Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine recently the hubman Lab podcast hosted a live event at the Great Hall in Brisbane Australia the event was called the brain body contract and featured a Lecture followed by a question and answer session with the audience we wanted to make the question and answer session available to everyone regardless if you could attend I also would like to thank the sponsors for the event they
are eight sleep and ag1 eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity now I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep is the critical foundation for mental health Physical health and performance now one of the key things to getting the best possible night sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment and that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep your body temperature actually needs to drop by about 1 to 3° and in order to wake up feeling refreshed and alert your body
temperature actually has to increase by about 1 to 3° eight sleep mattress covers make it extremely easy to control The temperature of your sleeping environment and thereby to control your core body temperature so that you fall and stay deeply asleep and wake up feeling your absolute best I've been sleeping on an eight Sleep mattress cover for about 3 years now and it has completely transformed the quality of my sleep for the better eight sleep recently launched their newest generation of pod cover the Pod 4 ultra the Pod 4 cover has improved cooling and Heating capacity
higher Fidelity sleep tracking technology and the Pod 4 cover has snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve air flow and stop your snoring if you'd like to try an eights Sleep mattress cover you can go to 8sleep.com huberman to save $350 off their pod 4 ultra eight sleep currently ships to the USA Canada UK select countries in the EU and Australia again that's eights Sleep.com huberman the other live event sponsor ag1 is a vitamin mineral prob drink that also contains adaptogens and other critical micronutrients I've been taking ag1 daily
since 2012 so I'm delighted that they decided to sponsor the live event I started taking ag1 and I still take ag1 once or twice a day because it gives me vitamins and minerals that I might not be getting enough of from Whole Foods that I eat as well as Adaptogens and micronutrients those adaptogens and micronutrients are really critical because even though I strive to eat most of my foods from unprocessed or minimally processed Whole Foods it's often hard to do so especially when I'm traveling and especially when I'm busy so by drinking a packet of
ag1 in the morning and often times also again in the afternoon or evening I'm ensuring that I'm getting everything I need I'm covering all of my foundational Nutritional needs and I like so many other people that take ag1 regularly just report feeling better and that shouldn't be surprising because it supports gut health and of course gut health supports immune system health and brain health and it's supporting a ton of different cellular and organ processes that all interact with one another so while certain supplements are really directed towards one specific outcome like sleeping better or being
More alert ag1 really is foundational nutritional support it's really designed to support all of the systems of your brain and body that relate to mental health and physical health if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs with your order plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman and now for the live event at the Great Hall in Brisbane [Music] [Applause] [Music] Australia what are my thoughts on nicotine um nicotine causes cancer when it's consumed
in the form of smoking vaping dipping or snuffing so don't do that um there's a debate now about vaping is it bad is it good it's bad um is it is is it worse for you than smoking probably not is it better probably slightly um you know what's Better just not doing it um but if you need to do it and you have to pick you know I suppose um you know I'm not going to tell you what to do but I think that vaping has allowed a good number of people to smoke less I'll
acknowledge that um and it's also clear it's not good for you so if you're going to going to do something that's bad for you do a bunch of things to offset the thing that's bad for you that's always my advice um but now in terms of nicotine Itself nicotine doesn't cause cancer the mode of consumption causes cancer that's important nicotine um binds to so-called nicotinic acetycholine receptors so these exist naturally in your body and on your muscles they're the way that actually your nerves control contraction of your muscles um so the consumption of nicotine let's
just say in um in I don't know about down here but in Europe it's becoming fairly common and in the Middle East also for people that take little pouches of nicotine can be absorbed um you know sublingually or through the gum gets into the bloodstream and it is truly a cognitive enhancer it's a cognitive enhancer not going to lie to you it will raise attention focus cognitive performance this is wellestablished the problem is it also raises blood pressure and causes vasil constriction this is well established so you know you have to ask Yourself is it
worth it do I do sometimes do I do it often do I choose to not do it at all I I don't think the young brain should be consuming nicotine even in these non-cancer uh causing uh forms like pouches um for a variety of reasons but mostly because the brain is so plastic at a young age anyway um but I actually am familiar with the use of nicotine for offsetting certain neurologic diseases when I was visiting Columbia Medical University in New York City some years ago I was in the office of a no Prize winner
um won't tell you uh who it was necessarily um and he proceeded to consume no fewer than six pieces of Nicorette gum in our half hour meeting I like whoa at the time he was in his late 70s he's now in his 80s and I was like Hey listen like what's the deal with the nicotine and he said oh well it offsets Parkinson and Alzheimer's I said really he said yeah yeah you can increase cognitive function I used to smoke but I don't want to get cancer so I just chew a lot and a lot
of neck rat okay really he's like yeah yeah yeah la nicet you know it it it can increase the amount of acetylcholine activation Through The Binding of these nicotinic acetylcholine receptors might even maintain some um dopaminergic neurons which are the neurons that one tends to lose with age and uh is rampant in diseases like Parkinson's I thought whoa okay so there's something there the Fact of the matter is that nicotine can enhance focus alertness and learning but it does have those other issues so you want to be considerate of those other other issues and not
become dependent on it and my experience is that people who taste the nicotine Focus From A Zin patch are those people who are buying those things pretty regularly I know somebody that went from one Zin patch twice a week to a canister a morning in about a month because the effect will Wear off if you keep consuming it uh every day um you have to consume more and more so take that into consideration probably best to um avoid unless you need really need the Boost and you can afford the increase in blood pressure that would
be my suggestion I've never taken nicotine and I don't smoke what's the best you can do for managing ADH if not taking medication okay so we did two episodes of The hubman L podcast on ADHD the first was On behavioral nutritional and supplement based tools 50% of the comments like thank you so much this is very helpful um can't wait to try some of the stuff the other will like get your evil um um you are you're trying to persuade people to not take Pharmaceuticals which is not true I I I'm interested in all of
it I just covered that stuff in the first episode and then the second one we did on H ADHD was about things like viance adderal rlin Etc most of which by the Way are amphetamines are we putting our kids on speed yes yeah they're amphetamines but I don't think that we should walk away from those things in every case they do have real clinical value in many cases and their clinical value comes from the fact that one not all but one of the major effects of amphetamines is that it can increase dopaminergic and nergic meaning
dopamine and norrine release in the brain which can increase attention And focus which is actually beneficial in some cases for the brain to learn to focus to get neuroplasticity of those very circuits so it's a you know you know consideration then 50% of the comments of that second episode were why don't you talk about the behavioral tools the suppl based tools and the nutrition tools and um and that everyone else said thank you for talking about the prescription drugs so the point being several fold one is that certainly A combination of Behavioral nutritional supplement based
and prescription tools is viable for most every situation and it's worth thinking about all of those when considering a treatment for ADHD and think we really need to get out of these silos of thinking you know like big Pharma is evil listen there are drugs that can help people is it evil I don't know is it going away no okay is there value there sometimes is it overprescribed sometimes What about nutritional tools well in some cases it can really help in other cases it one still needs prescription drug Tools in some cases doing behavioral nutritional
or supplement based tools can allow one to take lower doses of pharmaceuticals if that's your goal I think it really needs to be tailored to the individual what I would like to see is more of a tailoring to the individual than the simple write a script send people off or tell people That it's all bad if it comes out of a prescription uh drug label format now it is very clear that the original dosing schedule for things like Aderall viance Etc was during the week weekday but not the weekends that somehow has moved to uh
no weekends off so there's been a lot of changing in the the dosing schedules um and the way these drugs are taken are we creating a dependency on these drugs is always a big question and the answer seems to be a sort of very few people For whom these drugs work decide to come off them there's nothing magical about turning 25 after which you don't need these these enhancements but sometimes people don't need them or need as much of them because the neural circuits can be built up one thing that I would like to see
more of is attention to the behavioral tools for ADHD not the least of which is what's being carried out in many schools and Clinics in China where people are being encour children are Being encouraged to teach themselves how to maintain visual focus on a Target some distance away from them which then allows them to maintain cognitive focus when they move to their work the relationship between visual Focus as we've talked about a bunch of times tonight in the case of the cuddlefish ETC and cognitive focus is a an intimate one such that if you expect
yourself to focus you you can't really expect yourself to drop into Focus as an Immediate State you know so it's not a square wave function as you say you don't just sit down and drop into a state of Focus right we're so attracted to these Notions of of focus and we have these Concepts like flow and by the way I'm I'm not disparaging of those Concepts I know Stephen Cotler I have respect for him and his books um about flow but from a neuros psychiatric neuros pychological standpoint you know what we can really Say about
flow is that backwards spells wolf we don't really know that much about it um and so I think that if you expect yourself to focus you need to give yourself some warm-up time to focus don't assume that you have attention issues if you sit down and it takes five or 10 minutes to drop into a state of focus just like you wouldn't expect yourself to go out for a hard run without some sort of warm-up jog beforehand so the behavioral tools such As focusing on a visual Target are underexplored at least in most countries but
in China and elsewhere they are being explored pretty extensively so I would encourage a full exploration of all the tools in this case it says not taking medication then obviously heavier Reliance on the behavioral tools is going to be helpful while I'm getting more sleep now I neglected sleep for many years me too and at least 15 years of getting just Five or so am I doomed or can I offset this past damage you can offset the past damage one of the things that's really um wonderful about the brain and body is that it can
compensate you know there's certain things that I get asked a lot I don't know why I get this question a lot but people say you know I smoked meth for years and then um can I get my neurons back and I'm like well you know it's neurotoxic but the fact that you're asking the question is reassuring um you Know so don't start um but if you did you know I mean you can always do better than you're doing and you certainly can do better than you did in your past or at least that's what they
tell me um um so really when it comes to sleep deprivation you know I spent many all nighters um I I wouldn't talk about sleep so much if I didn't have challenges with sleep I mean for a long time I slept like a bulldog I would sleep anywhere any time by the way folks If you ever walk down the street and you see a bulldog and you stop you'll notice they always stop they always seem so friendly they always stop they always stop and they look up at you and you pet them and like the
reason they seem to like you so much is because they love to stop I owned one they're all about the stopping it's all it's not you it's about the stopping anyway the the goal is not necessarily to sleep As much as a bulldog actually it's the only animal see can't help myself it's the only animal for which there's a genetically induced apnea they're bracky calic which means they have a short snout they all those folds you know you know when the folds are there the folds are there because they have a genetic mutation they bred
out the pain receptors in the face because they used to like have them like they would bull bait they bite on the face of the bull They kill all the pain they bred out the pain receptors gave them a floppy face short snout English Bulldog thank you for the specificity a biologist loves the specificity the Frenchies are pretty cool the Frenchies are pretty cool they have a little more kicking them right the Bulldogs little less and costell was a bulldog master so he was s of more or less like a sea turtle you know just
slow movement stopping and he's going Forward and you can move aside or in fact Costello was so mellow that when he would lie down on the floor had one of those you know kind of robot vacuums things we call a Roomba in our country it would come up to his face and he would just and it would bounce off his nose and he wouldn't even take the opportunity to Blink it's the Bulldog is sort of the essence of a om of effort and actually if you look at people people resemble Different dog breeds I spent
a lot of time thinking about this some dogs and some people have a bit more kind of reverberation in them they've got a higher RPM all the time all the time all the time and then they're the Bulldogs right Rick Rubin right there are these people that are just more still and we look at these people that are more still and think well there probably isn't that much going on in there but now we know from the Rick Thing and the Carl thing that they're thinking a lot but in the case of Costello they don't
don't get much done you know I maybe Costello wanted to get things done but I he if he woke up on New Year's Day and said all right 50 rabbits this year he never actually achieved that but listen the point is some of us sleep like Bulldogs some of us tend to go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night I'm one of those people go to Sleep four hours wake up I hate it it but I figured out that non-sleep deep breast or yoga needra has taught me how to fall back
asleep really quickly and I can recover some sleep I haven't gotten through non-sleep deep breast some people are waking up in the middle of the night because they don't have their sleep timing right we have a series on sleep coming out soon with the great Matt Walker we record a six episode series with Matt and he talks about Something I take no credit for this this is Matt's acronym qqr T quality quantity regularity and timing you want to pay attention to to the amount of sleep some people need six some people need eight if you
only got seven for years and you're reading that you need eight or else you'll get dementia please don't worry about it it is simply not the case some people need less some people need more this varies across the lifespan then there's the quality how much of That sleep is continuous did you drink caffeine in the afternoon or alcohol in the evening in which case the quality will be diminished the regularity is very interesting going to sleep more or less five nights a week at least going to sleep more or less at the same time every
night plus or minus an hour it's fine on the weekends I'm not just saying that so you don't all leave at once or a third of you leave um some people do Best by going to bed at 800 or 900 p.m. and waking up at 3:00 or 4 in the morning and that's where you would feel best in fact if you're somebody that wakes up at 3:00 or 4 in the morning you might be going to sleep too late and you have this intrinsic chronotype as it's called and you can shift your clock a bit
later but most people want to go to bed sometime between 10:00 p.m. and midnight wake up sometime between 6:00 a.m. and 800 a.m. am and there's great Variation there too um but you know qqr T so think about the quality the quantity the regularity and the timing once you dial those in everything is much much better so much so that even if you're not getting enough sleep as long as you're going to bed more or less the same time each night you'll you'll Faire better so if you didn't do any of this stuff for years
like I didn't uh in when I was in graduate school Etc I don't despair don't despair um it's very clear That the brain can recover um and I wouldn't waste a single moment thinking about what you didn't do um also my time machine's broken your time machine's broken I realize that doesn't create a lot of comfort but it's unlikely that you did substantial damage unlikely you did substantial damage unless you did that your whole life and we're talking about a conversation that's happening late late in life but even then more sleep would be better do
you believe in Burnout H if so what would be your recommendation protocol relinquish burnout once it's already occurred this is a very interesting question you know we don't quite know what burnout is and it can come from a combination of things um and typically burnout comes not during the stress period but several months afterwards you know that the adrenals you know these two little nuggets above our kidneys and our lower back are capable of driving so much Neural energy in us that that we can do all sorts of things for a very long time even
in the absence of food as long as we have water and salt you know that the adrenals because they kick out adrenaline and cortisol and by the way are involved in salt appetite there's a reason for that because you need that the adrenals can keep us going and there is no such thing as true adrenal burnout because the adrenals don't burn out you've got enough adrenaline in your Adrenals for two lifetimes but there is an adrenal insufficiency syndrome so that's a real thing it's rare but it exists but burnout seems to be in my mind
more related to psychological burnout and I'm not a psychologist but I'm a fan of the poet David White and he has this beautiful poem that is either entitled or somehow includes um the word wholeheartedness I think that where we recover ourselves is by relating to and Engaging with things and people that we wholeheartedly enjoy even if that is simply relaxation or gardening or drawing or maybe just doing nothing for a bit I think burnout is very real and I think burnout as pushed through the filter of what we've been talking about earlier in the evening
is when we are not getting periodic experiences if you will of delight or excitement or a sense of Meaning and and here we're starting to drift into kind of abstract you know not everyone gets to do a job that they Delight in um certainly there were years where I didn't Delight in the sorts of things I had to do for certain jobs but finding some areas of life that create those neural energy states that carry forward that Wick out into other aspects of what we're doing and I don't know if I made this point clear
enough earlier but those moments of you know really Feeling excited about something in a way that really lights you up in particular are not just about that moment and seeking out more of those moments but in the way that it lifts our nervous system the way it carries us forward and allows us to do the other things that we have to do which frankly sometimes can be um not as exciting or even drudgery so if you've burnt out um I know the feeling I I have burnt out before and I encourage a combination of Rest
but also exploration of things that can evoke that kind of internal excitement or sense of meaning and one has to be a bit of a forager in in order to do that try new things and that can be difficult um but burnout is real and I encourage you to take it seriously because unfortunately typically what follows burnout is depression and then um things can really uh run ashore what types of food do you try to eat every day and why oh I love to eat um I do I Love to eat I even like the
mere Act of chewing so much so um it just yeah um that's why I buy those Persian cucumbers you just munch on those things all the time the um I tend to eat according to how alert or asleep I want to be it violates a few kind of popular thoughts about nutrition but that's what I do uh generally for me I like water caffeine um in early in the day and eat sometime around 11:00 or noon I'm not really Strict about these things if I'm hungry I'll have a plate of eggs in the morning or
something or a handful of macadamias by the way the macadamias down in Australia are awesome on they're so good in the states they like Infuse them with all these Palm kernel oils and stuff and so when I first tasted the ones and they taste good but they're I'm not like going to get into the seed oil debate I think a better ways to hang myself like with this micro microphone cord it's l Like you know I don't I guess I do sort of avoid the seed oils but you know I feel best um I love
the oh the macadamias see told you always find my way back the macadamias down here tastes as if they've been in infused with all sorts of stuff but then you look at the packaging it's just like macadamias and salt I don't know what is so good the coffee down here is amazing I know why it tastes so good it's so good the Produce I mean basically I eat like you guys gals I that's what I do that's what I do I basically eat meat and eggs and fruit and vegetables and I do like rice and
oatmeal and like there are people on social media tell you like oatmeal is going to kill you and I'm like if oatmeal were going to kill me I'd be dead like I eat so much oatmeal but that's not to say that some people feel better if they don't eat oatmeal I kind of find the nutrition debates to be kind Of like like funny they're so non-scientific they're funny but I also know that and here I have a theory that when you eat most of your foods from unprocessed or minimally processed sources something magical happens not
only are you let's say eating healthier foods quote unquote but we should Define healthier foods that for which their macronutrients proteins fats and carbohydrates also and calories tend to Be matched pretty well with high micronutrient content something that doesn't exist in highly processed foods right but probably also better for the planet but which is great I'm not being planet's important we want to keep that around the um but the other thing is that neurally when you eat Foods as their main ingredients which is not say you can't have a soup or a stew or a
salad every once in a while but closer to their original form and I do cook my Meat unlike other people on the internet the there's the guy eating chicken raw for like 28 days I was in the barber shop the other day they're like what about the raw chicken guy and I was like not a good idea like the so when you eat Foods in their kind of basic state the brain can associate The Taste with the macronutrient and amino acid cont content and micronutrient content and we know that the gut is sensing a lot
of That unconsciously subconsciously we know this through neural Pathways beautiful work being done by people here in Australia and in the states and elsewhere about the signaling of for the gut is actually tasting the food or it's it's measuring the amount of amino acids fatty acids Etc and so when you eat Foods in their kind of more original form nonprocessed or minimally processed it's clear that the brain starts to develop a more specific Intuition or Appetite for what you need you start to know oh like I need some fat or I need some protein or
I'm crave you start to Crave the things according to what's actually in them and highly processed foods and Rich combinations of foods don't allow you to do that so and that hasn't really been explored there's a little bit of work that's coming out on this by Dana small at Yale and um Kevin Hall elsewhere you know but it's we sort of starting to get there so this is why I believe when people go on these elimination diets where they like I'm only eating meat like the lion DED or whatever like Costello meat only and like
that they many of those people quote unquote feel better I think because they're starting to form a relationship with the nutrient content of the food the chloric content and the taste in a way that after that they like see a cracker and they're like no you know they can kind of reset the neural Circuits around appetite and all of this stuff but for me because I'm an omore like a normal person and sorry no disrespect to the carnivores I just kind of like the blood drinking like liver chomping car like come on like the um
I'm going to catch a bullet or like a you know someone's going to thr a bone at me so I I I fear them more than I fear the vegans they'll just be like a bunch of you know the vegans will attack you online but in person they'll just Like hit you with a parsley so it's not as you know the the um I'm going to get myself in trouble the um I'm an omav War like most people and the and so for me between 11:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. is typically when to eat but
sometimes eat at 9: I didn't eat before this cuz I don't like to eat right before I do this sort of thing so I'll eat a meal before I go to sleep tonight I'm not super strict about this stuff I'm not super super strict but in General it's some sort of intermittent is fasting thing and it tends to be Meat and Fish and eggs and love parmesan cheese and coffee and oranges and cucumbers and lettuce and and and food like food and pasta and um and I I suppose that having done that for so many
years I do you know adjust it like if I do a hard resistance training workout I'll eat a few more starchy carbohydrates to replenish glycogen but but I tend to avoid extremes with all That stuff and I love a great slice of pizza and I've sort of lost my taste for sweets but occasionally I'll I'll do that and I love vegetables like croissants and things of that sort so but you know all kidding aside um you know I do try and eat pretty healthy every day with a ton of info out there about health and
wellness Andrew I love the way uh nikil um what are your top health and fitness style recommendations for someone who has a busy lifestyle This is a great question and you know I get accused a lot I can accuse a lot of a lot of things um but you know one of them is well no one can do all this stuff but we talked about it earlier we do the best with what we have and the time we have try and get some bright sunlight even through cloud cover especially through cloud cover every day I
try and dim the lights or you know get under red light not Red Light Panel necessarily but just put in like red Party light I've done that this whole trip when we traveled in the evening just it's just a red light bulb there it's not fancy just a red light bulb screws in this little pedestal turn that on all the other lights go off and then makes for a nice easy taper into sleep because you know the the blue the blue and bright fluorescent lights those short wavelength light really is activating for the nervous system
especially late in the day so light is a Big one for me try and get a few walks in I think if you were going to exercise just two days a week it's very clear that those two days per week should be include some resistance training exercise and then maybe follow up with some easy cardiovascular training or something like that um hopefully one could get out in about maybe three days or or exercise sometimes not outside one can only exercise indoors maybe three days per week so I don't think it takes A ton of time
necessarily but that might even be excessive so with busy lifestyle I think it's those little carve outs of five or 10 minute walk um when we had Andy Galpin on the podcast and did a series and by the way Andy's launching his own podcast through our podcast um Channel um which is scom uh which Rob and I started um he's got the perform podcast with Andy Galpin he talked a little bit about these exercise snacks these are actually pretty cool um in the Sense that if you just take 60 seconds and do you know like
an near allout you know run up the stairs but be careful or jumping jacks for a minute as fast as you can that raises heart rate in a way and adjusts your physiology in a way that really does carry over to better performance including even things like V2 Max in other endeavors so it's probably not the case that that's all you should do but even small bouts of exercise can be very very valuable um so That that's reassuring and then I am a huge fan of non-sleep deep breast AKA Yoga Nidra which means yoga sleep
which is just lying there as uh we talked about before but it's slightly different than what we were talking about for creativity lying there and deliberately inducing using your mind to deeply relax the different muscles of your body stay calm long exhale breathing this kind of thing there's a 10-minute nstr with my voice on YouTube that you can simply Find and at zero cost there are many with other voices female voices Etc that you can find on YouTube as well and if you don't like those we're soon to release on our human lab Clips Channel
a number of different meditations and nsdr again all zero cost of 10 minute 20 minute 30 minute I would say that for limiting stress improving sleep and restoring mental and physical Vigor nsdr is perhaps the best tool out there and again I didn't create it I Simply took yoga Nedra I started calling it nsdr and by the way I was aware that I was going to upset some people when I did that I was not trying to appropriate anything I promise the problem was I would talk about Yoga Nidra and studies of yoga showing that
it replenishes dopamine in the basil ganglia can restore mental and physical Vigor and then people would back away from me slowly like yoga I don't want to do yoga I'm like no no This is Yoga sleep you don't actually move and they're like well that sounds pretty different and I'm like I know it sounds different I'd go on and on and then I just decid to call it non-sleep deep rest and when you call something what it is or what it can accomplish you move away from nomenclature and um I have very mixed feelings about
renaming things but I figured as long as I don't call it like the huberman protocol at least I'm distancing myself from it and It's a zeroc cost protocol so non-sleep deep rest is valuable for restoring mental and physical Vigor it can potentially help offset sleep that you didn't get it can help you fall back asleep at night if you do in the middle of the night it can help you get better at falling asleep if you do do it during the day I did it for 20 minutes just prior to coming out here I always
do that um prior to any event that or thing that requires a lot of focus this kind Of thing otherwise the jokes I tell are really you know just not okay and um so I do think it's quite valuable and it's something to explore at what age would you consider testosterone replacement therapy wow and what are the risk versus benefits of starting it sooner rather than later we got shouts well so one of the major effects of testosterone replacement therapy is is spontaneous shouting out in crowds um just kidding Um you know there've been number
of studies of testosterone in males and females by the way females have more testosterone than they do estrogen you know that right per deciliter of blood higher testosterone than estrogen just on average on average they tend to have lower testosterone than men per deciliter of blood so it's important in both males and females um I think you're referring James to the use of so-called trt in males but I'll touch on it in Females as well because lowd dose trt therapy oop sorry I just did that I get in trouble in in if you say like
PCR reaction ATM machine is there a name for that okay T the T at the end of trt is therapy testosterone replacement therapy testosterone replacement therapy technically means that someone's levels prior to that therapy fall outside the reference range so low lower than 300 nanograms per deciliter typically or Some other array of symptoms at and they replace it replacement therapy many many people nowadays in my opin opinion for far too many and Too Young take what I call testosterone augmentation therapy where their levels are within normal range and then they take it to get out
of range and look there's nothing wrong with that I'm not going to tell you what to do I'm not a cop you do what you want to do um there a couple things trt or tat augmentation and here we're just Setting aside high do steroid use um cuz that's just a whole other Biz and and frankly the bodybuilders will get upset but um but I'll get away from you because you'll be waddling and I'll be running um the that's just like a whole other business so um testosterone replacement therapy is um widely used nowadays I
think far too young basically it will lower your sperm count dramatically if you're a male so So you'd have if you want children um you want to conceive children you will need to offset that by taking something like human chonic gonadotrope and HCG um which is available synthetically they used to sell it in the form of pregnant women's urine um there was a black market for it we could really go off into the sticks with this question um my in my opinion if you want to explore this I would say first get your behaviors right
sleep exercise Nutrition stress control training get that right don't train too hard or too long get that right then there are certain supplements and we've talked about this on the podcast some are debated a little bit more than others things like zinc Tong Ali Etc that can probably provide a boost Beyond normal without shutting down the goads um and then and only then if you feel you really want to do this and it's in line with your ethics or you know I don't Know if you're playing a drug tested sport Etc um then just minimal
effective dose and then if you want to have kids someday or if you don't know if you want to have kids someday make sure you're taking the appropriate things to offset that that's basically what I would say and the major effect of testosterone in men and women is not libido per se and it's not aggression per se it tends to make people more like them if you're a jerk You're going become more of a jerk if you're calm you're become more calm if you're kind you're GNA I don't know if you become Kinder but there
actually been studies of altruistic behavior and administration of testosterone by nasal spray or other means and frankly people will become more they'll become competitively altruistic um I think the major effect also could be described as it makes effort feel good so um we could go on And on about this I'll just toss in that nowadays there's a lot of excitement about peptides I'm going to do an episode about peptides a lot of the young people I run into um here and in the states are like what are you what are your thoughts on bpc c57
what do you think about this peptide or that peptide peptides are simply small proteins um amino acid chains um so there are lots of things called peptides but typically these are things that increase growth Hormone that keep in mind that anything that increases growth hormone will increase the growth of any and all tissues so if you have a small tumor that you're not aware of that will grow also so just keep in mind if you're going to tickle these Pathways you're you're playing some with some serious biology but there are safe ways to do it
sorry you said What are the benefits of star it sooner rather than later uh start it Later what are the physiological and practical differences between breathing techniques can do Wim Hoff and the physiological side relation stress Focus Etc okay we can make this pretty straightforward first of all I know whim we go way back to 2015 I went over to the Pyrenees and visited him and hung out and then brought him to the states and you wiim Hof breathing is Tumo breathing but in science speak we call it cyclic hyperventilation it's just Cyclic hyperventilation so
um if you inhale vigorously and long your heart rate goes up if you exhale vigorously and long heart rate goes down through a process called respiratory sinus arhythmia volume of the heart changes when you breathe in versus breathe out speed at which blood moves through the heart changes as the blood gets bigger or smaller according to inhales exhales And basically the net effect is inhale heart speeds up a little bit exhale heart slows down a little bit so so if you do Wim Hof AKA Tumo breathing and you inhale vigorously and let it fall out
of your mouth and then you're going to increase heart rate increase autonomic activation Etc if you do a pattern of breathing like inhale inhale long exhale inhale inhale long exhale cyclic Sighing over time you're going to slow the heart rate down and you're going to calm down that's just how it works so when I hear about box breathing or now you hear about box breathing okay it's relatively equal ratios of inhale exhale so a little bit of pause in there that's the Box inhale hold exhale hold inhale hold exhale hold of varying durations depending on
your so-called carbon dioxide tolerance but at the end of the day you're maintaining kind of even Heart rate when you do big cyclic hyperventilation AK Wim Hoff Tumo breathing your increasing heart rate in autonomic arousal release of adrenaline do cyclic sighing a lot of exhales the opposite is true okay so that should give you a framework for thinking about breathing and how to apply different breathing techniques and get us away from some of the naming of things but I'm not trying to take anything away from so-called Wim Hoff breathing um by The way if you're
going to do Wim Hoff breathing be very very careful to not do cyclic hyperventilation or whm Hoff breathing and then do breath holds and don't do it and anywhere don't do that anywhere near water there have been cases of people drowning dying from combining cyclic hyperventilation and breathholds with water because it changes the threshold for shallow water blockout when you exhale a lot or when you Hyperventilate you remove a lot of carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide is the stimulus to gasp so what will happen is indeed if you do you're blowing off a lot of
carbon dioxide and you go right that's a whim exhale and then you hold and you go underwater yeah you'll hold your breath longer than you normally would but instead of feeling that impulse to breathe like the that gas reflex and you shoot for the surface you'll just BL Done so it's a serious thing and you want to be really careful to not combine cyclic hyperventilation and breath holds and especially both with cold water frankly any water exposure I always say don't do Wim Hoff Tumo or cyclic hyperventilation breathing even standing or seated in a puddle
okay so in response to stress it's really if you want to be more alert increase the Vigor and duration of your inhales if you want to be more calm Increase the duration of your exhales would you recommend that children also get morning sunlight yes and your pets too unless they're nocturnal pets right for anyone that had the not so smart idea of getting a hamster you realize they're nocturnal right they're going to run all night long on the wheel in fact rodents like to run on Wheels so much that hoppy Hofer at Harvard has shown
that if you put a Little running wheel like you know little wheels that the mice like to run in there in a field animals will run to the wheel and run in the field which tells you everything you need to know about rodents but really um children need that but obviously babies have sensitive eyes you you know we all can potentially hurt ourselves with sunlight and down here the UV index is very high when the sun is low in the Sky so-call low solar angle sunlight in the Morning and in the evening the UV index
and be mostly because of atmospheric interference but some other things as well it does it's not as damaging to the eyes that's why it's easier to watch a sunrise or a Sun closer to the Horizon it is to you know please don't stare at the sun in any case but an overhead Sun so I I think it's really important for circadian rhythms but of course kids need their sleep so if they're going to sleep in a little bit that's fine just Get them outside afterwards it's the staying inside and staying on a phone that's problematic
and then leaving that room at noon really shift your circadian rhythm in unhealthy ways and that's true for children perhaps especially true for children as a father what can I be doing to give my children the best start in life what a great question I hope my parents ask that um they abandoned me at the pet store no I'm kidding they didn't they didn't abandon me they didn't Abandon me at the bed store um if they did I didn't notice I was among my friends the fishes and the birds um I think this question probably
should be I'm going to I'm going to edit just say what can we all be doing to give our children the best start in life and and what does that mean for those of us that have already started in life um so first of all we have a episode of The hubman Lab podcast with an absolutely magnificent guest Dr Becky Kennedy Um coming out on I guess it' be Tuesday down here so this coming week all about this and you know we could talk about things for learning encourage them to play an instrument um I
would think that we perhaps should teach kids some tools to modulate their stress in real time like physiological size I don't see why not um I certainly wish I had tools to regulate my stress when I was younger now they didn't teach us that stuff they didn't know it where it the knowledge Was there but as I mentioned earlier they didn't teach us that stuff they taught us all sorts of stuff in high school health and stuff I mean they they taught us that you know drunk driving's bad um they taught us it just takes
one sperm one time they um they taught us all sorts of stuff but they didn't teach us the uh this business of physiological size or stress thresholds or about the intering L cortex because a lot of that stuff wasn't known or just wasn't Discussed so I think some tools to control one 's inner landscape play music I certainly am going to encourage the exploration of these energy states that you know letting kids explore I mean they need rules and Regulation and boundaries of course but there's this concept of impingement that I find very interesting that
the classic psychologists used to talk about you know when we when a kid says they like something or don't like things like yes They need to be doing certain things for their normal life progression but kids are very good sensors of what works for them and what doesn't work for them we don't want to impinge on certainly their healthy loves and desires things that don't endanger them right things that are really reflect their unique loves and desires don't force them to play Suzuki violin if they want to play the drums right let let them bang
on stuff and let the kids that want to play Suzuki violin do that don't make them play the drums so these impingements actually I think are are problematic they they lead to a lot of Confusion And if anything else they you know they they take us away from that unique wiring to be our own unique expression um Becky Kennedy does describe a few key principles of parenting that I think are really interesting that extend to all kinds of relationships she talks about the main role of parenting and to some Extent all relationships is to create
boundaries and to make kids feel safe seems pretty good to me um the other kind of short list of two things and she describes how to do this in in ways that um are highly actionable is that every child I found this really interesting every child wants to feel real like they want to feel like they're real like they're seen they exist and they want to Feel safe and so that one of the things that really rung in my ears and still does from that episode recording again out this week is that when a kid
or an adult says something about how they feel that perhaps one of the best responses we can give them is you know I believe you like that it doesn't you're not saying that like you don't want to go to school don't go to school right we're not saying you don't you don't enjoy doing something don't do it or or you Want like a you know a fifth serving of candy like you can say like I believe you you know no um you know and so I think that a lot of it is is is you
know we get confused with terms like validation and listening I mean what I like so much about what Becky offers um and I'm I do hope to do a Child Development series and the not too distant future um what what I like so much about what Becky offers is that you know it boils down to simple Concepts like we want to be real which I guess is a kind of an analog for scene and we want to feel safe not unlike when we did the podcast series on Mental Health with Dr Paul kti he said
you know it's really about mental health is really about agency and gratitude but there are a lot of things that siphon up into those feelings or those moments of or that state of agency and gratitude so I I would say that's perhaps the most important thing is you Know boundaries make kids feel safe and then make them feel real like their feelings and and what they're reporting matters um and then of course the impingement thing becomes a little bit complicated because they do need boundaries so we have to constrain their wishes sometimes and their behavior
but we don't want to do it in a way that takes them away from that unique wiring that makes them who they are so they can become you know the the characters and People and professionals and creatives and scientists and Poets and just you know good people right everyday good people so that's the best answer I can provide at this time they're not going to give me another question but I can keep going just briefly if I may um by just first of all saying that um again I'm very very grateful for the opportunity to
convene with all of you here tonight I realized it was me speaking and you listening Except for the guy on testosterone and um and I and I certainly um you know I I can't really express it enough in words what um the podcast means to me you know it's uh it's a it's a bizarre uh it's a bizarre thing it's completely transformed my life it's um made it you know incredible um I never dreamed of anything like this but for me it's really not about hearing my own voice it's it's this compulsion that came at
an early age and and it's really my wish Frankly that um the tools the protocols the knowledge whatever it inspires you to do or to think um you know we don't have to agree on everything I would hope we don't agree on everything the ways we disagree um with me and with each other and with others that you know that we start maybe thinking about ourselves as through a lens of science um and think about health and and and really trying to meet those discussions with with the kind of benevolence and curiosity and You know
Vigor you know a good argument every once in a while it's healthy too um that it really deserves you know I think we're we're in very interesting and kind of sometimes scary time um I often feel scared frankly um because of what I see and and even my own position in this whole landscape I sometimes think like I feel like a lot of times things are just kind of hanging on by a thread but I actually have a lot of optimism I think our species is very Smart I think that um we've managed to navigate
tricky places before and I think that through the learning and teaching of things that work for us that we learned from this these kinds of things and from each other that pretty soon we're going to start to fill in the gaps between the silos that are the yoga Traditions the chiropractic massage health and fitness traditional medicine non-traditional medicine functional medicine I mean I really encourage all Of you to try and you know stand back from it all and try and identify the common themes that may exist across these things and and really try and identify
some of the the links and points of convergence more than the differences and and at the very least to explore things if you don't like them you know that's great and if you do to pass them on to other people um especially the behavioral tools that we all Harbor within us that I think can Really uh enhance our mental health and vigor um our physical health and hopefully our longevity too so I could go on and on but I really just want to say thank you so much for coming out tonight um this is our
last night in Australia and I'm certainly going to miss being here and we intend to come back again soon thank you so much for paying tuning into the podcast paying attention to and tuning into the podcast and for being Willing to learn you're all amazing students and you're also amazing teachers I learned from you all uh in comments and feedback so um if you have that please keep that coming and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in [Applause] science actually I've never done this before but because it's my last night here
I've I've always seen people do this and I've Never done it but I'm going to do it can we get the house lights up I want to get one of these like I'm going to do this as a video and you don't have to do it your faces will show up but don't worry we won't um it will on the internet but this is not for me I just want to I'm going to send my mother this okay there we go thank you that's on you thank you you made my mother very happy [Music]
