Optimize & Control Your Brain Chemistry to Improve Health & Performance
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I made your huberman, and i'm a professor of neutral logy and opened ology at stanford school of medicine. Today we are going to discuss your brain chemistry and had to control and optimize your brain chemistry for all aspects of mental health, physical health and performance many times before on the huberman in lab podcast.

And Frankly, every time i'm a guess on another podcast, I get questions about science and science space tools for things like enhancing sleep, enhancing focus, enhancing creativity, improving relationships, getting over grief and on and on, all of which are valid questions, and for which there are protocols that are based in science and that work the first time and every time. However, far more important than knowing a protocol is understanding why a given protocol works. That's why i'm always hammering on mechanism and explaining the cells and circuits and chemical, at least to some detail, so that people can understand not just what to do, but why IT works and therefore how to change your protocol as their life circumstances change or as goals change.

Now today, we are going to go even a layer deeper. We are going to explore the foundations of your biology in your brain and body that allow any protocol to work. Because, as IT turns out, all of the protocols out there, whether or not a breathing protocol or a supplement or a prescription drug or an exercise routine, they all tap into and leverage a core set of just a few biological mechanisms that's right beneath everything you are able to do and feel, and indeed beneath every protocol that allows you to change for the Better and optimize your mental health, physical health and performance.

There is just a small subset of chemicals that you're leveraging toward that change. So today, we are going to talk about the four major pillars of neurochemistry that allow you to, for instance, be focused when you want to focus, that allow you to relax when you need to relax in these stress, that allow you to optimize your sleep, that allow you to optimize your exercise routine, or to work through a pain point in relationship or in career, or in your relationship to yourself. So what I can say for sure is that by the end of the episode, you have a much richer understanding about how your brain and nervous system, and indeed your entire body work.

And you'll have a much firmer understanding as to which protocols and tools to reach for, given your particular goals in the moment, in the day, across the week, across the month, across the year and indeed, across your entire lifespan. So what we're really going for today, our principles, deeper understanding of why any given protocol works. And we are also going to discuss specific protocols, some of those protocols i've discussed on previous episodes of the human lab podcast.

But I must say many of the protocols and tools that I will discuss, our brand new and on research that I have not disgusted, all simply because the research papers came out only recently, or these are papers that I only recently on earth. In fact, i'm going to share with you two recent studies in a moment that are exceedingly important for optimizing your sleep. And these are studies that, again, i've never discussed in any episode on sleep or on any other podcast.

So by the end of today's episode, you're going to have far more knowledge about your biology and psychology then you did at the start. And you will be armed with many more tools, and most importantly, principles, so that you can navigate not just the tools presented on this podcast, but in the vast landscape of tools that are out there for mental health, physical health and performance. Every so often I come across the study or set of studies that I get so excited about that I started telling everybody in my immediate life.

And I insist on also sharing with you the listeners of this podcast, because I find the information to be so incredibly interesting and actionable. The two studies that i'm going to discuss both relate to sleep and sleep states and how to access Better sleep. The first one was publishing the journal cell reports sell press journal, excEllent journal.

The title of this paper is a rapid and reversible control of human metabolism by individual sleep states. We will provide a link to the study in the show caption the first author is nora nowak and O W, A K. And basically what they did is they measured the different forms of a metabolic that occur while humans sleep.

As far as I know, this is one of the first studies of this kind. There are many studies of meta listed. There are many studies of sleep.

This study focused on how different states of sleep, such as rapid eyes movement sleep, which is associated with dreaming and high emotional content dreams, versus slow wave sleep, which tends to be more focused on physical repair of the body, more mundane dreams, how those different states of mind during sleep relate to different aspects of metabolism. And what they found was absolutely fascinating. First of all, they found that sleep states regulate more than fifty percent half of all the metabolic res detected in human breath.

What does that mean? Well, hell turns out that you can figure out what humans are metabolic, in particular more lipids or more copper hydrate, whether not relying more and luco s metabolism based on the contents of their breath. This is true during waking and during sleep. This is what allow them to do these incredible measurements of what's being meca lizer. During sleep, they measured closed to two thousand meta abo lights in breath every ten seconds across the entire night sleep.

And what they found was that there are major pathways related to lipid metabolic, fat metabolic, or to cover a hydrate, meta lisp, or other forms of metabolic that are upper down, regulated as human beings transition between slow wave sleep, rap and eyes, movement sleep and waking. And you might say waking well, yes, they also looked as people fell a sleep and as they emerge from sleep and believe IT or not, every so often during sleep, you wake up, you didn't know this. But you wake up in the midnight, you look around and you go back to sleep.

You're not aware of IT because you're still in a rather sleep like state, although you are awake. What they found was that sleep in the various states of sleep regulated individual meta lic pathways. They found, for instance, that the switch from sleep to wakefulness reduces fat acid oxy ation.

So that means while you're a sleep you're ox dating more fatigued and as you wake up that becomes less the case. And there's a switch and slow wave sleep that increases fat acid oxy ation. And there's this transition from rapid I movement sleep to other aspects of sleep that brings about things like the so called tca cycle.

Some of you familiar with metabolic, be familiar with the tca cycle, that so called trick bolic acid cycle intermediate, that's fancy nerd speak for specific aspects of metabolic being regulated during this rapid aid movement sleep transition. What does all this mean and how is this actionable? Well, on many episodes of the huberman lab podcast, such as the master sleep episode and the episode that we're going into in further depth today, we're gona talk about sleep and how to optimize sleep.

It's been thought of, but not really tempted down that quality and depth of sleep and duration of sleep is important for metabolic during the daytime. And indeed, that's the case. If people are sleep deprived, they're not sleeping enough. Things like glucose, metabolic and that are get really disrupted during the daytime.

But what this current study shows is that the metabolism that you experience during sleep, or to be more specific, the range of different types of metabolism that you experiences during sleep, may serve to tune up or to ensure that the specific aspects of metabolite that you require during wakefulness are working properly. In addition to that, this study clearly shows that getting enough sleep allows you to transition through all the various forms of metabolic and use all those different forms of metabolic ts during sleep in a way that's immensely beneficial for the systems of your brain and body. So the take home message here is that, as the author state sleep and experiencing the different states of sleep, slow way sleep early in the night predominated plus rapid I movement sleep told the end of the night, is extremely important for optimizing meta lic circuits for human performance and health.

In other words, by not getting sufficient duration sleep, you're not allowing your body and bring to transition through all the different aspects of fuel utilization, and you're not teaching your brain and body how to use similar types of fuels during wakefulness. So again, all of this points to the fact that we need to be getting sufficient quality energy of sleep. So if you're sleep deprived even by an hour or so, you're going to get far less rapid eye movement sleep.

Because rapid eye movement sleep is what occurs told the end of a sleep night during the early party night, far more slow wave sleep, in getting less rapid aid movement sleep. We know IT makes you more emotionally lay bio, but now we know it's also going to alter certain forms of glucose metabolism during the night and during wakefulness. So that all underscores the need to get sleep.

But then the question is how to get enough sleep and how to make sure you get into all these different sleeps states. And this is particularly important for you so called night hours. There's a lot of controversy out there as to whether not different so called chronic types exist, that is, people who just naturally or genetically want to be an early bird, wake up early and go to Better early.

So these people that wake up at four A M and would be most comfortable going to bed by seven or eight pm or nine pm, then there are so called nine hours. People that would feel best, or tend to feel best when they go to sleep at one m two A M, even three am, and like to wake up later eight, nine, ten or even eleven am or noon. And then of course, most people go to sleep somewhere between ten P M and midnight and wake up somewhere between five and seven A M, or I suppose more typically, six A M and eight.

Now, whether not real connect pes exist, or whether not people simply select schedules for sleep and wakefulness that they like because of their social schedules are the activities they enjoy. For instance, some people like to really go out. They like to go out dancing or hear music, or spend time in venues that are only open late at night, don't even open until new or after.

Other people like myself rarely go out at night, but I like to get up early. I like exercise. I like to see the sunrise I set up. So I don't know if i'm a morning person or an evening person. I just know the things I enjoy tend to happen in the early part of the day, and the things that I don't enjoy quite as much then happened late at night.

Regardless of whether not their real genetic propensities to be a kite or an early bird or a sort of typical person right in the middle, it's very important that people have some control over their sleep schedule and even more important that people are able to get sufficient amount of rem sleep and slow wave sleep for many reasons, but including the reasons I discussed in the previous study related to metabolism. I'm very excited, therefore, about a study that in sleep medicine, this was a few years ago, but somehow I missed this one. He was published twenty, twenty.

And the title of this article is resetting the late timing of nightlife has a positive impact on mental health, physical health and performance. This is a study done in humans focusing specifically on people that like to stay up late and sleep in, but who desire to be able to get up and feel alert in order to go to work or study and they want to go to sleep a bit earlier. And so they're a lot of questions embedded in this study, in particular, whether not people can actually shift their schedule by a few hours or more.

Some people out there content that if you're not, that's just going to be impossible or very, very chAllenging to do. Turns out it's not impossible and it's not even that chAllenging to do provided you do the right things. Just a brief overview of the study, and then i'll give you the key takeaway.

IT was a analyzed control trial. IT involved a number of different people, both male and female. And what they did was they use non pharmacological practical interventions in a real world setting.

Here i'm paraphrasing. They used targeted light exposure. They used consistent sleep wake times. They used to fixed meal times, caffeine and take and exercise. This is one the reason I love of the city so much, because i've done episode talk about temperature feeding, and most importantly, light exposure as a way to control and shift your sleep wake cycles, your so called circadian timing and entrainment.

What did they find? Well, they found, quote, significant improvements in terms of mood so far, less depression and stress subjectively measured, as well as improved cognitive performance that was objectively measure to improve reaction times, improved physical grip strength, which is actually a measured not just of strength pursue, but also of nervous system function, and a number of things that people could do in order to optimize their morning hours, even though they were nine hours previously. What do they have people do? Well, i'm going to going to list this off and sort of rapid fire succession, they will prove de a link to the study if you want to learn more.

First of, they told participants to try to wake up two to three hours before their typical wake up time, two to three hours. That seems a brutal to me and probably seems brutal to you. If you're somebody who typically wakes up at ten am to try and get up at eight or even seven, I am consistently.

But they were also asked to maximize outdoor light exposure during the mornings for reasons that if you've listen to this podcast before, if you heard me talk about before, that i'm constantly talking about, I probably go into the grave shouting, please get as much light exposure from sunlight early in the day as possible. Because IT sets an emotion, a huge number of things that are beneficial for your mental health and physical health, including dooming production timing, melt toni production correctly reducing court is all peaks late in the day at at sea. So they asked them to get a lot of outdoor light exposure.

They didn't give them a specific amount what they said maximize outdoor light exposure during the mornings, the time before noon. And again, they had them waking up two to three hours before their habitat wake up time they were also told. And this is very important if you're going to shift your schedule earlier to try and keep sleep wake times fixed between their workdays and their weekends.

So not sleeping in on the weekends, we're not having any sleeping days regardless of how well they sleep the night before, how fixed within fifteen to thirty minutes of their redesignated time. So if they were waking up at seven o'clock one day, they set the alarm and they made sure they got out of bed at seven o'clock every day, plus or minus thirty minutes, but never later than seven thirty, never earlier than six third participants were also asked to trying go to sleep two to three hours before their habitual bedtime. So again, these are people that want to stay up lately.

Eleven pm perhaps, but even as latest one am or two A M and now they are asked to go to sleep two to three hours before the habitual that time, and to wake up two to three hours earlier. As I mentioned earlier, they were also told, and I love this because IT fits with many of the things we talk about on this podcast before, to try and limit light exposure during the evenings, dim the lights or limit altogether artificial lights. Lot of reasons for that.

I covered that in the master sleep episode. I covered that in the optimized health using light episode. You can find those at huberman lab out com. They're asking them to do that here.

And they asked participants to keep a regular schedule for their daily meals, not eating on the hour for consistently, you know, at nine noon, three pm, exactly. But then again, about fifteen to thirty minutes, they're always eating at the same times. That was also important.

And again, that's because we had these so called food in train circling clocks. When you eat tells your body when to be alert and when you're not eating, when to be a sleep. And they were told to not drink any caffeine after three pm in the afternoon.

Another theme that we ve talked about on this podcast, they were also told not to take nps after four P M. Maps are an interesting feature of the sleep wake cycle. To be very brief of about this and to pull from the episode that I did with world sleep expert from university, half one, your berkeley bat Walker.

Nps are great for many people. Don't nap if he interferes with your nighttime sleep. And in this study, they told them, don't nap after four P.

M. And if you are a napper, don't nap for more than ninety minutes. Ten minute maps are fine. Twenty minute nap are fine. Zero minute nap are fine, but don't nap for more than ninety minutes and don't nap after four P M and to exercise during the morning this one can be a bit controversial because I know a lot of the P S out there and lot of the online um you know uh gym rats and people who and runs to for that matter, we will say well in according to body temperature and research, it's best to exercise in the afternoon. Look, it's Better to exercise some time as opposed to no time.

But if you're focused on how to shift your schedule earlier, meaning get up earlier and go to sleep earlier, this study had people exercise in the early part of the day, certainly before two pm and ideally before noon. So again, this is a really important study because IT combines a lot of different variables to arrive at this very impressive shift, where people can get up two to three hours earlier, and then pretty consistently and reflexively started going to bed two to three hours or earlier, feeling more lurching the day again. Improvements and cognitive performance, mood and physical performance, grip strength.

At setara, very few studies are able to are willing to tackle so many variables and combine them in one study. This paper, I think, is a marvelous job of doing this and this, incorporating things that individually, each have some support for them in animal studies, in previous human studies. But as far as I know, this is one of the few studies that really combines all these different features in one place, eating times, keeping those consistent, getting maximum sunlight exposure earlier in the day, getting up at a consistent time, going to a sleep at a consistent time and on on.

It's a really marvelous study for that reason. And I think for any of you that are night out and any of you that want to reinforce your early waking and leto bad times, and I think for most all of you who fall into that general middle category of tend to go to sleep somewhere between ten pm. And mike, is that most people and tend to wake up sometime between six A M and A M.

Well, maybe you want to become more of an early riser, or maybe you are going to travel, or the seasons are changing and you want to shift your time and you have a new job at sea, or something that actually very common in terms of relationship struggle. You want to match your wake sleep times, or maybe you want to offset you're away sleep times from a significant another. These sorts of approaches that I described here and that are supported by the data in this paper are absolutely powerful and science supported.

And i'm certain that if you would apply them, that you would see essentially the same effects that were observed here. Before we begin, i'd like to that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is etic Greens. Athletic Greens is an all in one of vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink. I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that their sponsor in the podcast, the reason I started taking athletic Greens and the reason I still take athletic Greens once or twice a day is that IT helps me cover all of my basic nutritional need to make up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, IT has probiotics, which are vital for microbiology health.

I've done a couple of episodes now on the so called gut microbiome, and the ways in which the microbiome interacts with your immune system, with your brain, to regulate mood, and essentially with every biological system, relevant health throughout your brain and body. With deleted Greens, I get the vitals I need, the minerals I need and the probiotic to support my microbial. If you'd like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com slash huberman and claim a special offer.

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Again, go to athletic Greens dog comes so huberman to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs and the ear supply of vitamin d three. K two. Today's episode is also brought to us by element.

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If you like to try element, you can go to drink element that element t dot com slash huberman and you'll get a free element sample pack with your purchase. They're all delicious. So again, if you want to try element, you can go to element element t docomo slash human. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga eja, recessions and nsd r non sleep depressed protocols.

I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I start doing yoga edra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations. And IT had a lot of different types of meditations to place, to bring your body into different states, and that he liked IT very much. So I gave the waking up up a try.

And I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate. Other times I have longer to meditate, and indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up up has lots of different types of yoga eda section.

Those who don't know yoga eza is a process of line very still, but keeping an active mind is very different than most meditations. And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yogananda and something similar to IT called non sleep deep breath or nsd r, can greatly restore levels of cognitive physical energy, even which is a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial.

Again, that's waking up, doc. Come slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial. Let's talk about how to optimize and indeed how to control your brain chemistry for the sake of health and performance.

Now in order to do that, we all need to be on the same page about some basic facts. Some of those basic facts involved learning some basic biology. And I promise that even if you don't have a biology or chemistry background, everything i'm about to say should be accessible and clear to you.

The important thing to know is that your brain and your spinal cord and the rest of your so called nervous system control all the organs of your body, and that all the organs of your body feedback, meaning they communicate through chemicals and other means to your nervous system. Now, your nervous system plays a particularly important role in generating everything from sleep to wake on this creativity, stress, calm, eeta by way of a particular type of cell, cell interaction. And that's called cynthia communication.

What is synaptic communication? Well, in order to understand that, let's dial back a little bit further and try to understand for a moment what makes up your nervous system in its simplest form. Your nervous system is made of nerve cells that we call neurons.

Neurons communicate with one another through chemicals. They release certain chemicals that make other neurons more or less likely to be electrically active. What you mean by electrically active, we mean as IT sounds, electricity passing down through cells and then literally causing electricity in other cells.

The simplest way to think about this is maybe when you were a kid, or maybe even still now, you would wear socks and you would suffer along the floor to generate some static electricity, and then you touch someone and you shock them with your finger. I'm a Younger brother, so occasionally do that to my sister, I D friends. We would do that to one another.

I know it's kind of silly, childish, yet IT illustrates the principle that we can generate electricity and pass electricity to other beings, or in the case of neurons, from one neuron to the next. The way neurons do that is that in between the neurons are low spaces. Those those spaces are called synapses, ses.

And neurons literally vomit. Well, they don't literally vomit, but they release little packets of so called transmitted chemical into that space. We call a synapse.

IT travels across the synapse. IT attaches to the cell on the other side, the other neuron. And then, depending on what that chemical is, IT either makes that next neuron more electrically active or less electrically active. So called exciting, either excites the next, nor on to be electronically active also, or IT inhibits IT, prevents the next year on from being electrically active. So again, very simply, we have nerve cells that communicate with one another through electricity and chemicals that inspire that electricity.

And the little gaps between neurons are called synapses, is you can understand that i'm certainly can make IT through the rest of the episode and that you will get all the depth and important detail that you need to know. But I want to go just a little bit further and explaining that neurons don't just talk one to one. There are trillions of neurons in your nervous system that allow you to be happy, to be in love, to be sad, to be in grief, to remember things and so on.

And what you do at any moment, what you feel and what you think relates to which so called neural circuits are active. So a lot times we think about brain areas, and we've all seen these pictures of the brain where you know someone who was in a fr. Scanner, or they were in a brain scanner of some sort, and they saw a picture of something.

And a certainly of the brain lights up, as it's called, that lighting up with the brain really reflects the activity of hundreds, if not thousands, baby, even millions of neurons in that region. Those images of brain areas lighting up, and indeed, talcum up, brain areas lighting up, can be a little bit or a lot misleading, because, in fact, no single brain area controls any one single perception or behaviour or feeling state. Rather, we have so called neural circuits, chains of neurons, chains of specific neurons, that is, that create different states of mind, that lead to specific behaviors, that lead to specific emotional states.

And those neutral circuits are made up of lots of different brain ears that light up in particular sequences. And when I say late light up, excuse me, what I mean is that particular brain areas either excite or prevent the exit. That is, the inhibit other brain areas in a particular sequence, much like keys on a piano play in a particular sequence makes up a particular song, particular brain areas activated or made silent in a particular sequence, leads to a particular behavior like getting a part of a chair, or a particular feeling state, like being really happy one day when you wake up.

Or particularly depressed, whether not that depression is caused by a life event, or whether not IT arrive spontaneously. So we have neurons, we have synapse ses, and we have neural circuits. And vitally important is the fact that which neural circuits are active and which neural circuits are likely to be less active at any given moment depends on two major categories of chemicals.

IT depends on hormones, and IT depends on so called neuromodulators. We're mainly going to focus on neuromodulators today because those are the things that if you can learn to control them, and indeed there are tools to control them, then you can control which neutral circuits are more likely or less likely to be active in you at any given moment. And in doing so, you can control whether not you are going to be alert and focused or deeply asleep.

You can control whether or not you are going to be in a creative state or whether not you're going to be in a state of mind, more fit, more capable, that is, of doing focused work or math, or more so called linear types of work, where there is a correct answer, there is a specific thing to follow, and you're simply going to plugged in hug, as IT were, through a particular set of steps in order to accomplish something. Or for instance, whether not you're going to be in a more relaxed and creative state where you're thinking about new ideas or new ideas are just seem to be spontaneous ly coming to mind. All of that can be controlled to a considerable extent by leveraging ly, so called neuromodulators.

What are neuromodulators neuromodulators or particular chemicals that make IT likely that certain neural circuits will be active and not others? And the four neuromodulators that we're going to talk about today that are of the utmost importance for your goals or doping. Epa, an also called a journal serotonin and a seto calling that dopamine, epa, phin, serotonin and a seto calling.

Today, i'm going to teach you how each of those different categories of neural delatour work and the things that you can do to control those neuromodulators, that is, increase them or decrease them through behavioral tools and supplementation in ways that allow you to access the brain and body states that you want at the times that you want. Just very quickly, I want to talk about how neuromodulators are able to work regardless of whether not its dopiness, tony or open aman at seta. There are many features of how our modulators work.

But for sake of today's discussion, we only need to focus on two of those features. And those are fast acting features and longer, slower features or what we call baseline features. What am I talking about when I say faster or baseline? Well, consider that at any given moment, whether not you're sleep or awake, whether or not the morning or afternoon or night, you have some amount of dopamine in being released in your brain body, some amount of serotonin, some amount of epiphone and some amount of a seto calling IT is rarely, if ever, the case that you have zero doping or zero serotonin.

So often we hear about someone being dopamine e depleted. These days, you hear a lot about that anyways, or you hear that people's theatre in is bottomed out. In reality, none of these new modulators ever disappear completely, but they tend to be present at different levels or different relative levels.

Another important thing to point out is that they don't work alone. In fact, as you'll soon learn, dopamine and epanchin are close cousins that collaborate in terms of creating states of focus on motivation, for instance, or in creating states of energy and the pursuit of particular goals. I say their close cousins.

What I mean is that they tend to impact some of the same neural circuits and believe IT or not, dopamine and epinephrine chemically related to, i'll just tell you right now that epinephrine actually derived from domine chemically een effin, that is, a drennan, is made from the molecule dopamine. Now, dopamine and serotonin can also work together to impact certain circuits in the brain. But in large part, they Operate on separate circuits.

And a seto coin, which you'll soon learn is involved in states of focus and can actually open up IT, can literally create state in the mind in which your brain is more plastic and able to change and learn more quickly. Well, a seal calling can do that on its own, but rarely does IT do IT on its own. More typically, IT gets assistance from some of the other neo modulators.

Now that might seem like IT complicate the picture, but IT actually makes the picture far simpler, because what we can say for sure is that the fast actions of dopamine were the fast actions of epiphone certa in ar C2Calling our act ions tha t occ ur on the ord er of sec onds or min utes or up to abo ut an hou r or so, whether the slower actions of those neuromodulators tend to occur on the order of hours, days or even weeks. Now, perhaps singly, i'd like to focus on the slow actions of the neuromodulators first, because those slow actions of the neuromodulators are happening in you and in me and in everyone right now. And they set the backdrop, the context in which the various tools to manipulate doping ean ef on serotonin or a eda Colin will work.

What do you mean by the context or the backdrop or the baseline? Well, it's fair to say that most people are a wake ture in the daytime and a sleep at night. I do realize that there are people who are going to be doing shift work, rather raising Young children, or that my have a sick person at home that they're tending to eat or even have insomnia, they're tending to them. So schedules of sleep and away from this will vary.

But in general, everybody, regardless of whether not your internal or you or higher and only awake in the day, pretty much everybody follows a schedule in which from zero to nine hours after waking, that is, from the time you wake up until about nine hours later, the neuromodulators doping and epinephrine tend to be at the highest levels that they will be at any point in the twenty four hour period, in any period of the day. So we can call this zero to nine hour period phase one of the day, just for simplicity. And i've referred to this before in a previous episode, but not in this exact context, from nine to about sixteen hours is what we will call face to.

And that's when dupine and epinephrine vell tend to subside a bit compared to the earlier face one part of the day, and serotonin levels start to increase and then face three of the twenty four hour cycle, which is from about and again about this year, approximate about seventeen hours after waking, until about twenty four hours after waking is face three of the day. And during that time there is chaos in terms of which neuromodulators are most present in the brain. And what I chaos, what I mean is that during sleep you have incredible peaks in the seattle calling and drops in the seattle calling.

You have incredible peaks in dopamine and drops and doing you've incredible pigs and serotonin and drops and serotonin. Most often you are not going to see much, if any, release of empires, a general. And that's because eban afan, also called journal, tends to wake us up and put us into action mode behaviors.

And that simply not happening during sleep. But for the other, the renewal modulators across the night is sort of chaos. You've got peaks and drops and peaks and drops in different combinations that you would ever see in wakefulness.

And this plays important roles in dreaming and important roles in some of the reparative functions of sleep. The point is that during that face, three, the levels of neo modulators are all over the place. But it's not random, right? I say it's chaos, but it's organized according to the specific reparative goals of sleep, the specific metal bolic roles of sleep at sea.

We're not going to focus too much on face three today because face three of the twenty four hour cycle that seventeen to twenty four our period is one in which you ought to be deeply asleep, whether not your knock nal or diagonal right. Seventeen hours after waking, you ought to be asleep. And there are a lot of episodes of this podcast, and indeed today, I started talking about two particular studies related to sleep there, a lot of tools to enhance sleep at sea.

And of course, there are things that you can do in the late portion of phase two of the day in order to enhance your transition time into a depth of sleep. But you can't really do much, darling, sleep. You're not taking supplements.

You're not doing breathing practices, the things to fall back asleep. We're not really doing much during sleeps. So we're mainly going to focus on what we're calling phase one and face to face one being this dopamine epinephrine input phase of our day and face to being this more serious c or serotonin dominated portion of the day.

And then you might say, what about a seto calling? Forgot about a city coin. Well, we didn't forget about a city to coin. A to coin is under control more in terms of what we happen to be doing at any given moment, whether not we're focusing or not focusing, whether not we're learning or not learning.

And here i'm referring to, you see, to calling specifically in the context of the brain and thinking because as some of you are probably shouting out there, right, if you are exercise philologists, or you know anything about how the brain controls a movement, a seto calling is used at the nerve to muscle synapse, right? So neurons don't just control other neurons electrically. The way you are able to move, in fact, is because neurons are controlling the electric activity of muscles, literally the contraction of muscle fibers, and that control is exerted through the release of a seto calling.

So a seto calling is working at muscles as well. But we're not focused on that today. We're focused on what we can do during phase one of the day and what we can do during phase two of the day to control the specific neuromodulators dopamine up an effort seton's in a seto coin toward particular and goals.

And as i've been harping on for the last five or ten minutes or so, IT is important to understand that in the early phase one part of the day, again, zero and nine hours, dopamine, epinephrine, ready, dominate the neurology GLE later landscape. That is, they are already elevated, and then they will take off. And face to, as in face two of the day, serotonin tends to dominate more than dopamine e and appeared.

And so if you think about that, what IT means is that if your goal is to increase serotonin in order to get some particular effect on your mental performance or physical performance or health, or if your goal is to increase your doping or epa afan to get some particular effect on your mental health, physical performance at setting up well, then you need to consider what the background level of dopamine or apple amine or serotonin happens to be. Because in doing so, you will know which tool to select and how hard you need to push on that tool, right? If your levels of dobin are already riding pretty high because it's the early part of the day, well then IT doesn't take a whole lot more to get dopa into a level in which you can, for instance, change your level of motivation.

We're as if you're in the late part of the day, let's say nine pm, and you have a lot of serotonin swiming around in your system and you really need to be focused in alert. Well, you can do that by leveraging the dopamine in an epa reference system and indeed the city to calling system too. But you're going to have to resort to tools that can do that far more potent tly and that can do that and much more sustained way if you're going to access the state that you want.

So again, it's really important to understand what the backdrop of these new modulators is, the so called baseline, and that they vary across the day. If you are going to be able to leverage tools to optimize your brain chemistry, anyone that tells you do this protocol in order to increase your doping, do this protocol take this supplement to increase your serotonin, they can be telling you the absolute truth. But if you don't consider the backdrop over which that supplemental behavior is going to have its effect, well, then you can't really predict the effect that will have.

But if you can understand these backdrop baseline elements to how their modulators work, well, then you're a terrific position to leverage the best tools in the immediate and short term that is on the order seconds, minutes and hours before we dive into the more pointed directed effects of specific tools on their modulators, like to just briefly mention hormones, because they are also important for understanding the background and the context and these baseline levels of neuromodulators. Now here i'm going to paint with a bit of abroad brush, but what I will say is accurate, even though I might not be exhaustive. What I mean by that is everything i'm about to say is true.

But IT doesn't cover every example in detail and nuances possibility out there. Hormones have many different effects on the brain, body. And not unlike their modulators, some of those effects are very fast.

Some of them are very slow. In fact, certain hormones, for instance, the steroid hormones like estrogen and like test boston one and cortical stones. And here, of course, i'm referring to the state hormones for what they are.

They are indeed steroid hormones, but i'm not talking about steroids that people inject for sports performance, for physical augmentation of talking about the steroid hormones that you make naturally, because indeed, you make these naturally. While the steroid hormones can actually control gene expression, they can change the identity of cells and the genes and proteins that cells express. This is why during puberty, for instance, testosterone industries are released into the body, growth home is released into the body, and bodies and voices and personalities and brains change tremendously, because literally, there is a transformation of.

The breast tissue, of the testicular tissue, of the ovarian tissue, of the bones, of the muscles of the tissues and cells that control hair growth, gene expression changes in all those cell types. And the child becomes an analysis, becomes a Young adult, right? That's what puberty really is.

In fact, puberty is perhaps the most dramatic transformation that we go through in our entire lifespan. In terms of our aging has indeed IT reflects a very rapid, I should mention, period of agent and transformation of the identity of cells. So study hormones and other hormones can have very slow, long lasting actions.

In that way, they can also have very fast actions so far, since a drennen at an ethon released from the dream o gLance can immediately make your heart beat faster, or can immediately change the circumference of your blood vessels and arteries and capillaries and change the way blood flows. IT can change the way you see the world. Literally, IT does change the way you see the world through visual system.

And that all happens on the order of hundreds of milliseconds or seconds. These are extremely fast actions. Cortical steroid also can have fast actions and slow actions.

But since this this into a discussion about hormones persae and we're done entire episodes like the optimize this ter on the essays in episode, you can find that a huberman lab dot com or the interview with the incredibly knowledgeable and clear and really wonderful um tuder of actionable information dr R R college ete who is also in this podcast that you can learn a lot about hormones there today we want to think about hormones as they relate to these neuromodulators the dopa means everyone in open eon and a seto, Colin. And in general, testosterone tends to collaborate with an increase the action of dopamine. That's not always the case.

But in general, when tester open goes up, doping goes up, and sometimes even vice versa when doping goes up to stow and go up. And this is true for both males and for females. In general, when cortecs eroes like cortisol and some related state hormones increase, epa phone levels go up.

And in general, when hormones like oxytocin or proactive are increased, levels of serotonin go up. We can't draw direct link between any one hormone system and a seto calling. A seto calling kind of sits off in a category of its zone in that way.

But again, in general, testosterone and dopa intend to collaborate in the same direction. Court is all an epinephrine tend to collaborate in the same direction. Oxytocin proactive, which are hormones, and sir tony tend to collaborate in the same direction.

And then we have poor old lonely to calling off on its own. But it's not poor and lonely IT actually has incredibly put in effects on its own. So it's really that IT just doesn't mean much help from the hormonal systems, or at least not the steroid hormones stems in order to have its tremendous effects.

Now a lot of what people think about, and we will do when trying to improve mental health and physical health, is they will try and increase or decrease certain categories of hormones of the source that I mentioned to sosa, n oxide, poland, so on. But often times the effects of those manipulations in hormones that are going to be most silent are not going to be due to the direct effects of those hormones. Sometimes IT could be, but often times it's going to be due to their effects on the brain and nervous system by way of how those hormones impact or modulators.

So for instance, there are very things that people can do, both men and women, to increase their testosterone and asteria en in the appropriate ratios. I talked about one such approach previous episode, and that is to get sunlight onto a large portion of one skin each day. Believe or not, this actually works. And IT works, because your skin is actually an independent organ, a hormone secreting organ. The beautiful study i've covered in on this podcast before, we will provide a link to this study again.

But they had people spend at least twenty minutes or so, closer to thirty minutes each day trying to max ize sunlight exposure to as much of their skin as they could in terms of still maintaining decent exposure, meaning not over exposing themselves in a cultural way, meaning wearing enough closed that they were decent, but still getting a lot of sun exposure couple times per week or more. What they found was that people's to stop stone and asteroid levels went up, feelings of well being went up, feelings of well um or I should say increases in label or served as well. They subjectively reported more passion.

It's at a testosterone and estrogen did indeed both go up. And again, I want to highlight that increases in estrogen, not just testosterone, are related to increases in the beto in both men and women. This is why you never want to crush your estrogen down to zero, rather not your male or female.

If you want to maintain some sort of healthy libido and general feelings of well being unrelated to libido, well, many of those effects we know are not due to direct effects of testosterone, estrogen, but rather are due to the effects of testosterone and emerging on the neuromodulators, dopamine and serotonin. Because much of libido and feelings of well being and feelings of relaxation, but also a desire motivation seta originate because of the activation of neural circuits that dopamine controls and promote and that serotonin promote and control. So this is very important, understand, as we move toward more specific discussion of the chemicals that we call their modulators, because hormones are controlling those neuromodulators in a very slow, modulators way.

So yes, I said IT hormones modulate neuromodulators. I sort of set IT twice on purpose. And this is a dramatic, important effect.

So just give you one more example. The hormone prolactin tends to be, and tagish IT tends to reduce amount of dopa. Or at least when proactive levels are high, dopamine levels tend to be lower.

You observe this after the birth of a new child. You observe this post quietly after meeting in all species, humans and animals, when proactive is elevated, seaton intends to be elevated. And when proactive is elevated levels of dopamine, and the effects of dopamine tend to subsided.

Now, as I move toward explaining what each of the four categories of your modulators do, this will start to make more and more sense to why this would be. We say I wasn't consulted design phase, meaning I didn't design these circuits. And if anyone tells you that they did, you should back away quickly, because none of us designing. So if this is the way that evolution and nature created these systems, and they tend to work in a bit of a sea soft fashion, proactive up, doping down, right? Doping up, proactive down, in general, that is the way they work.

So if we are to take a look at how each of these no modulator systems functions on its own, while understanding that they never truly function on their own, we can start to really make sense of the landscape of tools that are available to us and which tools are going to be most powerful to select if our goal is, for instance, to be focused or if our goal is to be less stressed or if our goal is to be highly motivated and highly focused for sake of learning. All of that is indeed possible if you understand these foreign al modulators, and you understand that while there are many tools ranging from pharmacologi C2Behavioral tha t can tap int o the se new mod ulator sys tems tha t pre ss on the gas of dop ing, pull back on serotonin and so on, but that there are particular tools, both behavioral and supplementation based, to some extent, prescription drug based to, and i'll touch on a few of those. If you understand that and why they work well, then you can create a sort of kit, a grab bag of things that you can use in any context, or I should say that you can look to, depending on the context in, and create the states of body and mind that you want.

Now, once again, painting with a somewhat broad brush, but none. There's an accurate brush. We can say that doping when elevated above baseline tends to increase states of motivation, both mental and physical motivation drive into some extent focus.

I've said many times before and i'll say again, there's a lot of misconception about depine. Many people out there think that dopamine is all about pleasure. You hear about dopamine hits, or people chasing dopamine, or the needs to have a dopamine fast at ta. Doping is not about pleasure.

Dopamine is about motivation, craving and pursuit for goals or for things that are outside our immediate possession and experience the motivation in pursuit of a mate, the motivation and pursuit to mate, the motivation and pursuit of food, the motivation in pursuit of a career goal, etta, things we do not yet have, but that we want. And we get into order of a forward center of mass and a pursuit of, and that pursuit can be physical. That pursuit can be cognitive and can be both cognitive and physical.

And IT can involve talking about something, right? Because in some professional pursuit of things involves talking. I think about lawyers, they talk a lot in pursuit of winning cases and money at seta, putting people in jail or keep ing people out of jail at sea.

That's done with their mouth, not with their bodies. Athletes in a state of motivated training or in motivated competition use their bodies with all. This is obviously course. But perhaps what is not so obvious is that one molecule not working alone, but predominantly one molecule doped, is responsible for all of those motivated states, which again, underscores the power of these neuromodulators.

So dopamine, we can think of these in the context of today's discussion as controlling and indeed promoting motivation, drive and pursuit, and to some extent, focus epa, ron, and a closely related molecule called nor epinephrine. And again, I want to emphasize that epinephrine, a gentleman and a gentleman, is epinephrine. Nor epinephrine is nor generalin and nor generalin is nor een efen.

But today they we're going to just simply talk about epinephrine nor and that category of neuro delatour is mainly responsible for generating our energy, our level of fuel and baseline level of forward center of masses, as I like to call IT. You can also think of IT is how hire your rpm r. Now we're not a car, and the car analogy sort of falls apart.

We go further into the biology, but is a decent one for now, when eph n levels are high, we tend to feel agitated. We tend to feel like we want to move. We tend to feel like we can't shut down our thinking and our anticipation of what's going to happen next and went up and after.

And levels are very, very low. We actually have less physical energy. We tend to have less mental energy in terms of generating thoughts very quickly and so on and so forth. And as I mentioned before, dopamine and epa effort are closely related, so much so that we know for a fact that up and effort is actually manufactured from the molecule toping. So that's i'm talking about these two neuromodulators and very close drugs to position because they do indeed collaborate with one another.

But for sake of today's discussion, we can just think of epinephrine, increasing energy a generally increases energy in our state of readiness IT also, I should mention, activates our immune system. Contrary to popular belief that stress inhibits our immune stem, ean f an is deployed. It's released at great levels in our brain and body when we are stressed.

And that actually protects us against infections of multiple kinds, at least in the short term. That and all the details of that and tools related to that were covered in our episode on the immune system, if you want to check that out now, the neuromodulator serotonin create a number of different states in the brain and body. But for sake of today's discussion, we're going to think about the predominant states that IT creates.

And those are states of contentments being happy, feeling fairly relaxed, feeling suit, and to some extent, even some relief from pain or lack of pain. Sir tony is associated with a feeling of satire, of having enough of what we already have now, when certainly is very, very high. People can even be the date. They can be completely a motivated, no motivation to seek out things like food or sex or work at sea, where as when certainly levels are very low, people can actually exhibit agitation and high levels of stress. So the levels matter here.

But again, for sake of today's conversation, when we lover serotonin, where you are really leveraging a neuromodulator, that tends to increase the activity of neural circuits in the brain and body that make us feel relaxed and happy, and IT tends to decrease the activity of neural circuits that make us rapidly and pursuit of things that we don't have, right? The opposite of content and stated is motivation, desire and hunger and thirst for things that we don't have. So serotonin is the molecule of peace.

IT is the molecule of contentment. ss. IT is the molecule of having enough, at least for the time being, or the feeling that we have enough for the time being. Now, a seto calling is a fourth category of neuro delatour that, as a mention earlier, is somewhat, not totally, but somewhat distinct from any direct control by the major hormonal systems of the body, or at least the major steroid hormone systems.

And a see to calling, we can say, is mainly associated with state of focus, and we can go a step further and say that it's mainly associated with steps of focus as they relate to learning and encoding new information, so called neural plasticity. Now neuropathy, or the brain nerve systems ability to change in response to experience, can be impacted by an enormous number of different chemicals, not just to see to calling, but a seto coin has a particularly potent ability to open up the thing that we call the neural plasticity, to allow plasticity to happen in one moment, or as in a previous moment. IT could not occur because the city of calling has not been released in the brain or in the spinal court, so a seto calling is involved in focus and in learning, but IT is not necessarily always associated with learning in the context of highly motivated, really ramped up states.

IT can be, but a seto calling can also be released and can encourage the learning and neuroplasticity associated with calm states. For instance, if somebody has a newborn e child, we know that they are flooded with oxytocin, which has actually even been called the love hormone. Although IT does many things in addition to control feelings of romantic attachment and attachment to children.

And IT said, that does all of that, but IT does a lot more as well. But when people have a new child, they also tend to be hyper focused on that child, not just as well being, but they narrow all they are thinking, all their vision, all they're hearing to that child. And they're obvious adaptive reasons for wanting to do that.

I recall a family dinner we had, gosh, this was over ten years ago. We had a couple over. They were my mom was in the habit of inviting people over who did not places to go on the holidays because that's just who he is.

I think it's quite nice. So you brought over this couple. They had a newborn. This baby had been more n maybe two or three weeks before, and he was seated. That seated IT was lying down.

I could not see this is like a potato bag really holds head up, but he was lying in a little basket on the floor as we ate dinner. And IT was almost hilarious, actually was hilarious. We laughed a lot about this that the entire meal, they were basically staring at this baby. They were so clearly in love with the baby and so flooded with oxytocin, and also that they couldn't take their focus off this baby. IT was actually really wonderful and enduring to see.

But in addition to that, i'd be willing to bet, had I been able to do a little bit of micro dialysis, which is the ability to measure the amount of modulator to give in location the brain, had I been able to do that experiment on them in that moment, I would have found that levels of a eto calling were exceedingly high, because they were so hyper focused on this child, not just in love with, but focus on that child. And without a doubt, the neural circuits related to focus and plasticity were heavily engaged, again for obvious adaptive reasons related to child wearing and learning the cues and cries and pain signals and pleasure signals of ones offspring. So we have dopamine associated motivation, drive and pursuit, and to some extent, focus.

We have epiphone and nor epa associated with energy of having a forward center of mass, mentally and or physically. We have serotonin, which is associated with a peaceful content saved state of being. And we have a seattle calling, which is associated with focus, and in particular, focus as that relates to learning and encoding new information.

So let so you want to be more motivated, you want to be more in pursuit of goals, and you want to have more energy and to be more focused. There are many ways to go about that. In fact, there's a near infinite cloud of opportunities, everything from prescription drugs to illicit drugs, which I certainly not recommend, supplements, nutrition, you can listen to particular music.

You can do all sorts of cognitive, behavioral, nutritional supplementation tricks or you can just understand that what you're really after our increases in dopamine above baseline that you control, and there are ways to control them that are quite present. And science tells us which tools are going to be the most potent and the most versatile for you. So i'm going to share those tools with you now with the caveat that each one of those tools could be its own entire podcast episode and that we've done near entire episodes on each of these tools or small collections of these tools.

So i'm going to cover these in somewhat superficial manner. We can provide links to previous episodes that related to each of these tools in detail, but i'll give you enough detail about them that would allow you to incorporate them into routine should you choose, let's say, you want increased to open mine for sake of increasing motivation. The first thing to do is to understand what the natural behavioral tools are, increasing dopamine, and to do those as consistently as possible.

Again, these are tools that you want to do nearly every day, if not every day. And I know i'm sounding like a broken record on this one, but here again, we come to sunlight. And I should say not just the desire to, but really the need for viewing the maximum amount of sunlight that one can reasonably get given schedules and locations in the world, time of, etcetera.

In the early part of the day, within the first hour of waking, ideally, but certainly in the first three hours of your day, you going to want to maxim sunlight, exposure to your eyes, never look at the sun or any other light so bright that it's painful to look at me. Yes, of course, blinking is fine, but no takes sun voices off, go outside once the sun is out and get some natural light in your eyes. And if it's appropriate, or I should say, in a way that's appropriate, maximized the amount of sunlight exposure to your skin.

But please don't get burned. Please do wear sunscreen if you're prone to getting burned. Typically early day sunlight is not going to burn you, at least not most people, unless you're extremely fair skin.

So I don't get burn. Do what you need to in order to protect yourself and burn. There is some emerging controversy about sunscreen and which one's are safe and which one's aren't safe. We have not done an episode on that yet, but I find IT to be an important and interesting topic. Dari, a rose.

Dr, or dara rose, I should say, has a podcast called the darom podcast, and did an episode all about sun screen, which are safe, which are not safe by interviewing experts on that. So I referred to that podcast as a relates to sun scream, but get some natural light exposure in your eyes. And if you wake up before the sun comes out, turn on as many bright lights inside is, you can turn on reasonably, given your electric bill.

Let that I get a lot of bright sunlight exposure early in the day and get a lot of sunlight exposure to your skin in the early part of the day in a way that doesn't burn you, meaning burn your skin or blind you. Please, please don't do anything that harms your vision, like staring bright light. That's painful.

What does that do? Well, IT sets emotion. A number of different biological cades. Some are very fast. There are fast actions of sunlight that will trigger, for instance, dopamine in release from different parts of your brain and your indication system.

And we now know that the increases levels of genes related to thread hormones and actually increases certain dopamine receptors. There is a wonderful paper, we will provide a link to this paper that shows that sunlight exposure can actually increase the amount of so called D R D four. This is a particular type of dope receptor. The dope cept.

The genes for dopamine and receptor four are actually under photic control, so if you get sunlight exposure to your eyes and IT does have to beat your eyes in the early part of the day, you increase the amount of dopa receptor that you have, which allows whatever circulating dopamine e happens to be there to have a greater effect on the motivation, and I should say, also on mood and feelings of being, pursuit, and generally in craving and pursuit of things in life. Now there's another way to increase the effect of whatever dopamine e happens to be circulating in your brain and body. And this again relates to increasing the number or the efficacy of the receptors for dopa amine.

Now here we're not talking about the dopamine receptor for, but a different category, dopamine e receptors, the d two and d three receptors, which are expressed multiple places in your brain and body. And buying dopamine, meaning dopamine parks in them like a parking spot, and allows dopamine to generally increase the activity of the neurons and cells that express those dopamine receptors. How do you do that? Well, turns out that regular in gestion of caffeine at safe and appropriate levels, about one hundred to two hundred fifty milligrams, is going to increase the number of d two and d three topman receptors.

I talk a little bit about this on a previous episode, again, will provide links to these studies. But this is an important finding, I believe, because this is not about the acute the immediate effects of caffeine on alertness. Although those occur to when you drink caffeine, it's going to increase your levels of a drennan and so called eena in which will increase your energy levels.

It's going to decrease levels of something called the Denny, which builds up while you're sleepy. It's going to make you feel less sleepy, more alert, more energetic. That's sort of obvious.

But what's less obvious is that it's increasing the number and efficacy of dopamine receptors so that whatever dopamine happens to be around in your system is going to have more of a potent effect. So how much caffeine should you drink? That's onna vary from person to person.

Some people are very sensitive caffeine, others or not. I tend to be fairly insensitive to caffeine because i've been drinking IT for a long period of time, but you know after one or two cups of a spress, so our coffee, I feel like i've had enough. I tend to drink my caffeine early in the day, which is what i'm going to recommend, that you do not drinking caffeine past two and certainly not four P.

M. If you're on a typical schedule, you want to be able to sleep that night, even if you can fall asleep. Having too much cafe in your system is not good, because IT disrupts the architecture of sleep.

Now, knowing about all the metabolite variability across the night cording to different stages of sleep IT should be even more obviously to why disrupting the architecture sleep will be bad for you. So limit that caine intake to early in the day and don't go list c if you're not certain. Ly logo obliged c in any case.

But for most people, anywhere from one hundred to four hundred milligrams of caffeine is going to have this effect. And this effect, again, is a slow accumulating effect by drinking caffeine consistently day to day. I get my caffy mainly from year b mott. I want to emphasize that is probably good idea to stay away from the smoke.

Mot there some evidence that can be in ic, but I brew my own, your vermont t or sometimes all drink coffee or expresso or sometimes both, Frankly, as i'm hydrogen enough and i'm getting enough sault and I tend to feel fine without much caffeine, the other way to increase doping and to make sure that your baseline levels dopamine are high enough is to make sure that you're eating sufficient numbers of terracing rich foods. You can look up what shoes include. Tirsan direction is a precursor to doping.

It's an a minister that is an direct pathway to dopamine synthesis. Entire acy foods include things like certain meets permai on cheese, very high entire acy, for instance. In fact, there's something called the cheese effect. Believe IT or not, I don't want to go too far off topic, but the cheese effect is kind of interesting because certain people will take entire depression that are so called mao inhibitors, mono ami oxyde y's inhibitors. Anytime you hear a ic that's an enzyme, they will take these inhibitors that prevent the breakdown of dopamine and other social category means, which allow more dopamine e to be in circulation.

But if these people eat certain cheese, including primary on cheese and their other foods, of course, that include not just terracing, but one of the derivative of terraces called IT thread, in that generates what's called the cheese effect, which is people get potent migraine headaches, blood pressure goes up. why? Well, because they've got a lot of seen in their system and doped in their system, and they've got less of the enzi that removes that doped or limits its action.

And so they have an excess of dupine, and that mean has effects on blood pressure at seta. So the cheese effect is something to avoid. If you are somebody who's taking drugs that tap into or manipulate the dopamine pathway other for parkinsons or depressions, obviously, you're going to want to be careful about adJusting up or down levels of doping too potently.

So mind the cheese effective if you're taking an mao inhibitor. A lot of information about the online, for most people, eating food like promise on cheese, eating foods like certain meat and certain vegetables, also can increase terracing levels, which will increase dopamine synthesis. So these are ways of modulating, more less the baseline of dopamine that you are able to produce.

And the ways that dopamine can have its action by way of binding to receptors, more potently. Now there are other ways to increase doping in a more acute or directed way, ways to Spike your dopamine, to enhance your state of motivation, mood, focus and so on. And in thinking about the vast landscape of tools that can do that, we have one category of tools, which are the really, really bad things that I don't recommend anybody do.

In fact, I recommend nobody do ever, which are things like cocaine, meth, teamin, eeta. They are incredibly destructive for lives because of the way that they so potently increased dopamine and then the crash and doping that occurs later. I mean, they can indeed and often do ruin lives.

So we're leaving those off the table. There are, of course, prescription drugs that many people in, especially people who have clinically diagnosed, add attention deficit, the activity disorder, rely on and in fact, benefit from. In many cases, things like ritalin. Atrial vivants nowadays is also a lot of interest in use of things like model are more definite. I covered all of those in the episode on add, and you can find that huberman lab out com.

And the other places this podcast is found, prescription drugs aside, because they require a prescription in a discussion that in depth and appropriate with you, physician, health care provider, there are supplements that can very potently increased dopamine as well, perhaps not to the extent that some of those other prescription drugs can, but certainly to a degree that will impact an increase dopamine and motivation in the other states, dopamine associated with, and the two main categories of supplements that are very effective in raising dope. I mean, and here I should provide the copy ot that any time you're going to add or remove anything from your supplementation protocols, please talk your physician who is knowledgeable on these topics. If you're somebody who has or is taking drugs for depression or mania, please be very cautious about manipulating your dopamine.

In any case, I don't just say that to protect us. I say that to protect you. But if we to look at the supplement landscape and ask which supplement increased to be mean, there are a vast number of them, but the three main ones, the most effective ones, that are readily available out there without a prescription, are mcinnis on.

This is actually the outside of a velvet being that has been extracted and put into a supplement. Muna presence is actual l dopa. It's ninety nine percent l dopa, which is a prescription drug that is given for parkinson's.

And for other purposes where increasing dopamine is important, I don't recommend the neurons. I'm not saying that no one should take IT, but I don't take IT and I don't recommend IT because IT tends to so potently and acutely increased to I mean that there is a presumption antil crash afterwards. So I avoided and I don't generally suggest that anyone take IT unless there is really a clinical need or they're working very closely with somebody that can really monitor that.

The other two supplements that can increase dopamine in a short term way, but in a significant way, are l tyros ines. You can buy that as a supplement. Mino acid.

I sometimes take this, I would say probably take IT about once a week, maximum for workouts or workouts. I'll take a indoors ges of anywhere from five hundred milgram to a thousand milgram. People vary tremendous ly in their sensitivity to supplementing altera acy.

I know people they can take two grams. I know people that can barely take one hundred milligrams. I know people that the best dose for them is zero milligrams. So there's a lot of variation. They're depending on sensitivity and there are natural baseline levels of doped and whether not they doing a lot of other things to support dopamine.

But honest taking all tyre scene will lead to fairly substantial increases in dopamine within about fifteen to forty five minutes, and at last for about thirty minutes to two hours. And then there's kind of a tape bring off. Some people experience a little bit of an emotional or and or, I should say, energetic crash.

Some people don't. Then the other supplement that I certainly use, and that I know a number of other people, uses more fast acting, but more protein, which is final flame. This relates to the so called P E A molecule. P P E A and final eth lamine increases dopamine and some of tablettes related to dopamine in ways that really increased energy and feelings of well being in motivation. And again, it's fast acting.

So my particularly protocol, the one I use, is i'll take final eth leaman at dosages about three hundred to six hundred milligrams, along with some male trophy, or i'll take IT on its own with about cool, or I should say, a compound that will talk about a little bit later that relates to a city coin, alpha gpc. But tyre sine and finley laming, taken alone or together, will make you feel more motivated and more alert, more willing and able to lean into particular motivates behaviors, whether not they are physical or cognitive. If you would like to learn more about these compounds and their supplementation and their effects encourage you to check out the ever valuable website examined that com, it's zero cost to access.

And they provide references and some more details about these sorts of compound and other related compounds. Now if we are going to look at behavioral tools for potentially in increasing dopamine, that too is a vast landscape. And we know, based on hundreds, if not thousands of studies, that things like winning at some sort of competition or succeeding in reaching a goal can certainly increase dopamine.

We talk a lot about this in the episode on dopamine motivation and drive. But leaving that aside, there are certain behavioral protocols that are unrelated to your overall goals and motivations that can increase dopamine in a very sustained way. And without question, the most potent behavioral tool for doing that is going to be deliberate, called exposure.

Deliberate cold exposure has been talked about a lot here and elsewhere in terms of its ability to do things like reduce information as a way to test and improve resilience because uncomfortable cold. Provided is applied safely is a great way to learn to be more resilient because you're essentially staying or forcing yourself to stay in a circumstance where your system is flooded with a drennen. But one lesser known aspect of deliberate cold exposure is one that's been demonstrated quite convincingly in humans, comes from a study position in the year two thousand, a link to this study.

I love this study, by the way, covered IT many times on this podcast because I love you so much, and I think it's truly important. And that's the study from stomach at all, entitled human physiological responses to emerge into water of different temperatures are not going to go into this into a ton of detail for sake of time. But basically what they show is that putting people in the cold water, and he mentioned the water that they use in the study wasn't that cold.

They have bunch different conditions. But they had people that got into, for instance, sixty degree fair high water for up to two hours at them sitting there be a long chair up to their neck, had very long sustained increases in dopamine transmission and dopamine circulation in their brain and body. And also, some of the other category means, as I mention before, dopamine intends to collaborate with een f an and vice versa.

Now you don't need to put yourself into sixty degree from and high water to get these kind of sustained increases, and you certainly don't need to do IT for two hours. We have strong reason to believe, based on subsequent studies, in fact, publish this last year, that getting into much colder water of, say, fifty degrees or fifty five degrees or ve been forty five degrees fahrenheit can potentially increase dopamine and epa re as well, and that you don't need to expose yourself to that cold water for nearly as long. So perhaps even as short as one minute or even thirty seconds exposure to really cold water can lead to these potent, long lasting increases in dopamine.

Many people will ask which protocols to follow, for instance, with a cold showers of fice? Very likely, yes. If your shower gets cold enough, do you need ice floating in the bath? No, it's all about the temperature or not, whether others ice present or not, how long to stay in there.

There are a lot of details that we don't time to go into this episode. Please see the episode on the use of deliberate cold for health and performance. You'll find that huberman lab dot com, we have a newsletter related to this IT gets into a lot of detailed protocols. But in general, we can say that the way to evoke dopamine epa afan released using cold water is to, ideally, you would do cold water immersion if you can't.

You use cold shower, but you want to use a temperature that is safe, meaning you're not have a heart attack, but that is uncomfortable, such that you really want to get out and then staying in for anywhere from one minute to ten minutes, depending on how cold adapted you are, and then getting out and drawing off and going about your day, unless you have some other protocol that you're trying to extract from the cold. So this is a cold exposure protocol specifically aimed at increasing dopamine. E, for some people out there, you might think this is kind of a silly using cold water to increase dopamine.

But when you look at the data in humans on the effect of cold water exposure to stimulate long lasting, very significant increases in dopamine, e and f, and I think you'll agree that this is a really poor tool that provided is given safely and gone about safely, is giving you the kinds of increases in dopa mean that you would seek using prescription pharmacology. Now, I shouldn't be used as a replacement for prescription pharmacology, although people have done that to success. One of the previous guests on the human law podcast with doctor on a empty or director of the do diagnosis addiction clinic at stanford is an amazing book called dopamine nation, all about doping and both its uses healthy and its perils in things like addiction.

And SHE describes a patient of hers that used deliberate cold exposure to try to maintain depine levels while coming off of drugs that were increasing double means, so potently that they were putting him down the path of addiction. So the use of cold water for increasing dopamine is a real tool. It's, I would say, a power tool.

In fact, it's the kind of thing that if you want to increase dopamine for sake of motivation, IT might be first go to provided you're also doing the things to maintain open mine baseline like sunlight exposure, in particular, making sure you're getting sufficient amount of terrine containing foods and so on. And now just very briefly, I want to point to a few quick tools that good peer review data tell us can be leveraged in order to make sure that you have sufficient dopamine when you want IT or that's available for IT to be released by any number of the tools I provided thus far. And those are sufficient number of b vitamins.

So IT turns out that b vitamins, in particularly be six or vital be six, can potently reduce proactive levels. And again, proactive and dopamine tend to work in kind of push, pull fashion. That said, you should be cautious about taking excessive levels of b six.

IT is a vital that if you take too much, you are likely extreme through your urine. But there is evidence that having excessively high levels of b six or supplementing with excessively high levels of b six can cause some period neuropace some death of nervous in the periphery. If you want to know what dosage levels are relevant there, just simply look at up online.

There's a lot of information about this, but you do want to make sure they are getting enough b six, b twelve at sea such that you can keep proactive levels in check. And if you suspect that you have a dopamine in efficiency, please talk your doctor and talk to them about ways you might adjust that process down and thereby dopamine the other way to ensure that dopamine levels stay high. Or put differently, that you don't quash whatever dopa mean you have in your system is to really avoid bright light exposure to your eyes between the hours of ten P.

M. And form. Or another way, putting this, because I realized people sleep at different times. That said, is to avoid bright light exposure to your eyes, not just blue light, but all colors of light in face. Three, that is seventeen to twenty four hours after waking up, because that's really when you should be a sleep or trying to get to sleep if you're having troubles sleeping.

Work from simmer haitai lab, the director, the biog unit, the national institutes of mental health, again, in a previous he remained podcast guest, tell us that bright light exposure in face three of your circadian cycle, seventeen to twenty four hours after waking, can have dramatic effects in reducing dopamine levels by way of activating a neural circuit involving something called the haben. Ella, want to get into too many details right now, but really trying keep the light dim in the middle night or off. If you can do that safely.

Really going to help if you're turning on your phone brightly, if you're turning on brightly lights. It's not just going to negatively impact melton's, the hormone that helps you fall and stay asleep. It's also going to negative impact dopamine levels not just that night but the subsequent day, so that more or less summarizes our coverage of ways to use behavior and supplementation and nutrition to increase dopamine and dopamine recept efficacy and number, and to keep sufficient amounts of dopamine in your system day to day for motivation, mood and focus.

And of course, keep in mind those things that can suppress up me the bright light exposure, elevated, proactive and so on. My hope is that by understanding those tools and how they work, and understanding that dopamine does certain things and not others, that you can assemble a versatile kit of behaviors and other things that you can do in order to adjust your dopamine e levels according to your particular goals. I want to just briefly return to the fact, however, that all of that is riding on that face, one face, two background.

Meaning it's probably going to take less cold water exposure, I should say, less time doing cold water exposure early in the day to get a big increase in dopamine that, that would later in the day because later in the day, your baseline levels of doping are lower and you've got more certinly circulating. That should make sense to now as to why that's the case. And does that mean that you should really modify your protocols dramatically? Probably not.

But you might keep that in mind that if, for instance, ince, you need to be in a highly motivated focus state in the late part of the day, for whatever reason, IT might take a few or more of these tools in combination in order to accomplish that. Well, as if you're somebody who feels pretty good during the day, but you kind of lacking motivation. You want to increase to open me levels, and you don't yet need to or want to resort to prescription drugs or supplementation within. You might layer in a couple behavioral protocols, paying attention to, of course, the things that you might be doing that would also potentially suppressed over mean.

So again, that kit of tools is designed for you to play with if you choose, if it's safe for you to apply them and do that, consider doing them individually, not trying to hit all the tools all at once, right? I mean, why throw all those tools at your dopamine in system at once? Better would be to have those tools in your kid and be able to deploy them depending on whether not your own travel, whether not you're eating well or less well, whether not you're sleeping well or less well.

That's highly individual. And I like to think that in having those tools in hand, will be able to adjust them and apply them in the ways that allow you to access the dopamine in increases that you're after. So next, i'd like to talk about epa, an also called a janine, want to point out that epinephrine released both in the brain and the body.

In fact, there's a barrier between brain and body that prevents the epinephrine released from your dream o gLance, crossing the blood brain barrier. So your brain has a separate site called the luxurious. This is a collection of neurons in the back of the brain that kind of sprinkle the rest of the brain with a penetrant and essentially wakes up whatever neural circuits happen to see, or I should say, wake up any circuits where that epinephrine ens to arrive, right? And generally increased the excitement of those networks.

That's why we say edf an increases energy. I'm not talking about chloric energy, although that's distantly related to this, but really energy and the desire to move, the feeling that we can think, the feeling that we can be alert. In fact, if you look at somebody and their eyelids are wide open, in large part, that's because of a lot of a gentleman in their system.

If their pupils are really big and their eyes are really wide open in general, that means they have a lot of that beneath in circulating there, where as one, we're tired and we're kind of hood ede and are of sleepy or our pupils are really small in general. That's because levels up and and also dopamine remembers they work together, levels of happen ever, and dopamine tend to be lower. This is also why when people take any drug like, again, not recommending this effet ine or cocaine or any stimulant, their pupils tend to be huge, their eyes tend to be wide open.

They don't blink very often. And the opposite through when people take seditious. So IT all starts to make sense.

When you think about the basic actions of these things, for many people, increasing a drennen or a penetrant might seem like a crazy idea. Most people probably associate this molecule was stress, and they would like to be less stressed. And we've done entire episode about stress, how to master stress, how to leverage stress, how to conquer stress.

A lot of great tools to do that, that a behavioral supplementation based. Please see the episode on mastering stress for those tools. But there are people, including me, that want to increase our levels of a and f, at least early in the day.

I'm somebody who wakes up rather slowly. In fact, right after waking up, I really want outside of bed, I try and push myself to do that. I'm always impressed by chock a willing types that are up at four thirty or up at five and already into action.

I tend to be kind of thinking about, thinking about maybe being an action early in the day, but I try and push myself to get into action, which itself can increase a pencil. I should mention that any physical activity, any physical activity, walking, running, weight lifting, swimming, even talking for that matter, is going to increase levels of appen f local rule, as is a brain structure that is tightly coupled with behaviors in a by direction way. That is, when you are in action, you increase the amount of epa from released from los realist, you wake up the brain.

And conversely, when luxurious as active, the brain wakes up. So it's recipe al IT goes both directions. So I thought funny tweet actually earlier today IT was something like going to the gym gives you energy, but you need energy to go to the gym.

Sounds like a pyramid scheme to me, which made me chuckle. But of course overlooks the fact that indeed, if you have energy, you are more likely to be willing to get into physical movement or cognitive movement, and thinking hard, or thinking a lot about something. But also, IT is absolutely scientifically proven that being in action increases levels of evenement.

This is why exercising early in the day gives you more energy for a rest of day. You still might experience a little bit of a crash in the afternoon, especially you're getting up extra early or if you're drinking coffee into close awaking. I've talked about this before.

If you drink too much caffeine close to waking, you're going to have an afternoon crash. Better to push that caffeine intake out about ninety to one hundred and twenty minutes after waking. I know this is really painful for certain people, but caffeine does increase at an ein. Caffeine does other things to limit sleeping ess. And by pushing out ninety, two hundred, twenty minutes after waking, you will avoid the afternoon crash to a large degree.

And if you get up in your exercises or even do any movement of any kind, one hundred jumping jack or a walk, if you can do that, anything like that will increase the total amount of happen, offend that you secrete into your blood stream and in your brain, and will get you more energy, not just in that moment, but throughout the day. So keep that in mind. Exercise does indeed give you energy IT color ic energy, but IT gives you neural energy by way of increasing empathy transmission from locus realist.

And presumably, if the exercise is intense enough, a drennan epiphone released from the adrin als within your body as well. So we have exercise, and we have caffeine as poin tools for increasing epiphone and thereby energy, another post tool that's purely behavioral, but is known to work based on excEllent studies in humans. And actually, my laboratory has been doing similar types of studies that are soon to be published, we hope is so called sick lic hyperventilation.

Some of you may be familiar with window breathing. There's also tumor breathing, which is very similar to deli breathing. All of those styles of breathing involve clic hyperventilation deep in halls and either passive x sales or active x sales, but repeating in hill x sale in l excell in a very deep and repetitive way.

If you were to do that right now, doesn't matter if you do IT through your nose or mouth, although ideally you would do the in health through your nose and the excel through your mouth if you did that for twenty five repetitions, twenty five in hills and excells, you would feel more alone. You'd also feel more warm. why? Because you increased epiphone, a general in release in the brain and body.

IT works the first time, and IT works every time to increase a penetrant, and thereby energy. And in fact, there are protocols and great scientific studies of using cynic of ventilation for periods of minutes, if not longer, where, for instance, you would do twenty five bigger hills and x sales, followed by a brief breath hold with your loan empty. Then repeat twenty five, then brief breath hold, excuse me, excel, hold your long as empty, and then repeat again for a third round, if you like.

If you do that over over, you are going to be very alert. You can have more energy. You're going to feel like you want to move around a lot more. In fact, you might even feel agitated, so people with a lot of anxiety or prone to panic attack might want to be cautious, and how they train and embark on that type of breathing might want approach you a little more carefully or avoided altogether.

But for most people think, like I, preventive lation is simply going to get you more energized and feeling like you want to move, feeling like you can think more clearly and you will be more wide, wide and alert because you are releasing a gentle and water exposure protocol that I talked about earlier. And that's covered in our episode on cold and in the newsletter on cold. Well, that as I mention earlier, potently increases developing but also have an affection.

So that's another terrific tool, whether or not it's applied by cold shower or cold emersion or some other thing like cro that is going to make you more alert because IT releases a drill in now we can't really say that there are foods to increase apple, apple rather, there are foods that include a lot of terraces that will increase doping. And remember, dopamine is the molecule from which epinephrine synthesized. So we can't really point to a particular food or categories of food for increasing up.

And everyone, I think caffeine and things like IT will increase up an elephant. There are, of course, prescription drugs that will increase up an elephant. And of course, there are all sorts of so called data blockers that will block the receptors for appen effort to make you feel calm for public speaking or previous ous heart conditions. That said, that really the domain of physicians, and should really be worked out with your cardiologist, with a physician.

Etta, I think the tools of exercise, and should you want very potent increases in a dunlin high intensity exercise, as well as the tools of caffeine, cyclical b of ventilation and deliberate cold exposure, really combined to give you a nice little kit, was a versatile kit of ways to increase up an american for sake of having more physical and mental energy. So next is the neuromodulator a eto calling. And as I mentioned earlier, a seto Colin is associated with states of focus.

And those states of focus can be high energy states of focus. So the ones that are accompanied by high levels of dopamine and empathy and where we're really excited about and really laser in on something or they can be the common more relax states of focus, like reading a book or practising music or listening very carefully to somebody in a way that's relaxed and calm. And yet nonetheless, where we have a narrow cognitive and typically a narrow visual apache and typically also a narrow auditory apache, that is, our auditory system in our visual system.

And our thinking can be very broad, IT can be all over the place, or IT can be very narrow and IT can be very focused. The seal calling is released from two major sites in the brain nucleus specials, which is in the forebrain and extends connections out to many different brain areas to offer the opportunity to release a city calling locally and more less in a chemical way, highlight those particular neurons and synapses for strengthening, for plasticity later. And IT is released from sites in the back of the brain in a way that can increase the so called fidelity of information coming in through our eyes.

Our years are, knows that that what do I mean, my fidelity. Well, we are constantly being bombarded with sensory information through all of our various senses. And a seto Colin released from this area in the back of the brain has the ability to increase the extent to which, say, visual information, or just visual and auditory information, would make IT through to our consciousness, where as all the other types of sensory information that are coming in our filtered out.

So your brain, because it's taking in all this information, needs to decide what to pay attention to. And in this way, we can say that a city calling has a lot to do, not just with focus in air quotes, but literally attention, which neural signals become relevant to our consciousness. There is a whole discussion to be had there, and we don't have time for that.

Rather, i'd like to focus on what are the tools that one can use to maintain healthy based lines of a city calling and increase a eda calling for sake of learning any type of information, physical, cognitive or otherwise. Now turns out there have been a lot of studies, including many quality per review studies, Carried out in looking at what happens when you increase a seat of calling levels in the brain and you accompany that with the attempt to learn. And what you find almost always is that people experiences increased focus, that when measured, the non al responses become more specific, so less broad scale activity, the brain, and more specific neural circuit activity, and that this triggers immediate and long lasting changes in the way those circuits work, even when a seattle calling is not being deployed.

So called neuroplasticity circuits literally change. So this is great. The work of Michael silver at berkeley, the work of Michael sonic at ucsf, work of Michael kill guard down in texas, all of those laboratories see this again and again again.

Increase a seto calling before and during learning. And there's a much higher probability that the learning will code in te sink in that the information will be retained because those newer circuits changed. Now ways to increase the city of calling in a pot way include, again, nutrition and supplementation.

IT is important to have baseline levels of a city to calling be sufficiently high as well. And for that, really the ideal situation is to regularly ingest foods that provide enough of the precursor s for a seto calling to be made. If you go online and you were to do a search of which foods contain a lot of coin, which is related to the sentences of seat to calling, you would get some interesting information back.

For instance, beef liver is the most poin source of calling. I know nowa ys, kind of a growing micro trend, if you will, of ingesting people ever, even raw liver, which to be lost. The thought of ingesting raw liver of any kind activates my area post rama, which is the area, the brain that triggers nadia.

In fact, i'm trying to celebrate a bit, not because i'm ungry, but I think the whole concept makes me ill. None the less. Cook liver um or bw liver for that matter, or liver of any kind seems to contain a lot of calling.

I realized most people, most people are not going to be running out and ingesting large amounts of beef liver eggs contain a lot of coin. Beef contains calling. Soybeans contained calling.

So there are vegan or nonmeat sources. Chicken, fish, mushrooms, kidney beans, these sorts of things contain a lot of calling. And there are other vegetables that contain calling. So depending on your dietary preferences and needs, you can select certain foods to ingest, to get enough calling, to synthesize enough baseline as seal calling.

In the realm of supplementation, there are some excEllent tools for increasing A C to calling in the acute short term, meaning over the course of about thirty minutes out, about two hours or maybe even four hours. And the number of different molecules that can do that, that are available without a prescription, at least in the us, is pretty vast. The most common of those molecules is actually nicking nicki ic.

A seat of calling receptors are abundant throughout the body and brain. The in various brain circuits, they are on muscle. And yes, smoking nicky tine, either by vapor or cigaret, will activate those nicean ic receptors.

But of course, smoking is a terrible thing. I will also activate things like lung cancer, so I definitely don't recommend that IT also activates addiction because of the ways that IT triggering activation of the dopamine circuit. So I think that triggers activation of a sea calling related pathways by interesting, by way of inhalants is generally a bad idea.

However, some people will to naira or other nickey type gums. I've never done that, but I have friends who actually rely on that. These are typically former smokers that are trying not to smoke, but still want to get some of the focus enhancement that they experience from negative.

Some people are very sensitive to nicotine, and this is important. Some people are very sensitive to injustice nickey. So nowadays are nickey dipped toothpicks.

There, of course, is nickey dumb. And other of nk, some people can take that and feel fine. Some people take IT and feel absolutely terrible.

I guess i'd never actually tried nicky in any of those forms, so I don't know how they worked for me. But some people do use them as a cognitive hanckel fact. I know one nobel prize winning neuroscientist who is quite well known in our field for chewing nick at all day long.

He insists that IT really helps him with his focus, and he is succeedin ingy smart and productive, though i'm sure there are other reasons for that. Supplements that I have used and do use for increasing a city of calling, or things like alpha gpc, or who prizing alphago gpc is in the Colin pathway such that more seto Colin is synthesis. Zed, after you ingested.

That's the general logic or framework of how IT works. Where as who prized is mainly in the ensemble pathway. IT tends to adjust how much as eto calling is broken down and lead to net increases in a eto calling. I will often take three hundred milligrams of alph a gpc prior to workouts or prior to cognitive work outs.

When I say often, I tend to do this anywhere from three to four times a week, typically not every day, although there are are people, including people who are trying to offset age relay cognitive decline that will take three hundred milligrams of alpha gpc three times a day every day, which closely mix some of the studies that have been done on humans looking at offsetting actually a cognitive decline using things like out for gpc. I should point out that there have been a few studies, a few, not many, but this studies emphasize that people who take a lot of alphago gpc chronically over time may be at increased risk for stroke. I think the data are still out on that, and we need more data.

But for me, in terms of thinking about the risk benefit profiles, taking three hundred milligrams of alphago gpc most certainly does increase my ability of focus. I've noticed that I tend to take IT alongside caffeine and final apple aiming. So I take that in combination other before workout or workout really sharpens my focus.

And again, i'm doing that three, maybe four times per week. And i'm careful to do that in the early part of the day so that he does not disrupt my sleep. Although I have taken alpha gpc in the second half of the day and I had no trouble sleeping at all, I don't know what the exact half life is of the given form that typically in supplementation is actually hard to get that information.

But typically the focus effects wear off after about two, maybe four hours maximum. Now one thing that I don't think has ever been discussed before, certainly not on this podcast, is that if you take off a gpc even semi regularly, you may notice that a particular feature of your blood work will increase. And that's tmo, which is sometimes associated with increased cardioscopes.

Sk, this may again may relate to some of the potential risk of very high levels of alpha gpc injustice over many years, increasing stroke risk. Again, those studies look at people been taking IT for up to a decade. But in any case, one way to prevent the increase in tmo, if you're taking off for gpc at all, is to take six hundred milligrams of garlic, because IT contains something called alison.

This was a trick that was handed off to me by doctor college. Alete, again, was a guest on this podcast some time ago, talking about hormones and hormones alth. Turns out that congestion of six hundred milligrams of Allison along side or even just same day as alpha gpc can really clamp those tma levels that would otherwise increase if you're taking off for gpc.

And indeed, i've done the blood work, and that turns out to be the case. I saw bike and t ml. I started taking six hundred milligrams of garlic, and those tmr levels came down. And last as IT relates to A C to calling, but certainly not least just as a eto, calling can increase focus. Focus can increase a city calling.

I talked a lot about this in the episode on focus, but there are behavioral tools that you can use to enhance focus, things like staring in a particular visual target at the same distance at which you're going to perform some work and doing that for thirty or sixty seconds, narrowing in a very deliberate way, your visual field, and then moving into a focus workout. That behavioral practice of narrow ing your visual capture will increase the amount of a seto calling transmission, in particular neural circuits, that will then make IT easier to focus. How do we know that? Well, I covered in that episode some of the peer viewed studies that are relate to protocols that are now actively being deployed in schools in china and elsewhere, where kids are doing deliberate visual focus exercises in order to increase their mental focus.

And while they're not doing microbial y sis or brain imaging on those kids in real time, the cog tive effects and indeed the performance effects in terms of academic ability and output are pretty impressive. So a seto calling increases focus. We talked about some dietary and some supplementation based ways to improve a city to calling, or I should that increase a city of calling.

And that does, in fact, lead to increases in once sibling to focus. This is why a lot of the prescription drugs for the treatment of alzheimer a really kind of decline. And indeed, even some of the drugs that tap into treatments for add also involved the eea calling system.

So there's nothing surprising or herrera here, but IT is important to point out that your behavioral ability to focus is also related to your ability to access and deploy a seto calling. So never do we want purely pharmacologic treatments to be the only way that people are increasing a given na modulator. I always say behaviors first, then nutrition, then supplementation.

And then if there is a need, certainly a clinical need, then prescription drugs, its center, of course, IT ministered through a physician. So let's discuss the tony. sir.

Tony, as I mentioned earlier, is associated with brain and body states of well being, of comfort, of society, and therefore should come as no surprise that a lot of the prescription drug treatments for things like depression involve increasing levels of serotonin in the brain and body. That said, any time we talk about prescription drugs for serotonin, we also want to acknowledge that there are often side effects associated with increasing serotonin. In particularly, serotonin levels go too high.

That is, if the dosages of those treatments go too high, people will, for instance, field reduced appetite, reduced libido, increased letter geeta, and there's a so called theatre gic syndrome. All of that can and should be considered with a well trained physician. So because their prescription drugs controlling the dosage, deciding what dosage to take, deciding which S S I to take, and whether or not to come off those drugs, how to come off those drugs, again, all of that should be handled with a licensed physical.

That said, there are behavioral tools, nutritional tools and supply national rules that can tap into the settlement system, not to the same degree in potency, but none. There's in ways that can still impact our feelings of well being in positive ways. So let's focus first on the behavioral tools. And some of these might make people chuckle a little bit, but I want to point out that a lot of these tools are quite potent. In fact, they are power tools for modulating serotonin.

And we know that based on human neuroimaging studies, human and animal microbial sis studies and other studies that really have evaluated circulating levels of serotonin and the particular brain circuits that release cirro onan when people do certain things, what sorts of things? Well, for instance, physical contact, in particular with loved ones, this can be romantic love. This can be, uh, children.

So your own children, or are your spouse, even if it's not sexual contact, friend to friend contact. Even friend to animal contact, you know, as a former dog owner, I have another dog soon, because unfortunately, costello passed away. But there is something really comforting and wonderful about petty your dog.

And certainly, given that many of the studies on serotonin and these other neuromodulators were done on animal models, we also know that serotonin is being evoked in the dog and of course, in the child and in the significant eta. So things like holding hands, believe or not, hugs, cuddling at sara can increase seaton and transmission. And they make people feel good.

They shouldn't really come as a surprise. There's also gratitude. And we did an entire episode about gratitude.

There's a lot of misunderstanding about gratitude often times to when people hear gratitude, they think gratitude. This is just being thankful for what you have. And it's kind of a weak sauce effect, meaning you is going to like me. Maybe a little 3 tony goes up or maybe there's a little bit of increased feelings of well being。

Nothing could be further from the truth that turns out, first of all, that receiving not giving gratitude is what has the most pot effects on increasing serotonin and activity, the brain circuits that involves serotonin and that lead to increases in feelings of well being. So is interesting. Receiving much more than giving gratitude is what activates of such a gic pathways.

So the takeaway from that is both give and receive gratitude, and of course, do IT an authentic way. The other thing about gratitude that somewhat counter intuitive, is that observing others, giving and receiving gratitude is immensely powerful for evoking serotonin and the activity of certain ogc circuits in you, the observer. So receiving an observing gratitude turns out to be the most poin way to increase serotonin in the brain and body.

And these, again, are dramatic effects that are quite long lasting and not the sorts of effects they're going to lead the decide effects, at least there's no reason think they would. Now what about nutritional approaches to increasing serotonin? Well, just as we have tyre seen as an a mino acid precursor upstream of dopamine sentences, we have the mino acid trip to fan, which is upstream of the tone synthesis.

And one simply has to go online and put in trip to and containing foods. And you will discover that there are a lot of foods that are enrich and trip to fan that can lead to net increases in the amount of serotonin available. The brain body, the most kind of famous or information of these is White meat turkey, so called trip to fan of effect when people get very sleepy after eating White beat turkey.

And IT is indeed highly enriching trip to fan, although typically the getting sleepy after eating turkey is um most often associated with the thanksgiving meal and the thanksgiving meal listen in the U. S. Is often associated with people vastly over reading. And so I do want to point out that if you fill you're gut with food, no matter what that food is, there's going be a diversion of blood to you're god that's going to make you feel sleepy because there's a diversion of blood away from other tissues. So if you eat a lot, you're going to a get sleepy period whether not you eat turkey or some other substance.

None there's there are a number of foods that contain a lot of trip to fan and that some people will leverage um in order to join increase the total amount of circulating serotonin available to them in order to have a modest increase in overall mood and well being. So what are some of these food? These are things like milk, in particular, whole milk.

So full fat milk I know a number of people choose not to drink milk because they are lactose and tolerance and raising my hands as i'm one such person although um when I was a kid I did enjoy milk. Uh can tuna turkey as we mentioned before, high and trip to find otes. I am a consumer of oatmeal, so that resent with me cheese.

And here I read, although not as high and trop to fan as meet and other dairy sources, certain cheese's like cheder cheese's can be rich in trip to fan certain nuts and seeds, certain breds chocolate. Know a number of people will be relieved to hear that. I know chocolate lovers are always looking for an excuse to eat chocolate.

I confess, i've never really like chocolate to accept there. I say, I like the smooth hundred percent chocolate. I know many people gagged on the hundred percent actually really like them, and some fruits can be highly enriched.

P to find things like bananas and apples and things that sort, although not nearly to the degree of things like turkey, cantona and milk. I'm sure there are other excEllent sources of trip defend from the diet, including vegan sources. So please prove the internet to try and find the sources that are compatible with your nutritional program, if indeed your goal is to increase trip to fan.

Now there are supplements that can increase trip to fan and can do so quite potently. One of the ones that has received increasing attention as of lately is this is quartering, glorious, complicated name. When taking in dosages of about three hundred to six hundred milligrams, can pretty dramatically increased salton's levels.

In fact, anywhere from thirty percent to thirty nine percent increases in circulating seton's. That's a big increase. And I can provide a link to that study.

The study was focused not so much on serotonin, but was focused mainly on treatment of obesity and appetite and weight loss. And IT should come as no surprise that seton's, if increased, might lead to decreases in appetite. A cautionary note.

This is quartering layers may need to be cycled. How quickly to cycle, meaning do you do two weeks on, two weeks off, whether not you need to do more rapid cycling like two days on, two days off, is a matter of debate. There not a lot of date on this just yet.

There are a lot of opinions about this on the internet. But again, not a lot of quality pure review data. Nonetheless, this squad, jingler has been showed to potently increased her, tony, in humans and for people, they are seeking to increase their tone, and maybe in particular, for sake of appetite and way control, that might be a useful compound.

I know many people also take five ht p, one of the precursors to serotonin, in dosages of anywhere from three hundred to five hundred milligrams. Typically, people are doing in anticipation of sleep, meaning in the final hour of wakefulness before going to sleep. I myself have tried five H T.

P. Prior to sleep. And all I can tell you is that IT LED to very deep sleep for about one to three hours.

And I woke up and I could not fall back a sleep. I ran that experiment twice before. I decided to abandon in five hg p as a sleepy.

And that's why i've never put IT into our sleep kit, or at least my sleep kit. And when I refer to sleep kit, that's something you can find a huberman lab, dom. This is a zero cost resource where you can see behavioral tools and also supplementation tools that can improve the transition time into and the depth of sleep.

And none of those rely on five H T P. supplementation. That said, I know a number of people use five H G P supplementation outside of sleep when I was during the daytime to try increase cirta ona and IT will indeed increase circulating serotonin.

But again, people vary in their sensitivity to these sorts of things. Some people might find, for instance, that three hundred milligrams of five gp is just far too much IT plants. Their appetite might even reduce libido.

There are into a lot of very well controlled studies looking at this. And so IT has to be figured out on an individual basis if you decide to approach IT at all. Now, one molecule that i've found to be particularly interesting, any useful, and this is one that I haven't talked about yet on this podcast, is inot al, and particularly mile in oit.

All my oinos all can have the effect of increasing serotonin and other neurochemicals, but primarily, at least in terms of the neuromodulators discuss today, serotonin, i've been taking nine hundred milligrams of milo and otis every third nighter. So as a test of its ability to improve sleep, and I have to say the depth and quality of sleep that i've been obtaining on my on oscitation is pretty remarkable. In fact, i've used IT alone an incoming inc.

With the magnesium three and eight epic and thin I sleep kit that i've talked about, and that's included in that against zero cost kit that's available of PDF on our website. So my on authorial is known to incase circulating levels of serotonin. IT has been explored extensively in both animal models and in humans for its daytime use for treating anxiety.

IT does seem to reduce anxiety and for all sorts of things. It's been explored for bipolar disorder. We're gonna an episode about bipolar disorder coming up.

It's been explored for the treatment of migraine. It's been explored for A D H D. It's been explored for a huge number of different conditions of brain and body.

Again, i've been using the nine hundred milligrams of milo and ospital in the thirty to sixty minutes before sleep to improve my sleep. And IT has been doing that very dramatically, especially in when I take IT along side the rest of those sleep kit supplements. A quick note about my own also ital for sake of increasing serotonin.

If you look at the human studies on my own offit, all that are out there, and in particular focus on the human studies, what you'll find is that the dosages that are often used are tremendously hide, like five grams, eight grams, eighteen grams of my own hospital taken throughout the day. I don't know how people stomach that. And in fact, many people drop out of those studies because of gate, just comfort.

And yet I also wonder how people tolerate IT, because IT has someone of a sensitive effect and kind of antis ida effect. And I can't even imagine, given my experience with nine hundred milligrams, what one would experience taking multiple or many more grams per day. So I certainly not encouraging that.

And the only reason I mentioned my own official is that IT has a known effective increasing serotonin. At least in my experience, IT does not lead to this falling deeply asleep and waking back up. Actually, to the contrary, if I wake up in mild the night to use the bathroom, or I wake up the middle for whatever other reason, I find IT far easier to fall back asleep if i've taken one hundred milligrams in hospital prior to sleep.

So for me, it's proving to be a quite useful compound. I'm not aware of having any seroit ogc efficiency over all. I don't consider myself depressed.

And of course, I should mention that no supplement either editor withdrawn from your protocol should ever be used as a direct replacement for prescription drug treatments that your physician is given. You should always talk your physician anytime you remove or add something to your. Drug protocol or prescription protocol, of course.

So we've got behavioral protocols that, as silly that feels to say, have been shown to potentially increase or toning things like physical contact, cuddling, holding hands with people that you love, of course, right? I think if there were people that you despise, you would have the opposite effect for obvious reasons, but also receiving gratitude and observing gratitude. Very poor increases in the tonic.

And things like this is quartering. hilarious. Things like five H G P may have their uses, right? They are very potent, increasing the tony, but they do seem to have the need to cycle them. And they are knew what some people respond well to them. Others, like myself don't. And of course, always beyond the look out for dramatic or even subtle decreases an appetite, libido or things that you might not want if you are going to be tinkering with your senator or gic levels and pathways.

And then my own hospital actually is proving to be quite useful to me, and whether not that because of its effects on serotonin or through some of its other effects on be reducing anxiety, which certainly experienced, I wake up in the middle, I don't like wake him with the mild and night. But on my own hospitals seem to not really care that I woke up and I fall right back asleep. So the direct sorts of the positive effects that i'm getting aren't clear, but none less.

I thought i'd pass IT along as a useful tool because IT is out there and IT is available over the counter. And provided you're taking the appropriate safety steps in considering whether not to use IT or not, I think IT might be a useful tool. And of course, as with all the other nero modulators we discussed, you have both a baseline of serotonin and the ability to give or provide yourself peaks of tony through these various protocols.

The diatribe interventions of the sort that I mention, meaning eating foods that are enriched, tripped to, and those are mainly going to adjust you're baseline levels of trip to end. For instance, if you really want to be sleepy, sure, you can eat some White meat turkey and hope is that that trip to fan will convert to, say, tony, and make you sleepy at sara. But in general, those are going to be pretty long lasting effects, especially given the fact that not all of the trip of annual and just is going to be converted into settling in your brain.

It's going to have other effects on other tissues and organs of your body. Now the last, if you want to increase, providing the appropriate baseline context is going to be useful. And again, this is a general theme of all four of these neuromodulators dopa, N F A E, collin, serotonin.

You want to make sure that you have sufficient baseline levels of those things through things like diet, regular behaviors and then you have the opportunity to use supplementation. And if it's for your prescription drugs and certain behavioral protocols to try and get this pot increases, these acute increases in whether the neuromodulators you happen to want to leverage for your particular goals. So that brings us to the end of at least this exploration of the neo modulators still mean appen append a city calling and serotonin.

Some of you who are regular listeners of this podcast might be saying what we've heard all this before, right? You had an episode on dopamine. You had an episode an anxious, you had an episode on sleep. And indeed, that's true. But what i've tried to provide today is a framework that cuts through all those episodes and at the same time, builds out a new.

And what I believe to be a really important theme in principle, which is that whether not you're using nutritional tools or supplementation or prescription drugs or any other sort of protocol to try and create a desired effect of focus or energy, motivation, relaxation, you are playing with the same neo chemical ingredients. Just as in the realm of nutrition, you have macro neutrons. You have proteins, cover, hydrate and fat.

They can be adjusted in different ratios and arranged at different times in order to achieve certain desired effects. Well, when IT comes to your neurochemistry and your ability to perform mentally, to perform physically and you're overall well being, you're dealing with a small handful of especially poin molecules. And I acknowledged that there are many neuromodulators, there indeed many neurotransmitters, ors, glue, mine, glin, gaba, that. But today we focus on the main form, meaning the most potent and most widespread, no modulators in the brain and body that give you access to particular brain states and body states of the sort that most people desire.

So what i'm hoping is that rather than decide that anyone tool is the most useful or that anyone neurochemical is most useful, for that matter, that the information that have provided today allows you a kit of versatile tools that allows you to figure out what levels of dopamine and augmentation of dopamine are appropriate and necessary for you, what levels of eeo coin and tools for manipulating a eto Colin are going to be most useful for you, and so on and so forth, because at least at this stage in time, that is june twenty twenty two, there is no simple at home test. In fact, there is no simple laboratory test that allows us to know whether not our dopamine levels are high, our ceremony and levels are low. We can look at somebody in their behavior.

We can look at ourselves and our own mood and behavior, and we can infer what those levels may or may not be. But unfortunately, we don't have a really good test of dopamine levels or so tony, levels that would allow us to say, okay, this person or I need to increase dopamine too fold in order to achieve the kind of motivation that we want. Unfortunate that doesn't exist.

Rather, we are confronted with the situation where we understand generally what these different, newer modulators do, the different mental states and physical states that they tend to put us into. And we review those. And we know that there are really potent tools to adjust those neuromodulators, if not alone, but in certain combinations, that is, injection of caffeine will tap into and support dopamine in open eine, increasing dopamine and up and f along side, increasing A C to Colin will allow us to access certain brain states that is focused, alert, energized brain states, great for learning in plasticity of all kinds.

Where's augmenting? Serotonin is going to put us into more relax state and so on and so forth. And i'd like you to keep in mind that there is no negotiating the fact that we all have different phases of our tony four hour cycle during which those very same neuroses modulators tend to be naturally higher or naturally lower. And I review that at the beginning of the episode.

So I wish for you is that you'll take this information experiment with IT as you see a fit for you and in a safe way, and as you go forward to really try gain intuition and understanding as to not just how these protocols work, but how any protocol that you might encounter, supplement based, drug based, behavioral based, how those might tap into the different major neuromodulator systems. And from that to be able to Better predict in evaluate whether not they going to be useful to you, detrimental to you or whether that they should be used in combinations that would be more useful to you. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel.

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Also a huberman lab dcom under the newsletter tabs, things like a tool kit for sleep and a neuroplasticity super protocol, all available as immediately downloaded able PDF. So I like to thank you once again for joining me today in our discussion about these incredibly powerful molecules we call neural modulators and the things we can do and take in order to control them so that we can enhance our mental health, musical health and performance. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.