LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the Newmark Theatre in Portland
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discussed science and science space tools for everyday life. I am Andrew huberman and am a professor of neurobiology opto ology at stanford school of medicine.

Recently, I had the pleasure of hosting two live events, one in seattle, washington, in one important organ, both entitled the brain body contract, where I discuss science and science related tools from mental health, physical health and performance. My favorite part of evening, however, was the question and answer period that followed the lecture. I love the question and answer period, because he gives me an opportunity here directly from the audience.

So what they want to know most, and indeed to get into a bit of dialogue. So we really clarify what are the underlying mechanisms of particular tools, how best to use the tools for things like focus and sleep. We also touch on some things we need to, mental health and physical health.

IT was a delight for me, and I like to think that the audience learned a lot. I know that many of you weren't able to attend those events, but we want to make the information available to you. Therefore, what follows? This is a recording of the question and answer period from the lecture in portal land organ. I hope you'll find IT to be both interesting and informative.

I'd also like to think our sponsors of these live events, the first is momentous supplements, which is our partner with the huberman lab podcast, providing supplements that are the very high quality that ship international and that are arranged in dosages and single ingredient formulations that make IT possible for you to develop the optimal supplement strategy for you. And I also like to think our other sponsor, which is inside tracker, which provides blood test in DNA tests, so you can monitor your immediate and long term health progress. I'd also like to announce that there are two new live events scheduled.

The first one is going to take place sunday, october sixteenth, at the wiltern theater in los Angeles. The other event will take place wednesday, november. Knife at the beacon theory in new york city.

Tickets to both of those events are now available online at huberman lab dot com slash tour. That huberman lab dot com slash tour. I do hope that you learn from and enjoy the recording of the question and answer period that follows this. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

What are the current best practices for post tb traumatic brain injuries? For those of you that weren't familiar with tbs, especially long term multiple u IT. Set to our thoughts on hyper berk om, so glad you ask this, danny, more ledge as a treatment for tbs.

Okay, tbi. One thing about tbi and concussion, everyone thing's football. Guess what? Most of the tbi is not football.

There are not that many foobar players. They're just large, so they stand out. There might be a few years this evening.

Of course, football players are concern when IT comes to tb. I most head injuries are going to be construction workers. Have you ever seen the heart heads they wear?

Those that don't even if they are just there for show, doesn't make sense. And that we actually have a lab at stanford that's focus very hard on trying to solve this problem. So construction workers, car accident, bicycle accident, portland, amazing city to cycle, i'm Frankly afraid to cycle.

Or small moving objects around these big objects. And people are staring to their little appeared on their phone while driving. I mean, whatever happened that, by the way, not texting while driving somehow IT that just disappeared, it's like is really is just disappeared.

There was all the science showing that it's worse than drunk driving and. Tbi, well, the basic rules of the don't apply, if you get a head injury, don't get a second ahead injury, but that often isn't feasible for people that you need to work, continue work in construction or that are struggling. What do we know? Well, this is a great opportunity for me to distinguish you modulators foundational tools from things that directly change your brain in our system in the way that you want to.

What do I mean by we hear so much, and there's so many studies showing that great sleep quality, nutrition, good social interactions, avoiding chronic stress and on and on and on are important for everything reduce. They're related to alzheimer's. They are related to add.

I mean, we could do thousands of podcast episodes just returning to the same ten things, sleep, not, don't stress, too much or too long, good social connection, avoid toxic people, eat good food, not too much process food. We could have an argument all night. I don't want to have one about whether or it's mainly ly plants or this.

I mean, on the inner, this obviously eating high quality food is something that we shall be doing. Which foods you select is a topic that is very barbed fire. And I can give only my opinions.

All of that modulates your brain function. But IT doesn't immediate or change anything directly. It's setting a foundation of what's possible.

So we should all be doing those things, and especially people who have tbi. Now this question relates the hyperbole chAmber, herbert chAmber. There's very interesting data, essentially a hyper oxygenation of the brain for very brief periods of time.

I think the date on hyper berry chAmber and tbi are very encouraging. The problem is much in the way that a few years ago, cro was only available in a few places, and now people are doing ice, bas and cold showers on their own. It's hard to find a hyperbaric chAmber.

They aren't just lying around and they don't have them at as typically, and they are quite expensive. So yes, they they are interesting and important data, I think, on hyperberetaeus definitely want to work with the physician or somebody who is very skilled a practitioner or who is very skilled in hyperbola chAmber. They do seem to improve brain function by hyper oxygen.

The brain for break periods of time seems to improve a number of things. But above all, that seems to improve the quality inertion of sleep, which indirectly allows the brain to repair itself. Because, as I mention early, your brain repair occurs, or brain change largely occurs in sleep.

So if you don't have access to hyper berry chAmber, but you do have tbi, what are some of the other data? What are those point to? Well, I go on and on and you don't have to get this from supplements.

You can get IT from food, but this threshold level of essential, these epa essential fat asses, there are now so many data, so much data on the valuable role of these essential E P A fati assets, thresholds being somewhere between one and two grams per day of the epa. So much so, actually, that there are now prescription forms of epa that doctors are starting to prescribed for people with tbi. Although for most people, you can get this through, you can look up.

And we've done podcast episodes about different ways to access. This also functions as an anti depression, equally good, believe in not in clinical trials to sss IT. Once one gets over the one or basically two grams per day of the epa. The resident expert on the internet about this is pretty extreme about the dosages.

And that doctor run a Patrick, who, by the way, deserves a nod of of acknowledged and support, because IT turns out that before me, or David and Clair, or matt Walker, and these guys were blamed to the world about stuff that they had learned, that, you know, archives of science and in their laboratories. The first person in was this woman named Brown, a. Patrick, as far as I know, the first public facing formally trained scientists to start going on all these podcast in risk her reputation in the this kinds of stuff that you deal with when you put your neck out there like that and and around us, I think terrific.

We don't agree on everything and they would be weird if we did. But I think she's really been the purpose ent of of these higher doses of bpa for tbi and for cognitive unction into all ages. We often hear about ways to increase total mean.

However, are there effective ways to decrease? Stop at me when you get too much of IT for certain behaviors or habits we want to break. Kd, ham, I think, is the last name.

Thank you. Kd, for your question yet. Dope, mean is a, is a slippery slope.

And doctor on olympics is the expert in this. And we've had a lot of conversation. She's one of my closer friends on the faculty. Unfortunately for her, our coffee discussions often last four hours or more. Her poor patients and family.

Here's the thing, when dopamine is higher in your brain and body, when you've deployed IT through excitement to our pharmacology, otherwise IT tends to narrow your focus and make you seek more of IT. In that general theme that you happen to be focused on could be anything that's the scary thing about doping. What can you do to control IT and to reduce IT?

Well, for those of you that are engaging in habits that are healthy, maybe that doesn't require reducing dopa mean, how do you define healthy versus unhealthy? Well, I think the simplest way to define addiction, at least by my mind, is that addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. And a good life is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure, a rather simple definition.

And yet, when we think about the biology of dopamine, dopamine is not unique to one pursuit. It's not unique to pursuit. The pursuit of sex are the pursuit of warmth when you're cold or cool environments when you're too warm, or food or social media.

It's just a dumb molecule that put you into this forward state of mass, small visual appeared and a kind of obsessive like nature. What can you do to counter that? Well, the best thing to do is to not get into that stake too long.

But if you do, the best thing you can do is to try and switch off that system, not through pharming logy, but by not pursuing more doping the day after a big vent, this so called post partum depression, named, of course, because of true postpartum after the delivery of a child, that's quite common for people to get very, very depressed. There is a lot of neurochemical and hormonal al adjustments that are occurring, but different types of post part of depression occur after a big party. The monday blues, the sunday blues, the post, whatever blues, the four months mark in a relationship.

Typically when dopamine e starts to drop. I always tell people just wait. I'm telling somebody very close to me right now, just wait four months, four months, four months and also spend as much time with that person as possible. I don't know what this deal is about not spending as much time with people.

I think people are afraid that the dopamine wave pool is just gonna pull them both under I think they have called that the escalator model of relationship where you just sort to find yourself in the relationship because you went through the stages without actually deciding on them in any event. Four months seems to be the stage in which the dopamine crh enda starts to relax a little bit, not in a long distance relationship. However, we know this right anticipation is dopamine, that positive anticipation.

And there's a whole beautiful science of this and and I should say psychology of this. There's a wonderful book. Actually, the name of the book is embarrassing always. I don't know why for me to say it's it's by psychology called kid love last, which is a psychoanalytic book about this doping serotonin system in the kind of sea saying back and forth in the fact that in relationships, people often just slam on the doping side of things, and then they hit a wall and want to break up where they go into this, like warm, cozy, fuzzy feeling things.

And they go, well, I guess the exciting part is over in this idea that one could actually or two people hom ever many people were in point, could isolate this sea saw. I don't think that you want to use pharma logy to turn off the dopamine system. But for people that to have a hard time sleeping and that are really in a state of agent and constantly obsessing the psychiatrists, one of the oldest and most effective treatments is that the psychiatrist, and this does have to be prescribed, we'll use a very, very low dose of a dopamine e recept blocker.

Like hello parao, which is a used to treat sk, is a fanning of very low dose to shut down the obsession component. Smart, well educated psychist sts know this as a useful tool. This is a one time thing with a very low dose because having your dopamine e block socks IT does not feel good, but not being able to sleep and being an obsessive mode also sucks.

So it's actually a very potent clinical tool. So pharma logy should is one tool. But really at the far end of things, I believe that one should try to modulate their own dopa mean by not rewarding oneself on a regular basis, but only randomly.

Random internet reward is truly the best schedule of reward, hence slot machines and so on. And you should engage range element and reward. And I think this is also the way that we should train kids ascent.

I caught training kids. You can tell I on my kids the, you don't reward them every time. I don't believe everyone should get a trophy every time, nor should you always just reward the winners.

Because those winners often we see cases of this, hyper file cases of this. They often crash and burn. I mean, the number of high performers that crashed and burned publicly and knows how many do IT privately is remarkable, because their dopamine e system is all messed up.

So random international and reward is the schedule reward that we should, in part on ourselves. If you have ten minutes a day to improve your brain plassy, what would you do and when would you do? IT, Richard common, thank you.

Well, i'm going to say again, I would absolutely anchor my physiology with morning sunlight viewing. I can help IT. You know what's interesting? And to tell you very briefly, you know what's special about morning sunlight? This lowing solar angle sunlight? I don't think I have talked about this much on social media or on the podcast.

There's a group at the university, washington in a couple jane morine nights, they run a lab together that sounds like a horrible thing, but they do IT and they get along very well. And we've discovered that the cells in your are the neurons that set your circuit on clock, make you a lurching the day and make you sleepy at night and so on. Those cells respond best to yellow, blue contrast and orange tones.

Now this is important because when you go out in the morning, even if it's not at sunrise, but it's close to sunrise, or you look at the sun in the evening, what you'll see is yellow, blue contrast or orange, yellow, blue, orange at all things from kindergarten or first grade. That's not the color of light that you're going to see when the sun is overhead. Now this also is really interesting because artificial lights, at least to my understanding, even the daylight simulators, have not picked up on this.

There's just about bright light. Someone ought to design something that can mimic this. But nature is done this beautifully for us. And so viewing low solar angle sunlight in the morning and in the evening is most effective because of those yellow, blue contrast.

Now here's the really wild thing, those circuits that set your levels of alertness and sleep, yes, they respond best to yellow, blue contrast. But what that tells us is crazy. What that means is that color vision was probably not related to color perception first, because all of that is completely subconscious.

The pathways that do this are present in people who are pattern vision blind. So what do I mean? I mean, that color vision likely evolved from need to synching ize your internal state with the external world. And the best stimulus in the outside world to do that is yellow, blue contrast.

In other words, our ability to detect color was first and foremost, and we understand this based on evolutionary genomics and so forth, to extract time of day information, not color of fruit or color of skin or anything like that. That's all secondary, which is wild and crazy. This is yet another example of the way we think things work is not the way they work.

It's completely a hundred eighty degrees opposite. I'm just going to be a little teaser. I had a guest on the podcast.

He isn't we have an air the episode yeah his name is eric jarvis. Sy works on speech and language. Also was admitted the alvanly dance company, again, who are these people is a professor of the rockefeller.

Anyway, I learned from eric. And you will learn when that episode comes out, that you only find a laborat speech and language in species that also engage in dance and song. And the genomics point to the fact that song and singing came first and language came second.

And that LED me during that episode of the podcast, I wrote down in my note, I was listening to him talk, and I wrote down in my notebook is just scrawled in big letters that says, I am so happy right now. I was just blown away. I could.

And IT makes so much sense when you hear IT, that the colors in the sky were what we, our system, is trying to extract, not a perception of those colors. And this guy, because they're informing us about time and orienting us in time, that song and the communication of emotional states would be simpler and more foundational than communication about specific patterns of language. When you hear IT suddenly IT makes sense.

But of course, we're human beings. And unless you're a jarvis, a ally chrome on olympic y, you think about all the stuff backwards as I do, how can I navigate my way through taking supplements to optimize my health when my career demands aren't for you, prevent me from being able to establish consistent routine andrey's an well, thank you for doing what you do, Andrew. So the consistent routine thing is tough.

You here, the here's what I can say without going into a long to a half hour episode about jet lag and shift work, which we've done. The most powerful way to encore your brain and body in time is indeed viewing light, sunlight at consistent times of day. That's not something I made up.

We know this based on a lot of work that dates back to the one thousand nine thirties. The second most powerful stimulus is going to be movement. And changes in body temperature, in particular, increases in body temperature, tend to make us alert and decreases in body temperature.

And to make us sleepy, body temperature drops one to three degrees to get us into sleep. Why does a cold shower wake you up? A gentleman is released.

And believe or not, your body is heading up and internally to combat that cold, unless you make yourself hypothesis. Mic, so sona hot, baz, to get sleepy cold showers. Ice, baz, at set up to wake up, sort of obvious when you hear IT.

But it's counterintuitive because you think, go heating up the body to wake up and cooling down the body to go to sleep. So getting into cold out to cool me down, but your body compensates. Just like if you threw a cold towel on a thermostat, you'd crank up the temperature in the room device for a suffer heat.

Okay, so what do you do? You want to try and to use as many of these things, light, temperature, exercise. Food when you eat is typically associated with waking.

Very few of us are capable of eating in our sleep. And then the other one is social activity in rythm. Now that the discommoding later person is going to be the person that has not aligned these things in a consistent way. So while schedules very, and I don't know you're exact schedule, what I can say is if you suddenly go from daytime behavior and sleeping at night to the so called the vampire shift, as it's called in the military, and suddenly you're up in the middle the night and you're sleep in during the day, then when you come off that shift, what you want to do is try and combine as many of those same things at one time.

So that would be, get your sun light, so go dragging without your sunglasses, drink your coffee, engage with other people and communicate, eat a meal afterwards, or is the case maybe before trying to bring us many of those things together the same time of day for a few days, and pretty senior system, more map around with that. So the reason I encourage, for those of us that are not doing shift work, to try and be fairly consistent about sunlight viewing is that sets in motion everything else. That's correct.

But if in terms of timing of eating, appetite will follow, when you are will follow, you'll start to learn your own rythm when you can't control your schedule. Try and combine as many of those cues again, light, temperature, exercise, food, social engagement into one period of time, and try and lock that into a more less of one or two hour period, or plus one, two hours at a particular time of day for at least two or three days, and your schedule, meaning your internal clocks, will lock to that. How is social media changing our brains? Thomas, at IT, well, you know, you hear you hear all the terrible ways in which is changing our brains.

And I think that again, we go back to the thing as is that the appeal that we're looking at. So is that the format that we're engaging in things? Or is IT the content? Well, the way I like to think about the phone is the way that we've been engaging with the phone in the laptop, for that matter, in staring into the small visual appeal, or each day is sort of like walking like this all day long, right? We have this amazing ability to shuffle our feet and take small steps or to take big strides to run, to move.

I think that's the sagittal plane for movement. I know for the brain, but I always make the pts are vicious people online, by the way, the pt and nutrition people i've i've learned to just not not say anything about that. I'm not a pt and i'm not physical therapy and do incredible work, but they're like it's a very spirit crowd and the nutrition thing is really weird how that I mean, it's just incredible people are you there are throwing liver at you or they're throwing cellar at you or that they're fasting or they are not fasting.

It's nuts. In any case, the social media and staring at a small visual appeal, he is changing our brains. Here's one way I know in which is changing our brains. And then i'll tell you how to fix IT.

If you stare or look at something to within two feet of you for a certain number of hours each day, your eyeball actually gets longer, and the visual image that is focused in front of your neural retna, not onto your neurology ina, and you are becoming biopic c near sided. And if you look at things in the distance enough, guess what? Your eyeball changes shape and your lend will focus ates.

The image on tier retina takes some work. Kids that look at things up close too much and adults to look at things up close much become near sided. And there's a beautiful set of clinical trials now where mainly in kids, if kids get outside for two hours a day getting a lot of this uvb and blue light, they were told us so terrible for us, but they get IT from sunlight.

They actually can reverse my oppoa, reduce the incidence of my oppoa, maybe even glow coma, although that's a big maybe. So how much staring into a small visual appeal or is too much, I don't know. But what we do know is that we are literally becoming biopic in terms of our vision, and we're becoming biopic in terms of our cognition.

And then there's the whole business of what's actually contained in those tweet and those social media feeds and those news stories, which Frankly, I feel like you lose either way, whether or not you're one political camp or another political camp, you're upset about half of the information out there. So I feel like, and i'm not not someone who knows how to talk about politics without stumbling. I didn't do well in social studies in a sort of thing.

IT just never make sense to me. It's just felt like that the prize goes to the person who can shout aloud and the most coherently for a moment. So but I encourage, of course, people to be politically active and I vote.

But the content is tRicky to navigate, and I can't really speak to that except that IT seems to be be bothering everybody on one side or the other or in the middle. And the format is something that we really understand. And again, I don't know of many people that are talking about this narrow visual window format thing that came up more during the lockdowns when we were all inside a lot and not looking out at a distance.

The the data said really to try and get at least ten minutes of long distance viewing. So longer than ten feet away from us for every thirty minutes of close up viewing. And not a lot of us are doing that. If you're walking to your car, looking at your phone, you're definitely losing an opportunity.

What new piece of neurological researcher you most excited about montague? I think the the piece of neurological research that are the weird stuff i've get this colleague at stanford, tony wise corry, they're brilliant, taking literally taking proteins from Young blood and Young spinal cord, a three b spinal fluid and putting IT into older people in animals and they get Younger. That's us prewar.

D um the fecal transplant stuff is pretty ild right? You take the microbial from one person, and as IT sounds, you transplant IT to somebody else, and they take on the physical characteristics of the donor. crazy.

Until I talk to my gun, there's some shouts for fecal transplant. nice. I have never read the method sections of those papers.

I'm actually afraid to read the method sections. I would say this is not neurological. But the work from Chris gardener and Justin sandberg, also at stanford, makes a sound like, I just like stanford, stanford car.

But these are the people i'm closest students surrounded by. There are excEllent places everywhere, of course, including ohsu. And i'm not just saying max m. Here, actually, close colleagues here and friends here.

I ohsu also amazing, although that tram thing freak me out, like I always just have all these ideas about what's going to happen if that thing breaks. But the that the microbial data really interesting. I never understood why getting your gut microbe was important and IT turns out it's because your god actually makes many of the neurotransmitter precursors that your brain use.

So that's prety cool. And I thought I would be a complicated thing to get. You've got microban on right.

But IT turns out that it's fermented foods that seem to have the biggest effect. There is all this argument about fiber. And yes, fiber is important. here. I am getting nervous talking about nutrition because the people going to like come at me with fiber.

But the but it's very clear from Justin and crisis data that people who are getting four servings a day of these of fermented foods, whether not its kim SHE or sour crowd or combo chelle, that stuff actually seems to encourage a healthy that microbiome and people feel Better in the immune system works Better. And I like this because IT actually um IT resolves an issue, which is that hyde's probiotics, there's very expensive need to be refrigerated things. Those actually can create rainfall and other issues there for real severe cases of this BIOS is.

So I always like instance where one can look to foods um which are good because I like to eat in order to resolve these issues. In terms of other neurologic issues, I think that Frankly, I think the stuff on dopamine is, is, is fundamentally important. So much addiction that's a severe case, but also so much waxing and waning of motivation.

And once you understand the dopamine system, you say what activities and engaging in or pharmacist in my engaging in, what am I doing to Spike doping, you start to go, oh, I get IT. The waves in this wave pool are too high, and that's why I can't do this consistently. And then you do that, the counter intuitive thing of approaching things with a little less excitement, but then you're able to do them more consistently.

So maybe with some luck, all end up finishing this book that i've been working on for four and and a half years as a consequence because I can't seem to thinking about the wim half method. Do you believe in how is really work in what process is happening in his brain? A boy medicine.

Cameron, everyone here probably familiar with a ROM hf, whose occupation on wikipedia used to be daredevil that was school like evil, can even had IT. And wim had IT, a story about wim, actually, in twenty sixteen, I heard about this guy, wim off. And um I gotto hold of him, actually is a children.

Um and I had one vacation that year, and I flew to spain, and I spent some time mount taine's ing with wim, which was absolutely terrifying. I almost lost a leg legitimately. I tied in wrong on a bridge swing.

He told me he was good for me. He told me to stare into the lizard eyes. And I added into the lizard eyes.

I jumped backwards off this homemade bridge sling thing, and I had the rope wrap through my leg in IT. I came back with basically the tending on the back of my nee exposed. And sitting next to me on the plane was our vice dean of research at stanford.

And I had to explain to him what I was doing and why IT was very embarrassing. What did we do on that trip? Well, a couple of things that will help me answer your question.

First of all, when I arrived, I suffer terribly from jet lag. But the moment I got their women did not say hello. He literally told me to get into the ice bath, and I did ten minutes in the ice bath, not because i'm tough, but because he held me down in the ice bat.

He is indeed what of the strongest human beings? Reminds me of the bus driver on the simpsons or the janitor. Excuse me, no auto.

Is the bus driver, right? That the genitor on the symmes. Like who? The guy? That's wim, incredibly physically strong guy.

What are I thin going on with? wim? Half stuff. Well, wim hop, whether not he understands IT or not, I would think he's sort of the bob dalen of breath work like everything he says seems to have some intuitive sense.

We don't really understand what in the world he's saying. It's going to come after me now. We've had a good but complicated relationship.

I'll just confess maybe sunday will resolve that. Not no big scandal story there, just we communicate very differently. When has a couple methods.

One is to deliberately hyperventilate. There's also got two more breathing. My lab actually studies this. We have a paper i'm happy to share with you the results. So they're not published yet where people do deliberate sick type of ventilation, which as the name suggests, you just breathe really deeply in and really deeply out twenty five times of your wim. You say you I just tell you here's how where you go, you do twenty five times and you heat up and you feel really agitated.

And that's because of a journal in, if you throw yourself into a nice bath or a cold shower, a general, if somebody upsets you, you get a trigger ing text, a generalin, a generalin sounds like a terrible thing, except when you deliberately induce IT. As my colleague, David speaker, says, there's a big difference between going into a state and you controlling your entry into a state. So it's not just about the state, iran.

It's about how you got there and whether not you had anything to do with IT states of high. A gentleman are very powerful. When you self induce a gentlemen by cold shower, sickly type ventilation, aka wm hf breathing or tumor breathing, you then have an opportunity to create a very distinct mind body relationship.

We all hear that interruption in the mind body relationship into reception. Just your ability to sense your heart beats and what's going on your body. Powerful, right?

Terrible if you how you feel socks. So into reception is wonderful. But when you're anxious, IT actually is a more adaptive to be able to maintain your thinking and get yourself out of that anxious state.

So if you're trembling in your bodies, freaking out in your cheeks or flushing and your and your brain is following your bottling state, well, that's not good. And if you're somebody, and sadly, this happens a lot where you've experienced a lot of trauma. Typically this the people have been barred with extreme criticism or physical abuse or other kinds of abuse during development.

They actually can seem very calm. But internally, they're freaking out in their head and they're just think they just get me through this and they're just go into a state where no one knows their upset. I've known people like this and it's easy to me because i've never had that response to stress, but it's very common.

And so we should learn and be careful about deciding that people are in one state or another based on their bodily or their mental response. Rim of breathing cold showers at seta are a great practice, in my opinion, because they allow you to Spike your a journal. And you can do that, for instance, by making the water holder, if you want more a gentle staying in longer, if you want more adrenaline, moving your limbs around in the water will give you more general, because IT breaks up, that thermal layer makes you a lot colder.

Or doing fifty deep in halls and x hills, that is very useful, because then you have the opportunity to use that preferences, cortex, and to stop and sense, saw that a journal in in your body, and yet maintain clarity of mind. And that's an absolutely powerful tool. I would even caught a powers tool.

And wim figured this out. I don't know if you know this, but the way that wim discovered all this was he was in deep grief about the tragic death of his White SHE, committed suicide, jumped off in eight story building, just truly tragic death. And he was in situation.

He had four children at the time. Now he has five. And he was in a state of depression, and he ended up going into the canal in amsterdam. And IT was very cold and IT shocked to a system.

And in that shock to the system, which is caused by a general, he somehow was able to anchor his thinking, and in a kind of genius of sorts. Wow, I can intervene in my physiology with this strange activity. And then he realized that breathing would do IT as well. You didn't have to get into cold water.

And then years later, we discovered, not we, meaning my lab, but other labs, that when you get into cold water, even just sixty degree water, that there's a very long lasting increase doping that is two point five x above baseline, which is on par with some prescription drugs for increasing dope, means. So when people laugh at me, oh, this cold water think I get tears a lot on the internet. I've heard on the internet that I, that I eat sticks a button, which I never said.

I said, I said, I like butter. I've been told, i've been told all sorts of things. I've been told I eat sticks of butter like, I don't know why i've been told that i'm dead. That was an interesting one. That was one of the cooler ones.

But you know, when I was going out, there is a serious scientists and saying, you know, using deliberate college, for sure, you can use all sorts of things, all right, you know, if you come to my lab, but be happy to put you in r and exposed you all sorts of scary after we can inject you with a general in or you can inject yourself with a generalin and titre that adjust the levels of that. So it's a very powerful tool, and I think that wim and others deserve credit for really tapping into that. And as a last point, there's a beautiful study in the purse ines in the national academy of sciences years ago using this deliberate cyclical hypo ventilation in twenty five brand.

And then another group meditate, and then they inject them both with ecole ye. And the people injected with the cola who meditate get nauseous vomit area and they get a fever. And the people who first, far fewer symptoms of any, why? Because of general and actually suppresses a lot of these innate immune responses in a way that's healthy in the short term.

This is why you can work, work, work, work, work. Or you can study for finals. You can take care of a loved one, and then you finally stop and interesting, go on vacation, and then you get sick.

Stress activates your nervous system. And in doing so, IT activate your immune system makes perfect sense. When you think about IT, how would we ever go through famine? If you're just getting flues, whatever you're stressed, we can deal with a lot.

My suggestion is if you're coming off a period of high stress to do some sort of a general in spiking behavior as you tape out of that stressful period, not going strictly to massage, vacation and yoga eer all day, long as I would reflexible do. Can red light therapy help treat exercise and tolerance sympathie medal construal disease? Allison, i'm glad you brought the step there.

You know, this is another case where I thought, you know, this red light stuff is crazy. And then I went into the literary, turns out that in nineteen eight, the nobel prize was actually given for phototherapy. So here we go again.

And here, you know, I have the slide, I chose not to use slides, and but I have the slide that shows knk zy in the magic boss and stuff from the one thousand nine hundred and thirties and psychologically and people getting into cold water. And then here we are, twenty thousand and twenty twenty. You've got width and mat Johnson giving people microdot of suicide, and we're right back where we were.

And one of my major goals is to really try and create some scientific discussion around these things. This stuff is crazy on the face of IT, but there are mechanisms that are real that underline red light, because its long wavelengths, light longer, literally as a positive short wavelength, like, can penetrate through things like skin and can indeed change my to cona. One of the more impressive results on red light comes from my good friend, gland Jeffery's lab at the university college london on glen.

For years and a few years, he was a basic vision scientists. And a few years ago, he started using red light to have people look at red light at a distance of about two feet in the mornings. There's a long wavelength light, and sometimes even just take a flashlight at torch as they call IT in england, and cover IT with a red film.

And they would look at this stuff for a few minutes each morning. And IT can reverse some forms of age related vision loss and macloan generation. How we now know IT can prove my a contrail function in photo receptors by reducing what I call to a reactive oxygen species.

Here's what's interesting. IT only seems to work in people older than forty, and IT seems to only work if you do IT within the first three hours of waking. And the incredible thing is you can do this for one or two minutes a week, and some of the positive effects last as long as three weeks.

And it's affecting a very specific form of visual improvement, which is acuity, kind of find detail stuff in my particular wavelengths. So particular colors and objects and things pretty impressive. So yes, red light can improve my a control function to the photo receptors.

If you are going to trying do this stuff, don't put IT too close. I don't have any affiliation, any red light panel companies, so I can't say anything there. They are rather expensive.

nowadays. People are putting red light everywhere, and I do mean everywhere. People are bring red light on their stomach for improving a very in function.

Whether I can penetrate is and clear to me all the way down there. People are trying to do this. Have a friend, I won't name him.

Recently, he told me he was really into the red light therapy is putting IT on his testicles to trying increase testosterone. But he told me that after he handed me the red light. True story, my team does see this is no one on my team they're onna like ah that's super interesting.

I actually don't think you want to contact the red lights directly to your skin, so red light is powerful. I don't think we have aside from the vision protocol, I don't think that it's clear which protocols are best. I will say if you're into red light inference sa, typically those don't get hot enough. Typically, if you want to get the benefits of sona, you want to get between eighteen one hundred degrees salsa s which is hundred and seventy six to uh two ten or two o eight four height.

And I don't actually do the conversion in my head and memorize you mention the consequences of blasting your brain with too much dope of me is possible to overdo ice bas, well, fall in the same line of thinking we experience extreme low and dope me or too many icebear loose uncle, thank you for the question. Any behavior that Spikes the journal, and you will eventually get Better at tolerating IT, you will become cold adapted and you will become comfortable at hia general in states. And you just have to ask yourself, this is just like lifting weight in the gym or running, you need to leave some space for improvement.

So if you run as people do, and you do your half man, your five k then your ten k then your half marathon, maybe a ten k is a half marathon, I don't know, but anyway, then you're doing your marathon, then you're doing all trust that are fifty miles and hundred miles. I mean, eventually you're going to start doing damage, right? And eventually you'll get every ultra runner.

And typically, these are people who are very much of the dopamine, an pursuit system. And I don't think that he would mind my good friend and a podcasts. Ter, I have tremendous respect for, you know, rich role, amazing human being, and also has an amazing story about addiction.

He was an alcoholic. I'm not sharing anything that he hasn't already shared in this amazing book. Finding ultra, you know, he got really a running, running, running all the time. And there's a dopamine history there for him.

Some of us can use ice baas so consistently and make IT so cold and doing them longer and longer that indeed you're playing with the dopamine system is IT bad. Well, depends on what you're trading that in for at the expense of what as a giving up cocaine yet. Great, stick with the ice bath.

But you you can only make IT so cold, and you can only stay in there so long before you become wim. Hf, right? And IT worked out for wim, but there's really only one of him off.

And in general, that speaks to a larger theme, which is, I love the idea of people using tools and understanding mechanism. I mean, of course I love, that is what I talk about and think about so much of my my life. But for most of us, we don't make a living doing those things.

And so I do think that the ideal situation is to have behaviors and tools that you intersperse throughout your day and throughout the week. For instance, I think three times as a week is fine for the ice bath. No one said you had to do IT every day, but you should see online every morning, if you can, just because if you miss a day, your system will be fine to spend.

This is long outside the next day, seriously, because it's a slow integrating system. But you know, for most of these high intensity things, the less often you do them, the more powerful they are. In fact, if you get into a very hot sauna for four, excuse me, thirty minutes sessions on one day.

So you go thirty minutes, get out for five minutes. Thirty months, get out for moments. Thirty months. Get off for women, two hours a day. And the song that's a lot of sona, but the growth hormone released from that, this type of protocol is a sixteen next improve, increase in growth horon.

This has been measured in humans as if you do IT every day or three or four times a week, you get diminishing returns on that. So I actually a big fan of doing really intense stuff only every once in a while. This is also why I only take one long run per week or one long hike.

First of all, I don't have time for IT. I'm not an ultra runner. I got other things to do as like of all, it's a strong stimulus.

I'm sore until tuesday or I don't want to run until tuesday anyway. I actually think that's fine and I actually encourage more healthy rational schedules of these kinds of behaviors. There's no rule that says you have to do something every day even if you're trying to engage general plasticity.

You can learn french or an instrument by practicing three times a week as long as you're practice is is very focused, right daily perhaps would be Better, but very few of us have the opportunity to do things every day consistently. And I really want encourage a more baLanced approach before working through asia. What's the bed couldn't Graces. The escape waters are always in the house.

My first nonbiological family was escape boarding community when I have great relationship with my parents now, but because there was a time when there was no one to go to socket games doing that stuff, the skateboard community took me in because there were no parents involved, there was great, there were no reference or coaches because I did like authority. And IT was IT was awesome, and there was no nutritional plan. You drank your sloppy, you SAT on the curb.

And IT was fantastic. I don't do that anymore, but escape working in community is one that i've ever main close with. I did right for for asha under a different name while I was opposed dog to make some extra cash.

You won't find those articles anywhere. I hope they're not very good. And best catcher light was involved in IT enough that I this when we make sense, like three people in the audience. But I decent heel flip, I could not Better than I could all, and I was never very good, and I just other more skate boards in the eyes.

But I will say though yet to be very careful with skateboards, because I don't want to claim that I was any good, any any successful I had was out of sympathy of others for letting me hang around. He was a great community, and IT gave me great appreciation for indeed, communities of kids that don't have you. Structure and sports leagues and teams and all that kind of stuff nowadays.

It's it's actually a much different landscape, and I have to also say what it's really amazing to see all the incredible girls and women skateboards. Also, there were none. It's olympic port now for women and girls and and olympic sport for for boys and two.

So it's it's awesome to see that community. Okay, what are your favorite brain hacks for doing hard things, ranging from cold exposure to getting through and through selection? hobby? Darling, thanks for the question.

Yeah, who hard things? Well, i'll be honest. I learned how to hack into my general system a long time ago through the worst possible mechanism, which is that I would set up battles in my mind.

I would I would get into competition with people imagined their real, or I would um get into states of fearing a shame and um you know screwing up. So I would you can this is what a lot of people do. I think you up scaring yourself and to try to do the hard thing.

And IT works. The problem is, IT feels rather like a downward spiral because those negative states of mine worked to liberal, to trend in and get you in in through hard things. So being know, as a kind of rebellious kid, know resistance.

If someone told me I couldn't do something as, like, try me this kind of thing. And I didn't mentioned before, I wasn't crazy about authority. And so that was the method for a long time. And then then I started reading all of her sexy books, and I started learning from people who seem to access things through this whole love thing. And I tried that love and kindness meditation thing and that in work.

And what I started doing was I actually, i'll just tell you, when I before I came out here tonight and before I do anything chAllenging, I just actually like to imagine the people that have supported me. It's it's a weird tool I don't think I ever shared. I'm actually slightly embarrassed to share this out because the only two things that make me cry, and that's talking about my bulldog and talking about my graduate advisor and if I talk about any longer, roll probably ly cry.

But I think about them a lot because they're kind of similar. They were kind of ordinary and they were hard on me and and I adore them both. And so these days I try and think about people that that really that I love.

And so I haven't trying to do this whole, like doing things from a place of love thing. And so for me, that's animals and people that I love. Okay, now, now, now I am Better move on.

So ah thank you. okay. They're telling me one more question, so i'm going to answer one more.

What do I fear? How do you manage your fear? Kb, oh, gosh, is gone to turn into a no one to get me as well until I cry, I get IT, I get IT, I do cry.

But again, about the things I mentioned before, I realize something, by the way, we just recorded episode on grief. IT hasn't come out yet. Fascinating topic.

I realized at one point. By the way, i'll just give this away that I thought I was really sad about losing them. I thought I would tear up really easily because I was sad about them.

But then I realized this, gosh, I can't be able to do this. But I realized that feeling, that I was feeling as the exact same feeling of love that I had when they were alive. So grief is love.

And when you look at the literature, ds, it's basically that, but your brain is freaking out because that map of knowing where people are in space and time, grief is basically a remapping of the space. Where are they? time? When are they? And then this kind of abstract map representation that we call closest.

And grief is this process of, like, ripping ourselves off of that. So in any event, what do I fear talking about things like this? What do I fear.

Quite honestly, the my biggest fear, the thing that will just make me feel just horrible as I fear letting down my friends. I have an amazing, I love my family and they're wonderful, but I have this incredible relationship to friendship. And I just, I adore my friends, and I would sooner give up all my limbs and die before I, I would deliberately let them down. So there you go. That's what I fear most.

I also fear i've gone long, and so my team has shut this down. I just wanted as briefly, two things. First, all I I course.

I want to thank everyone for coming here tonight. I realized it's middle of the week and to commit some hours of your life to thinking about these brain mechanisms. But we are pretty nerdy there for a minute.

And hofus ly, the tools redeemed, those who were only interested or mostly interested in practical tools, but hopefully some of the insights about how you work, where we're useful as well. I do want to just make brief mention of the sponsors that made this possible because I did make this possible and we made every effort to try and keep the ticket Prices manageable for people. And thanks to inside tracker, momentous for making this possible. And then, of course, I would be completely remiss if I didn't say thank you for your interest in science.

Thanks so much, everyone. Be sure to get home safely tonight.