The School of Greatness with Lewis Howes

>> Hi, I'm Lewis Howes, New York Times best-selling author and entrepreneur.

And welcome to "The School of Greatness," where we interview the most influential minds and leaders in the world to inspire you to live your best life today.

In this episode, we sit down with Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and mental health expert who shares the science behind managing mental health challenges, the positive effects of stress, and why it is so important to have hope.

I'm so glad you're here today.

Let's dive in, and let the class begin.

I'm curious.

Where does brain fog come from?

And how can we make sure that we have great morning routines to support us so that we don't have brain fog at all in the morning or later in the afternoon?

>> Great question.

Well, there are a lot of sources of brain fog.

The most obvious one would be a poor night's sleep.

And sleep, of course, being the most fundamental layer of mental and physical health.

You don't sleep well for one night, you're probably okay.

For two nights, you start to fall apart.

Three, four nights, you're really a degraded version of yourself in every aspect.

Emotionality is off, ability to do most anything is off, hormones start suffering.

So, sleep is fundamental.

But assuming that you slept well, there are a number of things.

One is your breathing patterns, and we often get into discussions of breathing, but this is a slightly different one than we've had in the past.

You know, a lot of people have sleep apnea.

They are not getting enough oxygen during their sleep or they are mouth breathing during sleep.

These days, it's become popular in some circles to take a little bit of medical tape and tape the mouth shut and to learn to be a nasal breather.

And there is excellent evidence now that being a nasal breather most of the time, as long as you're not speaking or eating or exercising hard enough that you would need to breathe through your mouth, that it's beneficial to be a nasal breather for a couple of reasons.

First of all, if you are deliberately nasal breathing during the day, the tendency is that you will nasal breathe at night, which tends to lead to less sleep apnea, less mouth breathing during the middle of the night, and less brain fog.

Why brain fog?

Well, during sleep, a number of restorative processes occur.

But if you're not getting enough oxygen into the system, the brain is literally becoming hypoxic.

And a lot of the cleaning-out mechanisms, the lymphatic system, et cetera, as they're called, don't get an opportunity to function as well as they ought to.

So, you wake up in the morning, you slept your normal six to eight hours, but you're feeling kind of groggy and out of it.

And of course, there could be other reasons that you're experiencing brain fog.

Maybe, you know, for people that drink alcohol, the night before, maybe they had alcohol.

For people that maybe they ate a meal that was too large before sleep.

May be any number of reasons, right?

>> Gotcha.

>> But getting adequate oxygenation of the brain during sleep is key.

So learn to be a nasal breather.

And for those of you out there that say, "Well, I have a deviated septum," a lot of people think they have deviated septums.

The problem is they're not nasal breathing enough.

The sinuses actually can learn to dilate if you nasal breathe.

Exercising while nasal breathing will kind of depend on the sport.

Like, if you box, oftentimes there's the need to do a "shh" or, you know, kind of like exhale on impact type thing.

So, I don't think anyone should tamper with their normal breathing patterns as it relates to sport or singing or some, you know, activity.

But what I'm talking about is when you're just standing around, when you're walking down the street, any low-level activity, you're working at your desk, you should be nasal breathing and breathing regularly.

That will reduce brain fog.

The other thing is about the immune system.

So, we hear about "the gut microbiome."

>> Yes.

>> And indeed, we have a lot of microbiota that live in our gut.

You can have healthy or unhealthy microbiota.

It's an essential part of our biology.

It, you know, supports the nervous system, the immune system and all of that.

But if you think about the gut, the gut is obviously -- when we think about the gut, we think about the stomach.

But of course, it runs all the way up to the mouth and nose.

We have a microbiome.

We have a nasal microbiome, a mouth microbiome.

We have a urethral microbiome.

And in women, there's a vaginal microbiome.

And the microbiome are these bacteria that maintain a healthy -- ideally, a healthy condition of the mucosal lining.

So without doing a whole lecture on the immune system, your primary barrier to infections of all kinds -- bacteria, viruses, and parasites -- is your skin.

If you have a cut in your skin, you're more susceptible, right?

But these are your entry points.

You actually have an ocular microbiome, too.

>> Ears too, or just eyes?

>> Ears too, but it's mainly -- it's mainly eyes, nose, and mouth are the primary sites of entry for infection.

>> And the nose has a filter, where the mouth is just like, you're sucking it in.

>> That's right.

So, the nose actually is better at scrubbing or filtering out bacteria, viruses, and we'll leave parasites aside for the moment, then is the mouth.

And so being a nasal breather actually is better in terms of combating different types of infections, all kinds of infections.

So, I think the important thing to bring us back to brain fog is that you want to get oxygen into the system, and ideally you're bringing that oxygen into the system mainly through your nose and not through your mouth.

It doesn't mean that breathing through your mouth is a terrible thing to do.

It just means that most of the time you want to be breathing deeply and rather slowly through the nose, maybe anywhere from four or five breaths per minute.

Don't hold me too close to that number.

But you want to be breathing slowly and deeply through your nose most of the time.

>> So what's the routine, then?

The ultimate morning and evening routine to set your brain and your mind up for optimal performance and not getting brain fog.

>> For me, I'll describe it as my routine.

I generally get up somewhere between 5: 30 and 7:00 in the morning, depending on when I went to sleep.

I'm not super regular about when I go to sleep.

But generally that's between 10:30 and midnight.

>> Yep.

>> So, I get up, obviously, I use the restroom, I drink some water.

I do think that hydrating is very important.

So I will drink some water.

And then the fundamental layer of health is to set your circadian rhythm.

The simplest way to do that is to go outside for 10 minutes and get some bright light in your eyes.

I'll just list off some of the things that people always ask.

What if you wake up before the sun rises?

Well, simple rule.

If you want to be awake, turn on as many bright lights in your house as possible.

But then when the sun goes out-- comes out, excuse me -- get outside and see some sunlight.

You do not have to look directly into the sun, but you do want to get outside out of shade cover if you can.

Don't wear sunglasses, if you can do that safely.

You want to do this because once every 24 hours you're going to get a peak in cortisol, which is a healthy peak.

You want that peak to happen early in the day because it sets up alertness for the remainder of the day.

There are really nice studies done by my colleagues in Stanford psychiatry and biology department showing that if that cortisol peak starts to drift too late in the day, you start seeing signs of depression.

It's actually a well-known marker of depression.

So, you want that cortisol almost stressed out kind of, "Ah, the day's beginning, I have a lot to do" feeling.

That's a healthy thing.

You want that happening early in the day.

The sunlight will wake you up.

And what's really cool is that over time you'll start to notice the sunlight waking you up more and more.

The system becomes tuned up.

If you miss a day, it's not the end of the world, because it's a, as we call it, slow integrating system.

But don't miss more than one day.

And if you live in an area where it's very cloudy outside, just know that the sunlight, the photons coming through that cloud cover are brighter than your brightest indoor lights.

Now, if you live in a very dark region of the world, or it's unsafe or purely impractical to get outside in the morning, then it might make sense to get a sunrise simulator or one of these lights.

But they tend to be very expensive.

What I recommend people use instead is just a ring light, ring blue light.

This is a case where you can blast your system.

>> Wow.

>> So, get that morning light.

This is -- it sets a number of things in motion, such as your melatonin rhythm to happen 16 hours later to help you fall asleep.

I would say this is the fundamental step of any good morning.

And if you don't do this enough, you are messing yourself up in a number of ways.

>> Does this mess with digestion, also?

>> Yeah, so, every cell in your body has a 24-hour clock.

All those clocks need to be aligned to the same time.

So, imagine a clock shop with lots of different clocks and you don't want them alarming off at different times.

This sunlight viewing or bright light viewing early in the day, I would say within 30 to 60 minutes of waking up, for about 10 minutes, or if it's very cloudy, maybe 30 minutes or so, that activates a particular type of neuron in the eye called the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cell, if people want to look that up.

Signals to the circadian clock, which is right above the roof of your mouth, but that is the master circadian clock that then releases a bunch of signals into your body.

This all happens very fast, and every cell in your body gets tuned to the exact same time reference point so that your system can work as a nice concert of cells as opposed to out of whack.

Your gut has a clock, your liver has a clock, your heart cells have a clock.

Every skin cell has a clock.

And for those that are not incentivized enough by the cortisol stuff and all the other things, actually the replenishment of stem cells in the skin, hair, and nails is activated by this system.

So hair grows more readily, skin turns over, and nails grow more quickly because you have stem cells, literally cells that release more cells, that become new hair cells or new skin cells and new cells that make up the nails.

So, skin, hair, and nails also benefit.

And it has to be light exposure to the eyes.

When we talk about all these things like the gut and the skin, et cetera, it's tempting to say, "Oh, it's sunlight on the skin."

No, it actually only can be signaled through the eyes because the clock lives deep in the brain, that master clock.

And you need the signal to get to that master clock.

>> So, this is important to do in the first 60 minutes of waking up, get outside 10 minutes.

You don't have to be in the sun, but you want to be able to look and see the sun, right?

>> One of the big mistakes that we've made in the last few years as a culture is assuming that blue light is bad.

During the day, lots of blue light is great because that's the best signal for these cells that wake up your system.

So, then I come back inside and then I do not drink caffeine right away.

It's important in many ways to delay caffeine enough so that you can clear out some of the chemical signals in the brain and body that lead to a -- lead to a feeling of fatigue.

So, the longer you're awake, the more a molecule called adenosine builds up in your system.

And when you sleep, you push that adenosine level back down.

When you wake up in the morning, that adenosine level can be zero.

But oftentimes there's still some hanging around.

Caffeine is an adenosine antagonist.

It blocks adenosine function.

It's a little more complicated than that, but that's effectively what it does.

So, if you wake up and you've got, let's say -- let's make -- this is arbitrary, but 20% of your adenosine still hasn't been cleared out.

That's sort of a drowsiness that you woke up with.

Then you go and you drink your coffee and you crush that, that ability of adenosine to have that effect.

But it hasn't gone away.

So that when your coffee wears off mid-morning, now that adenosine is there and you feel like there's a mid-morning crash or an afternoon crash.

So, I delay my caffeine intake for about 90 and ideally 120 minutes after I wake up, because in that way, you bring your adenosine level down very, very low to zero, and then you don't get this rebound crash in the afternoon.

For years I would get this post-lunch crash and I thought, maybe I'm eating too much for lunch, which I probably was, or maybe eating the wrong foods.

It turned out it was all related to my timing of caffeine.

So, and your system learns how to wake up naturally.

You get the natural cortisol and adrenaline.

>> Give it the time.

Yeah.

>> Give it the time.

So, I try and exercise or I do a 90-minute work bout.

And if I exercise -- we can talk about that -- then I would shower and do my 90-minute work bout.

But sometimes I do the 90-minute work bout first.

And that's generally when I'm starting to drink the caffeine.

And the 90-minute work bout is a serious, nonnegotiable time in which I don't allow myself to be on the internet, I'm not checking email, I'm not texting.

My phone is off, off, off.

And it's a process of learning to focus.

So, this 90-minute work bout is a kind of combined meditation, but also functional work for me.

So for me that could be writing, it could be planning a podcast, it could be reading.

It's something that's kind of hard.

And the thing to understand about this 90-minute work bout is that you should expect some friction early on.

It's not like you just flip a switch and you're in.

It takes some time to get into this focused mode, and throughout that time, your brain will flicker in and out.

And there's a tool that you can use to enhance your focus prior to this 90-minute work bout.

And I actually do this.

Sounds a little crazy, but it actually is grounded in really good neuroscience, which is that you place a crosshatch, you know, just a target at some distance on a piece of paper, and you force yourself to stare at it and not blink for about 30 to 60 seconds.

And what you're doing is you're ramping up the neural circuits in the brain that drive "go, no go," and harnessing your visual attention.

>> Your focus.

>> You're focusing.

Visual focus drives cognitive focus.

And for people that aren't sighted, auditory focus drives cognitive focus.

>> So, visual focus drives cognitive focus.

>> Yes.

These two little bits of that we call eyes are, as people probably heard me say before, are two little bits of brain that are outside the cranial vault.

They're the only way that your brain knows what to do in terms of whether or not it's day or night, who's out there, et cetera, but it's also a mechanism by which you draw your attentional systems into from kind of everywhere -- you know, imagine spotlights just kind of moving around, bringing those spotlights to a common location and then intensifying that spotlight.

And since most work involves what we call exterocepting, looking outside ourself, this is very different than, like, you know, sitting in meditation where you're focusing internally because when you sit down to work, you kind of want to forget about your heartbeat and how your feet feel on the floor and that you're back, you know, might be a little sore or something.

You want to be in the work.

And so I do, I set a timer and I force 90 minutes of this, and it's really tough.

Some days -- some days, it's anything to go get something out of the fridge... >> Get up and distract myself.

>> And occasionally I fail.

I will get up and go do something or I'll look at my phone.

I do falter sometimes.

But if you can learn to do this 90-minute bout... >> And I bet consistently, you can create some amazing work.

>> That's a holy part of my morning, as holy as the sunlight viewing, and it's something that's very hard to build in.

But I actually schedule it just like I would a Zoom call.

And it's really, it's cool because when you then, for instance, if you have a social interaction where someone comes to you and they say, "I've got something to do," and you're sort of distracted, or "Something I need to tell you," you'll notice that you can quickly intensify that what we call attentional spotlight in neuroscience.

>> That's the ultimate morning routine for you.

>> That's the ultimate morning routine for me.

People might say, "Well, you're only working for 90 minutes?"

But I would wager that in that 90... >> 90 minutes of focus is better than six hours of distraction.

>> In that 90 minutes, I'm accomplishing much more than I would accomplish in three or four hours.

I will often do a second 90-minute bout in the afternoon.

But very few people can do more than three hours or four hours of really focused work per day.

And I'm talking about real work.

I'm not talking about, you know, checking things or... >> Replying to emails.

>> Brainstorming with people, which is also a lot of fun and can feel like work.

But I'm talking about creative work.

I'm talking about hard math.

I'm talking about working on a problem where it actually feels like strain and friction.

And I'm talking about not getting up to get a drink of water, even if you're thirsty.

I'm talking -- I mean, this is a little -- >> Staying focused.

>> Yeah, this is very -- it's a little bit masochistic, but the payoff is huge.

>> Can we talk about dopamine focus and motivation and how to manage our dopamine hits, because it seems like every 30 seconds we're getting dopamine now, whether it's drinking coffee, having candy, social media, email pings, dings on the watches, whatever it is, it's a dopamine overload, it feels like.

>> Yes.

>> So, how do we stay motivated and manage dopamine at the same time?

>> Dopamine is the molecule of motivation.

>> The molecule of motivation?

>> Absolutely.

I mean, for years and years, people thought dopamine was about pleasure, but dopamine is mainly about craving and motivation and drive.

>> So, dopamine is a good thing in motivation.

>> Provided it's in proper levels, yes, that's right.

If your dopamine is depleted, you will feel not motivated.

Now, there's a double-edged sword here because many things, as you mentioned accurately, trigger dopamine release.

Seeing a positive comment, a compliment, food.

The more palatable a food -- a really tasty chip compared to a slice of a potato that's baked but doesn't have anything on it.

One truly releases more dopamine than the other.

But we have a baseline level of dopamine.

Nicotine, for instance, increases that by about 50%.

>> Gives you more dopamine.

>> More dopamine is released.

You have two major dopamine pathways in the brain.

There's one related to movement.

One related to reward.

Broadly speaking.

There are others, but broadly speaking.

So, nicotine, about a 50% increase.

Cocaine, 100% increase, a doubling.

Methamphetamine, 1,000 or even-- >> Come on.

>> Oh, thousandfold increase.

>> Holy cow.

>> Huge increase in dopamine.

>> That's why it's so addictive.

>> So addictive.

But what happens after that big dopamine increase is that the baseline levels of dopamine go below what they were before.

How low that dope drop is below baseline is proportional to how big the increase was before.

>> That's why it's so addictive to stay on these things.

>> That's right.

Well, and that's why if you're getting lots of little dopamine hits from things, as we call them, you're going to feel kind of depressed and those things don't feel as rewarding anymore.

Okay, now, eventually, this system can reset if you don't indulge.

When you're constantly pursuing things, eating highly palatable foods, engaging in very stimulating anything, any behavior that's very stimulating, there's a drop below baseline and it takes an increasingly great stimulus, high threshold stimulus, in order to excite you.

So if people are feeling bored, unmotivated, unstimulated, most of the time it's because they are overindulging in things that keep pounding this dopamine system.

But the baseline of dopamine is going down, down, down, down, down.

You have to be very judicious in your interactions with things that deliver pleasure, or else they will soon not deliver pleasure and they will diminish your pleasure for everything else that you interact with.

The key is to take this dopamine system and set it up for you to be able to be motivated and focused.

And the way to do that is to make the experiences around that thing that you want to be motivated to do a little less or a lot less exciting.

>> What do you mean?

>> This is why I don't listen to music these days or check text messages while I'm in the gym.

And sometimes I'll listen to a book or a podcast, but I really try and just be, just work out, including while I'm running.

Why?

Because these days we are layering in dopamine.

We're getting dopamine from the energy drink we're drinking.

Okay, big increase in dopamine.

I forget the actual numbers, but I think it's 1.8 times increase.

And some of them have L-tyrosine, which is a dopamine precursor.

Some of them have caffeine, which also increases dopamine and upregulates dopamine receptors.

So, you're getting it from the energy drink, plus it's the video game you're playing, plus you're with your friends.

It's just a dopamine soup, which sounds great, except that other things that you do afterwards are going to seem under-stimulating and you're going to think, "I can't focus on this."

The postpartum depression that people feel after a big celebration -- >> Is real.

>> That's real.

And if you just wait a little while, that system will reset.

You don't have to necessarily wait 30 days, but if you just had a great party, you should expect that there'll be a long tail of joy.

But then you might feel a little low, a little underwhelmed.

>> So true, man.

>> And if you're going to sit down and try to work and you're finding yourself not that focused, you might want to think about some of the behaviors that led up to that work.

So, I really try to get into my work in a focused way by making the period right before it a little boring, frankly -- going outside, getting some sun, like drinking my mat.

It sounds like a pretty boring life, right?

It's not like blasting a bunch of music and getting really amped up, but I'm able to get a nice peak of dopamine during that work bout, and I think that's a functional dopamine increase.

And then afterwards, yes, indeed, there's a drop.

>> This stuff is fascinating, man.

>> It's really interesting to me because that dopamine, you know, coming up in neuroscience...

I've been in the game a long time now -- almost you know, gosh, almost 30 years.

But dopamine was always thought of as pleasure.

But it's confusing because it's associated with pleasure, but it's not the actual experience of pleasure.

And immediately after sex, immediately after any powerful experience that's very pleasureful, dopamine system crashes down.

>> Drops.

>> Yeah.

>> What happens to the body when dopamine crashes?

>> Ah.

If you think about dopamine as a currency of motivation that biology has used for hundreds of thousands of years.

So, you know, whether or not -- you know, we think about currencies like dollars or euros or Bitcoins or Ethereum, all of those actually relate to dopamine.

Dopamine is the fundamental currency that we're all working for.

And dopamine has this quality of making us focused on things outside our immediate experience.

This is why people who are on cocaine or methamphetamine, which is a really extreme version of dopamine increase, they tend to be all about plans and action.

They're not sitting there thinking about how wonderful they feel in their own body, whereas drugs like cannabis and psilocybin and drugs -- these are not drugs that I recommend people use recreationally.

I'm not passing judgment, but I just want to be clear about what I'm saying and not saying, that any drugs that increase serotonin tend to make people kind of still, focused on their internal landscape, their thinking.

That's kind of an internal reflection thing.

So, the serotonin system and the dopamine system are kind of antagonistic to one another, and the prolactin system is associated with the serotonin system.

So, prolactin is kind of about, it's a mellowing out.

>> Interesting.

>> And just to nail the point, there are many people in the world who suffer from schizophrenia, 1% of the world's population, a huge number, a very sad thing, psychosis, hearing things, et cetera, and most of the drugs designed to treat schizophrenic psychosis are drugs that reduce dopamine.

And oftentimes you'll see people on the street who are taking these drugs and they'll be writhing like this with their face.

Sometimes men will have gynecomastia, they'll have breast development because these drugs block dopamine, increase prolactin and disrupt the motor pathways that are associated with movement.

>> Wow.

>> I say this for two reasons.

One is it illustrates the relationship between prolactin, dopamine, movement, et cetera.

But the other is to hopefully invoke a little bit of empathy for people that oftentimes we will see people who if they're shouting and acting crazy, that's probably an unmedicated person who's bipolar or has schizophrenia.

But if you see someone, they're catatonic or they are writhing and acting very strange, that's a person who's -- we don't know for sure, but very likely is actively trying to treat their own psychosis to eliminate the voices, things of that sort.

Oftentimes we see people acting crazy and we think, "Oh, they're..." You know, we make this disparaging judgment, and everyone's prone to doing it, of course, but they're crazy.

But oftentimes that those crazy movements and the things they're doing are the reflection of drugs that block the dopamine system.

>> Gotcha.

>> So, I don't mean to make it dark, but I think that there is a -- you know, 1% of the world's population is a huge number and a lot of people suffering from these things.

>> This is powerful stuff, man.

I'm so, so grateful for your wisdom, as always.

I want to acknowledge you, Andrew, for constantly showing up, man.

You constantly show up on the research, the data.

You're just studying and obsessing about how to find the best strategies based on data to support human beings, and that's what we're all about here on "The School of Greatness," is how do we learn the things that can improve our life?

And so I'm so grateful for you.

I appreciate you.

>> Thank you.

I appreciate you, too.

And I admire the way you show up to things.

I admire your energy levels and your positivity.

But hearing all that is very gratifying and thanks so much for having me on.

Always a tremendous pleasure.

>> Of course, man.

Final question.

What's your definition of greatness?

>> Constant, deliberate focus on self-improvement.

>> There you go.

My man.

Appreciate you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode and found it valuable.

Stay tuned for more from "The School of Greatness" coming soon on public television.

Again, I'm Lewis Howes, and if no one has told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.

And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

If you'd like to continue on the journey of greatness with me, please check out my website, lewishowes.com, where you'll find over 1,000 episodes of "The School of Greatness" show, as well as tools and resources to support you in living your best life.

>> The online course, "Find Your Greatness," is available for $19.

Drawn from the lessons Lewis Howes shares in "The School of Greatness," this interactive course will guide you through a step-by-step process to discover your strengths, connect to your passion and purpose, and help create your own blueprint for greatness.

To order, go to lewishowes.com/tv.