Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I am a draw. Huberman and I, A professor of neurobiology, opened ology at stanford school of medicine.
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Today's podcast episode is about sleep and wakefulness. We are going to discuss jet lag, shift work, babies, kids and the elderly. And we are going to discuss protocols that are backed by science. That means quality, peer reviewed papers publishing excEllent journals that can support particular tools that you can use to combat things like jet lag, offset some of the negative effects of shift work and make life easier for the new parent, as well as for the new born child, the adolescent.
Anyone that wants to sleep Better feel Better when they're awake at, said a, if you've listened to the previous three episodes of the human room in lab podcast, we've been expLoring these themes of wakefulness and sleeping. Ess had to fall asleep, how to stay asleep. And we've been discussing parameter as like light exercise temperature at seta.
If you've had a chance to listen to this episode is great, today's discussion will be even more digestible for you. If you haven't, that's OK. I will provide a little bit of background here there so that it's not necessary that you have listen to those previous episodes.
But if you get a chance to listen to them, please do IT. I think I will help you digest the information Better. Let's just take a step back for a moment and remind everybody what we're talking about.
We're talking about an endogenous meaning within us rathmore that we call the circadian rythm. The circadian rythm is a twenty four hours, thus in all sorts of functions. The most prominent one is a rythm in our feelings of wakefulness and sleepy ess. So believe or not, the experiment has been done throughout history, not often, but it's been done where people will go down into a cave and will exist in constant darkness for some period of time.
There are also cases where people have been in constant light for some period of time, but because people can close the eyes, it's actually easier to do the experiment where you're constant darkness to address the question of what is the indigenous, meaning the internal rythm that we all have. And IT turns out we all have this rythm of about twenty four hours, although it's not exactly twenty four hours, meaning every twenty four hours your body temperature goes from low to high and back down below again. And IT takes twenty four hours for that to repeat, not eighteen, not six, twenty four, plus or minus a couple hours.
You also have a rythm in sleepiness and wakefulness that corporates with that, we tend to be sleepy as our temperature is falling, getting lower, and we tend to be more awake or awake when our temperature is increasing. This is a biological fact. IT is write downs to our DNA.
We actually genes in every single one of our cells that ensure that every cell is on the twenty four hour ish rythm close to twenty four hours. We have a clock over the room of our mouth, a group of neurons called the super ka asthmatic nucleus. That clock generates a twenty four hythloday. And that clock is in trained, meaning IT is matched to the external light dark cycle, which is no surprise, twenty four hours spinning that your six, twenty four hours. So our sales, our organs, our wakefulness, our temperature, but also our metabolic, our immune system, our mood, all of that is tethered to the outside light dark cycle.
And if we are the living our life in a perfect way, where we wake up in the morning and we view sunlight as IT crosses the horizon, and then by evening we catch all sunlight, and then at night we're in complete darkness, we will be more or less perfectly match to the external or ambient light dark cycle. Very few of us do that because of these things that we call artificial lights and the other thing that we call life demands. So today we're going to talk about when we get pulled away from that rythm.
Now you may immediately be thinking, well, i've heard there are nine hours, and there are morning larks. There are sometimes called, and they are jill etic palling morphisms. That's just a fancy name for genetic variations that make some people want to wake up early and other people want to stay up late and teens want to sleep in more sure, that's all true.
That's all true. Regardless of what named we give those. However, there is no escaping the fact that human beings are a dire al species. We were designed, literally, our cells and the circuits of our body were constructed to be awake during the daytime and asleep at night.
How do I know that? Well, I wasn't consulted at the design phase, but I am certain of that because many studies have shown that when we deviate too far from a diagonal schedule and we try and become nock nal, we can pull that off. But serious health effects, both mental and physical, start to arise.
I'm not gonna spend much of today talking about all the negative effects of jet lag. I'll talk a little bit about IT or the negative effects of shift work or trying to scare you by telling you about the quite valid data around depression, amnesia, dementia, all the terrible things that happen when you're not slept well. Rather, i'd like to focus on what you can do in army with tools.
So let's talk about that perfect schedule for a moment, and then let's talk about jet lag and what jet lag really represents in how to push back on jet lag, shift your clock faster and escape some of the severe bad things that can happen with jet lag, including just feeling miserable when you're traveling for work of vacation. So what is the perfect day? What does that look like from a circadian sleep wakefulness standpoint? I am about to summarize what i've said in the three previous podcast episodes, as well as now countless instagram post.
Here's the deal. You basically wanna get as much light, ideally sunlight, but as much light into your eyes during the period of each twenty four hour cycle, when you want to be awake, when you want to be alert and you want to get as little light in your eyes. At the times of that twenty four hour cycle, when you want to be asleep or drowsy and falling a sleep, how much is enough? Well, you don't want to go so high with the light exposure that you damage arise.
Because, as many of you may say before, the eyes are actually two pieces of your brain, your central nerve system, that were excluded out of your skull. And as pieces of the central nerve system make your brain, they will not regenerate. At least right now, the technologies don't exist to regenerate those neurons in humans.
You do not want to damage them. So what is too brought well when it's painful to look at, when you have to blink or close your eyes in order to bear IT. So please don't look at very bright lights so painful that they're likely gna damage your eyes.
However, if you get up in the morning and it's still dark out and you want to be awake, you would be wise to turn on artificial lights, in particular over headlights, for reasons i've discussed previously. But there was overhead lights will optimates trigger the neurons, these ups and cells in the retina that will activate your circadian clock when the sun comes out. Even if there's cloud cover, the sun does come out every day, regardless of where you live, unless you live in a cave.
People have said to me, well, I live in an area where I can't really see the sun or the sun is there IT might be hiding behind clouds unless it's very, very dark, where you live like skin and navy and the depth of winter, which case you might want some artificial light, get some sunlight in your eyes when you can. Here's the deal with sunlight and artificial light that I have not discussed previously. A lot of photo on energy, a high amount of locks, L, U, S, comes through, even cloud cover.
A good number to shoot for as a rule of them, is to trying get exposure to at least one hundred thousand locks. Before nine I M ten I am, may be, but before nine, I am. Assuming you're waking up sometime between five and eight am, okay, so get one hundred thousand looks.
Now, you do not, I want to repeat, you do not want to stare at a two hundred thousand locks or a one hundred thousand looks light. It's very, very bright. The mechanism of circadian clock setting, and this is very important.
The mechanism of craton clock setting involves these neurons in your eye that send electrical signals to this clock up of the roof, your mouth. And that system sums, meaning IT ads. Photons is a very slow system.
So let's say that I wake up and I look at my computer screen briefly, or my phone screen. That's probably five hundred to a thousand looks. If I worked to look at that for a full minute, I would get that photon energy transferred into electrical energy of neurons, and that would be communicated to my circle clock.
However, the signal that this morning will not have registered with the circuiting clock unless I looked at that for one hundred minutes or more. So, one hundred thousand. Now the problem is, if you wake up at eight a clock, you're not gonna get enough light for artificial light before you reach what's called the circadian in deza.
You have this opportunity before nine am, maybe ten A M, capture enough photons, and you have to do IT with your eyes. I've discussed why that's important in previous episodes of the podcast. We have to do with your eyes.
There is no extra cute photo reception. This is not about vitamin d in your skin. This is about setting your circuit and clock, which is paramount for mental and physical health. So here we're talking about trying to get that at least one hundred thousand photonic, but not all at once. But you gotta get him before nine am ish, maybe ten A M.
So what do you do? You go outside, if you want to get nerdy about this quantitative, you could download a free APP like light meter and take a look around your house with light meter. And you'll notice that even bright overhead lights are only emitting about four thousand or five thousand looks.
It's going to take a long while of looking at those lights with eyes open in order to set your circuiting clock and tell your brain body. This morning, going outside, even on a cloudy day, could be seven thousand, ten thousand locks. It's really remarkable how bright IT is, meaning how much photo on energy is coming through.
So trying get one hundred thousand looks before that nine A M. Now if you can't do that because you live in an area of the world where it's just not right enough, some people have sent me pictures from northern england. It's just not bright enough in winter.
Then sure you can resort to using artificial lights in order to get enough photons. And i'm putting out this hundred thousand looks number as as a target to get each day before nine. And you can, in theory, get IT all from artificial lights.
But there are some special qualities about sunlight that make sunlight the Better stimulus for all free. If it's available outside. There is a number of different there are, excuse me, a number of different technologies kind of like this one, like light pad, that this one says it's nine hundred and thirty locks.
I'm covering this because i'm not trying to promote any specific products. Actually bought this just with my own money on amazon. Do not a sponsor.
And IT lets you tall the brightness. I think by holding this on, holding down this button, you can make a demo brighter. There's about a thousand luck that seems really bright, but a cloudy day outside will have five times more photon energy coming through.
So some people set these lights, or ring lights that they use for self fees and that kind of thing near their coffee or work station, forcing in the morning. But you really want to get sunlight. okay.
So those things are kind of a nice because they'll travel and we're going to talk about jet lag. But I can't emphasize this enough that light has to be captured and sum before you enter the circadian and dead zone, which is the middle the day. This is, again, trying to achieve kind of perfect schedule.
Then i've recommended, based on scientific literature, that you look at sunlight some time around, time when the sun is setting. And the reason for that, of course, is because he had just down the sensitivity of your eyes, because here's the diogo thing. Well, we need a lot of photon energy early in the day to wake up our system and set our circuit in clock and repair us for a good nights left.
Fourteen to sixteen hours later, IT takes a very little photo on energy to reset and shift our clock after eight P. M. And that's why you want to, as much as you safely, can avoid bright light, and even not so bright light, between the hours of ten or eleven pm and four am.
A number of people have asked me some questions about this. In the last episode, I went into red lights, how I discussed blue blockers, all that kind of stuff. I'm not onna repeat all that. But here is the thing.
If you see afternoon light, you are going to adjust down the sensitives of your eyes so that you have a little bit more wiggle room, a little bit more lee way to view lights from screens and overhead lights, even late at night without disrupting circon clock. But IT is a kind of a double lead sod where you need a lot of light early in the day and you need to avoid bright lights later in the day. I've mentioned studies on here.
A number of you have asked about getting the references. We are in the process of trying to get a weapon going with full links. There are some copyright issues that we have to deal with, but wherever possible, or train referencing studies and when people ask out, generally put them in the response to their comments on youtube. In syria, there have been two studies done from university colorado o, both published in current biology.
You can even find these online by just, you know, google the words current biology, camping and reset circling clocks that have shown that two days of waking up with the sun and avoid idling light at night, they actually took graduate students camping the cool experiment, to be a part of reset the malta in in courtezan rhythms for these people that had otherwise drifted quite far from their natural rhymes. There are other things that you can do to shift your clock and to reinforce your clock, like exercising more, less the same time, eating more, less the same time. I said, that's not what today's episodes about, so I just describe perfect schedule, get at least one hundred thousand looks of light exposure to the eyes, not all that wants, but summing across the morning, again, you know when it's too much, because it's painful to look at.
So that's obviously something to avoid. But then once the medal, the day let's you're waking up at ten or eleven, you go outside the sun's overhead. Forget IT, you're not going to shift your clock. You're just not IT doesn't work that way in the evening, you see the evening light and you want to get that light to adjust down your retinal sensitivity to afford you a bit of a buffer so that late at night, if you happen to look at screens or go to the bathroom in the middle, it's not going to shift your clock, because IT takes probably only about a thousand to fifteen hundred lucks of light energy to shift your clock in the midnight. So let's talk about shifting clocks because jet lag person, this ability to shift the clock with light temperature, exercise and food is vitally important for getting onto the new local schedule.
And there's so much out there about jet lack today, i'm going to die IT down to one very specific parameter that all of you can figure out without any technology or devices and can apply for when you travel for work or pleasure or any time your jet lag. And I want to absolutely emphasize that you don't have to travel to get jet lag. Many of you are jet lag.
Your jet lag because you're looking your phone in middle the night get lag as you're waking up at different times a day. Your jet lab, because your exercise is on a chaotic regime some days at this time, some days at that time. And if that works for you, great.
I want to be really clear that a number of people always say, well, I know soon, so that only needed four hours of sleep and uh, or they're just fine. They travel to europe and just fine. There's a lot of individual variability.
We're going to talk about the origins of some of that variability. I mean, I know people that can eat anything and somehow seem to maintain great lipid profiles and um you know um body weight and and fitness sbility. And I know some people that they eat one cracker and they sort dissolve into a puddle of a kind of tears.
right? Because they think that that's gonna throw them off and and maybe he does. I don't know. You know, there's a tremendous amount of variability out there.
So this is really about optimal and what's possible, and you have to ask, I can just save from personal experience, I suffered terribly from jet lag, travelling in certain directions, but not others. Some people do not trouble with jet. Like many people will travel to a new location.
They feel great for the first day and night, and then they crash and they have trouble sleeping where they travel back and they have a terrible time getting back onto a Normal schedule. And some of this varies with age and some of the varies with genetics. And there is no simple pill or anything that you can take to just get rid of jet lag.
IT doesn't work that way. If IT worked that way, I would tell you. But there are some simple things that you can do when to army with the knowledge of what jet lag is and how IT works.
And contrary to what many people out there say and believe, I know that understanding mechanism affords you more flexibility. Why understand mechanism is just posed to me, just writing up A P, D, F, and giving a list of things to do well. What happens when you can't do those things in exactly the way they are written down?
When you understand mechanism, you understand how to control the machine, that is, your biological system, your nervous system. So a little bit of understanding about mechanism goes a really long way. So that's where we're headed.
Let's talk about what jet lag is. okay? Well, I promised that I wouldn't get to dark with all the terrible things that can happen with jet lag, but i'm about to get dark.
There are quality p reviews papers showing that jet lag will shorter in your life. IT will kill you earlier. I guess IT means you'll die earlier. IT doesn't actually kill you necessarily, although there are many cases where tourists end up stepping in front of bosses, especially countries where the cars and bosses drive on the opposite side of the street that they are used to who are jet lag and lose that a life that way.
Jet lag is a serious thing SHE wait A A family story about this when I was growing up and a family member travel overseas for work and take a sleeping pill. I won't name the sleeping pill though. The end of going to talk about sleeping pills and had a case of totally amnesia for a week uh, that's not entirely uncommon if you've ever been really jet lag and fall in the sleep doesn't even have to be the middle.
The day woke him up. You might not know where you are and that's because time and space are really linked in the brain wasn't designed to be transported four, five, six hours into a new time zone IT just wasn't our brain in the biological mechanisms that govern circadian and timing were designed to be shifted by a couple hours, not necessarily six or nine or twelve hours. Really mess yourself up.
I've had that experience. I usually experience IT that fluctuations in mood. I flew twelve hours out of face.
Toby doby wants to give a talk. And why you are by doby. And IT was a mess. I actually was getting vert ago.
I wasn't fluctuating, but I was really out of IT, and my mood was just all over the place. Very bizarre. Jet lag, even if you don't experience IT as mood shifts or amnesia IT can short in your life.
Now here's what's interesting. Traveling westword on the globe is always easier than travelling eastward. Okay, it's interesting because the effects of jet lag on on have shown that travelling east takes more years off your life than traveling west. Now of course, travelling thirty minutes into a new time zone or three hours, just one time zone over or two times zone over, rather is far less detrimental to your biology and psychology than a eight hour shift or nine hour shift. Now here's what's interesting.
When we think about the effects of jet lag on longevity, or this idea that I can shorten our lives, we have to ask ourselves, why? Why is that? And IT turns out there's a pretty simple explanation for this.
We've talked before about the automatic nervous system, this set of neurons in our spinal cordian body and brain that regulate our wakefulness in our sleeping ess. Turns out that human beings, and probably most species, are Better able to activate and stay alert. Then they are to shut down their nervous system and go to sleep on demand.
So if you really have to push and you really have to stay awake, you can do IT. You can stay up later. But falling a sleep earlier is harder. And that's why traveling east has a number of different features associated with IT that because you're traveling easy, you're trying to go to bed earlier. Know as a california, if I go to new york city, i've got to get to bed three hours earlier, wake up three hours earlier, much harder than coming back to california and just staying up a few more hours.
And this probably has roots in evolutionary adaptation, where under conditions where we need to suddenly gather up and go, or forge for food, or fight, or do any number of different things that we can push ourselves through the release of a journey and epinephrine stay awake, where as being able to slow down and and deliberately fall asleep is actually much harder to do. So there's an a symmetry tour auto omy, our system that plays out in the a simec of jet lag. So if you want to read up on this because people have asked me about papers, you can look, there's a paper published by Davidson and colleagues two thousand six in curios that talks about the differences in lifespan for frequent eastward versus westword versus no travel and longevity in eeta, a number of different biological markers of launch.
So going east is harder because going to sleep earlier is harder if you're trying to do that on demand. Many people to have turned to melatonin is a way to try to duce sleeping ess. I'm going to talk about melatonin at the end.
Have mentioned on previous podcast a number of you have asked for the evidence that melatonin is potentially detrimental to some hormonal systems. Melton is a hormone on, and i'll discuss that at the end. In particular, the role of milestones in suppressing a hormone pathway that involves uti zing hormone test, astonia men and as rogen in females, as well as a really interesting peptide called kiss petain as a cool name.
All right, let's think about travel and what happens. Let's say you're not going eastward or westword, but you're going in north ourself. So if you go from, for instance, in washington, D C to santiago chili or you go from televise israel to cape town, south africa, you're just going north and south, right? And you either direction, you're not really moving into a different time zone.
You're not shifting, so you will experience travel fatigue IT turns out the jet lag has two elements, travel fatigue and timezone jet lag time zone jet lag is simply the inability of local sunlight and local darkness to match your internal rythm this dodger's rythm that you have. So before we get too complicated, and two down in the weeds about this, I want to just throughout a couple important things. First of all, I this earlier, but some people suffer from jet lag a lot.
Other people, not so much. Most people experience worse jet lag as they get older. There are reasons for that because early in life patterns of milestones release are very stable in flat and very high actually in children.
It's one of the reasons why they don't undergo puberty. Then they become sick during puberty, meaning IT comes on once every twenty four hours and turns off once every twenty four hours. Its cycles cynic.
And then as we get older, the cycles get more disrupted and we become more vulnerable to even small changes in schedule at set up meal times, right? So jet like gets worse. We age.
In addition, there are other things that happen with age that people start doing less exercise, their digestion can get worse at set up. So some of the effects of age might not be direct effects of getting older. But some of the things that are correlated with being older, like people who are willing to have a regular exercise regime, can use that exercise regime to shift their circadian clock.
And I have a good friend, uh his fathers in his eighties ah he's still you know pushing out you know twenty five thirty pushups uh each morning he's on the pelton's whatever IT is doing a lot cycling. So some eighty years old are doing that. Many or not many thirty year olds are not.
But if you have a regular exercise program that's going to make IT easy ier to shift your circuit and clock for the sake of jet lag, and it's actually a nob, you can turn and you can let leverage for shifting your clock before go any further. I want to make changing your internal rhythm really easy, or at least as easy in a simplest one could possibly make IT, I believe when I want to talk about, is perhaps one of the most important things to know about your body and brain, which is called your temperature minimum. Most of you know your approximate wait.
Some you even know your blood pressure, some you might even know your your body mass index. Some of you might know other things about your biology that have fancy names, but everyone should know their temperature minimum. Your temperature minimum doesn't require a thermo ter to measure, although you could measure IT.
Your temperature minimum is the point in every twenty four hour cycle when your temperature is lowest. Now how do you measure that without a thermometer? Tends to fall ninety minutes to two hours before your average waking time.
So I want to repeat that your temperature minimum tends to fall ninety minutes to two hours before your average waking time. So let's say you're not traveling and your typical wakeup time is five thirty A M. Your temperature minimum is very likely three thirty A M or four A M if you want.
If any of you want to, you can measure your temperature minimum, you can get a thermo ter and you can measure your template every couple hours. For twenty four hours, you can find your temperature minimum. What you're going to find is that you have a low point, the temperature minimum, and then your temperate will start to rise.
You wake up about two hours later, then your temperature will continue to rise into the afternoon. IT will peak, maybe a little trouble. Sometimes that happens, and then it'll start declining slowly.
As you approach in night time, there are things that will disrupt that temperature pattern. Saunas called bath, intense exercise, etta meals tend to have a thermogenesis effect that increases temperature slightly, little blips. But the overall cycle, twenty four hour cycle of temperature, has this patter.
And last time I talked about the seminal work of geotek hoshi and others who have shown that temperature. Actually, is the signal by which this clock above the reviewer mouth, in trains or collectively, pushes all the cells and tissues of our body to be on the same schedule. Temperature is the effector.
And once to hear that, there should be an immediate, of course, because how else would you get all these different diver cell types to follow one pattern, write a pancreatic cell, does something very different than a, know, a span cell or A A neuron, right? They're all doing different things at different rates. So the temperature signal can go out, and then each one of those can interpret the temperature signal as one unified and consistent theme of their environment.
So temperatures vary from personal person. Some people are ninety eight point six. Some people run called IT set up. But you have a low point. You have a high point, know your temperature minimum.
How are you going to figure out this temperature minimum? The temperature minimum can be determined by taking the last three to five wake up times. So let's say you wake up 7ATM three A M IT happens。
Take those, add them together, average them by taking, adding them up and dividing by the number of days that'll give you the average. If you are one of these people that wakes up at three A M and then goes back to sleep and sleep till ten, your wake up time was ten A M. If you use an alarm clock, your wake up time is still when you get up.
okay? I know alarm clocks have been kind of demonized, but in my world, being late and missing appointments is also demonized. So are using one of clock.
Many people will wake up at exactly the same time each day. There turn to be some variation for people. Some people it's gna vary depending on life circumstances, but average that for three to seven days or so, take that wake up time.
You can then get an average or sort of typical temperature minimum. Okay, so now you know how to get your temperature minimum. Your temperature minimum is your absolute reference point for shifting your circadian clock, whether not for jet lag or shift work or some other purpose. Here's the deal.
If you expose your eyes to bright light in the four hours, maybe five or six, but in the four hours after your temperature minimum, your circadian clock will shift so that you will tend to get up earlier and go to sleep earlier in the subsequent days. okay. So what's called a phase advance?
If you'd like to read up on this further, you advance your clock. okay? However, if you view bright light in the four to six hours before your temperature minimum, you will tend to phase delay your clock.
You will tend to wake up later and go to sleep later. I'm going to repeat this because there's so much confusion out there and people take about sarchedon time and all this. Find your temperature minimum. I tend to wake up at about six A M, sometimes six thirty, sometimes seven IT depends a lot on what I was doing the night before, as i'm guessing IT does for you.
But that means that my temperature minimum is probably somewhere right around four thirty A M, which means that if I wake up at at four thirty am and I were to view bright light at four thirty five A M, i'm going to advance my clock. I'm going to want to go to bed earlier the subsequent night and wake up earlier the subsequent morning. And as I shift my wake up time, my temperature minimum shifts too, right? Because each time we shift our wake up time, our teacher minimum shifts, assuming that wake up time shifts more than, you know, thirty minutes to an hour.
Okay, if I were to view bright light in the four to six hours before four thirty A M, guess what? The next night, i'm going to want to stay up later and i'm going to wants to wake up later the subsequent morning. Your temperature minimum is a reference point, not a temperature reading. Again, if you want to measure your temperature minimum and figure out what IT is, ninety eight point whatever, and ninety six point whatever, that's fine. You can do that, but that information won't help you.
What you need to know is what time your body temperatures lowest, and understand that in the four hours or so, just after that time, viewing light will advance your clock to make you want to get up earlier, and the four hours before your temperature, minimum viewing light will make you want to stay up later. Now some people might be saying why I wake up early and I want to stay up late and i'm sleepy all day and i'm a mess or I feel fine. Look, let's talk about feeling fine.
Turns out the definition of insomnia is when you're experiencing excessive sleeping ess during the day, sleeping ess and fatigue are different. okay? So in the world of sleep medicine, fatigue is a physical exhaustion.
Sleepiness is falling asleep, like falling sleepit at your desk or falling asleep in lectures, or there seems to be something special about my lectures that makes people want to fall asleepe. So if this cursor insomnia, fantastic. However, in all seriousness, sleeping ess during the daytime, unless it's around your temperature peek and only last about ninety minutes or so, is a sign of insomnia.
It's a sign of lack of sleep. I want to be very, very clear that if you know your temperature minimum, you can shift your clock using light. You can also shift your clock by engaging in exercise in the four hours after your temporary minimum to wake up earlier on subsequent nights, or exercise before then to delay your clock.
Okay, so now you can start to see and understand the logic of the system, and will talk about why this works and the underlying biology. But understanding that temperatures is the effector, and understanding that you have this low point and the that reflects your most sleepy point, essentially right before waking up and then temperature rises, you can now start to shift that temperature according to your travel needs. Here's one way in which you might do that.
Let's say I am going to travel to europe, which is nine hours ahead, typically from california. I would want to determine my temperature minimum, which for me is about four thirty A M, maybe five A M. And I would want to start getting up at about five thirty A M.
And getting some bright light exposure presumedly from artificial sources because the light, the sunlight isn't to be out at that time, maybe exercising as well, maybe even eating a meal at that time. If that's in your practice, you would want to start doing that two or three days before travel. Because once you land in or island in europe, chances are just viewing the sunrise or sunset in europe is not going to allow me to shift my circuit and clock.
Some people say get sunlight in your eyes when you land, but that's not going to work because one of two things is likely to happen with a nine hour shift like that. Either I am going to use sunlight at a time that core responds to the circuit, an dead zone, the time in which my cira an clock can't be shifted, or i'm in the end up viewing sunlighted, a time that corresponds to the four to six hour window before my temperature minimum. So it's gona shift me in exactly the opposite direction that I want to go.
So IT can be very, very chAllenging for people to adjust a jet lag. So you need to ask in my travelling east, or am I traveling west and I trying to advance my clock or delay my clock? Remember, viewing light exercise in eating in the four to six hours before your temperature minimum will delay your clock.
Eating, viewing sunlight and exercising, you don't have to do all three, but combination of those in the four to six hours after your temperature minimum will advance your clock. And this is a powerful mechanism by which you can shift your clock anywhere from one to three hours per day, which is remarkable. That means your temperature minimum is gna shift out as much as three hours, which can make IT such that you can travel all the way to europe.
And in as long as you prepared for a day or so by doing what I described back home and then doing that when you arrive, you can potentially do accomplish the entire shift within anywhere from twenty four to thirty six hours. And this is really important. Emphasize that once you arrive in your new location, and here i'm talking about travelling eastward, california to you.
Once you arrive in your new location, you have to keep track of what your temperature minimum was back home and how it's being shifted during your trip. Now it's much easier to do than you think. One of the unfortunate consequences of the smart phone is that you can't do, uh, you know, something goofy like wearing two watches, one watch that corresponds to the time back home and another one that corresponds to the local time.
Typically, IT updates automatically based on wifi IT set up, but if you can keep track of the time back home, then you can easily shift your clock going forward. I'm hoping this that makes sense. I I really want to emphasize that you don't have to be precise down to the minute.
Some of you may be asking what what about you know you've got this temperature minimum. And if i've you like one minute before IT, then i'm going to delay my clock. And one minute after IT, i'm going to advances my clock.
IT quite work like that. Okay, but it's very important. Understand that light is the primary way which we can shift our clock.
And now you should also be able to understand things like the circadian d zone from about nine, thirty, ten A M. All the way until six hours before your temperature minimum. You can shift your clock.
Nothing that you do in that time. In terms of light viewing behavior, feeding eeta is gona shift to your clock. And so a lot of people are landing in europe, getting sunlight in their eyes and throwing their clock out a wac or not shifting their clock at all.
This brings me to the other thing that's highly recommended, and i've mentioned this before. But you want to eat on the local meal schedule, if it's in your practice, fast, fast, that's fine. But when you eat, you want to eat within the local schedule for alertness, okay?
That means if you arrive in, everyone is eating breakfast and you can't stomach the idea of breakfast in your new location because your appetite ties. And there that means the clock in your liver, you have a clock in your liver. Biological clock has not caught up to the new time zone.
You can force yourself to eat if you like, or you can skip that meal. But what you don't want to do is stay on your home meal schedule, waking up in the midnight and eating that is really going to throw things off because a lot of the clocks in the pierre, like from the deliver the peripheral body, will send information back to the brain. Then the brain is getting really conflicted signals.
So the temperature of minimum is really your anchor point for shifting your clock best. I don't know why this information really hasn't made IT into um the popular sphere quite so much. There's all sorts of stuff about taking things like melatonin uh, using by neural b it's a lot of kind of like um uh more sophisticated, complicated, potentially problematic ways of trying to shift the clock.
Let's talk about melatonin. But first I just want to pause and shift gears a little bit because I talked about travelling eastward, but we haven't talked about traveling west toward. So I wanted to that.
Now let's say you're traveling from new york to california or from europe to california. The chAllenge there tends to be, how can you stay up late enough? Now some people are able to do this because, as I mentioned earlier, the automobile era system is asiedu ally wired, such that easier to stay up late later than we would naturally want to.
Then IT is to go to sleep earlier. So let's you land. And it's four P.
M. And you're just dying. Your in california, you came from eype. It's four P M in. You really, really want to go to sleep. That's where the use of things like caffeine, exercise and sunlight can shift you, right?
If it's after your temperature peek, then viewing sunlight around six pm or A P M, or artificial light, if there's in sunlight, will help shift you later, right? This can be, it's going to delay your clock and you're going to be able to stay up later. The worst thing you can do is taking APP that was intended to last twenty minutes or an hour.
I do this routinely and then wake up four hours later. Or you wake up at in its midnight and you can't fall back asleep. You really want to avoid doing that. So provided is not excessive amounts.
Stimulants like caffeine in coffee or tea can really help you push past that afternoon barrier and get you to sleep more like on the local schedule and eating on the local schedule as well. A number of people have asked about the use of military to induce sleepiness. Ss, are, well, let's think about what militaria is.
Melton's is this hormone that's released from the pony eel gland, which is as gland. Couple notes about the pioneer because i've been getting a lot of questions about this. I'm pregnant to draw some some fire for this but um I be happy to have a um fought'st sidey debate um with some pure viewed papers in front of us.
The piano does make this hysan genc molecule they called D M T. But in such a ministry amount that IT is not responsible for the hu SE nations you see and sleep and dreaming sorry folks, it's also not responsible for the fluctuation you might see through rather approaches to d mt. It's just not that's not where the d mt comes from.
It's infanta mally small amount. There are a lot of kind of wacked y claims out there about classification of the piano and florida and this kind of thing. Look, the panel el sits in an area of the brain near the fourth ventral where the skull is not to ably far away, although there's some overreliant neural tissue.
And with age, there's some aggregation of some of the mine gies and other things around there that stick to the skull. Young brains don't look like old brains, but there's no clarification of the piano, all right? So you can forget about coalification, the pioneers.
The problem, I don't know a where that whole thing got started, but that's not issue. Your piny will turn out melatonin life. Melatonin induces sleeping ess. Melanthon in during development is also responsible for timing. The secretion of certain hormones that are vitally important for puberty.
Does melatonin control the onset of puberty? Not directly, but indirectly? Militant an inhibit something called a canada rope and releasing hormone, which is a hormones that's released from your hypothesis also roughly above the roof, your mouth in your brain, the athrob in releasing hormones really interesting because IT stimulus later the release of another hormone called uti zing hormones which in females causes uh extradition to be released within the covers to involved in reproductive cycles and the males stimulates testosterone from the critz cells of of the test miltonic is inhibitory to generate gna rover releasing hormones and therefore is in hibbing to L H lutanist hormones and therefore is in hibachi to test test on in is just no two ways about IT.
There is an immense amount of data on the fact that high levels of military in in seasonally breeding and breeding animals takes the overnight from nicene bust ovis that are capable of depine eggs and this kind of thing, and literally shrinking them and making these animals in further. These are very high levels of melatonin in seasonal breeds. In winter, melatonin in males of seasonal breathers takes the testes and shrinks them.
Long ago, when I was at U. C. Berkeley as a master student, was working on neuron technology. And we're working on as hamper species of seasonal breeds. And basically when days are long, which inhibits melatonin.
These little cyberia hamsters, as they called, have tested about the size of typical table grapes, although that's a weird way to put IT when days get shorter and the melton's signal gets longer because light inhibits miltons, days get shorter. Milton gets longer. Those same hamsters would have tests that would evolution to the size of about of grain of rice.
Now, this does not happen in humans in short days, but none the less, the military and signal really does have a ton of effects on the hormone on system. Now, does that mean that if you have been taking military and you really screwed up your home's? Not necessarily.
Does that mean if a kid has been taking military, and that's really screw up their puberty? Not necessarily. Here's why militant onan Operates on a concentration level. So in a child that's very, very small, that has high levels of milestones, IT actually can inhibit jh lh testosterone gen depending on IT the sex of the child.
But as that child grows through other mechanisms like growth on on, released eeta, that same amount of melatonin released from the panel el is now diluted over a much larger body. So the concentration actually goes way. Wait down.
Okay, but here's the problem of supplementing milestones. As I mentioned the previous episode, concentrations of milestones in many commercial supplements have been shown to be anywhere from eighty five percent to four hundred percent of what's listed on the bottle. So when you take melatonin or a child takes malatino, often times they are taking super photos.
Ological levels of melatonin, which, at least by my read and the literature says that he could have dramatic effects on timing and course of things like puberty so it's not so much that the journals have come out saying or taking uh that military and inhibits puberty is that no single study has been done with the super physiological levels of militant onan that are present in a lot of these supplements in developing children. So miltonic is used widely for inducing sleepiness. When you want to fall asleep in the new location that you've arrived, right? You can fall asleep.
You take male and helps you fall asleep. IT does not help you stay asleep. In addition to that, militants in has been kind of touted as the best way to shift your circuit and clock. I'm happy to go on record saying, look, if you need melotte an and you can work with a doctor, somebody who really understand circuit an and sleep biology, go for IT if that's your thing.
But I as always on this podcast and elsewhere, I I have a bias towards behavioral things that you can tilde in control, like exposure to light exercise temperature at seta that have much bigger margins for safety and certainly don't have these other indre effects that we've been thinking about and talking about. So if you want to meet in the afternoon in order, fall asleep or in the evening, be my guess that up to you again, you're responsible for your health, not me. But for many people, melatonin is not going to be the best solution.
The best solution is going to be to use light and temperature and exercise on either side of the temperature minimum to shift your clock, but before your trip and when you land in your new location and your clock starts to shift, okay, so now you know my opinions about melatonin. Feel free to filter them through your own opinions and experiences with military an, and now you also understand what your temperature minimum is and how IT represents an important landmark, either side of which you can use light, temperature and exercise to shift your clock. Just remind you a little bit about temperature.
If you want to shift your clock, typically you would do that by, you would take a hot shower, and then that will have a cooling effect after the hot shower. And if you were to get into a cold shower or a nice bath, you have access to one afterwards, there's going to be a thermogenesis fect of your body increasing temperature. And if you just think about your natural rythm back home, when everything stable, we have a an idea, a low point in is your temperature minimum, and then you have a peak.
And you think about when you're doing this hot record shower in that rythm. Now you should be able to understand how you're shifting rhythm. That temperature rythm is the one that's going to move.
Give you an example, if I were to wake up in the morning and let's say I wake up six, six, and my temperature, I know is rising, i've past my temperature minimum. If I were to get into a hot shower, that would then lower my body temp ure when I got out. That is not Normally what's happening first thing in the morning, and therefore, my clock would very likely get phase delayed, right?
It's gonna lay the increase in temperature as if I got to a cold shower, something I don't personally like to do, but i've done from time to time for a nice bath that's going to then have a rebound increase in body temperature and is going to face advance my clock that peek in the afternoon is going to come about an hour earlier. I'm going to want to go to Better earlier later that night, so you can search to play these games with timing and hot and cold, with meals, whether are you eat or you don't eat, and with light exposure, whether not you view light or you don't view light. So now you can start to see why understanding the core mechanics of a system can really give you the most flexibility.
Because I could spend the next twenty five years of my life answering every question about every nuance pattern of travel. Well, we're going to sydney and then we're going there. What should I do? But that's on you.
You need to figure out your temperature minimum and your temperature peak, if you like, and then use these parameters to IT gives you flexibility. And that really underscores the most important thing is that when you understand mechanism, it's not about being neurotically ally attached to a specific protocol. It's open.
IT gives you power to not be neudorf attached to a specific protocol. IT can give you great confidence and flexibility being able to shift your body rythm however you want. And when things get out, wack and tuck them right back in the place.
One thing that's a common is that people need to do a quick trip. It's not always that you're gna go to, you know, on vacation for two weeks or you work some place sells for weeks on end. If your trip is forty eight hours or less, stay on your home schedule.
This can be tough and you may require scheduling meetings according to your home schedule, but if you can somehow manage that, the best thing to do would be to stay on your home schedule. Your clock is not going to shift more than a couple hours, even if you do everything correctly in one day. Okay, so if I were to travel, say, to europe, i've actually done this.
I did a twenty four hour trip to bozo switzerland, gave a talk and came back. People thought I was crazy. But a little bit of travel fatigue.
Because, remember, there's fatigue from the actual travel experience, the novelty of IT, the are never great on the planes. This was even true before. There were mask requirements and things like that.
There's the trouble fatigue. But you don't throw your clock off. If you stay forty eight hours, then you start to shift a little bit seventy two.
That's when you start turning into trouble. The transit time is also important. But I would say if it's three days or less, stand your home schedule as much as you can.
And because sunlight isn't under your control, must something about you? I don't know. That's when traveling with some sort of bright light like the light pad that I have down there that showed earlier.
Um for those who are living just on audio, it's just IT looks like an eight and half by eleven um pad. It's actually not designed for wake up. It's actually design and it's a drawing pad and you can um admit about a thousand locks of of light.
And so if you want to travel with something like that, you can use that in your hotel room to wake up when you like. Um some people will use uh night shades, you know not the night trades that you eat or that some people say you're not positive, you don't know anything about that. But the the the eye covers that to keep light out.
Those can be very useful on planes and in hotels and so on. So you can use light and dark and you can travel with your light and dark devices um so that you can stay on your home schedule and get most of your light when IT would be you're Normal wake up time back home. And what's kind nice is if you know when that your cacti and deza is back home, which is generally for most people around ten am to about three P M.
So basically the rising phase of your temperature, then you can also feel free to be outside without having more sunglasses, or you don't want to worry about light exposure. But if you know that window before your temperature, minimum that four to six our window, that's the time when if you're viewing a lot of light in your new location, you are going to shift your clock pretty considerably. And then you can come back home and have a terrible time.
At the end of graduate school, I went to australia, remarkable country, incredible people, incredible wildlife and amazing time. I came back, and I was the first time in my life where I couldn't sleep on a regular schedule, sleeping in like our long increment throughout the day. I was a nightmare, and IT took me weeks to get back on target.
And the way I was able to do that was exercising consistently at the same time every twenty four hours, turning my home to essentially a cave at night, even covering up the windows, and then getting as much bright light in my eyes as I possibly could during the day. No sunglasses at sea. So I can take some real work if you, if your clocks gets thrown out a wac.
There's a phenom enon called I C U. Psychosis, where people that are in the intensive care unit in hospitals actually lose their mind. They become psychotic fluctuations at sara, and it's because of alter scaean cycles.
We know this. Because they're exposed to these lights and these sounds, people coming in and checking on them, they leave the hospital. Or in some cases, they're been experiments where people replacing a window where they get some natural light and the psychotics symptoms disappear, presenting the warrant psychotics symptoms beforehand before they entered the hospital.
So it's pretty dramatic what I can do to the psych into the body. So let's talk a little bit about a different form of jet lag that requires no planes, no trains, no automobile. And that shift work, shift work is becoming increasingly common.
Many of us are shift working even though we don't have to. We're doing work in the mill the night we are um you know working in our computers at odd hours sleep during the day. A lot of people who are under shelter in place type stuff are doing more of this.
Kids with the drifting school schedules. Here's a deal with shift work. If there's one rule of them for shift work, it's that if at all possible, you want to stay on the same schedule for at least fourteen days, including weekends.
Now that should immediately queue the non shift workers to the importance of not getting too far off track on the weekend, even if you're not a shift worker. So sleeping in on sunday is not a good idea. The most important thing about shift work is to stay consistent with your schedule. Now I had a conversation on an instagram life with simmer haiti, who, a neuroscientist at the national institute, mental healthy, actually, ahead of the chrome ology unit there.
And he was really emphasizing this point because shift work, where people are doing this so called swing shift, where they are working four days on one shift and four days on another, is extremely detrimental to a number of health, prevents IT gets the court is all release from the adjustable really at a wax. And there these quarters all Spikes at various hours of the day that messes up learning IT really disrupts the dopamine in system. And well being IT is a serious, serious problem.
So if you can negotiate with your employer to stay on the same shift for two weeks at a time, that's going to be immensely beneficial, will help you all set a lot of the negative effects of shift work. Now I don't presume that all of you are going to be able to do that. Some of you just don't have that level of control.
And of course, I want to acknowledge that shift workers are essential, right? Of course, first responders, firefighters, police officers, parameter set a, but also pilots, nurses, people are working on on the hospital words, people picking up trash, these these nights shifts are critical to our functioning as a society, as i'm sure all of you can appreciate if you are going to work a shift where, let's say, you start at four P, M, and you end at two P A, two A M. Excuse me.
Then there's some important questions. veterum. Ze, for instance, should you see light during your shift? Well, this is a matter personal choice. But ideally you want to view as much light as possible, and is is safely possible when you need to be alert. So that would mean from four pm to two A M, and then you would want to sleep.
So using light as a correct of alertness and using darkness as a correct of sleeping ess, what this means is see as much light as you safely can during the phase of your day when you want to be awake. So it's the same thing I said way back the beginning of the of this podcast episode. And SHE is little light as safely possible and allows you to function during the time when you want to be asleep.
So if you're finishing out that two A M shift, that's when you would want to avoid bright light exposure, you'd want to go home. You'd really want to avoid watching TV if possible, if you need that in order to fall asleep. That would be a case where something like dimming the screen plus blue blockers, if that in your practice um or you wanted do that would be helpful.
Then going to sleep and then you'll probably wake up late in the afternoon or or early afternoon, something you might say, wait huberman, I thought you don't like blue lockers. I never said I don't like blue blockers. I don't like people wearing blue blockers at the time a day when they want to be alert.
And I don't like people asserting that blue blockers can prevent circadian shifts simply because people are wearing them. The brightness of light is what's important. It's not about the blue.
So if you wanted wear them, wear them or just give the lights or turn the lights off. So let's say you go to sleep at, you get home after this four P M to two A M shift, you maybe eat something. You go to sleep and you wake up and it's noon or one P M.
Should you get light in your eyes. Well, your first assumption based on one I said previously might be that you're in the circadian in that zone that you can't because it's new or one P M, but you're not in the circuitry and that zone because you're somebody who goes to sleep early in the morning at two. I am.
So it's not like a circadian dead zone is a strict time of day. It's an internal biological clock. So what do you need to know? You guess that you need to know your temperature minimum.
You need to know whether or not your temperature is increasing or decreasing. And now we can make this whole thing even simpler. And just say, if your temperature is decreasing of the light, if your temperature is increasing, get light.
It's that simple, okay? If your temperature is decreasing, avoid light. If your temperature is increasing, get light. The shift worker who works from four P, M until two A M has a temperate rythm that a very different than mine, where I wake up around six and five and I go to sleep around eleven P M.
Okay, we both have a twenty four hour ish circadian cycle, except mine is more a line to the rise and setting up the sun. And there's is not right. So you have to know your internal temperature altham and know you don't have to walk around with a thermometer wherever taking your temperature.
Although be great if some of the devices that are out there, you know people are counting their steps. I I think IT would be great if people had a car body temperature measurement. I'm not involved in any this device development, but think it's a real call to arms pointed ded to have a risk.
And that would measure temperature and will tell you your temperature minimum when you travel or or not. I don't know. Maybe, maybe some of these devices already do that, but if they don't, they should.
It's absolutely absurd me why we ouldn't have the simple, measured, very easy to get that kind of information. You even need the exact temperature read. All you need to know is the high and low point.
So let's say you a shift worker who really is knocked turn, al, you're flipped. Well, you want to stay on that alternate schedule. Now that can be very hard on families and social life of all kinds.
But the person who is working safe from, you know, A P M, like sun down to sunrise, this raises a question, should they be looking at the sunrise and should they be watching the sunset, waking up with the sunset, going asleep with the sunrise? You think, well, is that like gna throw them off? Probably not. It's just actually going to invert what sunrise and sunset are when they're waking up in the morning.
If they look at the you know, they get some sunlight in their eyes, they look at the sun, get some bright light from devices or overhead lights in their apartment or home, well, that's going to tend to wake them up if it's in the evening, right? So I don't know if I say that clearly, but in the evening, the sun is setting and they're looking at that setting sun, that is the morning sun for that person. And you will wake them up for the night shift.
So temperature rising, then toward morning, what's happening? Okay, where they're closing out their work shift, you're going home. The sun is rising. Do you look at the rising sun? Well, based on what you now know, your eyes are very sensitive to resetting of circling clocks.
What will you do at that time? If this were a classroom, I either cold call on somebody or I wait for the person in the audience inevitably exists. So temperature is for that person.
They've been up for a while. Temperature is falling. Not rising from you will be rising.
But because i'm not Diana, I am a wait in the day, but that person, and temperature is falling. And so they view light while temperature is falling. What's IT going to do? It's going to face delay them.
It's going to make IT harder for them to get to sleep the following night. So you would say that person should watch the setting sun to help them wake up because they're going to work the night shift. But you probably have sn classes on or avoid viewing bright light before they go to sleep.
So the same thing, there's just on an inverted ted as a typical person who who Diana, but they're on an inverted schedule. And so i'm really trying hard here to make this all really clear. There kind of two patterns of requests in the world i'm noticing, as i've kind of ventured into the this landscape of social media in podcast, there are people want to know every detail, want to quantify everything because they want to get exactly right.
These are like the graduate students and sues that don't want to make a mistake and to quote my graduate advisor provided the mistakes are not dangerous, certainly not lethal. You you can't want to make a few little mistakes so that you can adjust, right? You don't want to endanger yourself, but it's actually you're not going to get things perfect.
That's called learning. Learning is when you realize I have viewed some this time, and then I stayed up and I really messed me up. I'll never do that again. The other category of people seem to want the one size fits all, kind of like give me this pill or give me this protocol. And those things generally work, but they don't afford people flexibility.
And if there's anything like that, it's this temperature minimum thing that i've been just hammering on again and again and again today because it's something that you own and that you can really use as a key landmark for shifting your clock. I suppose there's a third category, which is people accept that biological systems are actually much more forgiving than the way they're sometimes described. And how many use this as an opportunity?
Dita realized a little bit. You know, there's so much made of sleep debt, but there isn't an I R S equivalent for sleep. They're gonna come around and try and collect all the sleep that you didn't get.
No one really knows. What the consequences are going to be for you and for me and for the next person for the sleep you didn't get you can't really recover the sleep missed out on. But you also don't want to get in radically attached to a schedule because there's a sin kle sleeping xiety, and then people have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep.
So I want to spend a moment on that and go back to a theme that i've said many times before, because these tools work what I call n sdr non sleeped ep press. This would be hip nosis. I give you the link, but i'll say you again, revery health dot com for clinically tested research, tested free hippos is for anxiety, but also for sleep.
Those are very beneficial people. N S D R protocols, non sleep deep protocols, for things like yoga nedra. I provide some links to those in the caption for episode two.
These things really work. Last night, I woke up through. I went to bed about ten thirty.
I woke up at three in the morning. I knew I wasn't feeling arrested. I did A N. Sdr protocol, I fell back asleep. I woke up six. Okay, you need to teach your brain in your nerve system, had to turn off your thoughts and go to sleep. And ideally, you do that without medication, unless there's a real need.
You do that through these behavioral protocols that they work because they are involved using the body to shift the mind, not trying to just turn off your thoughts in the midnight. Now there are periods of life where things are stressful and people are concerned, and you will have some struggle getting and staying a sleep. And there's that really has to do more with anxiety, which N S D R protocols also can help with.
As I always say, do them in the middle night if you wake up and you want to go back to sleep during the mill, the day a teacher nerve system, and come down to do them first thing in the morning if you didn't feel you got enough sleep. In other words, do them whenever you have an opportunity to do them, because they really can help you learn how to torn on the party MPA. There's slash, calming, ARM of europe, ic nervous system.
There's no other way that i'm aware of to teach your system to slow down and turn off your thoughts and go back to sleep. But these are powerful protocols and is a lot of research now to support the fact that they can really help. Meditation would be another example.
Meditation of certain kind of meditation involve focus and alertness. Those are slightly different than meditations that involve lack of focus and attention to, say, internal states. When I pause there, and then I want to talk about kids and the elderly, in other words, how do we control sleep and circling, rythm and wakefulness in babies, adolescence, teens and age, folks are right.
Before we talk about sleep and kids, I want to tell a little story, not a joke. many. We will be relieved that i'm going trying to tell another joke.
This episode, which is the relationship between light skin and paleo color, dopamine and reproduction, made so many seasonally breathing animals cyberia hamp stairs, which are mention earlier, rabbits, fox, other animals change the colour of their coat in the winter. They tend to be a lighter color, sometimes, uh, pure White, sometimes with flex of black or Brown. And in the summer, the palest changes to a color of, you know, Brown or red, some other vastly different color.
That shift is controlled by light and by melatonin. This has an interesting corporate in humans. So humans obviously have different skin tones, just genetically, because the amount of melanin in one skin, depending on genetic background.
But of course, sunlight will increase the amount of melon in the skin regardless, right? This is sometimes on burn netta, bronzing, whatever the whole system is wired. So that shifts in skin colour and shifts in these cells within the eye and milestones are actually very closely linked.
So here's the story many years ago, meaning about ten years ago, fifteen years ago. Let's see this a twenty twenty years ago, forgive me, I got igi prevents you who was running his own lab at uniformed armed services. This is a standard biological laboratory, discovered that there was an option in the eye, in the cells of the eye, that connect to the rest of the brain, called melon option.
Mellon open, as you many, if you know, know, is the option. It's like a pigment IT absorbs light IT is the option that converts light into electrical signals. Set the circuiting clock igi discovered mellon option because I was similar in form to what was in frog malania force.
IT was actually in the skin of frogs that allow those frogs to go from pale White when I was dark for most of the of the twenty four hour cycle to pigmented Green or Brown for a frog. So there's this relationship between the celin, our ee and the pigment cells of our skin. And we also know that in long days there's more breeding howat work.
Well, that's actually from dopamine trigger ing increases in testosterone mainly and males and estrogen mainly and females. Other, of course, is tester and echogen in both sexes. So we have this kind of pathway where it's light increases in melanin dupine and reproduction on the one hand, and lack of light melanthon in decreases in the darkness of skin, less melanin in the skin, or in the case of an animal with fur, White fur and no reproduction on the other hand.
And humans don't actually shift their breeding patterns, tremendous ly from long days and short days. Other awesome data that there are some shifts. We also don't radically change our skin color depending on how much sun light exposure we have. But the simple way to put this is when days are long, there's a lot more dopamine and we feel really good, and there's a lot more breeding and breeding like behavior. When days are short, there's a lot less dopamine and a lot less breeding behavior because these pathways are very highly conserved.
Now what's interesting is that as we've moved into a modern society where much of our waking days, we are looking at screens, which is fine because we're getting a lot of light that way, not as much as sunlight, but also at night, we're getting a lot of light from screens. What's happened is all these pathways, melanin in the skin, turn over of skin cells, dopamine, all of this stuff has become completely disrupted. Now that's not to say that we should go back to a time in which we didn't use artificial lights.
But I think the important thing to realize is that feeling good with getting a lot of light, the relationship to dopamine and melanin in the skin and the good feelings of of getting light also on our skin, provided you're not getting burned or you're not getting excessive U V exposure. Those are not just coincidences, those are hardwired biological mechanisms that exist in everybody, regardless of of how lighter, darker skin is to begin with. There's another point which is important, which is that the dopamine e system, which is this feel good molecule, is very closely related to the test astro's and as gen and reproductive cycles remember, Melody onan inhibits canada trope in releasing hormone luti zing hormones.
And the production of these these hormones and melatonin is the effector IT is the hormones of darkness. So I just threw a lot of biology yet. You and i'm not saying you're like a siberia hamster, least not in ways that i'm aware of. I'm not saying that your pellets color is going to change.
Actually, the reason people go grey is because when you're really stress did you know this when you're really stressed, there is an increase in the nerve fibers that released a general to the hair follow, and that activates peroxide groups in the hair follow that caused the hair to actually go grade White. So actually, stress does make your hair grey. White aging does IT too.
That was a brief aside, but for those of you, they are interested in the relationship between light and skin tone and all that kind of stuff. I thought you might find an interesting that these cells in you, I are a lot like the skin cells in frogs, are an animals that a shift their entire color and sometimes metamorphose. There are some species that literally change shape, and the reproductive organs.
In fact, if that wasn't weird enough, when I was in graduate school at berkely, there was another graduate student studying a species of her mathematic mall. Why does little things that dig her avid more that would change from having over as to test this and back again? Depending on day life super cool, super different um and wild biological mechanism, if you wondering how those animals reproduce, they actually adjust the numbers of males and females depending on the density of miles and females of the too many males, the some of the males turn their testes into over reason.
After too many females they turn their over reason to testes. They actually are true, her mathematic animals as opposed to suit her afford tic animals. Okay, let's get back on track.
Let's talk about the animal that most of you care about, which is the human animal, new parents and babies, right? As I mentioned earlier, melatonin is not cynic. It's not cycling in babies.
It's more physical. It's being released at a kind of a constant level. And babies tend to be smaller than adults they are.
And so those concentrations of military or very high as baby grows, those concentrations per unit volume are going to go down. Babies are not born with a typical sleep wake cycle. And now all the parents saying, tell me something I didn't know.
They also have, and I really want emphasized this, they also have much more sensitive optics of the eye. So a number people asked me, you know, should I be exposing my baby to sunlight? You don't want to to avoid sunlight, but their eyes are very sensitive.
The optics of their eyes aren't quite developed so much so that you know, when you look at a newborn baby and they are they look a little glassy and they're of looking through you or even a Young child, lot of people think that they're seeing you the way that you're seeing them. Hate to break IT to you, but if you um ever can ah just google visual image of a like a one month old, the optics of their eyes are so poor that you're a cloudy image they're not seeing you're fine detail. As the optics get Better, then they will see you with more and more clarity.
But a lot of that is clearing at the lands in some of the other features of of the newborn, I they don't see very well, but they also don't have such great ways of adJusting to bright light. And so babies have a natural version to bright light, so you really want to avoid trying to use sunlighted really bright light in the same way that you would find adult on a Young baby or child. As children get older, however, melatonin does start to become slightly more sick, slightly more cycled, and their body temperature rythm also start to fall into a more regular, not quite twenty four hour rythm.
There's more these all trade rhythm. So in episode, I think he was one or two of the podcast, maybe both. We talk about these ninety minute so called all trade in rythm, where every ninety minutes babies are going through a cycle of body temperature and some other hormonal features.
I mean, that so much is changing in their system. So what to do if a child is in sleeping? You can use phases of darkness and phases of light, but they're going to have to be shortened in order to try and encourage sleep. When you want the child to sleep, it's not that they're just not going to fall into an adult light regime of a temperature minimum and temperature maximum, their temperature minimum and maximum or fluctuating much more quickly and IT varies tremendous.
Ly um in IT actually it's so there's an interesting literature of whether not they have siblings, whether not their twins, whether not there in a nursery environment, whether not they're alone of the they is not alone, but you know what I mean that they are sleeping alone in a room while you're in the other room. There are a couple of things that seem to help, which is getting the overall environment until a twenty four hours schedule. So having the room slightly colder obviously want babies to code slightly colder when you would like them to be asleep, slightly warmer for the time you would like them to be awake.
Babies tend to be bunt pretty hot anyway. And obviously you want to be very careful about avoiding all extremes of temperature, cold or or hot. So if they're going through these ninety minute cycles, you are going to have to adjust those ninety minute cycles as well.
So people say, well, that's not going to help me IT at all, because how do I deal with the fact? And I need to be up every ninety minutes at night. There couple two rules that can be helpful. The first one is going to be to try and understand the relationship between calm and deep sleep.
So the economic nerve system can put us in the states of Young panic, where that kind of sov authority alert goes all the way to a panic or can be alertness or can be alerted calm, right? So there's a ranges there. It's a continue can also be that the um that you're in deep sleep so the other end of the sea SaaS way up or you're in light sleep or you're kind of sleepy or you just feeling kind of relax.
Perhaps the most important thing if you are having to map to a baby schedule in order to make sure that they're getting changing and nursing and set out appropriate times is to try maintain as if you can't sleep or you can't sleep continuously, to try and maintain a your automation ic nervous system in a place where you're not going into heightened states of alertness when you would ideally be sleeping. Now I realized that this could be translate to try and stay calm while sleep deprived, which is very hard for people to do. This is where the non sleeve deep breast protocol surface again, and can potentially be very beneficial for people to be able to recover, not necessarily sleep, but for them to maintain a certain amount of automatic regulation.
So what would this look like? This would look like the baby goes down. Maybe it's only going to go down for forty five minutes if you can capture sleep up.
Sure sleep. There are some data showing what's called Polly physics sleep. If you can sleep in forty five minute increments or batches.
Even if IT spread throughout the day with friends of wakefulness in between as miserable that sound there actually some adults that have deliberately employed that who don't have children for take a work productivity and IT does tend to reduce the total overall amount of sleep that you need. IT is a very hard schedule for most people to maintain. But if you have a baby, the baby may be thrown you into that kind of schedule anyway.
So if you can get forty five minutes sleep while they sleep great, if you can get another forty five minutes after waking and then they go back down to sleep, great. So as many phases of sleep as you can get. But if you can't sleep, the data on non sleep deep breath type protocols does show that, at least from a neurochemical.
Want to be clear what that means. Reset of things like dopamine levels in the basis of ganglia, measured by things like positions, onic, mission tomography, sea, those things tender, reset themselves pretty well if you can access these deep restate. So that means not being alert throughout the entire time that the baby sleep, being trying to sort mirror the baby sleep cycle, which can be brutal for certain people, and especially if you're trying to prepare meals and do all these things.
So I do recognize that there are a lot of constraints on parenting, not just mapping on your baby sleep schedule, as children approach ages one, two, three, four, that's when certain in the optics of the eyes have improved. But you don't want to damage the eyes, of course, with a very bright light. They are much more sensitive, even until there kind of ten, seven years old, and will talk about vision in children in a moment, but trying to get longer and longer batches of sleep through, hopefully not through the use of a administers milestones to the kids, because that's what I talked about before.
Why that could potentially be detrimental? Talk about that with your doctor, but more so trying to get longer blocks of sleep that map onto these already dian cycles. So if we Better off to get a three hour, like two ninety minute cycles, then a four hour batch of sleep, because waking up in the mill, those australian cycles can just be brutal for parent and kid.
So if one can't get a full sex or ten, or some kids should even be sleep in twelve hours when they're growing quickly trying to get batches of sleep, even if they are fractured throughout the twenty four hour cycle that are matched more to these ninety minute cycles, meaning maybe one australian cycle of ninety minutes or two back to back or three back to back to back, that's going to be Better than waking up in middle of an ultra an cycle. It's just gonna any number of other things in a Better direction than were you to try to say just in force or force of full eighty ten hours of sleep. That's at least what the literature shows.
Some kids sleep great through the night, starting in a very Young age. Others don't typically hear from people who are struggling tremendous ly. They're losing their mind, understandably, because they're not sleeping, their kids not sleeping and or their kid is sleeping for such brief periods.
So in other words, try to access deep calm if you can sleep. Try and access sleep if you can sleep, even if it's fractured. And then you say, well, what about all the sunlight viewing in the exercise stuff when sleep is really, really dismantled in meaning it's happening in various times of day or night, that's especially IT at those times.
This can be especially important for the parent to get morning and evening sunlight, because your circadian and clock is going into a tailspin. And IT basically wants to anchor to some things. You want to give you two anchors, morning and evening light.
okay? So this is rather different than what I describe for shift work. This is when things are really chaotic and you just not able to sleep.
Similar circumstances can arise. If you're taking care of a very sick love, you're up all night. Try and stay calm.
Using N, S, D, R protocols. I know it's harder to to do them to say, but those protocols are there. There are free.
There's researchers to support them. Try and get sleep whenever you can, but also try to get morning sunlight and evening sunlight in your eyes, if you can. And if you can get that, use artificial light.
What about later life? So kids now adolescence, teens IT is true that teens have a tendency to wake up later and go to sleep later, in part just because they're sleeping a lot more. They're turning out canada trope, releasing horn and luti zing hormone.
Their whole bodies are changing. I don't know whether not people realize this, but the fastest rate of aging that any of us will ever undergo is puberty. That is the fastest rate of aging. And so there is a huge number of biological process they're happening during puberty.
Probably devote a whole episode to power is a fascinating aspect to the life life course, but IT is accelerated period of aging, and the circuit and clock mechanism sometimes are very intact, and sometimes they are a little dismantle and going through some some change, but prioritize the duration of sleep for adolescence and teens now, if that means they're sleeping until two P M, and then waking up, and then they're upper night, the up all night part can become a problem, especially with all the devices testing in in the rooms are playing video games. Morning and evening sunlight would be ideal, but some kids are just gonna sleep through the morning sunlight. However, if you were to measure the temperature, what you would find is that their temperature minimum would come later in the morning.
It's not going to be adam. It's gonna maybe even ten am. If they're sleeping until eleven or twelve or IT might be a am if they're sleeping until ten, remember temperature minimum M S two hours before your average waking time, typically so intense and maximized of the total amount sleep try and get regular sunlight either in the morning or in the evening or but if they're sleeping through the morning sunrise, that's probably not as much of an issue.
Waking them up and depriving them sleep is probably worse because they're team in their temperature minimum is actually falling later, so their citi dead zone is later, etta. So I think with adolescence and teens, that makes sense to to give them a little bit more rope in terms of allowing them some lee way to adjust their own schedule. Some schools are even starting classes later on the basis of some very good biology to support this late shifted rythm.
In this extended sleep phase, there are data from dr. Or Jamie iza, prime psychiatry, behavior sciences and others at stanford showing that turning on the lights in the room of a team before they wake up helps them get more sleep. The subsequent night also tricks them into going to sleep a little bit earlier.
But IT gives them about forty five minutes more of deep sleep, and that's been shown statistically total sleep time increases as well. If they're hiding under the covers, that's not going to work, but their eyes don't have to be OpenAI know a few parents now that are coming in with a flashlight and flashing their kids over their elites before they wake up in hopes, again, this to work. Someone told me this is working.
That's not part of A A standard study um but IT does seem to work because now you should know why because if lights getting through the eyelids and IT say adam and the kid is still sleep and they're to wake up at ten, you're giving them light just after or around their temperature minimum, which is going to make them want to go to sleep earlier. And in the case of teens, for some reason we don't quite understand, sleep longer, about forty five minutes longer, spend more time in deep sleep. Adults can do this too, if you can persuade someone or put your lights on timer for lights to go on before you wake up, that's really going to help you wake up earlier.
Hi, so if you're starting hear some some themes are really resounding over and over again, that should be reassuring to you right there. These are core mechanisms. There are, fortunately, there are in a thousand different mechanisms.
Now in the elderly, there's a real tendency to want to go to sleep very early and wake up very early and people should talk to their physician um there is some evidence that military and levels and patterns to military and secretion can become a chaotic in elderly folks. What do I mean? elderly? Well, it's gona differ.
Rates of aging differ, right? You see some sixty five year holds that are struggling to move and are and seeing much older than sixty five year odds that are still hostile around out tons of energy. There's a there's a lot of variation, some of its genetic, some of its life style factors, you know, that IT really vars.
Certainly lifestyle of actors can play important role in rates of ageing. I think that the the most prominent results from sleep and circling rhymes in the elderly are they need to get as much natural light, even if its through windows. I realized that some elderly folks can't get outside as easily.
It's not safe for them to do IT. They can move around as easily. Exercise can come in various forms. For people that can't get outside and get a ton of sunlight by jogging or cycling, they're not able to do that light through a window.
In that case, open window, ideally, but for temperature reasons is set up, are sometimes the window has to be closed, getting people near the window in, away from our official light early in the day and away from our official lights, chewing the nights can have a tremendous effect. And in the elderly, that's when militants in might be a viable option. And this should be discussed with a physician, of course, but you know your way past the puberty time point.
In most cases, people who are in their seventies and eighties and nineties are not turning out a lot of generation ising horn to begin with. And that's where struggles with falling asleep and staying asleep all the same parameters and things we described before still apply light exercise temperature at seta. But that's where military and might be of greatest benefit.
And again, i'm not pushing military in here, but I think for elderly folks are having trouble falling in saying a sleep that might be worthwhile. There are. I should just also mention that regular schedule for folks that are elderly and natural as much natural light is safely possible, that those are going to be the really a the key levers for adJusting in circuit an schedules i've mentioned before in previous podcast.
Other supplements besides military and and some of those supplements are quite good for sleep. I know i'm not a supplement pusher. I am somebody who take supplements. I believe in them.
Some have worked for me, some have not worked as well, but I certainly believe in getting the behavior is right, whether not nsd r protocols, viewing natural light exercise, it's hot, baz, or cold showers or what have you. Behavioral protocols. First, there are some supplements that i've mention previous podcast, but i've seem to get a lot of questions about.
So I just want to take a couple minutes and just talk about some of the supplements that can be beneficial for helping turn me off thinking, accessing deeper sleep and even being able to contact your sleep schedule into a shorter period hours. Meaning getting by well with less sleep, people take a life sleeping pills, not going to tell people not to take sleep ing pills. They can be very problematic habit forming um high side effect incidents.
In many cases, some people can help them just fine. Again, no physician describe anything, professor so my professor, a lot of things, some of which are my opinion. Although if you look at the scientific literature, there are some impressive data around some non prescription drug type supplements that have fairly high safety margins. Um that you might consider, but you should talk your doctor always before adding or taking anything out of your health regimes, right? Your health is not my responsibility, your responsibility to be a strange and filter along those lines.
One of the most powerful and useful tools i've mentioned here on many times, and I planned to mention many, many more times, is the website examine dot com, which I have no affiliation ation with, but is a wonderful site that links you to quality per reviewed studies related to just about any supplement, including some safety warnings. We will also tell you what subjects where there was rattled cats, elderly folks or kids, the a given study was done on, which is important, can be kind of hard to pull from uh, sites where people are just advertising supplements, right? They don't tell you what the study was um who were these rats? Who were these kids? Um etta, there are three supplements that at least for me, have had a tremendously positive effect on my sleep that some of you might consider.
Um I would say if you're doing everything properly, really you're still having issues that supplements might be a good thing for you or if you are traveling and you want a little bit of extra help in buffering your sleep wake for this protocols. Um some people like to go just to the supplements that like what should I take of people in my life that don't you just tell me what to take no and more of years what you might want to do or not do but um and then think about what you might want to take or not take but personal preference and um free counts so and do what do what you like magnesium so magnesium has been shown to increase the depth of sleep and has been shown to decrease the the amount of time that takes to access sleep. To fall asleep comes in various forms.
I've talked a bunch of times about magnesium three and A T H R E O N A T E three, and which seems to be the mobile available form of magnesium. And magnesium three, eight, its seems, is shuttled preferentially to the brain, where, which is where you want IT and their certain transporters is actually engages the gaba pathway, which tends to turn off certain is the four brain allows you to fall asleep. There is a study, if you would like to explore IT, since people serious about supplementation might want to explore the study, which is A S at all, A T E S, those dependent absorption profile, different magnesium compounds looks to me like a quality per reviewed paper.
I can put the link in the caption and IT explore all the different forms of magnesium. Uh, IT does seem like magnesium. Glick ate can be similar to magnesium three eight in terms of which tissues that shuttle to magney sim met M A L A T E is preferentially settled to the muscle IT appears as opposed to the brain so it's gonna more of a muscle repair type thing or um restoring magnesium stores in the periphery y is opposed to the brain magney sim situate um has another name that I won't mention um in just because maesia centrate mean uh effect at least on me and the people I know seems to be a lacks of effect um as opposed to a cogent effect.
There is also some evidence that magnesium three nate can be narrow protective. Those data are come from quality labs, mostly road in studies, not human studies. What's kind of interesting? And again, the safety margins for these things tend to be pretty high.
But anytime you going to take something new, you should approach with caution, specially since magnesium m could be involved in heart rythm and things of that sort. The other supplement that has been very beneficial for me as theanine. So this is T H E A N I N E feeling T H E A N I N E feeling activate certain gaba pathways which are involved in turning off, top down, processing and thinking, making IT easier to fall asleep. And thein hundred milligrams to three hundred milligrams has a calming effect in is now showing up in a number of different uh energy drinks and even some coffees as a way to try and get people in just more of a given type of coffee because IT um the ideas that will take away the gitter and the anxiety allowing people drink more coffee.
I'm talking about taking magnesium and fine thirty to sixty minutes before bedtime, not during the day to quelling zid but rather thirty to sixty minutes before bedtime with or without food for me hasn't made a difference um and the combination of those two things has really helped thin for sleep Walkers can be a problem IT does IT increase the intensity of your dreams, gives you very vivid dreams. So for sleep Walkers or people that get night terrors, stay away from thinning is my advice. Magnesium m thie might be something to explore.
For those of you that don't have those issues with the emphasis on might and then i've talked about a compound, and last time I talked about the mechanisms of APP genin, which is a derivative of camera P I G N, on which acts a little bit of a hip note by activating core channels hyper polar as neurons increases gaba in the brain this makes you feel sleepy um and can mile for those view that read your um who was the Peter rabbits not into the mister maggard guard the cma mile fell sleep mister gregg came back okay, anyone flashing back elementary school? Okay um there's a story about cameel having these kind of sensitive like effects. Epigenetic rely concentrated cameel also has entire estrogens effects.
So if you want to keep your extra gent up, you might want to be cautious about up a Jenna. That's where things like examine 点 com become really useful because you can go to examination, put in epigenome. You'll tell you all the things that IT does and all the things that does can sometimes include things that you had no idea, like reducing a conversion of certain android to estrogen, which you might like or you might want to avoid that's up to you and where you want air surgeon levels, depending on who you are and what your life circumstances and goals are.
Few other things that can help the transition to sleep. Have our things like five H T P L trip to fan. I've talked about why i'm not a fan of those. For me, they tend to throw me into deep sleep, and then I wake up and I can't fall back to sleep. So I don't like to tinker with my serotonin system.
I don't like to tinker with my delta ein system for entirely other reasons, but none of which are particularly concerning is just that I find that if I increased my dopamine by taking all tyre sine in pill form, then I crash really hard the next day. If I take five H G P L trip to fan, i'd fall deeply. I sleep and then I wake up.
But I didn't mention that there might be ways to make sleep more compact. And so this is actually your request to you. I had a really interesting experience when I was a post dog. I went for the first time to an actual on trust I know they're wearing um thoughts and opinions out there about archibong cher um I can't say that I benefit so much from the active punch.
Um there are now quality per reviewed study showing IT publish in neon self press journal, excEllent journal showing that archibong cure can stimulate some anti inflammatory compounds depending on where the active punch is done. This is really good. Studies came out last year.
I talk about this own instagram. I may talk about again as well as certain act on your sites the increase information. So you know, uh, there you can get different types effects.
You can just say archibong tues, great across the board. And i'm assuming that the archives unctuous know which sites are good for increasing inflation. Tion with twins are good for the increase in information.
However, this acumen CER said, I went to, gave me these red pills. He said, these are minerals for sleep and IT was remarkable. I took the red pills in that thing. Take the red pill. I don't know what that means tuned in, but um these red pills look like low emms.
I took a couple of him on his suggestion, and I felt deeply ly sleep in four hours later, woke up feeling incredibly rested, more rested than i'd ever felt in my entire life. And I never required more than four hours sleep. Unfortunately, active punctures moved away.
I never figured out what was in those red pills, didn't get a chance to do the mass spectroscopy. And I still wonder, he said they were minerals. So somebody out there knows what these red pills are, what this compound is. And IT was incredible.
And I would love to know what those are so if you know um please don't go taking red pills at random to try recreate this non experiment um experience of mine but please do contact me if you find out if you're native punches you know what these mysterious red pills were because they were pretty awesome. Once again, i've thrown wn a tremendous amount of information at you. Um I hope you will figure out your temperature minimum and start working with that to access the sleep and wakeful cycles that you want to access.
I hope that you will explore N S D R you might want explore supplementation, if that's your thing. You have now access to a lot of mechanism about sleeping wakefulness. But in keeping with the theme of this podcast, where we stay on topic for an entire month or even slightly more, we are not done with sleep and wakeful.
This I know this is very different than the typical podcast format where one week gets how to become superhuman and the next week it's how to um you know develop growth mindset and have all over place with episode the episode we are staying on track because I really believe that as we drill deeper and deeper into these mechanisms and you start hearing some of the same things again and again, you are going to start to develop an intuition and an understanding of how these systems work in you and your particular life circumstances. And my goal is really to eventually become obsolete. It's what my graduate advisor used to call the hit by a bus principle that somewhat more bit than to humor, and used to be, well, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, what are you going to do without me? Blame at you here or so? I don't want to get hit by a bus.
I plan on living a very long time if I have anything to say about IT. But where I to get hit by a bus tomorrow, what would you do for you're sleeping wakefulness, right? You could put a comment on youtube, which I hope you'll do, but if I hit by a blush and killed, then I won't be able to answer your question.
So know your temperature minimum, understand light in the early part of the day is valuable. Light when you want to be awake provide is not so bright, it's damaging, is great for you, whether that comes from screen or sunlight, but sunlight is Better. Avoid light in the four to six hours before your temperature minimum, or else you going to delay your clock unless you're traveling.
And that's what you want to do OK use temperature, increase temperature to shift your clock, decrease temperature to delay your clock k, map out your temperature and understand that you don't have to know degree by degree across the day, know your minimum, know your maximum temperature in your twenty four hour cycle, and you feel great power through that. Because then you'll know also about these all tradition cycles, these nine minute cycles within which you can do focused work, don't expect to focus to come morally at the books, come in the middle, then kind of taper off, talk to look IT about kids, loit about elderly, about parenting. We are going to continue.
There is going to be more. But now, shift workers, travellers, people that are jet lacking themselves home. You know how leavers in place? Information can be powerful, but you have to implement IT in ways, obviously safe ways, in reasonable ways.
But implementing this knowledge in the way that you trust are safe and reasonable for you is going to be the way that you can develop a bit of a laboratory about yourself. I love the term biohacking sorry biohackers. I don't believe in hacking anything.
I believe in understanding mechanism and applying the principles of mechanism for which there are a large body of quality per review data and even a whole center of mass around certain biological principles, like the effects of light and temperature, temperature minimums, that will allow you to shift your biology in the ways that you want to go. That will allow you to shift your psychology in the way you want to go. Next podcast episode, we are going to talk more about a few things.
First of all, we're going to answer more of your questions because during office hours, I didn't get to all your questions from the previous episode. S so I do read the comments and and we're paying attention and figuring out the most common questions. We are gone to get to some of the harder topic.
Someone came at me always fun when somebody does say, say these are just the kind of basel low level questions. What about the big stuff? What about dreaming and Lucy, dreaming and consciousness? I'll talk about that stuff, and i'm planning to do that, some of which in the next epo de, in the following epo de, maybe even.
But I want to give you data. I want to give you things that are supported by data. So I will try to speculate as little as possible because this is a podcast about science and science based tools for everyday life.
This is not about me, speculated. Many people are speculated about the role of sleep, dreaming and conscious ness. Fascinating topics and a rather circular argument. Frankly, it's been going on for centuries. Someday will get there.
Right now, we're concentrated on these deep biological mechanisms that make you who you are and allow you to feel certain ways, good or bad, allow you to function physically in certain ways, good or bad, and give you more a sense of control. That's my goal here. Many people have quite graciously asked how they can help support the podcast.
First of all, thank you. We appreciate the question. You can support the podcast by subscribing to the podcast on youtube as well as subscribing on apple or spotify.
And you can also leave us comments and feedback on youtube and at apple. That really helps. We hope the feedback would be positive, but nonetheless leave us feedback, ask questions. We will use those questions to create future content for the podcast as well.
If you can recommend the podcast to friends and family and other people that you think might find the information of use, that's terrific and check out our sponsors that we mentioned at the beginning. That's a really great way to help support us in our ability to bring this information. And has mentioned the beginning of today's episode, we are now partnered with momentous supplements because they make single ingredient formulations that are the absolute highest quality and nerves international.
If you go to live momento stock calm slash huberman in, you will find many of the supplements that have been discussed on very episode of the huberman lab podcast, and you will find various protocols related to those supplements. Thanks so much for your time and attention. I really appreciate IT see you next time on the human lab podcast. And as always, thanks for your interesting thanks.