cover of episode Essentials: Master Your Sleep & Be More Alert When Awake

Essentials: Master Your Sleep & Be More Alert When Awake

2024/11/21
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Key Insights

Why is adenosine important for sleep?

Adenosine builds up the longer we are awake, creating a sleep drive or sleep hunger. It makes us feel sleepy and is blocked by caffeine, which is why we feel more alert after consuming it.

How does caffeine affect sleep?

Caffeine acts as an adenosine antagonist, blocking the sleepiness signal by occupying the adenosine receptor slots, preventing adenosine from binding and making us feel sleepy.

Why is morning light exposure crucial for sleep regulation?

Morning light exposure helps set the circadian rhythm by signaling to the central clock in the brain, ensuring proper timing of cortisol and melatonin release, which are vital for wakefulness and sleep.

What are the benefits of viewing sunlight around sunset?

Viewing sunlight around sunset can help protect against the negative effects of light later in the day, preventing disruptions to melatonin release and improving sleep quality.

How can artificial light in the evening affect sleep?

Artificial light in the evening can delay the circadian clock, making it harder to fall asleep and disrupting sleep patterns. It can also suppress the release of dopamine, affecting mood and learning.

What role does magnesium play in sleep?

Certain forms of magnesium, like magnesium threonate, can enhance sleepiness and improve the ability to stay asleep by increasing neurotransmitters like GABA, which promote relaxation.

How can naps benefit wakefulness?

Naps, especially those under an hour, can provide a boost in energy and focus, helping to counteract the natural dip in alertness that occurs in the afternoon.

What is the purpose of yoga nidra?

Yoga nidra is a form of meditation that helps train the nervous system to transition from heightened alertness to relaxation, making it easier to fall asleep when desired.

Why is it challenging to force ourselves to fall asleep?

Our autonomic nervous system is more easily engaged in wakefulness than in sleep, making it harder to force ourselves to fall asleep due to the asymmetry between sympathetic and parasympathetic systems.

What are the potential benefits of epigenin for sleep?

Epigenin can support the creation of a sleepiness state, helping to fall asleep and stay asleep by augmenting the effects of melatonin and other sleep-promoting neurotransmitters.

Chapters

The quality of sleep and wakefulness is governed by chemical and circadian forces. Adenosine builds up with wakefulness, creating a sleep drive, while caffeine acts as an adenosine antagonist. The circadian rhythm, influenced by sunlight, determines when we feel sleepy and awake.
  • Adenosine builds up with wakefulness, creating a sleep drive.
  • Caffeine blocks adenosine receptors, preventing sleepiness.
  • Circadian rhythm is influenced by sunlight, determining sleep and wake times.

Shownotes Transcript

Welcome to huberman lab essentials where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science space tools for mental health, physical health and performance and enjoy huberman. And i'm a professor of neurobiology and opened ology at ten ford school of venison. Today's podcast episode is all about sleep.

We're also going to talk about the mirror image of sleep, which is wake for this. Now these two phases of our life, sleep and wakefulness, govern everything about our mental and physical health. And we're not just gonna talk about what's useful about sleep.

We're also gonna talk about how to get Better at sleeping. That will include how to get Better at falling a sleep, timing your sleep and accessing Better sleep quality. In doing so, we're also gona discuss how to get more focused and alert in wakefulness.

So if you're like most people, includes me, you have some chAllenges with left at least every third or nighter. So and maybe even more often. So we're really going to go tool heavy today and talk about tools that can help you fall asleep, sleep Better and emerge from sleep feeling more arrested.

So what determines how well we sleep? And the quality of our wakeful state turns out that govern by two forces. The first force is a chemical force.

It's called a density. A denot's ine is a molecule in our nervous system, in body that builds up the longer we are awake. So if you just slept for eight or nine or ten really deep, restful hours, the Denny is can be very low in your brain and body.

If, however, you've been awake for ten, fifteen or more hours, a density levels are going to be much higher. A denisse creates a sort of sleep drive or a sleep hunger. And a good way to remember this and think about a density is to think about cafe caffeine.

For most people, wake them up and makes them feel more alert. Caffeine act as an a dency antagonist. What that means is that when you and just caffeine, whether not coffee or soda, tea or in any other form IT bind to the identical cept, it's what of parks there.

Just like a car would park in a given parking slot and therefore a deny can't park in that slot. Now when caffeine parks in the a deny recept slot, nothing really happens down stream of that recept tor. The receptor can't engage the Normal cellular functions of making that cell and you feel sleepy.

So the reason caffeine wakes you up is because IT blocks the sleeping veness recept. IT blocks the sleepy signal. And this is why, when that caine wears off, a denot's ine will bind to that recept, sometimes with even greater what we call affiliate.

And you feel the crash, you feel especially tired. Caffeine has a lot of health benefits and also, for some people, can be problematic for health that can raise blood pressure at eta. Caffeine increases this molecule that a neuromodulator that we call depine.

We discuss this an episode one which tends to make us feel good, motivated and give us energy. Because, as you may have learned in episode one, doping is related to another nemo's later called epinephrine, gives us energy. In fact, epinephrine made from doping.

Let's just take a step back and think about what we're talking about. We're talking about left sleeping ess. If you've ever pulled an all nighter, you'll notice something interesting as morning rules around, you'll suddenly feel an increase in your energy and alertness again, even though identity has been building up for the entire night.

And why is that? The reason that is, is because there's a second force which is governing when you sleep in when you awake. And that force is a so called circadian force. Circadian means about a day or about twenty four hours.

And inside all of us is a clock that exists in your brain and my brain, and the brain of every animal that we're aware of, that determines when we want to be sleepy and when we want to be awake. That block of sleep, and when IT falls within each twenty four hour cycle, is governed by a number of different things. But the most powerful thing that's governing when you want to be asleep and when you want to be awake is light, and in particular is governed by sunlight.

Now I can't emphasize enough how important and how actionable this relationship is between light and when you want to sleep. It's quite simple on the face of IT, and it's quite simple to resolve. But people tend to make a big mess of this whole circadian literature, Frankly.

So let's just break IT down from the standpoint of what's going on in your brain and body as you go through one twenty four hour day. Let's start with taking. So regardless of how well you slept at night or whether that you were up all night, most people tend to wake up some time around when the sun rises.

When you wake up in the morning, you wake up because a particular hormone on called cortisol is released from your renal gLance, your address inal gLance, sit right above your kidneys and there's a little pulse of cord is all, there's also a pulse of epinephrine is a journey from your dreams and also in your brain. And you feel awake now that push of court is all in a gentleman, and a pen effort might come from your alarm clock. IT might come from you naturally waking up, but IT tends to alert your whole system in your body, that it's time to increase your heart rate, is time to start tensing your muscles, it's time to start moving about.

It's very important that that cortisol polls come early in the day, at least early in your period of wakefulness. When you wake up in the morning and you experience that rise in court is all there's a timer that starts going and these are cellular timers and they're dictated by the relation between different organs in your body that says to your brain in body that in about twelve to fourteen hours, a different hormone, this woman we're calling melatonin, will be released from your pony al gland. So there's two mechanisms here, a wakefulness signal and a sleepiness signal.

And the wakefulness signal trigger the onset of the timer for the sleeper signal. I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, ag one. Ag one is an all in one vitamin mineral probiotic drink with adaptive giants.

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okay. So the rythm of cortisol and milestones is what we call indigenous. It's happening in us all the time without any external input. In fact, if we were in complete darkness, living in A K with no artificial lights whatsoever, these rythm of court is all in melatonin would continue.

So if you were in complete darkness, IT would happen once per twenty four hour cycle, but IT would be somewhat later in, later each day. We're as under norm, under Normal circumstances. What happens is you wake up.

And what happens when you wake up, you open your eyes. When you open your eyes, light comes into your eyes. Now the way this system works is that you have a particular set of neurons in your eye. You're called the retina gangling and cells.

When light comes into the eye, there's a particular group of retina gangling and cells, or type retina gangland cells, that perceives a particular type of light and communicates that to this clock that resides read above the mouth called the super kids matic nucleus. And the super kids matic nucleus has connections with essentially every cell organ of your body. Now it's vitally important that we get light communicated to the central clock in order to time the cortisol and milestones properly.

When I say properly, I can say that with confidence because we know, based on a lot of evidence, that if you don't get your cortisol and military in hythloday, they are tremendously a broad and bad effects on cardiff. Asked lar health metabolite effects, learning depression dimension. So let's think about what happens when we do this correctly and how to do IT correctly.

When we wake up, our eyes open. Now we're in a dark room. There isn't enough light to trigger the correct timing of this court. Is all melatonin thing.

These rythm, you might say, well, why any light do IT? Well, IT turns out that these neurons in our eye that set the circadian clock, and then allow our circadian clock to set all the clocks of all the cells and organs and dishes of body response best to a particular quality of light and amount of light. And those are the qualities of light and amount of light that come from sunlight.

So these neurons, what they're really looking for, although they don't have a mind of their own, is the sun at what we call low solar angle. The eye in the nervous system don't waiting about sunrises or sunsets. IT only knows the quality of light that comes in.

When the sun is low in the sky, the system evolved so that when the sun is low in the sky, there's a particular contrast between yellow and blues that triggers the activation of these cells. However, if you wake up a few hours after the sunrise, which I tend to most days personally, you still want to get outside and view sunlight. You don't need the sunlight beaming you directly in the eyes.

There's a lot of photons, light energy that scattered from sunlight at this time, but the key is to get that light energy from sunlight, ideally into your eyes. It's critically important that you get outside to get this light. Had a discussion with a colleague of mine, doctor jami's igher, who's in this a department psychiatry behavior sciences at stanford, a world expert in this, and he tells me that it's fifty times less.

Effective to view the sunlight through window through a car when shield or through a side window of the car, then IT is to just get outside with no sun glasses and view light early in the day. Once the sun is overhead, the quality of light shifts so that you miss this opportunity to time the cortese all polls. And that turns out to be a bad thing to do.

You really want to time that court is all pulse properly because we'll get into this a little bit more later. But a late shifted cortisol pulse, in particular in nine pm or a pm increase in cortisol is one of the consequences and maybe one of the causes of a lot of anxiety disorders and depression. So it's kind of a chicken egg.

We don't know whether not the correlated with its the cause or the effect, but it's a signature of depression and xiety disorder. Bringing that cortile pulse earlier in your wakeful period earlier in your day has positive benefits ranging from blood pressure to mental health at seta not can list them all off is are just so many of them. But many, many positive things happen when you are getting the court is all early in the day, far away from your Melody onand polls.

okay. So how long should you be outside? Well, this is going to very tremendously because some people live in environments where it's very bright.

So let's say it's colorado in the middle of winter, there's a snowfield. There's no cloud cover. You walk outside. There's going to be so much fat on light energy arriving on your retina that IT probably takes thirty to sixty seconds to trigger the central clock and set your courtesy in malta. And rythm is properly in, get everything in lined up nicely.

We're as if you're in skinny avia the depth of winter and you wake up at five A M in the sun is just barely creeping across the horizon, then goes back down again a few hours later. You probably are not getting enough sunlight in order to set these rythm, so many people find that they need to use sunlight simulators in the form of particularly lights that were designed to simulate sunlight. You could say, well, the light in my house or my phone are really, really bright, right? Everyone's telling us to stay off our phones at night because they're really bright.

But guess what? IT turns out that early in the day, your retina is not very sensitive, which means you need a lot of photons, ideally coming from sunlight, to set these clock mechanisms. So looking at your phone or our official lights, fine if you wake up before sunrise, but it's not going to work to set these clock mechanisms.

So you wanted use sunlight. If you can't see sunlight because of your environment, then you are going to have to opt for artificial light. And in that case, you're going to want an artificial light to either simulate sunlight or has a lot of blue light.

Now, without going off course here, you might be saying weight. I've heard blue light is bad for me. Actually, blue is great for this mechanism.

During the day, a lot of people say, oh, I should be wearing blue lockers throughout the day. No, that's the exact wrong thing that should be reserved for late in the evening. Because light suppresses melatonin.

Sunlight inhibits the piano IT prevents IT from releasing melatonin. Darkness allows the pioneer to release mallett. And so the piano is not the gland or the organ of sunlight.

IT is the gland of darkness. In fact, melanthon I can be fought of as a sleeping in signal that's correlated with darkness. So get up each morning trying get outside.

I know that can be chAllenging for people, but anywhere from two to ten minutes of sunlight exposure is going to work well for most people. If you can't do every day, you sleep through this period of the early day. Low solar angle.

Don't worry about IT these systems in the body, these hormone systems in a row, transmit stems that make you awake at certain periods of the day and sleepy at other times, are Operating by averaging when you view the brightest light. Some of you, many of you might be asking, what else can help set this rhythm? What turns out that light is what we call the primary, is light giver, the time giver.

But other things can help establish this. Rythm of court is all followed by military into alt sixteen hours later as well. The other things, besides light, or timing of food intake, timing of exercise, as well as various drugs or chemicals that one might ingest, not illegal drugs, although those who will impact are in mechanisms as well.

The other thing is sun set, when the sun is also at low solar angle, low, close to the horizon, by viewing sunlight at that time, a day in the evening or afternoon, depending on what time of year that is where you are in the world. These melanin ops and sells these morons in your eyes, signal the central circadian clock. That is, the end of the day, there was a really nice study that showed that viewing sunlight around the time of sunset doesn't have to be just crossing horizon, but so cus sunset within an hour.

So a sunset prevents some of the bad effects of light in preventing melatonin release later that same night. So let me repeat this. Viewing like early in the day is key.

Viewing light later in the day when the sun is setting, or around that time can help protect these mechanisms, your brain and body, against the negative effects of light later in the day. So let me talk about how you would do that. You'd go view the sunset or you would go outside in the late afternoon or evening again.

If you want to this through a window at work, that's fine. We'll take fifty times longer. So the best thing to do is just to get outside for a few minutes, anywhere from two to ten minutes, also in the afternoon, having those two signals arriving to your central clock, that your body, your international world, knows when it's morning and knows when in the evening is tremendously powerful.

There's always a lot of questions about how long, how much, how do I know if I ve had enough, you'll know because your rythm will start to fall into some degree of Normalcy. You'll start to wake up at more or less the same time each day. You'll fall a sleep more easily at night.

Generally, IT takes about two or three days for these systems to a line. So if you've not been doing these behaviors, it's going to take a few days. But they can have tremendous benefits and sometimes rather quickly on a number of different mental and physical aspects of your health.

I'd like to take a quick break and think our sponsor, eight sleep. Eight sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. Now I spoken before in this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each night.

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K. Select countries in the E. U. And australia. Again, that's eight legs dock slash huberman. Now let's talk about the bad effects of light, because light is not supposed to arrive in our system at any time.

And nowadays, because of screens and artificial light, we have access to light at times of day and night that Normally we wouldn't. Now earlier, I said that you need a lot of light, in particular sunlight, to set these clock mechanisms. That's true, but there's a kind of diablo feature to the way all this works, which is the longer you've been awake, the more sensitive your retina and the cells are to light.

So that if you've been awake for ten, twelve, fourteen hours, IT becomes very easy for even a small amount of light coming from a screen or from an overhead light to trigger the activation of the clock and make you feel like you want to stay up later. Make IT harder to fall a sleep and disrupt your sleep pattern. okay? So the simple way to think about this is you want as much light as as safely possible early in the day, morning and throughout the day, including blue light.

And you want as little light coming in to your eyes, artificial or sunlight after, say, A P M. And certainly you do not want to get bright light to your eyes between eleven P M and four A M. And here's why light that arrives to the eyes between eleven P M and four um approximately suppresses the release of dopamine, this Normative that makes us feel good as sort of an indigenous anti depression and can inhibit learning and create all sorts of other detrimental effects.

IT does this throw mechanism, for those of you who want to know the neural pathways that involves light to the eyes, that then signal to a structure called the haben ela. When that haven't la gets activated, it's actually called the disappointment nucleus, because IT actually makes us feel less happy and more disappointed, and can lead to certain forms of depression in the wakeful state. Now, if you wake with the mild and I you need to use the bathroom where you're on an all night flight and your, you know you need to read or whatever, IT is fine.

Everyone's in a while. It's not to be a problem to get bright light exposure to your eyes midnight. But if you think about our list yle nowaday and being up late looking at phones, even if you dim that screen, you're triggering this activation.

Because you're retina sensitivity and the sensitivity of these neurons has gone up late in the day. For those of you that are experiencing chAllenges with mood, those view that have anxiety, learning problems, issues, focusing the questions I usually get, how can I focus Better? One of the best ways can support your mechanisms for good mood, mental health, learning focus, metabolism and set a is to take control of the slight exposure behavior at night and not get much or any bright light exposure in the midnight.

These cells in our eye, these neurons that signal the central clock, resided mostly, not exclusively, but mostly in the bottom half of our retna. And because we have a lens in front of our retina, and because of the optics of lenses, that means that these cells are actually viewing our upper visual field. This is probably not coincidental that ah these cells were essentially designed to detect sunlight, which is overhead, of course.

So if you want to avoid improper activation of these neurons, it's Better to place lights that you use in the evening low in your physical environment. So on test tops or even the floor, if if that if you want to go that way as opposed to overhead lights. So overhead furren lights would be the worst.

That would be the worst case scenario. Lights that are overhead that are a little bit softer of this yellow or radish twins would be slightly Better, but dim lights that are set low in the room are going to be best because they aren't going to activate these neurons and therefore shift your circadian clock. But let's talk about what I can do in terms of shifting us in healthy ways.

So the way to think about this whole system again, as you've got a dentistry building up depending on how long you've been awake and it's making you sleepy and then you've got their circadian mechanisms that are timing your wakefulness and timing when you want to be a sleep, mainly through court, is all and melatonin. But there are a bunch of other things that are doing stream of court as all melatonin, like we tend to be hungry during our waite's period, then late at night. Some people like to eat IT late at night.

But if you're finding that you can't become a day person or morning person, shifting your light exposure, exercise and food intake to the daytime will help jie sights. R and colleagues had did a beautiful study showing that if you turn on the lights before waking up around forty five minutes to an hour before waking up, even if your islands are closed, provided you're not under the the covers after doing that for a few days, that increases your total sleep time and shifts forward the time at which you feel sleepy. IT makes you want to go to bed earlier each night.

Now, what kind of diabolical way they did this with teenagers who are for wanting to wake up late and stay up late. And what they found was bright light flashes just turning on the light in the environment, overhead lights, because they're trying to activate the system, and that's why they're using overhead lights even through the islands before these kids woke up, then made those kids naturally wants to go to Better earlier and they ended up sleeping longer so that something you could try, you could put your lights on a timer to go on um early in the day before you wake up up, you could open your blind so that sunlight is coming through again. If you you curl up under the covers, then it's not gona reach are these neurons.

But to remarkable, the light can actually penetrate the islands, activate these neurons and go to the central clock. That study illustrates a really important principle of how you're built, which is you have the capacity for what are called phase advances and phase delays. And I don't want to complicate this too much.

So the simplest way to think about phase advances, phase delays, is that if you see light late in the day, and in particular in middle the night, your brain and body, for reasons that now you understand, will think that that morning light, even though it's not sunlight, because you have this heightened sensitivity and IT, will face delay, will delay your clock IT will sentiment make you want to get up later and go to sleep later? So the simple way to think about this is if you're having trouble waking up early and feeling alert early in the day, you are going to want to try and get bright light exposure even before waking up, because IT will advance your clock. It'll send story like turning the clock forward.

Whether if you are having trouble waking up early, you definitely don't want to get too much light exposure, any light exposure to your eyes late in the evening, in in the middle the night because it's just going to delay your clock more and more. And what you're trying to do is provide them anchors. You're trying to provide them consistent, powerful anchors so that your court is all your melanthon in.

And then everything that, that cascades down from that, like your ism in your ability to learn in your sense of alertness, your dopamine, your serotonin, all that stuff is timed regularly. One of the reasons why there's so much, you know, chAllenge out there with focus and anxiety and depression, there are a lot of reasons for that. But one of the reasons is that people's internal mechanisms aren't anchored. Anything regular, these systems, again, will average. But if you can provide them consistent light anchors early in the day and in the evening and avoiding light at night, you will be amazed at the tremendous number of positive effects that can come from that at the level of metaphoric factors, hormones and just general feelings of well being.

And this is why whenever people ask me, what should I take, which is one of the most common questions I get, what supplements should I take? What drug should I be taking? What things should I be taking? The first question I always asked them is, how's you're sleep? And ninety percent of the time they tell me they either have trouble falling a sleep, staying sleeps, but they don't feel arrested throughout the day.

A brief note about nps, nps provided that they're less than one al trade and cycle, provide their twenty minutes or thirty minutes or even an hour can be very beneficial for a lot of people. You don't have to take them, but many people naturally feel a dip in energy and focus late in the afternoon. In fact, if we're going to look at wakefulness, what we would find is that you get that morning light exposure, hopefully your court is all goes, that people start feeling awake.

And then around two or three or four in the afternoon, there's a Spike in in everything from alertness to ability to learn some metals. Lic factors drop, and then IT just naturally comes back up. And then IT tapers office.

Then I goes on. So for some of you, nap are great. I love taking nps. Some people, they wake up from naps feeling really groggy.

That's probably because they're not sleeping as well as they should at night or as long as they should at night. And so they're dropping into rem sleep or deeper forms of sleep in the daytime. And then they wake up and they feel kind of disoriented.

Other people feel great after a nap. So that's another case where, just like with caffeine and you sort of have to evaluate for yourself, i'd like to take a quick break and think one of our sponsors, roca. Roca makes eye glasses and sunglasses that are the absolute highest quality.

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After the sun goes down, they filter out short wave elth light that comes from screen and from L D lights, the sort of L D lights that are most commonly used as overhead and, Frankly, lamp lighting. Nowadays, I want to emphasize rogo redlener classes are not traditional blue blockers. They're not designed to be warned in the day.

And to filter out blue light from screen light, they are designed to prevent the full range of wavelength that suppress military ants secretion at night. And that can alter your sleep. So by wearing roca red lens glasses, they help you calm down and they improve your transition to sleep.

Most nights I stay up until about ten P M, or even the night, and I wake up between five and seven A M, depending on when I went to sleep. Now, I put my roca redlands classes on as soon as he gets dark outside. And i've noticed a much easier transition to sleep, which makes sense based on everything we know about how filtering out short, way, length of light can allow your brain to function correctly.

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After all, if you'd like to try a roca, go to roka dot com, that's R O K A dot com and enter the code huberman to save twenty percent off your first daughter again, that's R O K A dot com and enter the code huberman at. Okay, so naps s are gonna be good for some people, not for others. I personally like to take an opper around three or four P M.

But there's a practice that i've adopted in the last five years that i've found to be immensely beneficial that is sort of like napping, but isn't napping. It's a thing that they call yoga nedra. Yoga nature actually means yoga sleep, and it's a sort of meditation that you listen to. Meditation and yoga product scripts have been immensely helpful for me in terms of accelerating the transition to sleep. So they involve taking a few minutes, ten to thirty minutes or so, just like you would for a nap, and just listening to a script almost passively.

And IT has you do some particular patterns of breathing and some other kind of body skin, like things that can really help people learn to relax, not just in that moment, but get Better at relaxing and turning off thinking in order to fall asleep when they want to do that at night. In other words, they're always good for you because it's a training mechanism by which you self train your nervous system to go from a state of heightened alertness that you don't want to heighten the relaxation that you do want. And so it's really teaching you to hit the break.

And that brings us to and even more important point perhaps, which is we've all experienced that we can stay up if we want to, right? If we want to stay up late on new years or we want to push in all nighter, some people can do that more easily than others. But we're all capable of doing that, but it's very hard to make ourselves fall asleep.

And so there's a sort of a symmetry to the way our automated ic nervous system, which govern this alertness commons thing, the sympathetic and are sympathetic nervous system, there's A A symmetry there where we are more easily able to engage wakefulness and drive wakeful ness. We can force ourselves to stay awake, then we are able to force ourselves to fall asleep. And one of the things that I say over and over again, i'm going to continue to say over and over again, is is very hard to control the mind with the mind.

When you have trouble falling asleep, you need to look to some mechanism that involves the body. And all the things I described, meditation, hip noses, yoga, edra, all involve excel emphasized breathing, certain ways of lying down and controlling the body. We're going to get into breathing in real depth another time.

But all of those involved using the body to control the mind, rather than trying to wrestle in your mind into a certain pattern of relaxation. And when we're having trouble controlling the mind, I encourage people to look towards the body, looked toward sunlight, avoid sunlight if in bright light, if that happens to be late at night. So there's a theme that starting to emerge, which is in order to control this thing that we call the nervous system, we have to look back to some of the things we discuss, the earlier, like sensation perception at sea.

But we have to ask, what can we control? Well, i'm talking about controlling light exposure, controlling your breathing and body non sleep, or what I here after we will refer to as n sdr non sleep, deep pressed as a way to reset one's ability to be awake after you emerge from M S, D R. So that gets some more wakefulness and ability to attend some emotional stability, as well as make IT Better and easier to fall asleep when you wanna to a sleep at night.

Now non sleep deeper, as does have some research to support IT. There's a beautiful study done out of a university in denmark. I will later provide a link to that study that showed that this meditation and yoga edra type meditation allows dopamine and other neuromodulators in the area, the brain called the straw atom that's involved in motor planning and motor execution to reset itself.

In other words, this n sdr can reset our ability to engage in the world in a way that's very deliberate. okay. So what about things that we can and maybe should or should not take in order to control and acts us Better sleep and Better wakeful?

This there are a couple things that are directly in line with biology related to falling and staying asleep and directly in line with the biology wakefulness. There's whole category of things like stimulants, cocaine and foaming and prescription stimulants that are the prescription ones were designed for the treatment of narcolepsy. So things like moda or armada that are designed to create wakefulness, they are all essentially um chemical variants of things that increase up an american and doping.

Now of course i'm over the the standpoint that seems like cooking and fedex ine are just across the board bad. They have so many addictive and terrible effects in the proper setting prescribed by the proper professional things like modafinil for um might be appropriate. I know that a lot of people out there take at at all, even though they haven't been prescribed at at all in order to increase wakefulness.

That is essentially you know what's is illegal for one, but it's also it's abusing the system in the sense that you're pushing back on the identify system slightly differently than you do. Caffeine IT will make you feel more alert. There tends to be a heavy rebound and they do have an addictive potential.

There are also some other effects of those that can be quite bad, but there are some supplements in some things that are safer, certainly safer. And that in cases where you're doing all the right behaviors, you're exercising and eating correctly and you're still having trouble with sleep, IT can be beneficial for falling and staying asleep. Now I want to be very clear.

I'm not pushing supplements. I am just pointing you towards some things that have been shown in pure reviews, studies to have some benefit. The first one is magnesium. There are many forms of magnesium, but certain forms of magism can have positive effects on sleepiness in the ability to stay a sleep, mainly by way of increasing neurotransmitters ors like gaba.

There are a lot of forms of magnesium out there, but one in particular is magnetic sim three and eight T H R E O N A T E, which you have to check to see if this right is right for you. Check with your doctor. The other thing is theanine T H E A A T H E A N I ne theanine one hundred to two hundred milligrams of fenne for me, also helps me turn off my mind and fall asleep.

Interestingly, thynne is now being introduced to a lot of energy drinks in order to take away the jitters that are associated with drinking too much caffeine or with some other things that in the energy drinks. So just a consideration. Again, i'm not here to tell you what to do and not do, but just want to ARM you with information.

The the thing about theanine in magnesium is taken together. They do for some people, they can make them so sleepy and sleep so deeply that they actually trouble waking up in the morning. So you have to play with these things and title ate them if you decide to use them again.

If you decide to go this out, I would not start by taking supplements. I would start by getting your light viewing behavior correct, and then think about your nutrition, and then think about your activity, and then think about whether not you want a supplement we already talk to about military. And earlier, there's another supplement that would be quite useful, which is epic in A P I G E N I N, which is a derivative cama mile.

Fifty milligrams of APP gene also can augment or support this kind of creation of a sleeping veness to help fall asleep and stay a sleep. As a important point, APP gene is a fairly poor estrogen. And hibbard, so women who want to keep the reston levels high or at whatever levels they happen to be at, should probably avoid APP genin altogether.

And men take that into consideration as well. Midnight destruction. And also, you don't want to completely eliminate your estrogen that I can create.

All sorts of bad effects on libido and cognition is set up. So epigenetic people is gonna a pretty strong estrogen inhibitor. So keep that in mind. So thank you so much for your time and attention. And above all, thank you for your interest in science.