Dr. Andrew Huberman: I'm guessing that very few of you out there are consistently getting seven
to nine hours of really terrific sleep, waking up feeling rested and like you're ready to attack the
day, and being able to go through the day feeling focused and alert without dips in energy or focus.
Dr. Andrew Huberman: Sleep is this tremendously important period of life because
it resets our ability to be focused, alert, and emotionally stable in the wakeful period.
Dr. Andrew Huberman: So we're really gonna go tool-heavy today and talk about tools
that can help you fall asleep, sleep better, and emerge from sleep feeling more rested.
Dr. Andrew Huberman: So what determines how well we sleep and the quality of our
wakeful state? Turns out that's governed by two forces. The first force is a chemical force.
It's called adenosine. Adenosine is a molecule in our nervous system and body that builds up
the longer we are awake, so if you've just slept for 8, or 9, or 10 really deep, restful hours,
adenosine is gonna be very low in your brain and body. If, however, you've been awake for 10, 15,
or more hours, adenosine levels are going to be much higher.
Dr. Andrew Huberman: There's a second force which is governing when you sleep and when you're awake,
and that force is a so-called circadian force. Circadian means about a day or about 24 hours,
and inside all of us is a clock that exists in your brain and my brain,
and the brain of every animal that we're aware of, that determines when we want to be sleepy
and when we want to be awake. Just think about it, we don't go through the day wanting to fall
asleep every 30 minutes and then feeling like we're wide awake. Our sleep and our period of
sleepiness tend to be condensed into one block. Typically one 6- to 10-hour block.
Dr. Andrew Huberman: That block of sleep and when it falls within each 24-hour cycle
is governed by a number of different things. But the most powerful thing
that's governing when you want to be asleep and when you want to be awake
is light, and in particular, it's governed by sunlight. And I can't emphasize enough
how important and how actionable this relationship is between light and when you want to sleep. It's
quite simple on the face of it and it's quite simple to resolve, but people
tend to make a big mess of this whole circadian literature, frankly. So let's just break it down
from the standpoint of what's going on in your brain and body as you go through one 24-hour day.
Let's start with waking. So regardless of how well you slept at night,
or whether or not you were up all night,
most people tend to wake up sometime around when the sun rises. Maybe not right at sunrise, but
within an hour or two or maybe three of sunrise. Now, I realize there are night-shift workers
and there are people traveling and experiencing jet lag where this is not going to be the case.
Dr. Andrew Huberman: But for most people, we tend to wake up about the time that the sun is
rising or so, and as we do that, adenosine levels tend to be low if we've been asleep
for reasons that you now understand, and
our system generates an internal signal that is in the form of a hormone.
Dr. Andrew Huberman: The definition of a hormone is it's a substance, a chemical
that's released from one organ in your body that goes and acts
on other organs elsewhere in your body, including your nervous system.
When you wake up in the morning, you wake up because a particular hormone called cortisol
is released from your adrenal glands. Your adrenal glands sit right above your kidneys,
and there's a little pulse of cortisol. There's also a pulse of some, and when I say a pulse,
I just mean the release of a little bit, there's also a pulse of epinephrine, which is adrenaline,
from your adrenals and also in your brain, and you feel awake. Now, that pulse of cortisol and
adrenaline, and epinephrine might come from your alarm clock, it might come from you naturally
waking up, but it tends to alert your whole system in your body that it's time to increase
your heart rate, it's time to start tensing your muscles, it's time to start moving about.
It's very important that that cortisol pulse come early in the day, or at least, early in your
period of wakefulness, I say that because some people are waking up at 8:00 p.m. and are sleeping
all day, but it's very important that that pulse of cortisol occurs early in the day and that it
happens all at once. It sort of sets a rising tide of cortisol in your system. Now, many of
you have probably heard about cortisol in relation to stress, and indeed, as we go through our day
and our life, different stressors, different events happen in our life that make us feel more
alert. Some of the more stressful ones might be looking at your credit card bill and seeing what
seems to be a fraudulent charge or looking at your phone and suddenly seeing a text that something
you thought was gonna happen at a particular time is not gonna happen, or you're running late.
Those will tend to increase norepinephrine and epinephrine
and adrenaline in your system, and if they're severe enough,
you'll start getting some pulses of cortisol released from your adrenals throughout the day.
But there's this normal, healthy rising tide of cortisol that happens early in the day, and I
say healthy because it wakes you up, it makes you feel alert, and it makes you feel able to move and
wanting to move and to go about your day for work, for exercise, for school, for social relations,
et cetera. So when you wake up in the morning is when that cortisol pulse takes off.
Dr. Andrew Huberman: There's a practice that I've adopted in the last 5 years that
I've found to be immensely beneficial that is sort of like napping but isn't napping. It's a
thing that they call yoga Nidra. Yoga Nidra actually means yoga sleep,
and it's a sort of meditation that you listen to, there are a number of scripts
Dr. Andrew Huberman: That allows you to consciously bring your entire body and mind into
a state of deep relaxation. And sometimes you fall asleep and sometimes you don't. This is done for
10 to 30 or even 60 minutes at a time. The other thing that works really well is meditation. So
I'm talking about naps, but I'm also talking about yoga Nidra, which is sort of a form of meditation,
and then more standard forms of meditation. All three of those do something powerful which
is that they bring our mind into a state of less so-called sympathetic nervous system activation…
Dr. Andrew Huberman: Which is what governs your alertness,
and instead, it activates cells and circuits in your body that promote the parasympathetic
nervous system, or the calming system. A lot of people are not good at falling
asleep because they're not good at calming down. So some people have no trouble falling asleep,
but many people have a hard time falling asleep, or at least every once in a while experience
challenges falling asleep. I don't have problems falling asleep most nights,
but I've noticed that if I'm working very hard or if the world is particularly stressful, my
mind gets into a bit of a kind of OCD loop where I tend to ruminate on things, and I'm not even
thinking about anything in particular. It's just challenging for me to disengage and fall asleep.
Meditation and Yoga Nidra scripts have been immensely helpful for me
in terms of accelerating the transition to sleep. So they involve taking a few minutes, 10 to 30
minutes or so, just like you would for a nap, and just listening to a script, almost passively,
and it has you do some particular patterns of breathing and some other kind of body-scan-like
things that can really help people learn to relax, not just in that moment, but get better
at relaxing and turning off thinking in order to fall asleep when they wanna do that at night.
There's another thing that's similar to this, which is certain forms of hypnosis for sleep,
for that, I'll just refer you to the website of a colleague and collaborator of mine,
David Spiegel, who's our associate chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
He's developed a website, which is reverie, R-E-V-E-R-I-E, health.com, so reveriehealth.com,
that has a lot of science-supported, clinically supported hypnosis scripts that essentially take
the brain into states of deep relaxation for the sake of rewiring the brain and neuroplasticity,
but one of those scripts that's there and is available free is for sleep.
Dr. Andrew Huberman: So a period of time each day that you devote to getting better at falling
and staying asleep is actually a really good practice to adopt. The other thing about these
practices like meditation, yoga Nidra, and hypnosis, is people would always say to me,
"Well, when should I do them?" and I always say, "Well, the best time of day to do it "is
when you first wake up in the morning, "provided you've gotten your sunlight already,
"anytime you wake up in the middle of the night, "or any time of day." In other words, they're
always good for you because it's a training mechanism by which you self-train your nervous
system to go from a state of heightened alertness that you don't want to heightened relaxation that
you do want. And so it's really teaching you to hit the brake. And that brings us to an even more
important point, perhaps, which is, we've all experienced that we can stay up if we want to,
right? If we wanna stay up late on New Year's or we wanna push an all-nighter, some people
can do that more easily than others, but we're all capable of doing that. But it's very hard to make
ourselves fall asleep, and so there's a sort of asymmetry to the way our autonomic nervous system,
which governs this alertness-calmness thing, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system,
there's an asymmetry there where we are more easily able to engage
wakefulness and drive wakefulness, we can force ourselves to stay awake,
than we are able to force ourselves to fall asleep.
And one of the things that I say over and over again, and I'm gonna continue to say over and over
again, is it's very hard to control the mind with the mind. When you have trouble falling asleep,
you need to look to some mechanism that involves the body. And all the things I described,
meditation, hypnosis, yoga Nidra, all involve exhale-emphasized breathing,
certain ways of lying down and controlling the body.
Dr. Andrew Huberman: All of those involve using the body to control the mind rather
than trying to, you know, wrestle your mind into a certain pattern of relaxation.
Dr. Andrew Huberman: When we're having trouble controlling the mind, I encourage people to look
towards the body, look toward sunlight, avoid sunlight and bright light if that happens to be
late at night. So there's a theme that's starting to emerge which is, in order to control this thing
that we call the nervous system, we have to look back to some of the things we discussed earlier,
like sensation, perception, et cetera. But we have to ask, what can we control? Well, I'm talking
about controlling light exposure, controlling your breathing and body. I'm not going into details
right now but you can see the yoga Nidra script or the reveriehealth.com, or Headspace would be
a great place to adopt a meditation practice, any of those are really teaching you to use
your body to control your mind, and to allow you to explore the mind-body relationship in a way
that gives you more control over your mind and the mind-body relationship.