back to indexUsing Cortisol & Adrenaline to Boost Our Energy & Immune System Function | Huberman Lab Podcast #18
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Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,
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where we discuss science and science-based tools
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for everyday life.
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I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology
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and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
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This podcast is separate from my teaching
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and research roles at Stanford.
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It is, however, part of my desire and effort
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to bring zero cost to consumer information
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about science and science-related tools
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to the general public.
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In keeping with that theme,
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I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
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Our first sponsor is Inside Tracker.
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Inside Tracker is a personalized nutrition platform
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that analyzes data from your blood and DNA
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to help you better understand your body
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and reach your health goals.
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I've long been a fan of doing blood tests,
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and more recently as they've been developed,
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And the reason for that is that so many of the factors
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that impact our immediate and long-term health
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and that inform our health choices
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can only be analyzed by way of blood or DNA tests.
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The great thing about Inside Tracker
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is they make getting the blood and DNA tests extremely easy.
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They'll come to your home if you like,
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or you can go to a place where you can get your blood drawn
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and your DNA swab taken there.
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As well, once you get the information back
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from Inside Tracker, it's very easy to understand
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what to do with that information, how to interpret it.
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And that's really what sets Inside Tracker apart, I believe,
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from other blood and DNA testing tools and companies.
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Most sources and companies will give you information back
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about what your levels of hormones are
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and metabolic factors, et cetera,
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but no clear directives about what to do
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with that information to get those markers
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in the ranges that you want
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in order to optimize your health.
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Inside Tracker makes that all very easy.
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It gives you directives about exercise, about nutrition,
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about various supplements you may or may not want to take.
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And once again, only through blood and DNA tests
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can you access that information.
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If you want to try Inside Tracker,
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you can visit insidetracker.com slash Huberman.
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And if you do that,
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you'll get 25% off any of Inside Tracker's plans.
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That's insidetracker.com slash Huberman
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to get 25% off and enter Huberman at checkout.
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Today's episode is also brought to us by Athletic Greens.
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Athletic Greens is an all-in-one
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vitamin mineral probiotic drink.
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I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012,
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and so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast.
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I started taking Athletic Greens
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and I still take Athletic Greens once or twice a day
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because it covers all my nutritional vitamin mineral
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and probiotic bases.
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Of course, you can get vitamins and minerals
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and probiotics from food,
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but many of us, including me,
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find it hard to do that on a consistent basis,
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especially when I'm working a lot,
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when stress and sleep aren't optimized, et cetera.
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With Athletic Greens,
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I make sure to get all the things I need,
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and then all the other supplements I take or what I eat,
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I can consider additional insurance.
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The great thing about Athletic Greens is it tastes great.
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I like to mix mine with water
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and a little bit of lemon juice.
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I take it once early in the day
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and then sometimes again in the afternoon.
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The fact that it includes probiotics
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is really important to me.
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There are so many data now pointing to the fact
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that probiotics and gut brain health
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and gut health generally are very important for metabolism,
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for hormone output, for neurotransmitter production,
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so many vital things related to our health.
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Athletic Greens makes it easy to make sure
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that I'm getting everything that I need
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in the vitamin mineral and probiotic department.
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If you'd like to try Athletic Greens,
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you can go to athleticgreens.com slash Huberman
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and claim a special offer.
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They'll give you five free travel packs
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plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2.
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There's now a ton of data as well pointing to the fact
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that vitamin D3 and K2 are important for a huge number
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of health related factors, including hormones,
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metabolic factors, neurotransmitters, et cetera.
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So they have the year supply of vitamin D3 completely free
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along with your Athletic Greens offer
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and you get the five free travel packs.
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So if you'd like to try that,
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you go to athleticgreens.com slash Huberman
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and claim the special offer.
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Today's episode is also brought to us by Headspace.
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Headspace is a meditation app that makes meditation easy.
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I started meditating many years ago,
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but I found it was difficult to stay consistent
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with my meditation practice.
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In fact, when I would get stressed or really busy,
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that's when I probably needed
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the meditation practice the most.
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And that's when I tended to drop the meditation practice
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and run around doing other things.
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So it was really a kind of catch 22.
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I learned about Headspace a few years ago
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on JetBlue flights when they had them included
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as an option of whether or not to watch a movie
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or a television show or do meditation.
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I tried the meditation and I really liked it.
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Very easy to follow along with a Headspace meditation.
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The meditations that they include on the Headspace app
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are also backed by dozens of peer reviewed
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quality independent studies.
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And of course there are now thousands
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of peer reviewed quality studies pointing to the fact
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that a meditation practice is beneficial
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for sake of improved sleep, for reducing stress
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and a number of other health metrics,
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cardiovascular disease, risk, et cetera.
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The great thing about Headspace is it's allowed me
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to stay really consistent with my meditation practice.
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They have meditations of different duration
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and different type.
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So you never get bored.
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I actually look forward to my meditation practice
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and it continues to benefit me.
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In fact, since starting Headspace,
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I've been consistent with meditation for much longer
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than I ever had previously.
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If you want to try Headspace,
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you can go to headspace.com slash special offer
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and you'll get a free one month trial
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with Headspace's full library of meditations
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for every situation.
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That's headspace.com slash special offer
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to get a one month free trial.
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That's their best offer out there right now.
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And then you can try their full library of meditations
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for every situation.
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Today, we're going to continue our discussion about hormones
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and we're going to focus on how particular hormones
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influence our energy levels and our immune system.
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Now, last episode, I mentioned at the end
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that we were concluding our month on hormones
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but we decided to include this additional episode.
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So this would be the fifth episode
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in the sequence of episodes about hormones
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because there are two hormones
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which are vitally important for a huge number
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of biological functions that we will talk about today
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but that are particularly important for energy levels
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and your immune system.
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This is something that I get asked about a lot.
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So rather than skip to the next general topic,
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today we're going to talk about the hormones cortisol
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and epinephrine, also called adrenaline.
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You do not have to have heard the previous episodes
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on hormones in order to understand and digest the material
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from today's podcast.
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If I mentioned anything related to previous episodes,
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I promise to give a little bit of quick background
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to get everyone up to speed.
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Today, we're going to talk about the biology of cortisol.
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We're going to talk about the biology of epinephrine.
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As always, we'll talk mechanism
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and there are going to be a lot of tools.
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If you're somebody who struggles with stress
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and energy levels and balancing stress and energy levels,
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today's episode is going to be vital for you.
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If you're somebody who has challenges with sleep
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or you're somebody who has challenges
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getting your energy level up throughout the day
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and getting your energy level down when you want to sleep,
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today's episode is also for you.
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And we're going to talk about the immune system
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and how to enhance the function of your immune system.
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We're also going to get into some fun topics
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related to learning and memory
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and how you can leverage cortisol
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and epinephrine in particular in order to learn faster.
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We're going to talk about so-called nootropics, smart drugs
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and how they work because there are several of them
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that tap into the epinephrine system
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that aren't often discussed and that you have access to.
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We're going to talk about how caffeine
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can actually rewire your brain for better or for worse.
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And we're going to talk about the biology of comfort foods
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and why they work so well and what they're doing.
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And in understanding that,
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you'll be able to better understand your food choices
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as they relate to short-term and long-term energy.
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So we have a lot to cover.
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Everything will be timestamped.
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I want to just remind people that we caption every episode
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in English and in Spanish.
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The captions take a day or two to pop up on YouTube.
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So if you're not seeing those within the first couple days,
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please be patient with us in order to get captions
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that actually read similarly to what I'm saying.
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We go through a captioning service
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and so we have them done by experts
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and that takes a little bit of additional time.
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Meanwhile, if you have any questions
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as the episode evolves, please write them down,
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please put them in the comment section,
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please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already
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and let's get started talking about
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how to increase your energy and improve
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and increase your immunity by leveraging the biology
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of cortisol and adrenaline.
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Before we dive into the biology of increasing energy
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and your immune system, I want to cover three topics
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that I promised I would mention from previous episodes.
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The first one relates to intermittent fasting.
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The second one relates to why your stomach grumbles.
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I forgot to mention the biology of that last time.
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And the third is a powerful way to increase growth hormone,
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which is powerful for increasing metabolism,
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fat burning and tissue repair, et cetera,
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that doesn't involve a sauna
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or wrapping yourself in plastic bags and going for a jog.
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So first, intermittent fasting.
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Last episode, I talked a lot about growth hormone
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and thyroid hormone and I mentioned things like sauna
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and exercise and sleep and how they can increase levels
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of growth hormone within the healthy ranges
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and why increasing growth hormone can be very beneficial
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because it can burn off body fat,
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it can improve muscle and general tissue health,
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cartilage, et cetera, and we tend to lose
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or our levels of growth hormone are reduced as we age.
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Many people ask me, well, what about fasting?
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Everyone's been promised on the internet
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that intermittent fasting leads to these big increases
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in growth hormone.
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The reason I didn't mention it is that I couldn't find
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a study that actually pointed to the underlying mechanism.
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I saw lots of claims, lots of podcasts,
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lots of degrees behind people's names,
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sometimes biologists, sometimes entirely different fields
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talking about this, but very few studies.
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And then I found what I would consider the study.
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We will link to this study.
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Turns out that fasting does increase growth hormone levels
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and the way that it does it is fascinating.
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I mentioned in a previous podcast about hunger
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and timing of meals and timing of hunger
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that when you're hungry, you release a hormone
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in your body called ghrelin,
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sometimes actually called ghrelin.
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Thanks for all of you ghrelinistas or ghrelinistas
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that corrected my pronunciation.
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It's both ghrelin or ghrelin, either one works.
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Ghrelin makes you hungry.
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When blood glucose, your blood sugar is low,
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ghrelin is secreted and makes you hungry.
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And it turns out that ghrelin, this hunger hormone,
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actually binds to the receptor in the brain
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that normally binds what's called
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growth hormone releasing hormone.
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So believe it or not, the hunger hormone
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can act like growth hormone releasing hormone
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and thereby stimulate growth hormone.
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Now, the levels of growth hormone that fasting promotes
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through this ghrelin system are pretty substantial.
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It's about a doubling of growth hormone levels
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in the waking state.
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So we know that you can release growth hormone in sleep.
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Intermittent fasting, it turns out,
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can increase growth hormone by binding ghrelin
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to the growth hormone releasing hormone receptor.
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And it does it also during the daytime.
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So yes, indeed, fasting can increase growth hormone,
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not to the supra levels that taking growth hormone
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would increase it or that a sauna could increase it,
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but it does seem to increase growth hormone.
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Later in today's episode,
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we're going to talk a lot about different patterns
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of fasting and eating that can control epinephrine.
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And so we will return to specifics about how long a fast.
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Do you need to fast for two or three days or 23 hours?
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Fortunately, for people like me who love to eat,
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that's not the case.
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So we'll talk specific fasting protocols
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later in the episode.
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We also said we were going to talk about tummy grumble.
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When your stomach growls,
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it is not because of fluid sifting around in there.
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A lot of people think, oh, you know,
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it's fluid sifting around.
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It turns out that your stomach has smooth muscle
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that lines its sides.
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And when you eat something or you don't,
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every once in a while,
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your stomach cinches off at the two ends like a bag
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with a hose on either end,
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because that's essentially what your digestive system is.
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And if there's nothing in there,
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what happens is the muscles that line the sides
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they kind of extend around the stomach in these cables.
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Those are always there.
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And if you have food in your stomach,
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what they do is they churn your stomach.
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They literally turn the muscles of your stomach
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like a tumbler to help break up the food
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that presumably you didn't chew well enough
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because you were eating too fast.
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When you don't have any food in your stomach,
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that churning continues.
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And that contraction of the muscle and the turning,
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literally turning over of your muscles,
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they don't flip over completely,
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but the turning over the muscles,
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that's what causes the stomach growling.
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If you don't want to be the person in the meeting
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or sitting there in a quiet theater
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whose stomach is growling, chew your food better.
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That's the simple solution.
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I talked a lot about how sauna controlled safe hyperthermia
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can cause huge increases in growth hormone release,
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anywhere from 300 to 500,
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even 1,600% increases in growth hormone release,
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really staggeringly high increases.
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I point out that many people don't have saunas
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in their yard or in their homes,
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and they would go through some other measures
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to increase safely their body heat,
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creating a steam room in their bathroom
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or jogging with extra sweats on, this kind of thing.
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Many of you asked about hot baths.
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Hot baths will increase growth hormone, excuse me.
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However, the temperatures that you need
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in order to increase growth hormone
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are high enough that you run the risk of burn.
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And so I really can't make any recommendations
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about hot baths, but if you can tolerate a nice hot bath,
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you are going to get some growth hormone release.
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However, the sauna has this advantage
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of you being able to enter 175 degree
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or 200 degree environment,
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provided you're not pregnant, you're not a young child,
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et cetera, you can do that safely.
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And getting big increases in growth hormone,
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the hot bath will lead to lesser increases
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in growth hormone.
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We're going to talk a lot about temperature regulation
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in a future episode, but as always,
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if you're ever going to start playing with hypothermia
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or hypothermia, cold baths, ice baths, hot showers,
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hot baths that are beyond the kind of norm
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of what's comfortable, you have to be extremely careful
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and please consult a doctor.
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I think it's fair to say that most people
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would like to have a lot of energy during the day,
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if you work during the day,
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and they'd like their energy to taper off at night.
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And I think it's fair to say that most people
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don't enjoy being sick, nobody wants to get sick.
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In other words, you want to have energy
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and you want your immune system to function well,
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to ward off infections of various kinds,
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bacterial infections, viral infections, et cetera.
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And it turns out that the two hormones
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that dominate those processes of having enough energy
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and having a healthy immune system
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are cortisol and epinephrine.
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Epinephrine is the same thing as adrenaline.
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In the body, we tend to call adrenaline adrenaline
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and in the brain, we tend to call adrenaline epinephrine.
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And I'm sorry for that, I didn't create this naming system.
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And the story behind it is uninteresting
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and not worth our time.
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I will use the words adrenaline and epinephrine
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interchangeably today.
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Cortisol is cortisol.
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And I just want to cover a little bit
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about what cortisol and epinephrine are,
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where they are released in the body and brain,
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because if you can understand that,
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you will understand better how to control them.
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First of all, cortisol is a steroid hormone,
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much like estrogen and testosterone,
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in that it is derived from cholesterol.
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Now that could be cholesterol that you eat.
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It could be cholesterol that's produced by the liver.
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As many of you probably know,
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the relationship between dietary cholesterol,
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the fats that you eat and blood cholesterol
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and liver cholesterol is a very controversial one.
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It's a barbed wire topic.
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There are people that claim that dietary cholesterol
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has zero impact on circulating cholesterol
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coming from the liver.
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There are people who argue the exact opposite,
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both with good data in hand, I would say.
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There are some problems for the idea
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that all your cholesterol levels
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are determined by dietary intake,
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namely that anorexics often have very high levels
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of cholesterol that their liver produces,
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even though they are eating very little
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and sometimes not eating at all.
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So understand that cholesterol is a precursor molecule,
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meaning it's the substrate from which a lot of things
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like testosterone and estrogen are made.
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Please also understand that cholesterol can be made
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into estrogen or testosterone or cortisol,
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and that cortisol is sort of the competitive partner
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to estrogen and testosterone.
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What this means is no matter how much cholesterol
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you're eating or you produce,
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whether or not it's low or it's high,
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if you are stressed, more of that cholesterol
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is going to be devoted toward creating cortisol,
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which is indeed a stress hormone.
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However, the word stress shouldn't stress you out
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because you need cortisol.
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Cortisol is vital.
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You don't want your cortisol levels to be too low.
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It's very important for immune system function,
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for memory, for not getting depressed.
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You just don't want your cortisol levels to be too high,
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and you don't want them to be elevated
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even to normal levels at the wrong time of day.
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So we're going to talk about how to control
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the timing and level of your cortisol.
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Epinephrine or adrenaline has also been demonized a bit.
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We think of it as this stress hormone,
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this thing that makes us anxious, fight or flight.
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You know, we used to get chased by lions
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and tigers and bears, and now we don't,
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and it's this ancient hangover.
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The fact of the matter is that epinephrine
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is your best friend when it comes to your immunity,
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when it comes to protecting you from infection,
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and we're going to talk about why,
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and epinephrine, adrenaline, is your best friend
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when it comes to remembering things
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and learning and activating neuroplasticity.
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We're going to talk about that as well.
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Once again, it's a question of how much and how long
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and the specific timing of release of cortisol
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and epinephrine, as opposed to cortisol and adrenaline
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being good or bad.
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They're terrific when they're regulated.
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They are terrible when they're misregulated,
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and we will give you lots of tools to regulate them better.
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Cortisol biology 101 in less than two minutes.
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Your brain makes what we call releasing hormones,
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and in this case, there's corticotropin-releasing hormone,
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CRH, is made by neurons in your brain.
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It causes the pituitary, this gland that sits
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about an inch in front of the roof of your mouth
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and the base of your brain, to release ACTH.
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ACTH then goes and causes your adrenals,
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which sit above your kidneys in your lower back,
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to release cortisol, a so-called stress hormone.
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But I would like you to think about cortisol
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not as a stress hormone, but as a hormone of energy.
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It produces a situation in the brain and body
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whereby you want to move
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and whereby you don't want to rest
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and whereby you don't want to eat, at least at first.
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Epinephrine or adrenaline 101 in less than two minutes.
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When you sense a stressor with your mind
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or your body senses a stressor, excuse me,
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from a wound or something of that sort,
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a signal is sent to neurons that are
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in the middle of your body.
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They're called the sympathetic chain ganglia.
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The name doesn't necessarily matter.
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They release norepinephrine very quickly.
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It's almost like a sprinkler system
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that just hoses your body with epinephrine.
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That will increase heart rate, will increase breathing rate.
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In some cases, it will constrict your blood vessels.
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It will also increase the size of vessels and arteries
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that are giving blood flow to your vital organs.
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This is why your extremities get cold when you're stressed
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and your heart is beating faster.
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More of that energy is being devoted toward your core.
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You also release adrenaline from your adrenals
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in, again, riding atop your kidneys.
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Those are a second system whereby your system gets flooded
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with adrenaline in pulses.
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So you can get one pulse, you can get 10 pulses.
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We'll talk about how to regulate the number of pulses.
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And you release it from an area of your brain
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called locus coeruleus,
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and that creates alertness in your brain.
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If you want to learn more about the stress response
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and all the details of that,
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including some protocols of how to regulate stress,
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please see our episode about stress.
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I go into a lot of detail there.
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I will touch on some of the same themes today,
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but I really want to cover energy and the immune system.
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And if you're very much interested in stress per se
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and stress regulation, please see the episode on stress.
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Okay, so we have cortisol and we have epinephrine,
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and their net effect is to increase energy.
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So first of all, I want to give you a tool
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that will help you regulate cortisol
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and can also help stave off
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certain patterns of mental illness.
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Now, of course, it's not going to cure mental illness
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on its own, but it can support healthy state of mind
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and can help reduce unhealthy states of mind,
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including depression.
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So the first tool is to make sure
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that your highest levels of cortisol
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are first thing in the morning when you wake up.
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One way or another, every 24 hours,
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you will get an increase in cortisol.
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That is non-negotiable.
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That is written into your genome.
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That increase in cortisol is there to wake you up
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and to make you alert.
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It's to stimulate movement from being asleep,
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presumably horizontal,
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to getting up and starting to move about your day.
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And I've said it before, but I will say it again,
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the best way to stimulate that increase in cortisol
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at the appropriate time is that very soon after waking,
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within 30 minutes or so after waking,
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get outside, view some sunlight.
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Even if it's overcast, get outside, view some sunlight,
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no sunglasses, never look at any light so bright
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that it could damage your eyes,
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but do that for two to 10 minutes.
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If it's very bright, two minutes.
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If it's not so bright, 10 minutes.
link |
Do that because in the early part of the day,
link |
you have the opportunity to time that cortisol release
link |
to the early part of the day, which will improve.
link |
This has been backed by peer reviewed studies.
link |
It will improve your focus.
link |
It will improve your energy levels
link |
and it will improve your learning throughout the day.
link |
It will also prevent a late shift in cortisol increase
link |
and late shifted cortisol, meaning cortisol that increases
link |
around eight or 9 p.m. is a signature feature
link |
of many depressive disorders,
link |
including major depression, anxiety.
link |
And that of course correlates
link |
with things like insomnia, et cetera.
link |
So that's a key tool.
link |
And I don't know how many of you are already doing that,
link |
but it is vital to do.
link |
Now I mentioned sunlight even on cloudy days
link |
and there are specific reasons for that.
link |
So I want to just briefly cover the data
link |
because in the episodes on sleep,
link |
I talked about brightness of light
link |
in regulating cortisol and sleep.
link |
And I talked about how to measure lux brightness,
link |
but I was not specific enough.
link |
I realized based on the questions
link |
that I've received since that episode.
link |
So here's how it works.
link |
Going outside and getting some sunlight requires
link |
that I also tell you how long and under what conditions.
link |
I've said looking through a window is not as good.
link |
It takes 50 times longer to get as much light,
link |
et cetera, et cetera.
link |
Many, many questions have told me
link |
that I'm not being specific enough.
link |
So I'm going to give you the data
link |
and from the data you will understand exactly
link |
how long you need to do this each day.
link |
On a sunny day, so no cloud cover,
link |
provided that the sun is not yet overhead,
link |
it's somewhere low in the sky,
link |
could have just crossed the horizon
link |
or if you wake up a little bit later,
link |
it could be somewhat low in the sky.
link |
Basically the intensity of light,
link |
the brightness is somewhere around 100,000 lux.
link |
Lux is just a measurement of brightness.
link |
If you want to download the app Light Meter,
link |
that is a free app that will allow you to do that.
link |
You can hold your finger down on the little button there
link |
and you can move it around
link |
and it will continuously give you a lux readout.
link |
It's not perfect, it's not exact,
link |
but it's pretty good and it is zero cost.
link |
I have no relationship to Light Meter, the company.
link |
On a cloudy day, it's about 10,000 lux.
link |
So 10 fold reduction, but bright artificial light,
link |
very bright artificial light,
link |
is somewhere around 1,000 lux.
link |
And ordinary room light
link |
is somewhere around 100 to 200 lux.
link |
And it has to do with how much light scatter there is.
link |
So even if you have a very bright bulb
link |
sitting right next to you, that's not going to do the job.
link |
Your phone will not do the job, not early in the day.
link |
To get the cortisol released at the appropriate time,
link |
you need to get outside.
link |
So let's just set a couple general parameters.
link |
If it's bright outside and no cloud cover,
link |
the light can be indirect,
link |
you don't have to be staring into the sun,
link |
please don't damage your eyes.
link |
We can't regenerate those neurons yet
link |
and restore vision that's lost.
link |
But if you have to blink, that means it's too bright.
link |
It's fine to blink, of course, please do if you need to.
link |
Get outside for 10 minutes
link |
or five minutes should suffice,
link |
but 10 minutes is sure to suffice.
link |
If it's a cloudy day, dense overcast,
link |
you're probably going to need about 30 minutes.
link |
If it's light cloud, broken cloud cover,
link |
it's probably going to be somewhere
link |
between 10 and 20 minutes.
link |
And if you can't get outside or you're on an airplane
link |
and it's bright overhead artificial lights
link |
or ordinary room lights,
link |
it's going to take you about six hours of light.
link |
And by time you reach the middle
link |
of your sort of wakeful period, it's too late.
link |
You won't be able to shift your clock
link |
and your cortisol will start drifting later and later.
link |
This is why it's vital to get this light on a regular basis,
link |
to get that cortisol released early in the day.
link |
That sets you up for optimal levels of energy.
link |
It sets you up for great sleep,
link |
but today's not really about sleep, it's more about energy.
link |
That cortisol pulse and the stress
link |
that you might feel early in the day
link |
from having a little bit extra energy,
link |
that is the energy that you want in order to move about
link |
and learn and do various things.
link |
That is a healthy level of energy.
link |
So please try and get that sunlight
link |
if it's within your protocols to do that
link |
and try and get sufficient sunlight
link |
first thing in the morning, again, within the first hour.
link |
That's the best way to make sure
link |
that you time your cortisol appropriately.
link |
Now, throughout the day,
link |
you're going to experience different things.
link |
Most of you are not spending your entire day
link |
trying to optimize your health.
link |
Some of you might be, but most of you have jobs
link |
and you have families and you have commitments.
link |
Life enters the picture and provides you stressors.
link |
And those stressors, whatever they may happen to be,
link |
a difficult coworker, some disappointment about something,
link |
you didn't get the raise you expected
link |
or you didn't get the vacation that you expected,
link |
those will cause increases in cortisol and epinephrine.
link |
This is important to understand.
link |
You don't have the luxury
link |
of just having this morning cortisol
link |
and then having it taper off.
link |
You want that major cortisol early in the day,
link |
but then you can expect, you should expect,
link |
increases in cortisol and adrenaline throughout the day
link |
based on events that are unpleasant to you.
link |
So for me, the events that are most unpleasant to me
link |
are things like traffic,
link |
emails that ask me to fill out a form
link |
for which I can't find the link.
link |
These kinds of things stress me out.
link |
I'm a human being.
link |
I don't lose my cool over them,
link |
but I can feel my level of alertness
link |
and kind of frustration increase.
link |
The normal kind of things that go with stress
link |
tense up a little bit.
link |
The key is these blips in cortisol and epinephrine
link |
You can't have them so often or lasting so long
link |
that you are in a state of chronic cortisol elevation
link |
or chronic epinephrine elevation.
link |
This system of stress was designed
link |
to increase your alertness and mobilize you towards things,
link |
get you frustrated and provide the opportunity
link |
to change behavior.
link |
That's what they were designed to do.
link |
So if you find yourself getting stressed
link |
and staying stressed,
link |
there are great tools that we provide in the stress episode
link |
that relate to things like the double inhale exhale,
link |
the so-called physiological psi.
link |
You can incorporate an NSDR, a non-sleep deep
link |
breast protocol, et cetera.
link |
But understand that the energy that you experience
link |
during stress, that sudden increase in alertness
link |
and attention that comes from seeing something difficult,
link |
that is a healthy hormonal system and neural system
link |
And the reason it works is that cortisol,
link |
when it's released into the bloodstream,
link |
it actually can bind to receptors in the brain.
link |
It can bind receptors in the amygdala, fear centers
link |
and threat detection centers,
link |
but also areas of the brain that are involved in learning
link |
and memory and neuroplasticity.
link |
And this is why I say that neuroplasticity,
link |
the brain's ability to change itself
link |
in response to experience is first stimulated
link |
by attention and focus
link |
and often a low level state of agitation.
link |
So understand that, and you won't be quite so troubled
link |
about the little stress increases
link |
that you experience throughout the day.
link |
Now, there are ways to leverage stress,
link |
epinephrine and cortisol in ways that serve you
link |
and to do it in a deliberate way.
link |
There are also ways to do that
link |
that increase your level of stress threshold,
link |
meaning they make it less likely
link |
that epinephrine and cortisol will be released.
link |
So I want to talk about the science of those practices
link |
because I get asked about these practices a lot,
link |
things like Wim Hof breathing,
link |
which is also called Tummo breathing,
link |
things like ice baths,
link |
things like high intensity interval training.
link |
All of those things have utility.
link |
The question is how you use them
link |
and how often you use them.
link |
Those tools, just like stress from a life event
link |
can either enhance your immunity or deplete it.
link |
That's right, those same practices of ice baths,
link |
Tummo breathing, high intensity interval training
link |
or training of any kind can deplete your immune system
link |
or it can improve them.
link |
Excuse me, they can improve it,
link |
meaning they can improve your immune system.
link |
The key is how often you use them and when.
link |
And so I want to review that now
link |
in light of the scientific literature,
link |
because in doing that,
link |
you can build practices into your daily
link |
or maybe every other day routine
link |
that can really help buffer you
link |
against unhealthy levels of cortisol and epinephrine,
link |
meaning cortisol increases that are much too great
link |
or that last much too long.
link |
Epinephrine increases that are much too great
link |
or that last much too long.
link |
And of course, we'll talk about all the negatives
link |
that go along with having too much cortisol,
link |
too much epinephrine for too long,
link |
but you hear about those a lot.
link |
You hear about Cushing syndrome,
link |
you hear about abdominal fat accumulation,
link |
you hear about sleep disturbances.
link |
I want to arm you with the tools first
link |
and then we can talk about the dark side
link |
and all the things that hopefully
link |
you'll be able to avoid entirely
link |
or that you can get yourself out of
link |
once you have the tools in hand.
link |
Let's say somebody tells you something very troubling
link |
or you look at your phone and you see a text message
link |
that's really upsetting to you.
link |
That will cause an immediate increase
link |
in epinephrine, adrenaline in your brain and body.
link |
And chances are it's going to increase
link |
your levels of cortisol as well.
link |
Let's say you get into an ice bath or a cold shower.
link |
Even if you love the cold or if you hate the cold,
link |
that will cause an equivalent increase
link |
in epinephrine and cortisol.
link |
We don't know the exact levels,
link |
but it's probably about the same.
link |
Let's say you go out for high intensity interval training.
link |
You decide you're going to run some sprints.
link |
You can do some repeats
link |
or you're going to do some weightlifting in the gym
link |
and you love lifting weights in the gym.
link |
Maybe you're like the powerlifting thing
link |
or you decide that you want to do some hot yoga
link |
or something that you really enjoy or you hate.
link |
You're going to increase your epinephrine
link |
and cortisol levels.
link |
There's simply no way around this.
link |
Let's say you decide to sit down
link |
and you're going to do some deep breathing.
link |
We all hear about the benefits of deep breathing.
link |
So inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.
link |
You're going to get big increases
link |
in epinephrine and cortisol.
link |
The data from multiple studies support this.
link |
All of those are stressors in air quotes.
link |
Now there is a way that you can cognitively reframe
link |
You can tell yourself,
link |
I love high intensity interval training
link |
or I love weight training or I personally love exercise.
link |
I'm not crazy about the cold.
link |
I do some cold exposure stuff now and again
link |
and we're going to talk a lot about how to do that
link |
in the optimal way in an upcoming episode.
link |
But getting into the cold doesn't feel good to me.
link |
I tell myself it's good for me and I enjoy it
link |
at some point usually when I'm getting out.
link |
All of those increase epinephrine and guess what?
link |
They increase your levels of energy and alertness.
link |
So if you're somebody who struggles
link |
with energy and alertness, it can be beneficial
link |
provided you get clearance from your doctor
link |
to have some sort of protocol built into your day
link |
where you deliberately increase your levels of epinephrine
link |
and your levels of cortisol.
link |
And I want to put the emphasis on deliberately.
link |
So how would you do that?
link |
Well, it's quite easy to turn the shower cold
link |
and get into that.
link |
That will wake you up and it literally wakes you up
link |
because of increases in epinephrine.
link |
You can do deep breathing of the sort
link |
where you inhale and exhale repeatedly 25 or 30 times,
link |
maybe hold your breath for a few seconds on an exhale
link |
and then repeat so-called Wim Hof or Tummo type breathing.
link |
Lots of adrenaline is released into your system.
link |
When you do that, you will have more energy afterwards.
link |
So it's really important to understand
link |
that the body doesn't distinguish
link |
between a troubling text message, ice, Tummo breathing
link |
or high intensity interval training
link |
or any other kind of exercise.
link |
Cognitively reframing that and telling yourself,
link |
I like this, I enjoy it is not going to change
link |
the way that that molecule impacts your body and brain.
link |
I sort of chuckle because people would love to tell you
link |
that all you have to do is say, oh, this is good for me.
link |
No, what it does to tell yourself that it's good for you
link |
or that you enjoy it is that it liberates other molecules
link |
like dopamine and serotonin
link |
that help buffer the epinephrine response.
link |
Now, the way that it does that,
link |
I've talked about previous episode,
link |
but I'll just mention that dopamine
link |
is the precursor to epinephrine.
link |
Epinephrine, adrenaline is made from dopamine.
link |
Cortisol is made from cholesterol.
link |
Epinephrine is made from dopamine.
link |
And that's why if you tell yourself
link |
you're enjoying something
link |
and because dopamine is so subjective
link |
that you can in some ways,
link |
as long as you're not completely lying to yourself,
link |
you can get more epinephrine, you get more mileage
link |
or more ability to push through something
link |
and you can sort of reframe it,
link |
but it's not really cognitive reframing.
link |
The cognitive part is the trigger,
link |
but it's a chemical substance
link |
that's actually occurring there.
link |
It's dopamine giving you more epinephrine,
link |
a bigger amplitude epinephrine release,
link |
and it gives you some sense of control.
link |
So here's a protocol that anyone can use
link |
if you want to increase levels of energy,
link |
if you suffer from low energy during the daytime
link |
or whenever it is that you'd like to be alert.
link |
Pick a practice that you can do fairly consistently,
link |
but maybe every third day or every fourth day,
link |
maybe it's an ice bath or a cold bath,
link |
maybe it's a cold shower,
link |
maybe it's the cyclic inhale exhale breathing protocol
link |
I described, if that wasn't clear
link |
and people always ask for a demo,
link |
I'm not going to do the whole thing right now,
link |
but I'm willing to do a few rounds of this
link |
or a few cycles I should say.
link |
I would do that more deeply,
link |
more like you do that 25, 30 times repeatedly,
link |
you will start to feel warm,
link |
people in the yoga community,
link |
they say you're generating heat,
link |
you're not generating heat, releasing adrenaline.
link |
Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale,
link |
25 or 30 times, you will feel agitated and stressed,
link |
that's because you're releasing adrenaline in your body
link |
and that's because you're releasing norepinephrine
link |
in your brain and you'll be more alert.
link |
Then you can follow that 25 or 30 breath cycles
link |
with an exhale hold
link |
and hold your breath for 15 to 30 seconds.
link |
Always, always, always do this on dry land,
link |
never while driving, operating heavy machinery,
link |
all of the standard safety protocols, never near water,
link |
please, people have passed out and died doing this
link |
with breath holds in water,
link |
there are several deaths associated with it,
link |
on land it's probably safer, clear it with your doctor,
link |
but 25, 30 breaths, exhale, hold,
link |
25, 30 breaths again, exhale, hold,
link |
25, 30 breaths again, exhale, hold,
link |
and then if you like, you can do an inhale and hold
link |
if that's within your margins of safety.
link |
So if all these protocols,
link |
all these activities are just equivalent,
link |
they're just stress, then how do we make them good for us?
link |
How do we actually benefit from them?
link |
Now, of course, the cold itself
link |
can have some health promoting effects,
link |
it can increase brown fat thermogenesis and metabolism,
link |
high intensity interval training or other forms of exercise
link |
of course has cardiovascular effects that can be good for us
link |
as does weight training, et cetera,
link |
but what we're talking about here
link |
are ways to increase energy and to teach our brain and body,
link |
to teach ourselves how to regulate the stress response.
link |
So in addition to the benefits of the actual practices,
link |
what we're talking about is building a system
link |
so that when you experience increases
link |
in epinephrine and cortisol from life events,
link |
you're able to better buffer those,
link |
and we are also talking about
link |
ways that you can increase energy overall,
link |
because that's what today's episode is all about,
link |
energy and the immune system.
link |
And indeed, we will talk about
link |
how you can actually leverage specific protocols
link |
to increase your immune system on demand.
link |
There's great scientific data to support
link |
that one can do that.
link |
So there's a biological mechanism that's very important
link |
if you want to do those things,
link |
increase energy and your immune system on demand,
link |
learn to buffer stress on demand in real time.
link |
And it means taking these protocols, these practices,
link |
whether or not it's cold water or ice bath or exercise
link |
or any of those, and making one small
link |
but very powerful adjustment in how you perform them.
link |
But in order to make that adjustment,
link |
I can't just tell you the adjustment,
link |
I have to tell you the mechanism
link |
so that you know if you're doing it correctly or not.
link |
This is really a case where
link |
if you can understand a little bit of mechanism,
link |
you will be far better off than just adopting protocols.
link |
So if you take away nothing else from this episode,
link |
except what I'm about to tell you,
link |
please take away the information I'm about to tell you.
link |
Cortisol, as I mentioned, is released from the adrenals
link |
and it can bind to receptors,
link |
it can have action both in the body and in the brain.
link |
In fact, it can bind the so-called
link |
threat detection center in the brain, or one of them,
link |
which is the amygdala, also called the fear center.
link |
It can do that because cortisol
link |
can cross the blood brain barrier,
link |
it can be released in the body
link |
and cross this biological barrier,
link |
it's like a fence that keeps things out of the brain,
link |
but cortisol has passing rights, it can go through.
link |
Epinephrine cannot, epinephrine is polarized,
link |
the shape of it is such that it can't make it
link |
through the blood brain barrier.
link |
That's one of the reasons why it's released
link |
both from the adrenals in your body
link |
and released from this brainstem area,
link |
the locus coeruleus in your brain.
link |
That's a powerful thing because what it means
link |
is that the body can enter states of readiness
link |
and alertness while the mind remains calm,
link |
that is biologically possible,
link |
it's not just a psychological trick
link |
and there are ways that one can do that.
link |
So I'm presuming at this point
link |
that you're getting your morning light
link |
to time your cortisol increase.
link |
I'm presuming that you want more energy
link |
or that you want to increase your immune system,
link |
its function and its ability to combat infections
link |
And what I'm suggesting is that you pick from the palette
link |
of exercises that are out there
link |
or tools that are out there to increase epinephrine,
link |
there are a lot of ways to do that.
link |
You can do that as I mentioned,
link |
through cold water, through exercise,
link |
you can even do that by having confrontations
link |
with other people.
link |
At a biological level, it is identical.
link |
So if you like to go online and place the kind of comments
link |
that will read the kinds of things
link |
or look at the kinds of things that agitate you,
link |
you can, if you like, look at that as an opportunity.
link |
I'm not suggesting you do that,
link |
I'd like to see people taking care of themselves
link |
and each other in much less destructive ways, frankly,
link |
but the prerequisite here is getting an increase
link |
in adrenaline released from the body.
link |
Now, the simplest way to describe how to do that
link |
would be in the context of cold water
link |
or a breathing protocol,
link |
because then I don't have to deal
link |
with the unknown life circumstances that get you triggered
link |
or I could tell you what gets me triggered,
link |
but I'm not going to.
link |
So let's presume cold water.
link |
So let's say you decide you're going to take a cold shower.
link |
You get into the cold shower and if it's cold enough,
link |
that will be stressful,
link |
you will experience an increase in epinephrine.
link |
It will increase your alertness.
link |
Now you're using this as a practice,
link |
as a tool to build, you could call it resilience,
link |
but the ability to stay calm in the mind
link |
while being stressed in the body, epinephrines in the body.
link |
And you do that by subjectively trying to calm yourself.
link |
Now you can do that by telling yourself it's good for you,
link |
by emphasizing your exhales,
link |
anything that you can do to try and stay calm
link |
despite the fact that you are
link |
in a heightened state of alertness.
link |
You do this with exercise, you could do this with music,
link |
pretty much anything that will give you
link |
a really heightened state of alertness
link |
offers you the opportunity to try and stay calm in the mind.
link |
What you're trying to do at a mechanistic level
link |
is to have adrenaline released from the adrenals,
link |
but not have adrenaline epinephrin released
link |
from the brainstem to the same degree.
link |
So you're not just trying to buffer this.
link |
You're not trying to say, oh, this is good for me,
link |
this is good for me, I'm going to grind this out.
link |
You're not trying to grind it out.
link |
You're trying to move through this calmly
link |
while maintaining alertness.
link |
You're not trying to zone out necessarily,
link |
although maybe that helps.
link |
You're not trying to distract yourself.
link |
What you're trying to do is shift cognitively
link |
your relationship to the somatic,
link |
to the body stress response.
link |
Now I'm sure some of you out there are shouting,
link |
yeah, that's exactly like whatever, whatever, whatever.
link |
This is in many ways a self-directed
link |
kind of stress inoculation,
link |
but we're not talking about this as stress inoculation.
link |
We're talking about this as a way
link |
to increase energy and focus.
link |
And the reason is that epinephrin when released in the body
link |
has a profound effect on the immune system.
link |
And when released in the brain has a profound effect
link |
on the ability to learn and remember information
link |
And so we're talking about splitting the location,
link |
separating the location from which you have
link |
epinephrin adrenaline released, okay?
link |
So let's say you are doing this practice simply to wake up.
link |
Okay, cold shower, we'll do that.
link |
Exercise, we'll do that.
link |
The ability to stay calm in mind
link |
while having heightened levels of adrenaline
link |
and presumably cortisol as well in the body,
link |
but the cortisol is going to circulate everywhere.
link |
We'll talk a little bit about cortisol more in a moment.
link |
You could do that through some self-soothing, calming way.
link |
That's going to be highly individual.
link |
You do it by telling yourself you enjoy it, et cetera.
link |
But what you need to understand is that
link |
in the immediate period following that practice,
link |
your system, your entire brain and body are different.
link |
Your body is actually primed to resist infection
link |
when you have high levels of epinephrin in it
link |
for short periods of time.
link |
So the scientific study that explored
link |
how increasing adrenaline in the body
link |
can improve immune resistance is grounded
link |
in a well-known phenomenon that increases in stress
link |
actually protect you against infection in the short term.
link |
So I want to look at the classic data first,
link |
describe what was done,
link |
and then I want to talk about the more recent study
link |
which is immediately actionable.
link |
There are classic set of studies
link |
that are really based mainly on the work
link |
of somebody named Bruce McEwen
link |
who was at the Rockefeller University in New York.
link |
Bruce passed away a few years ago,
link |
but he had many decades of incredibly impactful work
link |
under his belt when he did.
link |
The work that I'm going to talk about next
link |
has been done in humans and has been done in animals
link |
and has really explored how inducing stress
link |
can enhance the function of the immune system
link |
in the short term.
link |
And when I mean short term, I mean about one to four days.
link |
I'm not going to go through all the details of the study,
link |
but essentially what they were doing was exposing subjects
link |
to some sort of infection,
link |
either bacterial or viral infection and inducing stress.
link |
Sounds like a double whammy, right?
link |
You think that maybe getting a little electric foot shock
link |
or cold water exposure
link |
or something to increase your levels of stress
link |
and adrenaline would just make the effects
link |
of the infection worse, but no, quite the opposite.
link |
Brief bouts of stress,
link |
which now you should be thinking about
link |
in terms of cortisol and epinephrine release,
link |
were actually able to increase immune system function.
link |
Now that shouldn't surprise you
link |
if you understand a little bit
link |
about how epinephrine works in the body and in the brain.
link |
It essentially is the signal
link |
by which the nervous system can inform immune organs,
link |
things like the spleen and other organs
link |
that make killer cells of various kinds,
link |
B cells and T cells,
link |
to go and combat infections, bacteria and viruses.
link |
How else would your immune system know
link |
that there was an infection?
link |
Your immune system can recognize foreign invaders,
link |
but the nervous system provides the signal,
link |
the sort of alarm signal that liberates the killer cells,
link |
that tells them there's a problem
link |
and to go seek out the problem, so to speak.
link |
So the duration here is really important
link |
because if stress stayed too high for too long,
link |
then yes, indeed, stress can hinder the immune response,
link |
but for a period of about one to four days,
link |
it actually can protect you
link |
by way of increasing the immune response.
link |
Now, I can say with certainty
link |
that that effect is governed by epinephrine,
link |
adrenaline released from the adrenals and not from the brain
link |
because they actually explored
link |
whether or not the effect exists
link |
in the presence of what's called an adrenalectomy
link |
or removing the adrenals.
link |
So I should just say without the adrenals,
link |
you don't get the effect.
link |
So we know that that effect comes from adrenaline
link |
What does that mean for you?
link |
That means if you want to increase your immune system
link |
in the short term,
link |
you want to increase your epinephrine in the short term.
link |
That's why short bouts of very intense exercise,
link |
probably no more than an hour per day,
link |
provided you're doing everything else right,
link |
sleeping and nutrition, et cetera,
link |
maybe even shorter bouts of intense exercise
link |
or exposure to cold water
link |
or the cyclic breathing that I talked about before.
link |
Because they increase epinephrine,
link |
they will bolster the immune system.
link |
And we all hear these reports every once in a while.
link |
It seems to be the thing that every once in a while,
link |
there'll be an article about how coffee
link |
can improve your immune system or something like that.
link |
Indeed, caffeine can increase epinephrine
link |
and dopamine to some extent,
link |
but most people are drinking it chronically.
link |
So its effects are probably due to increases in epinephrine
link |
and probably whether or not something like coffee
link |
or other forms of caffeine can improve
link |
or degrade your immune system
link |
will probably depend on whether or not
link |
you're using it in a way that it increases your adrenaline
link |
as a spike that happens rarely.
link |
Once every two or three months,
link |
let's say you have an infection coming on.
link |
Yes, indeed, what these data probably mean
link |
is that drinking some hot caffeinated tea
link |
or some hot coffee even provided you don't get dehydrated
link |
from it because you're also drinking some water
link |
can probably improve your immune system function
link |
by way of increasing adrenaline release.
link |
But so can the breathing, so can cold exposure,
link |
The mechanism here is what's key.
link |
And I keep saying that because what it means
link |
is that you don't actually have to know
link |
the specific protocol.
link |
I'm not trying to say, do this particular protocol.
link |
You have to figure out, and it should be easy to figure out
link |
what short-term adrenaline increasing behavior
link |
you're willing to do on a regular basis every day
link |
or two or three times a week.
link |
Now you could say, well, I'm not sick.
link |
Should I be doing these things often?
link |
I would say two or three times a week at a minimum,
link |
if your goal is to keep your immune system tuned up
link |
and you are in the presence of a lot of children,
link |
for instance, which carry a lot of bugs
link |
because their immune system isn't developed,
link |
or you work in a healthcare setting,
link |
or you're simply somebody who's prone to get sick.
link |
I can just say anecdotally,
link |
I guess someone now calls this anecdata,
link |
which I don't like that phrase because it's sort of,
link |
I don't want anecdotal data to ever be misunderstood
link |
as anything but anecdotal data.
link |
Anecdotally, I can say that I've had instances
link |
where I've felt a throat tickle coming on
link |
or some sinus infection.
link |
I will do the cyclic breathing that I described before,
link |
25, 30 breaths, exhale, hold, 25, 30 breaths,
link |
exhale, hold, 25, 30 breaths, exhale, hold,
link |
and then big inhale, hold.
link |
And most times I didn't get full-blown sick,
link |
but I also take other precautionary measures
link |
to get sleep, et cetera.
link |
So whether or not it was causal
link |
or whether or not it's just correlated, I don't know.
link |
However, there's a human study
link |
that I definitely want to point out to you
link |
because it was published more recently
link |
than the McEwen work.
link |
It was published in the Proceedings
link |
of the National Academy of Sciences for the USA
link |
because they're Proceedings of the National Academy
link |
of Sciences for many other countries as well.
link |
The title of the paper is voluntary activation
link |
of the sympathetic nervous system.
link |
That's the system that causes fight or flight
link |
and AK stress and causes release of adrenaline
link |
and attenuation of the innate immune response in humans.
link |
This is Cox, K-O-X et al, P-N-A-S,
link |
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014.
link |
And they incorporate the ever famous Wim Hof breathing.
link |
Wim Hof breathing is much like the breathing protocol
link |
that I've described several times now in this podcast.
link |
It's also called Tummo breathing.
link |
Other people from other cultures and communities
link |
have called it other things.
link |
The naming really isn't important.
link |
Although I do think Wim is a pioneer
link |
in trying to bring these practices
link |
to the general public more broadly
link |
and was involved in this study.
link |
The study was done in the Netherlands.
link |
It was communicated by Dr. Thomas Horvath at Yale.
link |
I mentioned all that.
link |
Horvath is a terrific scientist.
link |
I'm familiar with his work over many years.
link |
Here's what they did.
link |
They injected people with E. coli
link |
and they had groups that either did the sorts of breathing
link |
I've been describing that increase adrenaline release.
link |
Although I should say, I don't think you need that breathing
link |
to get adrenaline release.
link |
You could do it with cold exposure.
link |
You could do it with other things,
link |
high intensity interval training as well.
link |
And what they found was that the response to the E. coli
link |
was quite different in the people that had a protocol,
link |
in this case, breathing to increase adrenaline.
link |
So this is a remarkable study
link |
because what they found was that the fever, the vomiting,
link |
all the negative effects of E. coli,
link |
many of them and in some cases, all of them
link |
were greatly attenuated
link |
by way of engaging the adrenaline system,
link |
in this case, using breathing.
link |
They looked at inflammatory cytokines, things like IL-6,
link |
which I've mentioned many times on this podcast,
link |
the sort of classic inflammatory cytokine were reduced.
link |
Things like IL-10, which are anti-inflammatory
link |
There were some inflammatory cytokines that were increased.
link |
What's the point here?
link |
The point is you can control your immune system
link |
by finding a way that you can increase adrenaline.
link |
And this runs counter to what we always hear,
link |
which is don't get too stressed or you will get sick.
link |
Learn to control adrenaline, turn it on and turn it off.
link |
Learn to control cortisol,
link |
turn it on with light in the morning, try and turn it off.
link |
And then when it spikes because of life events,
link |
learn to turn it off.
link |
Learning to turn on and off adrenaline,
link |
AKA epinephrine and learning to turn on and off cortisol
link |
affords you the ability to turn on energy and focus
link |
and your immune system.
link |
That's the most important point from today's podcast
link |
and understanding that it doesn't matter
link |
what protocol you use.
link |
Maybe it's a cup of coffee and running up a hill
link |
five or six times.
link |
That will improve your immune system function
link |
if you get adrenaline in your system.
link |
You can use an ice bath, you can use a cold bath.
link |
It really doesn't matter.
link |
You can get into an argument,
link |
but I'm not suggesting you do that.
link |
It really doesn't matter.
link |
What's important is that you're able to then shut off
link |
that response and there are ways to do that
link |
we will talk about, but I want to talk about
link |
some of the other benefits of epinephrine and cortisol
link |
that occur because of their actions on the brain,
link |
because these are many and they are powerful
link |
and they relate to energy, but also the ability to learn.
link |
If I haven't already convinced you that seeing light
link |
early in the day is good for timing your cortisol,
link |
I should also mention that another hormone
link |
that I discussed last episode, which is thyroid hormone,
link |
and it's critical for setting your level of metabolism
link |
is controlled in part by these circadian mechanisms
link |
and cortisol itself.
link |
The short takeaway on this is that if you get your cortisol
link |
release early in the day,
link |
it will increase your energy throughout the day.
link |
It will also time your thyroid release properly.
link |
So there's yet another reason why you would want to get
link |
that light exposure early in the day.
link |
For me, that's a non-negotiable practice.
link |
If I'm on a plane, I'll try and get it any way I can.
link |
I'm not shining flashlights in my eyes yet,
link |
but I really try hard to get that light exposure
link |
from sunlight early in the day without fail.
link |
And the thyroid increase has to do with the fact
link |
that your circadian clock itself is regulated by cortisol
link |
and the circadian clock times the release
link |
of thyroid hormone.
link |
I don't want to go too far off in that direction,
link |
but there are a number of studies,
link |
Kalsbeek et al, K-A-L-S-B-E-E-K et al, 2012,
link |
if you want to look it up on PubMed is a great one
link |
that describes how cortisol secretion begins to rise
link |
during sleep and peaks shortly after waking
link |
or immediately before.
link |
And that times a set of neurons in the circadian clock
link |
that then trigger the release of the releasing
link |
and stimulating hormones for thyroid.
link |
So a really important mechanism and thyroid will also tend
link |
to correlate with energy, but mostly metabolism.
link |
Very important to have thyroid in check.
link |
Now let's talk about epinephrine and cortisol
link |
and learning and memory.
link |
Everyone has a story about being so stressed
link |
they couldn't remember something,
link |
sit down to an exam, actually had this happen once,
link |
sat down to an exam and just blanked, just blanked.
link |
It only happened once, I don't know what happened.
link |
I don't think it was sleep deprivation,
link |
but I just completely blanked.
link |
And it was very hard for me to pull myself
link |
out of that ditch.
link |
I did manage to do it, but it was a scary experience.
link |
So I think most people think about stress
link |
and an inability to perform.
link |
However, most of the time increases in epinephrine
link |
provided they are not through the roof
link |
lead to improved performance.
link |
Now this has been shown over and over again on memory tests,
link |
on learning new information, on physical performance,
link |
that when blood levels of epinephrine are low,
link |
you don't perform very well.
link |
When blood levels of epinephrine are very high,
link |
up to about 1500 to 1700 picograms per mil,
link |
if anyone's out there who's actually measuring this stuff,
link |
but I doubt you are, performance goes way up.
link |
Performance gets better when you are alert
link |
and when you're a little bit stressed.
link |
Absolutely shown again and again and again.
link |
If you get too stressed, it's the mental side,
link |
it's the epinephrine in the brain that causes people
link |
to either focus on their somatic response too much,
link |
like they feel like they're sweating
link |
and they're focused on their bodily response
link |
and they're not focused on what it is they're trying to do
link |
or say or perform, et cetera, or learn.
link |
But epinephrine is a nootropic,
link |
it is a smart drug that we all make internally.
link |
And cortisol is as well.
link |
Now here's the twist.
link |
That does not mean that you want epinephrine high
link |
during the exam necessarily.
link |
Memory and learning and performance are actually favored,
link |
they are enhanced by epinephrine increases
link |
immediately after learning.
link |
And that's something that's rarely discussed,
link |
the timing is vital.
link |
So if you learn some information, you have a conversation,
link |
you're trying to learn a new language, a new motor skill,
link |
whatever it is that you're trying to learn,
link |
the increase in epinephrine that occurs just afterward
link |
is what's going to consolidate the information.
link |
It's going to ensure that the proper circuits and mechanisms
link |
in the brain for neuroplasticity are engaged during sleep
link |
later that night or the next night,
link |
which is when the real rewiring occurs.
link |
And you might say, that's crazy, why would that happen?
link |
Well, we have to remember none of these mechanisms evolved
link |
for us to do what we want and learn what we want necessarily
link |
although they will allow us to do that.
link |
We've experienced this before.
link |
We might have gotten up, gone outside, get in our car,
link |
drive to work or to somebody's house,
link |
you're not thinking about much at all.
link |
And then all of a sudden you see an accident on the road.
link |
Your alertness is primed
link |
if it happens to be a particularly gory accident,
link |
there's going to be a lot of sensory information there.
link |
All of a sudden adrenaline epinephrine
link |
is released into your brain and body.
link |
Not only will you not forget that event,
link |
but you will remember everything that led up to that event,
link |
which has an adaptive function
link |
because your brain and body's primary concern is safety.
link |
This is the neurobiological explanation
link |
for Maslow's hierarchy of needs is safety first.
link |
And so you have heightened awareness and alertness
link |
for everything that preceded
link |
that spike in adrenaline and cortisol.
link |
So the way to think about this is
link |
if you need to learn something better,
link |
if you're taking Adderall
link |
or you're taking a lot of coffee beforehand,
link |
you're actually driving the process in the wrong direction.
link |
You're increasing epinephrine for learning, sure,
link |
but past a certain point,
link |
you're actually degrading learning and performance.
link |
The time to do that is toward the end
link |
or immediately after the learning
link |
because this mechanism is not simply devoted
link |
to negative events like a car crash or a trauma.
link |
It works to make sure that the hippocampus
link |
that encodes memories
link |
as part of the memory encoding mechanisms
link |
is primed that it's told
link |
what you just experienced is important.
link |
You're going to need that information later.
link |
And so I've talked many times before
link |
about using non-sleep deep rest,
link |
NSDR or ensuring good night's sleep after learning.
link |
But what we're also talking about is
link |
as the learning event tapers off,
link |
as you're exiting that
link |
to make sure that your epinephrine levels
link |
are not tapering off as well.
link |
And this may be one of the reasons why the 90 minute cycle,
link |
the so-called ultradian cycle for learning works
link |
because it takes a few minutes
link |
to get into rhythm of learning.
link |
You can maintain that alertness for about 90 minutes.
link |
It's no coincidence that these podcasts
link |
are typically about 90 minutes long.
link |
And as you exit that 90 minutes
link |
you're going to start to feel fatigued.
link |
You're not going to be able to continue
link |
to secrete epinephrine at the same level.
link |
So I'm not telling you that at the end of this podcast
link |
you should give yourself a foot shock
link |
or that you should jump into an ice bath.
link |
Although I will say
link |
if you were to increase your epinephrine
link |
at the end of this episode
link |
by breathing or by way of cold shower,
link |
I'm willing to bet based on numerous published studies
link |
that the memory for the information would be enhanced
link |
because of this retroactive effect
link |
of epinephrine and cortisol.
link |
Put simply, you can remember things better
link |
if you increase your alertness,
link |
AKA your level of epinephrine and cortisol
link |
after, immediately after something that you want to learn.
link |
So I'm reminded by people here at the Huberman Lab Podcast
link |
that the optimal strategy therefore
link |
would be a 90 minute session of focus or learning.
link |
Then immediately after cold shower or tumor type breathing
link |
or ice bath or something of that sort,
link |
maybe a hard run or hit training
link |
if you can't get access to the other things.
link |
And then shower up and do a non-sleep deep rest
link |
and then get a good night's sleep.
link |
Those would be the optimal tools and the organization of
link |
tools for enhanced learning.
link |
And of course you could use caffeine
link |
to prime the whole process by drinking the caffeine
link |
towards the tail of the learning episode,
link |
which is counterintuitive at least to me.
link |
I should mention since many of you use caffeine
link |
and I use caffeine, I do drink coffee,
link |
I love mushroom coffee, I love mate,
link |
I drink caffeine in various forms,
link |
that there was a study that came out recently
link |
that is relevant to our discussion about energy
link |
and alertness and learning.
link |
And the study came out just recently in March, 2021.
link |
It's Maghalas et al, so M-A-G-A-L-H-A-E-S.
link |
And it was published in Molecular Psychiatry,
link |
which is a fine journal, a peer review journal.
link |
And the title pretty much gives it away.
link |
Habitual coffee drinkers display a distinct pattern
link |
of brain functional connectivity.
link |
Chronically drinking coffee changes brain connectivity.
link |
And it does it in a number of ways,
link |
but the key takeaways from this study,
link |
as it relates to sort of what the circuits do,
link |
as opposed to me just listing off a bunch of brain circuits,
link |
which is kind of meaningless in this conversation,
link |
is that people who drank coffee habitually every day
link |
had changes in their brain circuitry
link |
such that there was a shift or a bias
link |
toward anxiety even when they don't ingest caffeine.
link |
So a lot of times we think,
link |
oh, caffeine increases your levels of anxiety.
link |
And indeed it appears it does if you use it chronically,
link |
but not just to caffeine.
link |
It doesn't just raise your baseline of anxiety
link |
because of what's circulating in your bloodstream.
link |
It actually increases connectivity
link |
between the brain areas that relate to anxiety.
link |
Now that could be a good thing or a bad thing,
link |
depending on how you look at it.
link |
For people that are prone to chronic panic attacks
link |
or anxiety attacks, that's not going to be good.
link |
Some people might use caffeine in healthy ways,
link |
in order to just increase overall levels of alertness.
link |
Although now not only am I going to start
link |
delaying my caffeine intake
link |
till two hours after I wake up
link |
for reasons I've talked about in previous episodes,
link |
but I'm also going to start drinking it later
link |
in learning and focus sessions
link |
as a way to enhance plasticity
link |
around those learning and focus sessions not before.
link |
So interesting study, feel free to, it's free online.
link |
You can access the full paper online.
link |
We will put a link as well.
link |
I want to mention this issue of nootropic,
link |
so-called smart drugs,
link |
which is not a topic that I particularly enjoy
link |
because I don't like the name.
link |
I don't like the idea of a nootropic
link |
because what is a smart drug?
link |
Well, there's different kinds of smart.
link |
There's creativity, there's task switching,
link |
there's strategy building, there's strategy implementation.
link |
And most of the nootropics that are out there
link |
are just cocktails of a bunch of different things
link |
that aren't tailored to the individual at all.
link |
They all seem to have some caffeine
link |
or some cholinergic stimulation, et cetera.
link |
But there's an important way to frame this
link |
in light of today's conversation.
link |
Nootropics generally fall into two categories.
link |
One category are nootropics that increase blood glucose.
link |
So these are compounds that people take
link |
that increase blood glucose,
link |
and increasing blood glucose will improve performance
link |
and can enhance learning in some situations.
link |
I'm not suggesting people take these things,
link |
but here's just a list of a few of those.
link |
Some of them are legal, some of them are gray market,
link |
some of them are illegal.
link |
Piracetams, oxiracetams, the aniracetams, all the tams, okay?
link |
Elevate blood glucose, that's how they work.
link |
The neural effects that you hear are secondary or tertiary
link |
to the fact that they just increase blood glucose.
link |
We know that because if you block the blood glucose effect,
link |
you block the nootropic effect, okay?
link |
Others include, and definitely don't take these please,
link |
amphetamine, cocaine, those will increase learning
link |
in the short term in particular dosages,
link |
but because they increase blood glucose.
link |
And then of course, things like painful stimuli or stress
link |
will improve learning by way of increasing blood glucose.
link |
Now, stress and epinephrine that's associated with it
link |
not only improve performance during the learning bout,
link |
but as I mentioned before,
link |
having epinephrine come up afterward
link |
will increase the retention of that information
link |
And then of course, there's a whole category
link |
of nootropics that don't impact blood glucose
link |
that work by increasing the cholinergic system activity.
link |
And these are things like choline, lecithin, phosostigmine,
link |
it's a prescription drug, phosphatidylstyrene.
link |
So there are ways to increase energy
link |
that don't require increasing blood glucose.
link |
And this is vitally important.
link |
The reason we're talking about epinephrine and cortisol
link |
for increasing energy and immune system function
link |
is because they are largely independent of blood glucose.
link |
Of course, they interact with that system,
link |
but we heard so much growing up, you need to eat for energy,
link |
but the energy that we're talking about today
link |
is actually a much more powerful one
link |
than the one that you derive from food.
link |
It's, we could call it neural energy.
link |
It's neurotransmitters that create alertness and focus
link |
and the willingness and the ability to move
link |
and the willingness and ability for immune system
link |
to move in response to intruders.
link |
So I think we all too often think about food as energy,
link |
which is great because it is,
link |
but there are other sources of energy that are neural
link |
and they relate to these hormone systems,
link |
cortisol and epinephrine,
link |
and that's what we're focused on today.
link |
So up until now, we've been talking about increasing energy
link |
and increasing the immune system
link |
by way of cortisol and epinephrine,
link |
but I'd be totally remiss if I didn't cover
link |
how cortisol and epinephrine, if chronically elevated
link |
or if elevated too high,
link |
can have a lot of detrimental effects.
link |
These are the things we normally hear about.
link |
I'm going to describe some of those things,
link |
but I'm also going to talk about ways to ameliorate them,
link |
ways that you can adjust the cortisol levels
link |
even if you're stressed,
link |
ways that you can adjust epinephrine levels
link |
even if you're stressed
link |
so that they have less of a negative impact.
link |
I don't have to list off all the ways
link |
that stress is terrible and chronic stress is terrible.
link |
Insomnia, your immune system over time will get battered
link |
and you won't be able to fight infection off as well, right?
link |
You don't want to be stressed for too long.
link |
You can start laying down the sort of classic pattern
link |
of cortisol-induced body fat.
link |
In fact, there's a whole literature related to comfort foods
link |
and why we want to consume comfort foods
link |
under conditions of chronic stress.
link |
And it's quite interesting actually
link |
because it reveals something
link |
about the biology of chronic stress
link |
that's informative for how to prevent it
link |
or to down-regulate chronic stress once it's occurred.
link |
So let's talk for a second about comfort foods.
link |
And the work that I'm going to refer to
link |
is work that was done by a very impressive scientist
link |
by the name of Mary Dalman.
link |
Her work goes back decades.
link |
She was at University of California, San Francisco.
link |
And she asked this question that on the face of it
link |
seems kind of obvious,
link |
but for which there was no mechanism known
link |
until Mary and her lab personnel came along.
link |
And the question was, why do we seek high fat
link |
and or high sugar foods when we are stressed for awhile?
link |
Why would that be?
link |
And the reason is that the so-called glucocorticoids
link |
of which cortisol is a glucocorticoid
link |
is caused as we've mentioned before
link |
by releasing hormones from the brain
link |
and ACTH from the pituitary, et cetera.
link |
But normally high levels of glucocorticoid
link |
shut off the releasing hormones in the brain
link |
and in the pituitary.
link |
They shut down in a so-called negative feedback loop.
link |
So just like if testosterone or estrogen get too high,
link |
that's read out or that is seen so to speak
link |
by neurons in the pituitary and brain.
link |
And then we shut down our production
link |
of estrogen and testosterone.
link |
If cortisol levels get too high,
link |
if there's too much cortisol
link |
floating around in our bloodstream,
link |
there's a negative feedback loop
link |
and the brain and pituitary shut down CRH and ACTH
link |
which would otherwise stimulate more cortisol.
link |
So cortisol levels go down.
link |
So it's a beautiful negative feedback loop.
link |
Chronic stress, however,
link |
stress that lasts more than four to seven days
link |
and there's a way to think about
link |
what chronic stress really is in an actionable way
link |
causes changes in the feedback loop
link |
between the adrenals and the brain and the pituitary
link |
such that now the brain and the pituitary
link |
respond to high levels of glucocorticoids, cortisol
link |
by releasing more of them.
link |
It becomes a positive feedback loop.
link |
It actually gets right down to levels of gene regulation
link |
and transcription and translation.
link |
And so you really don't want chronic stress
link |
because it's a cascade of stress equals more stress
link |
equals more stress.
link |
So this is why it's very important
link |
to learn to turn off the stress response.
link |
You don't want it elevated for too long.
link |
So there's one study that Dalman and her colleagues did
link |
where they stimulate chronic stress
link |
by increasing corticosterone cortisol.
link |
And they found that subjects would increase their consumption
link |
In fact, they would even eat lard.
link |
It would just, it sounds disgusting
link |
but they were willing to just eat more fat and more sugar.
link |
And that led to all sorts of things like type 2 diabetes
link |
that led to dysfunction in the adrenal output, et cetera.
link |
And so the real key is to learn
link |
to shut off the stress response
link |
because the interesting thing is,
link |
is that Dalman and colleagues and some studies
link |
that followed up on their work found
link |
that if the system was kicked into motion for too long,
link |
then there was a tremendous shift overall towards anxiety
link |
because it turns out that body fat itself
link |
receives neural innervation.
link |
It received neurons actually talk to body fat.
link |
So now you have body fat releasing certain hormones.
link |
You've got the adrenals releasing cortisol
link |
and all of that is feeding back to the brain
link |
to make you want more sugar and fatty foods.
link |
So that's how the so-called comfort foods work.
link |
And you should watch yourself next time
link |
you experience stress.
link |
If it's a short-term bout of stress,
link |
typically it blocks hunger.
link |
If it's a longer bout of stress,
link |
typically it triggers hunger in particular
link |
for these so-called comfort foods, sugary and fatty foods.
link |
And it's kind of interesting how short-term stress
link |
can actually block hunger.
link |
It does that by activating or interacting
link |
with a system called the bombicin system.
link |
Bombicin is a peptide hormone.
link |
It was actually, I think it was named
link |
after some sort of reptile or amphibian,
link |
excuse me, some sort of toad.
link |
I think it was initially sequenced from the toad
link |
before it was later discovered in humans.
link |
And I think the toad's Latin name is Bombina bombina
link |
or something of that sort.
link |
And so they decided to call this thing bombicin,
link |
but it reduces eating and stress liberates bombicin
link |
and makes you want to eat less.
link |
But chronic stress causes all these positive feedback
link |
changes, which are not positive.
link |
They're positive, I'm calling them positive
link |
because they amplify the stress response over and over,
link |
not because they are good for you.
link |
So short-term stress, great.
link |
Long-term stress, really, really bad.
link |
Other bad effects of stress that we can talk about,
link |
and I won't list off too many more of these
link |
because you know so many of them, you hear about them,
link |
you really want to know how to control them, I'm guessing,
link |
is that yes, indeed, stress can make you go gray.
link |
The rates at which people go gray, meaning gray hair,
link |
some cases gray body hair as well,
link |
depend on some genetic factors.
link |
There are a couple of ways that we can go gray.
link |
There's actually a stem cell,
link |
what they call niche in every follicle.
link |
So you have stem cells in the follicle
link |
that can produce more and more of the given hair cell.
link |
And they're actually peroxide groups.
link |
You know, we hear about bleaching hair with peroxide,
link |
at least in the 80s, that was a thing,
link |
but you can use hydrogen peroxide to bleach things,
link |
and you can produce your own peroxide in the hair follicle
link |
that will cause the hairs to go gray.
link |
In addition, pigmentation of hair,
link |
just like pigmentation of skin,
link |
is controlled by melanocytes.
link |
Our old friends, the melanocytes.
link |
And I say old friends because on previous episodes,
link |
I talked about why sunlight and getting ample sunlight
link |
can increase levels of certain things
link |
like melanocyte-stimulating hormone,
link |
which reduce hunger,
link |
it can improve testosterone and estrogen levels,
link |
and all the reasons for that.
link |
Well, it turns out that activation
link |
of the so-called sympathetic nervous system,
link |
which is really just another name for the system
link |
that liberates adrenaline from the adrenals
link |
and epinephrine in the brain,
link |
drives depletion of melanocytes in hair stem cells.
link |
So indeed, there's a rate of aging
link |
that we will undergo based on our genetics,
link |
but stress will make us go gray.
link |
And the paper that you should look to
link |
if you want to read more about this,
link |
came out very recently.
link |
This is Zang et al, Z-H-A-N-G et al,
link |
Nature, fabulous journal,
link |
definitely one of the apex journals, 2020.
link |
So this paper showed that the activation of stress
link |
in various forms will deplete these melanocyte stem cells.
link |
You do not have to worry about an ice bath
link |
or hard exercise or breathing,
link |
increasing your levels of stress
link |
to the point where it's going to make you go gray.
link |
We're talking again about chronic stress.
link |
And if you want to offset the stress effects
link |
on graying of hair,
link |
you can do that by either having a practice
link |
that helps you regulate stress on a consistent basis,
link |
so something like non-sleep deep rest or meditation.
link |
If you can get access to massages or vacations,
link |
but having a practice to keep stress clamped
link |
so that it's not chronically elevated, that will be great.
link |
As well, this is another case where sunlight,
link |
we know, stimulates melanocytes,
link |
not just in skin, but in hair.
link |
And so getting ample sunlight,
link |
having a practice to regulate stress
link |
will offset the stress-induced graying of hairs
link |
by way of stress-induced depletion of melanocytes.
link |
And if melanocyte sounds a lot like melanin, you're right.
link |
That's because anything involved with pigmentation
link |
in the brain and body generally has melano
link |
in the front of the word in some way or another.
link |
So if chronic stress is so bad
link |
because of its effects on epinephrine and cortisol
link |
being elevated for too long,
link |
then the question becomes, of course,
link |
well, what's chronic stress?
link |
How do I know the difference
link |
between chronic and acute stress?
link |
And how do I keep chronic stress at bay
link |
because of all these negative effects?
link |
And I didn't even list out the number of other ones,
link |
the effects on depression,
link |
which certainly has a correlate with elevated cortisol.
link |
Thyroid hormone, low thyroid hormone
link |
is associated with depression, mistimed thyroid.
link |
Once again, getting your light and your feeding
link |
and your exercise and your sleep on a consistent schedule
link |
or consistent-ish is going to be the most powerful thing
link |
you can do in order to buffer yourself
link |
against negative effects on mental health
link |
and physical health for that matter.
link |
There are things that one can take,
link |
supplements, prescription drugs, et cetera.
link |
Some of you out there may have
link |
or may know people that have Cushing's,
link |
which is chronically elevated cortisol.
link |
There are prescription drugs that we will talk about
link |
But most people are dealing with a situation
link |
where life gets stressful, then less stressful,
link |
stressful, then less stressful.
link |
I would say based on the data from McEwen and others,
link |
Bob Sapolsky's lab over many years,
link |
I would say any stress that lasts more than a day
link |
or two days or three days
link |
is starting to become chronic stress.
link |
There's really no strict cutoff
link |
because we're not measuring everybody's cortisol
link |
from moment to moment.
link |
My lab has done experiments
link |
where we measure stress in people over time.
link |
People vary tremendously in their ability
link |
to have a really hard day and then fall deeply asleep.
link |
That's going to be the ultimate reset
link |
is the ability to sleep well,
link |
more or less undisturbed each night,
link |
although one or two wake-ups during the night,
link |
probably not going to be too detrimental
link |
provided they're not too long
link |
and you're not viewing light
link |
during those wake-ups or your phone.
link |
But the things that you can take
link |
if you feel like you're chronically stressed
link |
and you're veering toward
link |
some of the negative effects of stress are many.
link |
There are some simple things that people can do
link |
in terms of supplementation.
link |
All supplements of course have to be checked out
link |
for their safety margins for you
link |
because it's going to differ from person to person.
link |
You're responsible for making sure they're safe for you
link |
if you decide to use them.
link |
One of the most common ones is ashwagandha
link |
and it has a powerful anxiolytic anxiety effect.
link |
You're welcome to go to examine.com and for zero cost,
link |
you can see their so-called human effect matrix.
link |
Ashwagandha has many uses.
link |
It's been used to enhance power output in athletes.
link |
It has been shown to modestly increase testosterone.
link |
It has been shown to modestly adjust things
link |
like low-density lipoprotein cholesterol,
link |
the so-called bad cholesterol in quotes.
link |
It has a profound effect on anxiety.
link |
That's been shown in nine studies,
link |
nine peer-reviewed independent studies,
link |
I mean funded by organizations
link |
that have no vested interest in the answer.
link |
It has a very strong effect on cortisol itself.
link |
The decrease in cortisol noted in humans
link |
is 14.5 to 27.9% reduction
link |
in otherwise healthy but stressed humans.
link |
That's great, six studies.
link |
So that's, and it mentions this is significantly larger
link |
than many other supplements.
link |
Now, some people will say that taking ashwagandha
link |
chronically may not be good.
link |
If you've heard about that
link |
or you can point to specific studies
link |
that indicate exactly why it's not good,
link |
please put it in the comment section or let me know.
link |
In the comment section on YouTube would be best.
link |
The studies that I'm referring to did explore both genders.
link |
The number of subjects was reasonably high, 64 or more.
link |
One to six months studies,
link |
so these were long-term studies, that's great.
link |
You'd like to see that, not just an acute study.
link |
So males and females, lots of different ages,
link |
a weight, excuse me, overweight and non-overweight.
link |
They did blood draws of cortisol,
link |
which is going to end as well as saliva tests.
link |
Saliva is actually the best way to measure free cortisol.
link |
You can also measure it from earwax, it turns out,
link |
which sounds pretty gross and kind of is,
link |
but nonetheless, that's where cortisol will accumulate
link |
in earwax and in saliva, the free cortisol.
link |
But that's six very quality studies,
link |
independently supported that all point
link |
to these very significant 14.5 to 27.9% reductions
link |
in otherwise healthy adults.
link |
So if you're somebody who is dealing with chronic stress,
link |
it's a stressful period in your life
link |
and you want to stave off the negative effects of stress,
link |
well, then ashwagandha may,
link |
I want to highlight may be right for you.
link |
It also does tend to lower total cortisol,
link |
which is interesting, can lower depression
link |
to a somewhat minimal degree.
link |
And can lower, as I mentioned before,
link |
things like low-density lipoprotein.
link |
So that, I think ashwagandha comes through
link |
as kind of the heavy hitter in this department.
link |
Now what's interesting also is the other effects
link |
of ashwagandha that are downstream
link |
of reducing chronic stress and cortisol,
link |
because cortisol has so many effects.
link |
There are receptors for cortisol
link |
all over the body and brain.
link |
And so I'll just list these off quickly.
link |
I'm not going to list off each study
link |
or talk about how many subjects in detail.
link |
Again, you can go to examine.com if you want
link |
and just put in ashwagandha.
link |
C-reactive protein, which is a marker
link |
of all sorts of negative health effects.
link |
Cardiovascular health, even macular degeneration
link |
is notably reduced.
link |
Heart palpitations, notably reduced.
link |
Serum T3 and T4, our old friends for the thyroid hormones
link |
from a previous episode are increased.
link |
Symptoms of OCD decreased,
link |
both the obsessions and the compulsions, right?
link |
Obsessions are of the mind, compulsions are of behavior.
link |
So there are a lot of things that are downstream
link |
of reducing cortisol.
link |
Lowered heart rate, lowered rates of insomnia,
link |
slightly improved memory.
link |
Why that would be, I don't know,
link |
because cortisol in the short term can increase memory.
link |
I'm guessing it's from increased sleep,
link |
decreased pain, increased quality,
link |
decreased reaction times, things of that sort.
link |
So the list goes on and on,
link |
but all of those things stem downstream of decreased cortisol
link |
So if one were to decide to take ashwagandha
link |
in order to reduce cortisol,
link |
given that you want cortisol early in the day
link |
to have energy throughout the day,
link |
the time to take it is probably later in the day
link |
or in the evening.
link |
I've never heard of it preventing sleep
link |
or causing insomnia of any kind.
link |
That certainly wasn't listed as one of the major effects
link |
I will take ashwagandha from time to time
link |
if I'm chronically stressed
link |
or if I'm not sleeping as well as I ought to.
link |
You might think that with all my knowledge about sleep
link |
and sleep protocols
link |
that I would sleep perfectly every night,
link |
but unfortunately I have a dog
link |
that has a canine form of sundowners, of dementia.
link |
So he's up much of the night these days.
link |
And so there's no way I'm getting
link |
a solid night of sleep lately.
link |
And so I will supplement with ashwagandha
link |
and typically I'll take it before sleep
link |
and maybe also with my last meal of the day,
link |
which is at least two hours before I go to sleep.
link |
Again, you have to decide if it's right for you.
link |
The dosages can vary tremendously.
link |
I would just go by what's on the bottle
link |
from a reputable brand.
link |
I would also check out examine.com
link |
because it mentions a range of dosages that people have used
link |
and in various studies to different effects.
link |
Now, there is something out there
link |
that some of you may actually be taking or ingesting
link |
that can increase cortisol
link |
and not so incidentally can decrease estrogen
link |
Because remember cortisol is made from the cholesterol
link |
molecule, so is estrogen and testosterone.
link |
So our estrogen and testosterone, excuse me.
link |
And it's competitive.
link |
So you're either making more cortisol
link |
or you're making more of the sex steroid hormones,
link |
estrogen and testosterone.
link |
Believe it or not licorice,
link |
which I always thought of as a candy,
link |
but licorice contains a substance that I can't pronounce.
link |
G-L-Y-C-Y-R-R-H-I-Z-I-N glycyrrhizin,
link |
which is of the glabrous species of plant.
link |
Actually, because of its chemistry,
link |
this 18 beta hydroxyceridic acid,
link |
you don't need to know all that licorice, black licorice,
link |
contains a substance that increases cortisol.
link |
And its increase is not huge, but is significant.
link |
This has been looked at in females age 18 to 29,
link |
males and females age 18 to 29, people age 30.
link |
These are separate studies
link |
where I'm listing off the different ages, ages 30 to 64.
link |
It turns out that you can see pretty substantial increases
link |
in serum cortisol and decreases in testosterone and estrogen.
link |
So that was complete news to me.
link |
Also increases in blood pressure that are pretty substantial
link |
that's going to be downstream of cortisol,
link |
increasing cortisol is increased blood pressure
link |
in order to engage the stress response
link |
as part of this stress response.
link |
Increased hormones of other kinds
link |
that are associated with stress.
link |
I didn't know, maybe you knew previously.
link |
If you did, forgive me,
link |
but licorice and some of the compounds in black licorice
link |
can actually increase stress,
link |
probably not the thing to be ingesting
link |
during periods of chronic stress.
link |
Whether or not anyone has had positive effects
link |
of using it to increase cortisol in other contexts,
link |
But very interesting that the chemistry of licorice
link |
increases stress hormones,
link |
and therefore you would probably want to,
link |
almost certainly would want to avoid it
link |
in conditions of chronic stress.
link |
Also, if you're trying to optimize testosterone and estrogen,
link |
licorice seems like a bad idea.
link |
I suppose one instance where you might want to use licorice
link |
would be if you're traveling
link |
and you're trying to wake up at a particular location
link |
because licorice has these effects on cortisol
link |
and cortisol is associated with the waking phenomenon
link |
and alertness and energy,
link |
you could use it in that regard.
link |
However, I would be careful to time it
link |
so that you're not getting two cortisol increases
link |
throughout the day, two peaks.
link |
So you're going to want to make sure
link |
that you're doing all the other things correct for jet lag
link |
and adjusting to jet lag.
link |
And if you want to know what those things are,
link |
including timing your feeding,
link |
using temperature, using exercise,
link |
using light to adjust to jet lag more quickly,
link |
please see the episode that we did on jet lag and shift work
link |
where I cover all those protocols in detail.
link |
The other compound that I think deserves attention
link |
is apigenin, A-P-I-G-E-N-I-N, apigenin,
link |
which is what's found in chamomile.
link |
Apigenin, I've talked about previously,
link |
it has various effects.
link |
One is it is a mild anti-estrogen
link |
that's been shown in various studies,
link |
and it does have a bit of an anxiolytic effect
link |
of reducing anxiety.
link |
I take it before bedtime, 50 milligrams.
link |
Again, you have to decide or figure out
link |
if that's safe for you or not.
link |
I'm not suggesting you take it.
link |
The major source of action is to calm the nervous system,
link |
and it does that primarily by adjusting things like GABA
link |
and chloride channels, but also has a mild effect
link |
in reducing cortisol.
link |
So ashwagandha and apigenin together sort of,
link |
I would consider the most potent commercial compounds
link |
that are in supplement non-prescription form
link |
that one could use if they were interested
link |
in reducing chronic stress, especially late in the day
link |
by way of reducing cortisol late in the day.
link |
So you're probably getting the impression
link |
that cortisol and epinephrine
link |
are a bit of a double-edged sword.
link |
You want them elevated, but not for too long or too much.
link |
You don't want them up for days and days and days,
link |
but you do want to have a practice
link |
in order to increase them in the short term.
link |
So we should talk about protocols
link |
that can set a foundation of cortisol and epinephrine
link |
that is headed towards optimal.
link |
Optimization is always going to be a series
link |
of regular practices that you do every day.
link |
So sleeping at certain times, light at specific times,
link |
food at specific times, certain foods, et cetera.
link |
And that's highly individual, but there are some universals,
link |
and we've covered a number of those in the discussion today.
link |
Meal timing, meal schedules has a profound effect
link |
And as I mentioned before,
link |
the energy I'm referring to is not glucose energy.
link |
It's not burning carbs while running or ketones.
link |
What I'm talking about is neural energy,
link |
epinephrine and cortisol.
link |
Fasting and timing one's eating
link |
are two sides of the same coin.
link |
So even if you're on a kind of standard three meal a day
link |
with a couple of snacks in between diet or nutrition regimen,
link |
you are fasting whenever you're asleep
link |
or you're not ingesting any calories.
link |
So unless you're hooked up to an IV of glucose,
link |
you are fasting while you're sleeping.
link |
There are several different kinds of fasting
link |
that can relate to epinephrine and cortisol.
link |
I will do an entire episode on optimizing food intake
link |
for performance in the sports context.
link |
That's coming up, but in the meantime,
link |
I'd like to just talk about fasting
link |
as a source of epinephrine.
link |
Anytime when our blood glucose is low,
link |
cortisol and epinephrine are going to go up.
link |
If we fast for too long, that is stress.
link |
There's no way around that.
link |
Now that doesn't mean it doesn't have
link |
other beneficial effects.
link |
Running a marathon is stress,
link |
but it can also have positive effects if that's your thing.
link |
So stress has been demonized as a term,
link |
but we want to think about stress mechanistically
link |
as epinephrine and cortisol.
link |
And then if we do that,
link |
we can think about how to regulate its timing.
link |
So anytime we haven't eaten for four to six hours,
link |
levels of epinephrine and cortisol
link |
are going to go up pretty substantially.
link |
There's an exception to that,
link |
which is if you are used to eating on the clock
link |
every two hours or every hour,
link |
being half hour late or being even 10 minutes late
link |
on that schedule will induce stress.
link |
Most of that is psychological stress,
link |
but also the release of things like ghrelin
link |
that are going to make you hungry
link |
because they're on that eating clock.
link |
So one thing that many people do to great benefit
link |
is they follow a so-called circadian eating schedule.
link |
They eat only when the sun is up,
link |
they stop when the sun is down, more or less.
link |
The other way to think about this
link |
is they stop eating a couple hours before sleep
link |
and they eat more or less upon waking,
link |
assuming that they're waking up more or less
link |
around the time that the sun rises,
link |
maybe plus or minus two hours.
link |
Okay, so sort of typical schedule.
link |
Now let's say you decide to do
link |
what I do, which is I skip breakfast.
link |
I drink water, I delay my caffeine
link |
for 90 minutes to two hours, and then I drink my caffeine.
link |
And then my first meal is typically around lunchtime,
link |
And yes, occasionally I throw back some almonds
link |
or walnuts or something earlier in the day.
link |
I do do that from time to time if I get hungry enough
link |
or if I just happen to see them.
link |
I'm kind of a drive-by eater.
link |
If I see blueberries or nuts or something,
link |
I just kind of pick them up and put them in my mouth.
link |
I try and not do that off other people's plates,
link |
but I just have that habit of doing that from time to time.
link |
But typically I don't eat until about noon.
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So I've got a cortisol increase.
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I've got my sunlight in the morning.
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So I'm getting a big pulse in energy early in the day.
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And yes, there's a little bit of agitation.
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I am hungry sometimes early in the day, sometimes no,
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but my ghrelin system is used to kicking in
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right around noon.
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At the point where I eat,
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as long as I don't eat carbohydrate, in my case,
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I know that my epinephrine levels
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are going to stay pretty high.
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So for me, it's usually meat and salad
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or something of that sort or fish and salad.
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I don't particularly like eating fish because of the taste,
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but I'm essentially low carb or keto-ish throughout the day.
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So I'm probably in a slightly elevated state
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of epinephrine and cortisol throughout the day.
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Some of you are fasting even longer.
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You're pushing out till 4 p.m. or 8 p.m.
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or maybe you're even fasting around the clock.
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Anytime you're fasting,
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you're increasing epinephrine and cortisol release.
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You can do all the meditation in the world
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to keep your mind calm,
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but you are closer to that edge of stress
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and you're closer to that edge of peak stress.
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So that's something that's just important to understand.
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The description about comfort foods and cortisol
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was one of kind of an extreme case
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where cortisol systems kick over to a positive feedback loop
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but we all eat to suppress cortisol and epinephrine.
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When we're hungry,
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cortisol and epinephrine create an agitation
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so we go seek food.
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When we ingest food that typically,
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if it includes carbohydrate,
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there's a blunting of cortisol,
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there's a blunting of epinephrine in the bloodstream.
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If you've ever had too much coffee to drink
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and you go and have a couple of pieces of bread,
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you will feel that you might describe it
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as the caffeine getting soaked up out of your system
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but what you're doing is you're elevating blood glucose,
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which is more or less saturating
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the effect of caffeine in your system.
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Not completely, but it's going to have that effect.
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If you're very stressed and you sit down to eat something,
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it will calm you down.
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Yes, because some of the blood that goes to your stomach
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but more so because of these effects
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in blunting cortisol and epinephrine.
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So the important point here is that if you want to be alert,
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you can do that by way of not eating.
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Of course, please ingest fluids.
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I know some people water fast out there.
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I am yet to see good science on water fasting
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and why that can stimulate stem cells
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or people love the idea of after the Nobel Prize
link |
was given for autophagy and this idea
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that our cells clean up debris and senescent cells.
link |
Yes, that's true but the idea that water fasting
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is going to promote that I find rather amusing.
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Please send me the data if you know some great study
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in a decent journal but pretty much this is something
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I don't think water fasting is a good idea
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nor should you be drinking so much water
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that you kill yourself.
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You can actually drink enough water that you die.
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So I think ingesting water in healthy amounts
link |
is a good thing, stay hydrated
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but if you want to be alert, stay hydrated.
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Caffeine may or may not be in your regimen
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but fasting will make sure that your levels of energy
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are up and you will be primed very well
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for doing a protocol of the sort that we talked about
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earlier in this episode of breathing or cold exposure
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or exercise to get that increase
link |
in the immune system function.
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And if you do that after learning,
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after trying to learn something,
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it will increase learning
link |
for that particular set of information,
link |
whether or not it's motor or language
link |
or whatever it happens to be, mathematics, programming.
link |
So fasting is a tool for many reasons,
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can increase growth hormone, et cetera.
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But today I'm talking about fasting as a tool
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to bias your system toward more epinephrine
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adrenaline release and toward more cortisol release
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but still low enough that it's not chronic stress,
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that it's not causing negative health effects.
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But please know that if life is very, very stressful,
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if you're experiencing lots of stressors
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and you're chronically fasting,
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you are positioning yourself toward a greater likelihood
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of being chronically stressed in the ways that are negative,
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negative effects on the reproductive axis,
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lower testosterone and estrogen,
link |
negative effects on your hair will turn gray.
link |
There's reasons for that.
link |
Your sleep will suffer, your immune system will suffer.
link |
So I think while it's nuanced,
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our discussion today about epinephrine and cortisol
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increasing energy and immunity are designed
link |
to help you understand
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when you should be doing certain things,
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when you should throttle back,
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when you might want to kick up your adrenaline a bit.
link |
If you're suffering from low energy
link |
because you're just kind of feeling down
link |
and a little bit under-activated,
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well, then the practices of ice baths
link |
and intense breathing, et cetera, could be very beneficial.
link |
But if you're feeling exhausted and burnt out,
link |
so drained and stressed,
link |
well, then fasting or doing a lot of cold exposure
link |
or doing a lot of intense exercise
link |
is driving you further and further into chronic stress.
link |
So because I don't have a saliva test or a blood test
link |
or God forbid an earwax test to measure your cortisol
link |
as we're engaging in this discussion together,
link |
you have to gauge for yourself
link |
whether or not you are in a state of under-activated
link |
and need more epinephrine and cortisol
link |
or whether or not you are over-activated
link |
in terms of cortisol and epinephrine
link |
and you need ways to buffer those, ashwagandha.
link |
Maybe it should be a warm mellow bath, not an ice bath.
link |
So one has to learn how to regulate these hormones
link |
with behavior, with nutrition, perhaps with supplementation.
link |
And then of course there are prescription drugs.
link |
And I always leave these to the end
link |
because A, I'm not a medical doctor,
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I'm not prescribing anything, I'm a professor,
link |
I'm professing a number of things
link |
that you can decide for yourselves what to do with or not.
link |
But of course there are prescription drugs
link |
that can increase cortisol or decrease cortisol
link |
in cases like Cushing syndrome,
link |
which if you have that diagnosed,
link |
you should talk to a physician.
link |
You should talk ideally to a endocrinologist
link |
but to a physician of some sort, board certified physician.
link |
There are drugs that can be used to treat injury
link |
like corticosterones that you can inject
link |
to reduce inflammation and injury, but they are cortisol.
link |
So they're going to bias you
link |
towards more stress in other domains.
link |
Remember cortisol can cross the blood-brain barrier
link |
so you're going to be more prone to psychological stress.
link |
I also want to mention again
link |
that I think there's great benefit to having a practice
link |
that perhaps you do every other day,
link |
but if you can't maybe every third day or every other day
link |
of deliberately increasing your adrenaline in your body
link |
while learning to stay calm in the mind
link |
so that you learn to separate the brain-body experience.
link |
We hear so much about how beneficial it is
link |
to unify the brain and body,
link |
that we're all out of touch with our brain and bodies.
link |
I particularly dislike claims like that
link |
or statements like that because there's great power,
link |
as we learned today, in having your body activated
link |
by some sort of stimulus, cold water
link |
or even psychological stress,
link |
but learning to stay calm in your mind.
link |
I should just remind you
link |
that most of the negative effects on your life
link |
and on the lives of others
link |
are due to people, perhaps you, I hope not,
link |
being unable to regulate their mind
link |
when they have high levels of adrenaline in their body,
link |
either because they read something in a text
link |
or a comment section.
link |
Of course, that never happens to me,
link |
but it may happen to you.
link |
Of course, it happens to me,
link |
but the idea is to stay calm in your mind
link |
so that then you can regulate your action, right?
link |
And so I think that there are these practices
link |
that one can develop over time
link |
that are really straightforward and zero cost, right?
link |
You could find any number of ways
link |
to increase your adrenaline and stay calm.
link |
And we tend to focus on things like exercise
link |
as the way that we get our energy up.
link |
But today, again, I'm talking
link |
about deliberately increasing adrenaline
link |
while staying calm mentally,
link |
because that has great utility
link |
when the adrenaline hits through unwanted events,
link |
through things that we didn't seek out.
link |
So the ability to regulate adrenaline and cortisol
link |
is about inducing them deliberately
link |
when you want to push back on infection,
link |
potential infection from bacteria or viruses.
link |
It's about pulling back on adrenaline and cortisol,
link |
maybe through the use of supplementation,
link |
but certainly through proper use of light and sleep
link |
and mental tools that we talked about as well,
link |
when they are chronically elevated.
link |
It's about training your system,
link |
not just to be unified at brain and body,
link |
which sounds great until you're stressed,
link |
and then that's terrible.
link |
It's really about having a deliberate dissociation
link |
between the adrenaline response from the adrenals
link |
and the adrenaline response from the brainstem.
link |
So once again, we've covered a ton of material.
link |
I hope right now you're thinking,
link |
okay, am I in a state of chronic stress?
link |
Am I under-activated or could I afford
link |
to increase my levels of adrenaline and cortisol
link |
to improve my relationship to my immune system
link |
and to energy, neural energy?
link |
If you like the information that you heard today
link |
and you want to remember it,
link |
well then at the end of this episode,
link |
perhaps you go do something
link |
to increase your level of adrenaline.
link |
And now you know what some of those things are
link |
because it will help you retain the information,
link |
or you could apply that to anything else
link |
that you learn or experience, of course.
link |
And I hope that you'll think about some of the ways
link |
in which cortisol and adrenaline are not good or bad,
link |
that stress isn't good or bad,
link |
but short-term stress is healthy.
link |
Alertness and energy is healthy
link |
even if it puts you at the edge of agitation.
link |
That's an opportunity to learn
link |
how to control these hormones better.
link |
And I hope that if you're in a state of chronic stress
link |
that you'll do things to start tamping down
link |
some of that stress and that you realize
link |
that your nervous system and your hormone system are linked,
link |
but they're linked in ways that you can control,
link |
that we don't have to be slaves to our hormones
link |
and certainly not the hormones that cause us stress.
link |
We can learn to control those
link |
both to the benefit of our body and benefit of mind.
link |
If you're learning from this podcast
link |
and you like the information that you're learning,
link |
please subscribe on YouTube.
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That really helps us.
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And in addition, if you could hit the notification button,
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that will let you know when we release new episodes.
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Now we release them every Monday morning,
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but in addition to that,
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we are starting to release short clips now and again,
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as well as some special content.
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So hit the subscribe button please
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and hit the notifications button.
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If you haven't already subscribed on Apple and or Spotify,
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You can certainly subscribe to all three if you like.
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And on Apple, you can give us a five-star review
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as well as leave us a review.
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On YouTube is the place to leave us comments and feedback
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as well as suggestions for future episodes.
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We do read all the comments
link |
and I know many of you are anxiously awaiting
link |
particular topics and episodes
link |
and we will eventually get to them all.
link |
I'm not going anywhere.
link |
And we do want to be thorough about every topic.
link |
Today, we rounded out the discussion about hormones.
link |
We aren't going to continue with that topic any longer.
link |
We are moving to a new topic segment
link |
for an entire month or so.
link |
If you know of other people that you think could benefit
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from the information on this podcast
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or that you think would enjoy listening to it,
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please forward it along to them.
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We'd really appreciate that.
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Another great way to support us
link |
is to check out our sponsors
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that we mentioned at the beginning of the podcast.
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We also have a Patreon.
link |
It's patreon.com slash Andrew Huberman.
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There you can support the podcast
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at any level that you like.
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I should mention that I will be answering some questions
link |
that come up frequently in the comment section on YouTube
link |
in Instagram lives every once in a while.
link |
I am on Twitter at Huberman Lab.
link |
I'm on Instagram also at Huberman Lab
link |
and on Instagram from time to time coming up,
link |
I'm going to be discussing answers to your common questions
link |
in these Instagram lives
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and I will make sure that they're recorded.
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So you can check those out.
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Please follow our Instagram
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if you are not already doing that
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and check out our Twitter if you're on Twitter.
link |
I covered a lot of different types of tools today,
link |
behavioral tools, et cetera, but I did mention supplements.
link |
For those of you that are interested in supplements,
link |
we've partnered with Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E
link |
because we believe them to have the highest levels
link |
of stringency and quality in terms of supplement production,
link |
in terms of amounts of supplements
link |
in their different formulations, et cetera.
link |
If you want to check out the supplements that I take
link |
and you want to get a discount on Thorne supplements,
link |
you can go to Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E.com
link |
slash the letter U slash Huberman
link |
and you can get 20% off any of the supplements that I take
link |
or any of the supplements that Thorne sells for that matter.
link |
That's Thorne.com slash U slash Huberman
link |
to get 20% off anything that Thorne makes.
link |
Thank you for joining me for what I hope
link |
was an informative discussion and an actionable discussion
link |
about how to increase energy and the immune system
link |
by way of cortisol and adrenaline epinephrine.
link |
I really appreciate your willingness to learn new topics
link |
as well as to embrace and think about new tools
link |
and whether or not they're right for you.
link |
And as always, thank you for your interest in science.
link |
I'll see you next time.