Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. Regardless, if you could attend. I also would like to thank the sponsors for the event. They are 8-Sleep & AG1. 8-Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep is the critical foundation for mental health, physical health, and performance.
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The other live event sponsor, AG1, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens and other critical micronutrients. I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they decided to sponsor the live event. I started taking AG1 and I still take AG1 once or twice a day because it gives me vitamins and minerals that I might not be getting enough of from Whole Foods that I eat, as well as adaptogens and micronutrients.
Those adaptogens and micronutrients are really critical because even though I strive to eat most of my foods from unprocessed or minimally processed Whole Foods, it's often hard to do so, especially when I'm traveling and especially when I'm busy. So by drinking a packet of AG1 in the morning and oftentimes also again in the afternoon or evening, I'm ensuring that I'm getting everything I need. I'm covering all of my foundational nutritional needs.
And I like so many other people that take AG1 regularly, just report feeling better. And that shouldn't be surprising because it supports gut health and of course gut health, supports immune system health and brain health. And it's supporting a ton of different cellular and organ processes that all interact with one another. So while certain supplements are really directed towards one specific outcome like sleeping better or being more alert,
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What are my thoughts on nicotine? Nicotine causes cancer when it's consumed in the form of smoking, vaping, dipping or snuffing. So don't do that. There's a debate now about vaping. Is it bad? Is it good? It's bad. Is it worse for you than smoking? Probably not. Is it better? Probably slightly.
You know what's better? Just not doing it. But if you need to do it and you have to pick, I suppose I'm not going to tell you what to do. But I think that vaping has allowed a good number of people to smoke less. I'll acknowledge that. And it's also clear it's not good for you. So if you're going to do something that's bad for you, do a bunch of things to offset the thing that's bad for you. That's always my advice.
But now in terms of nicotine itself, nicotine doesn't cause cancer. The mode of consumption causes cancer. That's important. nicotine finds just so called nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. So these exist naturally in your body and on your muscles, they're the way that actually your nerves control contraction of your muscles.
So the consumption of nicotine, let's just say in, I don't know about down here, but in Europe, it's becoming fairly common. And in the Middle East, also for people to little pouches of nicotine can be absorbed, you know, sublingually or through the gum. It's into the bloodstream. And it is truly a cognitive enhancer. It's a cognitive enhancer. Not going to lie to you. It will raise attention, focus, cognitive performance. This is well established.
The problem is it also raises blood pressure and causes vasoconstriction. This is well established. So, you know, you have to ask yourself, is it worth it? Do I do it sometimes? Do I do it often? Do I choose to not do it at all? I don't think the young brain should be consuming nicotine even in these non-cancer causing forms like pouches for a variety of reasons, but mostly because the brain is so plastic at a young age anyway.
But I actually am familiar with the use of nicotine for offsetting certain neurologic diseases when I was visiting Columbia Medical University in New York City. Some years ago, I was in the office of a Nobel Prize winner. I won't tell you what it was necessarily. And he proceeded to consume no fewer than six pieces of nicorette gum in our half hour meeting.
At the time, he was in his late 70s. He's now in his 80s. And I was like, hey, listen, what's the deal with the nicotine? And he said, oh, well, it offsets Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. I said, really? I said, yeah, you can increase cognitive function. I used to smoke by, I want to get cancer. So, I just chew a lot and a lot of nicorette.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of nicorette. It can increase the amount of acetylcholine activation through the binding of these nicotine and acetylcholine receptors might even maintain some dopamine orgic neurons, which are the neurons that one tends to lose with age and is rampant in diseases like Parkinson's. I thought, whoa, okay, so there's something there. The fact of the matter is that nicotine can enhance focus, alertness, and learning, but it does have those other issues.
So, you want to be considerate of those other issues and not become dependent on it. And my experience is that people who taste the nicotine focus from a zin patch are those people who are buying those things pretty regularly. I know somebody that went from one zin patch twice a week to a canister a morning in about a month because the effect will wear off if you keep consuming it every day.
You have to consume more and more. So, take that into consideration. Probably best to avoid unless you really need the boost and you can afford the increase in blood pressure. That would be my suggestion. I've never taken nicotine and I don't smoke. What's the best you can do for managing ADHD if not taking medication? Okay, so we did two episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast on ADHD. The first was on behavioral nutritional and supplement based tools. 50% of the comments.
Thank you so much. This is very helpful. Can't wait to try some of this stuff. The other were like your evil. You are trying to persuade people to not take pharmaceuticals, which is not true. I'm interested in all of it. I just covered that stuff in the first episode. And then the second one we don't need ADHD was about things like violence, Adderall, Ritalin, etc. Most of which, by the way, are fedamines. Are we putting our kids on speed? Yes, they're fedamines.
But I don't think that we should walk away from those things in every case. They do have real clinical value in many cases.
And their clinical value comes from the fact that one, not all, but one of the major effects of amphetamines is that it can increase dopamine origenergic meaning dopamine and neurobeinephrine release in the brain, which can increase attention and focus, which is actually beneficial in some cases for the brain to learn, to focus, to get neuroplasticity of those very circuits.
So, consideration, then 50% of the comments of that second episode were, why don't you talk about the behavioral tools, the supplement-based tools, and the nutrition tools. And everyone else said, thank you for talking about the prescription drugs. So, the point being severalfold. One is that certainly a combination of behavioral, nutritional, supplement-based, and prescription tools is viable for most every situation.
And it's worth thinking about all of those when considering a treatment for ADHD. And I think we really need to get out of these silos of thinking, you know, like, big pharma is evil. Listen, there are drugs that can help people. Is it evil? I don't know. Is it going away? No. Okay, is there value there? Sometimes. Is it over-prescribed? Sometimes. What about nutritional tools? Well, in some cases, it can really help. In other cases, one still needs prescription drug tools.
In some cases, doing behavioral, nutritional, or supplement-based tools can allow one to take lower doses of pharmaceuticals if that's your goal. I think it really needs to be tailored to the individual. What I would like to see is more of a tailoring to the individual than the simple writer script, send people off, or tell people that it's all bad if it comes out of a prescription drug label format.
Now, it is very clear that the original dosing schedule for things like Adderall by Events, et cetera, was during the weekdays, but not the weekends that somehow has moved to no weekends off. So there's been a lot of changing in the dosing schedules. And the way these drugs are taken, are we creating a dependency on these drugs? So there's always a big question, and the answer seems to be a sort of very few people for whom these drugs work decide to come off them.
There's nothing magical about turning 25 after which you don't need these enhancements, but sometimes people don't need them or need as much of them, because the neural circuits can be built up. One thing that I would like to see more of is attention to the behavioral tools for ADHD, not the least of which is what's being carried out in many schools and clinics in China, where people are being encouraged, children are being encouraged to teach themselves how to maintain the health care.
And teach themselves how to maintain visual focus on a target some distance away from them, which then allows them to maintain cognitive focus when they move to their work. The relationship between visual focus, as we've talked about a bunch of times tonight, in the case of the cuddle fish, et cetera, and cognitive focus is an intimate one such that if you expect yourself to focus, you can't really expect yourself to drop into focus as an immediate state.
So it's not a square wave function, as we say, you don't just sit down and drop into a state of focus. We're so attracted to these notions of focus and we have these concepts like flow. And by the way, I'm not disparaging of those concepts. I know Stephen Kotler, I've respect for him in his books about flow, but from a neuropsychiatric neuropsychological standpoint, what we can really say about flow is that backwards spells wolf.
We don't really know that much about it. And so I think that if you expect yourself to focus, you need to give yourself some warm up time to focus. Don't assume that you have attention issues if you sit down and it takes five or 10 minutes to drop into a state of focus, just like you wouldn't expect yourself to go out for a hard run without some sort of warm up jog beforehand.
So the behavioral tools, such as focusing on a visual target, are under explored at least in most countries, but in China and elsewhere, they are being explored pretty extensively. So I would encourage a full exploration of all the tools. In this case, it says not taking medication, then obviously heavier reliance on the behavioral tools is going to be helpful.
While I'm getting more sleep now, I neglect his sleep for many years, me too. And at least 15 years of getting just five or so, am I doomed or can I offset this past damage? You can offset the past damage. One of the things that's really wonderful about the brain and body is that it can compensate. There are certain things that I get asked a lot. I don't know why I get this question a lot, but people say, you know, I smoked meth for years and then can I get my neurons back?
It's neurotoxic, but the fact that you're asking the question is reassuring. Don't start, but if you did, you can always do better than you're doing and you certainly can do better than you did in your past. Or at least that's what they tell me. So really, when it comes to sleep deprivation, I spent many all nighters. I wouldn't talk about sleep so much if I didn't have challenges with sleep.
For a long time, I slept like a bulldog, I sleep anywhere anytime. By the way, folks, if you ever walked down the street and you see a bulldog and you stop, you'll notice they always stop. They always seem so friendly, always stop. They always stop and they look up at you and you pet them and you like that. The reason they seem to like you so much is because they love to stop.
I own one, they're all about the stopping. It's not you, it's about the stopping. Anyway, the goal is not necessarily to sleep as much as a bulldog. Actually, it's the only animal, so you can't help myself. It's the only animal for which there's a genetically-induced apnea.
They're brachysofalocryntamines, they have a short snout. They're all those folds. You only want the folds are there. The folds are there because they have a genetic mutation. They bred out the pain receptors in the face because they used to have them like they would bulbate. They bite on the face of the bull. They tell all the pain, they bred out the pain receptors.
They give them a floppy face, short snout. English bulldog, thank you for the specificity of biologists, loves the specificity. The Frenchies are pretty cool. The Frenchies are pretty cool. They have a little more kick in them.
The bulldogs, little less, and Costello was a bulldog, so he was more or less like a sea turtle. Just slow movement, stopping, and he's going forward and you can move aside. Costello was so mellow that when he would lie down on the floor, I had one of those robot vacuums, things we call it a Roomba in our country. It would come up to his face and it would bounce off his nose and he wouldn't even take the opportunity to blink. The bulldog is sort of the essence of economy of effort.
People resemble different dog breeds. Some dogs and some people have a bit more reverberation in them. They have higher RPM all the time. They have more dogs. They have more dogs. They have more dogs. We look at these people that are more still and think, well, I don't know what's going on in there, but now we know from the rich thing and the carl thing that they're thinking a lot.
In the case of Costello, they don't think much done. Maybe Costello wanted to get things done, but if he woke up on New Year's Day and said, all right, 50 rabbits this year, he never actually achieved that.
The point is, some of us sleep like bulldogs. Some of us tend to go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night. I'm one of those people. Go to sleep four hours, wake up, hate it. But I figured out that non-sleep deep breaths or a yoga ninja has taught me how to fall back asleep really quickly and I can recover some sleep by having gotten through non-sleep deep breaths.
Some people are waking up in the middle of the night because they don't have their sleep timing right. We have a series on sleep coming out soon with the great Matt Walker recorded six episode series with Matt and he talks about something I take no credit for this.
This is Matt's acronym QQ RT quality quantity, regularity and timing. You want to pay attention to the amount of sleep. Some people need six. Some people need eight. If you only got seven for years and you're reading that you need eight or else you'll get dementia, please don't worry about it.
It is simply not the case. Some people need less. Some people need more of this varies across the lifespan. Then there's the quality. How much of that sleep is continuous. Did you drink caffeine in the after noon or alcohol in the evening, which case the quality will be diminished. The regularity is very interesting. Going to sleep more or less five nights a week at least. Going to sleep more or less at the same time.
Every night plus or minus an hour. It's fine on the weekends. Not just saying that so you don't all leave at once or a third of you leave. Some people do best by going to bed at eight or nine p.m. and waking up at three or four in the morning. And that's where you would feel best. In fact, if you're somebody who wakes up at three or four in the morning, you might be going to sleep too late and you have this intrinsic chronotype as it's called.
And you can shift your clock a bit later. But most people want to go to bed sometime between 10 p.m. and midnight. Wake up sometime between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. And there's great variation there too. But, you know, QQ RT. So think about the quality, the quantity, the regularity, and the timing. Once you dial those in, everything is much, much better.
So much so that even if you're not getting enough sleep as long as you're going to bed, it more or less the same time each night you'll, you'll fare better. So if you didn't do any of this stuff for years like I didn't, when I was in graduate school, etc. I don't despair. Don't despair. It's very clear that the brain can recover. And I wouldn't waste a single moment thinking about what you didn't do.
Also, my time machine is broken, your time machine is broken. I realize that doesn't create a lot of comfort. But it's unlikely that you did substantial damage. Unlikely you did substantial damage. Unless you did that your whole life and we're talking about a conversation that's happening lately in life. But even then more sleep would be better. Do you believe in burnout?
If so, what would be a recommendation protocol with a link which burnout once it's already occurred? This is a very interesting question. We don't quite know what burnout is. And it can come from a combination of things. And typically burnout comes not during the stress period, but several months afterwards. The adrenals, these two little nuggets above our kidneys and lower back, are capable of driving so much neural energy in us that we can do all sorts of things for a very long time.
Even in the absence of food as long as we have water and salt, the adrenals, because they kick out adrenaline and cortisol. And by the way, are involved in salt appetite. There's a reason for that because you need that. The adrenals can keep us going. And there is no such thing as true adrenal burnout because the adrenals don't burn out.
You've got enough adrenaline in your adrenals for two lifetimes. But there is an adrenal insufficiency syndrome. So that's a real thing. It's rare, but it exists. But burnout seems to be, in my mind, more related to psychological burnout. And I'm not a psychologist, but I'm a fan of the poet David White. And he has this beautiful poem that is either entitled or somehow includes the word wholeheartedness.
I think that where we recover ourselves is by relating to and engaging with things and people that we wholeheartedly enjoy. Even if that is simply relaxation or gardening or drawing or maybe just doing nothing for a bit. I think burnout is very real. And I think burnout as pushed through the filter of what we've been talking about earlier in the evening is when we are not getting periodic experiences, if you will, of delight or excitement or a sense of meaning.
And here we're starting to drift into abstract. Not everyone gets to do a job that they delight in. Certainly that were years where I didn't delight in the sorts of things I had to do for certain jobs. But finding some areas of life that create those neural energy states that carry forward, that wick out into other aspects of what we're doing.
And I don't know if I made this point clear enough earlier, but those moments of really feeling excited about something in a way that really lights you up in particular are not just about that moment and seeking out more of those moments, but in the way that it lifts our nervous system the way it carries us forward and allows us to do the other things that we have to do, which frankly sometimes can be not as exciting or even drudgery.
So if you burnt out, I know the feeling, I have burnt out before and I encourage a combination of rest, but also exploration of things that can evoke that kind of internal excitement or sense of meaning. And one has to be a bit of a forage or in order to do that, try new things and that can be difficult, but burnout is real and I encourage you to take it seriously because unfortunately typically what follows burnout is depression and then things can really.
What types of food do you try to eat every day and why? I love to eat. I do, I even like the mere act of chewing so much so it just yeah so I buy those Persian cucumbers you just munch on those things all the time. I tend to eat according to how alert or sleep I want to be. It violates a few kind of popular thoughts about nutrition, but that's what I do. Generally for me, I like water caffeine and early in the day and eat some time around 11 or noon.
I'm not really strict about these things if I'm hungry, I'll have a plate of eggs in the morning or something or a handful of macadamias. By the way, the macadamias down Australia are awesome.
They're so good in the states they like infuse them with all these palm kernel oils and stuff and so when I first tasted the ones and they was taste good, but they're I'm not I'd like to get into the seed oil debate I think a better ways to hang myself like with this microphone, microphone cord, it's less like, you know, I don't I guess I do sort of avoid the seed oils, but you know I feel best.
I love them. Oh, the macadamias told you always apply my way back the macadamias down here, tastes as if they've been infused with all sorts of stuff, but then you look at the packaging is just like macadamias and salt. I don't know what is so good of the coffee down here is amazing. I don't want to taste so good so good the produce I mean basically I eat like you guys.
Gals. That's what I do. That's what I do. I basically eat meat and eggs and fruit and vegetables and I do like rice and oatmeal and like there are people on social media to like, oh, no, I'm going to kill you. And I'm like, if oatmeal were going to kill me, I'd be dead. I need so much oatmeal, but that's not to say that some people feel better if they don't eat oatmeal. I kind of find the nutrition debates to be kind of like funny.
They're so non-scientific. They're funny, but I also know that and here I have a theory that when you eat most of your foods from unprocessed or minimally processed sources, something magical happens. Not only are you, let's say eating healthier foods, quote unquote, but we should define healthier foods that for which their macronutrients, proteins, fats and carbohydrates.
Also, and calories tend to be matched pretty well with high micronutrient content, something that doesn't exist in highly processed foods, right? But probably also better for the planet, but which is great, not being the planet's important. We want to keep that around.
But the other thing is that, normally, when you eat foods as their main ingredients, there's not say you can't have a super-store or salad every once in a while, but closer to their original form, and I do cook my meat on other people on the internet, there's the guiding chicken rauf, 28 days, it was in the barbershop the other day, they're like, what about the raw chicken guy? And I was like, not a good idea.
So, when you eat foods in their kind of basic state, the brain can associate the taste with the macronutrient and amino acid content and micronutrient content, and we know that the gut is sensing a lot of that unconsciously. So, consciously, we know this through neural pathways, beautiful work being done by people here in Australia and in the states and elsewhere, about the signaling for the gut is actually tasting the food.
It's measuring the amount of amino acids, fatty acids, et cetera. And so, when you eat foods in their kind of more original form, non-processed or minimally processed, it's clear that the brain starts to develop a more specific intuition or appetite for what you need. You know, oh, like I need some fat, I need some protein, or you start to crave the things according to what's actually in them, and highly processed foods and rich combinations of foods don't allow you to do that.
So, it hasn't really been explored, there's a little bit of work that's coming out on this by Dana Small at Yale and Kevin Hall, elsewhere, you know, but it's sort of starting to get there. So, this is why I believe when people go on these elimination diets where they say, like, I'm only eating meat, like a lion diet or whatever, like Costello, meat only.
And like, that they, many of those people, quote unquote, feel better, I think, because they're starting to form a relationship with the nutrient content, the food, the chloric content, and the taste in a way that after that, they like see a cracker, and they're like, no, you know, they can have reset the neural circuits around appetite and all of this stuff.
But for me, because I'm an omnivore, like a normal person, and sorry, disrespect to the carnivores, I just kind of like the blood drinking, like labor, chomping, like, come on, like that, I'm going to catch a bullet, or like, you know, someone's going to bone at me.
So, I fear them more than I fear the vegans, it'll just be like a bunch of, you know, the vegans will attack you online, but in person, they'll just like, hit you with a parsley, so it's not as, you know, the, I'm going to get myself in trouble.
I'm an omnivore, like most people, envy. And so for me, between 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. is typically 1 a.m., but sometimes I eat at 9, I didn't eat before this, because I don't like to eat right before I do this sort of things, all you don't mean before I go to sleep tonight.
I'm not super strict about this stuff. I'm not super, super strict, but in general, it's some sort of intermittent-ish fasting thing, and it tends to be meat and fish and eggs, and, look, Parmesan cheese and coffee and oranges and cucumbers,
and, let us, and food, like food, and pasta. And, and I, I suppose that having done that for so many years, I do, you know, adjust it, like if I do a hard resistance training workout, I'll eat a few more searching carbohydrates to replenish glycogen, but, but I tend to avoid extremes with all that stuff, and I love a great slice of pizza, and I sort of lost my taste for sweets, but occasionally I'll, I'll do that, and I love vegetables, like croissants and things of that sort.
So, but, you know, all kidding aside, you know, I do try and eat pretty healthy every day. With a ton of intro out there about health and wellness, Andrew, I love the way that, uh, Nekil. What are your top health and fitness style recommendations for someone who has a busy lifestyle? This is a great question, and, you know, I get accused a lot, I get accused a lot of a lot of things, but, you know, one of them is, well,
no one can do all this stuff, but we talked about that earlier. We do the best with what we have and the time we have. Try and get some bright sunlight, even through cloud cover, especially through cloud cover every day. I try and dim the lights or, you know, get under red light, not red light panel necessarily, but just put in like red party light.
You know, I've done that this whole trip when you traveled in the evening just, it's just a red light bulb. There's just not fancy. So the red light bulb screws in this little pedestal, turn that on all the other lights go off and then makes for a nice easy taper into sleep because, you know, the blue, the blue in bright fluorescent lights, the short wavelength light really is activating for the nervous system, especially late in the day.
So light is a big one for me, try and get a few walks in. I think if you were going to exercise just two days a week, it's very clear that those two days per week should be include some resistance training exercise and then maybe follow up with some easy cardiovascular training or something like that.
Hopefully one could get out in about maybe three days or exercise, sometimes not outside one can only exercise indoors maybe three days per week. So I don't think it takes a ton of time necessarily, but that might even be excessive. So with busy lifestyle, I think it's those little carve outs of five or 10 minute walk.
When we had Andy Galpin on the podcast and did a series and by the way, Andy's launching his own podcast through our podcast channel, which is a sitcom, which Robin, I started. He's got the perform podcast with Andy Galpin. He talked a little bit about these exercise snacks. These are actually pretty cool. In the sense that if you just take 60 seconds and do like a near all out, run up the stairs, but be careful or jumping jacks for a minute as fast as you can.
That raises heart rate in a way and adjust your physiology in a way that really does carry over to better performance, including even things like VO2 max in other endeavors. It's probably not the case that that's all you should do, but even small bouts of exercise can be very, very valuable.
So that's reassuring. And then I am a huge fan of non-sleep deep brass, aka Yoganidro, which means yoga sleep, which is just lying there as we talked about before, but it's slightly different than what we were talking about for creativity. Lying there and deliberately inducing, using your mind to deeply relax the different muscles of your body, stay calm, long exhale, breathing, this kind of thing. There's a 10 minute NSTR with my voice on YouTube that you can simply find in a zero cost.
There are many with other voices, female voices, etc. that you can find on YouTube as well. And if you don't like those, we're soon to release on our Hebrew and Lab Clips channel, a number of different meditations in NSTRs, again, all zero cost of 10 minute, 30 minute. I would say that for limiting stress, improving sleep, and restoring mental and physical vigor, NSTR is perhaps the best tool out there.
And again, I didn't create it. I just simply took Yoganidro. I started calling it NSTR. And by the way, I was aware that I was going to upset some people when I did that. I was not trying to appropriate anything. I promise. The problem was I would talk about Yoganidro and studies of Yoganidro showing that it replenishes dopamine and the basal ganglia can restore mental and physical vigor.
And then people would back away from me slowly, like, Yogan, I don't want to do Yogan. I'm like, no, this is Yogan's sleep. You don't actually move. And they're like, that sounds pretty different. And I know it sounds different. I'd go on and on. And then I decided to call it non-sleep deep rest.
And when you call something what it is or what it can accomplish, you move away from nomenclature. And I have very mixed feelings about renaming things. But I figure as long as I don't call it like the Huberman Protocol, at least I'm distancing myself from it. And it's a zero cost protocol.
So non-sleep deep rest is valuable for restoring mental and physical vigor. It can potentially help offset sleep that you didn't get. It can help you fall back asleep at night, doing the middle of the night. You can help you get better at falling asleep if you do it during the day. I did it for 20 minutes just prior to coming out here. I always do that prior to any event that requires a lot of focus. This kind of thing.
Otherwise, the jokes I tell are really, you know, just not okay. And so I do think it's quite valuable and it's something to explore. At what age would you consider testosterone replacement therapy? Well, one of the risk versus benefits of starting it sooner rather than later. We got shouts as well. So one of the major effects of testosterone replacement therapy is spontaneous shouting out in crowds.
Just kidding. You know, there have been a number of studies of testosterone in males and females. By the way, females have more testosterone than they do estrogen. You know that, right? Per desoliter of blood, higher testosterone than estrogen. Just on average, on average, they tend to have lower testosterone than men per desoliter of blood.
So it's important in both males and females. I think you're referring to James to the use of so-called TRT in males. But I'll touch on it in females as well because low dose TRT therapy. Oops, sorry, I just did that. I get in trouble in lab. If you say like PCR reaction, ATM machine.
Is there a name for that? Okay. The T at the end of TRT is therapy. Testosterone replacement therapy. Testosterone replacement therapy technically means that someone's levels prior to that therapy fall outside the reference range. So lower than 300 nanograms for desoliter typically.
Or some other array of symptoms and they replace it replacement therapy. Many, many people nowadays, in my opinion, far too many and too young, take what I call testosterone augmentation therapy where their levels are within normal range and then they take it to get out of range.
And look, there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm not a cop. You do what you want to do. There are a couple things. TRT or T at augmentation. And here we're just setting aside high dose steroid use because that's just a whole other biz. And frankly, the bodybuilders will get upset. But I'll get away from you because you'll be waddling and I'll be running.
That's just like a whole other business. So testosterone replacement therapy is widely used nowadays. I think far too young. Basically, it will lower your sperm count dramatically if you're male. So you'd have, if you want children, you want to conceive children, you will need to offset that by taking something like human corionic can add a tropin HCG, which is available synthetically.
They used to sell it in the form of pregnant women's urine. There was a black market for it. We could really go off into the sticks with this question. In my opinion, if you want to explore this, I would say first, get your behaviors right. Sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress control, training.
Get that right. Don't train too hard too long. Get that right. Then there are certain supplements. And we've talked about this on the podcast, some are debated a little bit more than others, things like zinc, tongue oly, etc. That can probably provide a boost beyond normal without shutting down the gonads.
And then, and only then, if you feel you really want to do this and it's in line with your ethics, or I don't know if you're playing a drug test at sport, etc. Then just minimal effective dose. And then if you want to have kids someday, or if you don't know if you want to have kids someday, make sure you're taking the appropriate things to offset that.
That's basically what I would say. And the major effect of testosterone in men and women is not libido per se, and it's not aggression per se. It tends to make people more like them. If you're a jerk, you can become more of a jerk. If you're calm, you can become more calm. If you're kind, you can, I don't know if you become kinder.
But there actually have been studies of altruistic behavior and administration of testosterone by nasal spray or other means. And frankly, people will become more out, they'll become competitively altruistic. I think the major effect also could be described as it makes effort feel good.
So we could go on and on about this. I'll just toss in that nowadays there's a lot of excitement about peptides. I'm going to do an episode about peptides. A lot of the young people I run into here and in the states are like, what are your thoughts on BPC157? What do you think about this peptide or that peptide? Peptides are simply small proteins, amino acid chains.
So there are lots of things called peptides, but typically these are things that increase growth hormone. That keep in mind that anything that increases growth hormone will increase the growth of any and all tissues. So if you have a small tumor that you're not aware of, that will grow also. So just keep in mind if you're going to tickle these pathways, you're playing with some serious biology, but there are safe ways to do it.
Sorry, you said what are the benefits of sooner rather than later, start it later. What are the physiological and practical differences between breathing techniques akin to WIMHOPH and the physiological sign relationship stress focus, etc. Okay, we can make this pretty straightforward. First of all, I know WIMM, we go way back to 2015, I went over to the Pyrenees and visited him and hung out and then brought him to the states.
WIMHOPH breathing is tumble breathing, but in science speak we call it cyclic hyperventilation. It's just cyclic hyperventilation. So if you inhale vigorously and long, your heart rate goes up. If you exhale vigorously and long, heart rate goes down. The process called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Volume of the heart changes when you breathe in versus breathe out. Speed, which blood moves through the heart changes as the blood gets bigger or smaller, according to inhales and exhales.
And basically the net effect is inhale, heart speeds up a little bit, exhale, heart slows down a little bit. So if you do WIMHOPH aka tumble breathing and you inhale vigorously and let it fall out of your mouth and then you're going to increase heart rate, increase autonomic activation, etc. If you do a pattern of breathing like inhale, inhale, long, exhale, inhale, long, exhale, cyclic sign.
Over time you're going to slow the heart rate down and you're going to calm down. That's just how it works. So when I hear about box breathing or now you hear about box breathing, you're okay, it's relatively equal ratios of inhale, exhale. It's a little bit of pause in there. That's the box, inhale, hold, exhale, hold, inhale, hold, exhale, hold of varying durations depending on your so-called carbon dioxide tolerance.
But at the end of the day you're maintaining kind of even heart rate when you do big cyclic hyperventilation aka WIMHOPH, tumble breathing. You're increasing heart rate and autonomic arousal release of adrenaline. Do cyclic sign, a lot of exhales. The opposite is true. Okay, so that should give you a framework for thinking about breathing and how to apply different breathing techniques and get us away from some of the naming of things.
But I'm not trying to take anything away from so-called WIMHOPH breathing. By the way, if you're going to do WIMHOPH breathing, be very, very careful to not do cyclic hyperventilation or WIMHOPH breathing and then do breath holes and don't do it anywhere, don't do that anywhere near water.
There have been cases of people drowning, dying from combining cyclic hyperventilation and breath holes with water because it changes the threshold for shallow water block out. When you exhale a lot or when you hyperventilate, you remove a lot of carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide is the stimulus to gasp. So what will happen is, indeed, if you do, you're blowing off a lot of carbon dioxide and then you go, right, that's a WIMH exhale.
And then you hold and you go under water. Yeah, you'll hold your breath longer than you normally would, but instead of feeling that impulse to breathe, like that gasp reflex and then you shoot for the surface, you'll just- black, done. So it's a serious thing and you want to be really careful to not combine cyclic hyperventilation and breath holes, especially both with cold water, frankly any water exposure.
I always say don't do WIMHOPH TUMO or cyclic hyperventilation breathing even standing or seated in a puddle. So in response to stress, it's really if you want to be more alert, increase the vigor and duration of your inhales, if you want to be more calm, increase the duration of your exels.
Would you recommend that children also get morning sunlight? Yes, and your pets too. Unless they're nocturnal pets, right? For anyone that had the not-so-smart idea of getting a hamster, you realize they're nocturnal, right?
They're going to run all night long on the wheel. In fact, rodents like to run on wheels so much that Happy Hofstra at Harvard has shown that if you put a little running wheel, like you know, all the wheels have the mice like to run in the- in a field, animals will run to the wheel and run in the field.
It tells you everything you need to know about rodents. But really children need that, but obviously babies have sensitive eyes. You know, we all can potentially hurt ourselves with sunlight and down here the UV index is very high. When the sun is low in the sky, so-called low solar angle sunlight, in the morning and in the evening, the UV index, mostly because of atmospheric interference, but some other things as well, it does- it's not as damaging to the eyes.
That's why it's easier to watch a sun rise or a sun closer to the horizon. It is to, you know, please don't stare at the sun in any case, but an overhead sun. So I think it's really important for circadian rhythms, but of course kids need their sleep. So if they're going to sleep in a little bit, that's fine. Just get them outside afterwards. It's the staying inside and staying on a phone, that's problematic.
And then leaving that room at noon, really shift your circadian rhythm in unhealthy ways. And that's true for children, perhaps especially true for children. As a father, what can I be doing to get my children the best start in life? I want a great question. I hope my parents ask that. They abandoned me at the pet store. No, I'm kidding. They didn't abandon me. They didn't abandon me at the pet store. If they did, I didn't notice. I was among my friends, the fishes and the birds.
I think this question probably should be, I'm going to edit and just say, what can we all be doing to give our children the best start in life? And what does that mean for those of us that have already started in life? So first of all, we have an episode of the Hubertman Lab podcast with an absolutely magnificent guest, Dr. Becky Kennedy, coming out on Tuesday down here. So this coming week, all about this.
And you know, we could talk about things for learning, encourage them to play an instrument. I would think that we perhaps should teach kids some tools to modulate their stress in real time, like physiological size. I don't see why not. I certainly wish I had tools to regulate my stress when I was younger. They didn't teach us that stuff.
They didn't know it or the knowledge was there, but as I mentioned earlier, they didn't teach us that stuff. They taught us all sorts of stuff in high school, health and stuff.
They taught us that, you know, drunk driving is bad. It taught us it just takes one sperm, one time. They taught us all sorts of stuff, but they didn't teach us the, this business of physiological size or stress thresholds or about the interimidcingly cortex, because a lot of that stuff wasn't known or just wasn't discussed.
So I think some tools to control one's inner landscape, play music. I certainly am going to encourage the exploration of these energy states that, you know, letting kids explore.
I mean, they need rules and regulation and boundaries, of course. But there's this concept of impingement that I find very interesting that the classics psychologists used to talk about, you know, when we, when a kid says they like something or don't like things like, yes, they need to be doing certain things for their normal life progression.
But kids are very good sensors of what works for them and what doesn't work for them. We don't want to impinge on, certainly they're healthy, loves and desires, things that don't endanger them, right, things that are really reflect their unique loves and desires. Don't force them to place a zookey violin if they want to play the drums, right? Let them bang on stuff and let the kids that want to place a zookey violin do that. Don't make them play the drums.
So these impingements, I actually think are problematic. They lead to a lot of confusion and if anything else, they, you know, they take us away from that unique wiring to be our own unique expression. Becky Kennedy does describe a few key principles of parenting that I think are really interesting and that extend all kinds of relationships. She talks about the main role of parenting and to some extent all relationships is to create boundaries and to make kids feel safe.
It's pretty good to me. The other kind of short list of two things that she describes how to do this in ways that are highly actionable is that every child, I found this really interesting. Every child wants to feel real like they want to feel like they're real like they're seen they exist and they want to feel safe.
And so that one of the things that really rung in my ears and still does from that episode recording again out this week is that when a kid or an adult says something about how they feel that perhaps one of the best responses we can give them is, you know, I believe you. Like it doesn't you're not saying that like you don't want to go to school, don't go to school, right?
We're not saying you don't you don't enjoy doing something, don't do it or you want like a, you know, a fifth serving of candy. Like you can say like I believe you, you know, no. You know, and so I think that a lot of it is is is you know, we get confused with terms like validation and listening. I mean what I like so much about what Becky offers and I do hope to do a child development series in the not too distant future.
What what I like so much about what Becky offers is that you know it boils down to simple concepts like we want to be real, which I guess is it kind of an analog for scene and we want to feel safe. Like when we did the podcast series on mental health with Dr. Paul Conti, he said you know it's really about mental health is really about agency and gratitude. But there are a lot of things that siphon up into those feelings or those moments of or that state of agency and gratitude.
So I would say that's perhaps the most important thing is you know boundaries make kids feel safe and then make them feel real like their feelings and what they're reporting matters. And then of course the impingement thing becomes a little bit complicated because they do need boundaries. So we have to constrain their wishes sometimes and their behavior.
So we don't want to do it in a way that takes them away from that unique wiring that makes them who they are so they can become you know the characters and people and professionals and creatives and scientists and poets and just you know good people right every day good people. I can provide it this time. They're not going to give me another question but I can keep going just briefly if I may.
By just first of all saying that again I'm very very grateful for the opportunity to convene with all of you here tonight. I realize it was me speaking and you listening except for the testosterone and and I and I certainly you know I can't really express it enough.
In words what the podcast means to me you know it's a it's a bizarre it's a bizarre thing it's completely transformed my life it's made it you know incredible I never dreamed of anything like this but for me it's really not about hearing my own voice it's it's this compulsion that came in an early age and it's really my wish frankly that the tools the protocols the knowledge
whatever it inspires you to do or to think you know we don't have to agree on everything I would hope we don't agree on everything the ways we disagree with me and with each other and with others that you know that we start maybe thinking about ourselves as through lens of science and think about health and and really trying to meet those discussions with with the kind of benevolence and curiosity and you know vigor you know good argument everyone's well healthy too.
That it really deserves you know I think we're we're in a very interesting and kind of sometimes scary time I often feel scared frankly because of what I see and even my own position in this whole landscape I sometimes think like I feel like a lot of times things are just kind of hanging on by a thread but I actually have a lot of optimism I think our species is very smart I think that we've managed to navigate tricky places before and I think that through the learning and teaching of things that work for us that we learn from the world.
We're also a lot of things that we've learned from the world and we're going to have a lot of things that we've learned from the world and we're going to have a lot of things that work for us that we learn from this these kinds of things and from each other that pretty soon we're going to start to fill in the gaps between the silos that are the yogic traditions the chiropractic massage health and fitness traditional medicine non traditional medicine functional medicine I mean I really encourage all of you to try and you know stand back from it all and try and identify the common themes that may exist across these things and really try and identify some of the links and points of convergence and that's a very important thing.
We're going to have a lot of things and points of convergence more than the differences and at the very least to explore things and if you don't like them you know that's great and if you do to pass them on to other people especially the behavioral tools that we all harbor within us that I think can really enhance our mental health and vigor our physical health and hopefully our longevity too.
I could go on and on but I really just want to say thank you so much for coming out tonight this is our last night in Australia and I'm certainly going to miss being here and we intend to come back again soon thank you so much for paying tuning into the podcast
and for being willing to learn you're all amazing students and you're also amazing teachers I learned from you all in comments and feedback so if you have that please keep that coming and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science.
Actually I've never done this before but because it's my last night here I've always seen people do this and I've never done it but I'm going to do it can we get the house lights up I want to get one of these like I'm going to do this as a video and you don't have to do it your faces will show up but don't worry we won't it will be on the internet but this is not for me I just want to. I'm going to send my mother this okay there we go thank you thank you you made my mother very happy.