My belief is that if you give people a minimum of required nomenclature that they can digest pretty much anything if possible and wherever it's not hazardous to start with behavioral tools. If you read enough books, about people who have embarked on certain kinds of Journeys, and made certain choices that at some point, you might interject some of their personality in their responses, and subconsciously start making decisions. And that, without even realizing it, you're starting to make better choices on your own behalf.
And then, at some point, you move from the interject to a recognition that wait, it was me, you know, we hear so much today about the negativity that's out there. And how to navigate the onslaught of negative news and negative interactions online. And for that reason, I really make an effort to really focus on the kind of the bright shining lights out there because I do think that the information that we consume sets, the internal context of our subconscious and sets the internal context for what we decide to do consciously. And in many ways, it's sort of like
Origin garbage out and if it's you know positive stories and inspiration in that's how you're basically going to react in the world.
The Rich Roll podcast.
Hey, everybody! Welcome to the podcast. Today's guest back for a second. Highly anticipated. Return to the show is Stanford neuroscientist. Dr. Andrew huberman Andrews. First appearance is by far the most watched and listened to episode in the history of the podcast with as of the date of this recording.
Nine point, nine million views on YouTube alone, which is just absolutely wild for those unfamiliar. Doctor. Huberman is a neuroscientist and tenured professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he runs the huberman lab, which studies neural regeneration neuroplasticity and brain State such as stress, Focus fear and Optimal Performance, Andrew.
Ooh, consistently publishes his original research findings and top peer-reviewed journals, like nature cell neuron and current biology. His work has been featured in major Publications, including Science magazine discover magazine Scientific American time and the New York Times. And he is a regular member of several National Institutes of Health review panels and is a fellow of the McKnight foundation in the Pew charitable, trusts subsequent to our first podcast. And
Launch the huberman Lab podcast in January of 2021, which has quickly become a sensation within a mere year of launching. It is already ascended to becoming one of the top most listen to podcasts in the world. I'll get into the specific topics of today's conversation. But first we're brought to you today by Birch. The world's best organic mattress and I say that as an experienced life long sleeper, I jest. But seriously Birch,
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Mom / Rich role today to get a free gift set with up to 50 dollars with your first order plus shipping is fast and free. Get started right now at Grove.com Rich role. That's groov.com / Rich Roll. Okay. So in this conversation, we discuss many things. We talk about Mind Body Neuroscience. We discuss the Neuroscience of ADHD and focus. We talked about hypnosis and how to properly
Early process. Trauma, we also discuss how to leverage, light temperature breath, and sleep. To better control your biology as well as tools for achieving Optimal Performance States. In addition. We talked about learning States and the power something called Gap effects, which is absolutely fascinating and many other topics. Andrew is a passionate man. He has this incredible facility for communicating complex, scientific Topics in a uniquely.
Spelling and understandable way. And this conversation for those keen on understanding how to better control. Our minds are neurochemistry and all told our biology is just straight-up appointment listening final announcement. Before we get into it. Andrew is going to be hosting two Live Events. This met one in Seattle on May 17 and one in Portland on, May 18 ticket pre-sales open on Tuesday, March 8th, which Andrew will share on his social media at human lab.
And on his website, he remained lab.com with a password and general ticket sales, open on Friday, March 11. These are going to sell out fast, so grab him quick and you could find more
information on all of this in the show notes. Okay, here we go. Round two with dr. Andrew huberman. Good to see you man. Great to be back. Great to have you back.
It's been quite a journey that you've been on. I can't wait to get into.
Into it and get into some really interesting terrain that you've been looking at and studying. But before we do that, let's just recap for a moment. The first time you came on the podcast which I guess was that was about a year and a half ago, right? I think it was July 20, large 2020, right? So, that podcast ended up becoming the most popular podcast in the history of this show. As of today. I think we're at nine point nine million views on YouTube, which is insane.
Thank you for that and sharing your wisdom. But what's really cool is that at that moment in time? You hadn't even launched huberman lab, the human Lab podcast, you end up starting the show in January of twenty Twenty-One and within ostensibly a year. It's become one of the biggest podcast in the world each episode. This sort of self-contained masterclass on some facet of Neuroscience or related scientific terrain and
have kind of become like a social media internet Superstar. It's crazy. Right? Like how does this totally unintended? You know, how's it feel? Well, you know that I'm not big on mission statements, but if I had to pick one and thing that's nearest and dearest to my heart is to try and share the beauty and utility of biology. That's what got me into science in the first place and I love learning and I love sharing what I learned and ever since I was a little kid. I've felt this compulsion to share.
You know what? I learn. So, in the sense that it gives me an Avenue to do that, and that people are receptive and hopefully learning from it and enjoying it and it feels great. Yeah, it was not planned at all, you know, 2020. Because the events in the world started going on podcasts, as you know, fortunate to you and likes Friedman and Joe Rogan and others to give me that opportunity. And then the plan was to write a book at some point about the work in my laboratory and related themes. But one way or another, I ended up in the podcast.
Last realm, Lex Friedman suggested, I start a podcast and and he said, I think you should start a podcast. But whatever you do, don't make it just you talking at the camera. So I followed the first part of the advice. We do have guests on and those are actually my favorite episodes when I can host guests. Gives me an opportunity to showcase amazing colleagues that for the most part probably wouldn't get the opportunity to share at that scale. So that's wonderful. And also, they get the opportunity to get feedback from the world and the encouragement because
Can be a bit of a Lonely Road doing science. So yeah, overall, it feels wonderful. I'm just I feel very gratified that people enjoy it and I'm having fun. Well, it's well earned and deserved and it's actually quite heartwarming to see so many people just gravitate towards an Embrace hard science in this way. The idea that millions of people across the world would hit pause on their life and basically listen to what is for the most part like a lecture right in the way that you would lecture.
Students at Stanford on, you know, pretty challenging topics and do it in a way where I think your gift really is as a communicator to take these very complicated subjects and figure out how to communicate the essence of them in a way that is understandable to the average person without kind of pandering or condescending to them. Well, my belief is that if you give people, you know a
I'm of required nomenclature that they can digest pretty much anything. Yeah, and you know, the podcast weaves back and forth between hardcore scientific mechanism and then we'll zoom out and talk about, you know, daily relevance or lifetime relevance. We definitely talked about protocols and things of that sort. So, sometimes I use an interest in some Wellness or health-related tool as a way to teach mechanism and sometimes I do the opposite. And so I'm trying to weave back and forth in a way that makes it accessible regardless of background. And I have to say, one of the most gratifying things has been
When I hear from people in, you know, the clinical Fields, you know, psychologists or even yoga teachers or athletes or coaches and school teachers and maybe even tools, they're already using suddenly. They feel like they can equip those with some mechanism that can, you know, recruit some additional students or attention. So there are a lot of different ways to frame signs and mechanism, but my belief is I think was Max stillbrook that said assume zero knowledge, and infinite intelligence or something like that. I probably missed quoted and misattributed.
So someone can correct me. But but I do believe that if you give people the basics that they can digest pretty much anything. Yeah, the core of the show is still you talking to the mic or the camera. How long does it take you to prepare for the for these episodes? Because they're so fleshed-out? Like, clearly, there's a ton of work and research and preparation that goes into this. Now. It depends on the topic. So if it's something a little bit more Neuroscience e than less time but we've covered topics as far out as you know, trauma and fear. And
Of that sort, which my lab works on related themes, but I'm not a clinician. So typically the process is, you know, we know what episode we're going to plan for. And then what I will typically do is reach out to a few colleagues at Stanford and elsewhere. I believe in the power of the telephone so I cold call people. I track them down. I get them on the phone, trying to figure out who the key players in the area are and then read papers related to their work and other really important labs and Clinics in that realm. And then I dive into textbooks. So my house is filling up with textbooks, and I'm really
Big on textbooks because you know, it's hard to track PubMed in the evolution of a field. But in textbooks, you get the kind of center of mass of something and then of course I spend time on PubMed and then I usually trying to Circle back to those colleagues. Make sure that everything I'm going to bring about is, you know, part the down as well as as well as it can and then where there's a place to speculate all comfortably speculate and I'll highlight that it's speculation. So, in the short answer is it takes anywhere from 6 to 24, working hours to prepare and
I
take walks and I rehearse it in my in my head and then I sit down and I make my poor podcast producer, listen to the whole thing. And sometimes a recording can take two hours for one and a half hour episode. Sometimes it can take six and a half hours that all scales with how well rested. I am the night before. There's a very clear correlation with how well rested. I am and how, well, I can structure things, but for sure, but it's a labor of love. I really. Truly enjoy it. Well, it's good. It's a gift to humanity. So I'm really glad that you're doing it and there's a lot of topics.
That I want to cover today. There's a million different threads that we could pull, I sort of honed in on a couple that I hope you can indulge me on the first thing that I'd like to get into is around, Focus, improving focus and perhaps even ADHD. And the reason I want to begin with this is is because it's sort of all my mind. I recently had Johann Hari on the podcast. Who wrote This Book stolen Focus, which is all about are declining ability to sustain attention. What the causes of that are from
Technology in our mobile devices to, you know, stress sleep, exercise connection with nature connection to other people, and the like. But let's kind of approach this from a neuroscience perspective. Like, how are you thinking about this, from a mechanistic point of view? So a lot of people are struggling with focus and I'll just point out that there is a fair amount of, you know, clinically diagnosed ADHD out there. I think the current numbers are somewhere between 10:00 and
seven percent of young folks are now diagnosed with ADHD. And I think that's probably accurate. I don't know whether or not the numbers are going up with social media, you know, there's a lot of speculation about whether or not things like ADHD and eating disorders are increasing with social media or whether or not, they've been constant in our ability to detect them is just getting better. So that's an ongoing debate, but the numbers are about 10 to 11% First of all, a couple sort of myths or pseudo myths to eliminate the first thing.
That we are very good at splitting. Our attention humans can multitask all Old World primates have. What's called covert attention. I can look at you and have a conversation with you and I can attend to the glass just to the right of my right hand, so I can split my attention into two cones. I can also bring one of those cones of attention internally so I can pay attention to maybe how fast my heart is beating right now while I'm talking to you, so it's a complete myth that we can't multitask. We absolutely can multitask. It's much harder to split our
Tension into three cones of attention or four cones of attention, but one thing that's very clear. It's very well grounded in neuroscience. And this concept of covert attention is that it has utility, right? Covert attention has been thought to be useful in the context of monitoring social circumstances. So the typical Neuroscience lecture form of this is you know, that monkeys in a big troop would need to pay attention to who the dominant and subordinate, males and females are and govern their behavior. Accordingly in other words, pay attention.
Going around you going on around you not just to what you want to do and how the person or a monkey in front of you is behaving, and humans do this to the the common example that's used in Neuroscience, lectures is a couple people out, a couple on a date, out to dinner and, you know, someone's attending to somebody else in the corner. That might have been a better date or something, or paying attention to that conversation, right? That's totally possible. So we split up, we can split our attention, but there's gotta be a distinction between what your primary focus is lasered in on.
Versus whatever that kind of background multitask is right? Like you couldn't like write two essays, you know, with each hand at the same time. That's right. And so that highlights a really important point, which is that you can wait these cones of attention, and you can bring them together. So, the best way to think about them as two spotlights. And you can bring both spotlights to one common area of focus and get a deeper depth of focus if you want deeper depth, a sort of redundant there, but, but you can get a more heightened state of attention or Focus.
By bringing those together. Likewise if I close my eyes and focus into entirely on my internal State, something we called interoception the distinguish, it from extra reception, which is the view of the outside world. You can pay attention to your heartbeat to your breathing. This is common to many meditative practices, so we can split this thing that we call focus our attention. And we can wait this thing that we call focus and attention. Now in ADHD, one of the less appreciated aspects of the clinical
No type meaning that the sorts of symptoms that show up. It's thought that people with it's commonly thought that people with ADHD cannot focus, but that's simply not true. If they are engaged in something, they really care about. Or like, they can focus very intensely. And that is because much of a focus relates to the dopamine system. This neuromodulator /, neurotransmitter that I know you had on a Lemke, my completely on here, plays it. The neuromodulator dopamine plays, a very active role in motivation craving and
Suit, it's commonly thought that it's only associated with reward and feel good type of behaviors or phenomenon, but it's actually associated with pursuit of things that at least we think are going to make us feel good in the short in the short term. So it's a kind of a generic currency for Pursuit and motivation when we focus. And when we are excited about something, there is a lot of activity in these so-called dopaminergic circuits, and so it's not a surprise, then that many of the prescription medications for ADHD.
HD are medications that amplify the amount of dopamine that's available in the brain through one mechanism or another. So these would be your riddle ins your adderall's and then nowadays. There's also a lot of prescribing of things like modafinil which is yet another category of drugs used to treat ADHD slightly different and then in the kind of supplementation world people delve into things like l-tyrosine, which is the precursor to dopamine. So there are a variety of ways to access the dopamine system.
The way that the dopamine system was designed to enhance focus, is that when you are excited about something or you really want to attend to something, it literally brings about a narrowing of the aperture of your visual window and your auditory window. So that you attend to this particular location in space. And then events within that location in space for what you see, and what you hear, movements of the whatever you're attending to become extremely important and extremely relevant. And so it just highlights this larger theme of how the brain attends and and unattended
attends, which is that we have an aperture or window on our focus and dopamine seems to narrow that literally any drug like any stimulant like cocaine or amphetamine at the extreme, but even caffeine will dilate, the pupils caused him that, you know, somewhat paradoxically causes a narrowing of the visual window and your ability to focus is enhanced. And that brings about the the perhaps the most important point, which is that for most people provided that they are cited as provided. They can see mental focus.
Follows visual focus. And for that reason, there's a lot of exciting research being done in classrooms and in clinical settings, training children and to some extent adults, but training children to Anchor, their visual Focus to a, maybe a crosshatch or fixation point and just learn how to keep their visual attention on a narrow aperture. It's essentially training these turns out to be for brain circuit. So the front of the brain right behind the forehead. And some of these dopamine circuits deeper in the brain, it's training those
To engage whenever the person deliberately wants to engage them. So for most people, you know, it, they hear this and they go, of course, mental, focus follows visual focus. And yet, if you think about the way our world is arranged now with, you know, your phone calling you over to this location and your computer calling you to that location and whatever's happening in your immediate environment, calling to that location, and things are happening within your body. It makes perfect sense. If you only have two cones of attention and they're moving around, you like those lights that Advertiser used to be used to
Sighs some event in a city, you know shining up in the sky moving all over the place. You realize that oh, it makes perfect sense. Why Focus is hard. We are now realizing that we need to train up focus and whereas in the past when we weren't so inundated with devices and distraction, that was probably easier to do. We didn't need such rigid. Blinders. Hmm. But in fact, we do need blinders and many people actually benefit from things like putting on a hoodie or wearing a hat actually limiting their visual.
Do and restricting their visual window can be very helpful for people to learn how to use a visual Focus to Anchor. Cognitive phobia. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, I'm just thinking about like, let me throw this at you. If I'm sitting down and I'm trying to write, I have to, I can't focus on two things. I have to focus on that one specific thing. My vision is, you know laser focused on that one thing and I become very intolerant to any kind of external stimuli like I feel very
Fragile like the notification can throw me off and there's the switch. Cost-effective that versus. Let's say I'm out on my bike on a training ride and I'm listening to an audiobook or a podcast. I can do both of those things simultaneously and I would contend and I'm interested in your perspective on this. I would contend that my memory retention of what I'm listening to is actually better when I'm out doing that. Even though I'm focused on, you know, the exertion, you know.
No of running, on a trail riding my bike, something about the elevated, heart rate, and the kind of controlled, labored breath for some reason, like, that's a better combination than if I was just driving around in my car, trying to listen to it. Yeah. It's exactly right. I mean, what we're really getting to here is this notion of brain States and I imagine, this is something we might get into repeated times throughout our conversation, which is that just as, in sleep. We have states of mind that relate to Dreaming or slow wave sleep or rapid eye movement sleep.
In our waking States, who are waking period. I should say we transition through various States. And for some of us, there are conditions in which we have so much activation in our body, what we call autonomic arousal, but so much energy. Basically that just sitting down to write of the computer, you would think. Oh, well, this is very hard. It should anchor, all of my attention, and energy into this narrow, cone of attention, but that fact, that you also have to sit still the fact that there's actually no
Not just what's right in front of you. But there's also all the internal dialogue that you're carrying about. What's going to happen with this. Passage. Is this any good? What someone would you think if someone is a notification going to go off in a moment? There are multiple scripts running and that's why we distinguish between this extra reception, which is the perception of things in the outside world, and interoception, which is our perception of things within the confines of our skin. And when we sit down to write, we might think that it's just one thing in front of us, but actually, we're paying attention to internal events and dialogues as well. So, we're splitting our attention in multiple ways. When
I can only speculate but I can imagine that when you're out for a ride a good amount of that audit excess. Autonomic arousal is consumed by the pedaling in the breathing that puts your brain into a kind of a rhythmic State. And we know that breathing, we know, based on a lot of good data that breathing sets, a condition in the brain for certain brain states to arise. And this is very easily experienced where if you slow down your breathing and, you know, commit to doing maybe two or three breaths per minute, you'll notice that your brain and your entire.
Your body will shift into probably a more relaxed name for most people. And if you were to commit to doing 15 or 30 breaths per minute, your brain and body, with shift into a more aroused state. So, over time, I think, almost everybody figures out the things they need to do. How much coffee how much movement whether or not you work before, or after your ride, what sorts of information you consume and what types of work one does in order to try and optimize this process but a lot of what my laboratory is doing at Stanford and what other Laboratories are.
So as to try and figure out what are these brain States? How do we Define them? What really is a state of focus and how do we arrive at a state of focus? If we're tired, how do we arrive at a state of focus? If we are kind of over agitated and so beneath all brain States, including our ability to focus is this. I like to visualize a sort of a seesaw of autonomic arousal. We can either be relaxed but and alert which is kind of the optimal state. For most things besides sleep. We can be very alert, we can be panic.
Act, or we can be very very calm or we can be asleep. So, you know on one end you have calming type experiences or states and on the other end you have and of Amplified States. If you are feeling really upset about something, it's going to be hard for you to focus whether or not it's at the computer or whether or not it's out on your ride while listening to this, this podcast, or whatever. It happens to be. So, I think that again, I can only speculate, but I have to imagine that your ability to comprehend things. And remember things when you're out on, these rides is based on a number of
Is the familiarity with the process. You're obviously very familiar with the bike. It's a, it's also probably a subconscious familiarity with a certain pace of riding that allows your brain to access the state in which you can digest information through through audio. I should say, one, kind of interesting, set of studies, that's emerging now and I can't really report back on the data yet. Simply because we don't know, is that some people who have trouble with attention, especially while reading or finding it, very beneficial, to listen to audio books while actually reading the book. And I swear, this is not an attempt to get people.
To both purchase the audiobook and, and the, the written book. I don't even have a book to promote at this point. So that's not the purpose in this, but we definitely are a species that likes to combine our audio and visual worlds. In fact, the maps of our visual world and the maps of our audio world or audition really, and the maps of our Motor World are in perfect. Register such that. If we hear sound off to our right, we turn to the right. Not to the left. If we hear something right in front of us, meaning arrives at the two years at the exact same time.
And what we call the interaural time difference is zero. Well, then we look straight ahead. And so it makes sense that when we can bring the audio world in the visual world into alignment. Our focus is always going to be greatest under those conditions. Some people learn better through their visual field than their auditory field. Right? Like, I know if I'm reading a book. I'm in a better position to retain that information. Like I, when I recall something that I've read in a book, I see it on the page and when I hear,
Hear it, it's much more Elusive. And I would assume that some people are the opposite of that. Yeah, some people are much more auditory in nature. Most people are primarily visual. There's an interesting study that was published recently just came out and that shows that actually memory and recall for material that's consumed on a phone is much lower than on the written page. And there's an interesting reason that they give for this, you know, there.
Could be a lot of reasons. I just want to point that out, but they monitored breathing and they monitored heart rate and they monitored some other physiological signals. While people were either reading on a smartphone or reading paper and what they found was that breathing was essentially normal or equivalent in both conditions, meaning people breathe the same way whether or not they're reading on their smart phone or reading from a written page, but there was a particular category of breath that was abolished by reading on the smartphone and this is what is referred to as physiological size.
Talk a lot about physiological size on the podcast, in my lab. Works on them. This is a spontaneous innate pattern of breathing, that's governed by a little subset of neurons in the brain stem. For those who want to know. This is a brain stem area, called the pair of facial nucleus, discovered by Jack Feldman at UCLA, who's the gum World expert in the neural mechanisms of respiration? And this little collection of neurons. Probably only 100 neurons are, so make sure that every 3 to 5 minutes you do what's called a physiological side, which is a very deep breath sometimes.
Followed by another short inhale. So and then a long, exhale, and the double deep breath or the very deep breath. Reinflates. The little sacs in the lungs. Your lungs aren't just two big bags of are they actually have hundreds of millions of little sacs that we call the Avo lie of the lungs and when you don't do these physiological sighs, so, in the second or third minute, after not having done a physiological sigh, these little sacs collapse and they're kind of moist on the inside. So you can imagine trying to blow up in a balloon that's moist on the inside. You need a little bit of
Added air pressure and so the size re-inflate those. And then on the exhale, allow you to offload carbon dioxide. Now, this happens even during sleep every three to five minutes and I've talked a lot about physiological size as what I think is really a terrific real-time tool for reducing anxiety and calming oneself down. Indeed, it works very well. We have a study that's out for review. Now is a collaborative work with David Spiegel and Psychiatry, but it but it points out that these physiological size can be used double inhale through the nose long, exhale, through the mouth to calm down and it works.
Well, because you offload carbon dioxide now in this study, about smartphone reading versus reading on paper what they found is that people stop engaging in physiological size during any time. They're reading on the smartphone. Now, it wasn't a perfect study because they probably also should had a tablet and a laptop condition. So it's not clear whether or not, it's due only to the reduced aperture of the visual window that you're narrowing your attention. And there's this sort of app almost like an apnea kind of starving of yourself for oxygen when you do this, but it's very
Clear, I mean, it's abundantly clear that two things, one is nasal breathing and that the other is getting sufficient oxygen to the brain is important for comprehension. So the takeaway from this is if ever possible, try and read from a written page and if you were from a book or a piece of paper, and if you can't do that, then try and access whatever you're learning from as large a screen as you can manage. In that particular environment, and I do realize when people are commuting, you know, and sometimes I'm guilty of looking at my phone and trying to read papers and passages on my phone, but it's interesting.
Because this study highlights the linkage between this visual Attention our respiration and the fact that you know, our body and our brain have these innate mechanisms for making sure that we're getting sufficient oxygen. We're getting sufficient blood flow to the brain areas that are required for Learning. And so again, I don't want to be emphasized. The fact that there is a lot of legitimate clinically diagnosed ADHD out there, but for a lot of people that are struggling with attention or they feel like they just can't focus. I think we all owe it to ourselves to ask.
Well, what kind of environment am I creating for myself that is depriving me of this focus and what simple things can I do to try and enhance my ability of focus because I'm personally of the belief that if possible and wherever it's not hazardous to start with behavioral tools right before ever moving to supplementation or prescription drugs, unless there's a real dire need. I would think that behavioral tools should be the most valuable for the simple reason that when you engage in a behavior over and over again, you get neuroplasticity your brain circuits changing get better simply taking a drug.
Or a supplement of any kind, although they can have their value isn't going to rewire your brain in the ways that you want. You are essentially dependent on that chemistry, in order to access the state that you want. Right? And the behavioral tools are going to range, from breath, light, exposure, nutrition, sleep mindfulness, temperature. All of these things that are becoming more and more part and parcel of the Neuroscience toolbox. Right? Like this this field, which originated, you know, from
Um, this perspective of, let's understand the brain has by necessity broadened to this mind/body study and trying to understand human biology more holistically. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm delighted that that's happening and I want to point out that often times in the Journey of teaching, some of these tools and sharing some of the science around breathwork or which is really respiration science for in the academic terms or about the role of temperature or light people will quite
Shannon Lee respond will wait, you know this has been known about for thousands of years, you know, getting light in your eyes in the morning, as useful, these sorts of things breathing in this way and I completely acknowledge that. And my stance is that the communities that have talked about these things for a number of years as well as the scientific Community are both guilty of the same thing, which is hiding and disguising things in very complicated language. And so my goal is not to say, oh, you know, science is discovering these things. And many of these things were discovered.
Before. But rather to put a language to them that is neither cloaked in mysticism nor is cloaked in scientific. Jargon. That's really a right, a key goal because I think that we should all acknowledge that many of these practices are quite useful and we weren't really taught them in school and also mysticism is often a barrier to a lot of these things becoming accessible. So my hope is that the scientists and the people from various communities Willis, or join hands and trying to propagate these tools. So, yes, it, it's all so amusing and
To me, I mean Stanford there's my group in neurobiology and Ophthalmology. There's David Spiegel is laboratory. That works on clinical applications of hypnosis and mind-body in the context of Psychiatry. So trauma pain management and a huge number of other things OCD ADHD and Ali crumbs work over in Psychology. Looking at belief effects and mind-body. She actually runs the mind-body lab at Stanford does incredible work. We can say that a few Topics in particular that were considered pretty fringy about 10 years ago, I would
Say, you know, breathwork was fringy by the scientific Community breathwork, the use of temperature to access different bodily and brain States, the gut microbiome, and the fact that things like fiber and fermented foods could be useful to us. I think would been kind of like scoffed at and kind of choked up off as a, you know, like what is that, a few years ago? And, and then of course, there's a lot of excitement about psychedelics a somewhat controversial area, but now we can say that at Stanford Harvard Johns, Hopkins school of medicine and many others.
Schools, there are hundreds of Laboratories working on these topics, trying to figure out mechanism trying to figure out clinical applications. And so it always raises this question of you know, what's considered Fringe now, it's very likely in 10 years is going to be a major focus of Laboratories. And I also just want to give a kind of a shout-out to the National Institutes of Health. We've has had an eye institute a Cancer Institute institute's for Immunology. There is now an Institute for complementary health and Medicine, ncci H, and they put
A significant amount of tax dollars, to the study of the, exact sort of things. We're discussing here. Yeah. It's fascinating. So many of these Traditions emanate from the traditions of yoga or Chinese medicine and are now getting validated through mechanistic study. Yes. It's pretty cool. I'm sorry to interrupt. I neglected to say cheuku mossi Lab at Harvard. Medical School is looking at the mechanisms underlying acupuncture and has incredible studies publishing. Really top-tier, journals finding that stimulation at one site in the body can invoke.
Heightened levels of inflammation, which I think most people would want to know about. I'm sure that the Chinese have known about this, for it, for eons and yet. Stimulation elsewhere can dramatically reduce inflammation, but they're defining the mechanisms by which this happens release of epinephrine, adrenaline from the adrenals or suppression of dopamine release from one site in the body or from the brain. And so by understanding mechanism. I think that the scientific Community is in it going to be in a very good place to improve on existing protocols validate many existing.
Protocols and also, there's a whole other reason for us to be excited about this kind of thing happening, which is that right. Now if you want your insurance to cover, some of the things that were talking about, which can be very effective. You have a hard time, convincing an insurance company that they should, you know, support, you know, hundred dollar a week, respiration training or something. If you don't already have a serious clinically diagnosed apnea or some other lung disorder in the near future, they'll be mechanism, scientific reports 2.2 and
Trials that, you know, my hope is that insurance will start covering a lot of these behavioral practices that are powerful. Not just because they work but because they reshaped the nervous system so that eventually you don't have to rely on them as heavily, which is the opposite. A lot of a lot of prescription drugs out there and I'm in full support of prescription drugs that can remedy, you know, I mean people in suicidal depression, often need these things people with really bad cases of ADHD or OCD. They sometimes really do need medication. But for many people out there the way that they are struggling, can
can be remedied with behavioral tools. So I'm just delighted that places like Stanford or so supportive. And other top institutions are really getting behind this,
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today, okay.
Back to the show in the covid area where everybody was kind of
forced, you know, Retreat to their homes. I know that your lab at Stanford use that as an opportunity to start conducting studies. And using the fact that everybody was at home as actually kind of an advantage in in, you know, studying some of the things that you're interested in. So talk a little bit about that and kind of what what has you
Excited right now, you know, among the things that you're looking at. So covid, presented a lot of challenges, and a lot of opportunities for science. We were already set up and doing experiments on humans in our lab, bringing them in putting them in virtual reality, scaring them. Essentially, looking at people who had anxiety or clinically diagnosed anxiety and exploring how breathing, and vision impact, those states of mine, going down underwater with Mueller and and swimming with the sharks, right? Which for some people.
Simply not scary in our laboratory, but we always find people's pain point where the other, you know, and that's that work was published and I think laid down some of the groundwork for, you know, what is the physiological signature for what? We call anxiety or fear, that hadn't really been addressed in it, in a realistic ish format because it's been hard to study in the lab. In virtual reality allowed that to happen. Then the pandemic it's a my lab had teamed up with our associate chair of Psychiatry. Dr. David Spiegel. Who's a the world?
Expert in the clinical applications of hypnosis. I know, hypnosis gets a little bit of a funny rap because people think of it as stage hypnosis, but really self-hypnosis very strongly, clinically back, studies from his lab showing what brain areas are activated and deactivated under conditions of hypnosis, and I wanted to join arms with David because he has a real interest in mind, body, and non-invasive tools for shaping the mind to improve clinical syndromes, but also for things, things like focus and things like enhancing sleep and so on. So what we did when the pandemic it
We got permission from our other colleague. Ali crumb in Psychology to equip a number of undergraduates. But also people in the outside world, with a whoop bands, to evaluate things like heart, rate, heart rate, variability, there sleep etcetera. And then we were in constant communication with them as they were Bend into groups. We had one group, do a particular type of breathing each day for five minutes a day, another group different 5-minute breathwork patent to 45-minute breath. We're pattern in the fourth group of did mindfulness meditation of a kind of traditional sort, which is just really pass.
Pavley breathing, however, your breathing, but paying attention to that breathing the other breath work without getting into too much detail. Really centered on whether or not inhales were more emphasized than exhales. So one condition was cyclic sighing of the sort that I talked about before. So it to inhales followed by an exhale to inhales followed by an Excel, but 45 minutes, which is a pretty long time to engage in that pattern, but it's still a manageable period of time. The other group did something that was sort of akin to Wim Hof breathing which we call cyclic hyperventilation. So deliberately.
For five minutes. I really taking their body and brain into a heightened state of arousal. With some limited breath holds every every so often and then we had another group that did the sort of traditional box breathing. Inhale, hold exhale, hold for equivalent amounts of time. And the basic takeaway from this study. Was that the cyclic sighing led to a more dramatic calming both within the breath work session, but also the ability to regulate one state away from the breath work session.
So people reported heightened sense of well-being, reduced anxiety, improved sleep, lower resting, heart rate overall. And the reason we were able to get all those data is because we were accessing them all the time, 24 hours a day. So covid, shut down our ability to bring people into the laboratory at that time, but it opened up the opportunity for us to first of all, study a much larger demographic than we would have. Otherwise not just Stanford students. Not just people in the Bay Area. But people all over the US for right now. It's just been the u.s. Not outside the US. We also can monitor
People different ages different backgrounds. Often times harder, to get to come to Stanford directly in person, but we could do that at scale at a distance. And then, of course, to monitor their data 24 hours a day and whoop was very generous and allowing us access to the raw data. So we weren't reliant on just the Sleep scores within whoop, we could get everything we wanted out of those data. And so for us it represented a really powerful data set and we're also delighted because ncci H, which is this
Entry Health division of NIH. They did not fund this study, but they paid careful attention to the fact that we and others started to do this. And now NIH is starting to have specific calls to action for funding science. That's done in the real world and analyzed in Labs at universities. And, of course, there are limitations to doing things this way, but I found this to be incredibly interesting, fun and informative. And it really says to me that if you were going to do a breath work practice, first of all, you don't need more than five.
It's per day. If you are going to select one, breath work practice cyclic, sighing. This double inhales followed by exhales 45 minutes a day, seems to have the greatest positive effect on the greatest number of parameters. And of course, there are other box breathing is still useful. Meditation is still useful. We certainly found positive effects of those practices, but it really points out the fact that some of these innate patterns of breathing like cyclic sighing that we do naturally every five minutes or so can be sort of how you
you act, if you will and brought into a more condensed form for five minutes a day. And I think five minutes a day is a pretty reasonable amount of time to ask of oneself to do breathwork and I should say it didn't matter if people did it early in the day or later in the day, but the consistency was important and how significant was the state change of that type of breath work versus Baseline and also in comparison to the other varieties. Yeah, great question. So, during the actual breath work session, every group and including the meditation group, experienced a dramatic in.
Often their state for the cyclic hyperventilation group. They actually were ramped up more autonomic arousal. You could think that is more stress, but is David Spiegel says, you know, it's not just the state you're in. It's how you got there and whether or not you had anything to do with it. So when you are self, directing an increase in autonomic arousal, like getting into an ice bath or charging up a hill or breathing really fast when you're doing that deliberately and you want to, you generally associate that with a positive shift in increased autonomic arousal, when somebody else triggers that in you or when
An event in the world triggers that. And you, then you generally say, well, that was really stressful, which really speaks to the power of the prefrontal. Cortex are mined in interpreting these bodily states that are exactly the same. But to answer your question, you know, we always have this cut off of a, you know, P less than 0.05 statistically significant differences, so they could not be attributed to Chance. The cyclic sighing condition did lead to, I would say a near doubling of the positive effects compared to the others, but all four groups. Displayed.
Shifts compared to what? Was that Baseline. Essentially now? It's very hard to have a pure control condition and something like this. Because if you tell people just sit quietly for five minutes. It is its own sort of form of mindfulness and Stillness. So control conditions in these. Sorts of studies are a little bit complicated. Our next step is to get people into brain scanners, to really understand what is changing at the neural level in the short term in the long term. And that's actually where Spiegel's group has done this incredible work on hypnosis showing that when people go into States of
Hypnosis, there are signature shifts in what they called, the default mode Network, you know how the brain is idling. The different brain areas that are active and the ability to control context which has a lot to do with focus and we could talk about hypnosis if you like although he'd be better suited to. Yeah. I know. I that was my next thing. I want to I want to better understand the Spiegel version of hypnosis versus, you know, the spinning pinwheel version that we all conjure in our minds. Like explain what that is and how that's
Becoming this tool for, you know, scientific study will. So this is David Spiegel's work and he's an interesting story. His father was actually a psychiatrist in hypnotist and his father learned about hypnosis and Incorporated it into his psychiatric practice based on a mentor that he had. So this is often how things are handed down in medicine. So David learned it from his father and I should say that the effects of clinical hypnosis are very robust, you know, incredible.
All success with things like smoking cessation, incredible success with pain reduction of 50 to 80 percent reductions in chronic pain outcomes in cancer, even probably due to the effect, the negative effects of chronic stress on cancer outcomes by reducing stress trauma and so forth. So, basically, what Spiegel and his father developed was a, a say, sort of what we call a curbside assay for determining, whether or not someone has a high medium or low degree of hypnotizability and this brings us back.
The visual system, the neurons in the brain stem that control eye movements are either they have a relationship either to the aspect of the nervous system that's associated with alertness or with calmness and not surprisingly. When people look up when the eyes are directed upward, that's actually in the neural Pathways associated with alertness. When they look downward or close their eyelids. Those are associated with the neural Pathways associated with calmness and sleep, which is kind of a dull. When you hear it's, or like, when you get tired, you kind of put your chin down, your close your eyes. When you're wide awake, you tend to be either.
Eyes up and eyes really wide recalling. Of course, that your eyes are the two pieces of your brain. That happened to be outside your cranial vault in the only two pieces of your brain outside your cranial Vault. So when you see eyes, those are two pieces of brain, which is just to underscore why they're so powerfully reflective of what's going on deeper in the brain. So the people can look this up online. It sounds a little wacky, but there's something called the Spiegel I roll test, which is not the, you know, teen, I roll of the, you know, that's usually associate with a different kind of PSI, but no, you're with that. We've all done it.
Or experienced it. So basically, you can assess how hypnotizable somebody is by having them look up. I can actually do this with you right now. And again, I'm not certain, I'm hijacking David's tool so you can look up towards the ceiling and then while maintaining upward gaze slowly close your eyelids. Okay, so you are able to just shut your eyelids down and you can open your eyes now. And so what I observed was as soon as you brought your eyelids down your eyes, also move towards me and your eyelids shut. Now, I'm very hypnotizable and there's a
Lil Bit of a bias demonstration because I'm trying to illustrate the differences but I fall at the very far end of the scale on high hypnotizability where when I look up and then I don't want to go into hypnosis and I close my eyes might the whites of my eyes, should still be exposed for a second before. So I mean again, in other words you're able to maintain your pupils focused upward as you're closing your eyes and and the reason this test was developed to be clear because I realize this is probably all sounding a little bit wacko to people the reason that this
Developed, is that? There's a known role of particular cranial nerves. Okay, three, four and seven, as well as some other cranial nerves. One set of cranial nerves directs, the eyes upward and is associated with alertness. The other set of cranial nerves, directs, the eyes down words associated with closing of the eyelid. So, these are two competing circuits. People, who, how are very capable of being hypnotized, tend to be able to maintain activation of both circuits simultaneously, which will make sense for what I'm going to say next, which is that hypnosis is really a state.
Out of deep calm yet High degree of focused and limited context. So remember that autonomic seesaw that we're either, you know, asleep or panicked a suit, you know, drowsy or or alert and you know, in a waking State like you or I or and now probably more towards alert become kind of seesaw, is even. So, this is a almost say, an unusual bending of the Seesaw, in a way that you're both very relaxed and very alert and context is limited by whatever the hypnotist says now.
To go, hypnosis. The goal is to get the person to self-direct their own mental changes. Whereas in stage hypnosis. The goal is exactly the same bring people into a state of very calm narrow, but narrow context and increased Focus, but the hypnotist is interested in directing the person's actions and States. So that's the key distinction and I think that clinical hypnotist like Spiegel and others who are also board, certified Physicians and psychiatrists, but I think all clinical hypnotist they look at stage hypnosis as kind of the
They don't like it so much because it attracts from the power of this thing that we call hypnosis, and people get distracted by the fact that people can be inspired to do things that they wouldn't otherwise. So, in a clinical hypnosis session Spiegel or someone else would bring you in. He do the this, this test, you would probably fall into the category of low to moderate. Hypnotizability that might rule you out. But for most people, they're going to be moderate to high levels of hypnotizability. And then there would be some discussion while you were in this state of hypnosis.
Where the clinician would encourage you to think about certain aspects of whatever it is that you're dealing with. So maybe it was problems with focus and they would have you visualized to two spotlights and bringing them together. Maybe we'll be to focus on something that really bothers you quite a lot and the bodily Sensations and then to dissociate those bodily Sensations and the degree of clinic or the degree of positive clinical outcomes, using hypnosis. Again are just remarkable if people want to try this. There is an app I can.
Mention with that Spiegel has developed on the basis of the clinical data and a lot of scientific studies exploring the brain areas that are activated. It's called, reverie are EV. ER. I I should mention it. It does now sit behind a pay wall, but I think you get a 7-Day free trial and it's right now only available for Apple, but I'm told that they're going to have it for for Android as well. But and there are other clinical tools for hypnosis. I've personally found hypnosis to be very valuable for enhancing my ability to get into sleep and for any time.
I'm dealing with a problem that I can't seem to solve simply by talking running and a couple good night's sleep. Well, or any kind of cathartic behavior that I might attempt. So there's a lot there and there's a lot more to be said about that and maybe Spiegel should step in at some point and join the conversation, but I think that hypnosis is really a wonderful example of how Vision can allow one to assess whether or not the brain can shift State easily or not. It certainly involves.
I'm a visual fields in order to Anchor focus and there's also a respiration component almost always in hypnosis. The hypnotist will encourage the person to take a deep breath as they close their eyes, and to then imagine floating and being in a state of calm and the bigger theme Here. Perhaps the most important theme is that neuroplasticity the brain and nervous systems ability to change in response to experience. Really is a two-part process. The first part of that process always involves focus and attention.
She is an adult, you simply cannot learn unless you are focused on what you want to learn. We know this as a kid. There's a bit more passive learning but as an adult unless it's a negative event which tends to automatically recruit your focus, right? The hot stove, the horrible experience, the car crash, the trauma of any kind which immediately grabs all your ex attention. You have to direct your attention. And then the second part of neuroplasticity because it is indeed a process is periods of depressed. It.
Is during periods of sleep and what we call non sleep, deep rest that the neural circuits themselves change and rewire hypnosis seems to incorporate both the focus and the relaxation in in a way that accelerates neuroplasticity. And so while it might seem kind of mystical or wacky or crazy, it makes perfect sense as to why this would be, it grabs, both states of autonomic arousal, High degree of focus and arousal and high degree of relaxation and it compacts them into a single routine. But in the
Context of a clinical hypnosis session the kind of Direction that's being given. The patient is to disassociate with the neural groove or whatever. Like let's say, it's they're trying to quit smoking. Like what is the process of, you know, untangling, that not so that you can create this new Behavior pattern. Okay. Yeah, very astute of you because it highlights a conundrum that the field of Neuroscience and Psychiatry and psychology halves and indeed that all of Wellness.
Nice and high performance has, which is, you know, on the one hand, you could imagine that the way to shift, one's brain, and body around a traumatic event, or some challenge would be to really fully embody, all the emotions and bodily sensations of that thing and then overtime desensitize yourself. So, that's one form of gradual dissociation, from at least the emotional component of something. You could also imagine that the goal is to split those off at the outset and I'll just mention, you know, we hear nowadays a lot.
Out a FDA approved therapy, which is ketamine therapy. Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic. It's being used to treat depression and Trauma. This is kept in emergency rooms. Now. This has been widespread use work for my colleague, Carl died, surratt's Lab at Stanford has shown that precise neural networks in the brain that are activated by ketamine in an animal model. But also in humans and it's very clear that it causes this dissociative state. It actually uncouples brain areas that normally would be coupled. And so, you think? Well, that's weird. I
I thought that in order to heal trauma, you're supposed to go into the trauma and then reduce the amount of emotion. But in these ketamine, induced States, people actively report things, like I was watching myself, third person in myself, go through the experience, which is exactly what you hear about. People who went through a trauma, you know, horrible sexual, you know, things like sexual trauma, like rapes people say, I was floating above my body and could see it happening as somebody else. And yet the therapy for a lot of these, many of the therapies designed to treat, trauma are exactly this sort of dissociative process that is occurring during
The
trauma. So I don't have an answer as to why those treatments can work despite embodying the same kind of approach that happened during the trauma. What does seem to be the case? Is that accessing the state of mind? That was occurring during the trauma or during anxiety or insomnia or pain? And then third person in that experience and being able to imagine a different bodily or mental response, seems to be the common theme through all treatments for trauma.
Severe anxiety, Etc. And the additional requirement. However, is that it's not sufficient to just cognitively rehearse. It there needs to be a shift in bodily State and almost always what threads through all these therapies like ketamine therapy, or any kind of even cathartic therapy is that, at some point, the patient or the person needs to access a state of self-directed deep calm. And so, you know, there are versions of hypnosis. For instance. If you're dealing with a particular problem, you imagine the problem.
Left screen, this is under hypnosis and left panel. And then you write out in your mind, the possible alternate responses on the right panel. You grow the size of that, and reduce the size of the other might sound like, well, why would that work? But under conditions, where the total context of the mind is set to that process and you're not even aware of anything else going on in the room that seems to accelerate the neural plasticity and allows people to actually do that in real life out of hypnosis. It's super fascinating. I mean, it's
Crazy to me to hear about the therapeutic applications of ketamine because my association with that is being in treatment with people that use that. Like, I knew one, go jump off his roof. Oh, yeah, I gotta be like that. Drug is no joke and it's cool that they're finding these ways of applying it in, you know, in a context like this. But yeah, like, buyer beware. I supposed to do these are controlled environments, obviously, absolutely. And you know, even though they are controversial one.
Can't help but notice the the work of, for instance, Matthew Johnson, who's at Johns Hopkins school of medicine and he's looking at macro, do psilocybin for the treatment of trauma and depression. And I've talked to Matt directly and I said, you know, what is the key element of a successful therapeutic session? Because he was telling me, you know, one person is having one experience another person's having another experience. So there's, there's nothing to Anchor this and he said, it's, the quote unquote letting go and allowing their autonomic arousal to be taken over by something else. And I thought
Well, the data are pretty impressive, but that's the exact opposite of what we're talking about. In terms of ketamine type therapies. I think hypnosis kind of resides in the middle in that, it involves going into the state that creates the anxiety trauma or pain, and then actively dissociating from that state in a way that you actively replace it with another state psychedelic therapies are still very poorly understood, you know, one of the things that I think is important to emphasize is we always hear such and such opens plasticity such and such a you know classes. He is a process.
Like digestion or something like that. You don't necessarily want to open plasticity because all sorts of things can happen in there and I'm aware of people that have benefited tremendously from psychedelic therapies. I'm also aware of people that have suffered tremendously from psychedelic therapies, and I have a colleague at Stanford also, in Psychiatry whose name is Nolan Williams. He does transcranial magnetic stimulation. He's an expert and a researcher and clinician in understanding, depression and tools to explore that. And he has studies that he's performing now. Looking at people, the brains of people who
ooh, have undergone different forms of psychedelic therapies with no bias whatsoever as to whether or not they're beneficial or not, but really to highlight the individual differences before not during but then after the Psychedelic therapies, and so I think there's still a lot to be learned and we are you know, as much as we understand mechanisms and brain areas and there's some successes out there and some failures out there in Psychiatry and Neuroscience. I mean, we're still groping around in the dark, more or less in terms of figuring out, like, what these compounds do and a big effort in,
Part led by a group of UC Davis. Some people are gonna be dismayed by this, but a big effort is being made to take these drug compounds, remove the hallucinogenic components from them and ask whether or not there are other aspects to their biology that have nothing to do with hallucinating or the letting go or the other aspects of psychedelic Journeys. In order to figure out whether or not something else in those compounds is allowing the brain to readjust itself. Yeah, interesting, right. Because we, there are there a lot of variables in a cycle.
You know, psychedelic Journey. It's not necessarily the case that the hallucination or the disruption of time and space is the thing. That's rewiring the brain. So there's a lot to be learned. Take the fun out of it. Yeah, for some people although I do think it will make it more accessible for people who are averse to the idea of losing control. Right? And so, you know, I'm excited by all these things. I certainly don't want to encourage, you know on a Maverick use of these things. Many of them are still scheduled drugs so they can land you in jail, right?
Um, I think hypnosis for, at least for me lands in a category of, you know, interesting and intriguing for people to explore. It's certainly non-invasive. You would definitely want to work with somebody very, very good who also has some clinical training in dealing with trauma who also has some clinical training in dealing with whatever it is that people are dealing with because there's been success with eating disorders, which is, which are very, very challenging in the apps. Even with medication. Those can be very, very challenging ADHD and some of the other clinical clinical syndromes.
Seems well the the the broadening of Neuroscience to you know, kind of include Psychiatry and psychology. I think it's super interesting and this idea of you know, how we're approaching the processing of things like trauma through dissociative practices is super interesting because we've always thought of dealing with are passed through a kind of talk therapy modality which by definition requires that we confront.
Some aspect of our past or something that we've repressed, and of course, that's going to bring up all types of powerful feelings and you have to feel those feelings. But you also have to understand that feelings are not facts and the only way to kind of get to the other side and and and kind of withdraw the charge that those past events. Have on, you know, how you think about yourself and behave in the world is to create that disassociation, right? So, how does that like, let's talk at. Let's just kind of like focus on
Trauma right now because I think it's super important, you know, everybody has their past trauma, and those traumas are very powerful as predictors, of current and future Behavior. Yeah. I mean, if ever, there was a phenomenon in life that I'm struck by is, it's trauma and you know, it's it's incredible to me, how, you know, we experience these things to some for some people more than others, right?
You know, to some extent, everyone has trauma to some extent. I think we need to be fair and say that some people have a tremendous amount of trauma and other people less but that there's some consistent themes that the psychoanalyst actually had, right? Which is that for many people. There's this what the analysts would call a repetition compulsion, right? Somebody experiences something really terrible as a child and then as an adult, there's they find themselves seeking out similar types of situations and it's just the most illogical thing, one can imagine and the analysts would say, well, this is a reparative.
Wish an attempt to throw oneself back subconsciously, throw oneself back into these scenarios to get a different outcome, right? So for example, if you had a deadbeat dad, you're going to your young woman, you're going to search out. You're going to seek out like a boyfriend, who has those same behavior patterns or the exact eyes Lodge logic. Yeah, and one case, it's the exact opposite in which case we might say. Well, that's a more functional step. The other case. It's yes this repetition compulsion making the same mistakes despite knowing
Are
right. And not necessarily from this standpoint of addiction where there are some deeper dopamine circuits driving that. So, you know trauma is fascinating in that way. I mean, what do we know about trauma? And again, I'm borrowing from some of my conversations with David Spiegel and with on a Lemke who I know you've had on the podcast. It's very clear that relief from trauma in some way or another almost always, involves going deliberately bringing oneself back into the State of Mind and Body.
D that occurred during the trauma, as horrible as that might seem avoiding, that seems to be an issue and then gradually, or hopefully quickly. But in some cases, gradually desensitizing oneself to that experience, as not just a overwhelming, horrible experience, but a sad, but no longer overwhelming experience so that they can gain some sort of ability to think inside of the, the memory and to parse what happened. One resounding theme that I've collected in talking to.
A therapist and exploring a lot of the therapies for trauma, is that, you know, oftentimes trauma involves a deep confusion, for whatever reason, a deep confusion about, who was responsible, and this is something that's somewhat complicated, and can be troubling to think about, but people will experience a trauma, a car crash, a sexual assault, a devastating Financial loss. Can also be a trauma, and then somehow in the, in one's mind. It's not clear whether or not
Not. That was something that happened to them or that they created for themselves. Now the typical script of this was people talking about. Oh, you know, I shouldn't have been out that late or dress that way or acted that way but it's actually can be much more subtle and diabolical than that. It can be that it can start to Route into people's own perceptive self. Like maybe I'm not worthy of being happy and therefore the fact that this happened makes total sense. People create these these crazy scripts and crazy because they don't match any real-world facts, but they do match a lot of internal.
And so, it becomes very complex to unpack all this. But what we know for sure is that accessing the state of mind and body that resembles the state of mind and body during the trauma, is the first step in moving trauma out of the body. So called trauma release. Now almost always, that has to be done in concert with a really well trained physician or clinician because that can be overwhelming. Certainly the first time there's also some evidence based on some decent studies that show that
Accessing deliberately, accessing states of high on autonomic arousal that are independent from the trauma. So things like ice, baths, things, like Hard Exercise, things, like very, very intense experiences separate from the traumatic memory can be useful in allowing people to attain Comfort at high levels of autonomic arousal. Right? I mean, you're trying to essentially say, you know, go back to this place and work it through. Try and get some space or some distance from the emotion. And yet, for some people, just an elevation and heart rate is over.
Whelming for them. And so they're not even going to set foot on the first step up the mountain. When in fact, that's exactly what they need to do. So there's now a kind of movement in Psychiatry and psychology to bring in more of these. I guess you could call them somatic approaches, but to my mind, they're really physiological approaches. They're really approaches that teach people how to be tolerant of high levels of autonomic arousal. And so, that's, that's something that we're starting to see a shift in the other thing. I should just ignore
Knowledge is that, you know, until the psychoanalyst, the cognitive behavioral therapist, the neuroscientist and the psychiatrist join arms. We are going to go around and around and around this Merry-Go-Round of not knowing how to deal with trauma and feelings. Right? I mean, we're all told to feel our feelings, but not trust them as facts. And yet, here, I'm telling you that most successful trauma therapies involve getting right up close to that event, really letting it almost over take oneself and then start to create these these gaps and these
Apps that I'm referring to our real gaps in neural circuitry that the worked from Spiegel and many others have shown and the work doing brain imaging under conditions of ketamine and other types of pharmacologic therapies have shown. There are active associations normally between the prefrontal cortex, which is thinking planning and reasoning, the insula, which is an area of the brain that monitors how we feel internally. And then some of these areas like the anterior, cingulate cortex, which are involved in kind of self-monitoring and figuring out.
Out, how much of what I'm experiencing is coming from thoughts and things within. And from things in my environment and under conditions of extreme autonomic arousal, and somewhat counter-intuitively under conditions of deep relaxation. Those neural circuits are able to rearrange themselves and when one emerges, from those treatments, the default Network then is one of perspective. It's one of saying, oh, this is something that happened, but it was not my fault or this is something that happened. And indeed, it set me up for a number of
Positive opportunities in my life, all the sorts of stories that we hear about all the time. So if this is sounding a little bit abstract, I'm trying my best to put some structure on it. But where there's a lack of structure, I'll kind of wriggle out of that by saying that, you know, there is no clear answer as to where trauma is represented in the nervous system. Many people talk about trauma, being manifest as physical symptoms in their body and that used to be considered kind of, you know, it's pseudoscience. It makes perfect sense makes perfect sense. After all, the nervous system is the brain, the eyes and the
Spinal cord for central nervous system and then every organ in your body is innervated by a nerve cells neurons in the peripheral nervous system. So the manifestation of things in the body and in the brain is shouldn't surprise anybody and I think one of the great expansions of Neuroscience in the last few years is that whereas five ten years ago, you would find very few grants and laboratory grants funding work in Laboratories and Laboratories working on elements of the nervous system in the body. Very, very few.
Be 98% of the focus was on things within the brain, memory Consciousness Vision hearing etcetera. Now, an enormous number of Laboratories are moving into this mind/body relationship, but they don't call it. That they call it the peripheral nervous system the autonomic nervous system, right? They called the gut brain axis. Right? So we have fancy names to to disguise the fact that we're studying mind and body, right? God forbid. God, forbid, anybody find out coming back for more, but first,
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Okay, back to the show.
What's interesting about the trauma discussion is, you know, when I think about it, I think of trauma.
Being just an extreme example of not just you know, something that you know, happened to you. But a story we tell about who we are. Like, we were talking about this the other day. Like we all walk around looping, some narrative, in our minds about who we are, what we're capable of what happened to us, why we are the way we are. And I think we caused ourselves a lot of suffering and undue pain as a result of narratives that are really detached.
I'm
reality whether positive or negative like there, they take on a life of their own and they're very real to us and yet if you put them under the microscope and deconstruct them, they actually generally don't hold up. So from a neurobiology point of view, how do you think about this and how can you talk about empowering people to deconstruct those narratives and hopefully create healthier versions of them? Yeah. Well the
Leti of self is a very mysterious, but very pervasive theme in Neuroscience. I mean, you wake up every day and depending on how you feel about yourself. You might feel better or worse. But your your, you everyday, you recognize yourself, but what is you? Yeah, and how malleable is your default personality?
Well, what is you is, I mean, this is that certainly not going to be anchored in one brain area. We know this is gonna be a network of activity. There are cases, of course of multiple personality and things of that sort, but it's exceedingly rare. Our self percept is often very different than other people's perception of us. I don't want to out him, but we have a member of our podcast team who to me is just like the calmest person in the world and he manages an incredibly complicated life with immense Grace.
Is extremely talented, his work is just an incredible human being, but if you ask him a bit more about his internal world, he he's feeling, you know, like he wants to share, but he'll say, yeah internally, I'm just it's just chatter chatter, there's tons going on, but externally, I experience him as the one of the calmest people. I know, and I think a lot of people see themselves or feel themselves as anxious. When in reality, the way they emerge in the real world is very, very different from their internal.
Percept. So that's the first thing to recognize conversely. A lot of people who think they're incredible, might not be perceived us incredible. And we could have a whole conversation about narcissus some other time, because that's a real thing. Right? I mean, ours is sort of exploit the reactions of other people in the commitments and allegiances or lack of allegiances of other people. In order to feed this very squishy internal ego, right? That they have their self-concept is actually very weak, but they come across often is very dominant and in control and you know,
We're getting better at recognizing who those people are. And the interesting thing is, they probably don't realize that they are the way they are just by the thousands, if not tens of thousands of videos about narcissism on YouTube and elsewhere. So narcissist aside, the the reality is that much of how we are gauged in terms of who we are, is on our behavior and how calm people perceive us to be, or how stressed people perceive us to be in the
Different in a bunch of different context and that's actually one of the major ways that we just sort of assess whether or not somebody would be a useful partner or somebody to know in one situation or another in many situations. We're very good at subconsciously perceiving other people's level of autonomic arousal through things like pupil dilation, you know, I'm talking a lot now. So, you know, I might be more flesh than usual but it's contextual, right? It's contextual we're here and we're talking a lot. So you also gain knowledge over time. And you realize that I, when this person is in this
Asian they occupy this kind of level of arousal in that situation that level real so and so on. So in terms of our concept of others, I think that we're gaining a lot of knowledge about the brain areas. For instance, incredible work from Nancy kanwisher is Lab at MIT. We have What's called the fusiform face area. Literally a little cataloger library of neurons in your brain. This fusiform gyrus area of your brain that recognizes faces with exquisite Precision. I mean, any number of people can
Walk into the room and you'll know who they are or if you don't know them. So, facial recognition, even when people are in profile or you see the back of their head, so it's not even a face face recognition in Old World primates of which we are. There's incredible Machinery there. Very little is understood about self-perception and we're self-perceptions, reside, but most people can recognize themselves in the mirror and that occurs from a very early age. So I'd be willing to speculate that a lot of what we perceive about ourselves. And our the stability of our self perception has a lot to do with our victim.
You'll images of our self and people's reactions to us. So we're cataloging all those data all the time. Now, how malleable is it? Well, I mean, last time we sat down for a recorded discussion, we talked about how, you know, I was really emphasizing actions first as a way to shift, perception, Sensations, and, and emotions, and I still stand behind that, because that's the accessible form of neuroplasticity. For most of us actions, change your nervous system over time, and
You know if ever there was a truth in Neuroscience, is that the nervous system can change in response to experience the more heightened or critical that experience is the faster. Those changes are going to occur. So that just leads me to a place where I'd say how crucial is it to change one's behavior and therefore one's identity is probably going to dictate whether or not you're able to do it or not. Yeah, I think about that show. Mad Men, where he basically takes on a completely different life and Persona and he was able to maintain that and this secret that he was actually somebody else for a long.
Period of time but it's through behaviors that people people gauge us and then we start to gauge herself. Sure. So it's actions if you want to transcend whatever Loop you're in, you start behaving in contrast to whatever that narrative is until your nervous system kind of Cotton's on to that and it becomes more habitual but the ultimate question of course would be if somebody just started behaving in complete control position to, you know, their entire personality.
Did you know talking about, you know, the opposite of the ideas that they believe in and start behaving on the like could you just completely transcend your personality and become another individual altogether? Personality-wise? Yeah, I believe that. Yeah, it's probably possible while it's really wild and it really speaks to the fact that the nervous system is paying attention to its own actions. It's kind of a case of cognitive dissonance and it's what your actions do in some sense Define, you both to other people outside of you and 21.
Self. There's this concept in psychoanalysis of the in trajectory, which I find it. Fascinating the interject is this idea that we can subconsciously embody the reactions of somebody else. So, one thing that fascinates me, now that I'm a bit more involved in, you know, sort of online interactions. And social media is the tremendous number of really inspiring people out there. I put you in this category. I'll put you on the spot and embarrass you but I read your book long before we met and was really motivated to make a number of important changes in my life on the basis of
Of reading that book a truly was and so just to, you know, embarrass you a bit here, but that's the real core. I'm gonna get flush appropriately. Yeah. Because it was an it's an incredible journey and or you know, last time we talked about David Goggins and there are many examples, right? You can go online now and see examples of incredible people doing incredible things. Now one version of that is to think it would, that's inspiring. It changes shifts my autonomic arousal. So I can get up at 4:30 in the morning, like Jocko and like get after it and do this stuff.
Frankly there been times when I'll see you social media posts. I'm like, yeah, you know, I'm being lazy. I should really push a little harder on, or you had Chad right on here, right? Was content. I, you know, he and I are very different in a variety of ways, and we've never met. But I find his content incredibly inspiring because the way that he communicates his conviction, even though some of my convictions are different than his and so, and I learned about him through through you. So we could consider that inspiration, but then the idea of the analysts that I think is,
Appropriate and keep in mind that while Freud, there were many issues with him and young an analysis. They did have a heavy interest in physiology as the root of the subconscious. And there's this idea of the interject is fascinating to me, because what it says is that if you consume enough of that content, if you read enough books, about people who have embarked on certain kinds of Journeys, and made certain choices that at some point, you might interject some of their personality and their responses and subconsciously.
Start making decisions. Hopefully, positive decisions on your own behalf, may be having more appropriate boundaries may be taking better self care or care of other people and that without even realizing it, you're starting to make better choices on your own behalf. And then at some point you move from the interject to a recognition that wait, it was me that made that change. I'm the one that man should get up or a bit earlier and do a little bit more to be kinder in this context or to listen a little bit better in this context. And over time. We start to ascribe those changes to our self. So
This is a more gradual shift in personality and the story of who one is, but I think it's a powerful one. And I like it because, you know, we hear so much today about the negativity that's out there. And how to navigate the the just onslaught of negative news and negative interactions online. And for that reason, I really make an effort to really focus on the kind of the bright shining lights out there. Because I do think that the information that we consume sets, the cart, the internal context of
Subconscious and sets the internal context for what we decide to do consciously. And in many ways, it's sort of like garbage in garbage out and if it's, you know, positive stories and inspiration in. That's how you're basically going to react in the world. So I think that the nervous system has a tremendous capacity to learn consciously and subconsciously. And after all it is during sleep, that our nervous system requires it, you know, we know that the dreaming that occurs during rapid eye movement, sleep has this very unique signature of being a
Very emotionally. Salient, you know, falling being chased etcetera, but that the body is incapable of releasing adrenaline epinephrine during that time. So that's its own sort of form of trauma therapy, right? So, that's a subconscious learning that we go through each night provided. We're getting into rapid eye movement sleep. So, the brain is designed to access these states in sleep. That help us rewire and beneficial ways. You can if you want. I don't recommend it. You can run the other experiment. Sleep deprived yourself for three nights, and see how your emotionality is doing. All right. Yeah, that's super interesting. I mean,
I think, ultimately though, it always goes back to action. Like, you can consume a tremendous amount of inspirational content and then convince yourself that you did something productive, or you feel better about yourself without have, or having ever actually done anything. And I, you know, I see a lot of that as well, but ultimately, at some point, you would think that that's going to translate into some kind of action or behavior one would hope. And and that brings up kind of these ideas around Alter Ego, right? Like if you feel yourself, not worthy of
You know, being that type of person you see, choco, he's waking up at 4:30 in the morning and doing what he does. And you say well, what would Jocko do? And then you do that like you kind of Step into the alter ego of Jocko and what he would do and start mimicking that behavior over time. Then like you said, you wake up and you realize like, oh, it's me. I don't longer, I Can Shed that Alter Ego now and I can kind of own this space for myself. Yeah, exactly. And I think that, you know, one of the hardest things to do.
To calibrate one's consumption of social media, or, or any kind of high potency information. If you think about it, this is the first time in human history that you can scroll through 50 movies in one minute, right? I mean, you know, if a picture is worth a thousand words, right, you know that a movie is worth 10,000 pictures. I mean that the visual system loves motion. And so there's you know, I'm sure the algorithms you reflect this and so really setting constraints on the amount of interaction with stuff.
F is important and I think setting, constraints on what type of information you're going to consume. I mean, there is something about our nervous system that draws us to look at the car crash, you know, to, you know, click behind that muted screen. That's that allows you to see the Gory thing or to get involved in some sort of very narrow context. Online argument. I mean, everyone is prone to that some people more than others, but, you know, there's also a lot of incredible content out there. And I think that,
A high potency, positive content, whatever that means, you know for some people that's listening to a piece of classical music. I'm these days. I'm really interested in and finding a lot of incredible artwork online and just going well, like people are creating some amazing stuff, you know, that can be inspiring. So it comes in a variety of different forms for different people. But being very, I think that we all need to be more guarded of the kinds of information in the context that we expose our nervous systems to and the problem with social media to just acknowledge it, is that
That it's a free-for-all in terms of context, and you can set limits on it in time, but you can't set limits on it and in terms of context at all, unless you're very good at self-governing or governing, the use of social media and kids. For instance. I mean, the, the the the just endless fire hose of stimulation that you can expose. Your neurochemistry to is unprecedented. Like we're not wired for that. Like, I can't imagine that being impulsed so, you know, vote.
Differently like so continually in the way that we are is doing anything good for us, like that neat, that seems to be the study, right? That needs to be done on like, what is this crazy Mass experiment that were running on the human brain right now? Yeah. Well, I think it brings us back to this issue of brain States, you know, we meaning Neuroscience, certainly not my work, but Matt Walker and others. William demented Stanford who defined rapid eye movement sleep, although he didn't Discover it. He helped Define it.
You know, they successfully defined the major stages or states of sleep slow-wave sleep rapid eye movement, sleep alternating in 90-minute Cycles, more or less etcetera, etc. Etc. When we dream, when we have emotional dreams, muscle repair growth, homeowners, all that stuff. We have very poor definition of waking States. We just don't even know what to call them. We call them flow or focused or happy or sad, but a lot of those are emotional labels and kind of subjective labels that have some degree of grading to them. Like oh, that was a good.
State or a bad state or a happy State. We have not yet defined. Most waking States. We did hear about Alpha Waves, gamma waves Etc. But that's very crude for people, that don't know. The way brain waves are generally measured by EG. These are these skull caps that are non-invasive with a bunch of electrodes terrific, because you can do this anywhere without drilling through the skull terrible because they only measure activity in the outer centimeter or so of the brain. So they're not telling you a whole lot about what's happening. It's like looking at the ocean, the waves on the ocean, trying to figure out what's happening at depth. Just not gonna not gonna work.
Work. So, we need to better Define waking brain States. However, one thing that's clear from the work on sleep, that's now working its way into the naming and understanding of brain States and wakefulness. Is that one state precedes. Another now, your bike ride where you're listening to the audiobook, is way in which your coordinating, your respiration, physiology your breathing, and your motor output, your bike riding with the ability to access auditory information and remember it? Well, so you figured out something about that state, but the nurse
Scientist in me, says, okay, but what follows that state when you get back? What state are you in? Then is a state of exhaustion that allows you to go into deep rest to access neural plasticity, or is it a state of where you've essentially moved, all that excess autonomic arousal out of your body. And now finally, you can sit down and just focus your cone of attention on your work. So one state precedes another and one thing that I think can be incredibly useful to people would be to think about two Hallmarks of brain States in order to access them more readily.
One is that the thing that we are all a slave to all of us is the 24-hour circadian cycle. Every cell in our body has a 24-hour clock, that runs at the level of genes and the level of cellular processes and every Network in our body within its nervous, system spleen, whatever is governed by this 24-hour clock, we can fairly crudely but still accurately subdivide that 24-hour period into three phases. What I would call Phase 1 and I'm just naming it phase one because we don't have
Better name for it is from about zero until about eight or nine hours. After you wake up. Phase two is from about nine hours after you wake up until about 16 hours. After you've woken up and phase 3 would be from about 17 hours to 24 hours, the 17-hour to 24 hour period that we're calling phase 3 is sleep and we know what we should be doing in that state. We should be accessing as much uninterrupted deep sleep as we can and the Beautiful work that Matt's done and others have done says okay, lower.
The temperature in the room, you know elevate your feet a little bit. Don't etcetera. Etc. Keep it dark. I mean there's a lot of things that we could talk about their Phase 1 and Phase 2. We know, based on really good Neuroscience have certain signature patterns of neurotransmitter release and autonomic arousal that lend themselves better to certain activities, both mental and physical, and not others. So, phase one for instance, is always accompanied by an increase in cortisol. This is a healthy release of cortisol, a stress hormone.
One that wakes us up. It's part of the wake up system and the release of epinephrine, which is also called adrenaline and the molecule dopamine. It turns out epinephrine and dopamine, dopamine, actually manufactures epinephrine there. Biochemically, so that phase one of the day, in many ways is ideal for any kind of linear, action-oriented items. If you had people will differ, some people say, I do creative work best early in the day, but most people are going to do best at kind of correct. Answer type work meaning where there is a
Correct, linear output. It's going to be accounting type work or it's going to be exercise where you might not know exactly what you're going to do. But there is a process that you can follow. It's going to be punching out a certain amount of words on a page because you're just trying to get the page the words down on the page for the book or doing math, or doing any kind of linear operations at the during that first phase one, phase two has a signature pattern of neurotransmitter release in the brain and body that are more closely associated not exclusively, but more closely associated.
The release of things like serotonin, these are neuromodulators that tend to make us feel a little bit calmer and they disrupt or I should say they alter because it's not a pathological shift, but they alter our perception of space and time in a way that allows us to make mental associations that are a little bit looser. They can be nonlinear. So that's a time that's excellent for Creative work or for brainstorming. And you might notice that when you're a little bit, fatigued your mind is a little Freer and if you're very fatigued the your mind is all over the place. So one thing that I think has been missing
and from the brain State work has been a kind of cohesive framework. And yet everyone, I think every neuroscientist would agree that the 24-hour cycle really governs, not just digestion and bodily temperature because it does temperature is higher in the morning, rising Rising rising to the afternoon and starts coming down and then you go into sleep in Phase 3 because your body temperature is lowered. So, those three phases really Drive our brain States and one precedes, the other. This is the key thing we can never look at a state in isolation. But if you wanted to understand, for instance, how to access a state of,
In
creativity, you might try placing it in Phase 2 of the day. So 10 to 16 hours after you've been awake and see how that works for you and pay attention to your State of Mind before you attempt to go into that state and as you exit that state. And so I think that if we've learned anything from the Sleep science, it's that we can't. Look at one state of mind. In isolation. We need to ask what preceded it and what follows it in order to understand its structure and how to access it better at the same time human beings, you know, do their best
To fuck with this by Sugar caffeine alcohol. Like we're trying to perpetuate a certain state that we're you know, that where we feel, we feel the best or were the most productive and that disrupts this, you know, natural likes our preset regarding the Circadian rhythm and the kind of hormonal regulatory balance that we would experience, you know, without, you know, all of these inputs that are screwing us up and comparing ourselves.
Sleep and, you know, ultimately have short-term gains, you know, you know, obviously, or we wouldn't do it but long-term, you know problems. Yeah, I think that there are our basic things that if I met everyone should do in order to Anchor their body and their mind in the most productive Rhythm that they possibly can. And the reason I feel comfortable saying this is that we were not designed to be nocturnal. We are capable of nocturnal activity and I want to
give a nod to, you know, shift workers and of all kinds that have to work in the middle of the night. I mean, that's the way the world Works nowadays and there are a whole set of things that shift workers suffer from digestive issues, mental health issues. I mean, they're prone to more cardiac events and suicides. I mean, it's obvious that shift work, especially swing shift work or people alternating their schedule. Pretty frequently is extremely detrimental to brain and body and there are number of things that people can do to offset that. I've done an episode of the podcast on
And I do some work with communities that are restricted to shift, work to try and help offset that. But for most people, it's going to be heading to sleep somewhere between 9 p.m. And midnight and waking up somewhere between 5 a.m. And 9 a.m. I would think I mean depended on thing in the college students, my college Years of sleeping in but there's tremendous value in anchoring ones, biology to this 24-hour cycle, and it's very simple as to how to do that. I mean, the most dominant zeit Gaber as we say,
/ that governs all these States including sleep is light. There's no question about it. And you ask any circadian biologists to say, there's a kind of a principle of circadian biology, which is that light is the dominant zeitgeber called Zion Gabriel, because the people who define this word German, and I'm pronouncing it incorrectly because I don't speak German. The, it's clear that if possible one should view sunlight, or at least get outside, even if it's cloudy outside within the first hour of waking. And if you wake up,
Where the sun comes out to flip on as many artificial lights as possible. If your goal is to be awake, if your goal is to go back to sleep, definitely keep the lights dim, but getting sunlight, in your eyes even through cloud cover is going to set in motion a number of different biological events readout. First through certain cells. In the eyes, these so-called melanopsin intrinsically. Photosensitive ganglion cells is the fancy name. They've discovered by David Burson at Brown University and they send a signal to your hypothalamus which then sets in motion, a huge number of hormonal and neural events in the body.
They create a cortisol pulse that wakes you up further sets the Baseline for your attention throughout the day. Also sets a timer of about 16 hours, not coincidentally, on your first melatonin pulse which will happen in the evening. So it's timing when your sleep is going to come people who stay indoors in dark environments for the early part of the day. Just looking at their phone. You're not getting enough light stimulation. The tricky thing is that later in the evening about 17 hours after you've been awake or when?
Woke up. What you'll find is that even a minimum of light from screens, can shift your circadian clock? And the reason is that there's a gradual shift in the sensitivity of the retina to external light. So you need a lot of light, ideally sunlight early in the day. And, of course, you don't want to stare directly at any light that. So bright. That is painful. You don't have to look directly into the sun. Absolutely blank. You can be kind of off-center from the Sun but try and get out there without sunglasses. If you can people always ask, can I wear eye glasses or contacts? I say. Absolutely because that actually will focus there.
Like to your retina, that's what they're designed to do through a window or windshield. Simply will not work as well, because of the filtration of the wavelengths of light that you want. And then there's a lot of data to support the fact that getting as much bright light in your eyes throughout the day provided. It's not painfully, bright is excellent for your wakefulness mechanisms. And even for the mechanisms of the brain and body. That control metabolism and feeding, mood and well-being. This is the work mainly of Samurai guitar at the National Institutes of mental health. He's the head of the chronobiology.
Unit of the National Institutes of mental health. So Sam would say, get as much bright light in your eyes as you can early in the day and throughout the day and then somewhere close to bedtime, trough, that and live in the darkest environment. You possibly can manage safely. He's not a big fan of being in completely light absent environments, but that simple behavior of early, light viewing, most days. If not all days sets in motion, these three phases that lend themselves, best to focus to work creative work, the ability to stay awake most of the day now,
Apps are fine. We know provided. They don't interfere with nighttime sleep. So, nap should be shorter than 90 minutes. But if any of an app of any duration, prevents you from falling and staying asleep at night. Then you don't want a nap. So light is the dominant way that you set this this whole process in motion and we know based on work that I wasn't involved in but that David Spiegel did with the great Robert sapolsky that if these cortisol Paul's doesn't arrive early enough in the day and it start because starts arriving in the afternoon.
Noon, that's a physiological signature of depression and anxiety. So that cortisol pulse is happening one way or another and you want to Anchor to the early part of the day. And so if you're feeling Wide Awake anxious in the sort of wired and tired late in the day, chances are you're not getting enough sunlight early in the day and throughout the day, right? So the delayed exposure to sunlight in the early part of the day can lead to that kind of depressed state. Absolutely. It seems like it's an easy fix to ensure that you're exposed to sunlight and an
It way in the early part of the day, the end of the day part is harder in our modern lives. Like we could do things with our screens and make sure they're off. Is there a qualitative difference between the light? That's being emitted, from the screens that we're looking at versus the overhead lights in our indoor environments. Like, we're just in light until it's time to flick the light off and close our eyes. Yeah. It's a great question. One of the things that I think can be very useful, again, is anchored in the biology of this system. Is that. So the melanopsin
Al's reside mostly not exclusively in the lower half of the retina and they view the upper visual field, that makes sense because these are cells that were essentially evolved to extract sunlight information. They're not involved in pattern Vision. They're involved in gauging. How much light there is in our overall environment in the evening. A lot of people now know to dim their screens dim the lights. But if possible, also, try and shift to an environment, where if you do have lights, make them desk lamps, or if you're really extreme, you can make them floor lamps, but try not to have too much bright.
Overhead lighting and I suppose if you work in an environment where you can't avoid that if they allow you to wear a hat or brimmed hat or something of that, sort, that could work fine too. A lot of people like blue blockers. They are not necessary in most cases, but I shouldn't say that. Excuse me. They can be very useful. If you're stuck in a bright environment to screen out. Some of the wavelengths of light, that can wake up your circadian clock so to speak because light inhibits melatonin, very potent Lee, and yet, if you're in a very bright environment, it
Matter? What wavelengths you screen out? These cells will be activated. So blue blockers. Alone won't do the job. You also need to try and dim screens and ideally lower. The light physically lower the lights in your environment or at least turn off the lights overhead, and rely on lights that are further down physically in the room and the converse of that is during the day, having as many bright lights above, you is terrific. And so, you know, I found a simple low-cost solution to this. I don't want to name any Brands because I don't have an affiliation with any of them, but
But a lot of people ask about day time since daylight simulators, I've found that the least expensive and most effective thing. Frankly is to just get a ring light of the sort design for selfie type stuff and just put it on your desk while you work throughout the day and that's giving you a lot of additional photons bright light, but you would also do well to, you know, do some of your workout on a deck, if you can get outside and take walks, if you can, we know that the major major stimuli for setting these brain states are light.
Temperature.
Movement food and social interactions, but it all really starts with light. And if we were to talk about temperature, it's clear that everyone has what's called their temperature minimum. So I should just ask you this. We can do the experiment in real time. What time do you normally wake up more or less? Generally, about six? Okay, so we can estimate that. The your lowest body temperature across the entire 24-hour cycle. Probably occurs, somewhere around 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. So your goal is to get sunlight in your
Rise in the 42 24 hours, following that temperature. Minimum, if you were to get bright light in your eyes in the 24 hours, before that temperature, minimum, it would push your clock out of phase. It would be like traveling. And the key Point here is that most people nowadays are jet-lagged, even though they're not traveling, right? And so when we feel anxious or disrupted, or we have our sleep is fractured into two, major phases, which isn't entirely normal, but abnormal, scuse me, but when we are having all sorts of issues a lot,
A lot of times it just brings us back to the question of are you getting the major stimulus for your autonomic nervous system to wake up at one time of day and be quiet and or quiescent and sleep? Eat another time of day. Are you getting that stimulus on a consistent basis? And for people that are in the northeast or in the UK and they say, well, you should see how much light is coming through right now. It's like zilch. It's really dark more photons are coming through that dense, cloud cover. Then you're ever going to get from your tablet, or your phone at the same time seasonal.
Fact disorder is like a real thing. Right? Like I have a really hard time, every every winter, I get into a funk, I slide into this semi depressed state, where I just have a really hard time getting enthusiastic about anything. I assume that that's related to the wavelength of light. And what I'm being exposed to as well as temperature, Etc, and I've done the, you know, expose myself to ring light and all that kind of stuff helps a little bit, but it doesn't really
A ameliorate it and what's interesting is even if I travel to a warm climate, you know, and I get in its tropical or whatever that time of year where where the days are short, unless I go below, you know, below to go to Australia or South America or something like that. And so it only ameliorate sit in part even though I'm in a warm environment. I still, you know, kind of can feel that washed over me until the days start getting longer. Yeah. Well, there are a couple of mechanisms for this, first of all, the
Dopamine system. It does many things in the body responsible for movement motivation, craving etcetera. But dopamine is very strongly regulated by seasonality in a lot of animals. In fact, the, for the animal lovers out there in the wildlife lovers of which I am the, you know, the shift in Pell Edge color, you know that animals are will have white or very pale for in one time of the year. And then it gets darker is actually due to a dope light regulated shift in dopamine. So, when days are short and nights are long level?
Of dopamine are reduced. This probably also explains the lower the reduced mood that you experience to some extent or another and dopamine is in this tyrosine. Kinase pathway. You people can look this up that is Upstream of the melon and pathway and as a consequence pelagia becomes white in the summer in the spring and summer months, when animals are getting more sun. There's an activation Through The Eyes. Again activates the dopamine system, the dopamine system then triggers a the melanin system to produce darkening of the
College right? And there's all sorts of amplification and seasonally breeding animals, where animals testes, involute. It's a horrible term, but a involute in the winter and ovaries will involute to they. In other words. They shrink. There's a species of hamster, actually, where the Siberian hamster, where it's testes are about the size of a grain of rice during the winter, and then they increase by more than 1,000 fold in the spring and summer. He's so there's these massive shifts. Now, humans are not restricted to seasonally breeding, you know, I mean, after all I was born in September, so that doesn't
Don't work because I'm imagining. If all things still work the way they, they do now that I was conceived sometime in. December Alta, two factors. I don't know the story of my conception nor do I want to know, but nonetheless, you know humans are subject to more subtle mood based variations and Physiology shifts across the year. And the reason is the following light comes in triggers these intrinsically photosensitive cells, then trigger a pathway that eventually converges, not just on the circadian clock in the hypothalamus, but on the pineal gland,
The pineal is responsible for secretion of melatonin. So when days are long because light inhibits melatonin the pulse of melatonin the duration of your melatonin pulse as we call it is very short when days are short and nights are very long. There's less light to inhibit melatonin. And so there's there's a long melatonin signal the Melatonin signal does a number of things. It makes you sleepy etcetera. It's going to make you feel a little bit more subdued, but it has a number of Downstream effects as well. So, what I would suggest for people that
Perience, moderate seasonally, seasonal depression would be to really emphasize trying to get as much bright light in your eyes as you can outside. And if appropriate there's a study out of Israel that shows that exposing as much of your bodily surface to light, actually can be useful to and for the following reason, we think of skin is just this barrier to outside stuff, which it is, but it's actually an endocrine organ. It can secrete hormones through it or it can direct the secretion of hormones. There's a pathway involving something called P 57 and it's a beautiful paper.
The described how people who get two hours of upper body. Most of upper-body sunlight, exposure have greatly increased levels of both testosterone and estrogen in the appropriate, ratios in men, and women, Etc, and improved mood, and improve libido, improved metabolism. The metabolism study is kind of a separate study, but nonetheless, it's not just about getting sunlight on your eyes. It's also about getting it onto your skin, which typically, we only do in the spring and summer months. So again, if appropriate trying exposes much of yourself,
To sunlight as possible. And I should say, no. This is not reinforcement for this trend that was taking over Instagram a few years ago of sunning every orifice on your body. That was more. I think we all know that was a that was more of a subculture phenomenon and there as far as I know, there are no laboratory data to support that fire. That would be a study that would be hard to get approved. I want to switch gears here a little bit and and talk about performance States. Like I feel like as an athlete I was taught certain things.
And I just naturally developed my own habits around getting into an Optimal Performance. State visualization has always been a tool but also intentional breathing practices without any instruction. It's just you watch people for example in swimming behind the blocks at the Olympics. They're all taking deep breaths. It's almost as if their body is telling them what they need to do, to induce a state in, which they can perform at their absolute Peak, but I've also been in situations
and we're now I go on stage to give a talk. And sometimes I'm very relaxed and it goes great. And other times I'm hyperventilating and I'm sweating and I'm nervous, and I can't catch my breath. And I can't get a word out. Like, I've, you know, exceeded the performance State and am in a state of induced Panic, right? So what are some practices? Because everybody, whether you have to give a presentation at work, or make a difficult phone call or have an uncomfortable conversation? We all you know, have a
Moments in our life, where we want to kind of execute to the best of our abilities. And I know that, you know, there's many things that we can do to kind of ensure that we're in the best position for the outcome that we seek. Yeah. Before I answer I just have to ask. Is there any correlation with what you described with how well you slept the night before 100%? Like when I sleep really? Well, I'm alert but I'm calm, I have a sense of confidence that comes easy. Words coming.
Easy. Thoughts, come easy. My memory is better. My recall all of that. If I don't sleep well, and often I don't particularly when I have to give a speech in front of a lot of people, because that induces a lot of anxiety and that I don't rest well. And then I wake up and I'm already off my game and then I'm in some sort of damage control. And often I find myself in a vicious circle that just makes it worse. And then there, I am on stage and just, you know, delivering a C- performance. Yeah. I have a lot to learn when it comes to that.
Art form, you're an excellent speaker at. I hear the the Stanford student in Yo, and, you know, very self-critical. But look. So self-criticism is also the the gateway to high performance over time, right? So, okay. So in terms of thinking about accessing States and self-directing, states, for performance, we should probably return to this notion of the autonomic seesaw, because we are all slaves to this process of alert alert, but calm, or stressed or sleepy etcetera. The reason I asked about sleep is
that the way to think about the autonomic nervous system is that it's not truly autonomic. In autonomic means automatic. We actually can exert some control over it. We can have certain kinds of conversations and not others. We can breathe faster or more slowly. As we talked about before, you can use your visual system in a number of ways. So we can exert control over this thing that we're calling the autonomic nervous system or the Seesaw, perhaps a better way to visualize it is that you're sort of like a imagine yourself as a stick figure. That's you on the autonomic seesaw.
And under well-rested well-prepared conditions. You can move back and forth across that seesaw. You can kind of surf that seesaw all day long and the hinge on that seesaw. So to speak is of the appropriate tightness and looseness. That, that makes it very easy. When we're sleep-deprived. There's a tendency for us to find that getting from one end of the Seesaw, to the other is a little bit more strenuous and I've talked to Matt Walker about what some of the underlying circuits that might reflect the hinge. Might actually be and it's something we might collaborate on in the future.
Future. But it's very clear that when we're well, rested, We can surf this seesaw pretty well. We feel stressed, and we can kind of take a deep breath. Calm ourselves, tell ourselves. Okay, you know, that person's nuts or that person, you know, is I'll deal with that later. But when were sleep deprived, we compromise our ability to do this, okay, regardless of whether not you're well rested or not. It's clear that there is a small handful of tools that can allow one to direct their movement along the Seesaw more efficiently. The first one is when we talked about before, which is
Physiological PSI and I'm not here to to promote. First of all, I didn't I didn't Discover it. I don't I don't know moaning. I don't own. It was Jack Feldman. That really understood the neural Machinery but physiological size of a known about since the 1930s, as a way to reset the oxygen, CO2 balance in the system. If one is feeling stressed, or I should just say more alert than one would like to be under any conditions, physiological size are at least to my knowledge. The
Fastest way to bring down that level of alertness. And again, it's a full inhale through the nose as deeply as you possibly can. And then sneak in a little bit more air at the top that's going to inflate the maximum number of a viola. And then a long exhale until basically you have no more air to Exhale. And how many times do you do that? We find that just once is often enough, but maybe three times maximum now that's very different than the five-minute physiological. Sign practice. So we were talking about before this is what I would call a real time tool. This is something that my lab has been really interested.
Developing because so many of the things that make us able to perform. Well involve taking us out of the Arena that we're in its meditation. It's a massage. It's a great night sleep. It's quality, social interaction and nutrition, and of course, we should still all. Do all of those things as often as we can. But there's this double-edged sword about or I should say, there's this very diabolical aspect to stress, which is that when we are stressed, oftentimes, we can't remove ourselves from the stress or the thing that's stressing us. And oftentimes, we are compromised in
Our ability to access the states of mind and good, sleep and all those sorts of things. You even alluded to that in your description. So, physiological size are an excellent real-time tool for dealing with things in real time. The other thing that's clearly useful is for people to get comfortable at high levels of autonomic arousal. And, in many ways. This could be thought of as raising ones stress threshold. And here, I have to give a nod to Wim Hof type breathing also, which is very
Similar to to mow type breathing which is very similar to what we call cyclic hyperventilation in the lab. But basically having a practice that you do away from the event. It doesn't necessarily have to be done every day, but maybe three times a week or so of deliberately putting your autonomic nervous system system, excuse me, into a state of very high autonomic arousal. So this would involve doing 20 or 30, really deep breaths in, through the nose and then exhaling very intensely, you know, normally are in
inhales are active and our exhales are passive in reptilian species. It's the opposite. It's kind of interesting there. Exhales tend to be active and their inhales tend to be passive. But for humans we tend to inhale and then just let the air kind of drift out of us when you both inhale, intensely and exhale, intensely 20 or 30 times. You're going to quote, unquote, heat up. That's the release of adrenaline from your adrenals. There's no question about that. You could also get into a cold shower. You can also do an ice bath, you could do submersion, you could do anything.
Number of things provided that it makes you uncomfortable. What you're doing is you're tipping that seesaw and you're doing it deliberately and then immediately after that, 20 or 30 breaths, you exhale, all your air. When I'm describing is classic two more women off type breathing, too many people and you hold your breath and try and maintain a state of mental calm. Despite being flooded with adrenaline, and then you, repeat and then repeat again. And maybe you do that three or four rounds, some people include big inhales with breath holds. I should point out that none of this should be done.
One, anywhere near water, not even standing next to a puddle because people have blacked out and drown in ice baths and in oceans and people have died doing this type of thing because of the ability that you can't breathe under water and the shallow water blackout phenomenon. So I want to emphasize that people who have a high degree of anxiety or who suffer from panic attacks are not going to want to do this unless they're doing this with clinical support right there, but for most people and for sake of high-performance, getting very comfortable at in high levels of adrenaline,
Coming through your system, can be immensely useful, such that when you get hit by something from the outside. Like the sudden appearance of an elevated heart rate for reasons. You don't understand. You can sort of third person from that in recognizing. I've been in the state before. It's are like when you learn how to drive you do it around the parking lot and you doing the local roads and then, you know, the first time you drive in really dense fog on a Mountain Road and you're scared for your life. It's one reflector at a time and that, you know, you make it through that the next time, it's two reflectors. You're like, okay, don't like this.
Could get rear-ended, anytime could go off a cliff. But I've been here before. Well, a lots of useful, for useful tasks. All right, I mean, no, no, a lot of that has to do with the root of the anxiety and often that's traced to a relationship with control. Right? Like you want to control the outcome, if you're an athlete and you have a game or a performance or, you know, whatever it is. It's that idea of like, I want this to go a certain way. I only have control over some of these variables. How am I going to be?
If what happens if x y or Z happens in an unexpected way, which is why I found visualization to be a powerful tool and I've generally used that or deployed it to visualize success like walking myself, mentally, through every step of what's going to happen and kind of plotting, how it's going to turn out in a favorable way. But I know that you have some thoughts around doing that in a failure context as well. So you're getting a comprehensive view of all the things that could happen, which could then kind of, you know, calm
Self down because you've considered it all. Yeah. So the there's some interesting data actually modeling data mean, computational models of learning that say what should the percentage of successful trials versus failed trials? Be when you're trying to learn something. So it's a little bit different than high performance in the context of competition or the on stage performance. Really, really talking about training at this point, huh? And there are a couple of interesting things about about this. The first of all the number that
Al's out of out of this really nice paper is that the best level of difficulty for something? Should be approximately successful trials, 85% of the time 15% of trial should be failed trials and obviously this will vary by contacts. If you're learning piano versus if you know you're shooting on a range or it for cognitive tasks for math, Etc. But this 85/15 rule seems to work well for the understanding of how the underlying neural networks for learning work. So that's hopefully will give people.
A little bit of guidance in terms of structuring their training or their learning in a way that it's appropriate levels of difficulty, neither too difficult, nor too easy. The other thing that's very clear is that the process of neural, plasticity? As I mentioned, has two steps, major steps. One is focused and then one is depressed. Most of the rewiring and learning in your nervous. System is going to occur during deep sleep. And so obviously try and get sufficient amount of quality sleep slow-wave and REM sleep as much as possible, but there are two really nice papers.
Published in the journal. Cell reports is cell Press Journal. Excellent Journal, which show that even brief 20 minute periods of resting or napping after learning about can greatly accelerate? The neural plasticity process. So whether or not you're trying to learn a new motor skill whether or not you have just done an intense visualization which can be relaxing, but it's really a form of training and repetition whether or not you're learning math or piano, or whatever it is that at, in some period of time within the immediate four hours.
Hours after the learning Ballot or The visualization to get 20 minutes of maybe a shallow nap. You could do what we call non sleep, deep breath. Some people call it Yoga Nidra. There are other forms of non sleep, depressed, essentially letting the brain go idle closing your eyes, they've done and this was, I should say, this is work, done in humans is done, sensory motor learning learning complex, sequences of a kind of a Simon Says game, which is, you know, hitting some people won't remember what that is, but remembering the sequences of lights and they're at can be very easy when there's only three or four things in that sequence because you got up to 20 or
That's some serious work. The other thing that really favors. Neuroplasticity are, what are called Gap effects. And these date back more than a couple decades, but and have been demonstrated in a huge variety of context of learning. But anytime you're learning something. It pays to have random intervals in which you stop and do nothing. So let's let's use learning a sequence of the keys on the piano. Just for sake of example, you're practicing a scale or you're practicing a piece of music.
Once in a while, if you have a timer that goes off randomly or the instructor or teacher tells you stop and you do and you attempt to do nothing. You could close your eyes or keep them open but you stopped the motor pattern or you stop trying to do the math problem or you stop trying to do the physical sequence that you were doing turns out that when we sleep. There's a rapid replay of the sequences that of events during the day, but at much higher speed. So per unit time, you're getting about 10 to 60 times the replay or repetition of what you're doing during the day during these brief gaps.
Ten Second gaps that are introduced while awake during your learning. You get a 10 to 20 times, repeat of whatever sequence you were trying to learn. So this is a way of getting more repetitions in even though you're doing less. And so, these Gap effects are fascinating, they're being demonstrated now for more and more types of learning. And fortunately, the more recent papers, really point to the neural mechanisms is the hippocampus and the neocortex areas involved in storage and retrieval of memories that are rapidly.
We re playing these sequences. It's like you. We talked about how one state defines the next. So when you repeating something over and over and over and you stop the nervous system doesn't just switch to what you're doing. It keeps generating that sequence and when you suddenly limit your motor behavior of your cognitive behavior, so your may be reciting lines to remember and all the sudden you just stop and you attempt to stop doing that, your mind keeps going and it accelerates the number of repetitions. And then you return to the practice. Why has that not been incorporated into our educational system? I mean, that's crazy. That's
Seems like such turboblast in our ability to, you know, synthesize information that it should be part. And parcel of how we are, you know, approaching our curriculums. Well, first of all, I will two responses to that. First of all, I've made some attempt to put that out there. We had a there's a free lecture that I did thanks to the support of Logitech. There's a free online lecture that was specifically for teachers and some steps to gaining more rapid neural plasticity because I think teachers are hungry for better ways to teach
Our students. I think I can speculate having been in the field of Neuroscience for a long while now, that there was so much excitement about neuroplasticity and bdnf or neuroplasticity, and nerve growth factor. All these frankly, hard to access mechanisms that people were thinking, you know, what can I eat? What can I do in order to enhance my learning? What's going to trigger, bdnf release? When in fact, the process of neuroplasticity is built into our childhood and how we developed For Better or For Worse, right? And it's the
About trauma, but there are a couple elements to neuroplasticity that we now know, require focus and then rest. So the number one support for learning is going to be deep sleep regular deep sleep. So, if kids want to learn better adults, want to learn better, that's the thing to focus on first, that's really the anchor to everything and we know this. And for people that feel anxiety, hearing this realize that you are resilient, you can have a poor night's sleep. I would say, try and get great sleep about 80% of the time, but that sleep
is really the thing to focus on until it's in place to get everything else to work. Well, but these other things like Gap, learning effects, they've been in the literature but they've never actually been translated into protocols for the real world. And so that there's the Neuroscience field is sort of guilty of placing things in language and context that's been really hard to access. And, you know, kind of, there have been people who have attempted to, to unbolt this stuff. People like, Mike Mirza, Nick from UCSF John, Rady from Harvard Medical School, but, you know, I think in the 80s and 90s.
Early 2000s, the world wasn't really ready for it. And here's a case where social media wasn't there. There weren't a lot of online learning platforms for people to hear about this stuff. And I want to be very clear. I have nothing to do with the specific research. I am the academic descendant of some people who did very well in their discovery of critical periods of neuroplasticity, but this isn't my work. But I am absolutely overwhelmingly enthusiastic about this work because I feel like we can all benefit from and this is absolutely free. There's no product to
Purchase, there's nothing to do except to introduce these short gaps. And then after learning to take a 20-minute nap, if you can or just try and shut off the amount of sensory input coming in. And again, that doesn't have to happen immediately after the learning but at some period in the next four hours after the learning, because we know that recall Persistence of the memory of what you learn and the ability to execute these motor sequences, just goes way, way up. Yeah. It's so crazy. How we've historically gotten it backwards. Like, whether you're
Ed student or a college student or law school or whatever it is. Like, it's all about cramming staying up all night. Exhausting yourself showing up for the test doing the dump and then crashing for a couple days, which is completely antithetical to maximizing your performance. Yeah, or, you know, unfortunately, Stanford understands the biology. And so, they don't do this at Stanford medicine or that in medical school. Many places students are sleep-deprived the residents on call. I mean, we all know that I'm gonna get in trouble for saying this.
This with the medical community, but I'll say, you know, if you end up in the hospital in the middle of the night, you should ask how long the physician right has been there. I mean, fatal mistakes have been made, right? So yeah, air traffic controllers and like all these people, the people that we that we turn over complete control of Our Lives, over to yeah. Air traffic controllers, Pilots surgeons. People like that. Are the people that are on these crazy shifts. Yeah, exists no sense. It makes no sense. And and the consequences are many and there.
VIR, the, I mean, they really can be severe. I don't know what it's like in law school, but I want to make sure that any lawyer higher is actually been rested for the learning of the material house with the lawyers are doing. I certainly don't not a lot of sleep in law school. All right. Well, we got around this out. But maybe let's close it down with with, you know, a recap or a supplementation of some of the practices that people who are listening or watching can begin to incorporate into their lives. We talked about some of the breath work practices.
Sure to light sleep, we've talked about, we don't need to go super into nutrition. Although that's super important. But maybe just a few things that people can start thinking about and practicing. Yeah. I think the most important thing is that the foundational practices which are get your sleep. Right, best way to get your sleep, right is get your morning, sunlight exposure, ideally within an hour of waking up again, if you wake up before, the sun comes out flip on as many lights as you possibly can, if you want to be awake.
Right, that's 11 basic way to just set the whole thing in motion properly. I think everyone should have a real-time tool for dealing with stress the physiological size, the best one that I'm aware of, and it's grounded in, you know, close to 100 years in physiology, and excellent work in a variety of Laboratories. I think that people should also have a way of increasing their stress threshold. And, you know, there's a lot made nowadays of ice baths and cold showers for dopamine release. And there is evidence for that, believe it or not extended dopamine release.
So from cold showers or ice baths are just cold immersion that can be very useful. I also think it's just very useful to have some sort of breathing practice or cold water, exposure, practice that you do maybe three to seven times a week. Depending on how aggressive you are to raise your stress threshold so that you can manage under conditions of high adrenaline, and your minimum effective dose for that is pretty nominal. Yeah. So there was a beautiful study. Published. The first author is dr. Suzanne us oberg. This was a study done.
Naevia published in cell reports medicine. I've spent a lot of time with this study. It was mainly focused on the metabolic effects of cold. Exposure, showing that if you want to be comfortable in cold environments, the best thing you can do is get into a very cold environment for about 11 minutes total per week. They also saw metabolic increases. You also see increases in resilience, which is basically translated to an ability to stay mentally calm. When you have a lot of adrenaline, you can do this with cold showers. You can do this with immersion up to the neck. A lot of people say, which is better. Immersion is
Better mostly because it's been studied more. It's hard to do studies with on showers because people don't always stand in the same depth as shower. As immersion is one way Etc. If you don't have access to either of those, yes, you could go outside and cold conditions, but the heat transfer and water is much greater. So, 11 minutes total translates to two or three minutes as many times a week as needed to hit about that. 11-minute threshold is really going to improve your brown, adipose tissue stores. These are tissues stores. That generate heat scum like a furnace in your body increase metabolism.
Increase this thing, we're calling resilience or stress tolerance. So 11 minutes per week, or a lot of data also about sauna, Etc, but I'll just say, if you are somebody doing cold exposure, people say, can I end with a warm shower? Hot shower? That's what I do. Because I like it. But supposed to do that. If you want to increase your metabolism, you will end with cold so that you have to continue to use your bodily, functions. Your metabolism. Or in order to reheat shivering, is actually a good thing. There's evidence that shivering from the muscle can release something called.
Succinate which triggers the more Brown fat accumulation, which is not the blubbery fat that most people want to get rid of, but is the fat that generates this heat in the body. So those are good practices to have. So limited minutes of cold exposure, total per week, divided into several sessions. But if it ends up being 6 minutes and five minutes, that's fine, too. I imagine, it's never really been looked at, and I can only imagine having talked to Suzanne has oberg that that that would be good as well. So have a real time tool have a tool to increase resilience or stress tolerance.
Then also try and limit your light exposure in the evening. Try and dim those lights, bring them low in the environment, try and make the room cool. So you can sleep well pile on the blanket. If you want. It doesn't mean being cold. It means having your environment be called. So you can toss off the blankets as needed and get deep sleep. The other thing is, I think could be very useful is to think about this three phase view of States both in sleep and awake that, you know, from 0 to 8 or 9 hours after waking that's going to be high energy, high output, High adrenaline.
Just naturally High cortisol. So linear type of operations that people always say, you know, what's your morning routine? Do you do the most difficult thing early in the day? Not necessarily sometimes I do the most boring terrible thing a day, which for me would be like an Excel spreadsheet for me is just, I'd rather get hives, then do an Excel spreadsheet, but the most difficult thing might be the creative work which would fall or brainstorming work or where it's what we would call non linear type thing, taking existing elements, but arranging them in new ways. Probably best done for most people in the second.
Is of the day. And then of course, from 17 to 24 hours. After waking, you want to be asleep, naps and depressed, or terrific limit them to 90 minutes or less, and don't do them at all. If they inhibit your ability to sleep at night and then in terms of additional resources, I think the or tools I should say that the Gap effects introduced during learning at random. So 10-second gaps introduced at random what the proper ratio is. So let's say you're doing an hour long training bout, you might introduce a kind of a
Ten to one. So for every, you know, 10 minutes, excuse me, for every 10 minutes of training, you might introduce, you know, one of these gaps, you could do them more frequently. It really hasn't been explored how often to introduce these gaps, but they should arrive more or less at random. Is that a situation? Like for example, you're reading a textbook, you're a student. So you read a certain section for 10 minutes and then you get up and walk around for a minute or is there something about moving the body? That enhances that in general? These have been studied simply?
Because it's a laboratory setting by Simply Having people stop, and either eyes open or eyes closed. Just try and limit the amount of sensory input, where n motor movement, doesn't mean that walking around wouldn't help. But you certainly don't want to look at your phone that's bringing in additional information that might even, we could speculate would inhibit this ability for the hippocampus to engage this more. You're essentially getting to getting more reps during the rest, right? And then, of course, the learning the ratio that seems about right is make things challenging such that about 15% of the time, you're getting things, wrong 85%.
And the time you're getting things. Correct? And then we touch on a few other things, some naps and, and deeps, deep sleep or shallow naps immediately after learning about, or within the, I should say, within the four hour period after learning about. And then, if you're interested in hypnosis, which is indeed, a very powerful tool for a lot of people depending on how hypnotizable they're going to be that reverie app. I think is extremely useful. I've been using it to improve my sleep. My somehow in the last year, my sleep got fractured. I always seem to wake up at 3 a.m. I was struggling to get back asleep. And so I will use
The Sleep script in there, every app during the day, it teaches you to get better at sleeping. And if I wake up in the middle of the night, I use that to get right back to sleep. And after now I'm very hypnotizable. So for me, it's worked very well, but there are clinical data and research data to support the hypnosis scripts in reverie. I'm bummed that I'm not so hypnotizable. Well, and we can we should just get Spiegel here for for a richer conversation Washington. I was lucky. He hasn't and I know he'd love to talk to you. He has incredible stories.
About how hypnosis emerged as a clinical practice and its various uses. He talks about people who have had what they thought was asthma. But it was a kind of in anxiety induced asthma and the use of hypnosis and clearing that up in single sessions. So hypnosis is powerful and I wish it was a different name for it so that, you know, neural, you know, neural re scripting or something, but then it sounds like some sort of online program, right? And all of this is was, I should say all the work on hypnosis. It will say was paid for by federal tax dollars and the NIH and
And things of that sort as well, but you know, this is serious science. And the work that Spiegel and his colleagues to his serious science around generating neuroplasticity through this trying to access the both ends of the Seesaw simultaneously. Well, I think we did it, man. I suppose we have. How do you feel? I feel grateful that you had me back on. I'm always grateful when I get to sit down with Rich Roll. I'm an embarrassing. Even further by saying even though we've known each other for some time and I'm very comfortable around you because I read your book.
First. And because I so admire what you've done and what you do, whenever I'm in your presence. I'm also just Fanning out a little bit. Come on, man. Do not flatter easy. No, it's not. You're the Superstar. I don't say it's a flatter. You I say it because it's true. So maybe someday I'll my autonomic nervous system will adjust. I'm trying to get better at receiving that kind of stuff. So I appreciate that and I appreciate what you do. It really is a gift to humanity and you're so talented at it and can't wait to see what you do next. I know you're working on a book. So hopefully we'll have
Of something to read pretty soon. Hopefully, someday he get around to it. My editor asked, you said, and you're always welcome here. And I think you have some, like, live events coming up or what you, what's coming down the pike for you. Yeah. So we're going to definitely continue with the podcast, the solo episodes and then I love having the guests on that so much fun to Showcase their incredible work. And then I am going to do some Live Events. So May 17th, I'll be doing a live event in Seattle, May 18th and Portland, and then toward the end of the
Here in the fall and winter, I'll be doing some live events in some other cities. Yeah, fantastic. Well, well, put all the appropriate links in the show notes and let's go for round three when you're ready, when the books out. Terrific. Thanks so much Rich. Alright, man. Thanks.
Peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation.
To learn more about today's guests including links and resources related to everything discussed today.
A visit the episode page at Rich world.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch. My books Finding Ultra voicing change in the plant power way, as well as the plant power meal planner at meals Rich Roll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest. And most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube.
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