The Optimal Morning Routine – Andrew Huberman
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Hello and welcome to a special episode of after skool i’m andrew huberman professor of 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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
