Name: The Optimal Morning Routine - Andrew Huberman
Uploaded: 2024-11-01T01:08:04.000Z
Duration: 16 min 29 s
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Hello, and welcome to a special episode of After School.

I'm Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

I'm also the host of the Huberman Lab Podcast, a weekly podcast focused on science and science-based tools for everyday life.

Today you're going to learn about practical tools for optimizing your morning routine.

So without further ado, practical tools for optimizing your morning routine.

There are certain foundational behaviors, do's and don'ts, that set the stage for you to be better at everything.

So a lot of times people will say, how can I lift more, focus better, remember things better?

It's like, well, let's think about the foundation of that.

And that's always going to come back to two elements, and that's sleep and what I call non-sleep deep rest.

So sleep is the fundamental practice or part of our 24-hour cycle, where if you don't get it on a consistent basis, you are down-regulating your ability to do everything, right?

Metabolism is screwed up, immune system is screwed up, et cetera, et cetera.

However, it is not the case if you get a one night's bad sleep or that if you're not sleeping perfectly that you can't perform well.

But let's talk about sleep and just because I think it's important.

The goal for most people, unless you're pulling vampire shifts on deployment or you're a shift worker, and thank you shift workers, we'll talk about shift work, you should try and get really good sleep 80% of the time, 80% of the nights of your life.

The other 20%, I hope you're not getting good sleep for good reasons that you enjoy.

But the point is that there are a couple of things that you can do.

First of all, every cell in your body has a circadian rhythm, meaning every cell has a 24-hour circadian clock that's regulated by genes.

Think of your body as a bunch of millions of clocks and you need to align those clocks to a single time.

This is why when you travel overseas, your gut goes off or it's more easily you get sick or your thinking isn't quite right, the clocks aren't in alignment, they're not entrained as we say.

Number one practice for everything, sleep especially, is try and get some natural light in your eyes within an hour of waking up.

If you wake up before the sun, turn on a bunch of bright lights and then get sunlight in your eyes once it comes out.

If there's dense cloud cover, there are still more photons, light energy coming through that cloud cover than there are coming from artificial lights.

So try and get five to 10 minutes without sunglasses outside in the morning once the sun is out most days, if not all days.

This has an outsized effect on a number of things.

First of all, it modulates the timing of what's called the cortisol pulse.

Once every 24 hours, you're going to get a boost in cortisol, big spike in cortisol.

It sets your temperature rhythm in motion, sets your level of alertness, your level of focus, and your mood.

You want that cortisol pulse to happen as early in the day as possible.

The cortisol pulse is naturally entrained by these genetic programs to happen once every 24 hours, but light will anchor it to the period where you see bright light.

So imagine the kid that wakes up and spends the morning in bed or you're spending the morning bed and you're texting or you're indoors and you're typing on the computer.

That's not enough light to accomplish what I'm talking about.

And then you go outside around noon or one.

You're in what's called the circadian dead zone, which is the time in which light arriving at the eyes can do certain things, but it can't time this pulse.

That means that cortisol pulse is going to come in the afternoon, which means that your temperature rhythm is going to be shifted late.

And that's actually a signature of depression and anxiety and difficulty falling asleep.

Many people are waking up and they're just spending time indoors and they're putting on sunglasses, getting in their car and driving, or there's cloud cover and they think there's no sun out.

I don't mean that you actually have to stare at the sun, never stare at any light so bright it's going to damage you.

But the indirect rays from the sun trigger these cells in the eyes called melanopsin ganglion cells.

Then the hypothalamus releases this peptide, which is a wake up signal for your whole brain and body and sets a timer for the onset of melatonin release 16 hours later.

Melatonin being the hormone that makes you sleepy and makes you want to go to sleep.

So you can imagine what happens if you don't get that light until a few hours later, everything shifted and then you want to go to, you don't know why you're wide awake at 1130 or 12 and everything's messed up.

The other thing is that you can get bright light from electronic devices early in the day, but it's not enough.

Now, if you live in Scandinavia in the depths of winter, if you're up in like Trondheim or Aarhus or something like, okay, fine.

Don't buy an expensive daytime simulator.

Get one of these led light boxes for drawing.

I don't have a relationship to any of these brands, but they're easy to find 20, 30 bucks.

Put that on your desk and just look at that thing for a few minutes in the morning.

Not as good, but better than being in the darkness.

This is a huge, huge effect for the following reason.

The signal that arrives from the eyes to the hypothalamus also triggers the release of the neuromodulator dopamine.

We hear about dopamine as a feel-good molecule, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine hits, but dopamine's main role in the brain and body is to drive motivation, craving, and pursuit.

Dopamine is actually the molecule from which adrenaline, epinephrine, is manufactured.

And you may notice you said we crave sun.

If you think about seasonally breeding animals, let's think about the Arctic fox.

Well, the Arctic fox in winter is white, but in the summertime has darker pellage.

It actually, there's a pathway going from sunlight to dopamine to melanin production in the skin and fur.

So animals that transition from light color to dark color, that's all mediated by dopamine.

There are animals that I've worked on in the laboratory and that also in humans, it's now been shown in a beautiful study that people who get 20 to 30 minutes of light on their skin, this was a study done in Israel.

So they wear an appropriate amount of clothing, but they're sleeveless, no hat, no sunglasses.

They were told to go outside 20 to 30 minutes, three times a week, just in the sunshine.

They measure testosterone and estrogen in men and women.

Significant increases in both and all the associated things of increased passion, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Well, it turns out that light to the eyes, but also light to the skin, the skin is an endocrine organ.

It's not just something to tattoo and hang earrings from and put clothing on.

It actually, there's a pathway involving a molecule called P53 and the keratinocytes are these skin cells that when sunlight, when UVB, ultraviolet blue light penetrates the skin, it actually triggers these keratinocytes to stimulate a pathway that releases dopamine in the brain and body.

So you feel better when you're getting light in your eyes and on your skin and you're increasing testosterone and epinephrine and dopamine increase.

That's why you feel good in the summer months.

People in Scandinavia know this, it's this kind of spring fever.

In the winter months, you want to go through every bit of effort to double or triple the amount of time that you're spending outside in the morning.

So instead of 10 minutes, make it 30 minutes.

We all are familiar with getting sleepy and falling asleep.

That's the parasympathetic nervous system taking over.

The longer we are awake, the longer the buildup of something called adenosine in the brain and body and adenosine turns on the parasympathetic nervous system, suppresses the sympathetic nervous system.

When we sleep, adenosine is pushed back down.

Caffeine effectively, through some chemical steps, blocks the effects of adenosine.

I don't like the word hacks because hacks imply using something for a purpose it wasn't designed for.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The Optimal Morning Routine - Andrew Huberman

rhythm

metabolism

slightly

period