LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman Question & Answer in Portland, OR

[Music] welcome to the hubermann lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life [Music] i'm andrew huberman and i'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at stanford school of medicine recently i had the pleasure of hosting two live events one in seattle washington and one in portland oregon both entitled the brain body contract where i discussed science and science related tools for mental health physical health and performance my favorite part of each evening however was the question and answer period that followed the lecture i love the question and answer period because it gives me an opportunity to hear directly from the audience as to what they want to know most and the need to get into a bit of dialogue so we really clarify what are the underlying mechanisms of particular tools how best to use the tools for things like focus and sleep we also touched on some things related to mental health and physical health it was a delight for me and i like to think that the audience learned a lot i know that many of you weren't able to attend those events but we wanted to make the information available to you therefore what follows this is a recording of the question and answer period from the lecture in portland oregon i hope you'll find it to be both interesting and informative i'd also like to thank our sponsors of these live events the first is momentous supplements which is our partner with the hubermann lab podcast providing supplements that are of the very highest quality that ship international and that are arranged in dosages and single ingredient formulations that make it possible for you to develop the optimal supplement strategy for you and i'd also like to thank our other sponsor which is inside tracker which provides blood tests and dna tests so you can monitor your immediate and long-term health progress i'd also like to announce that there are two new live events scheduled the first one is going to take place sunday october 16th at the wilton theater in los angeles the other live event will take place wednesday november 9th at the beacon theater in new york city tickets to both of those events are now available online at hubermannlab.com tour that's hubermanlab.com tour i do hope that you learn from and enjoy the recording of the question and answer period that follows this and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music] [Applause] what are the current best practices for post tbi traumatic brain injuries for those of you that aren't familiar with tbi especially long-term multiple etc thoughts on hyperbaric oh i'm so glad you asked this danny mortgage and his treatment for tbis okay tbi now one thing about tbi and concussion everyone thinks football guess what most of the tbi is not football there aren't that many football players they're just large so they stand out there might be a few here this evening of course football players are a concern when it comes to tbi most head injuries are going to be construction workers have you ever seen the hard hats they wear those i don't even know if they are just there for show it doesn't make sense and that we actually have a lab at stanford that's focused very hard on trying to solve this problem so construction workers car accident bicycle accidents portland amazing city to cycle i'm frankly afraid to cycle you're a small moving object around these big objects and people are staring to their little aperture on their phone while driving i mean whatever happened to that by the way of not texting while driving somehow that just disappeared it's like it really has just disappeared there was all this science showing that it's worse than drunk driving and look tbi well the basic rules of the don'ts apply if you get a head injury don't get a second a head injury but that often isn't feasible for people that you know need to work continue working construction or that are struggling what do we know well this is a great opportunity for me to distinguish modulatory foundational tools from things that directly change your brain and nervous system the way that you want to what do i mean by modulatory we hear so much and there's so many studies showing that great sleep quality nutrition good social interactions avoiding chronic stress and on and on and on are important for everything reduced they're related to alzheimer's they're related to adhd i mean we could do thousands of podcast episodes just returning to the same 10 things sleep not don't stress too much or too long good social connection avoid toxic people eat good food not too much processed food we could have an argument all night and i don't want to have one about whether or not it's mainly plants or this i mean on the inter this is you know obviously eating high quality food is something that we should all be doing which foods you select is a topic that is very barbed wire and i can give only my opinions all of that modulates your brain function but it doesn't mediate or change anything directly it's setting a foundation of what's possible so we should all be doing those things and especially people who have tbi now this question relates to hyperbaric chamber hyperbaric chamber there's very interesting data it's essentially hyperoxygenation of the brain for very brief periods of time i think the data on hyperbaric chamber and tbi are very encouraging the problem is much in the way that a few years ago cryo was only available in a few places and now people are doing ice baths and cold showers on their own it's hard to find a hyperbaric chamber they aren't just laying around and they don't have them at spas typically and they are quite expensive so yes they there are interesting and important data i think on hyperbaric chamber you definitely want to work with a physician or somebody who is very skilled a practitioner who's very skilled in hyperbaric chamber they do seem to improve brain function by hyper oxygenating the brain for periods of time seems to improve a number of things but above all it seems to improve the quality and duration of sleep which indirectly allows the brain to repair itself because as i mentioned earlier brain repair occurs where brain change largely occurs in sleep so if you don't have access to hyperbaric chamber but you do have tbi what are some of the other data what do those point to well i go on and on and you don't have to get this from supplements you can get it from food but this threshold level of essential these epa essential fatty acids there are now so many data so much data on the valuable role of these essential epa fatty acids thresholds being somewhere between one and two grams per day of the epa so much so actually that there are now prescription forms of epa that doctors are starting to prescribe for people with tbi although for most people you can get this through you can look up and we've done podcast episodes about different ways to access this also functions as an antidepressant equally good believe it or not in clinical trials to ssris it once one gets over the one or basically two grams per day of the epa that the resident expert on the internet about this is pretty extreme about the dosages and that's dr rhonda patrick who by the way deserves a a nod of of acknowledgement and support because it turns out that before me or david sinclair or matt walker any of these guys were blabbing to the world about stuff that they had learned in the you know archives of science and in their laboratories the first person in was this woman named rhonda patrick as far as i know the first public-facing formerly trained scientist to start going on all these podcasts and risk her reputation and the kind of stuff that you deal with when you put your neck out there like that and and rhonda's i think terrific we don't agree on everything and it would be weird if we did but i think she's really been the proponent of of these higher doses of epas for tbi and for cognitive function into all ages we often hear about ways to increase dopamine however are there effective ways to decrease dopamine when you get too much of it for certain behaviors or habits we want to break katie ham i think is the last name thank you katie for your question yeah dopamine is a is a slippery slope and dr onolemki is the expert in this and we've had a lot of conversation she's one of my closer friends on the faculty unfortunately for her our coffee discussions often last four hours or more her poor patients and family here's the thing when dopamine is higher in your brain and body when you've deployed it through excitement or pharmacology or otherwise it tends to narrow your focus and make you seek more of it in that general theme that you happen to be focused on could be anything that's the scary thing about dopamine what can you do to control it and to reduce it well for those of you that are engaging in habits that are healthy maybe that doesn't require reducing dopamine how do you define healthy versus unhealthy well i think the simplest way to define addiction at least by my mind is that addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure and a good life is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure a rather simple definition and yet when we think about the biology of dopamine dopamine is not unique to one pursuit it's not unique to pursue the pursuit of sex or the pursuit of warmth when you're cold or cool environments when you're too warm or food or social media it's just a dumb molecule that puts you into this forward state of mass small visual aperture and a kind of obsessive like nature what can you do to counter that well the best thing to do is to not get into that state too long but if you do the best thing you can do is to try and switch off that system not through pharmacology but by not pursuing more dopamine the day after a big event the so-called postpartum depression named of course because of true postpartum after the delivery of a child that's quite common for people to get very very depressed there's a lot of neurochemical and hormonal adjustments that are occurring but different types of postpartum depression occur after a big party the monday blues the sunday blues the post-whatever blues the four-month mark in a relationship is typically when dopamine starts to drop i always tell people just wait i'm telling somebody very close to me right now just wait four months four months four months and also spend as much time with that person as possible i don't know what this deal is about not spending as much time with people i think people are afraid that the dopamine wave pool is just going to pull them both under i think they call that the escalator model of relationship where you just sort of find yourself in the relationship because you went through the stages without actually deciding on them in any event four months seems to be the stage in which the dopamine crescendo starts to relax a little bit not in a long distance relationship however we know this right anticipation is dopamine that positive anticipation and there's a whole beautiful science of this in the and i should say psychology of this there's a wonderful book actually uh the name of the book is embarrassing always i don't know why for me to say it's a it's by a psychologist called can love last which is a psychoanalytic book about this dopamine serotonin system and the kind of seesawing back and forth and the fact that in relationships people often just slam on the dopamine side of things and then they hit a wall and want to break up or they go into this like warm cozy fuzzy feeling thing and they go well i guess the exciting part is over and this idea that one could actually or two people or however many people were in portland could oscillate this seesaw i don't think that you want to use pharmacology to turn off the dopamine system but for people that have a hard time sleeping and that are really in a state of agitation and constantly obsessing the psychiatrist one of the oldest and most effective treatments is that the psychiatrists and this does have to be prescribed will use a very very low dose of a dopamine receptor blocker like haloperidol which is a used to treat schizophrenia a very low dose to shut down the obsession component smart well-educated psychiatrists know this as a useful tool but this is a one-time thing with a very low dose because having your dopamine blocked sucks it does not feel good but not being able to sleep and being in an obsessive mode also sucks so it's actually a very potent clinical tool so pharmacology should is one tool but really at the far end of things i believe that one should try and modulate their own dopamine by not rewarding oneself on a regular basis but only randomly random intermittent reward is truly the best schedule of reward hence slot machines and so on and you should engage random intermittent reward and i think this is also the way that we should train kids essential i call training kids you can tell i don't have kids the um you don't reward them every time i don't believe everyone should get a trophy every time nor should you always just reward the winners because those winners often we see cases of this high profile cases of this they often crash and burn i mean the number of high performers that crash and burn publicly and lord knows how many do it privately is remarkable it's because their dopamine system is all messed up so random intermittent reward is the schedule reward that we should impart on ourselves if you had 10 minutes a day to improve your brain plasticity what would you do and when would you do it richard conlon thank you well i'm going to say again i would absolutely anchor my physiology with morning sunlight viewing i can't help it do you know what's interesting i'll tell you very briefly you know what's special about morning sunlight this lowing solar angle sunlight i don't think i've talked about this much on social media or on the podcast there's a group at the university of washington a couple jay and maureen knights they run a lab together that sounds like a horrible thing but they do it and they get along very well and they've discovered that the cells in your eye the neurons that set your circadian clock make you alert during the day and make you sleepy at night and so on those cells respond best to yellow blue contrast and orange tones now this is important because when you go out in the morning even if it's not at sunrise but it's close to sunrise or you look at the sun in the evening what you'll see is yellow blue contrast or orange yellow blue orange that old thing from kindergarten or first grade that's not the color of light that you're going to see when the sun is overhead now this also is really interesting because artificial lights at least to my understanding even the daylight simulators have not picked up on this it's just about bright light someone ought to design something that can mimic this but nature has done this beautifully for us and so viewing low solar angle sunlight in the morning and in the evening is most effective because of those yellow blue contrast now here's the really wild thing those circuits that set your levels of alertness in sleep yes they respond best to yellow blue contrast but what that tells us is crazy what that means is that color vision was probably not related to color perception first because all of that is completely subconscious the pathways that do this are present in people who are pattern vision blind so what do i mean i mean that color vision likely evolved from a need to synchronize your internal state with the external world and the best stimulus in the outside world to do that is yellow blue contrast in other words our ability to detect color was first and foremost and we understand this based on evolutionary genomics and so forth to extract time of day information not color of fruit or color of skin or anything like that that's all secondary which is wild and crazy and this is yet another example of the way we think things work is not the way they work it's completely a 180 degrees opposite i'm just going to give you a little teaser i had a guest on the podcast he hasn't we haven't aired the episode yet his name is eric jarvis he works on speech and language he also was admitted in the alvin ailey dance company again who are these people he's a professor at the rockefeller anyway i learned from eric and you'll learn when that episode comes out that you only find elaborate speech and language in species that also engage in dance and song and the genomics point to the fact that song and singing came first and language came second and that led me during that episode of the podcast i wrote down in my notes i was listening to him talk and i wrote down in my notebook it's just scrawled in big letters it says i am so happy right now i was just blown away i couldn't and it makes so much sense when you hear it that the colors in the sky were what we our system is trying to extract not a perception of those colors in the sky because they're informing us about time and orienting us in time that song and the communication of emotional states would be simpler and more foundational than communication about specific patterns of language when you hear it suddenly it makes sense but of course we're human beings and unless you're eric jarvis or ally crum or anna lemke you think about all this stuff backwards as i do how can i navigate my way through taking supplements to optimize my health when my career demands army infantry prevent me from being able to establish consistent routines andrew yogan well thank you for doing what you do andrew so the consistent routine thing is tough you know here are the here's what i can say without going into a long two and a half hour episode about jet lag and shift work which we've done the most powerful way to anchor your brain and body in time is indeed viewing light sunlight at consistent times of day that's not something i made up we we know this based on a lot of work that dates back to the 1930s the second most powerful stimulus is going to be movement and changes in body temperature in particular increases in body temperature tend to make us alert and decreases in body temperature and to make us sleepy body temperature drops one to three degrees to get us into sleep why does a cold shower wake you up adrenaline is released and believe it or not your body is heating up internally to combat that cold unless you make yourself hypothermic so sauna hot baths to get sleepy cold showers ice baths etc to wake up sort of obvious when you hear it but it's counter-intuitive because you think oh heating up the body to wake up and cooling down the body to go to sleep so getting in the cold ought to cool me down but your body compensates just like if you threw a cold towel on a thermostat you'd crank up the temperature in the room and vice versa for heat okay so what do you do you want to try and use as many of these things light temperature exercise food when you eat is typically associated with waking very few of us are capable of eating in our sleep and then the other one is social activity and rhythms now the discombobulated person is going to be the person that has not aligned these things in a consistent way so while schedules vary and and i don't know your exact schedule what i can say is if you suddenly go from daytime behavior and sleeping at night to the so-called vampire shift as it's called in the military and suddenly you're up in the middle of the night and you're sleeping during the day then when you come off that shift what you want to do is try and combine as many of those same things at one time so it would be get your sunlight so go jogging without your sunglasses drink your coffee engage with other people and communicate eat a meal afterwards or as the case may be before try and bring as many of those things together the same time of day for a few days and pretty soon your system will map around that so the reason i encourage for those of us that are not doing shift work to try and be fairly consistent about sunlight viewing is it sets in motion everything else that's correct but if in terms of timing of eating appetite will follow when your alert will follow you'll start to learn your own rhythms when you can't control your schedule try and combine as many of those cues again light temperature exercise food social engagement into one period of time and try and lock that into a more or less a one or two hour period or plus or minus one or two hours at a particular time of day for at least two or three days and your schedule meaning your internal clocks will lock to that how is social media changing our brains thomas well you know you hear you hear all the terrible ways in which it's changing our brains and i think that again we go back to this thing as is it the aperture that we're looking at so is it the format that we're engaging in things or is it the content well the way i like to think about the phone is the way that we've been engaging with the phone and the laptop for that matter in staring into the small visual aperture each day is sort of like walking like this all day long right we have this amazing ability to shuffle our feet and take small steps or to take big strides to run to move i think that's the sagittal plane for movement i know it for the brain but it always mess up the pts are vicious people online by the way the pts and nutrition people i've learned to just not not say anything about that i'm not a pt and i'm not a physical therapist and they they do incredible work but they're like it's a very spirited crowd and the nutrition thing is really weird how they i mean it's just incredible you're either people are either throwing liver at you or they're throwing celery at you or they're if they're fasting or they're not fasting it's not in any case they social media and staring at a small visual aperture is changing our brains here's one way i know in which is changing our brains and then i'll tell you how to fix it if you stare or look at something to within two feet of you for a certain number of hours each day your eyeball actually gets longer and the visual image then is focused in front of your neural retina not onto your neural retina and you are becoming myopic nearsighted and if you look at things in the distance enough guess what your eyeball changes shape and your lens will focus appropriately the image onto your retina take some work kids that look at things up close too much and adults that look at things up close which become nearsighted and there's a beautiful set of clinical trials now where mainly in kids if kids get outside for two hours a day getting a lot of this uvb and blue light that we're told is so terrible for us but they get it from sunlight they actually can reverse myopia or reduce the incidence of myopia maybe even glaucoma although that's a big maybe so how much staring into a small visual aperture is too much i don't know but what we do know is that we are literally becoming myopic in terms of our vision and we're becoming myopic in terms of our cognition and then there's the whole business of what's actually contained in those tweets and those social media feeds and those news stories which frankly i feel like you lose either way whether or not you're in one political camp or another political camp you're upset about half of the information out there so i feel like it's you know i and i'm not not someone who knows how to talk about politics without stumbling i didn't do well in social studies um and this sort of thing it just never made sense to me it just felt like that the prize goes to the person who can shout the loudest and the most coherently for a moment so but i encourage of course people to be politically active and i vote but but the the content is tricky to navigate and i can't really speak to that except that it seems to be bothering everybody on one side or the other or in the middle and the format is something that we really understand and again i don't know of many people that are talking about this narrow visual window format thing it came up more during the lockdowns when we were all inside a lot and not looking out at a distance the data say really to try and get at least 10 minutes of long distance viewing so longer than 10 feet away from us for every 30 minutes of close-up viewing and not a lot of us are doing that if you're walking to your car looking at your phone you're definitely losing an opportunity what new piece of neurological research are you most excited about matteo monado um i think the the piece of neurological research that all right the weird stuff i've got this um colleague at stanford tony weiss cory and they're really into taking literally taking proteins from young blood and young spinal cord uh cerebral spinal fluid and putting it into older people and animals and they get younger that stuff's pretty wild um the fecal transplant stuff is pretty wild right you take the microbiome from one person and as it sounds you transplant it to somebody else and they take on the physical characteristics of the donor it's crazy until i talk to mike there's some shouts for fecal transplant nice i have never read the method sections of those papers i'm actually afraid to read the method sections i you know i would say this is not um neurological but the work from chris gardner and justin sonnenberg also at stanford it makes it sound like i just like stanford san francisco but these are the people i'm closest to and surrounded by there are excellent places everywhere of course um including ohsu and i'm not just saying that because i'm here actually close colleagues here and friends here at ohsu also amazing although that tram thing freaks me out it it's like i always just have all these ideas about what's gonna happen if that thing breaks but the the microbiome data are really interesting i never understood why getting your gut microbiome was important and it turns out it's because your gut actually makes many of the neurotransmitter precursors that your brain uses so that's pretty cool and i always thought it would be a complicated thing to get you got microbiome right but it turns out that it's fermented foods that seem to have the biggest effect there's all this argument about fiber and yes fiber is important and here i'm getting nervous talking about nutrition because the people are going to like come at me with fiber but the um but it's very clear from justin and chris's data that people who are getting four servings a day of these fermented foods whether or not it's kimchi or sauerkraut or kombucha that stuff actually seems to encourage a healthy gut microbiome and people feel better and their immune system works better and i like this because it actually um it resolves an issue which is that high-dose probiotics these very expensive need to be refrigerated things those actually can create brain fog and other issues they're for real severe cases of dysbiosis so i always like an instance where one can look to foods um which are good because i like to eat in order to resolve these issues um in terms of other neurologic issues i think that frankly i think the stuff on dopamine is is is fundamentally important so much addiction that's a severe case but also so much waxing and waning of of motivation and once you understand the dopamine system and you say what activities am i engaging in or pharmacology am i engaging in what am i doing to spike dopamine you start to go oh i get it the waves in this wave pool are too high and that's why i can't do this consistently and then you do the counter-intuitive thing of approaching things with a little less excitement but then you're able to do them more consistently it's like ah and maybe with some luck i'll end up finishing this book that i've been working on for four and a half years as a consequence because i can't seem to thinking about the wim hof method do you believe it how is it really working what process is happening in his brain oh boy um madison cameron everyone here probably familiar with wim hof um whose uh occupation on wikipedia used to be daredevil that was cool it's like evil knievel had it and wim had it i got a story about whim actually in 2016 i heard about this guy wim hof and i got a hold of him actually his children and i had one vacation that year and i flew to spain and i spent some time mountaineering with wim which was absolutely terrifying i almost lost a leg legitimately i tied in wrong on a bridge sling he told me it was good for me he told me to stare into the lizard's eyes and i st aired into the lizard's eyes i jumped backwards off this homemade bridge sling thing and i had the rope wrapped through my leg and it i came back with basically the tendon on the back of my knee exposed and sitting next to me on the plane was our vice dean of research at stanford and i had to explain to him what i was doing and why it was very embarrassing what did we do on that trip well a couple of things that will help me answer your question first of all when i arrived i suffered terribly from jet lag but the moment i got there wim did not say hello he literally told me to get into the ice bath and i did 10 minutes in the ice bath not because i'm tough but because he held me down in the ice bath he is indeed one of the strongest human beings he reminds me of the bus driver on the simpsons or the janitor excuse me no otto is the bus driver right that the janitor on the simpsons like oh that guy that's whim incredibly physically strong guy what do i think is going on with wim hof stuff well wim hof whether or not he understands it or not i always think he's sort of the bob dylan of breath work like everything he says seems to have some intuitive sense but you don't really understand what in the world he's saying he's going to come after me now we've got we've had a good but complicated relationship i'll just confess maybe someday we'll resolve that um no big scandal or story there just we communicate very differently um wim has a couple methods one is to hype deliberately hyperventilate there's also called tumor breathing my lab actually studies this we have a paper that i'm happy to share with you the results so they're not published yet where people do deliberate cyclic hyperventilation which as the name suggests you just breathe really deeply in and really deeply out 25 times or if your whim you say no no no no i just tell people here's how it works you go you do that 25 times and you heat up and you feel really agitated and that's because of adrenaline if you throw yourself into an ice bath or a cold shower adrenaline if somebody upsets you or you get a triggering text adrenaline adrenaline sounds like a terrible thing except when you deliberately induce it as my colleague david spiegel says there's a big difference between going into a state and you controlling your entry into a state so it's not just about the state you're in it's about how you got there and whether or not you had anything to do with it states of high adrenaline are very powerful when you self-induce adrenaline by cold shower cyclic hyperventilation aka wim hof breathing or tumor breathing you then have an opportunity to create a very distinct mind-body relationship we all hear that interoception and the mind-body relationship interoception just your ability to sense your heartbeats and what's going on in your body powerful right terrible if how you feel sucks so interoception is wonderful but when you're anxious it actually is more adaptive to be able to maintain your thinking and get yourself out of that anxious state so if you're trembling and your body's freaking out and your cheeks are flushing and you and your brain is following your bodily state well that's not good and if you're somebody and sadly this happens a lot where you've experienced a lot of trauma or typically this is people that bombarded with extreme criticism or physical abuse or other kinds of abuse during development they actually can seem very calm but internally they're freaking out in their head and they're just thinking just get me through this and they just go into a state where no one knows they're upset i've known people like this and it's eerie to me because i've never had that response to stress but it's very common and so we should learn and be careful about deciding that people are in one state or another based on their bodily or their mental response wim hof breathing cold showers etc are a great practice in my opinion because they allow you to spike your adrenaline and you can do that for instance by making the water colder if you want more adrenaline staying in longer if you want more adrenaline moving your limbs around in the water will give you more adrenaline because it breaks up that thermal layer it makes it a lot colder or doing 50 deep inhales and exhales that is very useful because then you have the opportunity to use that prefrontal cortex and to stop and sense all that adrenaline in your body and yet maintain clarity of mind and that's an absolutely powerful tool i would even call it a power tool and wim figured this out i don't know if you know this but the way that wim discovered all this was he was in deep grief about the tragic death of his wife she committed suicide jumped off an eight-story building just truly tragic death and he was in situation he had four children at the time now he has five and he was in a state of depression and he ended up going into the canal in amsterdam and it was very cold and it shocked his system and in that shock to his system which is caused by adrenaline he somehow was able to anchor his thinking and in a kind of genius of sorts wow i can intervene in my physiology with this strange activity and then he realized that breathing would do it as well you didn't have to get into cold water and then years later we discovered not we meaning my lab but other labs that when you get into cold water even just 60 degree water that there's a very long lasting increase in dopamine that is 2.5 x above baseline which is on par with some prescription drugs for increasing dopamine so when people laugh at me oh this cold water thing i get teased a lot on the internet i've heard on the internet that i that i eat sticks of butter which i never said i said i like i said i like butter i've been told i've been told all sorts of things i've been told i eat sticks of butter like i don't know why i've been told that i'm dead that was an interesting one that was one of the cooler ones the um but you know when i was going out there as a serious scientist and saying you know using deliberate cold exposure you can use all sorts of things or you know if you come to my lab i'll be happy to put you in vr and expose you all sorts of scary stuff where we can inject you with adrenaline or you can inject yourself with adrenaline and titrate that adjust the levels of that so it's a very powerful tool and i think that whim and others deserve credit for really tapping into that and as a last point there's a beautiful study in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences years ago using this deliberate cyclic hyperventilation thing 25 breath and then another group meditates and then they inject them both with e coli and the people injected with e coli who meditate get nauseous vomit diarrhea and they get a fever and the people who first far fewer symptoms if any why because adrenaline actually suppresses a lot of these innate immune responses in a way that's healthy in the short term this is why you can work work work work work or you can study for finals you can take care of a loved one and then you finally stop and rest and go on vacation and then you get sick stress activates your nervous system and in doing so it activates your immune system makes perfect sense when you think about it how would we ever go through famine if you're just getting flus whenever you're stressed we can deal with a lot my suggestion is if you're coming off a period of high stress to do some sort of adrenaline spiking behavior as you taper out of that stressful period not going strictly to massage vacation and yoga nidra all day long as i would reflexively do can red light therapy help treat exercise intolerance and fatigue and mitochondrial disease alison i'm glad you brought this up there you know this is another case where i thought oh no this red light stuff is crazy and then i went into the literature it turns out that in 1908 the nobel prize was actually given for photo therapy so there we go again and here you know i have this slide i chose not to use slides tonight but i have this slide that shows um ken keysi and the magic boss and stuff from the 1930s and psychedelics and people getting into cold water and then here we are 2019 2020 you've got wim hof and matt johnson giving people macrodoses of psilocybin we're right back where we were and one of my major goals is to really try and create some scientific discussion around these things this stuff is crazy on the face of it but there are mechanisms that are real that underlie it red light because it's long wavelength light longer literally as opposed to short wavelength light can penetrate through things like skin and can indeed change mitochondria one of the more impressive results on red light comes from my good friend glenn jeffrey's lab at the university of college london i've known glenn for years in a few years he was a basic vision scientist and a few years ago he started using red light he'd have people look at red light at a distance of about two feet in the morning so this is long wavelength light and sometimes even just take a flashlight a torch as they call it in england and cover it with a red film and they would look at this stuff for a few minutes each morning and it can reverse some forms of age-related vision loss and macular degeneration how we now know it can improve mitochondrial function in photoreceptors by reducing what are called reactive oxygen species here's what's interesting it only seems to work in people older than 40 and it seems to only work if you do it within the first three hours of waking and the incredible thing is you can do this for one or two minutes a week and some of the positive effects last as long as three weeks and it's affecting a very specific form of visual improvement which is acuity kind of fine detail stuff in my particular wavelength so particular colors and objects and things pretty impressive so yes red light can improve mitochondrial function to the photoreceptors if you are going to try and do this stuff don't put it too close i don't have any affiliation in any red light panel companies so i can't say anything there they are rather expensive nowadays people are putting red light everywhere and i do mean everywhere people are putting red light on their stomach for improving ovarian function whether or not i can penetrate isn't clear to me all the way down there people are trying to do this uh i have a friend i won't name him recently he told me he's really into the red light therapy he's putting it on his testicles to try and increase testosterone but he told me that after he handed me the red light true story my team knows who this is it's no one on my team thank goodness i was like oh that's super interesting i actually don't think you want to contact the red lights directly to your skin so red light is powerful i don't think we have aside from the vision protocol i don't think that it's clear which protocols are best i will say if you're into red light infrared sauna typically those don't get hot enough typically if you want to get the benefits of sauna you want to get between 80 and 100 degrees celsius which is 176 to 210 or 208 fahrenheit and i i don't actually do the conversion in my head and memorize it you mentioned the consequences of blasting your brain with too much dopamine is it possible to overdo ice baths while following the same line of thinking will you experience extreme low in dopamine with too many ice baths lucy thank you for the question any behavior that spikes adrenaline you will eventually get better at tolerating it you will become cold adapted and you will become comfortable at high adrenaline states and you just have to ask yourself this it's just like lifting weights in the gym or running you need to leave some space for improvement so if you run as people do and you do your half merit your 5k then your 10k then your half marathon maybe a 10k is a half marathon i don't know but anyway then you're doing your marathon then you're doing ultras that are 50 miles and 100 miles i mean eventually you're going to start doing damage right and eventually you look at every ultra runner and typically these are people who are very much on the dopamine pursuit system i mean i don't think that he would mind my my good friend and a podcaster who i have tremendous respect for is you know rich roll amazing human being and also has an amazing story about addiction he was an alcoholic i'm not sharing anything that he hasn't already shared in this amazing book finding ultra you know he got really into running running running all the time and you know there's a dopamine history there for him some of us can use ice baths so consistently and making it so cold and doing them longer and longer that indeed you're playing with the dopamine system is it bad well it depends on what you're trading that in for you know at the expense of what as a giving up cocaine yeah great stick with the ice bath but you know you can only make it so cold and you can only stay in there so long before you become wim hof right and it worked out for whim but there's really only one vim hof and in general that's that speaks to a larger theme which is i love the idea of people using tools and understanding mechanism i mean of course i love that it's what i talk about and think about so much of my my life but for most of us we don't make a living doing those things and so i do think that the ideal situation is to have behaviors and tools that you intersperse throughout your day and throughout the week for instance i think three times a week is fine for the ice bath no one said you had to do it every day but you should see sunlight every morning if you can just because if you miss a day your system will be fine just spend twice as long outside the next day seriously because it's a slow integrating system but you know for most of these high intensity things the less often you do them the more powerful they are in fact if you get into a very hot sauna for three four excuse me 30 minute sessions on one day so you go 30 minutes get out for five minutes 30 minutes get out for five minutes three minutes get out from it two hours a day in the song that's a lot of sauna but the growth hormone released from that type of protocol is a 16x impro increase in growth hormone this has been measured in humans whereas if you do it every day or three or four times a week you get diminishing returns on that so i actually am a big fan of doing really intense stuff only every once in a while this is also why i only take one long run per week or one long hike first of all i don't have time for it i'm not an ultra runner i got other things to do and second of all it's a strong stimulus i'm sore until tuesday or i don't want to run until tuesday anyway i actually think that's fine and i actually encourage kind of more healthy rational schedules of these kinds of behaviors there's no rule that says you have to do something every day even if you're trying to engage neuroplasticity you can learn french or an instrument by practicing three times a week as long as your practice is very focused right daily perhaps would be better but very few of us have the opportunity to do things every day consistently and i really want to encourage a more balanced approach before working through thatcher what's the base oh goodness gracious the skateboarders are always in the house my first non-biological family was a skateboarding community when i i i've great relationship with my parents now but because there was a time when there was no one to go to soccer games or do any of that stuff the skateboard community took me in because there were no parents involved it was great there were no referees or coaches because i didn't like authority and it was it was awesome and there was no nutritional plan you drank your slurpee and you sat on the curb and it was fantastic i don't do that anymore but the skateboarding community is one that i've remained close with um i did write for thrasher under a different name while i was a postdoc to make some extra cash um you won't find those articles anywhere i hope um they're not very good and uh best skater i was involved in it enough that i'd this only makes sense to like three people in the audience but i had a decent heel flip i could nollie better than i could ollie and i was never very good and i just other more skateboarders in the audience what i will say though is you have to be very careful with skateboarders because i don't want to claim that i was any good any any um success that i had was out of sympathy of others for letting me hang around it was a it's a great community and it gave me great appreciation for indeed communities of kids that don't have uh you know structure and and sports leagues and teams and all that kind of stuff nowadays it's it's actually a much different landscape and i have to also say what it's really amazing to see all the incredible um girls and women skateboarders also there were none it's olympic sport now for women and girls and for and and it's an olympic sport for for boys and men too so it's um it's awesome to see that community okay what are your favorite brain hacks for doing hard things ranging from cold exposure to getting through getting through selection hobie darling thanks for the question yeah um hard things well i'll i'll be honest i learned how to hack into my adrenaline system a long time ago through the worst possible mechanism which is that i would set up battles in my mind i would i would get into competition with people imagined or real or i would get into states of fearing uh shame and um you know screwing up so i would you can this is what a lot of people do i think you end up scaring yourself into trying to do the hard thing and it works the problem is it it feels rather um like a downward spiral because those negative states of mind work to liberate adrenaline and get you in in through hard things so being you know as a kind of rebellious kid you know resistance was if someone told me i couldn't do something i was like yeah try me um this kind of thing and i as i mentioned before i wasn't crazy about authority and so that was the method for a long time and then then i started reading oliver sax's books and i started learning from people who seem to access things through this whole love thing though and i tried that love and kindness meditation thing and that didn't work and what i started doing was i actually i'll just tell you when i before i came out here tonight and before i do anything challenging i i just actually like to imagine the people that have supported me it's a it's a weird tool i don't think i've ever shared i'm actually slightly embarrassed to share this out because there are only two things that make me cry and that's talking about my bulldog and talking about my graduate advisor and if i talk about any longer i'll probably cry but i think about them a lot um because they were kind of similar um they were kind of ornery and they were hard on me and and i adored them both and so i these days i try and think about people that uh that really that i love and so i have been trying to do this whole like doing things from a place of love thing and so for me that's animals and people uh that i love has and how's okay now now i am better move on so oh thank you okay they're telling me one more question so i'm going to answer one what do i fear how do you manage your fear kb oh gosh this is going to turn into a no one's going to be satisfied until i cry i get it i get it um i do cry but again about the things i mentioned before i realized something by the way we just recorded an episode on grief it hasn't come out yet uh fascinating topic um i realized at one point by the way i'll just give this away that um i thought i was really sad about losing them i thought i would tear up really easily because i was sad about them but then i realized this gosh i can't believe i'm gonna do this but i realized that feeling that i was feeling is the exact same feeling of love that i had when they were alive so grief is love and when you look at the literature it's it's basically that but your brain is freaking out because that map of knowing where people are in space and time grief is basically a remapping of the space where are they time when are they and then this kind of abstract map representation that we call closeness and grief is this process of like ripping ourselves off of that so in any event what do i fear talking about things like this um what do i fear um quite honestly my biggest fear the thing that would just make me feel just horrible is i i fear letting down my friends i have an amazing i love my family and they're wonderful but i have this in incredible relationship to friendship and um i just i adore my friends and i would sooner give up all my limbs and die before i would i would deliberately let them down so there you go that's what i fear most i also fear i've gone long and so my team has shut this down i just want to just briefly um uh two things uh first of all i i of course want to thank everyone for coming here tonight um i realize it's the middle of the week and to commit some hours of your life to thinking about these brain mechanisms we got pretty nerdy there for a minute um and hopefully the tools uh redeemed those uh who were only uh interested or mostly interested in practical tools but hopefully some of the insights about how you work were useful as well i do want to just make brief mention of the sponsors that made this possible because they did make this possible and we made every effort to try and keep the ticket prices manageable for people and thanks to inside tracker and momentous for making this possible and then of course i would be completely remiss if i didn't say thank you for your interest in science [Applause] thank you thanks so much everyone be sure to get home safely tonight