In this episode, I describe a comprehensive toolkit consisting of behavioral and supplement-based tools that you can customize to enhance the quality, duration and impact of your sleep. This has an enormous positive impact on your overall health and daytime functioning, brain, hormones and immune system. I teach you how to effectively harness light (and darkness), temperature, food, exercise, caffeine, supplements, and digital devices in order to fall asleep faster, stay deeply asleep longer and overall, and achieve better quality sleep. I also describe how these tools can be modified to recover quickly from a poor night’s sleep, jet lag or bouts of shift work. Given that sleep is the foundation of all mental health, physical health and performance, this episode should benefit everyone as it provides an essential toolkit of science-supported, low- to zero-cost strategies that can be tailored to optimize your sleep routine.
For the full show notes, visit hubermanlab.com.
<h2>Thank you to our sponsors</h2>
AG1 (Athletic Greens): https://athleticgreens.com/huberman
LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman
Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman
<h2>Supplements from Momentous</h2>
https://www.livemomentous.com/huberman
<h2>Timestamps</h2>
(00:00:00) Tools to Optimize Sleep
(00:03:18) Sponsors: LMNT, Eight Sleep
(00:08:24) Factors to Control Circadian Rhythm & Sleep
(00:15:10) Morning Tool: Morning Sunlight Viewing, Cortisol
(00:20:44) Morning Sunlight: Circadian Rhythm, Artificial Lights, Cloudy Days
(00:26:18) Evaluating Light in Environment, Compensating for Missed Morning Light
(00:29:01) Sponsor: AG1
(00:30:46) Morning Tools: Temperature & Deliberate Cold Exposure, Exercise
(00:34:58) Timing Caffeine, “Afternoon Crash,” Exercise
(00:40:08) Timing Eating, Alertness & Circadian Rhythm
(00:45:20) 3 Daily Critical Periods
(00:46:49) Afternoons: Naps, Deep Relaxation (NSDR, Self-Hypnosis), Exercise & Body Temperature, Caffeine
(00:51:59) Afternoon Tools: Viewing Sunlight in Late Afternoon, Evening Light
(00:56:45) Evening/Night Tools: Overhead Artificial Lights, Light Sensitivity
(01:04:40) Evening Tools: Hot Bath/Sauna, Temperature & Sleeping Environment
(01:09:40) Alcohol, THC & Reduced Sleep Quality; CBD, Anxiety & Falling Asleep
(01:11:45) Sleep Supplements: Magnesium Threonate, Apigenin & Theanine
(01:16:34) Melatonin Supplementation (Caution)
(01:17:44) Additional Sleep Supplements: GABA, Glycine, Myo-Inositol & Anxiety
(01:20:08) Falling Back Asleep: Reveri App, NSDR, Yoga Nidra
(01:22:55) Staying Asleep: Eye Masks, Ear Plugs, Elevating Feet
(01:24:58) Tool: Sleep Apnea & Nasal Breathing
(01:28:20) Sleep Schedule Consistency, Weekends, Compensatory Sleep & Caffeine
(01:31:14) Tools: Temperature Minimum & Jet Lag, Shift Work & Red Lights
(01:37:38) Behavioral Tools for 3 Daily Critical Periods
(01:39:26) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube Feedback, Huberman Lab Clips, Spotify & Apple Reviews, Sponsors, Momentous Supplements, Instagram, Twitter, Neural Network Newsletter
Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac
Disclaimer
This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
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're talking all about sleep and how to optimize your sleep. This is a topic we've covered.
Previously on this podcast in the episode called Master Your Sleep. However, since the airing of that episode,
I think new science to come out. I've also received thousands, yes, literally thousands of questions related
Calls covered in that episode, as well as in the episode on jet lag and shift work.
But it is not specifically about jet lag and shift work. We are going to cover tools that will allow you to shift your schedule if you need to for work or travel. And we will also.
We'll cover tools that will allow you to fall back asleep if you happen to wake up in the middle of the night, or if you get a poor night's sleep, how to actually recover from that poor night's sleep more.
And yes indeed even replace sleep that you've lost. So today's episode is going to be filled with practical tools. We will touch on some of the underlying science, but.
It's really designed to be a practical toolkit for optimizing your sleep depending on your specific sleep needs.
Today's episode, I will refer to studies that form the backbone of the tools that I'll be describing, but whereas most of the podcast episodes here tend to be.
Deep scientific mechanism and then tools, scientific mechanism and then tools. Today, I'm mainly going to focus on the practical tools
Indeed, all people I believe should use in order to optimize their sleep. Why should everybody want to optimize their sleep and put considerable effort into optimizing their sleep? Well, put simply, sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance of all kinds, cognitive performance, physical performance.
It also controls things like our immune system, wound healing, our skin health and our appearance.
Or not we can think clearly or not, whether or not we will live as long as we possibly can or not, whether or not we suffer from.
Dramatic age-related cognitive decline or not. In other words, whether or not we keep our memory as we age. I could go on and on about all the terrible things that can happen to somebody if they don't sleep well. Thanks to the great work of Professor Matt Walker.
At University of California, Berkeley, and the wonderful book that he wrote, Why We Sleep. I think the world is largely on board now that sleep is critical to our health, our mental health, our physical health, and our performance.
What's not often discussed is how great life is. That is how much more focused and energetic and how positive our mood gets when we are sleeping.
The appropriate amount of time at the appropriate depth and when we were doing that regularly.
Everything in life gets better when we're sleeping well. So today I'm going to teach you the tools that will allow you to optimize your sleep. That is get to sleep and stay asleep, fall back.
Back asleep if you wake up in the middle of the night and adjust your sleep given the various life demands you may be experiencing.
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 Element. Element is an electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of salt, magnesium, and potassium, the so-called electrolytes, and no sugar. Now, salt, magnesium, and potassium are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electrolytes need to be present in the proper ratios. And we now know that even slight reductions
Or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits in cognitive and physical performance. Element contains a science backed electrolyte ratio of 1000 milligrams, that's one gram of sodium.
200 milligrams of potassium and 60 milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink Element first thing in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrate my body and make sure I have enough electrolytes. And while I do any kind of physical training and after physical training as well, especially if I've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try Element, you can go to.
Drink Element, that's lmnt.com/huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's drinkelementlmnt.com/huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up.
That includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and NSDR, non-sleep deep rest protocol.
I started using the Waking Up app a few years ago because even though I've been doing regular meditations 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 different states and that 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 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.
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