#521: Dr. Andrew Huberman A Neurobiologist on Optimizing Sleep, Performance, and Testosterone

The simple behavior that I do believe everybody should adopt... is to view, ideally sunlight, for 2-10 minutes every morning upon waking. So, when you get up in the morning, you really want to get bright light into your eyes because it does two things. First of all, it triggers the timed release of cortisol, a healthy level of cortisol, into your system, which acts as a wake-up signal and will promote wakefulness and the ability to focus throughout the day. It also starts a timer for the onset of melatonin.

That cocktail of 50 mg of apigenin, 300-400 mg of magnesium threonate or bisglycinate, and 200-400 mg of theanine, for me, has been the best way to consistently fall asleep quickly and stay asleep most if not the entire night, which, for me, is about 7-8 hours.

Hydration is a big one for cognitive function, and it's one that people often overlook. But the simple rule is... your body weight in pounds divided by 30 will give you the number of ounces of water that you should drink about every 20 minutes when exercising or doing mental work.

In the morning and during the day and anytime you want to be alert, you want to flip on as many overhead lights as possible. This is because these cells in the eye that trigger activation and alertness of the rest of the brain and nervous system reside in the lower portion of the eye; they view the upper visual field. Now, the inverse of all this is also important—as you approach the evening or night time and you want to go to sleep, that is the time to start avoiding bright lights of any color, not just blue light, and, if possible, to place whatever lights are present in your environment lower in your visual field.

Bright light exposure of any wavelength between the hours of about 11 PM and 4 AM cause a serious disruption in the dopamine system.

A 20-minute non-sleep deep rest protocol after a bout of intense focus or intense attempt to learn anything... accelerates plasticity by about 50%. So, you are learning faster, much faster, and retention of that information lasts much longer.

Our light-viewing behavior has perhaps the strongest effect on our levels of alertness and our capacity to fall asleep and get a good night's sleep.

Within 30 minutes of waking up, get bright light exposure in your eyes, and not from a phone or from a screen because it won't be sufficiently bright; get it from sunlight, and if you can't get it from sunlight, you can use one of these light pads ... You can find these very inexpensively online, and that's going to work great. I just set it at my desk in the morning if it's very overcast, and I'll work.

Anytime you emphasize exhales, in other words, making them longer than your inhales, you are slowing the heart rate down; you're calming your system. Anytime you emphasize inhales, you make them more vigorous or longer than your exhales, you're speeding up your heart.

Taking 1,000 mg per day of EPA, essential fatty acids, not just fish oil, but getting above that threshold is as effective as antidepressants in double-blind placebo-controlled studies.

Most people would benefit from waking 90 minutes to 2 hours after waking to ingest their caffeine.

Magnesium threonate and magnesium bisglycinate are able to be transported across the blood-brain barrier more readily than other forms of magnesium.

The important thing to realize is that both vision and breathing have a profound and very rapid effect on our internal state of mind and body—and it runs in both directions. Our internal state could be triggered by a text message or hearing something that somebody says that drives changes in our breathing and our vision, but our breathing and our vision can also cause changes in our internal state.

Most of the concentrations of melatonin that are in supplements are 10 to 1000 times what the endogenous internal levels would naturally be. So, people taking melatonin are seeing dramatic effects, but you're taking super physiological levels of melatonin.

Get your biology right. Start with sleep. Figure it out. Figure out how to get your sleep right because it's the fundamental layer of mental health.

You can't have stress without anxiety, you can't have trauma without stress, but you can have stress or anxiety without trauma.

Things that make us feel more vital—like testosterone, DHT, growth hormone—generally will shorten your life.

The vision and our visual system is perhaps the strongest lever by which we can shift our state of mind and body.

Almost all harm, almost all self-harm and unfortunate things in life, are the consequence of a poorly regulated autonomic nervous system.