a moment ago.
If you'd like to try Athletic Greens,
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Again, that's athleticgreens.com/huberman
to claim that special offer.
Okay, so now we're still focusing
on this early part of the
day when you've woken up,
the first hour or so after waking.
And we can go to our list of
other levers and tools, right?
We have light and dark.
We already talked about light
and sunlight in particular.
We've got temperature, food, exercise,
caffeine, supplements, and digital tools.
Now, once you've woken up and
you want to be awake, okay?
So this is likely to be early in the day
if you're following a
more standard schedule.
You will also want to
leverage not just light,
but temperature as a tool.
If you are inclined, it would be wise
to try and increase your
core body temperature
a bit more quickly than it would otherwise
if you were to just, you
know, shuffle around outside,
get your sunlight,
maybe read a little bit, et cetera,
and there are two main
ways you can do that.
The first way is to get into
cold water of some sort.
So this could be a cold shower
of anywhere from one to three minutes.
This could be an ice bath
if that's your thing.
It could be a cold tub,
or if you own a cold tub
that's specifically designed
for deliberate cold exposure.
Get under some cold water.
That will certainly wake you up.
And if you've ever jumped into cold water
or had a cold shower,
you know it really wakes you up
because you release
adrenaline, epinephrine,
from both your brain and body,
the body from your adrenals
and your brain from a
little cluster of neurons
called locus coeruleus.
Again, the names don't matter.
One to three minutes of cold
water exposure will wake you up
because of that adrenaline release
and, and I want to highlight the and,
it will serve to increase
your core body temperature.
That's right, your body and brain interact
as a bit of a thermostat system
where if you put something cold
on the surface of your body,
your brain, a little cluster of neurons
in the so-called medial preoptic area,
act as a thermostat and say,
"Ah, the external of my body is cold
and therefore I'm going to heat up
my core body temperature."
So it's a little bit paradoxical.
People think, oh, if you get
into cold water or an ice bath,
your body temperature is going to drop.
And indeed, that's true if
you stay in for a while,
but if you just get in for
about one to three minutes,
or under the cold shower
for one to three minutes,
your core body temperature will increase.
So then when you get
out of that cold water,
your body temperature is
increasing at a rate, at a slope,
that's steeper than it would otherwise
and you're going to feel more alert.
It also has the advantage
of increasing not just adrenaline,
but dopamine, which is a molecule involved
in motivation, focus, et cetera.
So this is great for waking up.
So we've got sunlight,
we've got temperature
triggered by cold water,
and we have exercise.
One of the best ways
to increase your core body
temperature early in the day
is to do exercise.
Now, some of you might choose
to do your full-blown workout for the day
first thing when you
wake up in the morning,
I would say the best time to exercise,
at least what the research points to,
is immediately when you
wake up in the morning
or three hours after waking
or 11 hours after waking.
But that's really getting
down into optimization
for sake of muscular
strength and grip strength
and it's very hard to give
a strict prescriptive.
Here's what I suggest.
If you want to be alert early in the day
and you want to sleep great at night,
get that bright sunlight,
get into some cold water,
and if you don't want to
get into some cold water,
try and get some movement.
It could be a walk.
So you can get your sunlight exposure
while you're taking a walk
first thing in the morning.
It could be a light jog.
It could be skipping rope.
These days, I skip rope for
about 10 minutes or 20 minutes
while looking at the sun.
So I'm trying to layer
in these different things
for waking up.
And then I take a cold shower afterwards.
This is what I've been doing as of lately,
but I don't do that all
year long necessarily.
Or some of you are going to
be working out mid-morning.
I sometimes do that.
But try and get your core
body temperature increased
first thing in the morning,
and a great way to do that
is with the cold water
and/or with exercise.
And again, it doesn't have
to be your full-blown workout
for the day
if you're doing workouts consistently,
which I hope everybody is
because everybody really should exercise
at least, I believe, five or six,
or maybe even seven days a week.
For me, it's six days
a week, sometimes five,
rarely is it seven.
So get that exercise
or even just a modest amount of movement,
walking, jogging, skipping rope,
some light calisthenics.
That will further increase
your core body temperature
and help you feel more awake.
Then we have the category of caffeine.
And again, we're just talking
about this early part of the day,
and you might be saying, "Wait a second,
I thought this was an episode
about tools for sleep."
Well, everything that
we're talking about doing
in these first 60 to 90 minutes of the day
really set in motion a
wave of biological cascades
that carry through the entire day
and into the evening and into the night
and really do serve to optimize sleep.
So just hang in there with me.
And for those of you that are interested
in focus and attention,
your ability to learn,
all of these tools and practices
are going to greatly
enhance those as well.
So the next category of tool
for use early in the day is caffeine.
Caffeine is a very important
compound to think about.
I do realize that some people
who are prone to anxiety,
especially panic attacks, anxiety attacks,
might avoid caffeine entirely.
That's absolutely fine.
You do not have to drink caffeine.
So what I'm about to describe
are ways to leverage caffeine use
to optimize sleep and wakefulness
if you are comfortable with
caffeine, if you like caffeine,
I happen to love caffeine.
I like it in the form
of coffee or espresso
or yerba mate tea,
in particular non-smoked
varieties of yerba mate tea.
Non-smoked because the smoked
varieties seem to carry
some carcinogenics, some
cancer causing risk.
There's increasing data on that.
So non-smoked varieties of yerba mate.
So caffeine is something
that a lot of people
consume early in the day.
How much depends on your tolerance,
and there's a lot of
individual variability here.
Again, caffeine is an
adenosine antagonist,
or effectively works as
an adenosine antagonist
and limits sleepiness.
I highly recommend
that everybody delay their caffeine intake
for 90 to 120 minutes after waking.
However painful it may
be to eventually arrive
at that 90 to 120 minutes after waking,
you want, and I encourage you,
to clear out whatever residual adenosine
is circulating in your system
in that first 90 to
120 minutes of the day.
Get that sunlight exposure,
get some movement to wake up,
and then, and only then,
start to ingest caffeine
because what you'll do if
you delay caffeine intake
until 90 to 120 minutes after waking
is you will avoid the
so-called afternoon crash.
And you may still get a
little bit of dip in energy
in the afternoon,
but it's not going to
be that massive crash.
I've talked about the
reasons for that crash
on previous episodes.
But if you delay your caffeine intake
90 to 120 minutes after waking,
you are doing yourself a great
service towards wakefulness
and to avoid the crash.
And the afternoon crash has
another liability to it,
which is typically people will emerge
from that afternoon crash
either grumpy or groggy
and then they'll lean into
drinking more caffeine,
which can then disrupt their sleep.
So wait 90 to 120 minutes
after waking in the morning
to drink caffeine.
And if you drink caffeine at
any point throughout the day,
really try and avoid any caffeine,
certainly avoid drinking
more than a hundred milligrams
of caffeine after 4:00 p.m.
and probably even better to
limit your last caffeine intake
to 3:00 p.m. or even 2:00 p.m.
And for many people,
shifting that caffeine intake
from immediately after
waking in the morning
to 90 to 120 minutes
gives them a much longer arc
of energy throughout the day
and they don't feel the need
to drink more caffeine
later in the afternoon.
If you do drink caffeine
later in the afternoon,
really try and limit the
total amount or drink decaf.
Certainly keep the total amount
to less than a hundred milligrams
if you are interested
in getting into the best possible sleep.
And I say this knowing that
many people, including myself,
can drink a double espresso
with 200 milligrams of caffeine or more
at 5:00 p.m. or even
6:00 p.m. or after dinner
and still, quote,
unquote, fall asleep fine
or still sleep fine.
However, there are terrific data,
Matt Walker and I talked about this,
and there are more and
more papers all the time
that point to the fact that
caffeine intake late in the day,
after 4:00 p.m. that is,
can really disrupt the
architecture of your sleep.
So you might think you're sleeping well,
but you're not sleeping
nearly as well as you could
if you avoided caffeine
in those afternoon hours.
Now, some of you might be doing
your main about of exercise
first thing in the morning
and you want your caffeine
before that about of exercise.
In that case, I say, go for it.
Drink your caffeine,
do your workout right after waking up.
I don't have a problem with that.
You will find, however,
that you're going to get an
early afternoon dip in energy
and that dip in energy is
going to be substantial
because it's going to be a dip in energy
that naturally follows that
workout from the morning.
So it's dependent on temperature,
and it's going to be related
to the elimination of that
adenosine blockade by caffeine.
So you're getting a
kind of a one-two punch
on your energy levels
by taking a lot of caffeine and
exercising early in the day.
You can sort of expect
that you're going to get a drop in energy
in the early afternoon.
That's okay if that works for you,
but just know that delaying that caffeine
90 to 120 minutes after waking
would be the ideal scenario
most days and most scenarios.
All that said, I
absolutely respect the fact
that people have different work schedules,
kid schedules, et cetera.
So if you want to do some
or none or all these tools,
that's really up to you.
I'm just providing them to you
in the simplest form that I
can possibly provide them.
Now, the other lever or tool
that you have available to you is food.
Not just what you eat, but when you eat.
And it turns out that if
you eat early in the day,
you support a biological clock mechanism
that will make you more
alert early in the day.
That said, many people choose to fast
in the early morning hours of the day
or in the first part of the day.
I'm one such person.
I generally don't ingest any food
until about 11:00 a.m. or 12 noon.
Sometimes I'll have a protein shake.
Sometimes I'll have some almonds.
Sometimes I'll have breakfast.
If people are meeting
for brunch or breakfast,
I will have breakfast for social reasons
every once in a while.
But most of the time I don't
eat until about lunch time.
However, some people are really hungry
when they wake up in the morning.
Just know that if you
eat early in the day,
you are further triggering
an increase in metabolism
and in temperature that
will make you more alert.
So you don't have to eat early in the day,
but you can start to see
how these different tools layer together.
Sunlight viewing, exercise,
cold water, eating.
Many of them are converging
on the same mechanisms.
In fact, when you drink caffeine,
there's also a small
increase in body temperature
due to the adrenaline
increase that it stimulates.
So all of these things can be
layered on top of one another
or you can use them individually
or think about them individually.
Now, food is an interesting lever or tool
because it's not just about when you eat,
but it's also about what you eat.
And I've talked a lot
about eating for energy
and what that means in
terms of caloric energy
versus neural energy, et cetera,
in previous podcast episodes.
We're not going to focus on that now
because, frankly, to
get into a description
of whether or not somebody
should eat fruits or vegetables
or animal proteins or dairy,
et cetera, early in the day,
that's very nuanced.
What you eat for your breakfast,
or if you choose to not eat breakfast,
is really up to you.
All that said, if you
eat a very large meal,
it doesn't matter if you
slept terrifically well
10 hours the night before
or if you are about to go to sleep
or if it's the middle of the afternoon,
if your gut is full of food,
there's just a large
volume of food in your gut,
it's going to divert a lot of blood
and other critical resources
away from other organs of your body,
in particular, your brain,
and you're going to be sleepy
after eating a big meal.
So this is sort of a duh,
but I think oftentimes in the discussions
about what to eat for energy,
people neglect to consider food volume
as a strong parameter or
variable in that discussion.
So if you eat a huge breakfast,
it's likely that you are going to be tired
immediately after eating that breakfast
unless of course you exercise
very hard prior to that
and you metabolize all
that food very quickly.
So it's up to you whether or not to eat
first thing in the morning or not.
But if you do eat in the first
few hours of the morning,
just understand that you are setting
or you are helping to set
a food entrained, as it's
called, circadian clock.
Light, temperature, timing of food intake,
movement and exercise,
all of these things literally
funnel in in a neural sense,
they funnel into this thing
that we call the circadian clock
and they let that clock,
that set of neurons,
predict when you are likely
to be eating and active
and viewing sunlight
the next day and the next
day and the next day.
I say all this because there
are some beautiful studies,
and I'll highlight one, again,
in the show note captions,
that show that if people
are having a hard time
waking up in the morning,
one of the things they can do
is maximize sunlight viewing,
exercise in the morning,
drink caffeine.
Although, again, I support the idea
that that would best be done
about 90 to 120 minutes after waking.
Eating some food in those
early morning hours,
et cetera, et cetera.
You can layer in multiple levers or tools
in order to be more alert.
And that's what these levers
and tools are really there for
in this sense of what
we're talking about today,
which is optimizing sleep.
Yes, they will make you more alert.
Yes, they will provide some
adrenaline and dopamine,
for instance, the cold
water, et cetera, et cetera.
But the reason we're
talking about these things
in the context of sleep
is that they start to give your body
some predictable autonomic timing.
What is predictable autonomic timing?
Well, your autonomic nervous system
is the components of your brain and body
that cause wakefulness and sleepiness
and you can start to
create some predictability
in that autonomic timing.
You can start to do things
that really make it such
that you naturally wake
up at six in the morning
or five in the morning.
That's right, if you're somebody
who naturally is a night owl,
who likes to stay up
until two in the morning
and sleep until 10:00 a.m.,
and you now have a job or
you have to go to school
or you have a partner
that likes to get up early
and go to sleep early,
well, you can make that happen
and you can make that
happen pretty painlessly
if you take a week or so
and go to sleep 30 minutes or
an hour earlier each night,
set an alarm
and wake up 30 minutes or
an hour earlier each morning
until, of course, you're waking up
at the time you want to wake up,
and then even in that groggy state,
get some exercise, get
some sunlight viewing.
If the sun's not out,
turn on those bright artificial lights.
Have some breakfast, even
if you're not hungry.
In fact, for those of you
that engage in shift work
because you have to,
or travel and you're jet lagged,
one of the quickest ways to
shift your circadian clock
and get onto the local schedule
is to eat on the local schedule.
So what all these tools do is
they really set up a cascade.
Think of it as kind of a
wavefront of wakefulness and focus
throughout the day.
It'll take you through
the middle of the day
and the afternoon stage we'll
talk about in a few minutes,
but really they take you to this period
that is about 5:00 p.m.
until your bedtime.
I realize some people are
going to bed very early,
like 8:00 p.m. or 9:00 p.m.,
which to me seems very early,
but very few people go to
sleep at 5:00 p.m. right?
Unless you're doing that for
shift work or other reasons.
But from 5:00 p.m. until bedtime
is really a critical period
in which you need to
leverage particular tools
in order to get and stay asleep optimally
and to be able to sleep through the night.
So really there are three critical periods
throughout each 24-hour cycle.
And during each of those critical periods,
you're going to want to do
as many specific things as you can
to optimize your wakefulness
and focus and mood throughout the day
and your sleep at night.
The first critical period
is the one that we've been
talking about up until now.
Things like morning sunlight viewing,
caffeine 90 to 120 minutes after waking,
exercise, and so on.
We can call that critical period one
and it really encompasses the
time from which you wake up
until about three hours after waking.
Although, I should just mention
'cause there are always
those people that say,
"Wait, I wake up at 4:00 a.m.
and the sun isn't out until 8:00 a.m.,"
okay, so it might be four hours.
But really it's those early
morning hours of your day
once you're awake.
The second critical period
is the time throughout
the day and afternoon
leading into evening.
So you may ask what are
the things that you can do
throughout the day,
the middle of your day
and into the afternoon and evening hours,
that are really going to set you up
for the best possible
sleep later that night.
Well, there are a few dos
and there are a few don'ts.
First of all,
be careful about ingesting
too much caffeine
throughout the middle of the day.
That's kind of an obvious one
for the reasons that we
talked about earlier.
Second of all, if you are a napper,
and I raise my hand now,
for those of you listening,
I'm raising my right
hand because I love naps.
I've always loved naps.
Nowadays I do NSDR or
a Reveri sleep hypnosis
almost every day.
And I tend to do that, as I mentioned,
in the early afternoon hours
if I'm feeling kind of sleepy,
because even though I optimize
my caffeine intake timing, et cetera,
I tend to get a little
sleepy in the afternoon.
Most people get a little
sleepy in the afternoon.
Some of that is related
to hitting that peak of body temperature.
And you might think, wait, I
thought high body temperature
is associated with alertness,
and it is,
but right as you crest
that high body temperature
and your body temperature starts to drop,
there's a tendency to
be a little bit sleepy.
So some of you might opt to
take a nap in the afternoon.
Should you nap, should you not nap?
That's a question that I get asked a lot
and that I asked Dr. Matthew Walker
when he was a guest on this podcast.
Here was his answer and
here's what the data support.
It is fine to nap in the afternoon,
but don't nap so late in
the day or for so long
that it disrupts your ability
to fall and stay asleep at night
for your major sleep about, okay?
So naps are fine,
but don't sleep so long during the day
or too late in the day
that it disrupts your ability
to fall and stay asleep.
I should also say you do not have to nap.
It's kind of an interesting phenomenon
that happens on these
podcasts and on social media
where we'll talk about naps
and the fact that naps are great,
but don't make them
longer than 90 minutes,
but then all the non-nappers
get really worried.
Like, wait, am I supposed to nap?
I don't like naps. I wake up groggy.
You do not have to nap.
In fact, if you can make it
through your whole day without napping,
great, more power to you.
But if you do nap and you
find that naps serve you well,
keep those naps shorter than 90 minutes
for reasons related to
ultradian cycles and so forth,
and make sure that you don't
nap too late in the day
that you are then staying
up too late at night
and having a hard time
waking up the next morning.
I will say that for a lot of
people who do not like naps
or that find they wake up
really grumpy from naps
or groggy from naps,
I encourage you to try the Reveri app,
try an NSDR script, try yoga nidra.
Try something of that sort
for anywhere from 10 to 20 to 30 minutes.
I tend to do this every day now.
I'll just lie down, and I love yoga nidra,
I love NSDR scripts,
I love using the Reveri app.
In particular, the
portion of the Reveri app
that gets you better at sleeping.
It really is beneficial for me
because it serves as very replenishing
while I'm doing that hypnosis,
but it's also gotten me much better
at falling and staying asleep
and falling back asleep in
the middle of the night.
So this critical period throughout the day
is one in which most people
are doing a lot of stuff.
They're emailing and picking up kids
and they're exercising
and they're commuting
and doing all sorts of things,
taking phone calls and Zooms, et cetera.
But if you can get that
period of deep relaxation
through a nap or NSDR,
that's going to serve you well.
Try not to drink too much caffeine,
certainly no more than a
hundred milligrams of caffeine,
after 4:00 p.m
if your goal is to fall asleep
at a reasonably normal time.
And for those of you that
exercise in the afternoon,
understand that if you
exercise very intensely,
so this might be weight
training or running
or some other very intense exercise,
typically that's going to further increase
your body temperature.
Makes sense, right?
Based on everything we know
about metabolism and body temperature.
And it's going to so-called
delay your circadian clock.
It's going to make it such
that you want to fall
asleep a little bit later,
maybe even a lot later.
So if you're exercising in
the afternoon or evening
and that's the only time you can exercise
or that's the time that
you prefer to exercise,
great, but be careful about
ingesting too much caffeine
in order to get the
energy to do that exercise
'cause that caffeine
will disrupt your sleep
and just know that you are
delaying your circadian clock.
You are making it such
that you will naturally
want to go to sleep later
and wake up later.
Contrast that with if you
exercise early in the day,
say, immediately after waking up
or in the first zero to
four hours after waking,
in most cases, that's not going to shift
your circadian clock much.
And toward the end of the episode,
we'll talk a little bit
about forced exercise
prior to wake-up times.
That doesn't mean doing
exercise in your sleep.
That means deliberately setting an alarm
and getting out of bed much earlier
than you naturally would.
That turns out to be a very potent tool
to so-called advance your circadian clock.
So we can talk about that a
little bit later in the episode.
But this critical period,
too, in the middle of the day
is when you're going to want
to leverage specific tools,
and we've talked about those:
limiting caffeine intake;
being mindful of the
clock-delaying effects of exercise;
the fact that, also,
if you're going to nap,
you don't want to nap too
long or too late into the day
otherwise you'll disrupt
your nighttime sleep.
So this critical period two,
or second critical period, I should say,
during the middle of the day
is a time in which you should
be doing certain things
and avoiding doing certain things.
So that raises the
question of whether or not
you should also be getting a lot of light,
in particular, sunlight,
throughout the day.
Now, that's something that
hasn't been explored too much
in the literature
until recently when Dr. Samer Hattar
who's the director of
the chronobiology unit
at the National Institutes
of Mental Health,
decided to do a number of experiments
exploring the effects of light on mood
and other aspects of brain
function and body function
when that light is delivered
not just in the morning,
which is great for us,
but also throughout the day.
So should you be looking at sunlight
or bright artificial
lights throughout the day?
Now, on the face of it,
you might just think, yes,
you know, sunlight's great.
Provided we're not getting a sunburn
and we're not staring at the
sun and damaging our eyes,
we should get as much
sunlight as we possibly can.
In fact, we talked about this
in the episode on hormones
about how getting light
onto as much of our skin
as we can throughout the day
can really help in the production
of testosterone and estrogen
in both men and women
in healthy ways that
improves mood and libido
and all sorts of things that
are associated with wellbeing.
However, because light is
such a powerful stimulus
for controlling the timing
of your sleepfulness, or
sleepiness, I should say,
and wakefulness,
we might want to be cautious
about how much light we are
viewing in the afternoon,
in particular, in the
early evening hours, right?
Well, turns out it's
not so straightforward.
Viewing, so sunlight to the eyes, sunlight
in the late afternoon and evening hours,
so again, depends on time of year,
depends on location that
you happen to be in,
but getting some sunlight in your eyes
for, again, maybe five
or 10, maybe 30 minutes,
depending on how much
cloud cover there is,
doing that in the afternoon
serves an additional beneficial purpose,
which is you protect or you
inoculate your nervous system
against some of the negative effects
of bright artificial light
or even dim artificial
light in the nighttime hours
between 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m.,
which is really critical period three.
And we'll talk about what
to do and what to not do
during critical period three
of every 24-hour cycle.
But to make it very clear
what I'm saying here,
get that morning sunlight in your eyes,
but also get some sunlight in your eyes
in the late afternoon and evening hours
when the sun is at
so-called low solar angle,
when it starts to descend in the sky.
Again, you don't have to
stare directly at the sun,
although if you can catch
a nice, beautiful sunset,
go for it.
But as the sun starts to descend,
it triggers those same neurons in your eye
that communicate with
your circadian clock,
but it communicates with
a different component
or different compartment
within the circadian clock.
That circadian clock
is not just one thing.
It's multiple things.
And you have what are
called morning oscillators
and evening oscillators.
And to make a long story short,
the tool that I'm describing
of looking at the sun
in the late afternoon and evening,
again, blinking is fine,
don't stare at the sun,
but getting that sunlight in your eyes
in the late afternoon and evening
signals to that clock
that it's evening time
and that sleep is coming.
It also serves as a second
anchor or reference point
for your body and your brain
to know where it is in time.
Remember back to the
beginning of the episode
when I said your brain and
your body and all your organs
are locked inside this skin and this skull
and they don't know what's
going on in the outside world.
Well, that morning sunlight viewing
and the other things you do
during critical period one,
those provide one strong set of signals
that it's wake-up time
and time to be alert
and time to be focused.
And then in the evening,
by getting sunlight in your eyes again,
in particular, sunlight that comes
from low solar angle sunlight,
well, that provides a second stimulus
or a second reference point
that tells your brain and
body, "Hey, it's evening.
The sun is descending."
Now, you might say,
"Wait, how does the brain
and these neurons know
the difference between morning
light and evening light?"
It turns out has to do
with the particular wavelengths of light
that are present in
morning versus evening.
It's an incredible mechanism.
And you are probably
familiar with the fact
that when the sun is directly overhead,
it's really bright white and yellow
and the sky's often blue,
and if there's cloud cover,
it just comes through as
a bunch of bright light,
well, next time you're out in the morning,
take a look at what a sunrise looks like.
There's a lot of yellow-blue contrast,
and those yellow blues signal
important specific sets of
cells in your eye and brain
that it's morning.
In the evening, you're also
going to see yellow and blue,
but the ratio of yellows
and blues has now changed
and you also see some oranges,
and in a really brilliant
sunset, you'll see some reds.
If you haven't noticed this already,
you'll really want to look for this.
It's really kind of fun
and cool to look at.
Well, those yellows and blues and oranges
that you see in the evening sunsets,
those signal to your brain
and body that evening is there
and that nighttime is coming
and they're really establishing
a second reference point or
wavefront of biological signals
that are going to optimize
your nighttime hours
and your transition into
really terrific sleep.
So now let's talk
about what I'm calling
critical period three
of each 24-hour cycle.
So this would be the period
of time of late evening,
So it might be 6:00 p.m. for some,
depending on when you go to sleep,
or 7:00 p.m.
extending into the hours
in which you decide to get
into bed and go to sleep
and then throughout the night.
There are a number of things
that you're going to want to do
and there are a number of things
that you are going to want to avoid doing
in order to optimize your sleep.
First of all, you're
going to want to avoid
bright artificial lights of any color.
Yes, of any color.
We haven't talked a lot
about blue blockers,
you know, lenses that
block blue wavelengths
or short wavelengths of light.
I don't have anything
against blue blockers.
In fact, many people find that
blue blockers provide them
some relief from headache
and some eye strain
if they wear blue blockers
throughout the day and certainly at night.
But you don't need them,
and even if you do wear them,
you will find that if
lights are very bright,
doesn't matter if it's a blue light,
a yellow light, or a red light,
those bright lights will
wake up your brain and body.
They will activate the same mechanisms
that were activated early
in the day by sunlight.
However, and here's the
really diabolical twist,
I mentioned this earlier,
but the diabolical twist
in the way that your brain
and body respond to light
is that early in the day,
in the morning hours, you
need a lot of bright light,
ideally from sunlight,
to be very alert and to wake up,
but in the evening hours
and nighttime hours,
it takes very little
light, very few photons,
in order to wake up your brain and body
and to disrupt your circadian
clock and disrupt your sleep.
So what that means is that
once the sun goes down,
which, of course, is going to happen
at different times of year
in different places on earth,
but once the sun goes down,
you would be wise to
try and dim the lights
in your indoor environment
most days, right?
I realize some nights you're
going to throw a party
and have people over.
You might not want to dim the lights.
Some nights you're going to go out,
you might view a lot of bright lights.
But most nights of your life,
you're going to want to dim the lights
in your internal environment.
And ideally, the lights that you do use
you would place low in
that physical environment.
So you would try and
not use overhead lights,
but rather rely on desk lamps or lights
even placed low to the
floor, even on the floor.
If you are going to use light at night,
and most people do,
I would encourage you to use
as little artificial light
as is required to carry
out the activities you need
to require safely.
That could be studying,
in which case you might
need a little bit more light
in order to read or study.
If you're watching a television show
or you're watching
something on your computer,
dim that screen way, way down,
as dim as possible while
still, of course, being able
to view what you need to view.
Even better, I should say, ideally,
you would use candlelight
and/or moonlight.
Now, some nights the moon is really bright
and you actually can use moonlight
to go about your usual activities.
Moonlight might seem very, very bright,
but, actually, moonlight is
fairly low light intensity,
and candlelight, which
can also seem very bright,
actually is very low light intensity.
If you're sitting across a table
with some candlelight there
and it's a really bright candle,
chances are it's only
about three to 10 lux,
which is very, very little light energy
compared to, say, an artificial desk lamp
or an overhead light,
which is going to be in the area
of anywhere from a
hundred to a thousand lux.
So candlelight is fine.
Of course, be cautious with open flame,
but candlelight is fine.
Moonlight is fine.
Dimming artificial lights is fine
provided they're dimmed way, way down.
And again, try and avoid using
overhead artificial lights.
The absolute worst lights
are going to be overhead
fluorescent lights
of the sort that you would
have in the supermarket
or that you would see at a gas station
or something of that sort.
And I confess, there are times
in which I'm driving home
and it's late at night and I
want to be able to get to sleep
and I'll need to stop at the grocery store
or a gas station or something like that,
I've actually put on sunglasses at night
in order to avoid getting
that bright light exposure at night.
Although that's a little bit extreme,
I have done that from time to time
because that bright light exposure
will absolutely quash, it will eliminate,
any melatonin that
happens to be circulating
in your brain and body.
Now, melatonin, a lot of people
think of it as a supplement,
but melatonin is naturally released
as the evening comes about
and into the nighttime hours.
It's the hormone that
makes you feel sleepy
and allows you to fall asleep.
So viewing bright light
in the late evening
hours and nighttime hours
is really not good for your sleep quality
and your ability to fall and stay asleep.
So for most people, a simple rule of thumb
is going to be avoid bright
artificial lights of all colors,
and in particular, overhead
bright artificial lights,
between the hours of
10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m.
That's right, between
10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m.,
avoid those bright artificial
lights as much as possible.
Use only as much light as
is absolutely necessary
in order to carry out the
routines and activities
you need to carry out safely.
I should mention
that the reason overhead
lights are problematic
is the same reason why
sunlight is so great
early in the day,
which is that the cells,
that is, the neurons,
that can wake up your brain and body
through activation of the circadian clock
reside mainly in the bottom half or 2/3
of your neural retina
and the way the optics of your eyes work
is that the cells on the
bottom half of your eye
view the upper visual field.
So this is a beautiful adaptive mechanism
that allows these cells
to respond to overhead light from sunlight
in the early part of the
day and throughout the day.
But in the evening, if you have
bright artificial lights on
and those bright artificial
lights are overhead lights,
it's going to more closely mimic
what sunlight does in the evening time,
and that turns out to be a bad thing
if your goal is to eventually go to sleep.
So again, do like the Scandinavians do.
Use lights that are set
low in the room at night,
and if you really want to
optimize your sleep-wake cycles,
I suppose you could also do the
opposite throughout the day.
You could really emphasize the use
of bright artificial lights and sunlight
that comes from above.
And of course, sunlight
always comes from above.
But if you're working in
a given office environment
and, you know, it's 2:00 p.m. or 3:00 p.m.
and you want to be as awake as possible,
really crank up the overhead lights.
And then in the evening,
which is this critical period
three that we're referring to,
really try and dim those
lights or have them off
or just rely on candlelight or moonlight
from the hours of about
10:00 p.m. until 4:00 a.m.
Our good friend Samer Hattar,
who's been on this podcast before,
Samer is director of
the chronobiology unit
at the National Institutes
of Mental Health,
well, he's absolutely obsessive
about this light stuff
and avoiding light at night.
In fact, he lives in what I sort of joke
is like a cave at night.
From 9:00 p.m. until 5:00 a.m.,
which is really his kind of sleep cycle,
he has his house so dark
that you'd be lucky to be able
to find a spoon in the kitchen.
In fact, you'd be lucky
to find your way down
the hallway if you're me.
But in any case, dim the lights.
Turn them way, way down.
It will serve you well.
It will make it much easier for you
to get sleepy and stay
sleepy and fall asleep
and stay asleep throughout the night.
Now, not to depart from
this critical period three,
but if you recall, viewing
that afternoon light,
the low solar angle light
as the sun is heading down in the sky,
so it could be sunset
or what I call circa
sunset, around sunset,
well, doing that is going to slightly,
but not completely, offset
any of the negative effects
of viewing artificial light at night.
So I don't want to give
people a pass here,
but let's say you know
that you're going to watch
some Netflix at night
or you're going to be up late studying
and yet you still want to be
able to fall and stay asleep.
Definitely make sure you
see that evening light.
There's a great study.
We'll provide a link to this study,
which showed that if people
view evening sunset light
or evening sunsets
or sunlight right around
the time of sunset,
it really serves to
inoculate or offset some,
again, some, not all,
of the negative effects
of artificial light
between the hours of
10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m.
Now, that's light.
But as you recall,
we also have this tool
related to temperature,
and you're probably not
going to be surprised
that the way to leverage
temperature in the evening
is the exact opposite
of the way that you want
to leverage temperature
early in the day.
Early in the day, temperature increases
from cold showers or exercise,
et cetera, wake you up.
What that means is that taking
a cold shower late at night
is probably a bad idea.
Rather, taking a nice hot bath or a sauna,
you might think would heat up your body,
and indeed, that's what happens
if you stay in a very long time,
but if you do hot tub or a hot bath
or a sauna in the evening,
and you don't stay in for
more than 20 or 30 minutes
and you get out,
you take maybe a cool-ish
shower or a warm shower,
then what happens is there's
a compensatory cooling off
of your core body temperature
for the reasons we discussed earlier,
and your body temperature will
drop by one to three degrees
and it will make it much
easier to get into sleep.
So if you're somebody
that enjoys hot baths,
hot showers, or hot tubs,
evening and nighttime
is going to be the best time to do that
if your goal is to facilitate sleep.
Similarly, you should try
and make your sleeping environment
pretty cool, if not cold.
Now, that doesn't mean you need to be cold
while you're asleep.
You can get under as many
blankets as you need,
but it's a good idea to make
your sleeping environment cool.
In fact, drop the temperature
in that sleeping environment
by at least three degrees
and you'll be happy that you did.
Now, some people rely on
things like Eight Sleep.
I use that.
One of these controllable
temperature mattress covers.
Other people would simply do this
by putting a fan in the
room or opening a window.
Again, depends on time of year,
depends on technology,
depends on budgets, et cetera.
But you're going to want to sleep
in a relatively cool or
cold sleeping environment
and then layer on the blankets
as needed to stay asleep.
And I say as needed
because one of the things
that you're going to do in your sleep,
or if you happen to wake up,
is if you're too warm, you're
going to put a foot or a hand
out from under those blankets.
And the reason for doing
that is very logical
once you understand the mechanism.
You have special portals,
you essentially have ways of passing heat,
excuse me, in and out of your body
primarily through the palms of your hands,
the upper half of your face,
and the bottoms of your feet
through so-called glabrous skin.
This was covered in the
episode with Dr. Craig Heller
from the biology department at Stanford.
If you lower the temperature
in your sleeping environment,
so lower the temperature in that room
or use a controllable mattress
cover that can cool down
like Eight Sleep or
something of that sort,
it's naturally going to make
your sleep environment cooler,
and if you're too warm under the blankets,
all you have to do is
extend a hand or a foot
out from under those blankets.
Whereas if the sleeping
environment that you're in
is too warm,
there's very little you can do to cool off
besides push off those blankets.
So for instance, if you're too warm
and you're waking up in
the middle of the night,
which is what happens if you get too warm,
you'll push off those blankets.
But if the room is too warm,
well, what are you going to do?
You'd probably have to put
your hands into some cool water
or take a coolish shower or something
for a couple of seconds.
That's not very practical.
Better to just keep the
sleeping environment cool.
I'm not a big fan of
people putting socks on
while they sleep,
or I should say, I'm not
a fan of putting socks on
while I sleep,
because that eliminates
this glabrous skin portal
on the bottoms of one's feet.
So for those of you that have heard,
you know, wear socks while you sleep,
that works great for people
that tend to run too cold while they sleep
and wake up because their feet get cold,
but if you're somebody who wakes up
in the middle of the night,
chances are you're waking up
because you're getting too warm
and the best thing that you could do
is to cool or lower the temperature
in the room that you're sleeping
and not wear socks,
get under as many blankets
as you need to fall asleep,
and then across the night,
you'll naturally just
move a hand or a foot
or all hands and feet out
from under those blankets
to cool off
because of the relationship
between temperature and sleep.
That is, dropping your
core body temperature
one to three degrees
gets you into sleep and
helps you stay asleep.
So let's say you do
exercise late in the day
and you're finding yourself
very alert in the evening
and you need to fall asleep,
or let's say you've exercised
and you needed four cups of espresso
in order to do that exercise.
Well, there are a few
things that you can do
to try and bring your nervous system down
into more state of calmness,
and you can do that
also by lowering your
core body temperature.
One of those I already
talked about before,
taking a nice hot shower or a hot bath
and then getting out and cooling off
will decrease your body temperature.
Maybe not enough to get you into sleep
if you have a ton of
caffeine in your system.
But again, you can use this
mechanism of temperature shifts
to wake up
or temperature shifts to fall asleep
in ways that really can help you overcome
some of the irregularities
in your sleep-wake cycle
and exercise cycle, et cetera.
Because, of course, nobody's perfect.
Some days we end up having
to workout in the afternoon
or we'll miss the workout entirely.
Other days, we end up
having that cup of coffee
in the afternoon with a friend
and then we have a hard
time falling asleep.
So you can use these tools
not just in their optimized form,
you know, being absolutely
obsessive and compulsive
about exactly when you
do each of those tools.
That would be wonderful,
but life happens as they say
and some days you're going
to feel too alert at night
and you want to fall asleep,
or you've got to get up
especially early the next morning
and you're not somebody
who normally goes to bed at 10:00 p.m.
Well, that's when a something
like a hot bath or a sauna
can really benefit you
because it can adjust your
temperature rhythm accordingly.
I would be remiss if I
didn't touch on alcohol
and CBD and THC.
I always get questions about these.
And I should say, of course,
many places, but not all, THC is illegal.
Although, there are medical uses
and in some places, it's decriminalized,
other places it's legal.
Alcohol, of course, is consumed
almost as frequently as
caffeine is consumed.
I personally don't drink alcohol.
I don't have anything against it per se.
I just don't tend to enjoy it.
One of the reasons I don't enjoy it
is if I drink alcohol,
I simply fall asleep.
So that doesn't really accomplish
any of the things that I
really want to accomplish
because the sleep that one
gets after drinking alcohol
is greatly disrupted sleep.
Hate to break it to you,
but that's the truth.
And when Dr. Matt Walker
came on this podcast,
he said exactly the same thing.
While THC and alcohol do
help some people fall asleep
and maybe even stay asleep,
the architecture of
that sleep is suboptimal
compared to the sleep they would get
without alcohol or THC in their system.
So I'm not here to tell you
what to do or not to do.
I'm certainly not the substance police.
That's not my role.
I'm just reporting to you the biology.
If your sleep is not restoring you
to the extent that you feel it should,
or if you are regularly
relying on a drink or two
in order to fall asleep,
or THC in order to fall asleep,
that is disrupting your
total pattern of sleep.
However, I do realize
that nowadays a lot of people
are relying on THC and/or CBD,
especially edible forms,
in order to fall and stay asleep.
And, you know, we can
just acknowledge the data.
It does seem that there's
an anxiety lowering effect
of some of those compounds
that do help people
who have a hard time
falling and staying asleep
because of reasons related to anxiety.
Although, in a moment,
we'll talk about some supplements
and supplement protocols
that can also assist in the
ability to fall and stay asleep
and that can adjust anxiety
and that do not seem to
disrupt sleep architecture
in negative ways
and, in fact, can enhance
the depth and quality
of sleep architecture.
Okay, so you've done everything
correctly up until now.
You got your morning routine
from critical period one.
You've got your afternoon routine.
You saw some sunlight in the afternoon.
You avoided caffeine in the eight hours
or 10 hours before bedtime.
You're not drinking alcohol.
You've cooled down the room.
You're doing all these things right.
You've dimmed the lights,
et cetera, et cetera.
What else can we do in
order to optimize our sleep?
Well, I always say behavioral tools first,
then look to nutrition,
then, if necessary,
look to supplementation,
and then, if still necessary,
look to prescription drugs
obviously prescribed by a
board certified physician.
Well, we've talked a lot
about the behavioral tools
for critical period three.
We have not talked a lot
about the supplementation-based tools.
There are supplements that for most people
will greatly improve their
ability to fall and stay asleep
and the three main
supplements in that category
or that kit of sleep supplements,
and I've talked about these before,
are magnesium threonate,
so T-H-R-E-O-N-A-T-E,
apigenin, A-P-I-G-E-N-I-N, apigenin,
and theanine, T-H-E-A-N-I-N-E, theanine.
Now, some important things to point out
about mag threonate, as it's
called, apigenin, and theanine.
First of all,
you don't necessarily
need to take all three,
although, many people
get a synergistic effect
from taking all three.
In fact, you may not even
need to take even one.
What I recommend is that
if you're already doing
all the behavioral tools regularly
and you're still having
trouble falling asleep
and staying asleep,
well, then you might try
one of the supplements
within this sleep stack.
They do have fairly
wide margins for safety.
Although, I should also say,
anytime you're going to
add or remove something
from your supplement protocol
or your nutritional program,
you definitely want to
talk to your physician.
I don't just say that to protect us.
I say that to protect you.
But for most people, the margins
of safety on these things
are going to be pretty broad.
A couple of notes about dosages.
For some people, the dosages
of any one or several
of the supplements I
mentioned will be zero.
That is, you won't need them
in order to get and stay asleep
most nights of your life.
That's terrific if you don't need them.
For many people, however,
taking 145 milligrams
of magnesium threonate
can be very beneficial.
That's the dosage that most
people will benefit from.
Some people need to go a little higher.
Some people need to go a little bit lower.
One of the reasons that
we've been pointing people
towards single-ingredient
formulations these days
is because it allows people
to adjust the dosage of one component
of a so-called sleep stack
without having to disrupt the
dosage of another component,
and so on.
It also allows people to try
just one element within the sleep stack
without having to purchase
and try the others,
which is a problem if
you're buying a blend
of a lot of different ingredients.
So 145 milligrams of magnesium threonate.
50, 5-0, milligrams of apigenin.
And again, you could just
take the apigenin on its own.
And 100 to 400 milligrams of theanine
taken, again, alone or in combination
with the other supplements
mentioned in the stack
many people find allows
them to get really drowsy
and fall asleep, sleep really deeply,
and they feel much more
refreshed the next day
and they don't have a grogginess to them.
Now, a couple of notes about
these different supplements.
About 5% of people report
that magnesium threonate
really disrupts their gut.
It gives them diarrhea
or gastric distress.
In which case, don't take it.
If magnesium threonate disrupts
your gut or your digestion
to a point where it's
uncomfortable or at all
and you don't like it,
don't take any of it.
The proper dosage for you, in other words,
would be zero milligrams.
Now, in a slightly different way,
many people who can
tolerate magnesium threonate
or really thrive on magnesium threonate
and like apigenin
might find that theanine,
even at the lowest dose
of a hundred milligrams,
'cause, again, the range is
a hundred to 400 milligrams,
that theanine gives them such vivid dreams
that they actually find it disruptive
where they wake up in
the middle of the night
or they find that the
sleep that they're getting
is kind of anxiety ridden
because of the intensity of those dreams.
So some people might
choose to leave theanine
out of the sleep stack
and just take magnesium
threonate or apigenin
And again, some people might
leave magnesium threonate
out of the sleep stack.
Again, all of this is really about finding
the supplementation protocol
that's ideal for you.
I should mention that whether or not
you're taking one or two
or three of the components
of the sleep stack,
the ideal time to take those
is 30 to 60 minutes before bedtime,
especially if you haven't
had anything to eat
for the three hours or so before bedtime.
I confess that oftentimes
I'll have a little bit of a
snack late in the evening,
some berries or something.
I try not to eat too close to bedtime,
but some evenings just
because of work schedule,
I'll get home late, be 9:00 p.m.,
and I'll eat a big meal
and then I'll take the
sleep stack and fall asleep.
Every once in a while,
that just so happens.
Nobody's perfect. Certainly I'm not.
But that sleep stack
can be very beneficial.
And I do think that it's
preferable to melatonin.
Here's the reason.
First of all, melatonin is a hormone
that you endogenously make.
You now know a lot about melatonin
and it's controlled by light,
meaning light inhibits
it or eliminates it,
darkness promotes it.
And melatonin indeed
can help us fall asleep,
but the dosages of melatonin
that are contained in
most commercial products
is far, far, far greater
than what we would make endogenously.
So it's really supraphysiological.
So that's of concern
because melatonin is not just responsible
for making us sleepy and fall asleep.
It also does things
like interacts with other hormone systems,
testosterone and estrogen,
even in the puberty system, in kids.
Is taking melatonin every
once in a while a problem
for adjusting to jet lag, et cetera?
Probably not. I would even say no.
But taking it chronically over time,
especially kids taking
it chronically over time,
can potentially be problematic.
So at least in my opinion,
these other supplements
are going to be preferable to melatonin.
Now, as I mentioned in the
beginning of today's episode,
there are some other things
that I certainly take
every once in a while
and that other people
might consider taking
in addition to the sleep
stack I talked about before
or in place of that sleep stack
if that sleep stack
doesn't work well for them.
So every third or fourth night,
I will take two grams of glycine
and a hundred milligrams of GABA
in addition to the standard sleep stack
that I talked about before.
So I'm taking mag threonate,
apigenin, and theanine,
and then I will also take two
grams of glycine and GABA,
which I find greatly enhances
my ability to get into sleep.
But the reason I only add glycine and GABA
every third or fourth night
is that if I take it too often,
I find that the entire sleep stack
doesn't work quite as effectively.
I don't know exactly why this is the case,
but in any event, that's what I do.
And more recently, I've
also started using inositol,
in particular myo-inositol.
Every other night, I'll take
900 milligrams of myo-inositol
in addition to mag threonate,
apigenin, and theanine,
and not on the nights when
I take glycine and GABA.
So I'm adding 900 milligrams of inositol
to the standard sleep stack
of mag threonate, theanine, and apigenin.
And what I find is not only
does it greatly enhance
my ability to fall asleep quickly,
but if I wake up in the
middle of the night,
which I often do to use the bathroom,
I find it very, very
easy to fall back asleep.
Whereas when I don't take
inositol every other night or so,
I find that if I wake up
in the middle of the night,
it's a bit more of a
challenge to fall back asleep.
So inositol has a number of different uses
that have been discussed
in terms of mental health
and in terms of adjusting
anxiety for its daytime use.
What I'm talking about
is taking 900 milligrams of myo-inositol
also 30 to 60 minutes before sleep
along with the standard sleep stack
and I found that to be
immensely beneficial.
I also noticed that it
has a pretty long tail
of anxiety suppression throughout the day.
And I'm not somebody who
suffers from anxiety,
but I have to say it just has led me
to feel a bit calmer throughout the day,
and I don't really know how to say this
except in subjective terms,
to feel a bit more buffered against
or resilient against stress events.
And if you look at the
literature on inositol
and its interactions
with the serotonin
system and other systems,
that all makes sense as to
why that would be the case.
So we'll provide links to
our so-called sleep kit,
which is part of our
Neural Network Newsletter.
It's a zero-cost newsletter
where you can access this
information about supplements
and other behavioral tools
for sleep in list form.
But that sleep kit doesn't include
some of the newer information
that I've provided this episode,
in particular, the
information about inositol
and what I'm finding
to be the very beneficial use of inositol
for the ability to fall back asleep
after waking up in the
middle of the night,
which is something that a
lot of people struggle with.
Now, that's supplementation
for falling and staying asleep,
but we can return to the behavioral tools
also as powerful levers and tools
for falling asleep and
getting back to sleep.
And again, we look to
NSDR, non-sleep deep rest,
or the Reveri app as a way to do that.
As I mentioned earlier,
the Reveri app has been
developed on the basis
of really high-quality,
peer-reviewed research,
both clinical and non-clinical,
by my colleague, David Spiegel,
who's our associate chair
of psychiatry at Stanford.
It's a wonderful tool.
It does carry a cost after
the initial seven-day trial.
I can tell you what the cost on that is
so you can get a sense
because I do realize that
anything that carries a cost,
for some people, it won't be accessible.
Right now, Reveri,
and I should just mention,
they didn't pay us for an ad read.
I'm just telling you what they told me
so that I can accurately report
what it costs to use Reveri.
They have a monthly subscription
to use the Reveri app at 14.99.
You do get the seven-day free trial.
They have a yearly subscription of 99.99
with a seven-day free trial.
And they have a lifetime
purchase, one-time purchase,
of 249 with no trial.
It right now is only available
for Apple, not for Android,
but they are, yes, going
to have it available
for Android soon.
There's a signup list there.
I should mention that while
the cost might seem high,
if you compare that cost
to, say, supplements,
or you compare that cost to a
poor night's sleep over time,
the cost, at least to me,
seems somewhat modest,
certainly within range
for a number of people.
But I acknowledge not within
range for other people,
which is why I also want
to point to zero-cost tools
and the zero-cost tool for
getting asleep, staying asleep,
and falling back asleep
is going to be NSDR.
We'll put a link to a
non-sleep deep rest protocol
that's available on YouTube,
so available to anybody zero cost
provided you have a internet connection.
Again, dim the screen
if you're going to turn
that on late at night.
And there are a number of
other yoga nidra scripts
and apps and sources around the internet,
in particular, on YouTube,
that are zero cost that you could use
if the Reveri app is
outside your price range
or is not preferable to you, et cetera.
When I wake up in the middle of the night,
it's usually to use the restroom.
I'll go use the restroom.
I'll keep the lights as dim as possible.
I'll get back into bed.
And if I find that it's
easy to fall asleep,
great, I'm asleep.
And if not, then I will
generally plug in the Reveri app.
They have a fall back asleep hypnosis,
and 99 times out of a hundred,
I'm back asleep within minutes
and I don't wake up until morning.
Now, very briefly, I just
want to touch on some tools
that are very commonly used
by many people out there,
and believe it or not,
there is peer-reviewed science
on things like eye masks.
Do eye masks improve your
ability to stay asleep?
And indeed, they do,
provided they are not too tight
and provided that the room is cool enough.
Why?
Well, eye masks cover the
upper half of your face,
which is where glabrous skin is localized.
Remember, palms of the
hands, bottoms of the feet,
glabrous skin on the face.
So a lot of people who
wear eye masks will wake up
because they're too warm
if the room is too warm.
So if you're going to use an
eye mask to keep light out,
definitely make sure the room
and your sleeping environment
and your bed are cool enough
in order for you to stay asleep.
In addition, I get a lot of
questions about earplugs.
Here's the deal with earplugs.
Some people find that
earplugs are very beneficial
because, of course, they
prevent the entrance of sound
into the ear that could wake us up.
But some people find that the sound
of their own beating of their
own heart can be disruptive
and they get a sort of
humming in their head
when they have those earplugs in.
I'm one such person.
Although, I have family members
that like using earplugs when they sleep.
So it's really up to you.
You have to see whether
or not those earplugs help
or disrupt your sleep.
For me, they're no good.
For some people, they really enjoy them.
I don't use an eye mask
unless I'm sleeping in a
really bright environment
or I need to sleep on a plane
and things of that sort.
Other tools that I'll just mention
that have peer-reviewed
research to support them.
Elevating your feet either with a pillow
or by elevating the end of your bed
by about three to five degrees
can be really beneficial for
increasing the depth of sleep
because of the so-called
glymphatic washout.
This is the movement of
and circulation of fluids
in your brain at night
that lead to more wakefulness
and actually can improve
cognitive function
and a number of other things
related to brain health.
There's one caveat to that.
For people that suffer from acid reflux,
having your ankles
elevated above your chest
or above your heart in
the middle of the night
can actually exacerbate that acid reflux.
You want to do the opposite.
You want to actually elevate
the head side of your bed
by about three to five degrees.
Now, one of the common
causes of sleep disruption
that has tremendously detrimental effects
is so-called sleep apnea.
So this is basically bouts of suffocation
or lack of oxygenation during sleep.
This is particularly the case
for people that are very heavyset,
and that heavyset could be from obesity,
it could also be heavyset
from having too much muscle.
A lot of people who are
carrying too much muscle
will actually have sleep
apnea without realizing it.
Sleep apnea is actually very dangerous.
It's associated with a number
of cardiovascular issues.
It's associated with sexual dysfunction.
It's associated with
issues with cognition.
Sleep apnea is bad.
A lot of people will have to use the PAP,
which is a, it's a device.
It looks like a sort of like
a snorkel mask or a dive mask.
It's a whole apparatus that
people will go to sleep with.
However, many people can relieve
themselves of sleep apnea
provided it's not too serious
and can sleep much better,
in fact, I think all people
can sleep much better,
if they train themselves
to be nose breathers while they sleep.
There are a lot of reasons
to be a nose breather
unless you are breathing
very hard due to exercise
or talking or eating.
That was all covered
in James Nestor's book,
"Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art."
It's been covered in a
number of different podcasts.
We've talked about it
on this podcast as well.
It's a good idea to be a nose breather
unless you need to mouth breathe.
And it's a great idea, it's a superb idea,
to be a nose breather in sleep.
And one way to really get good at that
is to take a little bit of medical tape
and to tape your mouth
shut before going to sleep.
You heard me right.
Put some medical tape over your mouth
and force yourself to
nose breathe during sleep.
It also prevents snoring in most cases.
Really offsets sleep apnea.
Sleep apnea, again, being a
very serious health concern.
I should also mention as a tool
that if you have a hard time
being a nose breather in sleep,
you can try doing your
cardiovascular exercise,
at least the lower-intensity
cardiovascular exercise,
through purely nasal breathing.
And one way to do that, again,
is to tape your mouth shut
or put a gulp of water in your mouth,
but don't actually swallow
that mouth full of water,
or to use a mouthpiece
or just deliberately
keep your mouth closed
and insist on breathing through your nose.
Most people find
that when they start doing
cardiovascular exercise that way,
it's really challenging at first,
but over time, they
actually can feel quite calm
and still can generate
a lot of physical effort
purely using nose breathing.
The reason that doing nose breathing
during cardiovascular exercise
translates to being a
nose breather during sleep
is that your sinuses actually
can dilate, they're plastic,
and over time,
plastic meaning they're malleable that is,
and they can become wider.
You're not going to get giant
nostrils. Don't worry about it.
Your airways within your skull,
'cause that's what the sinuses really are,
these little passages within the skull,
and, of course, within the nasal passages,
will dilate and will allow you
to breathe more easily through your nose.
But for those of you
that are waking up in
the middle of the night
breathing on your back [breathing heavily]
or your partner is telling you that
or other people are telling you that
or you're that person on the plane
with your mouth hanging open and drooling
and your mouth breathing,
terrible, terrible,
terrible for health reasons
and other reasons,
put some a medical tape over your mouth,
learn to be a nose breather during sleep.
Your sleep will improve
and your daytime feelings
of wakefulness and focus will improve,
your cardiovascular health will improve,
and on and on and on.
So now we've largely covered
the tools that one could use
to get and stay asleep,
and we talked about exercise,
we talked about temperature,
we talked about supplements,
and we talked about, of course,
keeping the sleeping environment
both cool and as dark as possible.
I do want to mention a
couple of broad contour tools
that will impact your ability
to sleep really well on a consistent basis
and the one that impacts
the most number of people
is weekends.
Turns out that most
everybody feels the impulse
to sleep in on the weekend,
especially if they've been
out late the night before.
However, the data show
that keeping relatively
consistent sleep and wake times
is really going to enhance
the quality and depth of your sleep.
So if you stay out late one night,
sure, you might allow yourself
to sleep in an extra hour or so,
but you should really try
to avoid sleeping in longer
than an hour beyond your
normal wake-up time.
That's right.
If you normally get eight hours of sleep
and you wake up at 7:00 a.m.,
probably okay to wake up
at 8:00 a.m. on the weekend
or after a night out the night before,
but try not to sleep until 11 or noon
thinking that you're going
to catch up on your sleep
or that's better than waking
up at a consistent time.
It would be better to wake
up at a consistent time
plus or minus an hour
and get a nap in the afternoon
provided that nap, again, isn't too long.
And the other tool
that relates to nights that
you stayed out too late
or that you feel like you
want to sleep in a bit more
in the morning
is if you are going to wake
up at your consistent time.
So for example, normally
you go to bed at 10
and you wake up at six.
Let's say that's your schedule.
And you end up staying up late one night
until midnight or one for whatever reason
and the next morning you wake up at seven
and you're still groggy.
In that case, you absolutely want to wait
to ingest caffeine 90 to
120 minutes after waking.
You really do because there are good data
to support the fact that
caffeine can disrupt sleep.
Yes, that's obvious.
Caffeine especially disrupts sleep
if you take it too late in the day.
That's very obvious as to
why that would be the case.
But caffeine especially disrupts
what's called compensatory sleep.
So if you start changing your waking time
and your to sleep time
and you start using additional caffeine
to offset the sleepiness
that you're experiencing
because of those late nights out,
well, that's when you
really start to disrupt
not just your nighttime sleep,
but your daytime compensatory
sleep, so those naps.
You also are disrupting the
total architecture of sleep
in the early morning hours.
There's a lot of great science
that's been put to this,
or that's emerged from this, I should say.
So try and keep those sleep-wake
times relatively constant
plus or minus an hour,
and try as much as you can
to delay that caffeine intake
90 to 120 minutes after waking every day,
but especially on days where you wake up
and you feel you haven't
gotten enough sleep.
In that case, I highly recommend
you just use NSDR or the Reveri app
or some other form of deep relaxation
to try and compensate
for the lack of sleep,
knowing, of course, that
there's no complete compensation
for lack of sleep.
There are just things that we can do
to partially offset lack of sleep.
Now, a couple of final
points and additional tools
that I think are going to
be useful to everybody,
in particular, people
who have young children
or are following a shift work schedule
or who are experiencing jet lag.
Keep in mind, jet lag
can be due to travel,
which is obvious,
but jet lag can also be due
to getting woken up in the
middle of the night, right?
Your body doesn't know the difference
between flying to a new time zone
and getting woken up in
the middle of the night.
The tool that I'd like to offer you
is an understanding of something
called temperature minimum.
And I'm going to make
this as simple as possible
and I'm confident that
everyone can understand this
even if you don't have
any science background.
Here's the question you
need to ask yourself.
What is your typical wake-up time, okay?
What's your typical wake-up time?
If for you, your typical
wake-up time is 7:00 a.m.
plus or minus half an hour,
and that could be 7:00 a.m.
because you set an alarm clock
or it could be 7:00 a.m.
because you naturally wake up
at 7:00 a.m., doesn't matter,
if your typical wake-up
time most days is 7:00 a.m.,
well, then your temperature
minimum is 5:00 a.m.
That's right, your temperature
minimum is not a temperature.
It's a time within your 24-hour cycle.
Approximately two hours before
your typical wake-up time,
your body is at its lowest temperature
that it will ever be in the 24-hour cycle.
That's why it's called
your temperature minimum.
Here's what you need to know
about your temperature minimum.
If you view bright light,
exercise, or drink caffeine
or all of the above
in the two to four hours before
your temperature minimum,
that will delay your clock.
What that means when
I say delay your clock
is it will make you want
to go to sleep later
and wake up later the next night, okay?
So let's run this exercise for you,
the person waking up at 7:00
a.m. on a regular basis,
I can predict with almost certainty
that your body is going to
be at its lowest temperature
at 5:00 a.m..
So what that means
is that if you get up at
3:00 a.m. or at 4:00 a.m.
and you flip on bright
lights in your house
or in your bathroom
or you have a cup of coffee
or you do any kind of exercise
or you get up and head to the airport,
the mechanisms in your brain and body
that control timing of sleep
and timing of waking will shift.
They will delay.
It's as if you put your clock
on hold for a little while
and then let it start again, okay?
That's the simplest way I can describe it.
And you will tend to
want to go to sleep later
and wake up later the following night.
Now, the opposite is true
if you view bright light, drink caffeine,
or exercise or socialize, I should say,
in the hours immediately after
your temperature minimum.
So for you in this example,
the person who's waking up at 7:00 a.m.,
your temperature minimum is 5:00 a.m.,
if you view bright light, exercise,
maybe have a snack, maybe
not, or socialize, move about,
at 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. or 7:00 a.m.
That will tend to phase
advance your clock.
It will tend to basically make you
want to go to bed earlier
and wake up earlier
the following night.
Now, I used this example
of a person who wakes up
typically at 7:00 a.m.
whose temperature minimum is 5:00 a.m.,
but, of course, you need
to adjust that for yourself
if you're somebody who
wakes up at 9:00 a.m.
or at 5:00 a.m. et cetera.
Why do I offer this as a tool?
Well, this is an immensely powerful tool
if, for instance, you
are headed to a time zone
where you need to go to bed earlier
and wake up earlier once you
arrive in that time zone.
What it means is in the day
or two before you leave,
you can force yourself to
exercise, drink caffeine,
maybe even to eat a meal
early in the morning,
or maybe you still fast
early in the morning
and that's really up to you,
but you force yourself
to do the activities
that are going to phase
advance your clock.
Whereas if you're traveling to a time zone
where you are going to need
to go to sleep much later
and you're going to need
to wake up much later
or even a little bit later,
you can do those things
in the hours prior to
your temperature minimum.
Now, for those of you
that work shift work,
this can be especially useful,
but I want to say a couple
of things about shift work.
There are a lot of details
about shift work and jet lag
in an episode that I did
specifically about jet lag and shift work.
So for the deep dive, go there,
but suffice to say this for now,
if you are going to do shift work,
try to stay on the same shift
for two weeks at a time.
It's very detrimental to brain and body,
it can even be horrifically challenging
for your brain and body
in a number of ways,
if you are switching on
the so-called swing shift,
you know, you're working
three days the night shift,
three days the day shift,
three days the night
shift, three days the...
Try and stay on the same
schedule as much as possible.
And I should say for everybody,
people who are jet lagged and
engaged in shift work or not,
but just for everybody,
if you need to be awake in
the middle of your sleep cycle
and it's not just a quick
departure to the bathroom
and back to bed,
but you really need to be awake,
you know, you're feeding a baby
or you're taking care of a loved one
or you need to do
something that's critical
or you need to work,
if possible, use red light, okay?
Now, for shift workers
who really are trying
to stay awake all night and sleep all day,
this is not going to be ideal,
but for people that, for instance,
need to stay up really late one night
or wake up especially
early, like 3:00 a.m.,
to prepare for an exam that
you're just not ready for
or to head to the airport, et cetera,
using red light has been shown
to allow people to be awake enough
and obviously see what they need to see
in order to perform
their activities safely
but it does not seem to
disrupt the cortisol rhythm
that is the healthy,
normal cortisol rhythm.
Now, I realize this is
kind of an advanced tool
and many people won't have access to this.
There are a number of different
sources for red lights now.
Companies like Joovv or KOZE light.
These are different brands.
I don't have any affiliation
to any of these brands, I should say.
There are a number of different
red light bulb sources out
there and commercial sources
that you can explore if you want.
But understanding this temperature minimum
is really powerful
because it allows you
to adjust your schedule
depending on travel,
depending on changing work
schedules or school schedules.
And if you're not a morning person,
you can use the tools related
to temperature minimum
to really become a
morning person over time,
and it actually is pretty easy.
And I talked about this
in a previous episode
but I'll just mention
that there have been shown
to be important, positive
effects on cognition,
on even grip strength
and physical performance,
for people that are early morning risers,
and that's especially true for night owls
that deliberately shift
themselves to become early risers.
Okay, so that's a lot of
information and a lot of tools
and I suppose the one set of tools
that I really didn't
drill into too deeply,
the ones related to
jet lag and shift work.
And again, please check out the episode
on jet lag and shift work
if that's relevant to you.
But I think for most people
who are going to sleep at night
and are trying their best
to sleep well at night
and are trying their best
to wake up in the morning at whatever hour
and stay alert and focused
throughout the day,
maybe with a brief nap,
the tools that I talked about today
related to light,
temperature, food, exercise,
caffeine, supplements, and digital tools,
I'm hoping will prove to
be very useful for you.
They certainly are all supported
by excellent peer-reviewed research.
And I should just emphasize again
that most of the tools we talked about
are completely zero cost.
So while the supplements and
some of the digital tools
do carry some cost to them,
I really want to encourage everybody
to get your behaviors right.
Get all of the things related
to your timing of exercise
and type of exercise
in the best possible
order and time of day.
We talked about this critical
period early in the day
and then another critical
period in the middle of the day
and the late afternoon
and then this third critical period
in the middle of the night.
Different tools for the
different three critical periods.
I promise that if you
start to implement some,
or ideally, all of these tools,
the quality of your sleep
will increase tremendously.
And of course, in doing so,
the quality of your daytime alertness
and your ability to focus
will improve tremendously.
Again, sleep is the absolute foundation
of your mental health,
your physical health,
and your performance in all endeavors.
So if there's one area of your life
to really focus on and try and optimize,
if your goal is to be
happier and more productive
and just to have a better life overall,
I can confidently say
that sleep is really
the thing to optimize.
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During today's podcast
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single-ingredient formulations.
They ship internationally,
their quality is exceedingly high,
and by largely focusing
on single ingredient
and various dosages of
different supplements,
you can create the optimized
supplement protocol for you.
If you're not already
following us on social media,
we are @hubermanlab on Instagram
and also @hubermanlab on Twitter.
There, I cover science
and science-related tools,
some of which overlaps
with the content of The
Huberman Lab Podcast,
and other of which,
I should say much of which,
is distinct from the information
covered on this podcast.
If you're interested
in obtaining protocols
or summaries from these podcasts,
you can get those completely free of cost
by going to hubermanlab.com.
Go to the menu at hubermanlab.com.
Go to the Neural Network Newsletter.
You simply provide us your email
and you'll get the
Neural Network Newsletter
for free each month.
You can also find previous newsletters
there at hubermanlab.com.
For instance, Toolkit for Sleep
or Deliberate Cold Exposure
and so on and so forth.
Again, we don't share
your email with anybody.
So our privacy policy is
made very clear there.
And it's completely zero cost.
So thank you for joining
me today for our discussion
about tools for optimizing sleep,
and in doing so, tools for
optimizing not just sleep,
but your daytime feelings
of alertness and focus
and your overall health.
And last but certainly not least,
thank you for your interest in science.
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