After Skool
The Optimal Morning Routine – Andrew Huberman
Andrew Huberman, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and tenured Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has made numerous significant contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function and neural plasticity, which is the ability of our nervous system to rewire and learn new behaviors, skills and cognitive functioning.
Huberman is a McKnight Foundation and Pew Foundation Fellow and was awarded the Cogan Award in 2017, given to the scientist making the most significant discoveries in the study of vision. His lab’s most recent work focuses on the influence of vision and respiration on human performance and brain states such as fear and courage. He also works on neural regeneration and directs a clinical trial to promote visual restoration in diseases that cause blindness. Huberman is also actively involved in developing tools now in use by the elite military in the U.S. and Canada, athletes, and technology industries to optimize performance in high stress environments, enhance neural plasticity, mitigate stress, and optimize sleep.
Work from the Huberman Laboratory at Stanford School of Medicine has been published in top journals including Nature, Science, and Cell and has been featured in TIME, BBC, Scientific American, Discover, and other top media outlets.
In 2021, Dr. Huberman launched the Huberman Lab Podcast. The podcast is frequently ranked in the Top 25 of all podcasts globally and is often ranked #1 in the categories of Science, Education, and Health & Fitness.
The core audio from this video is from a podcast Andrew Huberman did with Jocko Willink. Check out the full podcast here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5ApNHAPJVU&t=13066s
To learn more about Andrew Huberman visit: https://hubermanlab.com/
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neurobiology and ophthalmology at stanford school
of medicine i'm also the host of the hubermann 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 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 etc etc 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 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 eighty
percent of the time eight percent of the nights of your life the other twenty percent i hope
you're not getting good sleep for good reasons that you enjoy but the point is that there are
a couple 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 these your body
is a bunch of millions of clock to need to align those clocks to a single time this is why when
you travel overseas your gut goes off or it's more easy you more easily you get sick or uh 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 ten 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's a
healthy boost 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 once what's triggering the cortisol pulse 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 got it a late-shifted cortisol pulse so imagine the kid that wakes up and spends the
morning in bed or you spend the morning bedding 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 please don't and blink as necessary but the indirect rays from the from sun
trigger these cells in the eyes called melanopsin ganglion cells these ganglion cells these are our
neurons they send a signal to your hypothalamus 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 st you don't know why you're wide awake at 11 30 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 you need photons from sunlight now if you live in
scandinavia in the depths of winter if you're up in like you know trondheim or ohus or something
like okay fine don't buy an expensive daytime simulator get one of these led light boxes for
drawing they're very inexpensive in comparison you find them on amazon 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 then when the sun's out get outside now 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 it is not the molecule of pleasure it is the molecule of drive it is life force
dopamine is actually the molecule from which adrenaline epinephrine is manufactured and you may
notice you said we crave sun it also does make you feel good here's why 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 pellets it actually there's a pathway going from sunlight to dopamine
to melanin production in the skin in fur so animals that transition from light color to dark
color that's all mediated by dopamine guess what else happens the gonads grow 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 or 30 minutes three times a week just in
the sunshine ideally they were shorts also they measure testosterone and estrogen in men
and women significant increases in both and all the associated things of increased passion
blah blah blah that is what they measured in the study why 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 and 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 because it can penetrate the skin superficially 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 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 what is caffeine caffeine effectively through
some chemical steps blocks the effects of adenosine so if you wait so here's a little trick
if you that's i don't like the word hacks because hacks imply using something for a purpose it
wasn't designed for here we're talking about hardwired biology but if you wake up in the
morning and you didn't sleep quite as much as you would have liked that means and you're
sleepy that means you still have a buildup of adenosine in your system let's say you immediately
reach for caffeine great you suppress the action of that adenosine and you will be more alert
and guess what happens then the caffeine wears off and the adenosine binds to the receptors with
greater affinity and you have your afternoon crash so a practice that's very useful to people is
to delay the intake of caffeine by 60 to 90 minutes after waking allow the adenosine to be
cleared out because it's not just cleared out in sleep it's also cleared out in those kind
of sleepy states of early morning so allow it to be cleared out the other thing that clears it
out exercise exercise so when you get up in the morning you're kind of sleepy i don't want to do
this i don't want to do this but you hydrate and train you clear out the adenosine now i like to
drink caffeine before i train her during training i'm weak like that but for people that have an
afternoon crash this can have tremendous benefits of and maybe start by pushing it out 15 minutes
per day most everyone that does this says oh my goodness i didn't understand why in the afternoon
i'm crashing so hard this will really really help so let me ask you this i have a sense for you what
time do you wake up typically generally between well between 4 15 and 4 30. okay so for
most people it's gonna be a little bit later probably but for you that means so you're waking
up if it's because of an alarm it's because of an alarm but you're if that's your natural wake-up
time now without an alarm that means that your temperature is starting to rise at that time
that's why you wake up that temperature increase triggers that cortisol release now and that's why
some people wake up right before their alarm clock it's this cortisol pulse okay and two hours before
that so for you approximately 2 30 in the morning is what we call your temperature minimum it's when
your temperature is lowest that it's ever going to be in the 24 hour cycle so the way it works is
you wake up because of an increase in core body temperature that increase in core body temperature
triggers that increase in cortisol and by viewing light at that time you entrain you you ensure
that it happens at the same time the next day the clocks of your body are matched to this cortisol
pulse so viewing bright light in the morning anchors it when we say entrained it it tel through
a circuit that involves cells in the eye and cells in the hypothalamus which then talk to the rest of
the cells of the body through a signal a peptide that's released make sure that the temperature
starts rising goes up up up up up and sometime around two or three in the afternoon you're going
to hit your temperature maximum you might feel a little sleepy at that time but that's actually
the time in which your gut your all your systems are kind of revving at the maximum capacity
and then it's going to start to drop and start to drop drop drop now that drop in temperature
eventually will be a full one to 3 degrees below what your temperature maximum and that's when
you're going to get sleepy and fall asleep this is why it's important to keep
the room cool at night to fall asleep the goal here is to increase body temperature in
order to be awake and to decrease body temperature in order to be asleep if we stay with those
themes a lot of this will just fall into bins exercising will increase body temperature somewhat
paradoxically getting into a cold shower or cold water everyone says what must make you cold
right well if you stay in there a long time to become hypothermic right but let's remember
the thermostat example you have a little area in your brain called the medial pre-optic area and if
you make the surface of your body cold guess what happens core body temperature goes up so getting
into so if you're going to do ice baths or cold showers you can do i would say do them sometime
better than not at all there's a beautiful paper published in the european journal physiology
in the year 2000 which took people and had them sit they actually had them on lawn chairs in
water a pool it's a great way to run an experiment i always say people ask about cold showers
they're not a lot of experiments on cold showers because think about it's very hard to
control is everyone under the shower the same way et cetera you put someone up in water up
to their neck it is you know what you're doing so there's it's experimental rigor that drives
that but they had people get into reasonably cool water 60 degrees fahrenheit so it's not
that cool but they had them stand for an hour or they've had people get into very cold water
something like 40 degrees for just 20 seconds now here's what's really interesting that shock
that you referred to is a adrenaline also called epinephrine and it is released from the adrenals
obviously but also from a site in the brain called locus ceruleus a little area of the brainstem
that then sprinklers the rest of the brain with epinephrine and wakes up the rest of the brain so
that shock occurs in the brain and the body and actually the stuff in the body doesn't cross the
blood-brain barrier so you're a two-part system when those two systems are aligned it's beautiful
when those two systems are out of alignment that's not good so you get into cold water that's the
shock for the first 30 seconds for most people who are untrained your forebrain which is controlling
decision making is basically suppressed in its activity and other areas are ramped up so just
know that exact panic just understand that passes then what happens is when you get out of the cold
whether or not it's a longer period at 60 degrees or a short period i would hate to hear that people
are only doing 20 seconds but maybe a minute to three minutes at 45 degrees or something there's
a long arc release of dopamine and epinephrine that's what was shown in the study in humans
because people always go well it's just in mice no in humans and that long arc of dopamine leads to a
near doubling or more of dopamine and epinephrine in my colleague anna lembke's book called
dopamine nation she works on addiction runs our dual diagnosis addiction clinic at stanford
she talked about a patient of hers that basically helped himself get over cocaine addiction by doing
cold baths because it was the only thing that would give him the kind of dopamine release that
even slightly mimicked his cocaine addiction and allowed himself to wean himself off with a
healthier behavior now i'm not saying it's the equivalent of a drug like cocaine but i am saying
that it's a better decision than than a drug like cocaine for obvious reasons so that mood-enhancing
effect that you feel afterwards it's real it's based on a real neurochemical effect
and that dopamine and epinephrine will combine with the temperature increase from
cortisol plus light plus exercise all things that increase core body temperature now you've
got increased core body temperature you created a dopamine release epinephrine you've created a
summer month inside your body in the in i don't care if you live in minneapolis in the depths of
winter or someplace even as cold as new hampshire you are you are creating summer in your body by
doing that now if you live in san diego or los angeles or arizona and it's the summer and you're
staying indoors and you're on your phone and you're not doing any movement until the afternoon
which is fine exercise in the afternoon i realize there's some important benefits of that and you're
laying in bed or you're just walking around the kitchen and putting on sunglasses and driving
to work guess what you're creating a colorado winter inside of your body despite the fact that
the sun is out so if you're wondering why you're slightly depressed your metabolism is lower your
testosterone output is slightly lower than maybe you'd like it to be there could be other reasons
too of course but again we're talking about modulators i'm not saying getting sun in your eyes
in the morning is going to make your testosterone perfect what i'm saying is you're you're setting
an internal milieu through things that increase core body temperature dopamine epinephrine etc and
that should be done relatively early in the day thank you for joining for this special
episode of after skool if you'd like to learn more tools for mental health physical
health and performance check out the huberman lab podcast which is available on all platforms
youtube apple spotify anywhere podcasts are found also check out huberman lab on both instagram and
twitter there i cover science and science-based tools some of which overlaps with the content
of the huberman lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content of the huberman lab
podcast we are also hubermanlab.com that's our website and there you can find links to all of
our social media and all of our podcast episodes you
#Optimal #Morning #Routine #Andrew #Huberman
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Remember these practical tips: Try to get natural light in your eyes within 1 hour of waking up. Try to incorporate exercise as early as possibly. Get in cold water after. Wait 90 minutes before drinking any caffeine. These simple tools can have a profound positive impact on mood, energy, metabolism, dopamine, sleep, focus, body temp and more. Big thank you to Andrew Huberman for sharing so much valuable insight. Please check out the Huberman Lab Podcast for more in-depth information. If you want to support After Skool, the best way to do so is on Patreon. Thank you! https://www.patreon.com/AfterSkool
idk look at nikola tesla and da vinci's sleep schedule
I read The Science of Lasting Health after my doctor suggested it, and I finally understand how dopamine, melatonin, and cortisol affect my energy and focus. Small changes based on the book made a huge difference for me.
Thank you, Andrew. That was very insightful. Especially the part about no coffee until 60-90 minutes after waking up. I tend to crash in the afternoon, so now I'm going to try this method.
This morning routine is a game-changer for daily optimization
Can you just open the window and look at
Unpack your gear and why you carry it.
great job!
Excellent as always!
bro is goated, thanks
so mucchhh
Hubermam routine: Grow large beards and record your podcast at a dark dim basement and spread random misinformation here and there.
Huberman routine: text, call and email various women who think they are my monogamous g/f
All are quite correct. The production is extraordinarily good; thanks to everyone. The problem is doing them in the modern work environment. I, as an attending urologist in individual private practice, even hardly keep up some routines; it's really hard for people laboring all day. The guy seeking pleasure instead of pain around 13:00 is not intentionally doing that. He has been living with some kind of debilitating economical pain all his life. The change is not that easy for the most.
Perfect way to restart the day.
Basically get enough sleep, take a quick cold shower, and get a dog… Seriously the dog part takes care of the rest (and if you REALLY want to get some exercise in the morning get a dog you can run with!) Best part of getting a dog is that it will FORCE you to get up, get outside, and exercise EVERY MORNING. 🙂
13:10
De-stress effectively
Does time driving in a car count (commute?)
Hell yah! I'm in!
Nop
THANK YOUU
One healthy choice at a time
Not me watching this at 11:50pm at night and have only been getting 4 hours of sleep each night this week 😩
5:17 dopamine is drive/motivation/pursue hormone. Not pleasure hormone
Thank you!
Morning routines give you the time and space to focus on what matters most for success.