Mental Health Toolkit: Tools to Bolster Your Mood & Mental Health
Date: 2023-10-30 | Duration: 02:04:11
Transcript
0:00 Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are discussing tools for mood and mental health. I will include tools and resources taken from the guest episode that I did with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, who is a psychologist and neuroscientist whose laboratory focuses on mood and emotion.
0:30 During that episode, she mentioned several important tools that I do believe everybody should apply and that, indeed, I’ve been applying to my own life and have found to be extremely beneficial. I will also highlight some of the specific research articles those tools are based on which were not covered in the podcast with Lisa. I will also discuss tools gleaned from the four-episode series that I did on mental health with Dr. Paul Conti, who is a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry, and that episode, as some of you may already know, focused on mental health and the
1:00 self as well as relationships, and it included a deep discussion of what is the self. We talked about the unconscious mind and the conscious mind, and we also covered a lot of tools for understanding oneself both within the context of therapy but also within the context of things that one can do alone and that require zero cost. In addition, we talked about tools for improving relationships; we talked about first principles of self-care. So, I will provide highlights and takeaways of those tools during
1:30 today’s episode. And thirdly, I will include tools—what we often refer to as protocols—gleaned from some recent publications, indeed publications that came out as recently as two weeks ago, which really emphasize specific things that we can all do that, again, are zero cost, that have been shown in quality peer-reviewed research to significantly improve mood and mental health. For instance, if you’re a regular listener of this podcast, you are probably familiar with my nearly constant reminder that
2:00 people should view morning sunlight and afternoon sunlight, and if you can’t, to embrace some alternatives like looking at bright artificial light, although sunlight is best. There was a recent paper published in the journal Nature Mental Health, an excellent journal, focusing on not just the positive effects of viewing light at those times of day and, indeed, throughout the day, but also the independent and positive effects of being in darkness for six to eight hours every night. That’s right: not only is light during the day correlated with
2:30 significantly improved mental health outcomes, but darkness at night—that is, avoiding lights, not just bright lights, but lights for up to eight hours at certain periods of your 24-hour circadian cycle—has been correlated with improved mental health outcomes and, indeed, has been shown to significantly offset certain negative mental health outcomes. This is a spectacular study; again, it involved an enormous number of research subjects, more than 85,000 research subjects, and it touches on a
3:00 large number of actionable protocols that I’ve distilled down to just one or two things that all of us can easily do to improve our mood and mental health on a consistent basis. Before we begin, I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I’d like to thank the sponsors of today’s podcast. Our first sponsor is Plunge.
3:30 Plunge makes what I believe is the most versatile at-home, self-cooling cold plunge for deliberate cold exposure. I’ve covered the topic of deliberate cold exposure several times on this podcast; indeed, we did an entire episode about deliberate cold exposure. What’s very clear from the research literature is that deliberate cold exposure can induce dramatic positive shifts in so-called catecholamines—that is, dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine. This is a small collection of molecules that are released in the brain and body when
4:00 we do deliberate cold exposure and that subjectively lead to greatly enhanced feelings of mood, alertness, and focus for many hours afterwards. That’s perhaps the best-substantiated reason and the most popular reason why people who get into deliberate cold exposure—no pun intended—continue to do deliberate cold exposure on a consistent basis. Plunge uses a powerful and very easy-to-use cooling, filtration, and sanitation unit to give you access to deliberate cold exposure in clean water whenever you want. I’ve used a Plunge for several years now and
4:30 I really like it because, first of all, it can use a standard outlet; you don’t have to modify the electricity in your home or yard, and it’s very easy to clean. In fact, it stays clean for long periods of time, which makes it very easy to maintain as well. Plunge has several different models to select from, including their new All-In cold plunge, which offers faster cooling, smartphone connectivity, and more. If you’re interested in getting a Plunge, you can go to plunge, spelled p-l-u-n-g.com/huberman, to get $150 off your
5:00 cold plunge. Again, that’s plunge.com/huberman to get $150 off. Today’s episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight 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—that is, getting enough quality sleep on a consistent basis—is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. Now, one of the key things to getting the best possible night’s sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment, and that’s because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature
5:30 needs to drop by about one to three degrees, and in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. With Eight Sleep, controlling the temperature of your sleeping environment is made extremely easy. Eight Sleep mattress covers allow you to program the temperature at the beginning, middle, and end of your night. It can even divide the temperature on the two sides of the bed for different people. It also has sleep-tracking capacity; it will tell you how much slow-wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep you’re getting and really help you dial in the exact
6:00 parameters so you can get the best possible night’s sleep. I’ve been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for well over two years now, and it has significantly improved my sleep and, therefore, my daytime mood, focus, and alertness. If you’d like to try Eight Sleep, you can go to eightsleep.com/huberman and save up to $150 off their Pod 3 covers. Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that’s 8sleep.com/huberman. Today’s episode is also brought to us by Waking Up. Waking Up is a
6:30 meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, Yoga Nidra sessions, and NSDR (non-sleep deep rest) protocols. I started using the Waking Up app a few years ago because, even though I’ve been doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing Yoga Nidra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an app—turned out to be the Waking Up app—which could teach you meditations of different durations and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain and body into
7:00 different states, and he liked it very much. So, I gave the Waking Up app a try, and I, too, found it to be extremely useful because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times I have longer to meditate, and indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the Waking Up app has lots of different types of Yoga Nidra sessions. For those of you who don’t know, Yoga Nidra is a
7:30 process of lying very still but keeping an active mind. It’s very different than most meditations, and there’s excellent scientific data to show that Yoga Nidra and something similar to it called non-sleep deep rest, or NSDR, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy even with just a short 10-minute session. If you’d like to try the Waking Up app, you can go to wakingup.com/huberman and access a free 30-day trial. Again, that’s wakingup.com/huberman to access a free 30-day trial. Okay, let’s
8:00 talk about tools for improving mood and mental health. I think it goes without saying that these are extremely important topics for everyone, not just to know about, but in my opinion, also for people to implement. And the reason is that we are currently in a worldwide mental health crisis, and while we could debate the reason why we are in a worldwide mental health crisis, it’s very, very clear that mood disorders and challenges with mental health abound. And of course, there are many
8:30 different therapies for the treatment of mood disorders and mental health: everything from talk therapy with a psychologist or psychiatrist or social worker, prescription drug treatments, there are nutritional approaches, somatic approaches, and I want to be clear that I do believe that there’s value in all of these approaches. What tends to matter in terms of what sorts of tools and approaches one adopts includes both access—so whether or not people have access to these types of therapies, whether or not they can afford them on a consistent basis—and also, of course, the
9:00 severity of the mood or mental health disorder. And I’d be remiss, of course, if I didn’t make the statement—and I don’t say this just to protect me, I also say this to protect all of you and those that you know—that if you are concerned about yourself or somebody else having a serious mood or mental health disorder, please do seek out help from a licensed clinical psychologist or psychiatrist or other healthcare professional who’s qualified to help you in that regard. With that said, we can now have a discussion about tools and protocols for enhancing mood and mental health that
9:30 truly apply to everybody regardless of age. To start off, I want to talk about a fundamental aspect of mood and mental health enhancement that was discussed both in the guest episode with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett as well as in the guest series with Dr. Paul Conti, and that has to do with what Dr. Paul Conti referred to as the first principles of self-care or mental health. The first principles of self-care include, but are not limited to, taking excellent care of one’s biology,
10:00 which, of course, includes both the mind and the body. And in order to make this very simple and actionable, I’ve distilled out what I refer to as the Big Six. I’ve sometimes referred to these as the six major pillars of health—both mental health and physical health, as well as performance for that matter. But if we’re going to talk about tools for mood and mental health, we absolutely can’t discard discussions about our biology. That is, we need to make sure that we’re taking care of our normal biological
10:30 function and, indeed, enhancing the production of specific neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, that we are optimizing—yes, I use the word optimizing—the function of our so-called autonomic nervous system, that aspect of our nervous system that’s humming in the background all the time. It’s operating unconsciously to regulate our sleep-wake cycles; it’s regulating how well or poorly we react to things; it’s regulating how much dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine, and acetylcholine we are
11:00 producing. All of this stuff is humming in the background and sets the stage for all the conscious work that we might put to—for instance, trying to understand what our life narrative is, what our unconscious mind is doing, what sorts of defenses it might be producing. All of the sort of high-level and directed work that we’re going to talk about a little bit later exists on a background of autonomic function, of neurotransmitter production, of hormone production—not just testosterone and estrogen, but things like cortisol, prolactin, and on
11:30 and on. So, it’s important to understand that if our goal is to be in the best possible mood given our life circumstances, and to have the best possible mental health given our life circumstances, and to improve our mood and mental health consistently over time, that we have to pay attention to what I’m referring to here as the Big Six, or the six pillars of mental health. And those are—just to list them off, then I’ll go into a little bit more detail: sleep, sunlight—although I’d like to
12:00 modify sunlight because, based on some new data that just came out a couple of weeks ago, I’d like to now make that second pillar not sunlight, but light/dark. So we could even just think about it as light—when and how much light you get—but what you’ll soon learn is that how much dark you get is also extremely important. So we’ve got sleep, light, movement is the third, nutrition, social connection, and stress control. Now, these are topics that I’ve spoken about
12:30 extensively on previous Huberman Lab podcast episodes, so I don’t want to go into a deep dive of each of these six pillars right now, but I am going to just give you a few highlights of each, and then, of course, we will provide links in the show note captions for which you can go on the deep dive if you like. And I also would like to mention that if you ever have questions about specific protocols or tools and you’re seeking those out, or previous episodes or specific timestamps of previous episodes of this podcast, you can go to our newly revamped hubermanlab.com website and put any topic of
13:00 interest, or even several topics of interest, into the search function, and it will take you to the very specific timestamps and other resources that provide information on those topics. So, I’m going to go into a few of the key bullet points about each of the six pillars, or what I also refer to as the Big Six of self-care and mental health. Again, this is a necessary list, but is not sufficient. Again, necessary to do these things every 24 hours—indeed, every 24 hours if you want to have the
13:30 best possible mood and mental health, but it is not sufficient. That means you still need to do some of the other things that we’re going to talk about in terms of directed approaches at improving mood and mental health if you are to, quote-unquote, “optimize” your mood and mental health, or if you are, let’s just say, trying to constantly improve your mood and mental health. But these are the necessary-but-not-sufficient pillars of mental health. So, under the heading of sleep, it’s safe to say that
14:00 most people need between six to eight hours of sleep per night. Some people can get away with five; some people need as much as nine or 10. Certainly, growing kids, babies, teenagers, and those that are suffering from some sort of illness are going to need more—as much as nine, 10, maybe even 12 hours of sleep per night. However, most people do well to get somewhere between six and eight hours of sleep per night. You’re just going to have to experiment and figure out what’s best for you. Now, one
14:30 thing I heard recently—so I can’t claim this as an original idea, but I think it is a really good way to think about sleep—is that sleep, much like physical fitness, is something that we have to constantly be working on. It’s not the sort of thing where you can get a great night’s sleep one night and then the next night just let all the protocols go and expect to get a great night’s sleep. You don’t have to be neurotic about getting a great night’s sleep; indeed, I do believe that we should strive to get enough quality sleep as many of the nights of our life as possible. And if you can’t do that, hopefully it’s for good reasons, but of
15:00 course, things happen in life: raising kids, you have emergencies, all-nighters to study so you can make sure you get that best possible grade on an exam, etc., etc. But we should all strive to get the best quality sleep that we can, and as much of it, most nights of our lives. So, it’s important to look at sleep as a process that you’re going to be working on for the rest of your life, just like fitness. And I don’t say that to overwhelm you; I say that so that if, on any given night, you get a poor night’s sleep, you don’t stress that too much; you just get back on the wagon and you try and get the
15:30 best possible night’s sleep the next night, and the next night, and the next night. Much like fitness, there’s no 10-week program that’s going to transform your physical fitness forever. Just like there’s no sleep program that’s going to transform your sleep forever. It’s a daily—or rather, I should say, nightly—investment, although some of the things that are going to positively impact your sleep or perhaps damage your sleep are things that you do during the daytime, right? So, avoid that caffeine too late in the day, get that morning sunlight, and on and on. But sleep is something that you’re constantly
16:00 investing in, and it is a critical investment for your mood and mental health. The other thing that’s not often discussed, and I really haven’t talked about terribly much on this podcast, is the importance of having a fairly consistent sleep routine. Now, I realize that not everybody can get to sleep at the exact same time each night and wake up at the exact same time each morning, and frankly, that’s not practical; I certainly don’t do that. However, what we know from the circadian health literature is that everybody should strive—again, that’s strive, nobody’s perfect, but
16:30 strive to get to sleep at more or less the same time each night and wake up at more or less the same time each morning. This turns out to be really important for regulating mood and mental health and, indeed, for improving your overall levels of sleep, getting the optimal amounts of slow-wave sleep (aka deep sleep) and rapid eye movement sleep. And what we know is that, ideally, you’re going to get to sleep within plus or minus one hour of your regular sleep time. So, if your regular to-bed time is 10:00—you’re used to getting in bed at 10:00 and falling
17:00 asleep somewhere around 10:30—then if the next night you fall asleep at 9:30, great, you’re still within the plus or minus one hour. And if the next night you go to sleep and you don’t fall asleep until 11:30, don’t sweat it; in fact, you’re still within that plus or minus one hour. However, if you start getting into a habit of going to bed at vastly different times, deviating more than or less than one hour from your normal to-bed time, then you’re going to start to run into issues such as waking up feeling groggy even if you got enough
17:30 sleep. So, even if you slept the full eight hours that you’re used to getting, people who go to sleep much later than they normally do or much earlier than they normally do start getting into issues of mood regulation and energy regulation, not just in the morning but in the afternoon. Likewise, try and wake up at more or less the same time each morning, plus or minus one hour. That’s really going to help you anchor your overall sleep schedule, and it’s really going to help lead to predictability of your overall levels of energy, mood, and focus throughout the day. The second
18:00 pillar in that Big Six is light. And I used to refer to this as sunlight, right? I’d say—and I’m going to say it again now, although I’ve covered this in a lot more detail, so again, just hitting the top-contour critical elements: try to view sunlight—that is, with your eyes, view sunlight—as early as possible after waking. Whenever I say that, the most common question I get is, “What do I do if I wake up before the sun comes out?” Unless you have superpowers that I’m not aware of, you can’t make the sun come out any earlier, so just flip on artificial lights as
18:30 needed until the sun comes out, and then get outside. Face east in the morning. Take off those sunglasses. It’s perfectly safe to look at low-solar-angle sunlight without sunglasses, providing you’re not driving into bright light and you crash. Get outside, look at the sunlight, definitely blink to protect your eyes as needed, but get that sunlight in your eyes early in the day. This has myriad positive effects on mood, focus, and alertness, and nighttime sleep later that night, and it does so through
19:00 a number of well-defined biological and endocrine hormonal pathways that I’ve discussed on many previous podcast episodes. And you want to do this for about 10 minutes on non-overcast days and as long as 20 or 30 minutes on overcast days. And that highlights the second most common question I get, which is, “What do I do if there’s no sun where I live? I live in an area where there’s no sunlight.” Look, if you live on planet Earth, there’s always sunlight. There might not be very much of it; it might be very overcast where you live; it might seem very dark; but trust me, there’s far
19:30 more photons—light energy—coming through that cloud cover, even in the darkest mornings of winter, than there are at night in those dark winters. So, get that light in your eyes and do it as consistently as possible. And also do that in the late afternoon and evening; that’s critical for regulating your circadian clock for reasons that I’ve talked about previously, but I’ll get into in a future podcast, really explaining how those clock oscillators and mechanisms work. But just to keep it really simple, since this is a toolkit episode for mood and mental
20:00 health, your mood and your mental health will benefit tremendously from getting morning sunlight in your eyes. Now, if you need to get more light in your eyes because, indeed, there’s just not enough sunlight or you don’t have the opportunity to get outside and view sunlight in the morning for whatever reason, you might invest in getting a bright light source that you can plug in. You probably want one that’s as bright as 10,000 lux—so that’s pretty bright. Those fall under the category of so-called SAD lamps—SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder lamps—and you can
20:30 purchase those; they can be somewhat expensive. You can also opt to get a 900 Lux drawing tablet. By the way, I have no financial relationship to any of these sorts of light sources, but you can find them pretty easily and, in the case of the 900 Lux light tablet, fairly inexpensively online. And you can put that on your desk or where you have your morning coffee and try and enhance the total amount of light that you’re getting in the morning. But frankly, nothing is as good as sunlight. So, if you can’t get sunlight, you might think about investing in one of those SAD lamps and
21:00 indeed, those SAD lamps aren’t as good as sunlight, but they are the next best thing if you really can’t get sunlight on a consistent basis. A few other fine points that I always get asked about: first of all, it is absolutely okay to wear eyeglasses or contact lenses. Those sorts of corrective lenses are actually going to focus the light to your retina, which is where you want it. However, this whole process of viewing morning sunlight and afternoon light does not—again, does not—work through a window or windshield, because windows and windshields filter out the relevant
21:30 wavelengths of light that you want to get directly onto your retina. Okay, so that’s the reality of it. In addition, please don’t feel that you have to look directly at the sun, and certainly don’t stare at the sun. Never force yourself to look at any light, sunlight or otherwise, that’s so bright that it’s painful to look at. So, if it’s comfortable for you to look directly at the sun and just blink every once in a while, and you can do that without any pain or discomfort or watering of the eyes, please do that. You’re getting a lot of photons into your eyes, and they’re transmitting that to your brain, and your brain to the rest of your body, and on and on.
22:00 However, if you find it uncomfortable to look directly at the sun, in that case, what you’ll want to do is offset your gaze to 10 or 20 degrees—which is nerd-speak for just a little bit to the right or a little bit to the left—and get the sunlight into your eyes indirectly. Okay. And I often also get asked, “Can I stand in the shade while I do this? What if I have an overhang in my apartment?” The best thing is, of course, going to be to face directly to the sun and look either directly at it or slightly offset. But if you can only get morning sunlight by going out onto your balcony and your
22:30 balcony doesn’t face east, rather it faces west, you’ll still get a lot of photons from the sun reaching your eyes there. But ideally, you would find some way to look toward the sun first thing in the morning. I realize that with kids and work and other obligations, this can be challenging, but it is a challenge worth meeting—meaning, don’t lose your job or forget to take care of your kids to do this, but you can bring your kids to do this, and indeed you should. It sets their circadian rhythms also. And people often will ask, “Does it work
23:00 on dogs?” And indeed, dogs and other animals have these exact same circuits and pathways for setting their circadian rhythm, so it’s great for them, too. Now, there are also clear and documented benefits for mood and mental health to getting bright light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight, throughout the day as much as you safely can. Please don’t get sunburned; don’t get cataracts by getting too much sunlight. But getting outdoors and getting sunlight in your eyes during your lunch break or a walk here and there, or if you have to remain indoors during the day, getting the
23:30 lights in that environment as bright as possible—as safely possible, I should say—is known to improve mood and mental health. Why? Because there’s a special so-called opsin within the cells of your eyes; it’s called melanopsin, that doesn’t respond to the same differences in color that are present in sunlight in the morning and the evening, but rather responds to the overall brightness of light. So, very bright lights, either from artificial sources or ideally from sunlight, activate these cells, and these cells project these little wires we call
24:00 axons into specific parts of the brain that improve your mood and feelings of well-being. So, I can’t give you a specific number of five minutes a day or 10 minutes a day; just get as much light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight, throughout the day as is safe for you, meaning where you’re not getting sunburned and you’re not damaging your retina. And if you want to know if you’re damaging your retina, anytime you have to blink or turn away from light because it’s really bright, that’s a signal that the light is too bright. So, while you want to place yourself into
24:30 bright environments, you don’t want to place yourself into any environment so bright that it’s painful to be in. Okay, so use that as a metric and you should be just fine. And the last point about light for mood and mental health is a relatively recent theme that’s emerging from the scientific literature and that really was driven home by a recent study that I mentioned a little bit earlier in the episode. This is the study published in Nature Mental Health showing that darkness during a particular stage of your 24-hour cycle—your so-called circadian rhythm—is also very beneficial
25:00 for mood and mental health, and it’s beneficial for mood and mental health in a way that is independent from light and from sleep. Now, what do I mean by that? There are a number of different ways that this can be examined, but in this particular study, which I like oh so much, entitled “Day and night light exposure are associated with psychiatric disorders: an objective light study in more than 85,000 people,” what the researchers did is they analyzed how much light and/or dark people were
25:30 getting across the 24-hour cycle and correlated that with mental health outcomes, looking at a range of different mental health challenges including bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, PTSD, and much more. And I’ll go into this study in a lot of detail in a future episode because it’s such an important study with so many gems within it that we should all know about. But one of the key things from this study is that the positive effects of daytime sunlight exposure and the positive effects of nighttime dark
26:00 exposure—that means, of course, the absence of light—are independent of one another. Put differently, making sure that you are in very dim to completely dark environments for a continuous six to eight hours within every 24-hour circadian cycle is correlated with much better mental health outcomes. In other words, we shouldn’t just think about the presence of light in the morning and throughout the day as positive for mental health—
26:30 that’s all true, it’s absolutely true, and this study further verifies that. But that’s been known for some time—indeed, decades—from the scientific research, and of course, it’s been known for thousands of years intuitively and subjectively without detailed scientific measurement. But in addition to that, this study shows that people who stay in very dim to dark environments for eight hours every 24 hours—or I should say approximately eight hours in every 24-hour cycle—they benefit from improved
27:00 mood and mental health outcomes in a way that’s independent of how much light they’re getting and independent of how much sleep they are getting. The point is this: the time when you wake up, consider that time zero, and then about—again, you don’t have to be super strict about this—about 16 to 24 hours after that wake-up time, you should be in a very dim to dark environment for that 16-hour to 24-hour period after wake-up. Okay, what do I mean by this? I mean if you go to sleep at 10:
27:30 p.m. and you wake up at 6:00 a.m., that 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. phase of your circadian cycle, you should be in a very dim light or entirely dark environment. This is a great opportunity to reference another study, which is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which shows that even having a small amount of light in the room—which isn’t even that bright—while you’re sleeping with eyes closed can disrupt morning glucose levels. So, in other words, keep your sleeping environment dark; keep
28:00 your nighttime environment dim to the best of your abilities, right? Certainly go out to dinner every once in a while, go to the movies, go out and have a party, enjoy yourself. If you have to go to the hospital, God forbid, or you have to tend to some emergency, do that. But to the extent that you can control it within the confines of life and its demands, keep your nighttime environment dim or dark, because that, independently of any sunlight and other bright light that you’re viewing during the daytime and afternoon, is going to positively improve
28:30 your mood and mental health. Now, moving on to the other pillars—and these I’m going to move through a bit more quickly than I have the previous two because we’ve done entire series on these—the third pillar is movement. And when I say movement, I mean exercise. As you all know, we should all strive to get anywhere from 180 to 220 minutes of Zone 2 cardio per week. That’s movement
29:00 that allows you to hold a conversation, but were you to do it more intensely, or even a bit more intensely, you wouldn’t be able to hold that conversation. In addition, we should do some VO2 max work; we should get our heart rate very high at least once a week doing some sort of movement that’s safe for you. So that could be running, or cycling, or swimming, or Pilates—whatever it is for you, getting your heart rate way, way up is also important, and to do that at least once a week. But daily movement, either cardiovascular training or resistance training—and it’s very, very clear that
29:30 we need both. Maybe not on the same days; in fact, I split them to separate days. Resistance training done for anywhere from six to 10 sets per muscle group, either close to or to failure—this could be with weights, it could be with bands, it could be with machines. All of that was covered in detail in the podcast series that I did with Dr. Andy Galpin, an exercise physiologist who’s expert in all those areas. I also did an episode on a foundational fitness protocol that has been distilled into a very simple
30:00 three-page PDF that you can get for completely zero cost by going to hubermanlab.com and just put “foundational fitness protocol PDF” and you’ll be taken to that toolkit. So, all of the details of a weekly exercise routine that involves daily movement, but also certainly in my case includes at least one full day of rest per week, because many people do indeed need one, maybe even two full days of rest per week. So that highlights the third pillar, movement. But we know that cardiovascular training and resistance training aren’t just great for our body; they also improve mood and mental health.
30:30 That’s so very clear from the research literature, so we can’t overlook those in a conversation about mood and mental health. Now, the fourth pillar is nutrition. And nutrition is a big topic; it’s a very barbed-wire topic if you get involved in this stuff online. You’ve got your people who believe that carnivore is better than vegan; you have the people who believe vegan is better than carnivore; most people are omnivores; you have your seed oil debates and on and on and on. We’re not going to touch any of that now. Indeed, if you want to learn more about
31:00 nutrition and what works and what doesn’t work for sake of aesthetic changes, weight loss, muscle gain, etc., I would refer you to the guest episode that we did with Dr. Layne Norton. You can find that again at hubermanlab.com, where we do a deep dive on all the variations in different nutritional protocols. But suffice to say that regardless of whether or not you’re vegan, omnivore, carnivore, or keto, or whatever, everybody needs to consume sufficient amounts, but not excess amounts, of quality calories per day. Now,
31:30 you may do that by intermittent fasting, you may do that by a more traditional meal scheduling, but everybody’s going to need to do that because your body and brain—and indeed the parts of your body and brain that translate to mood and mental health—require macronutrients (proteins, fats, and carbohydrates) as well as micronutrients. So, the key takeaway with nutrition is to make it quality nutrition within the bounds of whatever sort of nutritional program that you’re following, and that means getting most of your food sources from either
32:00 non-processed or minimally processed foods. These would be foods that you’re going to need to prepare or foods that would perish over time. These are not the sorts of foods that live in boxes and cans and other packages that would allow them to live on the shelves forever and ever. And as I say that, I know many people are shouting, “What about rice? Rice can live on the shelf for a long time.” And yes, okay, I consider rice a minimally processed food because, of course, it can live on the shelf for a long period of time. And here I’m just going to back out
32:30 of the whole conversation about nutrition at this point because, as you can probably tell, it’s a deep series of rabbit holes that we can fall into and really get distracted. The point is: make sure you’re getting enough food; don’t overeat. We know energy toxicity is a problem for not just body composition, but for mental health. So, you want to get enough calories, but not too few calories, and you want to make sure that you’re getting them from quality sources. And I say that because, of course, food is not just the substrate for the cellular repair and, indeed, production of tissues
33:00 in your body, but it’s also the substrate for all the sorts of neurotransmitters, right, which are derived from amino acid precursors that are derived from food. All of that dopamine stuff and serotonin stuff is derived from amino acids that come from food sources. So, the link between nutrition and mental health should now be an obvious one. As we all know, quality nutrition influences, of course, our physical health, but also our mental health and our cognitive functioning—our memory, our ability to learn new things, and to focus. And we
33:30 know that one of the most important features of high-quality nutrition is making sure that we get enough vitamins and minerals from high-quality unprocessed or minimally processed sources, as well as enough probiotics and prebiotics and fiber to support basically all the cellular functions in our body, including the gut microbiome. Now, I, like most everybody, try to get optimal nutrition from whole foods, ideally mostly from minimally processed or non-processed foods. However, one of the challenges that I and so many other people face is getting enough servings
34:00 of high-quality fruits and vegetables per day, as well as fiber and probiotics that often accompany those fruits and vegetables. That’s why, way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast, I started drinking AG1. And so I’m delighted that AG1 is sponsoring the Huberman Lab podcast. The reason I started taking AG1, and the reason I still drink AG1 once or twice a day, is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs—that is, it provides insurance that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and fiber to ensure optimal mental
34:30 health, physical health, and performance. If you’d like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim a special offer: they’re giving away five free travel packs plus a year’s supply of vitamin D3 K2. Again, that’s drinkag1.com/huberman to claim that special offer. The fifth pillar in the Big Six is social connection. And we’re going to talk a little bit more about this later in the episode, but let’s just be very brief and specific about this: we all need to strive to limit the number of
35:00 social interactions that we feel tax or even vex us, that cause us stress. This is something that was covered in depth in the episode with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, where she talked about the fact that we don’t just have a nervous system that regulates itself through experience and through our thoughts and our actions; we are, as a species, interacting with other nervous systems—both of our own species, other humans, as well as non-human species: dogs and cats, and if you have
35:30 them, horses and other animals. So, we need to think about our nervous system as being both regulated from the inside and through our own actions and choices and thoughts, but also through interaction with other nervous systems. And while we don’t always have as much control over which social interactions or work interactions we have to engage in, we should really strive to understand and, indeed, pay some serious attention to whether or not certain types of social interactions are what she referred to as net savings,
36:00 neutral, or taxing. Right? Certain types of social interactions with certain people or groups of people just make us feel taxed; it makes us feel stressed; it leads to negative affect—that is, not good feelings or emotions—and often elevated levels of autonomic arousal that leave us ruminating and leave us having challenges with sleep. We really should all strive to limit those interactions to the extent that we can. On the reverse side of that, as Lisa Feldman Barrett so
36:30 beautifully pointed out, we also have the capability to regulate each other’s nervous systems in ways that produce savings—that is, that allow us to feel and, indeed, cause physiological changes that make us feel not just happier, not just relaxed, not just happy because we enjoy interacting with somebody or a group, but that give us a savings, that give us the kind of resources—literally metabolic and neurochemical resources—that make us feel more capable and give us a sense of elevated mood and improved
37:00 mental health when we are not engaging with those people. And this is highly subjective, of course, but you should be able to distinguish—in fact, I encourage you to spend a little bit of time, maybe even just five or 10 minutes, thinking about who are the individuals and groups that I interact with that leave me feeling taxed, that really seem to drain my energy and have me ruminating and in a not-good space when I leave whatever interaction I had with them. This could be a real interaction or online interaction. Indeed, I did this the other day based on Lisa’s
37:30 suggestion; I found it to be tremendously useful. What I did is I decided to—and by the way, this was happening on a run where I was thinking, a lot of my mind is in a conversation with people that aren’t even here. I was working through a conversation; I was thinking about what I would say, what I did say, what they said in an interaction that, unfortunately, was pretty unpleasant. It wasn’t extremely unpleasant, but it was pretty unpleasant. And I realized, okay, that is a sort of interaction that I would like to avoid in the future, because it wasn’t happening right then
38:00 but it was carried forward into a portion of my day—my morning run—that for me is normally very pleasureful and quite sacred to me, actually. So, paying some attention to how much of your internal dialogue is with yourself versus with others, and how much of that is positive or negative, is extremely beneficial. And I’m not talking about always just thinking about oneself and not thinking about others; to the contrary, we also need to think, as Lisa pointed out, about who are the people with whom we interact with or observe
38:30 that lead us to have ongoing dialogue with them in our mind, or think about those interactions in ways that give us energy, that lead to energetic savings—literally metabolic savings—that we can apply not just in those interactions, but in our work endeavors and our solo endeavors, whatever that we’re doing when we are away from those people. So, while this concept of savings or neutral or taxation of our metabolic and our neurochemical systems might seem a little bit squishy, it is not squishy.
39:00 This is a neurobiological concept; it’s also a psychological concept. And it’s one that I’m so glad that Lisa brought up because social connection, social interaction, is so vital to our mood and mental health. But oftentimes we hear “social connection,” we think, “Oh, that means we have to spend a lot of time with friends, we have to organize dinner parties.” Sure, that’s all fine and good if you can do that, and I do, of course, encourage people to spend time with those that they love. But it’s also important to take a step back and just think a bit, maybe even write out a bit,
39:30 who are the groups and sorts of individuals and interactions that really tax you, who are the people you find neutral, and what are the individuals and groups that really provide what Lisa referred to as savings—that is, they tap into the metabolic and neurochemical pathways that lead us to have improved mood and mental health not just during those interactions, but away from those interactions as well, and often pervasively and extremely positively so. This is no small deal; this is a really important aspect of our mental health. Now, the sixth pillar in
40:00 the Big Six is stress control. And the reason it’s included is that, look, stress is going to happen; life is filled with so-called stressors. And for a good number of years—in fact, the last 15 years—there’s been a lot of debate in the field of psychology and neuroscience as well, whether or not stress is good for us, whether or not stress is bad for us, whether or not we simply need to reframe stress as good or bad. And to some extent, all of that is true. We know that chronic stress is not good for our memory, our immune system, or our
40:30 health. We also know that if you understand the reality—which is that stress also allows us to harness our mental and physical resources to perform better than we would otherwise in certain circumstances, and that provided we can get to sleep each night, that perhaps stress isn’t so bad and perhaps is even performance-enhancing. I talked about this in the guest episode with Dr. Alia Crum from the psychology department at Stanford, and I’ve talked about this in other podcasts as well. And I’m not here to tell you that stress is good for
41:00 you; I’m not here to tell you that stress is bad for you. What I am going to tell you is that it is extremely important that we all have readily accessible stress management tools that work the first time and every time. And these fall into two categories: the first category are real-time tools—so, tools that you can use to reduce your level of stress in real time. And the best way that I’m aware of that’s grounded in excellent physiology and neuroscience to reduce your stress in real time is the so-called physiological sigh. I did not invent this pattern of breathing; it’s
41:30 not breathwork per se. This is a pattern of breathing that we all naturally do in our sleep to restore carbon dioxide and oxygen levels to their proper ratios. We also do it periodically throughout the day without noticing. Indeed, we have a defined or specific neural circuit in our brain that extends to our diaphragm and communicates with aspects of our heart, etc., that allow physiological sighs to calm us down faster—at least in my knowledge—than any other directed protocol. And the physiological sigh, as
42:00 many of you know, is very simple and straightforward. Anyone can do this. You simply do a big inhale through your nose, try and maximize the inflation of your lungs, and then, before you exhale, sneak in another brief inhalation—even if it’s just a tiny micro-inhalation—to maximally inflate the lungs. And that has an important effect on the little sacs in the lungs called the alveoli of the lungs; it’s going to open up whatever alveoli we collapsed in there. And then you’re going to do a long, extended exhale through the mouth. And typically
42:30 just one—although sometimes it requires two or three—but just one physiological sigh is effective in bringing down one’s level of stress significantly enough that you don’t need to do it again. So, this can be done essentially anywhere and by anyone. I suppose you probably couldn’t do it if you were underwater—or certainly don’t do it if you’re underwater—but otherwise, it’s a very safe and very effective way to calm down and reduce your levels of stress in real time, maybe before public speaking or in whatever circumstance you feel you need to calm down in real time. So, I’ll
43:00 demonstrate the physiological sigh for you here. I’ve done this many times before in previous episodes, but for those of you that haven’t heard or seen those episodes, I feel obligated to do it again now. Okay, so it’s a deep inhale through the nose, followed by another brief inhale through the nose, and then a long exhale through the mouth. And before you start asking questions about, “What do I do if I have a deviated septum? Can it be just through the mouth?”—do the first two through the nose, do the third through the mouth. So, it’s like
43:30 this. And indeed, I feel calmer. And indeed, if you do it, you will feel calmer. You’ll notice that second inhale through the nose was sharp in the sense that I had to really push—put some physical effort into making it happen. And my shoulders jolted upwards—if you’re just listening to this and not watching, my shoulders jolted upwards. That second inhale through the nose is important for a variety of reasons I’ve talked about elsewhere. So, the physiological sigh is going to be the
44:00 go-to protocol for you. Again, not invented by me—this is not “Huberman breathing”—this is a pattern of breathing discovered in the 1930s by physiologists. It’s hardwired into our nervous system, and that’s what makes it so great: it works the first time, and it works every time. So, that’s, to my knowledge, the best way to control your stress in real time. Now, why is that important for mood and mental health? As we’ll talk about later, if you want to access your so-called generative drive—a theme that we’re going to get into in a bit more detail—
44:30 this is something that came up during the series with Dr. Paul Conti—you will learn that stress and anger and negative emotions, while they can be very motivating, very arousing, they are not going to be good for your long-term mood and mental health, period. So, having tools to regulate your stress and your levels of anger, your levels of reactivity, and also to elevate your feelings of agency and control over your life—starting with agency and control over your physiology, your internal state—is going to be vital.
45:00 And what I love about the physiological sigh is that, of course, it’s completely zero cost, but also there’s a dedicated circuit in your brain and body for this particular pattern of breathing. We do it spontaneously, but you can do it intentionally, and it works just as well, if not better, to regulate your levels of stress—that is, to bring them down—which has outsize positive effects on your mood and mental health, not just in the moment, but also should improve your confidence that when stress comes—
45:30 because the world is filled with stressors—it’s not “if,” it’s “when”—when stress comes, that you will have a physiologically, scientifically supported tool to deal with and reduce that stress. Now, in addition, I do believe it’s important for sake of mood and mental health to also have a tool or a protocol to raise your stress threshold—that is, to increase your capacity to deal with life stressors without them feeling so stressful. And there are a number of different ways to do this, but they all center around elevating your levels of
46:00 adrenaline, epinephrine, and norepinephrine (noradrenaline). Those are the same thing; they just have multiple names. Forgive me, I didn’t give the same two things four names, so don’t blame me; blame the other scientists that did it. The point is, there are several ways that you can self-induce elevations of noradrenaline and adrenaline, and then to learn to anchor your mind and your thinking to stay calm in the elevated adrenaline states as a practice for when stressors hit you in the outside world
46:30 and your adrenaline and noradrenaline spike. Now, one of the best ways to do this—because it works the first time and every time, and is also zero cost (in fact, it will save you money)—is to put yourself in a cold shower or other deliberate cold exposure environment. Most everyone has access to a cold shower—not everyone, but most people—and of course, by turning off the heat, you’re going to reduce heating costs, right, your water bill. So, getting into a cold shower for a minute or so to elevate your
47:00 levels of adrenaline and learning to either use your breathing—you could do physiological sighs—or to distract yourself, or whatever tools and approaches you need to be able to stay calm while you have elevated levels of adrenaline in your body. And the reason deliberate cold exposure works so well to do this is that it is pretty non-negotiable. Even if you really love cold showers or cold plunges or things of that sort, you’re still going to get that elevated adrenaline and noradrenaline.
47:30 It’s pretty much non-negotiable. For the first 10 or 15 seconds that you get into a cold plunge or a cold shower, you should fully expect yourself to feel stress and for your breathing to accelerate. And then your goal is to try and anchor or control your breathing in that stressful environment. The reason for doing this is that it’s a practice; it’s a practice that’s going to translate to a better ability to manage your internal state and, therefore, your thinking, your cognition, and your ability to make good decisions under stress. It’s not about becoming untouched by stress;
48:00 it’s about being able to better navigate stress. Indeed, I think of this as analogous to driving in fog—something that I had to learn to do because I grew up in the Bay Area and it can be very foggy there sometimes. And of course, you don’t learn to drive in fog the first day you learn how to drive. But the first time you hit heavy fog driving, where you can only see one reflector in front of you at a time, it is truly stressful, right? You don’t know if you’re going to come up on another vehicle in an instant, which of course can happen. So you have to adjust a number of things;
48:30 you have to learn how to do that. And while I would never elect to drive in fog, learning to drive in fog teaches you how to be comfortable driving in different weather environments. Same thing with driving in a rainstorm, or for you East Coasters from the Northeast, learning how to drive in a snowstorm. You would never elect to do that, but once you do it a few times, you feel more comfortable in those extreme conditions. So that’s really what raising your stress threshold is all about. Of course, do it safely; do it under conditions in which you’re not going to get hurt or anyone else will get hurt. But learning how to do this can be extremely
49:00 beneficial. And of course, deliberate cold exposure isn’t the only way, but frankly, it’s the most reliable way and it’s the most versatile way to do that, because you can do it in your shower or in a cold plunge at home. So you can practice these things. Again, safety first: always make sure you’re not exposing yourself to cold to the extent that you’re going to damage yourself mentally or physically. But it’s a great practice, and you could probably think of other ways to spike your adrenaline that are safe. And of course, life will spike your adrenaline, so you can also use real life
49:30 as your stress inoculation tool, and we all have to do that anyway. What I’m suggesting is that you adopt a real-time tool—physiological sighs—and that you adopt at least one offline tool that you do anywhere from one to three, maybe seven days a week, but at least one day a week, that you put yourself into a cold shower, deliberate cold exposure, not for sake of increasing metabolism or anything else, but really just to learn how to calm yourself and maintain clear cognition when stress hits, because indeed stress is going to hit. So that’s the Big Six for improving
50:00 mood and mental health. And the Big Six apply—that is, they are the cornerstone for mood and mental health regardless of who you are, regardless of your age, dealing with an acute or a severe mood or mental health disorder, or you find yourself to be reasonably healthy with respect to mood and mental health and you simply want your mood and mental health to be stable and/or improve over time. Now, the reason why the Big Six, those six pillars, are so important for
50:30 mood and mental health, and indeed form a critical component of what Dr. Paul Conti referred to as the first principles of self-care, is that those six pillars establish a milieu—that is, an environment—of neurochemicals, including neuromodulators such as dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, and other neurochemicals, as well as hormones—testosterone, estrogen, prolactin, cortisol, and immune molecules, and on and on—that
51:00 lead to a high degree of predictability in your brain and nervous system. Now, what do I mean by that? Why would predictability be such a key component of mood and mental health? Is it really just about knowing that you’re going to feel energized in the early part of the day and tired at the end of the day? Now, that might be part of it, but that’s not the major takeaway. The major takeaway is that, as Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett so aptly pointed out, your brain and indeed your entire nervous system has a couple of major jobs. It has the job of
51:30 regulating your breathing and your heart rate, etc. It also has the job of regulating your thinking and your planning and your memory. Those are the jobs of the brain and nervous system that we normally hear about. But if we think about the more macro jobs that the brain has, the key function of the brain—certainly the parts of the brain that are more recently evolved, the ones involved in thinking and planning, etc.—are really involved in generating predictions: predictions about what’s going to happen next and whether
52:00 or not you’re going to be prepared for what’s going to happen next. And indeed, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett also beautifully illustrated this model of the brain as regulating a brain-body budget and moods, and a related topic which she called affect. Okay, I’ll explain what affect is in a moment, setting the stage for being able to better predict what’s going to happen next and, therefore, regulating your mood in the moment. Let’s just take a moment and explore that
52:30 statement in a little bit more detail. Essentially, what she was saying, and what I’m now again saying, is that your brain and body go through different states. Your state at a given moment can be labeled as your affect. Your affect includes a lot of different things, including levels of autonomic arousal, levels of hormones, levels of transmitters—all of that stuff—but it falls under the umbrella of affect. Affect essentially sets the stage for particular emotions to be more likely or less likely to emerge. So emotion and
53:00 affect aren’t the same thing. Affect is a bit more general and undergirds the possibility of having certain moods, like feeling elated, happy, or sad, or depressed. It really sets the general stage for different types of specific emotions, even highly specific emotions. So in that way, when you’re taking care of the Big Six, when you’re tending to these six pillars on a regular basis—and I should point out that we really want to tend to those six pillars every
53:30 single day or every single 24 hours—we really need to make those a regular investment to the extent that we can. When we do that, we create a neurochemical and a neural milieu that allows the brain to be in a better predictive state. It allows the brain to give rise to certain affects—spelled a-f-f-e-c-t-s—that lead to certain emotions being more or less likely to occur. Put very simply:
54:00 when we’re tending to those six pillars on a regular basis, we feel better more generally, and therefore the emotions that we tend to have under different conditions—even conditions of a difficult interaction with a coworker or with a family member—tend to be more positive than if we are not tending to those six pillars. Now, in some sense, that’s a “duh” statement. For instance, if you’re sleep-deprived, if you’re not fed well—like you haven’t eaten in a few hours—of course you’re going to be more irritable, you’re going to be more reactive, you are going to be
54:30 more emotionally labile. But sleep and nutrition are just two of those six core pillars. When we talk about those core pillars and the necessity for tending to them on a regular, every-24-hour basis, what we’re really talking about is creating a milieu within our brain and nervous system that allows the nervous system to do what it does best—and in fact, what its main job is to do—which is to predict what’s going to happen next. Because, as Lisa Feldman Barrett pointed out, emotions are really context-dependent states that allow us to
55:00 navigate not just our present circumstances, but they are our nervous system and brain’s best guess about the circumstances that we are soon going to encounter. Now, I don’t offer you all of that as a bunch of tangled mess of nerd-speak to confuse you. What I’m saying is that by tending to those six core pillars, you are shifting the likely affects that you will experience and, therefore, the likely emotions that you’ll experience. So you’re biasing your whole system towards
55:30 more positive affect and more positive emotions regardless of what your life circumstances happen to be and the stressors that you encounter. And indeed, you also are including that sixth pillar of stress control, so when those stressors arrive, you will be better able to navigate them. Now, this view of emotion regulation, of mood and mental health, is certainly not a novel concept. People have talked about the physiological regulation of mood from the time of William James and even earlier. It’s been a long-standing question, for instance, or
56:00 debate in psychology and neuroscience as well, whether or not stress is good for us, whether or not stress is bad for us, whether or not we simply need to reframe stress as good or bad. And to some extent, all of that is true. We know that chronic stress is not good for our memory, our immune system, or our health. We also know that if you understand the reality—which is that stress also allows us to harness our mental and physical resources to perform better than we would otherwise in certain circumstances, and that provided we can get to sleep each night, that perhaps stress isn’t so bad and perhaps is even performance-enhancing. I talked about this in the guest episode with Dr. Alia Crum from the psychology department at Stanford, and I’ve talked about this in other podcasts as well. And I’m not here to tell you that stress is good for
56:30 you; I’m not here to tell you that stress is bad for you. What I am going to tell you is that it is extremely important that we all have readily accessible stress management tools that work the first time and every time. And these fall into two categories: the first category are real-time tools—so, tools that you can use to reduce your level of stress in real time. And the best way that I’m aware of that’s grounded in excellent physiology and neuroscience to reduce your stress in real time is the so-called physiological sigh. I did not invent this pattern of breathing; it’s
57:00 not breathwork per se. This is a pattern of breathing that we all naturally do in our sleep to restore carbon dioxide and oxygen levels to their proper ratios. We also do it periodically throughout the day without noticing. Indeed, we have a defined or specific neural circuit in our brain that extends to our diaphragm and communicates with aspects of our heart, etc., that allow physiological sighs to calm us down faster—at least in my knowledge—than any other directed protocol. And the physiological sigh, as
57:30 many of you know, is very simple and straightforward. Anyone can do this. You simply do a big inhale through your nose, try and maximize the inflation of your lungs, and then, before you exhale, sneak in another brief inhalation—even if it’s just a tiny micro-inhalation—to maximally inflate the lungs. And that has an important effect on the little sacs in the lungs called the alveoli of the lungs; it’s going to open up whatever alveoli we collapsed in there. And then you’re going to do a long, extended exhale through the mouth. And typically
58:00 just one—although sometimes it requires two or three—but just one physiological sigh is effective in bringing down one’s level of stress significantly enough that you don’t need to do it again. So, this can be done essentially anywhere and by anyone. I suppose you probably couldn’t do it if you were underwater—or certainly don’t do it if you’re underwater—but otherwise, it’s a very safe and very effective way to calm down and reduce your levels of stress in real time, maybe before public speaking or in whatever circumstance you feel you need to calm down in real time. So, I’ll
58:30 demonstrate the physiological sigh for you here. I’ve done this many times before in previous episodes, but for those of you that haven’t heard or seen those episodes, I feel obligated to do it again now. Okay, so it’s a deep inhale through the nose, followed by another brief inhale through the nose, and then a long exhale through the mouth. And before you start asking questions about, “What do I do if I have a deviated septum? Can it be just through the mouth?”—do the first two through the nose, do the third through the mouth. So, it’s like
59:00 this. And indeed, I feel calmer. And indeed, if you do it, you will feel calmer. You’ll notice that second inhale through the nose was sharp in the sense that I had to really push—put some physical effort into making it happen. And my shoulders jolted upwards—if you’re just listening to this and not watching, my shoulders jolted upwards. That second inhale through the nose is important for a variety of reasons I’ve talked about elsewhere. So, the physiological sigh is going to be the
59:30 go-to protocol for you. Again, not invented by me—this is not “Huberman breathing”—this is a pattern of breathing discovered in the 1930s by physiologists. It’s hardwired into our nervous system, and that’s what makes it so great: it works the first time, and it works every time. So, that’s, to my knowledge, the best way to control your stress in real time. Now, why is that important for mood and mental health? As we’ll talk about later, if you want to access your so-called generative drive—a theme that we’re going to get into in a bit more detail—
1:00:00 this is something that came up during the series with Dr. Paul Conti—you will learn that stress and anger and negative emotions, while they can be very motivating, very arousing, they are not going to be good for your long-term mood and mental health, period. So, having tools to regulate your stress and your levels of anger, your levels of reactivity, and also to elevate your feelings of agency and control over your life—starting with agency and control over your physiology, your internal state—is going to be vital.
1:00:30 And what I love about the physiological sigh is that, of course, it’s completely zero cost, but also there’s a dedicated circuit in your brain and body for this particular pattern of breathing. We do it spontaneously, but you can do it intentionally, and it works just as well, if not better, to regulate your levels of stress—that is, to bring them down—which has outsize positive effects on your mood and mental health, not just in the moment, but also should improve your confidence that when stress comes—
1:01:00 because the world is filled with stressors—it’s not “if,” it’s “when”—when stress comes, that you will have a physiologically, scientifically supported tool to deal with and reduce that stress. Now, in addition, I do believe it’s important for sake of mood and mental health to also have a tool or a protocol to raise your stress threshold—that is, to increase your capacity to deal with life stressors without them feeling so stressful. And there are a number of different ways to do this, but they all center around elevating your levels of
1:01:30 adrenaline, epinephrine, and norepinephrine (noradrenaline). Those are the same thing; they just have multiple names. Forgive me, I didn’t give the same two things four names, so don’t blame me; blame the other scientists that did it. The point is, there are several ways that you can self-induce elevations of noradrenaline and adrenaline, and then to learn to anchor your mind and your thinking to stay calm in the elevated adrenaline states as a practice for when stressors hit you in the outside world
1:02:00 and your adrenaline and noradrenaline spike. Now, one of the best ways to do this—because it works the first time and every time, and is also zero cost (in fact, it will save you money)—is to put yourself in a cold shower or other deliberate cold exposure environment. Most everyone has access to a cold shower—not everyone, but most people—and of course, by turning off the heat, you’re going to reduce heating costs, right, your water bill. So, getting into a cold shower for a minute or so to elevate your
1:02:30 levels of adrenaline and learning to either use your breathing—you could do physiological sighs—or to distract yourself, or whatever tools and approaches you need to be able to stay calm while you have elevated levels of adrenaline in your body. And the reason deliberate cold exposure works so well to do this is that it is pretty non-negotiable. Even if you really love cold showers or cold plunges or things of that sort, you’re still going to get that elevated adrenaline and noradrenaline.
1:03:00 It’s pretty much non-negotiable. For the first 10 or 15 seconds that you get into a cold plunge or a cold shower, you should fully expect yourself to feel stress and for your breathing to accelerate. And then your goal is to try and anchor or control your breathing in that stressful environment. The reason for doing this is that it’s a practice; it’s a practice that’s going to translate to a better ability to manage your internal state and, therefore, your thinking, your cognition, and your ability to make good decisions under stress. It’s not about becoming untouched by stress;
1:03:30 it’s about being able to better navigate stress. Indeed, I think of this as analogous to driving in fog—something that I had to learn to do because I grew up in the Bay Area and it can be very foggy there sometimes. And of course, you don’t learn to drive in fog the first day you learn how to drive. But the first time you hit heavy fog driving, where you can only see one reflector in front of you at a time, it is truly stressful, right? You don’t know if you’re going to come up on another vehicle in an instant, which of course can happen. So you have to adjust a number of things;
1:04:00 you have to learn how to do that. And while I would never elect to drive in fog, learning to drive in fog teaches you how to be comfortable driving in different weather environments. Same thing with driving in a rainstorm, or for you East Coasters from the Northeast, learning how to drive in a snowstorm. You would never elect to do that, but once you do it a few times, you feel more comfortable in those extreme conditions. So that’s really what raising your stress threshold is all about. Of course, do it safely; do it under conditions in which you’re not going to get hurt or anyone else will get hurt. But learning how to do this can be extremely
1:04:30 beneficial. And of course, deliberate cold exposure isn’t the only way, but frankly, it’s the most reliable way and it’s the most versatile way to do that, because you can do it in your shower or in a cold plunge at home. So you can practice these things. Again, safety first: always make sure you’re not exposing yourself to cold to the extent that you’re going to damage yourself mentally or physically. But it’s a great practice, and you could probably think of other ways to spike your adrenaline that are safe. And of course, life will spike your adrenaline, so you can also use real life
1:05:00 as your stress inoculation tool, and we all have to do that anyway. What I’m suggesting is that you adopt a real-time tool—physiological sighs—and that you adopt at least one offline tool that you do anywhere from one to three, maybe seven days a week, but at least one day a week, that you put yourself into a cold shower, deliberate cold exposure, not for sake of increasing metabolism or anything else, but really just to learn how to calm yourself and maintain clear cognition when stress hits, because indeed stress is going to hit. So that’s the Big Six for improving
1:05:30 mood and mental health. And the Big Six apply—that is, they are the cornerstone for mood and mental health regardless of who you are, regardless of your age, dealing with an acute or a severe mood or mental health disorder, or you find yourself to be reasonably healthy with respect to mood and mental health and you simply want your mood and mental health to be stable and/or improve over time. Now, the reason why the Big Six, those six pillars, are so important for
1:06:00 mood and mental health, and indeed form a critical component of what Dr. Paul Conti referred to as the first principles of self-care, is that those six pillars establish a milieu—that is, an environment—of neurochemicals, including neuromodulators such as dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, and other neurochemicals, as well as hormones—testosterone, estrogen, prolactin, cortisol, and immune molecules, and on and on—that
1:06:30 lead to a high degree of predictability in your brain and nervous system. Now, what do I mean by that? Why would predictability be such a key component of mood and mental health? Is it really just about knowing that you’re going to feel energized in the early part of the day and tired at the end of the day? Now, that might be part of it, but that’s not the major takeaway. The major takeaway is that, as Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett so aptly pointed out, your brain and indeed your entire nervous system has a couple of major jobs. It has the job of
1:07:00 regulating your breathing and your heart rate, etc. It also has the job of regulating your thinking and your planning and your memory. Those are the jobs of the brain and nervous system that we normally hear about. But if we think about the more macro jobs that the brain has, the key function of the brain—certainly the parts of the brain that are more recently evolved, the ones involved in thinking and planning, etc.—are really involved in generating predictions: predictions about what’s going to happen next and whether
1:07:30 or not you’re going to be prepared for what’s going to happen next. And indeed, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett also beautifully illustrated this model of the brain as regulating a brain-body budget and moods, and a related topic which she called affect. Okay, I’ll explain what affect is in a moment, setting the stage for being able to better predict what’s going to happen next and, therefore, regulating your mood in the moment. Let’s just take a moment and explore that
1:08:00 statement in a little bit more detail. Essentially, what she was saying, and what I’m now again saying, is that your brain and body go through different states. Your state at a given moment can be labeled as your affect. Your affect includes a lot of different things, including levels of autonomic arousal, levels of hormones, levels of transmitters—all of that stuff—but it falls under the umbrella of affect. Affect essentially sets the stage for particular emotions to be more likely or less likely to emerge. So emotion and
1:08:30 affect aren’t the same thing. Affect is a bit more general and undergirds the possibility of having certain moods, like feeling elated, happy, or sad, or depressed. It really sets the general stage for different types of specific emotions, even highly specific emotions. So in that way, when you’re taking care of the Big Six, when you’re tending to these six pillars on a regular basis—and I should point out that we really want to tend to those six pillars every
1:09:00 single day or every single 24 hours—we really need to make those a regular investment to the extent that we can. When we do that, we create a neurochemical and a neural milieu that allows the brain to be in a better predictive state. It allows the brain to give rise to certain affects—spelled a-f-f-e-c-t-s—that lead to certain emotions being more or less likely to occur. Put very simply:
1:09:30 when we’re tending to those six pillars on a regular basis, we feel better more generally, and therefore the emotions that we tend to have under different conditions—even conditions of a difficult interaction with a coworker or with a family member—tend to be more positive than if we are not tending to those six pillars. Now, in some sense, that’s a “duh” statement. For instance, if you’re sleep-deprived, if you’re not fed well—like you haven’t eaten in a few hours—of course you’re going to be more irritable, you’re going to be more reactive, you are going to be
1:10:00 more emotionally labile. But sleep and nutrition are just two of those six core pillars. When we talk about those core pillars and the necessity for tending to them on a regular, every-24-hour basis, what we’re really talking about is creating a milieu within our brain and nervous system that allows the nervous system to do what it does best—and in fact, what its main job is to do—which is to predict what’s going to happen next. Because, as Lisa Feldman Barrett pointed out, emotions are really context-dependent states that allow us to
1:10:30 navigate not just our present circumstances, but they are our nervous system and brain’s best guess about the circumstances that we are soon going to encounter. Now, I don’t offer you all of that as a bunch of tangled mess of nerd-speak to confuse you. What I’m saying is that by tending to those six core pillars, you are shifting the likely affects that you will experience and, therefore, the likely emotions that you’ll experience. So you’re biasing your whole system towards
1:11:00 more positive affect and more positive emotions regardless of what your life circumstances happen to be and the stressors that you encounter. And indeed, you also are including that sixth pillar of stress control, so when those stressors arrive, you will be better able to navigate them. Now, this view of emotion regulation, of mood and mental health, is certainly not a novel concept. People have talked about the physiological regulation of mood from the time of William James and even earlier. It’s been a long-standing question, for instance, or
1:11:30 debate in psychology and neuroscience as well, whether or not stress is good for us, whether or not stress is bad for us, whether or not we simply need to reframe stress as good or bad. And to some extent, all of that is true. We know that chronic stress is not good for our memory, our immune system, or our health. We also know that if you understand the reality—which is that stress also allows us to harness our mental and physical resources to perform better than we would otherwise in certain circumstances, and that provided we can get to sleep each night, that perhaps stress isn’t so bad and perhaps is even performance-enhancing. I talked about this in the guest episode with Dr. Alia Crum from the psychology department at Stanford, and I’ve talked about this in other podcasts as well. And I’m not here to tell you that stress is good for
1:12:00 you; I’m not here to tell you that stress is bad for you. What I am going to tell you is that it is extremely important that we all have readily accessible stress management tools that work the first time and every time. And these fall into two categories: the first category are real-time tools—so, tools that you can use to reduce your level of stress in real time. And the best way that I’m aware of that’s grounded in excellent physiology and neuroscience to reduce your stress in real time is the so-called physiological sigh. I did not invent this pattern of breathing; it’s
1:12:30 not breathwork per se. This is a pattern of breathing that we all naturally do in our sleep to restore carbon dioxide and oxygen levels to their proper ratios. We also do it periodically throughout the day without noticing. Indeed, we have a defined or specific neural circuit in our brain that extends to our diaphragm and communicates with aspects of our heart, etc., that allow physiological sighs to calm us down faster—at least in my knowledge—than any other directed protocol. And the physiological sigh, as
1:13:00 many of you know, is very simple and straightforward. Anyone can do this. You simply do a big inhale through your nose, try and maximize the inflation of your lungs, and then, before you exhale, sneak in another brief inhalation—even if it’s just a tiny micro-inhalation—to maximally inflate the lungs. And that has an important effect on the little sacs in the lungs called the alveoli of the lungs; it’s going to open up whatever alveoli we collapsed in there. And then you’re going to do a long, extended exhale through the mouth. And typically
1:13:30 just one—although sometimes it requires two or three—but just one physiological sigh is effective in bringing down one’s level of stress significantly enough that you don’t need to do it again. So, this can be done essentially anywhere and by anyone. I suppose you probably couldn’t do it if you were underwater—or certainly don’t do it if you’re underwater—but otherwise, it’s a very safe and very effective way to calm down and reduce your levels of stress in real time, maybe before public speaking or in whatever circumstance you feel you need to calm down in real time. So, I’ll
1:14:00 demonstrate the physiological sigh for you here. I’ve done this many times before in previous episodes, but for those of you that haven’t heard or seen those episodes, I feel obligated to do it again now. Okay, so it’s a deep inhale through the nose, followed by another brief inhale through the nose, and then a long exhale through the mouth. And before you start asking questions about, “What do I do if I have a deviated septum? Can it be just through the mouth?”—do the first two through the nose, do the third through the mouth. So, it’s like
1:14:30 this. And indeed, I feel calmer. And indeed, if you do it, you will feel calmer. You’ll notice that second inhale through the nose was sharp in the sense that I had to really push—put some physical effort into making it happen. And my shoulders jolted upwards—if you’re just listening to this and not watching, my shoulders jolted upwards. That second inhale through the nose is important for a variety of reasons I’ve talked about elsewhere. So, the physiological sigh is going to be the
1:15:00 go-to protocol for you. Again, not invented by me—this is not “Huberman breathing”—this is a pattern of breathing discovered in the 1930s by physiologists. It’s hardwired into our nervous system, and that’s what makes it so great: it works the first time, and it works every time. So, that’s, to my knowledge, the best way to control your stress in real time. Now, why is that important for mood and mental health? As we’ll talk about later, if you want to access your so-called generative drive—a theme that we’re going to get into in a bit more detail—
1:15:30 this is something that came up during the series with Dr. Paul Conti—you will learn that stress and anger and negative emotions, while they can be very motivating, very arousing, they are not going to be good for your long-term mood and mental health, period. So, having tools to regulate your stress and your levels of anger, your levels of reactivity, and also to elevate your feelings of agency and control over your life—starting with agency and control over your physiology, your internal state—is going to be vital.
1:16:00 And what I love about the physiological sigh is that, of course, it’s completely zero cost, but also there’s a dedicated circuit in your brain and body for this particular pattern of breathing. We do it spontaneously, but you can do it intentionally, and it works just as well, if not better, to regulate your levels of stress—that is, to bring them down—which has outsize positive effects on your mood and mental health, not just in the moment, but also should improve your confidence that when stress comes—
1:16:30 because the world is filled with stressors—it’s not “if,” it’s “when”—when stress comes, that you will have a physiologically, scientifically supported tool to deal with and reduce that stress. Now, in addition, I do believe it’s important for sake of mood and mental health to also have a tool or a protocol to raise your stress threshold—that is, to increase your capacity to deal with life stressors without them feeling so stressful. And there are a number of different ways to do this, but they all center around elevating your levels of
1:17:00 adrenaline, epinephrine, and norepinephrine (noradrenaline). Those are the same thing; they just have multiple names. Forgive me, I didn’t give the same two things four names, so don’t blame me; blame the other scientists that did it. The point is, there are several ways that you can self-induce elevations of noradrenaline and adrenaline, and then to learn to anchor your mind and your thinking to stay calm in the elevated adrenaline states as a practice for when stressors hit you in the outside world
1:17:30 and your adrenaline and noradrenaline spike. Now, one of the best ways to do this—because it works the first time and every time, and is also zero cost (in fact, it will save you money)—is to put yourself in a cold shower or other deliberate cold exposure environment. Most everyone