Andrew Huberman: The Sleep Science That Will Transform Your Energy

0:00I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. and if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you wanna make it easier, you wanna make it flow, you wanna feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is gonna help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and stay tuned to this episode of The Daily Motivation Show.

0:38Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.

0:50What about working out and sleep? Okay, yeah. Work out in the morning, afternoon, night. How does that affect the sleep when you work out and how you work out? Yeah, well, I want to be fair to the fact that people have different schedules and different constraints. And that work, you know, getting that 150 to 180 minutes of zone 2 cardio per week is essential. People should be doing some resistance training regardless of goals or in order to maintain muscle because it's so important to avoid injury and maintain metabolism, etc. So you need to get it in somehow. now, but you then have to ask yourself what's happening around that workout.

1:31So are you going into a brightly lit gym at 11 o 'clock at night? I am blasting music and are you drinking three espresso energy drink before you go, you're going to be awake. You're going to have a hard time going to sleep. It's not just the workout. It's the context around the work. Yes. My preference is always to work out as early in the day as possible. That's my preference. I don't always accomplish that. We, people should also know that if you work out at the same time for three or four days, your body builds in an anticipatory circuit. You will feel an energy increase a few minutes before that workout.

2:05So if you are working out at 10 PM at night and you're finding it hard to go to sleep, if you can shift that workout earlier in the day, you will soon become a morning person. It might not be as natural as somebody who naturally wakes up at 4 30 or 5 in the morning but let's say you're a you want to get on an earlier schedule you want to get that morning light but also force yourself to work out in the morning and then by the second or third day of doing that you will start to feel more alert as you arrive to the workout because there are these anticipatory circuits that's cool working out late at night some people say cardio okay but not weight some people say i i think it's highly individual and i don't think there's ever been a really good study addressing that regularity is key i think for me the best times to work out are three hours after waking up 11 hours after waking up just based on body temperature rhythms or immediately like get up and just put the shoes on and just go and i don't tend to do that last thing very often these days i tend to wake up and move through the morning a little bit like a lazy bear sunlight and being awake for my caffeine caffeine but every time i do that early morning workout i feel much better and more alert all day you fall asleep probably and i fall asleep much more easily and there the other thing you can do to fall asleep is this might seem a little counterintuitive i said that you need to lower your body temperature by one to three degrees you can take a hot shower or do a sauna which you would think well it heats you up but when you actually heat the surface of the body, your brain cools off your core body temperature, unless you stay in that heat for a very long time.

3:44So you take a brief, you know, I don't want to say how long people should shower, get in the sauna or whatnot, or hot shower, and then, you know, maybe rinse off with some cool water for, not cold, but cool water, lukewarm water for 10 seconds and dry off and get into bed. Your body temperature will drop. If you get into an ice bath or a cold shower, it's very jolting. So I don't recommend people do that late in the day unless they want to be awake for some reason at night. But the other thing is when this is a little counterintuitive, but my colleague at Stanford, Craig Heller works on thermal regulation.

4:16If you want to cool down and you put a cold towel or ice around your neck, you're cooling the surface of the body just like you would put a cold pack on a thermostat. What's going to happen? Your brain's going to start to heat you up. So I would avoid cold exposure right before sleep, especially if it's very stimulating, like to the point cold enough that you get that adrenaline bump. So cold air is key to drop the temperature down. Keeping the room cool. Cool. Yeah, but you don't want that really... Not like an icebox where you're shivering. Exactly. The acute cold exposure, as we call it, of an ice bath or something.

4:51Rather, a sauna or a lot of people don't have access to sauna, maybe a warm or hot shower before sleep. But people tend to be very specific about this too. Some people like to shower in the morning, some people in the evening. I like to shower whenever I have an opportunity to shower. Generally, I try and shower after I work out because if I don't, everyone suffers. But I think that if people don't have access to a sauna, that hot shower or warm shower before sleep can be very beneficial because the body will naturally start to dump heat and cool off as you get into bed. Gotcha. And then in terms of the actual architecture of sleep and dreams, with dreams, you know, the dreams in the beginning of the night tend to be kind of mundane and seem kind of ordinary.

5:37And the dreams toward morning tend to be more intense. You wake up and you remember like what just happened. That's right. Not what happened in hours before. Right. And the early part of the night in very broad strokes, the early part of the night tends to be when we release growth hormone, when we tend to repair motor circuits and damaged tissues. And there's a real lack of emotional context to those dreams. Now, the dreams toward morning tend to have much more emotional enrichment and be very intense. Often if people see visual hallucinations, that's in the so-called REM sleep.

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