Essentials: Optimize Your Learning & Creativity With Science-Based Tools

0:00Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science -based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. My name is Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Let's talk about neuroplasticity. More specifically, let's talk about how we can optimize our brains. Neuroplasticity is this incredible feature of our nervous system that allows it to change itself even in ways that we consciously decide. That's an incredible property. Our liver can't decide to just change itself.

0:39Our spleen can't decide to just change itself through conscious thought or through feedback from another person. The cells in those tissues can make changes, sure, but it's our nervous system that harbors this incredible ability to direct its own changes in ways that we believe, or we're told, will serve us better. Today's podcast is really directed toward answering your most common questions and the bigger theme of how does one go about optimizing their brain or even think about optimizing the brain? What is this thing that we're calling optimizing the brain? In doing so, I'm also going to share some of my typical routines and tools.

1:21I share them because many of you have asked for very concrete examples of what I do and when. So I want to open up the discussion today by emphasizing something that's fundamentally important, which is that plasticity is not the goal. The goal is to figure out how to access plasticity and then to direct that plasticity toward particular goals or changes that you would like to achieve. Let's start by talking about the different systems within the nervous system that are available for plasticity and in doing so, I'll frame them in the context of what I do on a daily basis on a weekly basis and on a yearly basis.

2:05First of all, there are several forms of plasticity. The best way to think about it is in terms of short term, medium term, and long term plasticity. Short term plasticity is any kind of shift that you want to achieve in the moment or in the day, but that you don't necessarily want to hold on to forever. What kinds of things are those? Well, for instance, short term plasticity might be you wake up earlier than you would like to catch a flight. You're not feeling particularly alert and you want to use a protocol or you decide to use a protocol, which could be coffee or it could be a certain form of breathing or it could be some other tool to become more alert at a time of day when normally you aren't that alert.

2:49But your expectation is that when you return home, you will discard with that the need to do that at 5 .30 a .m. because you'll be asleep at 5 .30 a .m. So there's short term plasticity, behavioral plasticity. Then there's medium term plasticity. For instance, if you go on vacation to Costa Rica and you don't know your way around Costa Rica, you want to learn the different town and the routes there, but you don't have any intention of going back. It's just medium term. You want to just program it in for sake of your time there and then you want to discard it. Most of the time when we think about or talk about optimizing the brain, we're talking about long term plasticity.

3:23We're talking about the kinds of changes that people want to make so that their brain reflexively works differently. Long term plasticity is almost always the big goal. It's I want to know how to speak that language. I want to be able to do that skill. I want to be able to feel this way. I'm going to frame all this in the context of the daily life, the weekly life, and the yearly life. And that's because neural plasticity and optimizing your brain rides on a deeper foundation of this thing that governs plasticity. In fact, governs all our life called autonomic arousal, which is that we're asleep for part of the 24 hour cycle and we are awake almost always.

4:06I've said it before, but I'll say it again, the trigger for plasticity and learning occurs during high focus, high alertness states, not while you're asleep. And the focus and alertness are both key because of the neurochemicals associated with those states. But the actual rewiring and the reconfiguration of the brain connections happens during non -sleep deep rest and deep sleep. So you trigger the change and in sleep you get the change. So some of the things that we'll talk about today about optimizing the brain are centered around not sleep, but around the autonomic arousal system. We have this system of neurons in our brain and body that's just incredible that wake us up and make us alert.

4:49And when we're not accessing that system well, we cannot access plasticity, we cannot optimize our brain. Likewise, if we cannot sleep well and we can't rest well, we will not access plasticity and rewire our brain because that's when the actual configuration between the connections occurs. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. As somebody who's been involved in research science for almost three decades and in health and fitness for equally as long, I'm constantly looking for the best tools to improve my mental health, physical health, and performance.

5:26I discovered AG1 way back in 2012 long before I ever had a podcast or even knew what a podcast was, and I've been taking it every day since. I find that AG1 greatly improves all aspects of my health. I simply feel much better when I take it. AG1 uses the highest quality ingredients in the right combinations and they're constantly improving their formulas without increasing the cost. In fact, AG1 just launched their latest formula upgrade. This new formula is based on exciting new research on the effects of probiotics on the gut microbiome. And now includes several clinically studied probiotic strains shown to support both digestive health and immune system health, as well as to improve bowel regularity and to reduce bloating.

6:06Whenever I'm asked if I could take just one supplement, what would that supplement be? I always say AG1. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1 .com slash Hubertman to claim a special offer. For this month only January 2025, AG1 is giving away 10 free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, go to drinkag1 .com slash Hubertman to claim the 10 free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D3K2. So to set this in context, I wake up each day and I'll be totally honest, I usually don't feel like bouncing right out of bed. I wake up generally more tired and groggy than I would like because I tend to go to sleep too late.

6:51What it means is that I'm not really matching my hardwired needs of going to bed probably at 8 .30 or 9 and waking up at 4am. So neural plasticity will allow me to optimize my wakefulness, but I have to do something in order to access that. And some of you may already be anticipating what I'm about to say, which is, oh no, he's going to tell us to get sunlight in our eyes in the first 30 minutes of the day. I am going to tell you to do that, but I'm going to also tell you two things that I have not discussed before, which relate to the plasticity between the melanops and cells, these sunlight detecting bright light detecting cells in our eye and the circadian clock.

7:33I've never said this before in this podcast, but it turns out that the connections between these melanops and cells in the circadian clock are plastic throughout the lifespan. So there's an opportunity for short term plasticity. So that's why I view sunlight first thing in the day helps me wake up. The other thing that I do is that there's a circuit that exists between the circadian clock and our adrenals that I've talked about before that triggers the release of cortisol first thing in the morning that wakes us up, especially when we view light. So if you're groggy in the morning, that's why viewing light is helpful.

8:04The other thing that I do is I delay my intake of caffeine for the first two hours that I'm awake. Earlier, we talked about the adenosine system and how the accumulation of adenosine makes us sleepy and caffeine suppresses adenosine. It makes us feel alert. And so by delaying caffeine until about two hours after waking, I'm able to capture and reinforce to potentiate the neural circuit that exists between the circadian clock and the cortisol release in the adrenals, as well as leave those adenosine receptors unoccupied so that I can then use the caffeine to reduce the caffeine. So I'm able to get a natural lift in alertness and focus two hours later as opposed to using it just to wake myself up out of sleepiness.

8:48I also make sure I hydrate first thing in the morning. There are plenty of data now showing that even a slight increase in dehydration, meaning just when you're lacking water, can make people have headaches. It can provide some additional photophobia for those of you that are migraine prone. Bright light can trigger migraines. That's no surprise to those of you that get headaches and migraines. But dehydration can compound the vulnerability to migraine and headaches. So I drink water, I drink black coffee, or I drink mate, which is just a, because I have Argentine lineage, which is just a high caffeine drink first thing in the morning.

9:21But I delay it until two hours after I wake up. And that's because I want the circuits between my eye and my circadian clock and my adrenals to be functioning in a particular way so that then later the caffeine is an addition, it adds more alertness. Now this is a discussion about how to optimize your brain. Many people who wake up quickly and just naturally feel like bouncing out of bed, I envy these people. They will do just fine by going into a learning bout or taking care of whatever it is that they need to take care of. Sometimes that's kind of more mundane tasks like email or and whatnot.

10:00Here's a more or less a rule about how the brain functions vis -a -vis focus learning and creativity. Generally, states of high alertness, when we're very, very alert, are great for strategy implementation. The sort of thing that we are very good at when we're well rested and we're focused and our autonomic arousal or our alertness rather as it is at a high level. If you are somebody who is hitting that alertness phase of your day very early right after you wake up, that's a great time to move right into things that, at least the research says, you already know how the strategy you just want to implement the strategy.

10:40For me, for instance, I get up, I'm not terribly alert first thing and so I try and just get my brain and my thoughts organized. It's not a time for me to be responding in a very linear fashion to emails or carrying out calculations. That comes about two hours later. I think many people out there will relate. Mid -morning is when many people tend to achieve their peak in alertness and focus. Now, many times I get the question and this is what I'm about to say is directly related to the hundreds of questions I got about this. Should I use background music in order to learn? So as a rule of thumb, if you're feeling too keyed up, then silence and quiet is going to be helpful.

11:23In fact, if you're very keyed up, a particular circuit related to the basal ganglia starts getting triggered more easily. It's called the go -no -go circuit. We have circuits that connect our four brain to our structure in our brain called the basal ganglia, which is actually a collection of structures. And the four brain, which is involved in rational thought and thinking and planning and action, is always trying to plan what should I do and then implement that action. And the basal ganglia are intimately involved in that discussion. There's a reciprocal loop of communication between basal ganglia and cortex.

11:56The basal ganglia has one set of connections to the cortex and the cortex back to the basal ganglia that facilitates go, if facilitates action. And the molecule, the neuromodulator dopamine, triggers the activation of go. It tends to make us want to do more things. It tends to make us bias toward action by the way that dopamine binds to something called the D1 receptors, just a particular type of dopamine receptor for those either want to know. The no -go pathway, the pathway in the basal ganglia and cortex that suppresses action, involves dopamine binding to this other receptor called the D2 receptor.

12:39Now, D1, D2 receptors, you can't just consciously decide, oh, I only want my D1 receptors and my D2 receptors to be active. You have to think about which sorts of states of mind and body facilitate go and which ones facilitate no -go. There are three sort of levels of autonomic arousal of alertness that bias us more toward go, no -go, or both. So here's how it works. Let's say I'm very alert. Maybe I got a particularly good night's sleep the night before. I had a little too much coffee and I'm going to sit down to some work. The thing to know, and what I always tell myself is when I'm very alert, I am very prone to go to action, but I'm also prone to not no -go, right?

13:30I'm not going to be very good at suppressing action. So those are two different things. Being biased toward action and being biased towards suppressing action are two different things. So those are push pull, toward action, suppress action. So if I'm very alert, I'm aware that I will have a biased toward action. It will be hard for me to suppress non -action, but that it's very non -specific. When you are very alert, the best situation for learning is going to be silence. It's going to be complete quiet. If you are low arousal and you're tired and you're kind of sleepy, a lot of people find that having some background chatter and some background noise can help elevate their level of autonomic arousal for most people three hours after waking, those three hours tends to be the period in which they're most alert throughout the day.

14:20So that morning three hours is quite vital. I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, David. David makes a protein bar unlike any other. It has 28 grams of protein, only 150 calories and 0 grams of sugar. That's right, 28 grams of protein and 75 % of its calories come from protein. These bars from David also taste amazing. My favorite flavor is chocolate chip cookie dough, but then again I also like the chocolate fudge flavored one and I also like the cake flavored one. Basically, I like all the flavors. They're incredibly delicious. For me personally, I strive to eat mostly whole foods.

14:55However, when I'm in a rush, or I'm away from home, or I'm just looking for a quick afternoon snack, I often find that I'm looking for a high quality protein source. With David, I'm able to get 28 grams of protein with the calories of a snack, which makes it very easy to hit my protein goals of one gram of protein per pound a body weight each day. And it allows me to do that without taking in excess calories. I typically eat a David bar in the early afternoon or even mid afternoon if I want to bridge that gap between lunch and dinner. I like that it's a little bit sweet, so it tastes like a tasty snack, but it's also given me that 28 grams of very high quality protein with just 150 calories.

15:30If you would like to try David, you can go to Davidprotein .com slash Huberman. Again, the link is Davidprotein .com slash Huberman. Now, many of you might ask about exercise and when to exercise. In terms of rising body temperatures, they and matching body temperature to mental alertness, et cetera, it's pretty clear that exercising early in the day, not only by us as us towards waking up earlier, but that it also triggers the release of things like epinephrine and other neuromodulators that lend itself to a situation where we have heightened levels of arousal and mental acuity. And this can be very good because if you want to restrict most of your focus learning to the early part of the day, exercising early in the day does set a neurochemical context or milieu for go.

16:23It tends to trigger activation of the go pathway. And so for those of you like myself, we have a hard time kind of engaging and getting into action early in the day, early morning exercise within an hour of waking and certainly no later than three hours after waking. We'll give you quote unquote more energy throughout the day. So in kind of reviewing what I've set up until now, I do the morning light thing, I delay my caffeine two hours after waking and then I generally try and get exercise in in the first hour or ideally within the first three hours of waking up. And then I'll move into a focused learning about if I find that I'm too alert and then I generally will tend to eat and kind of bring down my level of alertness and will continue working.

17:06I typically eat my first meal right around mid day, whether or not I've exercised or not. In general, I rely on a low carbohydrate meal. I'll eat meat or salad or some variation that and nuts and fats and things like that because of the colon content for focus. I'm just going to mark continue March through my day. And this is of course what I experience. Some people are quite different. But what I find is around two or three p .m. I start getting a little groggy a little bit sleepy. I will tend to shift my work from work that requires a lot of duration path outcome, really careful analysis and activation of the no go pathway around early afternoon.

17:47I find I can do kind of typical more mundane tasks because those tasks require less cognitive load. And they can be done more or less in and out of sequence. I can answer a couple of email here, maybe answer that email there. And then typically around four p .m. or so. I do two things. One is I make sure I hydrate and then I always do a non sleep deep rest protocol sometime in the afternoon. This is sometimes a 10 minute yoga nidra type protocol or a 30 minute yoga nidra type protocol. And I do that because for me by about 4 30 in the afternoon, I'm capable of doing basically nothing. I personally find it a mistake to that point down a double espresso and charge really hard.

18:33It just doesn't work for me. I end up really disrupting my sleep schedule. I end up disrupting a lot of different things. So for me, I do the non sleep deep rest protocol. I usually emerge from that feeling like I have another whole day second win like I could just work, work, work, work. And then I'll do a second bout of learning. I'll do some sort of work that either involves linear analysis of something. So maybe numerical work or I'm trying to learn something. This learning bout is very different than the than the morning one. This is a work about or learning bout that's more in the clear common focus regime because I've come out of this non sleep deep rest.

19:12I'm not ingesting caffeine because I want to make sure that I can sleep later that night really well. And this tends to be more when I do creative type work creativity is a very interesting state of mind in which we're taking existing elements things that we already know and rearranging them in ways that are novel creativity has two parts. It has a creative discovery mode where you're kind of shuffling things around in a very relaxed way and kind of being playful or exploring different configurations. And then creativity also has an absolutely linear implementation mode in which you take the idea or the design you come up with and you create something very robust and concrete.

19:56And so creativity is really a two part thing and the first part of actively exploring different configurations sometimes in a playful way sometimes in a in a way that's almost random and just kind of exploring that state is definitely facilitated by being relaxed and almost sleepy. When you find yourself in that kind of clear common focused mode creative works tend to come about very well in those regimes. I know there are a lot of people out there rely on substances to access creative states. I'm not a marijuana user. It's just not the drug for me for a variety of reasons. I'm not a drinker. It's not the not the substance for me for a variety of reasons.

20:40The problem with using substances to access creativity is that generally the ones that the substances that relax people will allow them to get into that creative brainstorming mode but not so good at the linear implementation mode. So that afternoon block is when I try and access the freer kind of looser mindset that's associated with the fatigue that comes later in the afternoon. For some of you that state that favors creativity and creative learning might be better in the morning. I don't know you're going to have to decide for some of you you're going to be late shifted some of you are going to be morning shifted.

21:17But where we have alertness generally we are good at linear implementation we're good at activating the no go pathway and suppressing action and we're good at pursuing particular goals and strategy implementation. And where we tend to be more relaxed and we tend to be almost in a kind of sleepy mode so for me coming out of one of these non sleep deep breast modes or sleep that's when we tend to be better at novel configurations of existing elements which is creativity. And this brings about a question that I get all the time which is what about psychedelics on psychedelics people report being able to smell colors or to you know hear trees etc.

21:58And that's because there's a lot of sensory blending. However that's led to the misconception that sensory blending itself is a creative process. There's nothing creative about sensory blending the essence of a creative process is new ways of configuring things that lend themselves to a bigger bigger or greater or deeper or novel understanding on the part of the observer. And just sensory blending is not going to accomplish that. Now I think that there may come a time and certainly there are clinical trials that are happening now where psychedelics are leveraged toward particular clinical goals these are clinical studies done with a psychiatrist present that is authorized to do that that can help people through depression trauma etc.

22:42So all of this is to say that no I don't take psychedelics to access creative states that's not where I think the major role the important role of psychedelics might show up if it's going to for humanity. I think that it may have these important roles in the clinical context provided it's done legally and safely. I think that the creative process being a two stage process means that I am personally best served by having this period of non -linear exploration of concepts whatever it is I happen to be working on in the afternoon. But then I will actually show that work I'll just set it aside and then I'll revisit it the next day or even the next day to see whether or not that the work itself is ready for deliberate linear implementation which I would want to do during one of these highly focused states.

23:32So the long and short way of saying this is that when we're very alert do linear type of operations when we tend to be more sleepy and more relaxed that's when creative works can first be conceived but their implementation requires high levels of alertness. I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors element elements is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't that means the electrolytes sodium magnesium and potassium in the correct ratios. But no sugar we should all know that proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function in fact even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance to a considerable degree.

24:13It's also important that you're not just hydrated but that you get adequate amounts of electrolytes in the right ratios drinking a packet of element dissolved in water makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate amounts of hydration and electrolytes. To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of both I dissolve one packet of element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I'll also drink a packet of element dissolved in water drink any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes.

24:44There are a bunch of different great tasting flavors of element. I like the water melon I like the raspberry I like the citrus basically I like all of them. If you'd like to try element you can go to drink element dot com slash huberman to claim an element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink mix again that's drink element spelled LMNT so it's drink element dot com slash huberman to claim a free sample pack. Now that gets us more to the kind of late afternoon evening now I am as I've mentioned before I'm a proponent of getting sunlight in the evening as well. By getting light in the evening it accomplishes two things for me first of all it makes sure that I don't get up too early that I'm not waking up at three or four in the morning because it's going to shift my clock it's going to delay it a little bit and so this is really important if you want to keep your schedule on a normal routine on a regular 24 hour cycle and not have your circadian rhythms of sleep and wakefulness drifting all over the place and you want some predictability to how your mind is going to work in order to optimize learning and performance.

25:46Well then you need to get morning light and evening light the morning light is going to advance my clock make my system want to get up earlier and the evening light is going to delay my clock a little bit so that on average it kind of book ends my circadian mechanisms and I'll basically want to go to sleep at more or less the same time each night and wake up more or less at the same time each morning that's how it works and that's a hard wired mechanism that's not some subjective thing that I tell myself that's a hard wired mechanism. So that gets us to the evening and generally in the evening I'll get that light by going outside and then I'll start to dim them for the evening because as I've mentioned many times before and I'm not going to belabor the point you want to minimize your light exposure especially overhead bright light exposure in the evening from about 10 p .m.

26:30to 4 a .m. So for me it screens off it's dim lights and that's what favors falling asleep in a good night sleep for me since we were talking about food earlier I'll just revisit a little bit of what I said before my evening meal tends to be more carbohydrate rich so I'm not one of these people that's keto or high high meat only or anything like that remember fasting in low carbohydrate states facilitate alertness carbohydrate rich foods facilitate calmness and sleepiness they'd stimulate the release of trip to fan in the transition to sleep I tend to achieve that state using carbohydrates and it also replenishes glycogen the next pieces of scientific data that I'm going to describe is a very important piece of scientific data for sake of understanding how to optimize your brain and access sleep it also can help avoid a lot of anxiety issues the peak output of the circadian clock for wakefulness in other words the peak of our wakefulness and the suppression of the sleep signal actually happens very late in the day.

27:33So we have this trough of activity and body temperature is lowest right before waking then as we wake up our body temperature goes up and into the afternoon it continues to go up up up up up up up and then it tends to fall in the evening and towards bedtime but there's a brief blip of release of peptides and other substances from the from the sleep centers in the brain that signals the peak of alertness and wakefulness about an hour before bedtime. Now that's often the time when people start stressing about the fact that they have something to do the next day and they worry about not being able to sleep and it can cascade into a whole set of things I anticipate a peak in alertness and activity and I don't worry about it I use that perhaps to get organized for the next day but basically I just go through if I'm going to do anything it's going to be very mundane task like cleaning or things that require almost zero effort and that probably speaks to my cleaning abilities to tend to go to sleep somewhere around 10 30 11 and if all goes well I stay asleep for four or five hours typically it's three or four and then I wake up what it probably reflects is that the real time meaning the time that I should go to sleep is probably closer to eight o 'clock the word midnight was literally supposed to mean midnight we were meant to go to sleep and wake up with the setting and rising of the sun.