#700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain

Drinking is one of the few activities that if you don't partake, people assume or accuse you of having a problem—and that's just wild. Like, why would that be?

In the morning and throughout the day, your eyes are less sensitive to light, and you need more of it in order to get what you need ... At night, your eyes are for more sensitive to artificial lighting, and you need far less of it in order to disrupt your circadian system in bad ways, disrupt your mental health.

I think, going forward... success is largely going to be determined by who has the most self-discipline.

People, and in particular children, who overuse mouth breathing as opposed to nasal breathing have changes in the structure of the face that what, to be quite direct, makes them far more unattractive than if they were to mouth breathe.

If you breathe through your mouth as opposed to your nose, first of all, you bring in less oxygen ... So, you're effectively putting yourself into a state of apnea, which is bad during sleep. And guess what? It's bad during waking states, also.

The nasal microbiome is particularly well-suited to scrub or capture and destroy viruses, bacteria, and even some fungal infections. So, in other words, when you're breathing in through your mouth, you're more susceptible to infections.

When we exercise... it creates a cocktail that then crosses into the blood-brain barrier that then creates a milieu of general growth health, or at least maintenance of cognitive tissue, that's there.

I'll mention it now that as an alternative to alcohol consumption, get your friends together around a fire. By the way, the fire light, the light from fire, does not disrupt the circadian system ... Candlelight, moonlight, fire light, as bright as it is, it's just very low Lux. So, that's where great things happen.

Sandra Khan is an expert in craniofacial function and structure and the fact that if your parents and you did things right, you should be able to place your entire tongue on the roof of your mouth with your mouth closed.

The entire field of orthodontia—things like braces, things like headgear, things like retainers—are the by product of poor breathing and let's just say overconsumption of soft foods in place of hard foods behavior.

When we do load-bearing cardiovascular exercise, so running as opposed to swimming... there's a hormone that's literally secreted from bone... called osteocalcin ... It can cross the blood-brain barrier, and we know that it plays an active role in promoting not just new cell production... but enhancement of nerve health and function in the hippocampus...

There's so there's so many better ways to have a good time that alcohol isn't necessary.

If people look at red light for 2 or 3 minutes once or twice a week, in particular early in the day, it can offset some age-related vision loss.

If one is constantly moving their attention from one thing to the next, it undermines the stability of all the circuitry in the brain that's responsible for prolonged focus.

I'll wager both upper limbs, anyway, that many, many, many of the mental health issues that we see nowadays in young people and in adults is the consequence of disrupted circadian rhythms.

I've started doing a practice of 20 minutes a day of just sitting and eyes closed typically—sometimes it's right as I wake up, but usually it's not—and just trying to think about certain topics and hold those topics in the kind of linear way or sometimes just letting stuff geyser up.